I regretted the idea as soon as I said it, but my overwhelming need to get the letter felt justified. In an instant, it had become the thing I deserved all along, after everything that had happened here in Vegas and everything I’d been through all those years with Suzy.
Happy said, “How you know that?”
“Sonny’s boy told me. He sent me here. Put me in the room next door and made me wait in case she showed up one last time. He and his father have no idea why she was coming here. But they’re barred from the Coronado. You probably know that. It’s just me here. You’ll be safe.”
“No.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow morning. You got to do this for me.”
“No way I go to that place.” There was an edge again to her tone. I couldn’t tell if she was refusing my request or refusing something else.
“It’s a casino. You’ll be safe.”
“That place — I can’t tell you.”
“Good God, tell me what?”
“You not believe me.”
“I’ll believe anything at this point.”
Happy made a sound, like a pained laugh, like she was ready to cry and tell a joke at the same time. “Bob,” she said in a pleading voice, “how I can explain it to you? Her husband. Her first husband. He die in Vietnam long long time ago. She think he come to the room. She think he come back to find her.”
I waited a moment before saying, “Are you kidding me?”
“No,” she murmured, and I could almost hear her slowly shaking her head. She hung up before I could ask the question again.
I called her back, but the line just kept ringing. I banged the receiver on the nightstand and let it drop to the floor.
The heater by the window clicked on. A dull drone permeated the room. I stood up to sniff the air. That smell was still there, and as I looked around the shadowy room, my skin crawled and it made me want to yell at myself for being so easily spooked.
“If you’re there,” I said out loud, “say something. Vietnamese, English, just fucking say something.” I picked the receiver off the floor and slammed it down on the cradle.
I sat on the bed with the duffel bag in my lap and stared at the time blinking on the VCR atop the TV set. Then, like an alarm had gone off, I remembered the videotape.
I didn’t want to, but I had to turn off all the lights in the room.
Victor’s account had been unsettling, but watching the video with my own eyes — remote in hand, constantly fast-forwarding and rewinding — was like seeing three versions of Suzy at once: the one I remembered, the one Victor romanticized, and this other phantasmagoric shade of her that had descended into Sonny’s darkness. Her bizarre behavior appeared harmless one minute, heartbreaking even, but the next minute grotesque. When I got to that final footage, where Sonny is on top of her, I found myself watching it as a stranger might. Could she not be enjoying herself? How could you tell if she had truly forgotten any of it, that what she felt in Sonny’s dark office that night was horror and not shame? And yet despite the questions, I still felt sick seeing her on the screen, seeing Sonny there with her, looming like an incubus. I thought watching the video would bring me more clarity, but after half an hour the story felt as incomplete as ever.
I shoved the tape back into the duffel bag and changed into some dark jeans and a black sweater. I washed my face in the bathroom, drank a full glass of water though I wasn’t that thirsty.
Leaving all my things in the room, I hurried downstairs to the casino. In the gift shop, I bought a black down coat with a hood and a midnight-blue baseball cap with the Coronado’s logo and put them on before leaving the shop.
At the front entrance of the casino, I jumped into one of the waiting taxis and showed the driver the address I had torn out of the phone book from my room. There were over thirty listings under Happy’s surname, and sure enough one of them — Tuyet Phan — matched her phone number. The driver said it was thirty minutes away in Summerlin, which was west of the Strip and sounded like some faraway made-up place.
“Get there in twenty and I’ll pay you double,” I told him.
As we sped away from Fremont, I peered behind us for any suspicious-looking cars. The driver was playing holiday music and I asked him to turn it off, which he did a little begrudgingly.
In the darkness of the cab, I looked again at the listing and wondered if the first name — Tuyet — was fake, then realized I’d been foolish enough all these years to believe that Happy was actually her real name.
15
WE MERGED ONTO THE 95 going west. Towering sound walls flanked the highway like Native American murals, emblazoned with turtles and geckos and giant scorpions lurking beneath parabolas of shadow and amber light.
Traffic was moderate, easily navigable, and the driver was weaving across the four lanes with a wildness that pleased and slightly nauseated me.
I held the cell phone in my lap, waiting for it to ring, unsure if I would answer it. Victor would have called by now if he had seen me leave. For the first time since Happy hung up the phone, I considered the possibility of this working out, of me convincing her to hand over Mai’s letters too. Who else could deliver them at this point?
I could see her standing by the phone with her hands over her ears as it rang and rang. She might have regretted telling me about the letters, but my suspicion was that she had wanted to all along, that all her redemptive promises to Suzy had become too burdensome for her. Happy meant well. Despite what she’d done, she wasn’t a liar. But she also wasn’t someone who sought the truth or lived very easily with it. Her preference was for the scenic route, the path that skirted the forest and the brush and led circuitously to the sea, and if you were lost she’d draw you a map, or better yet blindfold you and lead you by the hand. That’s why she was the perfect friend for Suzy.
What made Suzy good for her was still a mystery to me. The same question I had for myself.
I pictured Suzy bent over the desk in the hotel room, scribbling away for hours to her daughter, to Victor, to God knows who else. All those years of her being as generous as a mute, and now she apparently had words for everyone. Even me.
Was it something I needed to know or something she needed to tell me — secrets she was at last confessing? That she had abandoned her only child twenty years ago because she was too young and afraid, too selfish, to raise her on her own? Because she’d lost that child’s father, a man I’d never been able to replace, no matter how happy I had made her in those first few years or how hard she had tried to bury him and their child and that life they had together before she came here, before she ever met me? And now this man had returned. A ghost? A figment of her imagination? An impostor?
I thought of her red journal at the bottom of my dresser at home and all the things she might have revealed in there about the past two decades, or just the past two years, like what had led to her disappearing, where she was planning to go. I had brought it back from Vegas all those months ago with firm plans to translate it all — if necessary, hire someone in the department to do it for me. But I kept putting it off. It was easier to leave it buried beneath my socks and sweaters and not know what she might have truly thought of our life together — or worse yet, that she had thought nothing of it at all.
Her voice came back to me in the silence of the cab and with it a series of events about midway through our marriage. I’d nearly forgotten them.