The face nearest me turns and the rushing stops. I go very still inside. Her eyes rise to me and they are blank. She does not recognize me. I was only a child when she last saw me. But I know this face. She is not dead. She has been crouching here all along, chewing and forgetting, and she saved her own life from a threat that never was, and after that, she wanted nothing from the past, including her daughter. And I have nothing to ask her now. Nothing to say. There is only one thing more and I do not even need her for this. Ben already knows she is a stranger to him. But I hear my voice shaping the words anyway. I say, “Do you know this man?” and I already know the answer and I will hear it and Ben and I will walk away and I will never tell her who I am.
I follow the movement of her face, the lift of her eyes, back to Ben, and I look at him and his eyes are wild, though they are fixed, fixed hard, not moving, but I feel the wildness behind them, and I look at my mother and her own eyes widen, as if she has looked into the morning sky and a great ragged body had suddenly appeared, blocking the sun, ready to fall with teeth and claws flashing, and they flash now in me, the shape falls into me and begins to slash away, and I turn to Ben one last time, desperate to see a flush of relief there, a laugh, but he turns his wild eyes on me, and they are so beautiful, these eyes, these dark eyes, all the gentleness I have ever dreamed of is here in these eyes, and my hands ache to plunge to that sweet hard center of him and draw his body into mine, at this moment, at this very moment, I want to cling to my father’s secret body, and I cry out, I hear myself cry a wordless thing and I know that whatever horror is in this sound, there is also my woman’s love for him, I ache as a lover for my father, and I break away and I move into the bamboo shade and I turn in the path and I am running now and my foot falls and falls and each fall strokes that secret part of my body and he is in my head and we are by the sea and it is night and he falls in me and falls and strokes and I burst from the path and across the little square and past the cistern and I know where I am going now and I pulse in my sex and I pulse there and I cry out again at this terrible thing and there is nothing to stop it but this thing I must do and I am in the path again leading from the village and then I am in the open field.
I slow, I slow, I quake in my sex and I am nearly blind from the sun here and I push my body on, I push on, and the South China Sea waits and my eyes clear and the sea is enormous and it is green darkness like the dark inside the banyan tree and I move and I think of my child and the quaking makes it hard to put one foot before the other now and this is the child of my father inside me, and this much the quaking knows, this much is clear in the secret path I follow now across this field: we cannot all of us remain here in this life together, we cannot remain.
And I move more quickly and the sea grows larger and the edge is near and the wind beats at me but I am stronger I will go now and the clean cut of the cliff edge will be mine, another step another and a hard thing suddenly circles me, an arm is around my waist and jerks me back and Ben’s voice is in my ear. “Tien.” And the arm loosens and I turn and his face is above me filling the sky and his eyes are deep and I could leap there, I think, I could drown there and he pulls back from me, only a little bit, only for a moment, and we are touching eyes we are touching still and I say the word I do not mean to say, I do not want to say, I say “Father,” and we try to hold on to that word, I feel him straining like me trying to hold that word between us and the ache is wild in me and I feel it in him and then we are in each other’s arms and our mouths are touching from that ache and from what I know is good-bye and I am ready to go but he says, “Only one of us, my darling,” and his arms slip away and he is a blur now I cannot move he turns and he steps and he leaps and he flies he flies and he is gone.
Father, I am here. I left the dark burning of this incense for you. I offer your spirit the peace that comes from the love and prayers and devotion of your daughter and I ask you for the harmony and the peace that a father can give to his family.
I wait. I do not blame you for this pain. It is the suffering that comes from desire, my love. I desire the lie of our two nights of touching. The true lie of it. I desire, as well, that moment clinging to your back. I would find peace in just that. I light another stick of incense now, and another. I would fill my lungs with the smoke of your soul. I ask for you to give me peace, even as I offer you the same thing. We will try each night. We will try.
My father, my love, on this day, one month after her birth, I took our daughter to a pagoda, and a monk poured special water from the altar into a white jasmine flower. Then I held her before a great sandalwood statue of Long Vuong, the Dragon King, and our daughter’s dark eyes were open and she was very still and the monk put the blossom in my hand and I brought it gently over her face. My hand was very steady, Father, and she waited with great patience, a patience that I pray I will learn from her. And I tipped the blossom ever so slowly, and the water swelled and swelled, and then a single drop formed at the sharp tip of a petal, and as if she knew what gift this was, our daughter opened her mouth and the drop fell onto her tongue.
Father, her words will be sweet as jasmine all her life. One day her sweet words will join mine and rise with this smoke to you. She will atone for us, my darling. She will love you, always, with the pure love of a child who owes her life to her father. And I will love you, too, as I have been given to do, always.