Dragonfish: A Novel (11 page)

I remember the minutes after it happened, when people peered overboard and waited breathlessly for the swimmers to come back up with the woman’s body, and all I could think was how melodramatic it was, how cowardly. She had no right giving up. To come all this way, and then to do that.

It turned out, of course, that she died for nothing. Hours later, someone below decks lifted the tarp that covered the fuel store and found the boy wedged between the twenty-gallon cans, lying amid a pile of filthy gasoline-soaked rags. He had a burning fever and could barely move or make a sound. Who knows why he had wandered down into the hold that night, or how he even got there, weak as he was. He must have passed out beneath the tarp, hidden from people lying arm’s length from him, and deaf to his mother wailing his name for hours.

He was carried above deck where two older women forced water down his throat, cooled his forehead with a damp rag, and rubbed hot oil over his chest. I prayed for his recovery, yet dreaded it. What would we say when he was strong enough to ask for his mother?

He ended up surviving the boat trip somehow, despite hardly moving for the final four days. Once we made it to the camp, he disappeared onto the floating hospital, that white ship moored off the island’s shore, and we heard three months later that he recovered and was sponsored by his uncle in Australia.

He’d be a grown man now, with children of his own and stories about his childhood that he might not be able or willing to tell. He’s probably forgotten what his mother looked like. I still remember, more than I want to, her writhing in the arms of a consoler, tearing at her white blouse until the neckline ripped, her long equine face crumpled behind the tangles of her hair, mouth ajar and eyes clenched shut, that howling mask.

She must have felt she lost everything when she thought her son was gone. Until then, she had only lived for him. What was she now to herself or to the world if she was no longer a mother to anyone?

It was shame that welled inside me after they found the boy that day. I imagined myself losing you, and realized that I could not have done what she had done. I would have mourned you for the rest of my life, there is no doubt, but your death would not have been, back then, the death of anything inside me.

As I write down these thoughts, I wonder if you can read Vietnamese, if any of these words make sense or if they are as foreign to you as the sound of my voice. It is the only way I can speak honestly to you because it is the only language, the only world, in which I truly exist. I wish that weren’t so. I’ve always wanted it otherwise.
My suspicion is that you’ve grown up to see things as an American would and that you live your life for yourself alone. It saddens me that you might be so distant from the world I still dream about every night, but I feel envy for you too and a strange relief.

A few months ago, I came across the jade rosary your father gave me when we first got together, tucked away and forgotten in an old cigar box of trinkets I saved from the refugee camp. I had clutched that rosary all nine days we were at sea. You once wore it like a necklace, sitting startled on our bed in Vietnam and gaping at your father, who took the photograph. It was black and white, bent and tattered from the trip across the ocean. I discarded it years ago, along with all the others.

I have wondered often if you’ve grown into some version of me or become someone entirely different, someone better. In my mind, I can only see you as your five-year-old self. Your pursed lips and cracked brow. Your eyes always bruised with thought. When you were angry, curious, you glared at people until they either looked away or scolded you. When you were pensive, you wandered into yourself like a lonely old woman.

People said that you resembled me in every way, that even at a month old, you already had my eyes, my cheekbones, and most of all my temper. Something about our likeness to each other bothered me back then. It was as though you had come into the world to remind me constantly of myself.

Your grandmother always said that I was the most stubborn, the most selfish, of her three daughters. Growing up, I never shared sweets or toys with my sisters and constantly argued with them, sometimes hitting them since I thought it was my right as the oldest.
I talked back to everyone, even your grandfather, a former soldier who had cut men’s throats and spent days on the jungle floor listening for enemy footsteps. He spanked me often for my loose mouth, though secretly, I believe, he admired it.

He used to hit us with a wooden rod as thick as his finger. We’d stand before him in the family room, arms crossed, and confess our offense, and after he told us how many rods we deserved, we would have to turn around and face the wall and await them. If we uncrossed our arms or tried to dodge them, it would earn us an extra blow.

One time, when I was ten, I refused to bow and apologize to him after getting five rods for breaking the porcelain Jesus on our family altar. I had been running in the house, but only in order to rush and answer my mother’s call. Why am I being punished for an accident? I demanded through my tears, I didn’t break Jesus on purpose! My outburst startled him, but only for a second. A sixth rod nearly buckled my legs. When I still refused to bow, he hit me twice more until I bled through my shorts.

That night, when everyone had fallen asleep, I retrieved the rod from its home atop the bookcase and brought it out to our front porch, where I set it on fire with his matches. I watched it burn, then stomped on it. I left it there on the porch in three charred pieces, right by his smoking bench, fully aware that he was always first to rise and that smoking was the very first thing he did. When I came out the next morning, the mess had been swept away. He must have suspected that I had done it, but he never said a word. Two days later I saw a brand-new rod atop the bookcase.

Your grandmother liked to say that I was the fearless one in the family, that I would challenge the Lord if I ever met him. It was a compliment, but also a criticism of my temperament, which I suppose made her blind to everything I was actually afraid of.

The rosary also reminded me, of course, of your father. Not that I still yearn for him. I am not so romantic as that. It’s just the way of memory and loss. We never truly forget the things that have passed out of our lives. We merely move further away from them in time, until they become either less important than they actually were or more profound than we might have ever imagined.

Had your father lived, I would never have left you. What happened on the island would never have happened. And of course I would not be writing these words. I know it sounds ridiculous to attribute all these things to one event, to one person, but that is how I have always seen it.

He was a farmer’s son, your father, and a captain in the air force. He grew up raising ducks and pigs, and by the time he met me he had authority over hundreds of men.

I was seventeen the first time he arrived at our house in his perfectly pressed olive uniform, accompanying a fellow soldier who was pursuing one of my sisters. They drank tea with your grandparents for two hours.

It was not his uniform or his stature that impressed me. Everything about your father was easy. The way he smiled and sat back in his chair and seemed to know everything about every topic. The way he asked questions as though your grandparents were the most interesting people in the world. They soon ignored his friend and started boasting to him of my sisters’ talents at school and in the kitchen, and of my skill at cutting hair. Your father nodded politely and never once looked at me. Although he was only twenty-four at the time, he seemed as old to me as your grandfather.

Two days later he returned alone with a tin of French biscuits.
He was on his way to work at the Saigon airport, yet still spent an hour visiting with my parents. They spoke mostly about religion, your grandmother’s favorite subject, and about the war, your grandfather’s. I understand now that what impressed them, what impressed most everyone who met your father, was the certainty of everything he felt. He offered it to people not as a criticism or a play for superiority, but as a gift, as though he were a soldier offering safety, a priest offering forgiveness.

For more than two weeks, he stopped by every few days on his way to work. Always in uniform, always with a gift of cookies or candy, and never noticing me as I served him his tea. My parents wondered if he was interested in any of us. We soon just figured he enjoyed the company. He even started talking to me and my sisters, though he showed none of us any special attention. Everyone agreed that he carried a casual kind of loneliness.

Then one day he came with a carton of American cigarettes for your grandfather and a bundle of expensive silk for your grandmother. But instead of sitting down with them on the couch, he remained standing and asked them if I could accompany him to Saigon for lunch. His manner was as casual as if he was asking for a glass of water, despite everyone’s surprise, not least of all my own.

I thought his interest in me had come out of his visits, but at that first lunch in Saigon, he asked me questions as if he had been storing them up for those last two weeks. He confessed that he had loved me since the moment he stepped into our house, which frightened me at first, that someone could just love you so completely before you’d had a chance to return any of it. I realized that befriending your grandparents had been your father’s way of ensuring that he was the best man for me in their eyes, and that he already knew that my love for him was inevitable. I should have been offended, but something about that moved me deeply.

He gave me the jade rosary that afternoon, a peculiar first gift, particularly as a profession of love. I suspect now that he already saw me as a creature of faith. He had no idea how wrong he was.

We married five months later, in late 1974, when I was eighteen. I moved to his base in Pleiku, and despite the distance from my family and my home, despite my inexperience in almost everything, I was somehow never too afraid. In no time at all, he taught me how to take care of him, how to love him and be loved by him, how to believe in this entity we’d become as man and wife, even though I wondered where his own understanding of these things had come from. It was as though he’d been a grown man and a husband since the day he was born.

We set up a simple home in the barracks, with two twin beds pushed together and a modest bathroom and kitchen your father built himself. He worked at his office during the day, but we spent our evenings together, reading the newspaper or an old novel to each other, or hosting his officer friends, who came for my cooking and stayed for mah-jongg and poker. Your father rarely lost. On the weekends, we walked to town to see a movie and always enjoyed the ones with Charles Bronson or Alain Delon, who both talked very little and always got the job done. On Sundays we strolled up the hill, along a path that skirted a mango orchard, and went to church.

I struggle now with the idea that those days could’ve lasted much longer, perhaps even forever. That’s the naive and sometimes dangerous urge in all our memories. What might have been is a vast and depthless ocean that surrounds the tiny island of what actually happened, what was actually possible. You can either die of thirst on that island or wade out into all that endless water.

When I became pregnant with you, just a few months into this life with your father, it was as though I had uncovered a startling
secret about myself. It should have felt natural, invigorating, as it would for any woman, but for me it was like a sudden and incurable affliction. I had only recently been given a brand-new version of myself to walk around in, and just when I started to feel comfortable inside it, I was forced into yet another version that seemed not only alien but unbearably permanent. Once you became a reality inside me, I knew I could never go back to being anything else.

Your father, however, immediately wrote his family and went about building a new crib and a bigger dining table, and three or four times a day he playfully caressed my flat belly as though the bump was already there. Before you ever actually existed, you were already the center of his life.

His joy was brief. When I was three months pregnant with you, we moved back to Cat Lai to await the Communists. He had already decided long ago, without telling me, that he would never flee the country, that as the oldest son he would stay and bear his responsibility to the family.

On the day Saigon fell, as your father’s family and I sat in the basement with the buried gold and listened to the radio and the screaming missiles overhead, your father put his ear to my belly and, to you or to me or perhaps to himself, murmured a lullaby in the darkness,

The lights in Saigon—some green, some red.

The lights in My Tho—some bright, some dim.

Go back now to your books and learn patience.

Nine moons I shall wait for you, ten autumns I shall wait for you.

By noon that day, he was nothing more than a farmer’s son.

But the Communists knew everything. He was immediately forced to attend their weekly meetings in the town square. He had
to bring his own chair and mosquito net, as well as the reeducation booklet they provided. Not once did he look afraid. You would have thought he enjoyed studying the booklet. Each time he went, I refused to say good-bye, so he started leaving me with a kiss on the cheek and these grinning words in my ear:
If anything happens, I’ll kill a hundred men to get back to you.

On the night of his fifth meeting, he never came home.