The Boat (35 page)

When Mai poured her ration into Truong's cup, Quyen frowned, and then flinched away. "Thank you," she said at last. For the first time she used the word for "younger sister."

"It's nothing. I already took a sip."

"Poor child," repeated the old woman, shaking her head.

Truong took some water in, then coughed some of it out. People looked over. In the dusk light his face was pallid and shiny.

He opened his mouth. "Ma," he said.

"I'm here," said Quyen.

"Ma."

Quyen bit her lips, wiped the sweat from Truong's brow with a corner of her shirt. Finally his eyes focused and he seemed to look straight at Mai.

"It's so hot," he said.

"
Thoi
," said Quyen, dabbing above his eyes, around his hairline.

"I want to go up."

"Sleep, my beloved. My little prince. Sleep."

Mai wanted desperately to say something to him-something useful, or comforting-but no words came. She got up to close the hatch door.

The old woman took out a betel leaf and inserted it into the slit of her toothless mouth.

***

HIS SICKNESS FOLLOWED the usual course. Muscle soreness and nausea in the early stages. That evening his blisters began to rise, some of them bleeding pus. He became too weak to swallow water.

In the middle of the night, Mai woke to find Truong half draped over her stomach. His weight on her so light as to be almost imperceptible, as though his body were already nothing more than bones and air. "Everything will be fine," she whispered into the darkness, her thoughts, still interlaced with dream, scattered remotely across space and gray sea. Back home she'd slept on the same mat as Loc. Her mother by the opposite wall. She reached down and touched Truong's brow.

He stirred awake.

"Is Child alright?"

"I want to go up."

The skin on his face was hot and moist. Mai lifted her eyes and noticed Quyen, mashed in the shadow of the companionway steps, staring at both of them.

"Take him," she said dully.

Mai found a spot for them by the pilothouse, surrounded by sleeping families. When dawn came, Truong's head slid with a slight thud onto the planking. Half asleep, Mai sought his shoulder, shook it. His body gave no response. She sat up and shook him again. His clothes stiff with dried sweat. Nothing.

"Truong," whispered Mai, feeling the worry build within her. She poked his cheek. It was still warm – thank heavens! – it was still warm. She checked his forehead: hotter than it had been last night. He was boiling up. His breath shallow and short. With agonizing effort she cradled his slight, inert body and bore him up the stairs into the pilothouse.

Anh Phuoc was slumped underneath the tiller, sleeping. Three infants were laid out side by side on the floor, swaddled in rags.

He woke up. "What is it?" He saw Truong in her arms. "Where's Quyen?"

She laid him down. Then she turned to find Quyen.

"Wait." Anh Phuoc got up, surveyed the boat through the windows, then retrieved a flask from behind the bank of gauges. He unscrewed the cap and poured a tiny trickle of water into a cup. "This was for them," he said, gesturing at the motionless babies. "How they've lasted twelve days I don't know." He screwed the flask cap back on and then, with tremendous care, handed her the cup. "But they won't make it either." He paused. "Let me find Quyen."

Truong wouldn't wake up. Mai dipped one finger into the cup, traced it along the inner line of his lips. Once it dried she dipped her finger again, ran it across his lips again. She did this over and over. One time she thought she saw his throat twitch. His face – vthe burnt, blistered skin, its spots and scabs – the deeper she looked, the more his features dissociated from one another until what she looked into, as she tended him, was not a face, but a brown and blasted landscape. Like a slow fire it drew the air from her lungs.

Commotion on deck. Someone shouting. She jolted awake, checked Truong – he was still unconscious, his fever holding. A weird tension suffusing the air. Another death? Mai opened the pilothouse door and asked a nearby woman what was happening.

"They saw whales," the woman said.

"Whales?"

"And then land birds."

It was as though she were sick again, her heart shocked out of its usual rhythm. "Land? They saw land?"

The woman shrugged.

All at once Quyen burst out of the hold, her hair disheveled and her eyes watery and red. She spotted Mai.

"Here!" Mai called out excitedly. "Chi Quyen, here!" She stood on tiptoes and scanned all the horizon she could see. Nothing. She looked again. "Someone said they saw land," she announced aloud. Realizing people were scowling at her, she turned toward Quyen. Too late she caught a new, rough aspect in her eyes. Quyen strode up into Mai's face.

"Where's my son?" She pushed into the pilothouse. Mai stumbled back, tripping over the doorsill.

Inside, Quyen saw Truong and rushed toward him, lowering her head to his. She emitted a throaty cry and twisted around to face Mai.

"Stay away," she declared. "You've done enough!" Her voice was strained, on the verge of shrillness.

"Chi," gasped Mai.

"I've changed my mind," Quyen went on, the pitch of her words wavering. Her expression was wild, now – cunning. "He's my son! Not yours – mine!"

"
Thoi
," a man's voice interjected.

Mai spun and saw Anh Phuoc in the doorway.

"What's the matter?"

Quyen glared at him. He waited for her to speak. Finally, her tone gone sullen, she said, "She took my son."

He sighed. "Mai was looking after him."

Quyen stared at him, incredulous, then started laughing. She clamped both hands over her mouth. Then, as though in embarrassment, she dipped her head, nuzzling Truong's chest like an animal. Mai watched it all. The thick dense knot back behind her temple. Quyen's body shuddered in tight bursts awhile, then, slowly, hitchingly, it began to calm. It seemed for a moment as though Quyen might never look up again. When she did, her face was utterly blanched of expression.

"Mai wouldn't hurt Truong," said Anh Phuoc tiredly. "She loves him."

Quyen threw him a spent smile. "I know." But she didn't look at Mai. Instead, she turned and again bent over the unconscious shape of her son. That was when she began to cry – silently at first, inside her body, but then, breath by breath, letting out her wail until the whole boat could hear.

***

HE WAS HER SHAME and yet she loved him. What did that make her? She had conceived him when she was young, and passed him off to her aunt in Da Lat to raise, and then she had gotten married. With the war and all its disturbances, she had never gone back to visit him. Worse, she had never told her husband.

"He would leave me," she told Mai. "He will."

But she couldn't abandon her only son – not to the Communists – not if she could find a way out of the country. Even if he didn't want to leave, and even if he didn't know her. Her aunt had balked, and Quyen had been forced to abduct him. She'd been wrong to have him – she knew that – but she'd been even more wrong to give him away. Surely, she thought, she was right to take him with her. Then, when she saw him weakening-then falling sick-she realized that perhaps he was being punished for her shame. Whether he lived or died- perhaps it wasn 't for her to decide.

She begged Mai to forgive her.

Mai didn't say anything.

"He doesn't love his own mother," said Quyen.

"That's not true."

Quyen leaned down and unstuck his hair from his forehead, and parted it. They'd moved him back down into the hold, under the companionway stairs, for shade.

Quyen sniffed. "It's fair. What kind of mother watches that happen to her only son-and does nothing?"

"You were sick."

Quyen turned to her with a strange, shy expression, then lowered her gaze.

"I knew you would take care of him," she said.

"Of course."

"No." She looked down at her son's fevered face. "Forgive me. It was more than that. My thoughts were mad." She gave out a noise like a hollow chuckle. "I thought of asking you ..." she said. "I was going to ask you to take him in-to pretend he was your son." She shook her head in wonderment. "He likes you so much. Yes. I thought – just until I could tell my husband the truth."

Mai remained quiet, her mind turbulent.

Quyen sniffed again. "
Thoi
," she declared. "Enough!" Caressing her forearm-still scored with rope marks from the storm six days ago – she smiled into the air. "It's my fault."

"Chi."

"Whatever happens to him."

Mai stared down, unsteadily, at the marred, exposed field of Truong's face.

"You don't have to answer," Quyen continued in her bright voice. "Whatever happens, I deserve it."

***

HE ENTERED INTO THE WORST of it that afternoon, moving fitfully into and out of sleep. His breath short, irregular. Their neighbors kindly made some space for him to lie down. When some children came to visit, Quyen rebuffed them without even looking. Mai sat silently opposite them, next to the old betel-gummed woman, transfixed by her friend's intensity.

Then, at the end of the afternoon – after five long hours – Truong's small body suddenly unclenched and his breath eased. The lines on his forehead cleared. It seemed, unbelievably, that he had prevailed.

"It's over," Mai said joyfully. "Chi, the fever has broken."

Quyen cradled him in her lap, rocking him lightly. "Yes, yes, yes, yes," she sighed, "Sleep, my beloved." His clothes were soaked with sweat. For a fleeting moment, as Mai saw his face unfastened from its distress, the fantasy crossed her mind that he was dead. She shook it off. Quyen's hair fell over her son's face. They both appeared to her strangely now, as if at an increasing remove, as if she were trying to hold them in view through the stained, swaying window of a bus.

Truong hiccuped, opened his eyes and rasped, "Ma has some water?" With an almost inaudible moan Quyen hunched over and showered his brow with kisses. Outside the evening was falling, the last of the light sallow on his skin. After a while Truong gathered his breath again.

"Ma will sing to Child?"

"Sing for the poor child," said the old woman.

Quyen nodded. She started singing: a Southern lullaby Mai hadn't heard for years, her voice more tender than Mai had imagined it could be.

Truong shook his head weakly. "No – not that one." He made an effort to swallow. "My favorite song."

"Your favorite song," repeated Quyen. She bit her lip, frowning, then swung around mutely, strickenly, to Mai.

Mai reached out to stroke Truong's hair. She said, "But Child must sleep,
nha
?” She waited for him to completely shut his eyes. Quyen found her hand and held it. Mai cleared her throat, then, surprised to find her voice even lower, hoarser than Quyen's, she started singing:

I am the vigil moon that sheds you light

My soul abides within the Thousand Peaks;

Where drunk with wine and Long-Tuyen sword you seek

And slaughter all the leopards of the night.

And in the steps of Gioi Tu, seize Lau-Lan

And quash the Man-Khe rivers into one.

You wear the scarlet shadow of the sun:

And yet your steed is whiter than my palm...

Abruptly her voice broke off, then she swallowed, picked up the thread of melody again, and sang it through, her voice as hard as Quyen's face was tender, her voice resolute and unwavering, sang it through to the very end.

The old woman nodded to herself.

***

THE NEXT MORNING
 
– the morning of their thirteenth day – a couple of the fishermen sighted land. A swell of excitement, like a weak current, ran through the boat. People looked at one another as though for the first time.

"We made it," someone quietly announced, returning from deck. He paused on the companionway, his head silhouetted against the sunlight. In the glare, Mai couldn't make out his face. He said, "We're safe now." The words deep in his throat.

Quyen and Truong were underneath the stairs. Mai had left them to themselves during the night. Now, with those others strong enough, Mai followed the man above deck. Outside, the dawn sun steeped through her, as though her body were made of paper. Dizziness overwhelmed her when she saw the half-empty deck – had they been so depleted? She thought, with an odd pang, of Truong, his incessant counting. Then she saw the prow, teeming with people, all peering ahead, attitudes stalled in their necks and shoulders. She made her way forward, then spotted, far ahead, the tiny breakers on the reefs, and behind those, the white sand like a bared smile. Birds hanging in midair over the water.

During the night she had come to her decision. Her thoughts starting always with Truong and ending always with her father, upright in his hospital bed, staring at some invisible situation in front of him. A street with its lights turned off. She came into morning feeling a bone-deep ache through her body. The boat would land – they would all land – Mai would write to her family, and wait for them, and then she would look after Truong as if he were her own child. The decision dissolved within her, rose up with the force of joy. She would tell Quyen. She would look after him, completely, unconditionally, and try not to think about the moment when Quyen might ask her to stop.