The House on Dream Street (19 page)

Carolyn looked at me, confused. “POWs and MIAs,” I told her. I’d heard the Vietnamese pronunciation before.

The uncle looked deeply into my eyes, then he did the same to Carolyn. “I have their remains,” he said. Then he paused to let this information sink in.

I looked down at the picture. The smiling men stood in front of a row of palm trees. The ground beneath them was flat and could have been an airport tarmac, a parking lot, or even the boardwalk at the beach. My eyes focused on each face, each cocky smile, each pair of eyes squinting in the sun. I thought of Captain Raymond Stacks, my MIA. Even though I’d prayed for his return, deep down I’d wondered if he’d ever really existed.

But a photograph—particularly one that came with its own set of bones—well, that was more substantial proof. Captain Raymond Stacks could have been the light-haired little guy, shoulders lifted, straining to be taller. Or the burly mustached one, brows bunched like worry above his eyes.

Son’s uncle was watching me and waiting. I looked at him. “Where’d you get the bones?” I asked.

He grinned, revealing two rows of cracked and yellowed teeth. “I have a friend in central Vietnam,” he said, explaining that this friend had found the bones and brought them up to Hanoi, then asked Son’s uncle to contact the organizations representing the American POW and MIA families in order to return the remains. He stressed the word “remains” as if he thought the euphemism would prove his sincerity.

I handed Carolyn the photograph and she examined it for a while. “Do you know who these people are?” she asked. She appeared to be fascinated.

The uncle leaned back against the headboard of the bed and
examined his fingernails. “We have a list of names, from U.S. military dog tags,” he said. “We believe that several of these men come from the region of Wisconsin in America. Or maybe from a place called Milwaukee. We are certain that the families will be so happy to have the remains of their soldiers returned. You know, we Vietnamese are like Americans. We, also, insist on burying our dead. Did you know that?”

“I know that,” I said.

The uncle raised his eyes to the heavens dramatically and laid his hands against his cheeks with dismay. “We Vietnamese are
haunted!
Do you know that?
Haunted.
”

His performance was making me ill, even though I knew he was right. Vietnamese
were
haunted. They had a much worse MIA problem than we had. Through an agreement with Vietnam, the United States had recently begun an active search for American MIAs, and the U.S. teams had been able to settle all but a few dozen cases, either by discovering and identifying the remains or by gathering enough evidence to verify each death. The Vietnamese, on the other hand, had barely begun to search for answers to the fates of some three hundred thousand of their own soldiers and civilians who remained unaccounted for, even twenty years after the end of the war. Still struggling to feed their living, they didn’t have the resources to search for the dead. This inability remained a wrenching problem. According to the religious beliefs of the majority of Vietnamese, it’s necessary to bury the dead, then worship them at family altars. A body that goes unburied cannot be worshiped, and the soul is left to wander. Vietnam, to the Vietnamese, was haunted by the ghosts of so many wandering souls.

“We’ve got to bury these poor men, don’t we?” asked the uncle, throwing the responsibility for doing so on Carolyn’s shoulders. Turning to her, he said, “Son tells me that you are leaving
our country in just a few days. You must help these American families by returning the remains of their sons to them.”

Carolyn looked at him. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

“We need you to help us set up a relationship with the American families.”

I was afraid Carolyn was about to commit to something she’d later regret. “The United States has an office in Hanoi to settle these problems,” I said. “Why don’t you take the bones there?”

Son’s uncle looked at me. “Of course I know about that office, Miss Dana,” he said. “But you must understand our situation. Our government will punish us for contacting them.”

“But your government has been cooperating with them,” I argued.

The uncle sighed and smiled sadly, as if there were aspects to his government’s behavior that I, a foreigner, would never under stand.

“Why don’t you let me take the bones to them?” I asked.

The uncle’s smile disappeared. “No,” he said.

“That’s really the way to do it,” I insisted.

The uncle muttered something to Son in Vietnamese, and then the truth came out. “My friend went to a lot of trouble to procure these remains,” he said. “He carried them all the way here from central Vietnam. He spent his own money to do this service for the American families. We know that the American families will want to thank him.” He was looking earnestly at Carolyn now. “We know that they will want to thank you, also. The compensation can be quite large. Sometimes several hundred dollars for each set of remains.”

His ignorance of U.S. domestic politics was staggering. The people he imagined giving him money—the organizations representing POW and MIA families—would see this bone-selling
scheme as proof that the Vietnamese were trying to extract as much money as possible out of the search for the dead. In this case, at least, they wouldn’t be wrong.

Carolyn sat looking down at the picture for a long time, her eyes completely focused on the faces staring out at her. Finally, she lifted her eyes and calmly handed the photograph back to the uncle. “I don’t want money for bones,” she said.

The uncle rushed to reply. “Yes, of course not. But my friend went to a lot of trouble. Don’t you think he deserves something?”

Carolyn’s eyes settled on me. “I have to go home,” she said.

Neither the uncle nor Son tried to argue after that. The uncle shook his head like a disapproving parent, trying to make us think that we were making a gigantic mistake. Son, to my surprise, didn’t even look disappointed. He got off the bed, helped Carolyn gather her things, then walked us out to the street and hailed a cyclo. Then he shook our hands, thanked us for coming, and stood waving while our cyclo rolled away.

Carolyn did not wave back. For the entire ride home, she fumed. Son’s bone-selling scheme had been the last straw. She didn’t like Son’s officious manner or the way he treated Linh. He’d also speculated, incorrectly, that Carolyn liked Linh because Carolyn was a lesbian. And Carolyn had gotten tired of how often her visits with Son and Linh involved expenditures of money—Carolyn’s money. If she went with Linh to the market, Linh expected her to pay for everything. Son and Linh were always suggesting restaurants they’d like Carolyn to take them to for dinner. Linh was as guilty of mooching off Carolyn as Son was, but Carolyn cared so much for Linh that she put up with it.

“Just wait,” she said. “The next time Son says to me, ‘Now you will drink tea,’ I’m going to tell him. ‘No, Son, I will not drink tea,’ just to make him mad.”

I tried explaining to Carolyn that Son’s lack of social graces had as much to do with the Vietnamese language as with his own personality, that Vietnamese just didn’t say “please” that much. But Carolyn wasn’t mollified a bit. She was so angry that she threatened to stop speaking to Son altogether. She never got that chance. Two mornings later, something happened that made Carolyn’s relationship with Son completely irrelevant.

      The doorbell jarred me out of a deep sleep. I knew it was Linh because her ring had a signature insistence to it. I forced my eyes open and glanced at the clock. It was 6:10
A.M.
The buzzer sounded like a motorbike barreling through my bedroom. I pulled some sweatpants on under my T-shirt and hurried out onto the balcony.

Linh began yelling up from the sidewalk as soon as the top of my head appeared over the railing. “I’m going to my mother’s,” she declared. “I’m not going to live with Son anymore.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. As soon as I pronounced the first word, a sharp pain cut across my throat.

Linh continued. “I want a divorce.”

This sort of news wasn’t easy to digest so early in the morning. “Do you want to come upstairs?” I finally asked, leaning over the railing and almost whispering to protect my throat.

“No! I have my little son with me,” Linh said, pointing to the edge of the road. For the first time, I noticed the cyclo parked there. Piles of suitcases and blankets covered the seat, with the baby squeezed in between. The cyclo driver was leaning over Linh’s belongings, trying to humor the fussy baby.

“What about Giang?” I asked, thinking how calm the ten-year-old had looked the other day, watching ninjas slice each other open on TV.

“Giang is at Son’s mother’s house. He must stay there to go to school.” Linh already had every angle figured out.

“Tell Caro-leen my terrible story!” Linh said. She turned around and, with more bounce in her step than I’d seen in a while, she hurried back to the cyclo, lifted the baby, then sat down. The cyclo driver climbed back on his seat and started pedaling away. Just before they slid out of yelling range, Linh turned around. “I am single woman now!” she called triumphantly. She raised her hand into the air and gave the thumbs-up sign that Carolyn had taught her.

      When I left for my Vietnamese lesson a half hour later, Carolyn was still asleep. I quickly scrawled out a note telling her about Linh, then I rushed off to get breakfast and go over my new vocabulary words before my lesson at eight.

By the time I got home late that morning, the sky was beginning to darken, and I could see the storm clouds rolling in over the city. Grandmother Nhi was packing up her tea stall to avoid the shower.

Tung and Phai were sitting in the living room watching the day’s installment of the Chinese ninjas. Huong wasn’t around. Her interest in imported TV drifted closer to the cowboy drama from Brazil, the Chinese soap opera
Beijing People Living in New York,
and the Mexican poor-girl-makes-a-million miniseries
Maria
and its sequel,
The Rich Also Cry.
Tung, like his son, was crazy for the ninjas. He hardly noticed when I walked in, threw myself onto the couch, and let my keys and backpack slide to the floor.

“Is Carolyn still here?” I asked Phai.

He shook his head.

“Do you know where she went?”

“She went out,” Phai shrugged. Carolyn spoke no Vietnamese and Phai spoke no English.

I put my hands on my throat and tried to massage it. After two hours dedicated to perfecting the pronunciation of a Vietnamese folktale, the pain in my throat had begun to creep north toward my ears.

Phai watched me. “Are you sick?” he asked.

I shook my head and stood up. “My throat just hurts a little. I need to drink some hot water.” The words came out shredded into pieces.

Phai jumped out of his seat and got to the kitchen first. By the time I reached the door, he had pulled a tall glass down from the shelf and filled it with hot water from the thermos. He handed it to me. “If you’re sick, you shouldn’t talk,” he said.

“I’m not sick.”

Phai grinned. He rested one shoulder against the refrigerator and looked at me. I leaned against the doorway, gazing down at the floor. Neither one of us made a move to return to the living room.

“Mr. Long just came by,” Phai said.

Mr. Long was a neighbor who lived somewhere in the back alleys behind our house. Tall, muscular and very
vui,
he seemed about sixty, but was actually eighty-five. Sometimes when I left for my lessons early in the morning, I’d spot Mr. Long from the landing. He’d be standing in the concrete courtyard between the houses, eyes closed, arms raised in the air, doing calisthenics. Mr. Long lived alone. His entire family had been killed in 1972, during one of the U.S. bombing raids on Hanoi. Sometimes, in the afternoons, he’d come by the house. He and Tung and I would sit listening to Metallica.

“I still don’t understand why he likes me,” I said to Phai.

Phai grinned and shook his head. “You think he shouldn’t be friendly to Americans because he lost his family during the war.”