The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (41 page)

Helen used the small fork to tear apart her apple tart.

Lilly reached over and held Helen's arm for emphasis. "I'm not naive. I understand things. He hated the war, and the two of you took solace in each other."

Helen cleared her throat. "I brought everything I thought your son--"

"You're the first one of them he talked of marrying, though."

Them
. So this was her purpose. Revenge posthumously. Helen put the tiny fork down and picked up the sandwich with her fingers. "He loved what he did."

"Oh, yes." Lilly stood and moved to the now dark window. She ran her hands over her hair and looked out into the dusk. A natural, unselfconscious gesture, it spoke of many afternoons spent alone. Helen could see only the pale forehead and curved line of her chin in the glow of the lamp. She imagined her as the young woman that Darrow had married. "He was ambitious, wasn't he? That's what I have to convince Sammy of. That he was a great man doing important work. That his death was a hero's death."

"Yes." It took everything for Helen to remain seated in the room, not to run. A terrible mistake coming here; this woman twisting everything around until it was impossible to determine what was what.

"Every year he told me he was quitting. Each woman was the last. Finally I figured out that he was going to stay till he got killed."

"We were about to leave."

"I got divorce papers out of the blue. He wasn't thinking straight."

"He asked you in Saigon."

"He never asked such a thing. We argued when he was coming home. What kind of father doesn't see his son?"

"I came for the boy's sake. You didn't even know him. Everything that was most important about Sam, you didn't know."

"I'd say neither of us was his first love." Lilly leaned back and spread her arms out, encompassing the room. "But at least I have this. His home. I'm his grieving widow. At least I have Sammy."

"Yes."

Lilly moved closer till Helen could smell her perfume, could see her eyes narrowed on her, and understood for the first time how angry she was, and how hard she was working at controlling that anger. "Women like you I can't figure out. Was that little part of him really enough for you?"

Dizzy, Helen shook her head. "We had the war."

"I loved him, you know. I loved him when he was himself. He lost himself over there, in that horrible little country, but that didn't make me stop loving him."

The kitchen had turned shadowy and cold. Helen shivered in her thin cotton shirt, she was always cold now, but Lilly had sweat across her pale, high forehead; she glowed with a mineral kind of heat. Finally Helen saw--this place had nothing to do with Darrow, except for the boy. It was their life, and the war inside it, that was real, and she had simply not understood.

"I hated you in Saigon," Lilly said. She seemed weary from the long afternoon. "But I don't anymore. You've lost more than I could ever take away."

A month passed. Helen
had returned to working in the bakery. Something had been solved in her mind regarding Darrow, and she lived with the past more easily. When Robert drove down from Los Angeles, and they walked arm in arm along the boardwalk in the cool, damp evening air, life almost seemed normal. The street along the beach was lined with slow-moving cars, teenagers cruising. Robert looked ten years younger than he had in Saigon.

"Peace has been kind to you," Helen said.

"Can you believe we made it? Seems too good to be true," he said. "Every morning I wake up, and I feel so grateful for the smallest things."

She didn't tell him about opening Linh's letter. How the glow over the ocean was purple, the room dark, and as she opened the envelope, the pool of light from the reading lamp shone on the sheaf of gold rice stalks as they fell out onto her lap.

How instantly she was transported, and what relief she felt.

The paper on which Linh wrote had the faint outline of a lotus blossom in pale yellow, and his writing in black ink on top of the image reminded her of the streets of Saigon, the constant juxtaposition of beauty with necessity.

"It seems so far away." She eyed the crawling line of cars. When the one nearest them backfired, she flinched.

"Remember the first night I took you to dinner? And you tried to free the ducks of Vietnam?"

"How could I have been so stupid?"

"I thought you were charming. And that you'd never last."

"I went to see Darrow's ex-wife."

"Why?" He frowned, tired of her constant exhuming of the past.

"My whole experience was clouded over there. We were in a dream. It was so vivid, I thought it wasn't real. But it was. Truer than anything here."

"Peace is kind to everyone, Helen. Except you."

She led Robert out to the sand, and they sat against a large rock, watching as the waves dissolved from view in the near dusk. The kelp had drifted in, and a strong brine smell blew down from the north part of the cove. "Nothing compared to
nuoc mam
, huh?" The fermented fish sauce smell was a staple of any local Saigon restaurant one entered. She grabbed Robert's hand, intertwined her fingers with his. "It feels good to be with you. You know, someone who
gets
it. Don't you miss it just a little?"

Robert sighed. "Saigon? Happy to have gone through it and survived."

Helen rested her head on his shoulder. "I don't mean the war. Of course not."

"Come to work in L.A. The story Darrow and you did on Lan was a big success. They want a follow-up on her here in California."

"Local?"

"I'm not sending you back to Vietnam, if that's what you're asking." He had never been one of them, had not understood MacCrae, or even Darrow, for that matter. The war had never captured his imagination. "What happened in Saigon... what didn't happen... things were crazy. But I thought maybe we could try seeing each other under normal circumstances."

Helen gave a small laugh. "Is that what this is? Normal circumstances?"

"Yeah. Not a war zone." He pulled back, irritated. "You know, I don't buy the 'weren't those the days' crap about the war. The war was shit, Saigon was shit, and we're lucky to be out of it alive."

"Sure." She could not share, after all, waking up in the middle of the night and pretending that she needed to get up for a mission, could not share her midnight patrols of the neighborhood with Duke.

"I gave you the benefit of the doubt over there. That you were out of your element."

"Have you heard from Linh?"

Robert was silent for a long minute. "A couple of times. He's on staff. I offered him a transfer, American citizenship to boot. He turned me down."

"I thought he married."

"Linh? No, that's not it. He's either patriotic or really patriotic, if you know what I mean. Darrow always joked that he was working for Uncle Ho's side."

"Whatever he is, I'd trust him with my life."

Robert said nothing.

"Do you remember that first night? When I left you at the restaurant? I thought you'd hate me, but you didn't."

"Didn't we go to some lousy Chinese place... in Cholon? I don't remember." But, of course, he did remember each thing from that night, and he had hated her, but it didn't hold.

"Remember Darrow saying they were lucky because there was always another war? I thought it was just macho posturing. But now I wish he was here so I could tell him I finally understand."

They got up and walked back to the boardwalk. The sky overhead black, a pale moon casting a sterile light on the water, on the houses in the hills behind them.

"There are plenty of twenty-year-old guys thinking they're immortal. You and I know better," Robert said.

"I'll take the assignment."

"Good girl."

She nodded and took his hand again, brought it to her lips. "Sometimes I wish I could just be back there an hour. Just enough so that I could really love all this again."

That night she opened
the window while she changed for bed. After seeing Robert, she was confident that the dreams would come that night. She undressed in the dark, listening to the sliding of the ocean as she pulled the white, veil-like nightgown over her head. She put her hair back chastely in an elastic. Only then did she turn on the light, look at the pictures on the walls that were already in her head, then quickly turn the light back off. The dreams had begun to go away, and when they did come, they were less intense, and she found she needed to jog her memory before she fell asleep to meet Darrow again in that vast darkness. But instead of Darrow, the dream of the children came to her. She was kneeling this time, an unknown man beside her, lying prone, and the group of Vietnamese children approached and circled the two of them, pressing in, circling around and around, touching, but again when she tried to speak with them, they turned their backs to her. Even while dreaming, she was trying to remember where the image had come from--it was a more threatening feeling than that day on the beach with Linh in Vung Tau--but she couldn't place it.

The rehabilitation center was
down in the Wilshire district, and Helen circled the hospital block a few times, finally parking a quarter mile away at a coffee shop. The day was hot, the air crackling dry with Santa Ana winds, the usual smog-stained haze replaced by a sharpness that etched the trees and buildings on the landscape. Helen sat in the restaurant, her appetite lost in the smell of grease, floor wax, and disinfectant. She tried to focus on the assignment, to think of Lan as just another story.

She was late as she muscled her camera bags onto her shoulders in the parking garage and pushed through the pounding sunlight, the sour smell of hot asphalt under her feet. On the children's floor of the hospital, a whole platoon of doctors and therapists waited for her in their long, white, picture-ready coats. The head doctor on the case lectured about surgeries, using charts. His lab coat looked stiff and creased, as if it had just been taken out of a box. Samples of prosthetics had been laid out on a banquet table loosely covered by a long red tablecloth so that the display had the eerie feeling of an awards table, each flesh-colored appendage set apart and spotlighted from above.

"Where's Lan?" she finally asked.

"I thought you should see her progress first," the doctor said. He sulked at her lack of interest.

"How about I see her first," Helen said. "We'll talk after."

The room grew quiet, the doctor coughed into his hand. "Well then, let's go see her."

In a quick decision to brief her on the run, the woman psychologist walked alongside Helen. She was short and made a little skip every third step to keep up. Each time she spoke, she bit her lower lip as if the coming words might be bitter. They passed rooms filled with children. "Lan's by herself right now," she whispered. "She's had an aggression incident again with the other children." The woman narrowed her eyes so they disappeared in the flesh of her full cheeks. "That's not acceptable behavior. Biting."

"It wasn't ideal... her living conditions in Saigon."

"But we've saved her," the woman said.

"Actually
we're
the ones who hurt her."

The woman stroked her own cheek with a dimpled hand, as if the unpleasantness of Helen's words might bring on a rash.

At the end of the hall, she stopped and opened a door. At first the room appeared empty, but then Helen saw Lan sitting at a low table in the corner, shaping a ball of clay. The adults formed a semicircle around the table, but Lan acted as if she heard nothing, did not move her eyes from the clay figure in front of her. Impossible to believe she was the same girl from Saigon--now filled out with rounded arms and cheeks, glossy hair tied in ponytails with pink yarn, wearing a pink Cinderella T-shirt and pants.

"Lan?" Helen said. "Remember me?"

The girl looked up with a heavy, bored look, as if bracing herself for more unwanted attention. Helen moved closer, bent down to hug her. Her skin smelled sweet and medicinal, like cough syrup. Close-up, it was obvious that her face was bloated, her eyes dry and hard. Helen wondered what medications she was on. Lan's body remained limp in her arms.

Helen sat on a low plastic stool. The table was filled with toys, but Lan had attention for only the small ball of clay in her hands. She had the dull, listless behavior of an animal in the zoo. "You have a lot of toys," Helen said.

Lan grabbed her hand. "You bring me candy?"

Helen laughed, relieved at the shared memory. The doctors standing around them made her feel she needed to offer something up. "I brought her candy in Saigon."

Lan shook her head, impatient, with a sharp tilt of the chin. "Sam bring me candy. What you bring me now?"

"I came to take pictures again for the magazine."

Lan yawned. "I'm hungry."

The nurse stepped forward eagerly. "I'll bring you back some lunch, sweetie."

"I want hamburger," Lan said to her retreating back as the door swung shut.

Helen looked from Lan to the doctors. "Should we start taking pictures?"

"What are you giving me?" Lan shouted.

Behind her the doctors moved off, whispering and marking their clipboards. Under her breath, Lan began to sing a tune, the words getting louder until they could be clearly heard: " 'There was a little honey from Kontum/Boy did she ever like boom, boom....' "

"No," Helen said, bending down and hushing the girl. "Not in the hospital. Don't let them hear you." She felt a flush of parental embarrassment.

Lan shrugged and plucked at her hair, pulling out a few strands that she dropped on the floor.

"What do you want me to bring next time?" Helen said, figuring on bargaining with the child.

"A camera," she said. "Sam promised me a camera, and he lied and goes to die instead." The words froze Helen, and Lan noticed, becoming suddenly attentive. "He lied to you, too?"

"It was an accident, Lan. He didn't want to die."

"Mama says no accidents. I lose my leg because I was stupid girl."

"That's wrong. It wasn't your fault."

"I pick vegetables because they grow bigger and more easy than walking around to safe place."