A Mother's Heart (25 page)

She drummed her fingers on the glass-topped table.

“Sam, let me think about it. I’ll call you in a few hours.”

She hailed a cab back to her own hotel, surprised by the discomfort Sam’s request had triggered. She was a professional. A simple assignment like this—a profile of an accomplished man—was hardly challenging.

Sam was right; she could knock this off in a day or two. And the fear she had of getting drawn back into the vortex of emotion that Phil Coughlin had elicited in her so long ago seemed ridiculous. She had been young and inexperienced then, and more vulnerable than she had admitted to herself, caught up in the raw and desperate situation in Saigon.

She’d lived through a lot since those tumultuous days—raised a child; excelled in her profession; even been in and out of love a few times, although never married. She wasn’t one to fall under anyone’s charismatic spell now, no matter how piercing his blue eyes or engaging his smile or noble his mission.

Mel let herself into her hotel room. Through the open French doors she saw Tien sitting on the balcony and went out to join her. Although the rain had subsided, the air was still heavy and the balcony offered no relief from the sweltering heat.

Tien’s face was taut and clouded with anger as she turned to Mel.

“Where have you been? I was worried.”

Mel didn’t answer her question. “Why didn’t you call? I had my phone on.”

“You seemed to want to be alone when you left me at the lawyer’s office.” Tien’s voice was icy, accusatory.

“I thought we both needed time away from each other. How did you spend the rest of the day?”

“I met with someone. Mr. Nguyen made the arrangement. She was the right age, came from the same region. But she couldn’t answer the questions you gave me.”

Mel had prepared a short list of questions that only Anh would be able to answer.

Mel read the disappointment and frustration in her daughter’s eyes. She refrained from asking Tien how much she had paid for this hastily arranged and failed assignation. She knew Tien didn’t need to hear an “I told you so.” But she was also wary of the barely camouflaged anger just below the surface of Tien’s remarks. It was clear to Mel that Tien was gathering up all the false leads and dashed hopes into a bundle that she was laying at Mel’s feet. She could hear the unspoken litany—if only Mel had made an attempt to maintain contact with Anh after she and Tien left Vietnam; if only Mel had recognized that Tien would want—
need
—to know her mother and had begun the search when Tien was younger and leads were still fresh. Mel saw it dawning on Tien that she had begun too late, that she might not find Anh, and that it was all Mel’s fault.

Mel, weary and unwilling to engage Tien in another verbal battle, decided to retreat into work. She told Tien about the call from Sam.

“So I’m going to fly up to Chiang Mai and do the interview. You’re welcome to come with me if you want to, or you can stay here and continue the search—maybe you should go to Anh’s old village.”

“I’ll stay. If word is starting to circulate among people who might have known her, I want to stick around—not
be on some inaccessible mountain. Who knows if you’ll even have cell reception?”

“Do you want me to arrange for an interpreter while I’m gone?”

“Mr. Nguyen has already taken care of that.”

“I hope this avenue works for you, honey.” And with that Mel got up, went into the bedroom and called Sam to let him know she’d take the assignment.

By the next morning she had a round-trip ticket to Chiang Mai and a reservation for a four-wheel drive vehicle to get her up into the mountains to Phil Coughlin’s compound. She felt both relief to be away from Tien’s bitterness and an apprehension that she was heading into emotional territory that might be just as entangled.

As the plane landed in Thailand, she reminded herself that this upcoming interview was about Phil Coughlin and what compelled him to do extraordinary things, not what he thought about Mel Ames. Nevertheless, she steeled herself for an unsettling reunion.

Armed with the information Sam had e-mailed her and a map from the car rental agency, Mel navigated out of Chiang Mai and followed the highway toward the mountains. Sam had offered to get her a driver, but she’d always preferred being on her own. She wanted time to think, not have to banter in pleasantries with an eager-to-please chauffeur. She wasn’t a tourist in need of pampering.

Although it was monsoon season here in northern Thailand, as well, the rain only lasted for an hour or so during the day and then brilliant sunshine burst onto the refreshed countryside. As the road became narrower and more serpentine, Mel discovered a breathtakingly beautiful landscape around each bend. But as she passed through tiny villages scattered up the mountain she also saw heartbreaking poverty.

It was mid-afternoon when she reached the intricately carved gate to the clinic compound. Her arrival was noticed first by a group of boys, who were scattered around a dusty pitch playing soccer as she rolled to a stop just inside the walls and parked next to a rusting Toyota pickup.

The boys clustered around her as she emerged from the car, chattering in a dialect that she assumed must be Lahu, the hill tribe in this region. She spoke Phil’s name and one of the younger boys ran off to a large thatched bamboo building resting on stilts. As she listened to the boys, she glanced around, taking in her surroundings and cataloguing them for later inclusion in her article. Several stilted buildings rimmed the courtyard, simple but well maintained. She remembered how orderly Phil’s flat had been in Saigon and saw that same precision reflected on a much larger scale here. The entire compound bustled with activity—women shepherding small children, awaiting their turn at what appeared to be the main clinic; men unloading supplies from a flatbed truck; an older woman tending a vegetable garden.

A tall, thin man, his face lined from years witnessing the pain and suffering human beings inflicted upon one another, descended the stairs of one of the houses and crossed the courtyard toward her. As he approached she realized with barely contained surprise that it was Phil. He stretched out his hand and greeted her, but with wariness and discomfort.

“Po told me a round-eyed woman with hair like a boy had spoken my name. I assumed it was either a desperately lost tourist or the reporter from
The Washington Post
the foundation had warned me to expect. They didn’t tell me it would be Melanie Ames.”

At least he recognized her, but beyond remembering
her name, he seemed both distrustful and unwilling to acknowledge their shared history. She wondered what had so damaged him in the intervening years.

“They said they had pulled you away from your vacation. I apologize for the disruption. If I’d had any say in this, you’d still be sitting on a beach drinking mai tais and I’d be left alone to do my good works, of which the foundation seems so enamored. However, it appears that neither one of us had the option of refusing, so here you are. Welcome.”

She wanted him to know that she could have refused but had chosen instead to come. But he seemed to think that she was like any other journalist sent to irritate him. In the face of that indifference, her own apprehensiveness about falling once again within his sphere seemed foolish and self-absorbed.

“Thanks for agreeing to meet with me,” she answered, determined to tamp down the churning in her gut and silence the voice that was asking plaintively, “How can you not care that it is
me
who has come to do this story?”

She followed Phil around the compound, notebook in hand, observing, questioning, showing suitable appreciation for the ingenuity of the Lahu tribesmen who’d been able to create a medical village with the most meager of resources.

Phil was comfortable expounding on the services he and his small staff of rotating medical workers were able to provide to one of the most impoverished of the hill tribes. He was willing to talk about the mobile clinic he brought to the more remote tribes at higher altitudes. He even described a plan he had for trying to prevent the younger generation from developing the opium addiction that was widespread among the elders of the tribe.

But he remained opaque and resistant whenever Mel
tried to steer the conversation to Phil himself—what had been the journey that ultimately brought him to these lush mountains? What about the hill tribes had so captured him that he would devote his life to them? He offered nothing that she could not see herself, presenting only the facade of the hero doctor, a self-aware and hardened version of the cocky bravado she remembered from decades before.

After little more than an hour, he was ready to dismiss her.

“I have the evening clinic to prepare for. Many of the Lahu men offer themselves out as labor in other villages and return late in the day. That’s when I treat them. I can ask the cook to prepare you some tea before you go. Feel free to enjoy it on my verandah.” He pointed up to the porch above them, jutting out on stilts. “The view is spectacular.”

Mel, frustrated by her inability to elicit anything of the man’s spirit and irritated by his abrupt dismissal and unwillingness to even sip a cup of tea with her, decided to leave without accepting his offer. Her phone rang.

“Excuse me, but it’s my daughter. I must answer this.” She turned and took a few steps away from him.

“Mom, oh, thank God you’ve got reception up there!” Tien sounded tightly wound, as if she wanted to leap out of the phone, grab Mel and pull her back.

“Tien! What is it?” The distance she had felt between them in the last few days evaporated. She was once again a mother responding to a cry of need from her child.

“I think I’ve found her! This isn’t some scam artist passed off on me by that lawyer. Someone in the Ministry of Child Welfare called this afternoon. They gave me an address and assured me that this was the Anh Tran who had relinquished the infant Tien Tran in 1975.”

“Have you tried to contact her?”

“I only have an address, and I can’t find a phone number in the directory. I’m going to have to go myself…but that’s why I called.” She was silent for a moment. The bitterness and frustration were gone from her voice.

“Mom, I’m sorry I was so angry with you the other day. I said things I shouldn’t have. And you were right about Nguyen. He was only trying to take advantage of my need.”

“I understand, sweetheart. All is forgiven.”

“Mom, I don’t want to go to her alone. Will you come back and be with me?”

“Of course I will. I’ve got a flight out of Chiang Mai in the morning. There is nothing to keep me here any longer.”

Mel clicked the phone off and absorbed what she had heard from Tien. Although there were no certainties, this latest information about Anh was probably as good as they could get, given its source. Mel was excited for Tien. She had heard the anticipation in her voice—the hope—and she shared that with her. But at the same time, she was hit with the old fear that she was about to lose something very precious.

“Is something wrong?” Phil’s voice broke her train of thought. “You look like you’ve been given devastating news.”

Mel was exhausted and drained. She’d already regretted making the grueling trip, a waste of time for both of them given the paltry, sterile information she’d managed to obtain. She was angry with him—for his arrogance, for his lack of understanding of what she could have done for him with her story, for his unwillingness to acknowledge that something—however tenuous—had once existed between them.

She should have just shrugged off his question, refused the tea and climbed into her car.

But she didn’t.

Something seized her, perhaps ignited by the tentative reconciliation she’d just experienced with Tien on the phone and her own recognition that, as much as Phil had erected a wall between them, she’d allowed it to remain and had not even attempted to establish a connection with him. She’d played the objective, disinterested journalist instead of the woman whose life he had touched in an irrevocable way. Damn it, she was Mel Ames! Where was the fervor, the willingness to leap into unknown territory?

“I’ll take that cup of tea you offered, but only if you’ll join me and allow me to tell you what that phone call was all about.”

She was about to make that leap and see if Phil Coughlin would follow her.

He shrugged and looked at his watch.

“I imagine I can spare a half hour.”

He led the way up to the verandah and made the tea himself.

The view was indeed extraordinary, extending across the mountains to the west. Mel settled into a cushioned wicker chair and cradled the cup in her hands. With a jolt of recognition she saw it was one of the Red Sox mugs he’d had in Saigon.

“You still have these mugs!”

“I still have many things from Saigon. So you have a daughter. When did you marry?”

“I didn’t. I adopted Tien.”

“Tien?”

“The baby from St. Agnes I originally came to help before you persuaded me to rescue all of them.”

“I had no idea.” Phil seemed truly stunned, as if he had
not imagined her ever considering such an action. “I didn’t realize you intended to adopt her yourself.”

“I didn’t—intend to, that is. But by the time we arrived in San Diego, she had made it very clear what she intended—she wanted no one else but me.”

“So she’s a grown woman now. But clearly close to you, and upset about something that has upset you, as well.”

“Was it that obvious?”

“When you ended the conversation, some realization affected you. I could see the change in your face. When you were talking with her, your tone and your expression were totally empathic. You were a mother with a hurting child. But after you got off the phone, it was
you
who was hurting.”

It was Mel’s turn to be stunned. For someone who had barricaded himself from her an hour before, he had nevertheless been tuned in to what she was experiencing. She swallowed another sip of tea and realized this was the opportunity she had been hoping for—the breach in the wall. She plunged in, willing to open herself up to him in the hope that he would reciprocate.