Dragonfish: A Novel (18 page)

“So they leave, and I do exactly as I’m told. An hour later Mr. Jonathan arrives at the hospital. He’s alone, acts real concerned with the doctor and the nurses, even holds back a tear when they tell us that Mrs. Nguyen broke her left arm and suffered a concussion. She was lucky she didn’t break her neck. After that I’m told to go home.

“A week later, I finally see Mr. Nguyen again. He’s got a metal splint on two of his fingers. Him and his son act like nothing happened, but for the next few months, he’s a lot calmer and nicer on the phone with Mrs. Nguyen. He’s drinking less, brings food and flowers home to her. They even go to Hawaii for a week, and I know how much he hates flying.

“But once she gets better, things go right back to how they were. I pick him up one morning and he’s got a big bandage above his left eye. Few days after that—this was about a month ago—she comes storming into the restaurant during dinnertime and demands to see him. Mr. Jonathan tries to calm her down, but
she swipes a glass from the counter and smashes it on the ground. That’s when Mr. Nguyen comes rushing out of the kitchen, grabs her by the arm, hauls her into the kitchen. There’s a lot of yelling at first, stuff flying around, but then his office door slams shuts and we don’t hear anything for hours. Even after the restaurant closes, they still don’t come out.

“So I wasn’t all that surprised when Mr. Jonathan took me aside the next day and told me to start following her. It was now my full-time job. Rent a different car every day, park down the street, wait for her to leave the house. Anywhere she goes, I go. She didn’t work anymore, so I was usually following her to the grocery store or the shopping mall, sometimes to the movies. One thing she liked doing was going to the casinos in the afternoon and just walking around, gambling a little, watching people. Sometimes she’d go driving for an hour and then come straight home. I reported all that.”

Victor had been telling his story mostly to me, but now he turned thoughtfully to Mai. “What I didn’t report was her visiting you. One afternoon she parks across the street from your complex, crosses over on foot. She walks directly to your apartment, drops an envelope in your mailbox, and doesn’t stop until she gets back to her car. I guess you got that letter.”

Mai gave me a knowing glance but offered Victor only coolness. “You just kept that to yourself? Respecting her privacy all of a sudden?”

I expected someone like Victor to bristle at sarcasm, but again he seemed surprised, more hurt than annoyed by her tone. “I was respecting the situation,” he insisted. “I figured I was following her because Mr. Nguyen thought she was cheating on him or something. This felt like something else though. The way she looked after she went to your apartment . . . When she got back to
her car, she sat there for a long time with her hands gripping the steering wheel and just stared at your complex. It was like someone had died. I went back to your apartment that evening and waited on that bench by the pool. You passed me, actually, when you came home. You were wearing exactly what you’re wearing now. I knew at once who you had to be. It’d be obvious to anyone who’s seen your mother. And I don’t know—something about the whole thing . . . it felt so
private
, I guess. I admit I was curious, but I didn’t want to say anything until I knew more.”

He tried to look Mai in the eye, searching for some approval, and I could see now why he was doing all this. The first time he saw her, she must have inflamed his curiosity just as her mother did to me ten years before. He probably went back to that bench the following night and every night after that. Might have even fantasized about this very conversation, in this bar, with her and only her sitting across from him.

“I watched her mostly during the day,” he went on. “Mr. Nguyen was home in the evening, and she rarely went out after sundown anyway. The one night I had to keep watch was Thursday night, which has always been Mr. Nguyen’s long session of poker. He plays at the casino from seven in the evening to seven in the morning, so she spends that night alone, and recently she started going to the movies. That didn’t surprise me. I had already followed her one afternoon to a showing of
Castaway
. Sat four rows behind her and saw her cry several times, even during parts of the movie that weren’t sad at all.”

His face softened. He spoke to Mai with sudden confidence, an intimacy he seemed sure she would reciprocate: “You and her left Vietnam by boat and were at sea for a long time. Awful things happened, I’m sure.” He said a few words in Vietnamese, as if reciting some adage she surely knew too. Then his voice leaned
into her. “Mr. Nguyen and his son were also on that boat. All four of you went to the same refugee camp.”

Mai appeared to withdraw from him in her seat. In a small voice, like she was claiming innocence, she said, “My uncle said my mom and I were on Pulau Bidong.” She pronounced the name with Vietnamese inflection.

He nodded. “That’s where she first met him,” he added delicately. “You must have met him too. We were there, actually, me and my brothers. Seven years later, long after you guys left. I think that’s how he first felt he could trust us. Knowing we’d been to the same place, and that our father died there.”

I’d become the stranger at the table. Victor fell silent, and Mai was speechless, cupping her Coke with both hands. I wanted her to know what Junior had told me about him and his father in that camp, how Suzy had loved Sonny long before she met me. I wanted to tell her that as bad as it is to have no memory of something significant you were a part of, it’s much worse to know you were never part of it at all.

“Anyway . . .” Victor turned back to me. “I was actually looking forward to going to the movies, but when Thursday came around, she drove to Fremont Street instead. To the Coronado. It was suspicious for sure, her going to the one place in town where Mr. Nguyen and Mr. Jonathan are blacklisted. Anyway, she checked herself into a room with nothing but her purse, and that’s when I got real nervous for her. I had the front desk put me through to the room, but she answered, so I hung up. If someone was in there with her, I knew I had to report it, and there was no telling what Mr. Nguyen would do about that. Then five hours passed and nothing happened. At midnight she came out, checked out of the hotel, and drove home. I tried calling the room again right after she left, but the front desk said it was vacated. So that’s what
I told Mr. Jonathan—that Mrs. Nguyen had been alone in there the entire time.”

Victor refilled his glass with the pitcher. He drank like he was thirsty. It seemed to embarrass him, telling us all this, hearing his own voice so much. I wondered if this wasn’t some kind of confession for him, one he was ashamed yet eager to give—more to Mai apparently than to me.

“Do me a favor, Victor,” I said. “Don’t call her that.”

“Mrs. Nguyen? You want me to call her Hong?”

“Whatever. Just don’t call her that.”

He shrugged his assent, and he and Mai exchanged a brief private look like they both understood my pain.

His cell phone chimed and startled all three of us. He picked it up, his eyes gathering Mai and me carefully before he answered it. His voice was low, his Vietnamese soft and slurred, a southern accent. He appeared to be answering questions.

When he hung up a minute later, he said, as if issuing us a warning, “That was Mr. Jonathan. He’ll check on me every two hours.”

“You said something to him about a gun,” Mai said.

“I told him a few weeks ago that I saw your mother buy one at a pawnshop. I was just reminding him there.”

“So she’s packing heat too? Jesus, is this woman seriously my mother?”

“But she hates guns,” I said to them both. “Never even touched one. She bought a gun?”

“Not exactly,” Victor replied. “But she does have one.”

“So you lied to him?”

“About her buying the gun, yeah. She’d actually taken one of his.”

“Then why mention it at all?”

“Because she wanted me to.”

In the silence that followed, he put a fresh cigarette between his lips, then changed his mind for some reason and inserted it back into the pack before returning to his story.

A
FTER THAT FIRST TRIP
to the Coronado, he spent most of the following week sitting in his car, watching their house from his curbside seat. The only time Suzy left home was for groceries, the mail, or takeout at the nearby Chinese place. Through his binoculars, he could see how unkempt her hair and clothes were and how stark her face looked, like she was perpetually waking from a nap. I knew that face from all her long melancholy spells, going to bed as soon as she got home from work, sleeping until two in the afternoon on her off days, sometimes spending the entire day in bed watching television. Victor said she moved like an old woman.

When Thursday evening arrived, however, she came out of the house in a dress with her hair brushed and her face made. She was carrying a red knapsack. As she had the previous week, she drove to the Coronado and checked herself again into room 1215.

Victor tried to stay out of sight, but just in case she spotted him, he had also started wearing baseball caps and sunglasses, which must have got to him. I could see it now on his face. It wears on you—watching someone who doesn’t know you’re there, who doesn’t know they should be hiding from you. After a while, you start feeling like the one hiding from them.

But did Suzy know he was there that entire time? Sitting in his anonymous rental by her curb, the same guy who picked up her husband every morning in a funereal Lexus, that dark figure behind the steering wheel and the tinted windows? Had he
made some sort of impression on her from that distance, even before this mess started? Her world was hardly big enough for the people in her life, let alone those on the periphery. So how did Victor get in?

To look more like a hotel guest that night, he wore a suit. He sat in a chair across from the elevators, just around the corner from her room. Anytime he heard someone approach, he lifted the magazine he was reading. He must have wondered how long he could keep this up before she started noticing him there every time she left her room, or before some hotel staffer or security camera noticed too. Maybe it was that night that he realized how tiring it was to hide. Maybe that’s why he was careless.

Nothing happened for a couple of hours. Hardly a soul passed him in the hallway except for the hotel maids rolling their cleaning carts.

At some point, he dozed off. He didn’t know for how long, but when he opened his eyes, Suzy was sitting on the edge of the chair next to his and eyeing him like she’d been waiting for him to awake.

She spoke to him in Vietnamese, a proper northern accent, which often makes southerners feel inferior. She told me that once when I laughed at her English. I’m not a dummy, she chided me. In Vietnam I speak beautifully.

Tell me, little brother, she said to Victor. What is your name?

He told her his Vietnamese name. Perhaps he was still in shock, because it never occurred to him to lie or deny anything.

You’ve been following me. For my husband.

When he nodded, it felt like a confession.

He believes I’m crazy, she said. His son does too. You’ve been watching me for some time now. Please tell me the truth. Do I seem like a crazy person to you?

She had asked the question so sincerely that he knew she’d see through a lie. So he said, A little.

Why? What makes you think that?

Because you always seem like you’re looking for something that isn’t there.

She sat back in her chair.

It’s good that Son chose you, she finally said, her eyes calmer now. Instead of your brother. You seem like someone who thinks long and hard before you do anything. I think that’s why you have a sullen face. And why you smoke all the time. You should stop that, by the way. You’re so young and yet I see you coughing all the time.

Suzy waited for a hotel maid to reach the end of the hallway before she spoke again, her voice lowered:

I decided tonight. Just now in my room. I want to ask for your help. You can say yes or no, of course, but from here on it’s all in your hands. There’s nothing I can do about it after tonight.

Victor knew she was about to tell him things she couldn’t take back, but he must have been burning to know what else she meant by that. Suzy had a habit of putting things in that way, as though she had accidentally set your house on fire and had no choice now but to stand back and watch it burn.

She said, You followed me to that apartment I visited last week. That’s my daughter who lives there. I haven’t seen her since she was five. I’ve been writing her letters. She has no memory of me, I’m sure. It’s quite possible she hates me, or doesn’t think of me at all. Twenty years ago, I left her with her granduncle and went as far away as I could. I’m still not sure I can explain why—to you or to myself. I don’t regret it though, as difficult as it was to do. The strange thing is that I’ve never stopped thinking of myself as a mother. You must think that’s ridiculous. How can
a woman give up her child and still see herself as a mother? But that’s why I’m here now, talking to you. You’re the first person I’ve ever told this to.

Victor remembered her taking a breath after she said that.

“W
AIT A MINUTE
,” I stopped him. I had to check the disbelief in my voice. “Why you?”

Victor shrugged slightly. “That afternoon at Mai’s apartment. She recognized me. She saw me in her rearview mirror, smoking out of my car window, and immediately realized what was going on. It really worried her, of course—Mr. Nguyen finding out about Mai. But when she got home, he didn’t act any different with her. If he knew something, she would’ve seen it. He’s not very good at hiding his feelings. So that really shocked her—that I hadn’t reported anything. Somehow she just knew it and decided to trust me.

“There’s another reason. She told me this at the hotel. The night I waited for the ambulance with her—she opened her eyes at one point and started moaning, murmuring to herself. I figured she was too out of it to see or think clearly, but she remembered me kneeling beside her and telling her not to move, that help was coming. She said I held her hand until the ambulance arrived. I guess I did do that.”