She gave me a blank look and said, “You know, I’m famished. I’d love a hot dog. But can we please get away from this place and go somewhere else? I’ve been here every day since … well, since.”
“I’m parked in a garage a few blocks away. Let’s get a bite to eat and then we can find somewhere with more privacy where we can talk.”
“I know a place,” she said, “but it’s not nearby. I would very much like to see the bonsai gardens at the National Arboretum. I don’t suppose you would like to visit it?”
“I’ll take you anywhere you want to go, Mrs. Natale. But maybe we should eat our food before it gets cold.”
“Call me Linh,” she said. “Please.”
“Linh.”
We sat on a park bench and ate our hot dogs and drank the Cokes I’d bought.
“There was a botanical garden in Saigon, but the war destroyed it,” Linh said in her carefully accented English. “It was beautiful. I went there often as a young girl. Now it’s gone, all gone.”
“We can spend as much time at the arboretum as you wish,” I said.
“Thank you, dear. You’re very kind. I need to calm my soul.” Her voice broke and my heart ached for her. “It’s unbearable to think of life without my daughter. The police have no news … nothing. The waiting is torture.”
“I know,” I said. “Come, let’s walk to my car.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d visited the arboretum, but it was so long ago that I had to check the map for directions. The twenty-minute drive was a straight shot out of the center of the city, over railroad tracks and through a blighted industrial area to the pretty 450-acre park tucked away in the far eastern reaches of Washington.
I drove through the front gate, and the pollution and noise of the city faded. Dogwood and flowering cherry trees bloomed along the winding drive to the Bonsai and Penjing Museum. Here the warm spring air smelled fresh and clean.
“There is no one except us,” Linh said. “It is so quiet.”
“It’s a weekday,” I said. “Looks like we might have the park to ourselves.”
“In Saigon our gardens are always filled with people,” she said. “They find tranquility in nature.”
“In Washington it’s our buildings that are filled with people,” I said. “Government workers. And there’s no tranquility.”
She smiled. “I prefer the ways of my country.”
“What is ‘penjing’?” I asked.
“An older form of bonsai. From China.”
I pulled into a gravel strip parking lot by a low pavilion next to one other car. In front of us at the crest of a hill surrounded by meadows nearly two dozen Corinthian columns rose like a ruined temple transported from ancient Greece. Blindingly white against an azure sky, they made a spectacular tableau in the middle of nowhere.
“How beautiful,” Linh said. “What is it?”
We got out of the car and I went over to read a brown-and-white park sign.
“The Capitol Columns,” I said. “They used to be part of the East Portico of the U.S. Capitol. It says here they were removed and put in storage in 1958 when some expansion work was done on the building. Moved to this site in the late 1980s and dedicated in 1990.”
“Perhaps we can walk up there after we see the bonsai,” Linh said.
We crossed the parking lot and entered the outdoor pavilion of the bonsai exhibit through a Japanese-style wooden gate that led to a path called the Cryptomeria Walk. Linh fell silent as we toured the grounds, fingers pressed to her lips as she paused to contemplate each of the ancient miniature trees from Japan and China, some several centuries old. Her breathing seemed to slow, as though their mysticism and timelessness did, in fact, calm her troubled spirit.
Though I tried to connect to her Zen-like serenity, I couldn’t. Instead I felt restless, edgy. I had questions I wanted to ask, but it would be wrong in this almost sacred place. Perhaps when we visited the columns.
“Rebecca loved gardens. Did you know that?” Linh asked.
We had come to the North American pavilion, the last of the outdoor exhibits, where more bonsai were displayed in rustic simplicity on weathered wooden tables. The afternoon sunshine cast silhouettes onto the white stucco walls, transforming the miniature trees into bizarre shadow puppets.
“No, I didn’t.”
“We used to visit some of the grand estates together. Biltmore, Winterthur, Longwood. She loved doing that.”
I thought of the passage referring to a garden that Rebecca had marked in the epistle to Richard Boyle. Would Linh find some significance in it that Ian, Horne, and I did not?
“My mother also loved gardening,” I said. “We went to those same places and she brought me here to the arboretum many years ago. But her favorite place was Monticello. She followed
“I’ve never been there.” Linh faced me, folding her arms across her thin chest. “Do you want to tell me what’s bothering you, Lucie? It’s about Rebecca, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
We passed under the branches of a gnarled cherry tree as a sudden breeze blew the puffball clusters of blossoms, sending petals like fat snowflakes swirling around us and making a pale pink carpet on the ground.
Linh bent her head and, for a moment, I wondered if she were praying. When she looked up, her eyes were again bright with tears.
“What do you want to know?”
I wanted to know things that were really none of my business, things that were intensely personal that Rebecca had perhaps not shared even with her mother. But Rebecca had dragged me into the middle of this. Whether or not she was still alive, Ian was dead and I couldn’t help but think his death was somehow related to her disappearance.
“I don’t want to upset you,” I said.
“There is little chance of that.” She tilted her chin. “I knew my daughter, Lucie. Flaws and all. And I loved her. She was my life. You know that.”
“I know. And I know she loved you just as much.”
Linh linked her arm through mine. “Ask your questions.”
“Let’s talk while we walk to the columns,” I said.
“This isn’t too difficult for you?” She indicated my cane.
“I can do everything I used to do. It just takes me longer. Though my running and cross-country days are over.”
She pressed her lips together again. “You, too, have had your share of problems.”
The dirt footpath had been worn smooth into a narrow meandering trail that led to the grassy knoll where the enormous columns stood like an ancient ruin. They had been placed on a foundation made of stones taken from the east side of the Capitol. A constant wind whistled across the wide-open scrubby meadow as we made our way like pilgrims journeying to a holy site. Except for the flowering trees and a budding magnolia, everything else in the surrounding woods was brown and bare, just as it was back home in Atoka.
“You know Rebecca and I hadn’t seen each other since she graduated,” I said. “Until last weekend. The only time I heard from her was when she sent me flowers in the hospital.”
“I was aware of that, yes.”
“Do you know why she wanted to see me, out of the blue, after all these years?”
“Perhaps because she wanted to connect with an old friend?”
So Linh didn’t know.
“I, uh, think it might have been more than that,” I said. “I think there was something she wanted me to do … or something she wanted me to know.”
Linh tugged my arm and we left the path so she could admire an enormous flowering cherry tree. Across from us a young couple sat talking on a wooden bench, absorbed in each other.
“And you don’t know what that is?” Linh asked.
