At first, when I heard the soft sobbing, I thought it was coming from Vinh and looked up at the tree. But his eyes were wide and he was staring back down at me.
“It’s Grandma,” he said.
“She’s crying,” I said.
Then we started calling for the adults: “Grandma is crying! Dad, Grandma is crying!”
Soon everyone was awake and had surrounded Grandma. She was still in bed. She’d probably just woken up from her nap.
“Mom,” my father said. “Why are you crying? Are you in pain?”
Grandma shook her head and continued to cry. As soon as she wiped away her tears, more ran down her cheeks. We tried to comfort her, but it wasn’t working. We looked at one another wondering, Who made Grandma cry? Then suddenly she stopped crying for a moment and took my father’s hand.
“Why did you shoot my son Ut Hon?” she asked softly.
Much later in my life, after I had experienced various ups and downs, I would still swear that no words caused me more distress than my grandmother’s question that day.
Everyone standing around the bed was still, except for my father, who stumbled backward as if an arrow had pierced his heart.
“Mom!”
“You shot and killed my son Ut Hon.”
But Grandma kept repeating these words, which just made my father suffer even more, as if an arrow were being twisted deeper into his chest. Sometimes I cried to myself, because I felt like my father was slowly dying. Meanwhile, my mother knew nothing; she was too busy with her stall at the market. When she came home in the afternoons, she seemed surprised to find that Grandma refused to eat with us, turning her back to the table as she held her bowl and unhappily swallowed her food. She ate only what Vinh put in her bowl. Elderly people could act as stubborn and irrational as children sometimes.
Her behavior upset my father. A lot of times he would put his chopsticks down without finishing the meal. It was as if he were still bleeding from the wound caused by his mother’s harsh words. He stared at her back, trying to understand. Had she seen something in a dream? Or was this merely behavior caused by dementia? Once she’d watered the vegetables we had stored in the refrigerator and planted some weeds in a water pitcher. Another time she’d looked around the table at all of us and asked, “Who are you? Why do you call me ‘Grandma’? ”
If Grandma had acted strange—if, for example, she’d climbed up a tree and started to sing or burned her clothes to heat a pot of water—I would not laugh, because what she did would not seem unusual. But her sobbing that day in October was unusual. She cried because of a war that had ended long ago. The war was over, and the wounds it had caused were now healed scars. At least that’s what we thought, because when Vinh and I shot each other with water guns Grandma laughed until tears ran down her face. It wasn’t until that day in October that I realized maybe she was actually crying out of sadness. Her tears were for the war in which my father and Uncle Ut Hon, Vinh’s father, had fought on opposite sides.
It was difficult to understand Grandma. Some mornings she would act normal, as if nothing had ever happened. She woke up early, walked to the dining table, and ate a bowl of instant noodles that my mother had prepared before she left for the market. Meanwhile, my father still looked haggard. Grandma would ask, “You couldn’t sleep? Why do you look so sad? Why are you staring at me like that?” But my father wouldn’t say anything. Had Grandma already forgotten what had happened, or was she just trying to suppress her sadness?
Maybe her crying had been some sort of delirious episode, like when a drunken husband comes home and says to his wife, “My darling Diem!” even though his wife’s name isn’t Diem, and Diem probably isn’t even a real person, just some fictional character in a film or a novel. But of course the wife becomes furious anyway.
Or like when Vinh used to point up at the sky and shout, “Look at those birds!” when really there wasn’t anything in the sky, and I’d realize that he was trying to trick me again.
What Grandma had said to my father was cruel. Besides, the accusation didn’t even make much sense. My father had been stationed in Saigon and Uncle Ut had been killed in a remote forest somewhere, far away from the city. My father didn’t believe that he had shot Uncle Ut. But he still had to dig deep into his memory to be sure; there was a small possibility that his younger brother in fact might have once faced him in combat.
This thought ate away at my father. He wasn’t able to live his life in the present. But we all tried to continue like everything was normal, even Grandma. Two months after the day she’d suddenly started crying, she was found sitting in the front yard stitching a pair of shirts. If somebody asked, “Who are you going to give those shirts to?” she would smile and respond, “To my grandchildren, Hien and Vinh.” But the shirts were only about as big as an open palm.
To Grandma, time was malleable. She couldn’t help mixing the present with the past. After a good sleep, she could wake up and suddenly be transported twenty years back in time. Unfortunately, I wasn’t old enough to do that. Otherwise, this ability would have allowed me to
