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.
