Impossible to believe she was the same girl from Saigon-now filled out with rounded arms and cheeks, glossy hair tied in ponytails with pink yarn, wearing a pink Cinderella T-shirt and pants.
“Lan?” Helen said. “Remember me?”
The girl looked up with a heavy, bored look, as if bracing herself for more unwanted attention. Helen moved closer, bent down to hug her. Her skin smelled sweet and medicinal, like cough syrup. Close-up, it was obvious that her face was bloated, her eyes dry and hard. Helen wondered what medications she was on. Lan’s body remained limp in her arms.
Helen sat on a low plastic stool. The table was filled with toys, but Lan had attention for only the small ball of clay in her hands. She had the dull, listless behavior of an animal in the zoo. “You have a lot of toys,” Helen said.
Lan grabbed her hand. “You bring me candy?”
Helen laughed, relieved at the shared memory. The doctors standing around them made her feel she needed to offer something up. “I brought her candy in Saigon.”
Lan shook her head, impatient, with a sharp tilt of the chin. “Sam bring me candy. What you bring me now?”
“I came to take pictures again for the magazine.”
Lan yawned. “I’m hungry.”
The nurse stepped forward eagerly. “I’ll bring you back some lunch, sweetie.”
“I want hamburger,” Lan said to her retreating back as the door swung shut.
Helen looked from Lan to the doctors. “Should we start taking pictures?”
“What are you giving me?” Lan shouted.
Behind her the doctors moved off, whispering and marking their clipboards. Under her breath, Lan began to sing a tune, the words getting louder until they could be clearly heard: “ ‘There was a little honey from Kontum/Boy did she ever like boom, boom…’ ”
“No,” Helen said, bending down and hushing the girl. “Not in the hospital. Don’t let them hear you.” She felt a flush of parental embarrassment.
Lan shrugged and plucked at her hair, pulling out a few strands that she dropped on the floor.
“What do you want me to bring next time?” Helen said, figuring on bargaining with the child.
“A camera,” she said. “Sam promised me a camera, and he lied and goes to die instead.” The words froze Helen, and Lan noticed, becoming suddenly attentive. “He lied to you, too?”
“It was an accident, Lan. He didn’t want to die.”
“Mama says no accidents. I lose my leg because I was stupid girl.”
“That’s wrong. It wasn’t your fault.”
“I pick vegetables because they grow bigger and more easy than walking around to safe place.”
“It was an accident.”
The nurse came back carrying two cafeteria trays of food and put one down in front of each of them. She winked at Helen. “If you two finish your lunch maybe I can find you a dessert.”
Lan’s face turned red, her brow furrowed. “My mama’s right. No accidents. You’re stupid.”
Helen took a deep breath, suddenly tired of the whole idea of the shoot, the effort too hard; she just wanted to escape from the girl’s craziness. “You like America?” Helen asked, bending down and taking a camera out of its case.
“I want that camera.”
“This is mine. I’ll buy you your own.”
“I want to go home. Why can’t my parents visit?” Lan shoved the tray of food across the table, sending it flying over the edge and onto the floor. “I hate chicken. Lan is special girl, eat anything she want.” She jerked herself sideways on her stool, grabbing for the crutches against the wall, moving so quickly she lost her balance and fell.
Helen made no move to help her, and when Lan looked up and saw her sitting back, she cried louder as the nurse rushed forward and kneeled next to her.
“Don’t touch,” Lan screamed. “No touch me.”
Helen’s face beaded with sweat; she couldn’t breathe, the commotion bringing back the low, dark Red Cross room in Saigon, the close smell of urine and unwashed bodies.
Images clattered one after another in her head. Helen rose on unsteady legs as if rising from a heavy, drugged sleep. No matter what she did, she could not escape, that much was clear. Even a dangerous talent better than nothing.
She longed for cool air and quiet. Lan’s screams grew louder, more out of control, but Helen saw only the wounded children of Saigon in front of her, laid out on their beds sardine-style, the little boy in the courtyard eating bougainvillea blossoms. The camera in her hand shook. Lan rocked on the floor with the doctors kneeling around her like a wounded soldier attended by medics. Helen grabbed her camera bag and ducked out the door.
In the hallway, the cries muffled, Helen leaned against a cartoon rabbit painted on the wall and closed her eyes.
The nurse came out. “Sorry about that. Today’s a bad one.”
“She’s done this before?”
“Oh yeah. Back and forth. Shell shock for kids. Not pretty.”
“She wasn’t like that.”
“You don’t look so good yourself. Why don’t you lie down, and I’ll get a doctor.”
“That’s okay.” Helen moved toward the elevator.
“Aren’t you going to say good-bye?” the nurse said.
“I don’t want to upset her,” Helen mumbled as the elevator doors opened.
“I can tell her you’re coming back, right?” the nurse shouted, but Helen was already gone.
Helen and her mother walked below their house with Duke, along the crescent of beach where she had grown up; in the sand she took her first steps in, stumbling into her father’s arms; along the water where she and Michael spent innumerable summers building sand castles while their young mother sat and talked with the other mothers and prepared sandwiches and Kool-Aid for their lunches. They walked under the limestone cliffs, Duke’s gold body weaving in and out of boulders, where Helen and teenage friends had burned bonfires late at night and talked and drank warm beer, the whole point to pair off and go into the dark, lie back in the cool embrace of sand and explore with lips and tongues and hands, to allow a first kiss, hands under a blouse, a bra to be unhooked, gentle kisses and quick straightenings, and then return to the group at the fire, and all that sweetness, all those boys smelling of shampoo that would later be transformed into the shapes of body bags. They walked in the late afternoon, the sun saffron-colored, and Helen’s mother cried, her face punched-looking, pale and blotched, hands clutching.
“I forbid it. No,” she said. “It isn’t fair.”
“But it’s no good,” Helen said. “I don’t belong anywhere else right now.”
“No!”
“I need to go,” Helen said.
They walked past families having early dinners, small children and dogs running and chasing, Duke running and chasing, around picnic tables piled with food, people laughing and talking, the same people they used to be, and Helen stumbled, something sharp against her ankles, her balance upset, and without thought she was diving sideways, facedown, pitching over her shoulder in a combat roll into the sand, and when she looked up she saw it was a piece of line pulled taut to a fishing pole stuck at the water’s edge, and two frightened little boys turned from their dinners, afraid they were in trouble, and because it wasn’t a trip wire, because it was not an ambush with a mine or a grenade or death at the end, Helen lost her control, sobbed and screamed and pounded her hands into the sand that had cheated her, that had cheated all of them, and her mother froze, a premonition, she did not know this strange haunted woman at her feet, her movements as foreign as that far-off, floating, green country, and seeing with her own eyes the death of her little blond-haired girl who was as dead now as her son, she
