Because Max’s van is old and slow, we do not arrive until it is almost sunset. The light turns the spume into gold. Both the shore and the sea are full of people—families and lovers and friends and the stray suntanning foreigner. The Fortune Teller squints down at them all from beneath the brim of her hat. It is too crowded for her to try and sense the girl. We will have to return tomorrow. If her spirit is here, we will find her. But if she is not dead, or if she has become something in between, it will not be so simple.

The Fortune Teller did not want to tell me about the missing girl at first, when her parents called us from America. Years ago, they had come to Saigon to speak to the police and look for her themselves, back when she first went missing. But after a long search that uncovered nothing, they decided to turn to the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co. All they could track down was the motorbike belonging to a boyfriend she had been living with, before she’d disappeared. It was discovered here, in Vung Tau, with an illegal new license plate and no sign of its old owner. It had changed hands many times. Something was not adding up, the family told us. The Fortune Teller’s suspicion was that the arithmetic in question had been tampered with by the spirit world.

She’d asked me if I wanted to stay in the city, saying that it might be too difficult for me, as a former missing girl myself. Of course I’m coming with you, I said. My Fortune Teller, my love, my lucky ticket. I just cannot bear to tell you that I am not a former missing girl; I still am one. I have given you all that remains of me, and you have granted me joy I did not believe was possible, but I disappeared long before I ever set foot in that forest when I was fifteen. Here, the secrets engraved on my body: my father’s bed was the traditional, carved kind, uncushioned and made from an endangered species of rosewood. It weighed five hundred pounds, and he attributed his posture and the suppleness of his joints to it. I know that the child I grew inside of myself as a child was sired by at least one monster, but I do not know how many. One of them left something burning and corrosive behind inside of me, that I could never get rid of even after the baby had torn its way out. On the day that our father was crushed by his balcony I was standing above it, and just before I whispered the word “die” and the stone began to crumble when it heard the word, I tasted ash in my mouth. Every night I still dream that I am surrounded by trees and flying. My love, you know so many ghosts, but you cannot know mine.

Yen, she calls to me from the van. Let’s go somewhere.

We drive up the mountain, to the whitewashed lighthouse above the city. We park the van and walk around it with our arms linked, pretending that we are at this seaside resort for our honeymoon instead of the dark work that has really brought us here. We lean over the railing and look across the water. I like to imagine that my child ended up far from that dry, lonesome place. I like to think that she escaped.

I hear a bark.

The dog lies in the shade of a plumeria, at the end of a long rope whose other end is tied to an ice cream seller’s cart. Its muzzle is white, its belly round and clean and contented. It is an old dog now, but its tail smacks the ground excitedly like a puppy’s when it sees me, the years falling away from it. The dog barks again, and the Fortune Teller turns and sees it too.

Her hand tightens on mine, and we begin walking toward it together.