My parents met in the valley of Long Tieng. It is a special place, rising more than three thousand feet above sea level, and ringed by mountains on three sides—challenging terrain for planes and runways. And yet, by the late 1960s, this area the Lao call “the Most Secret Place on Earth” was one of the busiest airports in the world. A valley so empty it was unmarked on maps was home to nearly forty thousand people. There were Hmong tribesmen and South Vietnamese soldiers and Thai mercenaries. There were American Special Forces and men who worked for something called the Special Activities Division, which is part of the CIA, and pilots who flew the agency’s planes for Air America. There were women who set up shop in the mud streets of the sprawling encampment that lined the runway, cooking noodles and tailoring clothes and taking in laundry and sometimes the men themselves. The unofficial mayor of Long Tieng was a CIA officer named Jerry Daniels, who had founded the pop-up town as a base camp for the Americans’ chosen Lao ally, Major General Vang Po, of the Royal Lao Army. Long Tieng existed so that US forces could penetrate the Ho Chi Minh Trail that ran along the North Vietnamese border with Laos. It had no other reason for being. When the CIA left, everyone else would leave, too.
My mother, Paj, was the wife of Thaiv Haam, who had been educated in Vientiane and spoke fluent French. He also spoke some English. He worked as a translator for the Americans, but later traveled to Vientiane, where there were reporters, he knew, who wanted information about the Most Secret Place on Earth. That was where he met Spencer Murphy, a grinning journalism veteran of the chaos in Southeast Asia who was tracking the dominoes—South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos—as they fell to Communist insurgencies one by one. Murphy bought Haam a Harvey Wallbanger at a Western-only bar. Haam agreed to show him Long Tieng and hire on as his interpreter. It seemed a simple bargain. A deal between allies.
Thaiv, in Hmong, means “to shield.” My mother’s name, Paj, means “Flower.”
My name is Nora. From the Latin Honora—or honor.
There is Destiny in all the ways others choose to name us.
“It feels like revenge to me,” Elliot said.
He and David were sitting under an umbrella at a table near the tennis courts at the Nantucket Yacht Club. It was a private club founded over a hundred years before. Their father had been a member in good standing for nearly four decades, skippering a classic 1930s wood-hulled boat designed by John Alden. He’d discovered it one summer at an islander’s yard sale and meticulously restored it. Over the years, he’d competed in the Opera House Cup each August with a hand-picked crew of cronies. His sons had learned to sail in a Beetle Cat, which was known as a Rainbow on Nantucket, because each catboat had a different solid-colored sail. The Yacht Club had come up with the idea so that parents could recognize their kids’ boats from a distance during weekend races. The Rainbow Fleet, as it came to be called, had been a familiar sight around the island since 1926. The boats were as iconic as a Wianno Senior off Hyannis Port.
Spence had allowed Nora to sail the family Rainbow during her Nantucket summers until she was eighteen. When she had disappeared for college and the world, he sold the catboat and concentrated on skippering his Alden. Those were the epic Opera House Cup years, nearly a decade of competition. He’d had a decade of gentle cruising after that. But as his eightieth birthday approached, Spence had capitulated and sold his beloved boat. That was the year Barbara was first diagnosed with cancer. He’d had other priorities than sanding hulls and varnishing teak. His Yacht Club membership remained.
David and Elliot’s sailing days were long behind them. This morning they had walked down from Lincoln Circle to trade sets of tennis. They had greeted old friends of their father’s and people they’d known themselves as adolescents, both of them secretly astonished at how badly everyone had aged. Now they were drinking iced tea and lemonade with a view of the harbor. The Yacht Club was swathed in red, white, and blue, but it was an oasis of sanity on July 3rd, as crowds of weekenders and day-ferry tourists milled up Main Street, over Centre, and down Broad.
“My plan to keep Dad on the island. How is that revenge?” David asked. “He loves it here.”
“Revenge against Kate. By making poor Laney miserable.”
“Laney’s never been poor in her life.” He stared steadily at the blue water of the harbor. “I’d just like to see whether she can accept a challenge for once. Do something necessary, whether she likes it or not.”
“I talked it over with Andre last night. He agrees that we should move Dad to New York,” Elliot said. “Assisted living. A place that offers graduated levels of memory care. So that if he gets worse as time passes, there are supports already in place. He won’t have to be moved again.”
“How generous of Andre. Is he going to pay for it, too?” David asked.
“Well—” Elliot hesitated. “Actually, Dave, I might as well tell you. Andre and I are getting married. We were going to announce it this weekend but the whole Nora mess has made it . . . inappropriate somehow.”
“Don’t,” David said.
“Don’t what?”
“Get married. You’ll end up hating him.”
Elliot frowned slightly. “I think we ought to compare costs, between hiring more people on an hourly basis here and paying for memory care in New York.”
“But you’re not Dad’s power of attorney,” David said flatly. “I am.”
“Maybe we should discuss that, too.” Elliot’s voice was strained. “I’m not sure it’s healthy for any of us to put the Dad-problem solely in one set of hands.”
“What does that mean?”
“Andre thinks that decisions about Dad’s future—whether he stays here or goes, what happens to the house once he’s gone—should be equally shared. After all, Dad’s leaving Step Above to both of us. You’re a lawyer and I’m sure you’re a great executor, but your decisions affect my inheritance. The house needs upkeep. We should set aside funds for that, and draw up a schedule of necessary maintenance, now that Dad is no longer capable of managing it. That should happen whether he’s living here or not. With all these costs and payments, Andre thinks the process should be more codified and transparent. It shouldn’t be something you have to handle alone. I agree.”
“You do realize I don’t give a rat’s ass what Andre thinks?” David said. “He has no more right than Kate to know about any of this.”
“But I do,” Elliot persisted. “I’d like to go over Dad’s assets with you. You know how much of his royalty income is left. I can give you a rough estimate of the house’s worth. It’s the only way we can make informed decisions about his future.”
“It doesn’t matter whether the house is repaired or falls down,” David said impatiently. “It’s the location that will matter to buyers once Dad’s gone. Steps Beach is Nantucket’s Gold Coast. The house will be razed.”
Elliot was shocked. “We’re not selling Step Above!”
David tore his gaze from the water and stared at his brother. “Of course we are.”
“Since when?”
“Why would we do anything else? The place is a gold mine. We can’t keep it. The taxes alone are insane.”
“But it’s important to us!”
David shrugged. “Not to me. I can’t unload it fast enough.”
“I love that house! More than anything else in the world!”
“Don’t tell Andre that.” He pushed back his chair and rose from the table, jiggling the remaining ice in his drink glass. “When Dad dies, you can buy me out. But I reserve the right to an independent appraisal. Forgive me if I don’t take yours as gospel.”
“David—” Elliot was despairing. “You know it needs a ton of work. A new foundation, probably. New wiring and windows. A new roof. New plumbing and a new septic field. Which means new landscaping. And that doesn’t even begin to touch the actual renovation. Of the interior space, I mean.”
“Oh, God. Don’t tell me. You have blueprints drawn up in your head.”
“The house deserves to be brought into the twenty-first century. That’s going to cost significant money.”
“Which is why we should sell it.”
“You might feel differently if you saw the place as it could be,” Elliot argued. “Not a falling-down wreck with an unmown lawn, but a jewel of a place to entertain your clients. I’m amazed you haven’t thought of that before, Dave. It’s such a quick flight from Boston. We’d be willing to let you use it any time you wanted.”
David placed his empty glass deliberately on a nearby tray. “My taste is nothing like Andre’s. And neither is my clients’.”
Elliot flushed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means Nantucket isn’t exactly Fire Island.”
“Did you really just say that?”
“Yes, Elliot, I did.”
“You don’t give a fuck about any of us, do you?”
David picked up his racquet and tossed a towel over his shoulder. “I have work to do. I’ll see you back at the house.”
Because Peter Mason lived on a farm, he was in the habit of rising early. His foreman, Rafe da Silva, was generally responsible for the flock of sheep that roamed over Peter’s acreage—what little of it wasn’t bog devoted to cranberries. But since his marriage to Tess, Rafe no longer lived in the apartment above the barn. He drove the six miles from town each morning in semi-darkness to the unmarked sandy track through the moors that led to Mason Farms. By the time his headlights raked across the entrance gate, Peter had already checked the henhouse for eggs and was waiting for him with a fresh mug of coffee. Neither of them talked much in the morning. They stood a few feet apart, hands thrust in their pockets, with the dog, Ney, at their feet. Smelling the air. Feeling the weather. Drinking the coffee as it cooled.
Merry was rarely awake for this ritual. Unlike Peter, she could never get enough sleep. So he was surprised when he reentered the house to find her out of bed and on a stepladder in his library, searching the bookshelves.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine. Do you have anything here on Long Tieng?”
“Long what?”
“Tieng. It’s a place in Laos.”
“Of course it is,” he said resignedly. “Because, Nora Murphy. There should be a book somewhere in the left-hand section—try the upper shelves, not too near the ceiling. A Great Place to Have a War. Guy named Kurlantzick wrote it. The spine is orange.”
He went back to the kitchen. She would want her morning drink exactly the way she liked it—half steamed milk, half black coffee, in that order. People who didn’t know Merry took one look at her straight blonde hair and efficient work clothes and assumed she was low-maintenance. He knew better.
“You’re a military historian,” she said when he reappeared near his bookshelves.
“In college,” he temporized.
She took the mug and handed him A Great Place to Have a War. “I don’t have time to read this. But I don’t know enough about the US involvement in Laos to understand Nora Murphy’s notes. Could you summarize for me?”
“Sure.” He glanced at her uncertainly. “How much do you know about the Vietnam War?”
“I don’t care about that,” she said. “I’m asking about Laos.”
“But they’re connected.”
“Okay. Then just—assume I know enough. We were fighting the Communist North Vietnamese, who were backed by the Chinese and the Russians; our allies were the South Vietnamese, who were supposed to be democratic. Fifty thousand US soldiers died and the North Vietnamese won.”
“Good,” Peter said encouragingly.
“But Laos. From Nora’s laptop, she seems to be talking about stuff that happened after we pulled out of Vietnam.”
“Only kind of.” Peter sat down on the sofa. Merry curled up next to him with her nose in her coffee mug. “We weren’t supposed to set foot in Laos. Neither were the North Vietnamese. It was a neutral country. But neither side respected that, which is why the warfare there was secret. If you look at a map, Laos is sandwiched between Thailand—a major US staging ground—and Vietnam. The Ho Chi Minh Trail, the principal north-south supply route during the war, ran along the Lao-Vietnamese border. During the rainy season it was impassable for six months and not much happened. During the dry season—which began roughly in December each year—the trail became a North Vietnamese highway to the south.”
“Okay,” Merry said. “I get it. The CIA set up a base camp in this place called Long Tieng to ambush the North Vietnamese when they were using the trail. And at its height, there were tens of thousands of people in this makeshift city—some American, some Lao or Hmong, as Nora calls them—”
“The Hmong are a hill tribe native to that part of Laos,” Peter explained. “They worked for the Americans. And yes, at that point Long Tieng was the second-largest city in Laos, after Vientiane. And yet it was never marked on a map.”
“Go on. I shouldn’t have interrupted.”
“The US involvement in Vietnam ended with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords early in 1973—I think as early as January that year. So American forces pulled out of Southeast Asia in the months that followed.”
Merry’s eyebrows crinkled. “But Nora’s writing about two years after that. At least.”
“That’s because the Communist insurgency in Laos—backed by their friends in North Vietnam and their friends in China and Russia—continued to fight a civil war for control of the country. Same thing happened in Cambodia. In Laos the insurgency called themselves the Pathet Lao. By the spring of 1975 they’d seized control of the government and the capitol, Vientiane. And there were still fifty thousand people—most of them Hmong tribesmen or mercenaries of various nationalities who’d worked for the US—living in Long Tieng. The Pathet Lao made it pretty clear they’d annihilate them as soon as they took the valley.”
“So what happened?”
“Oh, it was a disaster,” Peter said. “At that point, the only Americans left in Laos were a few diplomats still attached to the embassy and one CIA guy in Long Tieng. He became famous. I’ve forgotten his name but it’s somewhere in this book.”
“Jerry Daniels,” Merry said. “Nora mentions him.”
“Right. Daniels. Anyway—he had one Air America plane and one pilot on the airstrip. And fifty thousand people who wanted out. He got a few more planes sent in from Thailand and managed to evacuate a thousand other people out of the city before the Pathet Lao arrived. The rest were left hanging.”
“They always are,” Merry said. “So who made the cut? Who got on the plane?”
“Top Lao commanders, people close to the Agency.”
“But probably not Nora’s parents,” Merry suggested. “Her mother was a cook in Long Tieng. She was married to Spence Murphy’s interpreter—who, if you remember, was killed.”
“I do,” Peter said. “I’ve got a copy of Spence’s book right there on the shelf.”
“You’ve read it?”
“You haven’t?”
Merry shook her head.
“He witnessed the evacuation of Long Tieng. But he wasn’t supposed to be there. He was the only Western reporter on the ground. He refused to leave his interpreter—the guy married to Nora’s mother, apparently—and when all three of them were left behind, with the Pathet Lao coming, they did what most of those abandoned in Long Tieng did: they started to walk.”
“To where?”
“In Spence’s case, south toward Vientiane. The Pathet Lao were there, sure, but so was the US embassy.”
“How far away was it?”
“About a hundred and fifty miles, I think. I don’t remember exactly.”
“Down from this high mountain valley. That was so secret there were no roads.”
“According to Spence’s book, it took the three of them several weeks to walk out. Nowhere was really safe. There were insurgents in the jungle.”
“With knives,” Merry mused. “He mentioned that, recently.”
“Spencer Murphy wouldn’t have survived without his Hmong interpreter—who also saw Spence as his own best chance out of the country.” Peter took her coffee mug from her hand and rose to refill it. “It made sense, I suppose. They could wait in Long Tieng for an evacuation that never happened, or make it to the American embassy and get three seats on a plane back to the US. Only it didn’t end that way.”
“It never does.”
“By the time Spence reached the capitol weeks later, the US embassy was shut down. Everybody had gone home. Being the only American on the ground in that situation must have been terrifying.”
“Maybe,” Merry said. “But being the only American on the ground made it possible for him to lie.”