44

They found Decker’s body a mile downstream, wedged beneath the roots of a half-uprooted oak. I wondered if he’d thought he had a chance, or if he’d meant it when he said he’d prefer death to prison. I wasn’t sorry he was dead, but neither was I glad. Some ledger had been evened, but it was too late for the women he’d helped sell or bury.

Claire, resilient as Talbot had predicted, held a press conference. She didn’t make excuses, and she didn’t whitewash anything. Instead, she apologized for her naïveté, opened her books to the public, and devoted Hands of Mercy to the restoration of the women we’d rescued from Talbot’s compound. Trust would be a long time coming, but looking at her sincere face, I knew it would come.

The storms passed, the air behind them hot and steaming. Khanh said it felt like home. In early June, five of us waited at the airport security gate. Khanh and Tuyet stood with their arms around each other, looking eagerly at the arriving passengers. Their wounds were healing, and Tuyet’s brand was hidden by a high-collared shirt.

Paul stood up straight in his Cub Scout uniform, occasionally giving his Wolf patch a proud pat. He looked up at Jay on his other side and grinned.

A flood of people poured through the gates. They came in waves, first the Type As, heads down, taking long strides, then the regular folks, and finally the elderly and infirm and families with small children. Tuyet nudged her mother and pointed. “Bà ngoạingoa!”

A moment later, I spotted an airline attendant pushing a small woman in a wheelchair. She looked hunched and withered, lines of hardship webbing her face. She wore tan slacks with sandals and a white sleeveless blouse. Around her neck was a tiny jade monkey on a silver chain.

The attendant wheeled the chair through security, and Khanh and Tuyet rushed forward to take over, chattering in Vietnamese. Paul edged closer to me, pressed his back against my legs.

“It’s okay, Sport,” I said.

Tuyet slipped her hand into the older woman’s, and Khanh pushed her over to where I stood with Paul and Jay.

“You very like him,” she said, and took my hand in hers.

“This is Paulie,” I said. “Paulie, this is Khanh’s mom. Phen. You have something to give her.”

He handed her a small velvet-covered box, then stretched up and gave her a sticky kiss. “You get well now.”

She opened the box, and Dad’s silver star winked up at her. She stroked it with her fingertips, and for a moment, I saw them both, a younger Phen laughing, with flowers in her hair, my father, young and uniformed, smiling in a rice paddy ten thousand miles from home. Ghosts of the living and the dead.

We stopped to pick up Billy, who hobbled out to meet us. He looked stitched together, the patch over his eye giving him a piratical look. Paul smiled and pulled up his shirt, showed the small scar where the surgeons had gone in to repair his heart.

“Look, Uncle Billy. We bofe look like Frankenstein.”

Billy ruffled Paul’s hair and gave Khanh a kiss on the top of the head.

Back at home, Khanh filled a bowl with spring water and flower petals. Tuyet lit a stick of incense and handed another to Paul. Together, we marched through the house, Khanh chanting a prayer and sprinkling drops of scented water, Tuyet and Paul waving sticks of incense, filling the house with sweet-smelling smoke. Jay and I walked on each side of Phen, supporting her insubstantial weight, while Billy stumped along beside us.

The house felt lighter with her blessing. But we had shed blood, and our blood had been shed. I’d added more bodies to my balance sheet. It had been justified, but no matter how justified, killing has its costs. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

Khanh looked back at me and smiled, then walked on, chanting, not ridding us of our ghosts, for they are always with us, but maybe—at least for the moment—making peace with them.