Her name was Tuyet.
Or so everyone told her.
Patty cowered under the blankets, glad the female cop was gone. Glad to be alone. Terrified to be alone. Wishing Monk were still there. Glad he wasn’t.
Because of Tuyet.
Tuyet.
Her left hand was swathed in bandages. That helped. She could not see the crude smiley face she’d drawn. Patty told everyone—the doctors and nurses, the cop—that she didn’t remember doing that new tattoo, but that was a lie. In her mind she crouched naked in one of the barber chairs in her studio, a pot of ink open, the needle buzzing like the open line of an old-style phone, sending only noise after someone else hung up.
The memory of that was as clear as memories associated with the little girl were hazy and fleeting. Everything connected with Tuyet was as splintered as pieces of a broken mirror on the floor of her mind. Drawing over the other face. Trying to use new lines to trap the little girl’s face as it faded. Too drunk, too crazed to do it—or anything—right. Failing. Feeling her memories and perceptions shift like furniture in a house caught in a mudslide. As that sensation grew worse and the alcohol polluted her blood, her skills failed. Going a bit crazy. More than a little. The little girl’s face warped, became distorted by her new lines, and then there was a time of blackness when she must have turned the attempted cage of lines into that stupid, ugly, mocking smiley face.
There was nothing after that until she woke up on the bathroom floor.
The memories of Tuyet were still fading, becoming nothing more than a plaintive voice crying in her thoughts. On some deep level, though, Patty knew that her attempts to save her memories was successful. Partially. Enough? She didn’t know and with each hour she was losing hope that she could cling to at least some of the memories of.…
Of …
What was the name?
Tuyet. Yes. That was it. Tuyet.
Her daughter.
On the drive to the hospital Monk had kept talking, explaining Tuyet, clearly hoping to say something that would be the key that opened the lock on whatever box or chamber held those memories. He was crying, too. Monk. Crying. Tuyet had been murdered, he said. Monk had killed the killers. He’d been with Patty through the process of identifying the body, and then burying the little girl and Tuyet’s own grandmother. Patty remembered her mother, remembered that she’d been killed. But not why. And there was nothing in any box, or room, or anywhere. The memories were gone. Something had opened her head like an October pumpkin and scooped out every last bit of who Tuyet was, leaving her only the awful knowledge that she could not remember a single thing about her only daughter. It was worse than rape, worse than being stabbed through the heart.
“Tuyet,” she murmured and hated herself—deeply, passionately loathed herself—because she barely remembered that poor little girl who’d died half a world away.
“Ám ảnh tôi,” she begged. “For God’s sake … Ám ảnh tôi.”
The minutes dragged past with cold indifference.
Ám ảnh tôi.
She said it again in English. Pleading.
“Haunt me.”
In the wintry graveyard of her memories the only sound or movement was an empty wind that had no voice with which to speak.