November 20, 1933
“Let’s just act normally, please,” Victor said from where he’d been watching me wake up. The morning light felt blinding, though I could see that the bedroom curtains were half drawn. I’d managed to sleep past sunrise. “For Lucie’s sake,” he added as I squinted against the glare and turned away from the window. I blinked a few times and peered down at the clock. It was 7:23. We were due to leave for the station, to board the ten o’clock train to Vinh, in less than two hours. I wasn’t clearheaded, I could already tell that, and my nerves had been set on edge by Victor’s insistent expectations and the looming reunion with his family, but I knew he was right. I did want to act as normally as I could for Lucie’s sake. I hadn’t seen her in four days, since the evening of Khoi’s party, as Victor had told her I was very ill with the flu, was contagious and couldn’t be disturbed, even for a quick hug. But I was sure she had heard me, not just when that doctor had tried to drug me into a stupor but also, according to Victor, shouting out in my sleep. As large as our house was, it seemed designed to bounce voices, especially high-pitched, terrified ones, off its thick walls.
I missed Lucie sorely, and I was afraid that if I acted anything but the ideal mother around her, Victor would panic. And in that frame of mind, he could do the unthinkable. He could keep me from her, and maybe for a very long time.
“Of course,” I said, smiling at him, the corners of my mouth already belying my feigned confidence. He stood from the chair where he’d been sitting and came to the bed, lying down next to me. I leaned over and put my head on his bare chest, resting my weight on him, hoping that my touch might reassure him. Surprisingly, he put his arms around me, hugging me tightly.
“I don’t know what happened at the Nguyen home,” he said quietly. “I know what I saw, and you seem to know what you saw, but I want to forget all that. Because what I really know, what I’m sure of, is that I need you back, Jessie.” His voice sounded suddenly tired. “I need you to return to me. The brave Jessie. The one who sailed to France by herself and drank at Maxim’s and kissed a stranger in the Tuileries when she was only twenty-three years old. The one who committed her life to my career and our family and convinced me that it was my time to try to lead the family business abroad. You’ve been the driving force behind me as much as I have been behind you. What will happen to us if that disappears?”
I had always thought that Victor would be fine if I vanished. That because the world was so bent in his favor, he’d bounce right back up like a rubber ball and the memory of me would eventually fade. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe he did need me as much as I needed him, albeit in a different way. Because he loved me. Because I, a girl whose parents considered her a scrap of a person, a girl who was destined for a small, difficult life, had managed to change myself, and fate had agreed that I deserved something good. That I was loveable after all.
“That girl hasn’t gone anywhere,” I said, trying to sound like the person Victor remembered, the determined young American who’d shifted the universe on her own to make our meeting happen. I had thought that Lucie being taken away from me was the worst fate I could imagine, but losing Victor’s love was just as terrifying a prospect. I had already had my family break apart once; I could never let it happen again. “She’s still here,” I declared. I placed my thumb on my ring finger, feeling the absence of my emerald ring. The little bag filled with its shards was now in the drawer of my nightstand. Parts of me were missing, but it didn’t mean I couldn’t piece myself back together again, almost as good as new. I could still live my life, even if my mind went its own way sometimes, at odds with the rest of the world. I could survive.
“Don’t drink anymore,” said Victor, letting me go. “And if you’re taking other things, other intoxicants, don’t take them. Please.”
Other intoxicants. I thought of the way the smoke from the burning, sticky opium had felt in my lungs when I’d needed it the most, on my way home from Dau Tieng, distraught and unable to calm myself on my own. I looked into Victor’s startling blue eyes, which glinted with the confidence built by generations of wealth and privilege. I wondered what it would be like to live the way Victor did. To have a good heart, a great heart, but one that only beat for certain people. Maybe my mind was somehow out of kilter, as he and doctors in two countries had claimed, but suddenly, that didn’t bother me so much. I had lost a part of my soul at Dau Tieng that day, but I knew a wisp of it was still there. I hoped that one day Victor would realize that he’d lost a part of his soul to those men, too. Even if he’d been too proud to notice.
“It’s nearly seven-thirty. We should be off soon,” he said as he stood up. He straightened his pajama pants and looked at me, more seriously. “Don’t make any apologies to the servants. They don’t expect them, anyway. Just act as if nothing unusual has happened, and they will do the same. We’ll all act the same. We will have our eggs and tea, dress, go to the station, and proceed as if the world has righted itself on its axis.” He touched my head. “Even if it hasn’t, exactly.”
“Of course, Victor,” I said, pushing back the covers and standing as well. “I think that’s best.”
He nodded and watched me as I put on a dressing gown and made for the door, eager to fetch Lucie.
“I’m feeling much better,” I said brightly. “Really. I feel like my old self again.” I walked out of the room and up the stairs, letting my put-on smile fade.
I was halfway up the stairs when Trieu stopped me.
“Madame,” she said loudly. I turned to see her standing in the hallway, looking as polished as always. “Shall we dress you before you see Lucie?”
I stopped and was about to shake my head no, but then I realized that Lucie might be more convinced of my recovery if I looked the part. With my hair a mess, and in a wrinkled dressing gown, I was hardly the picture of well-being.
“That’s a good idea,” I said, turning around. “I need to look quite elegant, as we are meeting Victor’s cousin, but also be fit for travel. We leave for Vinh shortly.”
Trieu nodded understandingly and escorted me to my dressing room.
When I was presentable, Trieu placed my lucky red hat on my head, the only sign that she knew I needed the world to be on my side today. I thanked her, happy to have an ally, and hurried upstairs to Lucie’s room. I couldn’t wait to see her.
“Mama!” she exclaimed as soon as I burst through the door. I was too excited to open it quietly, feeling Lucie’s absence like a hole in my heart. She was still in bed, flipping through a large picture book. When I approached her, I saw that it was written in Annamese. One of the servants must have bought it for her.
“I haven’t heard you call me Mama in a long time,” I said, sitting down and embracing her, careful not to crush her. “You sound like a little American. My little American.”
I could tell I was holding her for too long, but I didn’t want to let go. I waited until she wriggled out of my arms to sit back next to her.
“Are you not sick anymore?” she asked me quietly, looking down at her bedspread.
“I’m not sick anymore,” I replied, with a big smile. I inched closer to her and leaned softly against her.
“Oh, good,” she said, turning and hugging me back. “You’ve been sick so much, I worried you might not like Indochine. Maybe it makes you sad. Or allergic. Because you were less sick when we were at home.”
“It doesn’t make me allergic,” I said, reaching for her hand. “I promise. And today we are going on a trip. All of us. Did Papa tell you? We’re all taking a train together. Finally.”
Lucie nodded excitedly. “Finally!” she echoed.
“But first, a bath,” I said, helping her out of bed. When we were standing together, I heard the water running in the tub. Cam must have been listening and started it straightaway.
When Lucie was immersed in the warm water, her servant cleaning her, I switched to English to keep our conversation private. Intimate.
“We will be meeting your father’s cousin Roland and his family in Vinh, so you will have to be very polite and well behaved. No shouting out in Annamese or talking about opium pipes. Okay?”
Lucie smiled at Cam as she scrubbed her arm with a thick pink bar of soap.
“Lucie, did you hear me?” I asked, trying to fight through the familiar pounding that had begun in my head. Lucie was not the problem in our family. I was, and my body seldom let me forget it.
She looked at me and nodded.
“Best behavior,” I said.
“You’re not allowed to speak English to me when we are on best behavior,” she rightly pointed out.
“I’m well aware,” I said, rubbing my eyes, which were still heavy.
I sat with Lucie as she finished her bath, letting her fill me in on the last four days. Perhaps I had made some wrong decisions in my life, but crashing into Victor’s world was a brilliant one. Without it, I would never have had Lucie. Victor was right. The brave, decisive Jessie who kissed a perfect stranger in the Tuileries gardens needed to be found again.
An hour later, the whole family was dressed, starched, powdered, and settled in the car, Victor and I acting as if it were just another routine family trip.
When we arrived at the station, the stationmaster, a wiry, energetic man, greeted us, along with a porter, who took my bag from me. It was the one with the broken handle, which I’d grabbed in a hurry. I pointed it out quietly, not wanting to give Victor another reason to question my behavior, and Lucie quickly jumped in and explained to the porter in Indochinese that he had to be careful with it.
He nodded politely before the stationmaster barked at him and hurried off with all of our bags.
Once inside, Victor paid off the stationmaster so he would leave us alone; then we headed to the benches in the waiting area farthest from the entrance. The station was jammed with people.
“This is the busiest I’ve ever seen it,” Victor murmured in annoyance. He turned sideways so a group of native men could pass.
Lucie hovered by the benches, not sitting down even as Victor and I did. I realized it was because she didn’t want to wrinkle her dress.
“We have a very long train journey ahead of us,” I reminded her, gesturing to the spot next to me. Lucie nodded and was about to sit when she was suddenly struck by a young boy who had rushed toward us. She tumbled back, her body slamming into the wooden bench. I reached out for her as Victor spun around.
“Careful, boy!” Victor yelled. The youngster was a shoeblack who had been coming after Victor’s expensive brogues. Victor angrily swatted him on the back with his newspaper.
The boy grinned, ignoring Lucie and me, and suggested a shine, holding up his brush and pointing at Victor’s shoes.
“After this!” Victor shouted, gesturing to frightened Lucie and adding a string of the few insults he knew in Annamese. “You’re lucky I don’t have you banned from the station.”
I held Lucie by the shoulders. She was looking down at her dress in horror. On the upper part of her starched white skirt was a black, checkmark-shaped swoop of shoe polish.
“Maman!” she cried, staring at the stain. “He ruined my dress,” she whispered, tears starting to flow.
“No, Lucie, no, don’t cry,” I said, hugging her, making sure to avoid the stain. “I’ll take you to wash it. We can get it out, don’t worry, chérie.” I patted her on the shoulder, but suddenly my nerves flared again in sympathy with hers. I had spent so much of my life comforting crying children, sibling after sibling, but when it was Lucie whose tears dampened my cheek, I usually shared them with her.
“Take her to the washroom,” said Victor, stroking Lucie’s head comfortingly while keeping his eyes on me. “I’ll wait here.” He gestured to the bench closest to the bathroom.
I nodded and pushed Lucie the few steps to the door.
When we were inside, and luckily alone, Lucie pulled her skirt up and looked at the mark, breathing deeply to try to stop her tears.
“Are you sure it will come out?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said brightly, reaching for a hand towel. I wet it and soaped it up before starting to scrub.
We watched as my right hand moved back and forth and I tugged at the fabric with my left. But all that did was spread the black stain, so I crouched down on the floor to get a better angle.
I scrubbed as hard as I could and listened as her sobs quieted. If I could do anything right today, it would be this. To help my child. But as I looked up to smile at her, happy that the mark was starting to fade, black spots swam before my eyes and I had to bend my head quickly.
“Maman?” I heard her say, but her voice sounded small and far away.
“I’m just a bit faint,” I said, standing up carefully. Feeling dizzy enough to fall, I gripped the sink and closed my eyes, letting my head drop heavily forward. The darkness felt welcome, and with my eyes still closed, I turned on the water. I opened them and watched the stream coming out of the metal tap. I placed one of my hands under it, keeping the other on the sink for balance.
When I felt a bit steadier, I bent down and drank from the sink, lapping the cool water in large gulps.
“I’m sorry, Lucie,” I mumbled when I felt I could stand up again without help. I glanced in the mirror briefly, surprised by my pale reflection, then whipped my head to my left.
Lucie was no longer standing next to me.
“Lucie?” I exclaimed, turning around to the toilet stalls. Three were empty, but one had the door closed. I pulled it open, and it flew back, banging the wooden door of the next stall. Lucie wasn’t inside. “Lucie!” I called out, running in a circle in the little room. She wasn’t anywhere.
She was gone.
I ran out to the waiting room and checked the bench Victor had pointed to, but she wasn’t there, either. Neither was Victor.
“Lucie!” I shouted, rushing between the benches, all jammed with travelers, and out to the central space. “Victor!”
The weather was the nicest it had been since we’d arrived, so it was no surprise that the station was packed, but suddenly I felt as if I were swimming in a sea of bodies, when I should have been able to spot them so easily.
“Victor!” I cried out again. I sprinted through the station, bumping people as I did, and out the front door. There were rows of vendors, some desultorily trying to make a sale, others asleep. At the end of one row, I saw a man selling sugarcane and ran to him. It was Lucie’s favorite snack. I asked him if he’d seen a little French girl, accompanied by her father in a beige traveling suit, but he just smiled and held out a stalk of the sugarcane. I repeated the phrase in Annamese, but he just shook his head no. Lucie would have translated better than I did. Where was she?
Back inside the station, I looked up at the clock. The train for Vinh was due in two minutes. I ran out to the platform and studied the large group of travelers waiting. I even glanced down at the tracks, fearing the worst.
But Victor and Lucie were nowhere to be seen.
I rushed back inside to the bathroom where I’d washed Lucie’s dress, but she was not there. She wasn’t in the waiting area nearby. She wasn’t anywhere. I sat down on the bench where Victor had said he would wait for us and started to sob.
“Madame Lesage!” the stationmaster exclaimed as he approached me, handing me his handkerchief. “What is the matter?”
He tried to guide me to a waiting area, but I balked. He handed me another starched handkerchief and sat next to me.
“Can I assist you in some way, Madame Lesage?” he asked as I cried.
“Yes. I hope you can,” I managed to say, clenching his handkerchiefs in my fist. “Something just went terribly wrong.”
“I’m sure I can help,” he said soothingly. “That’s why I’m here. Please tell me what’s upsetting you.”
My words poured out through sobs.
“Just a few minutes ago I went to the washroom to clean my daughter Lucie’s dress,” I said. “To get out a shoe-polish stain. A boy, a shoeblack soliciting my husband’s business, had pushed up against her with his greasy brush, making a terrible mark on her white dress. But I couldn’t wash it out. Then, I don’t know what happened. I closed my eyes for a few seconds, perhaps a minute at most, and when I opened them, Lucie was gone. I ran out to find her, but she’s not anywhere in the station—and I’ve looked everywhere—and neither is my husband, Victor, who was supposed to wait for us right here.” I gestured toward the bench we were sitting on. “I’ve been running all over the station for fifteen minutes now, but I can’t find them. I’m alone, and we are going to miss our train to Vinh. We have to meet Victor’s cousin. It’s a very important trip, and now he and Lucie have disappeared. They’re gone.” My voice cracked again.
The stationmaster looked at me intently. “You say that you are looking for your husband and daughter? Victor and Lucie Lesage?” he said slowly.
“Of course!” I said, exasperation getting the better of me. “You just greeted us outside a half hour ago! Who else would I be looking for?”
He shook his head and laced his hands together. “But madame, I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” he said, meeting my gaze. “I did greet you a half hour ago, as you said, but it was just you in the black car. Just you and your chauffeur. There was no husband and child. You were alone.”
Alone.
There was no husband and child. I was alone.
“No, Monsieur Dat. You are mistaken,” I said, shaking my head. “Of course they were with me. We are all journeying to Vinh together, as I said. To see Victor’s Michelin cousin.”
He looked at me with concern and repeated, “I am sure you were alone.”
“That can’t be,” I insisted. “You are not remembering correctly.”
I rested my heavy head in my hands, my vision blurring even more, and closed my eyes. “We traveled together to the station,” I repeated, feeling queasy. “Victor, Lucie, and I.”
I lifted my head with a jerk, propelled by a sudden idea. “Lanh will tell you!” I said loudly. “Please call my tai xe now. I insist. Phone our house. Lanh will have returned. And our servants saw us all off this morning. Please phone them,” I begged. “Ask for Lanh, or Trieu. One of them should answer straightaway.”
“Of course,” he said, standing up.
The man had to be wrong. He had to be. But then I thought of the blood I had seen pouring down the Annamite woman’s arms at the Nguyen house and Victor contesting my account. I thought of the poster I had seen displayed over the train timetables and glanced in that direction. The image of a hundred suns still wasn’t there. Then there was Red. Red, whom I was absolutely sure I had kissed. Yet he’d assured me I was very wrong, and why would a man like that deny a conquest? I bit my lip, my tears welling up. This couldn’t be happening again.
The stationmaster was walking back to me, and I could tell from his expression that he did not have good news.
“Did you phone, Monsieur Pham? Did you speak to Lanh? Or Trieu?” I asked anxiously when he was close.
“Yes, Madame Lesage,” he replied, his voice even. “I made the call myself and spoke to Madame Trieu. I’m sorry, but she said that she saw you off this morning, alone. That your husband and daughter are in Trang An for the day. To see the caves.”
“Caves! What are you talking about?” I cried out. “They are here, with me. Victor doesn’t have time to take Lucie to inspect caves. Please help me look again,” I said frantically. “Please.”
“Of course we can look again, Madame Lesage,” he said gently. “Perhaps they arrived in a separate car. Perhaps I just didn’t see them.”
I recognized the way he was staring at me, that look of feigned concern, when he was really trying to identify signs that I wasn’t quite right. That I was crazy. It was how everyone in that psychiatric prison in Switzerland had looked at me.
I stood up and shook my head.
“You’ve been very kind. I’m sorry to have been such a bother, Monsieur Dat,” I said, looking at his gold nameplate again. “You’re right about everything, I’m sure. I must just be remembering incorrectly. Perhaps I’m unwell.”
I turned around without thanking him and hurried out of the station. He didn’t follow me.
I could still feel Lucie’s touch and see the distress on her face when the shoeblack had collided with her. I wasn’t unwell. I wasn’t forgetting anything. My family had disappeared.
I sprinted down the street, a panicked surge of energy making me feel as if I were floating instead of running, but I stopped suddenly as I approached a large group of indigène children. They looked so similar, like siblings. They reminded me of the way people always said that my brothers and sisters looked alike.
Another one, that same Holland face, our teachers used to say at the start of every school year.
After I married Victor, I returned to America only once, traveling to New York and then on to Virginia. I knew it was the last time I would see my mother. With Victor’s money, the generous allowance he gave me, I had moved every one of my siblings to upstate New York. It had been my plan all along: As soon as I had the means, I would rip my siblings away from my mother and into the safety of a new, anonymous town. They wouldn’t know what to do in a city, and it would be too expensive to support them there. But with Victor’s funds, I bought a tobacco farm in Lindley, just west of Elmira, one of the few areas in New York known for the crop. Tobacco farming was the only work any of them had ever done. I could take them out of the South, but I only wanted to strip the bad from their lives, not the good.
To my brothers and sisters in Lindley, Virginia was just a distant spot on the map that they would probably never see again. When I told my mother she would be left to live out the rest of her life in Virginia alone, she hadn’t even wept. She’d just looked at me coldly, as if she’d forgotten that I was her firstborn child, and said, “My family has disappeared.”
But she had disappeared for me long before I did for her. The first time my father’s fist hit my face and she did nothing to protect me, nothing to comfort me when the blows finally stopped—that’s when she started to disappear. When my brother Peter, who was just three years younger than me, went blind in his right eye and partially in his left from a particularly vicious assault when he was only ten years old—that’s when my parents turned into monsters. And when Peter’s brain stopped working right—when he started suffering what the doctors called hallucinations, mania—that’s when I knew I would never see my mother again.
Thousands of miles away, I shook my head, trying to fight the memories. In my worst moments, my mother always found a way to return to me, to seize my hand and try to wrench me down, just as she had done in life.
The words sounded in my head as I continued on down the street, whispers from voices I didn’t recognize. I put my fingers in my ears, but still the sentence reverberated, circling me, strangling me. My family has disappeared. I looked over my shoulder, expecting to see my mother and her long gray hair, but all I saw was a sea of locals jostling one another as they navigated the crowded street.
At the end of the road, a house appeared to be in flames, but when I got near, I saw that it wasn’t, just a vendor roasting nuts over a fire and the breeze carrying the smoke up. I sank to the ground, too tired, too confused, to go any farther.
Time seemed to stop, and my eyes grew heavier, but before they closed, I felt someone’s breath on my forehead. A rickshaw coolie was bending over me.
“You need ride? Where you go, madame?” he said in a nasal voice.
I looked up at him and shook my head. I looked at his hands. They were dirty, with yellowed fingernails that were curling over. I looked more closely. The dirt on his fingers looked like opium tar.
I thought of the beds in Khoi’s boat and then of the beds I knew were in all the opium dens in Hanoi. There, I could lie down. I could shake off the nightmare this day had become and give my mind space to right itself. I could try to piece together where my family had gone.
“Take me to Luong-Vuong,” I said to the man. “I want to lie down at Luong-Vuong.” I knew I didn’t have to ask if he knew what it was.
He helped me into the back of his rickshaw, and I nodded off as we bounced through the streets. Then I felt us slowing, and someone carrying me inside, where I heard whispers, felt a woman’s hand on my face, and then was lowered onto a wooden bed.
When I was horizontal, I let my hand go slack. “Take my money,” I said into the air, letting my bag drop to the floor, desperate for past and present to just disappear in curls of smoke.
“Your pipe, madame,” a woman said, holding up my head.
I took in the smoke deeply once, then a few times more in quick succession, before pushing her away with my limp hand. “No more,” I said, rolling onto my side and trying to bring my knees to my chest. I wanted to shrink to nothing.
I was drifting in and out of sleep when I felt hands on me again. “I don’t want any more,” I said, trying to wave the woman away.
“It’s Lanh,” I heard a voice say. I managed to open my eyes. It was indeed Lanh. I held my arms out to him, not able to get up on my own.
Under Lanh’s reassuring touch, I let my eyes close again and collapsed against him as he picked me up.
When I awoke, I couldn’t tell if it had been minutes, hours, or days. I blinked and sat up slowly. I was in the back seat of the Delahaye with the doors open on either side, a cool breeze passing through. Outside the car, on a large rock, I saw Lanh sitting, though the edges of my vision were still frayed from sleep. We were on the bank of the Red River, in a spot he had driven me past before. A scenic detour, he’d called it. One of many he had taken, happy to meander and show me the city when Victor wasn’t present. When he realized I was awake, he jumped up and came over to the car.
“Lanh,” I said quietly, trying to focus on him. I stretched my hand out to him, and he helped me climb out of the car and steady myself on the dry reddish ground. He pointed to the rock and I shook my head, still feeling too unstable, so we both sat on the ground next to it instead, leaning against it for support.
I looked at him, hoping for answers.
“The woman who prepared your pipe at Luong-Vuong,” he began. “She saw your identity card in your bag. She went to the hotel next door and telephoned the house. I answered. She robbed you, I think, but at least she telephoned.” He gave me an anxious look. “Are you feeling like yourself now?”
“I don’t even know what that means anymore,” I replied. “But the world seems to be calmer. I think. And I feel less sick. The opium helped.”
He nodded, his eyes still on me.
“What time is it?” I asked, looking up at the sun directly above us.
“It’s almost noon,” he replied.
It wasn’t even midday and I felt like I’d already been to war.
“Lanh,” I said, turning to him, suddenly remembering where I’d been before Luong-Vuong. “Did you take me, Lucie, and Victor to the station this morning?”
“Of course,” he said without pause.
“Of course,” I repeated, feeling the familiar, stinging sensation of tears ready to flow. I buried my face in my hands.
“I’m so utterly confused,” I said through the sobs that needed to come.
“Do you not remember?” he said, inching away to give me some room.
“I do,” I said, opening my eyes again. “I think that’s why I’m crying. Because I do remember. Today, yesterday, all of it. I do remember, but everyone is telling me I’m wrong. That something is very wrong with me. But I don’t think there is.”
I glanced at him and he quietly said, “Who is telling you that you’re wrong?”
I repeated the same story I had told the stationmaster. “But he told me I arrived alone. Without Victor and Lucie. And then he called the house and Trieu told him that they weren’t in Hanoi at all. That they had gone to see the caves in Trang An together. Caves, of all things. I wasn’t convinced by what he was saying, but I just don’t trust myself lately, so I agreed and ran out of the station. As you can imagine, I was very distraught. All I could manage was to lose myself under a cloud of opium for a while. But then you found me, thank God. I knew I wasn’t wrong. I don’t know where they are, but I know they are not in Trang An and they did not disappear.”
“Come,” said Lanh, standing and helping me up. “I think I know what’s wrong. We will find Lucie and Monsieur Lesage soon—I’m sure they are worried about where you are, too—and they may just be at the house. But there is something else that’s even more important than the whereabouts of your family.”
He helped me into the car, and we traveled in silence toward the house. I was still processing Lanh’s words. The stationmaster had lied to me. But more importantly, my family had not disappeared.
Lanh turned toward our neighborhood, maneuvering the car around the usual potholes, but turned off before our street. He parked the car near the lake, in a quiet spot, and turned to me.
“Madame Lesage. Jessie,” he said. It was the only time he’d ever said my first name.
“Lanh,” I said softly, as if our relationship had somehow just shifted by him saying that one word.
“I know why you’re feeling the way you are,” he said, his hands in his lap, fidgeting. “And why you were too distraught to find your family.”
“Victor would say it’s because my mind is broken.”
“Your mind is not broken,” he said very quietly. He tilted his head up and looked at me, as if seeing me for the first time.
“What is it, then?” I asked, searching his dark eyes.
“You are a woman being preyed upon.”
“By Victor?” I asked, my voice catching in my throat.
Lanh looked away but said nothing, letting the silence sit with us for a moment.
“Do you remember when we drove back to the yellow house after I took you to the hippodrome? After the horse race? You were very upset.”
“I was,” I said, thinking back to my conversation with Red. Of Marcelle.
“I asked Trieu to bring you something to eat and to make you very hot tea. Something to soothe you.”
“I remember,” I said, though it was blurry.
“I stayed near you that day because I was worried, and you’ve always been very kind to me. To us,” he said, indicating his sister without saying her name. “When I wasn’t by your side, I was in the shadows, not far away, making sure you were being taken care of. Trieu brought you what I asked, but you didn’t drink all the tea she’d prepared, maybe only half, then you fell asleep. Trieu pulled all the curtains closed and then took the half-full cup downstairs with her when she was clearing your dishes, and I followed. When she was in the living room, on her way to the kitchen, she separated the cup from your plate and placed it aside. Lucie, who had been playing in the living room with her funny doll, that one with the pale face—”
“Odile,” I whispered. I had bought it for Lucie before she was even born.
“Odile,” he repeated. “Lucie left the doll and picked up the cup, smelling its contents and then lifted it up to drink from it. But before Lucie could drink the tea, Trieu, who was coming back from the kitchen, rushed over and knocked the cup out of her hands, causing it to shatter on the floor. I think she was as startled as Lucie was, in a way. It was forceful. She didn’t think anyone saw it—I was in the shadows, like I said. She stared at the mess and then quickly apologized to Lucie. She said that her mother was quite sick and that if she used the same cup she could fall ill, too.” He paused and looked at me. “I’ve seen you with your daughter. You share everything. You’re a good mother. I knew you wouldn’t have minded about the cup.”
I looked at him, my layers of confusion multiplying.
“But Lucie never mentioned anything to me about that,” I said, thinking back.
“I think she’s very sensitive about your being sick,” said Lanh.
I nodded, thinking of her words earlier that morning.
“With Lucie standing there, shocked, Trieu ran to the kitchen for a broom and rags to clean up the mess, and then Cam came and pulled Lucie away to wash her.”
“But you were still there.”
“I was, watching from the dining room. When they were gone, I quickly went over to the shattered cup, took some of the herbs out of the fragments, and wrapped them in a napkin.”
“Why did you do that?” I asked, looking at him quizzically.
“I had a bad feeling. Trieu has never been anything but kind with Lucie. For her to push the cup like that was strange. It was out of character.”
I nodded. It was true that Trieu was fond of Lucie. I had felt very lucky that they all pecked over her lovingly.
“That tea,” Lanh said slowly, looking out at the river. “I had never seen those particular herbs before. Or I didn’t think I had. So I took them to a doctor that many of the local people like me, servants, rely on. A Chinese herbalist. A highly regarded one.”
“Out of concern for Lucie?” I said.
“No,” said Lanh quietly. “Out of concern for you.”
“What did he say?” I asked, searching Lanh’s face.
“It didn’t take him long at all,” said Lanh. “He smelled the small bit I brought, then he ingested a little of it. A trace amount. As soon as he’d swallowed it, he said it was without any doubt an herb called ky nham. Langdang in his language, in Chinese.”
“Ky nham?” I said numbly.
“Ky nham,” he repeated. “Henbane in French. Hyoscyamus niger is the medical name. It’s a poisonous plant. And a very strong hallucinogen.”
“A hallucinogen?” I said, my stomach churning. “They’ve been giving me a hallucinogen?”
“I don’t know who has. And I don’t know if it was once or many times, but that day, when Trieu gave you that tea, that’s what was in it.”
“That can’t be right,” I said, thinking back to the tea I drank that day. It hadn’t tasted strange. It tasted just like the tea I drank nearly every day. The one she had been serving me since my second day in Indochine—the day I’d seen the dead man. The king’s herb, she called it. It had had no effect on me then. I’d been fine then. But when had I stopped being fine? It had all been so gradual. When was the line drawn dividing the Jessie Lesage who’d been able to handle her nervous energy into a woman who was consumed by worry, and much worse?
“Why would she give that to me?” I asked, my heart starting to pound.
“I don’t know,” said Lanh. “That’s what I’ve been puzzling over.”
“But when was that? The afternoon I spent at the horse race, that was six days ago.”
“Yes,” he said, apology in his voice. “I have known for a few days, but you were dealing with your own matters and I haven’t been able to speak to you alone. But when I received this phone call today, I knew. Something was terribly wrong, and it had to do with Trieu and that herb. I was sure of it.”
Trieu. I thought of my relationship with Trieu. Don’t try to befriend them, Victor had said. And I hadn’t, but it didn’t mean I hadn’t grown fond of her. More than that, I had come to rely on her. She had seen me naked, bathed me, spoken to me at my most vulnerable. She must have been going up to her room every night and laughing at me. Me, the foolish woman, yet again.
“How long has Trieu worked in the house?” I asked.
“Not long. Madame van Dampierre hired her a few months before you arrived. That caused me to worry even more. Unlike Diep or Cam, she is still not very familiar to me.”
“What else does this ky nham do?” I asked.
“It’s a hallucinogen. That’s what the herbalist said. A very strong one. The effects can last hours, he said, but can linger for days. In your case, I’m unsure. It depends how much she was administering. He also said that if ingested with alcohol, the effects could be worse. And drinking, it’s something that all French women seem to do more in Indochine than they usually would,” he said. “Alcohol aside, this herb, even in small doses, could cause confusion, problems with the memory, stomach illness. All things that perhaps you’ve been suffering from for some time?”
“Yes,” I said, gripping my hands together. “But I thought it was just me. Just my mind refusing to cooperate with the rest of the world. A repeat of something that happened to me years ago. After Lucie was born.”
“I don’t know much about you, beyond what I see, but I don’t think you’re sick. Here or here,” he said kindly, pointing to my heart and then my head.
I nodded, letting his disclosure sink in. In the past few months, what had been real and what hadn’t been?
I was scared, and I was angry. My whole experience in Indochine felt stolen from me, as if I’d been living the way someone else had wanted me to. Ever since I’d left Virginia, I had done everything I could to have the freedom to choose my own path, to direct my life the way I wanted it to go. Trieu had taken that from me, just as my parents had when I was a child.
“I know I brought it up before. But those posters you described. The house of a hundred suns. You’ve really never seen them since you were a child?” I asked. More than anything, that’s what I wanted to be true. To have seen the poster in the station.
He looked at me gravely and slowly shook his head no.
I bit my lip and thought about the words. If I had never seen them on a poster, how did I know them?
“When I traveled down to Saigon, just a few weeks ago, I thought I saw one of the posters you were describing hanging above the timetables. I have such a vivid memory of it. The image was of a station just like the one in Hanoi, and above it, it said, ‘Pour aller loin, pour payer moins, pour être bien, prenez le train.’ But just my mind playing tricks on me, I suppose. Or Trieu playing tricks on me.”
The instant I uttered her name, my sadness started to bleed into another rush of anger. Where were Victor and Lucie? We needed to return home and see if they were there. And if they weren’t, we had to find them and, together, confront Trieu. They had not disappeared, and now we had to make sure that Trieu didn’t, either.