11
Van
At one o’clock in the morning Van and Linny cleaned the house. Their father and his friends had sped off an hour before, leaving the living room looking like a bunch of frat boys had blown through. Van found balled-up napkins behind the couch, plastic cups of flattened beer balanced on the television set. She was annoyed, though not surprised, that her father had left without saying good-bye or acknowledging the work she and Linny had done for the party. It reminded Van of how often she had felt uninvited around him, cast out from his thoughts. Why else had she worked so hard to capture his attention? She was the one who had organized his notes, had tried (and failed) to help him get a patent for the Luong Arm. It shamed Van to admit that she’d had years of lawyering to help him get that patent, and hadn’t yet done a thing.
Linny, on the other hand, seemed untroubled, skimming around the edges of the house, sipping whiskey, picking at the platters of food while wrapping them in foil. The remainders of the sheet cake she simply tossed in the trash.
“It’s so weird seeing everyone after all these years,” she said. She got chatty when she drank. “They all look so old but exactly the same too. Sometimes I forget that time doesn’t stop just because we’re not at home anymore. I don’t know why so many of them stayed.”
“Where else are they supposed to go? They’ve made this place their home. You make it sound like we’ve just landed here from London or Paris.” Van got what Linny meant, though. In high school they had shared an unspoken solidarity in declining to attend any more Vietnamese parties. And they had both fled after graduating.
When Van and Miles got engaged, they decided against inviting all of the Luongs’ old friends and acquaintances to the wedding, a move that would have wounded her mother deeply but only vaguely bothered her father, who, as the man in the family, didn’t have to worry so much about keeping up appearances. Visiting at holidays, Van and Miles rarely stayed longer than forty-eight hours. To Miles, the monthly checks Van sent her father balanced out all the extra time they spent with the Ohs in San Francisco.
For all of her supposed involvement in the immigrant community of Detroit, Van had practically opted out of the Vietnamese one in west Michigan. Linny had too, but she didn’t seem to feel bad about it. She wasn’t bothered by the sense of being on the sidelines, of having let membership dues lapse. Van was the one who felt out of bounds. She was looking in, not knowing how to get back, or if she even wanted to get back, to where she thought she was supposed to be.
But all she said was, “I think Mom would have been happy that Dad finally got his citizenship.”
“Sure. Not that it changes anything.”
“It’s an added layer of security that we take for granted.”
“Yeah, that’s what Mom always said.”
“She did?” Van didn’t recall this.
“She was anxious about it. Remember when she gave us photocopies of her naturalization certificate in case hers got lost or ruined? I still have mine, even.”
And suddenly the memory floated back: Mrs. Luong handing Van a black and white sheet of paper that said United States Certificate of Naturalization. Van had humored her mother by sticking the copy on a pile of school papers that, somewhere along the line, had gotten thrown out.
“What do you think about the TV show?” Linny asked suddenly.
“It’s just an audition.”
“Dad seems to think it’s a done deal.”
“Well, that’s a problem. We’re both going to have to go, you know.” At Linny’s look of incredulity Van added, “Can you imagine him trying to navigate a TV show audition by himself?”
“You act like he’s helpless.”
“He doesn’t even know how to use a computer. He spends his time exactly the same way he did twenty years ago. A little tiling and carpentry work, fussing around in the basement, hanging out with his friends. Do you know what I saw on TV, almost two months ago? This infomercial where one of the featured products was basically a Luong Arm.”
“You’re kidding.” Linny started laughing.
“It wasn’t even as sophisticated as Dad’s version. And it was being pitched as an accessory—the rest of the infomercial was for products for people who are housebound. Don’t tell Dad.”
“Like I would. Why are you watching infomercials?”
“It was late at night,” Van answered, self-conscious. In fact it had been nearly dawn, sometime in that first week after Miles had left. Van had been mortified to see a primitive version of the Luong Arm on the screen, modeled by a feeble-looking old lady in a recliner, trying to reach a pair of slippers. The only consolation was how much better-looking, even more useful, the Luong Arm seemed by comparison. “Anyway,” she said, “I think we should go to the audition.”
“I don’t want to drive all the way from Chicago just to take care of him. You do it, if you want to.”
Van brought a heap of oil-stained paper plates to the kitchen. She felt the old arguments rising again between her and Linny and she wanted to say something to keep them at bay.
Linny had the refrigerator open, trying to make the leftovers fit. She shifted the subject by saying, “I wonder what Dad’s friends really think of him. Do they think he’s weird or pitiful?”
Van had thought this herself, at times hating to see the comparison between her father and Rich Bao, whose Polo clothes and sweeping McMansion made Mr. Luong look—she hated to admit it—fobby.
“That stupid bitch Lisa Bao was making fun of the TV show right to my face. Did you see her? Carrying a Louis Vuitton logo bag, of course. And she’s giving her kids growth hormones. Did you know that?”
“She told me, but those kids didn’t look that small.” Van brought a bag of pop cans to the back door of the kitchen, wondering how long they would sit in the garage. When she and Linny were kids they would collect as many cans as possible and take them to Meijer for the ten-cent deposits. The numbers would add up fast, until soon the girls had ten dollars to split between them.
“They’re normal. She just wants them to look like big white-bread American guys.”
“Good god. Does Dad know?” Van had thrown him into near hysterics the time she’d showed him a New York Times article about a gruesome height surgery that was gaining popularity in some parts of China. The article had described how patients elected to have their leg bones broken and stretched in order to become a couple of inches taller, though many of them ended up never walking again.
“He already knows. She told me he tries to lecture her about it. She thinks it’s hilarious.”
Van could picture her father trying to persuade Lisa not to do such a thing to her sons. She knew just what his reaction would be. Her father had always believed in the ingenuity and triumph of short people—he believed in inventiveness, his own inventions. He said it wasn’t about being tall; it was about being smart. And he, Dinh Luong of Luong Inventions, would offer the gift of cleverness to all the short ones out there. He would equal the playing field.
Dawdling in the kitchen, Van was relieved to have averted an argument with Linny. They almost never sustained this kind of gossip without bickering. So Van went along as her sister assessed Nancy Bao’s hair, Co Ngoc’s pestering, and Na Dau’s drunken antics. Gathering stray bean sprouts from the floor, Van realized that she hadn’t thought about Miles in at least half an hour. That was a record, so far.
You’re kind of a different person around him, Linny had said once in that half-pensive, half-blunt way she had. No doubt she meant that Van was even more reserved, which was true. Van’s family had seemed a lonely crew compared to the dozens of cousins, aunts, and uncles Miles claimed and visited along the West Coast. Not that he had ever been less than polite and kind to her father. Still, Van had always been fearful of possible judgment and ridicule. Miles had come close, several times, to witnessing what she often felt to be her fraudulent Vietnamese identity. Like the time they had flown to California to attend one of his cousin’s weddings in Irvine. Miles had wanted to drive to Little Saigon and eat some really great pho. Van, who had never before been to Little Saigon, had felt lost in the onslaught of strip malls and Vietnamese signs; she had no idea where to eat. The sidewalks teemed with the most confident-looking Vietnamese kids she’d ever seen. Girls had big gold hoops swinging from their earlobes, their shirts revealing tawny midriffs and surprisingly curvy figures. They carried patent leather bags and clopped along on wedge heels higher than Linny’s. And so many of the guys were downright gangster-looking, with slick-backed hair, neck tattoos, and the white sleeveless tees that she had heard people refer to, odiously, as “wifebeaters.” These were Vietnamese who had the look of ownership and swagger, far removed from the pale population Van had grown up with in small-town Michigan. Eventually Van and Miles found themselves in a café where the waitress seemed amused by Van’s halting Vietnamese. You use words kind of like my grandma, she had said in English, meaning that Van’s language was too formal. She had missed the years of updates and slang, the immersion she never knew in a Little Saigon.
In her father’s house without Miles, Van’s family seemed like an old habit she had secretly returned to. Sometimes when Van conjured an image of her father she saw him standing in the cold at the bus stop, waiting to get to the grocery store. They had all done that together, before they had a car. Back then, the winters seemed especially unrelenting with their stone-colored cap of sky, the empty trees that could hide nothing. Van would draw a knit hat over her ears while Linny had a fake fur muff that she stuck out in front of her. Their mother, holding tight to her purse, made sure the girls stood far enough from the curb to avoid being splashed with slush. Their father had always stood a little to the side, anxious, staring down the street as if willing the bus to arrive more quickly. He said so little to them that, once they were on the bus, Van would wonder if other people could tell he was her father. Sometimes the only thing that seemed to bind him to the family was his very face, his hair, his Vietnameseness a mark of identity that all of them had to bear.
That night when Van and Linny climbed into their opposite twin beds Linny said, “I saw Dad with Nancy Bao once. When I was fifteen. It was at a party. I saw them—in the car.”
“How drunk are you?”
“A little. Not too much.” Linny stretched out her arms. She’d thrown on an old T-shirt printed with the state of Michigan motto—If You Seek a Pleasant Peninsula Look About You—and the near-fluorescent print shone faintly in the dark. “She used to call sometimes after that. You probably didn’t notice. Then it all stopped, sometime before my senior year. I remember one day thinking about her and realizing the phone hadn’t rung and Dad hadn’t answered in his weird way in a while. I bet you didn’t know, huh?”
“I’m not sure.” The scenario was unsettling but not completely surprising. “What about Mom?”
“I don’t know. Tom says he’s never had anyone gossip to him about it, but that could be a generational thing.”
“Who’s Tom?”
“Tom Hanh. He’s a dentist now? He said whenever the patients are Vietnamese they like to talk and talk. But then again, he’s splitting the community’s business with a bunch of other guys. So maybe the big gossips are getting their teeth fixed somewhere else.”
“I have no idea who Tom Hanh is.”
“Van, you even talked with him tonight. He’s from the old school parties.”
Van had not tried to retain the faces she’d spoken to, or who’d spoken to her, over the course of the party. She’d spent most of her time trying to dodge questions about Miles and when she was going to have a baby. That took enough of her attention. Her parents’ friends were tenacious in their demands to know why she wasn’t pregnant yet. They had no compunction about asking after her fertility, or squeezing her arm to help them decide if she’d gained weight. She got only a few minutes of respite when her father gave his speech in his studio. There she had been able to stand by herself, pretending to listen, letting her father’s voice fade into the dimness of the basement. It was a way to gain a little peace: zone out, drift off, put her mind anywhere else but where she was.
It figured that Linny had been off having a great time, reigning over the kitchen so as not to have to chat with the elders. Tom Hanh—of course. He must have been that cute guy she’d noticed Lisa talking to. Linny wouldn’t have bothered otherwise. Of course they had spent the evening together. No matter where Linny went, even at home, she could find a guy.
“What about Mom?” Van repeated.
“I think she must have known.”
“It doesn’t really make sense, though. Dad’s never seemed interested in anything besides his inventions and parties. And watching action movies.”
“Well, what do we know? It’s not like we know him.” As if sensing Van being taken aback, Linny went on, “Have you ever even had a real conversation with him? I haven’t. He’s an Asian father. No real talk. That’s how it is. Anyway, I thought this whole Nancy Bao thing was ancient history until she showed up at the citizenship thing yesterday.”
“What about Rich Bao?”
“God, who knows? Maybe they had some sort of arrangement, which is gross to think about.”
“Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe you didn’t see what you thought.”
“No way. It was very clear.”
“You were fifteen.”
“I know what I saw. I know Dad and Nancy Bao talked to each other on the phone. And then it all just stopped.”
Van still wasn’t convinced. She didn’t say any more but Linny noisily turned over on her mattress and said, “You can think whatever you want. You weren’t there.”
That night Van listened to her sister breathe for a long time before falling asleep herself. Linny never seemed to have a problem with insomnia. Same with Miles. Van could fall into naps just fine during the day but nights gave her anxiety. She could stare at the ceiling for hours, flipping the pillow over and over. How many times had she watched Miles sleep, the wall of his back silhouetted by the glow from the streetlights? She would slip out of bed to walk the house and check the window locks, finally collapsing on the sofa with the television volume on low.
In her old bedroom with Linny, Van thought about how fast it all seemed to go, those growing-up years. You weren’t there. She had missed a lot, she knew, buried so deliberately in her books, lost in the library or school projects. Tuning everything out with the noise of television shows. Which was what she’d wanted at the time, constantly pushing toward college. She had wanted to be on her own, and she thought Linny had too. Hadn’t they shared that feeling more than anything, that wish to be free? But free from what exactly? Van had a sense that she herself had reached back somehow as if with a blurring tool to swirl all of those years together, leaving a final impression of something like guilt, forgetfulness. And every return to this house, to this room, left her awake in the dark by herself.
Yet in the morning she knew she would get up, unsure of how she had ever fallen asleep; she would dress and brush her hair while looking in that same full-length mirror tacked onto the back of the door. In middle school and high school Van used to approach the mirror thinking she might suddenly be pleased with what she saw. It took years for the lesson to be learned, for such optimism to be tempered. The mirror, unlike the teachers who favored her for her discipline and grades, would never give her an easy pass. No grade inflation there. The reflection was accurate, telling her she was the same plain, short girl she had always been.
Van believed she wouldn’t care so much about being short, wouldn’t continue thinking about it still, if the subject hadn’t always consumed her father. But it was the one thing he liked to talk about, the one thing she could get him to talk about. His pronouncements at the dinner table—about how short people were discriminated against, and how short people had to work extra hard to get good salaries and respect—well, these did seep into Van’s thoughts.
There’s a core insecurity about you, Miles had told her once. This was weeks before their wedding, when a sentence like that could both shatter Van and make her determined to be the opposite. I’m not criticizing, he added. I’m just curious about where it comes from. Van didn’t say what she really thought: Didn’t he think she’d tried to figure that out a thousand times already? She’d blamed her height, and being Asian in a mostly white, conservative town in the Midwest, and sometimes called it a shyness coded into her genes. Van had never explained to Miles, or to anyone, how exhausting it was to work against the sense of inadequacy that arose whenever she felt on display—whether it was on the Model UN team or in the courtroom. She had been standing on her tiptoes for most of her life.
There were times, of course, when she did forget about herself altogether, when no one else reminded her of her place in the world. That was why she only liked going to theaters that had stadium seating. It figured that the movies Miles always wanted to see were in the old-fashioned indie art houses where the barely graduated rows forced Van to strain her neck around the tall person who inevitably sat in front of her.
In college Van’s favorite job had been at the university fund-drive office. Everyone else loathed the work, and the turnover was high because people couldn’t handle the rejection of rude responses and phones slammed down. But Van got bonuses for completing more transactions than anyone else. Each call she made to coax a donation seemed a game. She was allowed to identify herself as Vanessa, and she knew that the people on the other side of the line, if they talked to her, would never know who she was. They couldn’t see her; they couldn’t perceive her race, her height, or anything about her. She relished being a disembodied voice.
Her mother had expressed a similar thought, once, about sewing at Roger’s, where she and the other seamstresses worked in one large room above the floors of shopping. Van had only been there a few times but would never forget the sound of the sewing machines, all the individual buzzes adding up to a roar, and the black-haired heads of Vietnamese women bent over hundreds of yards of accumulated fabric. “It’s nice to be up here, out of the way,” Mrs. Luong once said. “Most people shopping don’t even know we’re here.” Hearing this, Van had felt both understanding and aversion. She knew well that secret feeling of being tucked away, unseen. But she hated that her mother had known it too.
When Dinh Luong came into the kitchen the next morning Van couldn’t tell if he’d just woken up or if he’d been out all night. He was wearing the tan windbreaker he’d owned for as long as Van could recall, and the same clothes from the party. He’d slept in his clothes before. He even made a point to do this sometimes, claiming it was easier to get up in the morning when already dressed.
Looking a little dazed, probably hung over, he walked past Linny at the kitchen sink and sat down at the table where Van was starting to eat a bowl of cornflakes, the only cereal her father kept in the house. “Problem with Na,” he declared. The skin under his eyes looked like dark putty, his hair an oily mess. Van wondered, as she had so many times, what he and his friends did with all their time—what did they talk about when they were drinking and playing cards?
“Problem with what?”
“Na Dau,” he said impatiently. “Nancy Bao’s brother. From the party. He’s in trouble.” He explained that Na had gotten pulled over, after leaving the party, and arrested for drunk driving. “Rich Bao just go to get him out of jail.”
Van’s body felt heavy with the morning. She was instantly irritated with her father, his friends, the same old ways. Wouldn’t they ever learn? “It was only a matter of time before this happened, Dad. I’ve told you a hundred times that you and your friends need to be careful. You should be thankful this didn’t happen to you.”
“This is not about me, it’s Na.”
“Well, he was drinking at your party. And drunk driving is drunk driving. You can’t do it. It’s dangerous, not just to you but to everyone.”
Her father put up a hand to stop her. “I already heard it before. What all I want to know is: how much trouble is it for Na?”
“Is this his first offense? Is it an Operating-while-Intoxicated or what?”
“I don’t know. I’m asking about the green card.”
“If it’s a basic OWI, then he should be okay, I think. There’ll be a fine, maybe some community service, probation.”
“Rich is asking about the green card.”
“He probably won’t have to worry too much. DHS doesn’t look kindly on drunk driving, but as long as it’s a first-time OWI he should be okay. Besides, Na’s from Vietnam.” Van was more alert now, answering these questions.
“What does all of that mean?” Linny asked from where she was washing dishes by hand, the old dishwasher having died years ago. “What’s DHS?”
“Department of Homeland Security.”
“What happened to the INS?”
“I don’t know what news you haven’t been paying attention to, Linny, but DHS just absorbed Immigration. It’s all part of controlling the threat of terror and tightening the reins on civil rights.”
“What you mean,” their father interrupted, “about the part about Vietnam?”
Van explained how Vietnam was one of the few countries that wouldn’t accept deportees from the United States. She was certain she had mentioned this to him before, during one of her warnings about how he needed to be careful not to drink and drive. It had become a chronic problem for guys in his generation, in the community.
Linny asked, “They can deport people for getting DUIs?”
“Even if they’re permanent residents.”
“Jesus.”
But Mr. Luong was cheered. “But it’s okay for Na. It’s good.” “I wouldn’t say it’s good. Na can’t get deported but he could be detained. He still needs to be careful. You need to be careful. Plus, if you haven’t been in the U.S. for seven years, at least five of them as a permanent resident, then you don’t have as much protection.”
But already Van could see that her father was losing interest. He tapped his fingers on the table, his mind clearly moving on to some other place. “I already told Rich Bao you help just in case. And if they can’t deport to Vietnam, then it’s all right.”
“Help with what?”
“You be his lawyer. I already told him if there’s trouble, you’re going to fix it.” Somehow he managed to sound both casual and stern, his words a directive. Then he stood up from the table.
“Hold on,” Van said. “If Rich Bao wants to retain a lawyer he should get someone here in town, in Grand Rapids.”
“You already the lawyer. You helped him before.”
“That was completely different.”
“He better pony up the cash,” Linny put in.
Mr. Luong didn’t look Van in the eye. His hands ran along the edge of the table as if considering how to wear it down. Then he produced a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and dropped it next to Van’s bowl of soggy cereal. “That’s Na’s cell phone number. He call you if there’s more trouble.”
The discussion was over. That was how her father worked: the beginning and end of conversations were always his to decide. As he retreated to his basement studio he didn’t say thank you to Van, who knew better by then not to expect the words anyway. He had probably never once in his life said thank you to his wife or children. Or the word sorry. That was something you didn’t hear from an Asian dad, Van thought, remembering the time she was in middle school and he had screamed at her for leaving papers on the dining table, smacking the back of her head for good measure. Later, just before her bedtime, he had walked into her room and silently handed her a twenty-dollar bill.
Linny asked, “What did you do for Na before?”
“I helped Nancy file the paperwork to sponsor him a few years back.”
“He looked out of control last night. I bet the Baos have to take care of him all the time.”
Van picked up the slip of paper with Na’s cell phone number scratched onto it with her father’s calligraphic handwriting. “Dad and his friends are crazy. It’s a miracle they haven’t all been picked up for drunk driving. I used to worry about it constantly. And Mom refused to say anything to him.”
“He went ballistic once when I hid his keys.” Linny swished a soapy sponge around an ancient Pyrex pan as she said, “I didn’t know you ever helped Nancy Bao.”
Van shrugged. She didn’t tell her that over the years she’d filed dozens of applications for her father’s friends. Some of the fees she never got and ended up having to pay herself. Miles gave her a hard time about that but Van always argued the word community. Sometimes obligation. What Linny didn’t seem to feel any measure of, tying her to this place.
Yet why then did Linny seem to belong in this house more than she did? Van never remembered where all of the dishes and foil and utensils were kept but Linny never forgot. Linny knew exactly how to work the old rice cooker, and didn’t even use a measuring cup to pour in the rice. Just yesterday she was sharpening knives on the bottom of a ceramic coffee cup, the way their mother used to do. The knives had flashed in Linny’s hands, singing a note that sounded like preparation. It had sparked jealousy in Van to see how deftly her sister cooked their mother’s Vietnamese dishes.
When Van brought her cereal bowl to the kitchen sink Linny said, “So even if Na fucks up royally he can’t get deported.”
“No, but as I said, he could be detained. And Vietnam could change its policy. There are stories all the time about immigrants who get deported even though they’ve lived here for years and years. If you don’t have citizenship, then you don’t have full protection. Especially these days. For Na, it’s probable that nothing will happen. If this is his first offense he’ll get a fine and probation, community service, and that’s that. But he could get handed over to DHS afterward. Or if nothing happens now, then later on down the line it could trip up a future citizenship application.” Van was aware that her voice sounded like she knew what she was talking about, as if she hadn’t been out of the real game for over a year now. Here too she was on the sidelines, reading newspaper articles about Immigration and Customs Enforcement—ICE, the acronym too fitting—starting to wait at jails, show up at immigrants’ homes, or raid factories in border towns. In Michigan, ICE was building its own detention centers in Battle Creek and Monroe County. If those filled up, then picked-up immigrants could be sent to one of the new for-profit detention centers beginning to crop up around the country. But she didn’t mention any of this to Linny, who’d never asked much about Van’s job, who didn’t know a thing about the day-to-day paperwork at Gertz & Zarou. Neither her father nor Linny had ever heard about Vijay Sastri, the pregnancy that never took, why she had stopped working at the International Center.
“That’s pretty insane,” Linny said. “I didn’t know all of this was going on.”
“It’s a tough time to be an immigrant.”
“I guess it’s a good thing Dad got his citizenship. Is this what you’ve been doing all this time? Helping people not get deported?”
Van picked up a dish towel to start drying pans. “Not really.”
Linny looked at her as though reading her and it made Van nervous. She’d never been very good at masking her feelings in her face. Miles said that, and it was true.
The door to the basement opened and Mr. Luong appeared again, wearing a fleece jacket over his windbreaker. He had shaved his face and combed down his thinning hair. “You girls driving back today?”
Van nodded and her father said, “I call you about the details of the TV show so you can go see it.” At the very mention of it his humor changed, lighting up in a smile. He clapped his hands and let them fly apart, waving away the previous talk of Na Dau. “What do you think? Pretty great, isn’t it?”
“Sure, Dad.”
“Linh—what do you think?”
Linny barely turned from the sink to say, “Yeah, Dad. It’s great.” Years of their standard responses, of telling their father what he wanted to hear.
“I tell everyone about that song.”
“What song?” Van asked.
He started singing, “Short people are no reason to live.”
Linny laughed but Van corrected him. “Got no reason. Anyway, isn’t that song supposed to be ironic? The guy who wrote it is pretty short himself, isn’t he?”
“Really?”
Her father’s interest made Van feel eager, like she should keep talking to keep him in the room. “Randy Newman—that’s the guy’s name.” She remembered then that she’d heard he wasn’t short at all. But her father didn’t need to know that.
“I never hear of him. Only the song. Did you know one out of ten infocommercials is successful? The TV show is a good way to go because then people really see. They watch. You saw the Luong Wall, didn’t you? Great name, huh? It’s the big three with the Arm, the Eye, and now the Wall.”
“Very nice,” Van answered, though the very word wall made Van think of boundaries, the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China, the tightening border between the U.S. and Mexico, between the U.S. and everywhere else.
“Yeah,” Linny chimed in.
Their father fished his car keys from his pocket, signaling the end of the conversation. Outside, his truck was parked at the curb instead of in the driveway, as if his wife might still come back home in her own secondhand vehicle and hem him in. When Van thought of winter in Michigan she thought of her father’s truck at the curb, covered in snow. While the engine ran, he scraped ice from his windshield, the sound echoing back into the house.
“Tell Miles I say hi,” he said as he headed out the kitchen door. “Tell him to help you look after Na.” And then he was gone.
Van saw her sister staring at her, reading her again. A vague shift seemed to be happening, and Van didn’t know how to stop it. I’m the older sister, she wanted to insist to someone. I’m the one who worries, not the other way around.
It was Linny who made Van talk, after all, by asking, “What is up with you?”
Van felt the morning draining away and she knew: What use was there? Linny would have to know. Her father would have to know. The realization was one that struck her as irreversible: by telling the truth, she was committing herself to it, to the story she never wanted to create. She was creating fact by admitting herself to it.
Van sat back down in her old place at the table. On the long-ago days the four of them ate meals together, they always took the same seats. Her mother, closest to the kitchen, would ferry plates of lime wedges and bottles of hot sauce back and forth. When Van and Miles visited at holidays, he would sit in Mrs. Luong’s chair.
Van said, “Miles left.”
Linny didn’t move, didn’t flinch. Van, for once, met her sister’s gaze and was relieved not to see the pity or smugness she’d braced herself for. “When?”
“February.”
“February!” Now Linny was really shocked. “Jesus, Van.” She tossed the dish sponge on the counter. “I have to tell you something.”
Van had a sudden, wild thought that her sister was going to say, He left you for me. She truly almost expected those words to tumble out of Linny’s mouth, so much that she was not at all prepared for what Linny said:
“I saw him with someone. In Chicago, last week. They were at a hotel.”
Van had the sensation of falling down all over again, that same inward crumpling feeling she had felt when Miles had first stood in the thrown light from the entryway and said, I don’t want to live with you anymore.
“I was at the hotel bar and I ran into them. I saw them get into an elevator together. She’s a lawyer.”
Van tried to speak slowly. “How do you know they were together?”
Linny looked amazed. “I saw them. I even met her. Her name is Grace. She gave me the Asian Once-over. Are you listening? I’m sorry.”
Van couldn’t bear those two words, couldn’t bear the idea of a name. Don’t say Grace, she wanted to say. Instead, she said, “That’s circumstantial at best. You don’t know what they were doing there. They could be working together.”
“They were in a hotel bar, on a Saturday, together. In Chicago. They were getting in an elevator that was going up to the hotel rooms.”
Van got up from the table as if it would stop Linny’s bluntness, prevent her from seeing what Van was feeling. She remembered the image of the photo frame, its blankness. How he had removed her as if from his entire line of vision.
“Look, I don’t know what I’m supposed to say here,” Linny said. Her voice softened at the end.
“There’s not necessarily anything to say. Separations are very common.” It helped to remind herself of that fact.
“What are you guys doing about money?”
“We share bank accounts. It’s still all the same.”
“Aren’t you afraid he’ll drain them and leave with you nothing?”
Van shook her head. “He would never do that.”
“But it’s been more than two months. Where’s he been?”
“He’s just taking some time,” Van said, avoiding an answer. The words were smooth, rehearsed-seeming, but they didn’t soothe her. She may as well have said, He’s on vacation from our marriage. “I need to get going anyway,” she said. The thought seemed to impel her to action, made her hurry down the hallway, until suddenly she couldn’t wait to get out of there, before Linny could say anything more, before her father got back from wherever he had gone. In the old bedroom she stuffed her clothes into her bag. She didn’t bother to brush her teeth or make the bed. Why stay? She should have left hours ago. She never should have told Linny the truth. Now Linny wouldn’t let it go. She’d bring it up forever, demanding answers, spilling forth information Van didn’t want to hear.
When Van carried her bag out to the living room she found Linny sitting at the table, her arms flat on the surface like she was waiting for a palm reading.
“Don’t go saying anything to Dad,” Van said.
“I won’t. But—”
“I have to go,” Van insisted. “I guess we can figure out Detroit later.” She pushed herself out the front door so quickly that she forgot to glance back at the credenza, to bid good-bye to her mother, as she’d always done in the past. For a moment Van hesitated on the front stoop, but then kept going to her car. She didn’t want to go back and face her sister. It seemed like a long time had passed since last night, when they had cleaned the house together. The audition in Detroit was four weeks away—enough time, maybe, to let their conversation about Miles descend into the realm of the unbroachable.
Van backed the old Infiniti away from the spot where it had been sandwiched between Linny’s Corolla and their father’s truck. She wondered where he’d gone—to his friends, or even, as Linny perhaps believed, to Nancy Bao? All the way back to Ann Arbor, driving I-96, U.S. 131, M-22, and the windier roads leading to her subdivision, Van’s mind whirled around the faces and words of Miles, her father, her sister. Of Na Dau, whose number lay somewhere in her bag. She could guess what he’d say when she called, fulfilling her father’s directive. He would have the same questions that so many of Van’s clients had: What will happen? What should I do? And sometimes: Where will I go? And Van would have to try to provide the answer.