"The Lotus Eaters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Soli Tatjana)

FOURTEEN. Back to the World

Helen refused to attend the memorial service for Darrow in New York City. She considered it a hijacking of his wishes and would not be party to it. She would not be party either to her moniker of other woman. Gary and the others thought her callous not to go, to represent his colleagues in Vietnam. No. They expected her to be a good sport, to let the past stay in the past, but it was not within her to do it.

She flew from Tokyo to San Francisco, and felt a childish excitement as she looked down through the clouds, the idea of home suddenly real after such a long absence. Home would fix things. On the plane to Los Angeles, the last leg, she sat with soldiers still in uniform who had processed out of Travis and were going home. Could it be as easy as walking off a plane to leave the war behind?

Her mother, Charlotte, met her at the gate with a bouquet of flowers wrapped in cellophane. She saw her own face in her mother’s, softer and more fragile now. How she had missed that smell of Joy perfume. She pushed away the guilt she felt, her mother resigned to the whole selfish tribe she had raised. As they hugged, Helen watched the returning soldiers heckled by a small group of antiwar protesters. A stringy brunette wearing tattered jeans and a suede halter top stood in front of the soldiers, blocking their way. Her long brown hair was tangled, a feather dangling from a braided strand of it. With barely a glance, one of the soldiers shot his arm out to shove her aside.

The girl’s eyes widened until the whites were visible, and she yelled, “Who do you think you are touching me?” But the soldiers ignored her and moved off.

“Let’s leave,” Helen said.

“You’re so thin,” her mother said. “I hardly recognized you.”

Helen put her arm around her mother’s thickened waist as they walked by the brunette. She slowed and stared at the girl, who returned a flat, dreamy gaze. A look with no contradiction, not the smallest doubt. “Think peace,” the girl offered, then turned to drink from a soda can.

Helen stopped, transfixed. Her mother tugged at her arm.

The girl looked back now, flushed. “What?”

“That’s real brave… what you’re doing here.”

“I want to leave,” Charlotte said.

“Gee, thanks,” the brunette said with a nervous giggle and turned to the two men she was with.

“You’re really making a statement… standing in an air-conditioned airport.”

“Look,” the girl started. “My boyfriend was drafted. Were you there?” “Yes.”

The girl’s eyes widened. “That’s so cool. Did you see them bayonet babies?”

Helen shook with a rage she didn’t know was inside of her. Charlotte dragged her down the walkway.

“What was the point of it?” the girl yelled, gaining confidence at their retreat.

Helen stopped, unable to think. No one had ever asked her the question before.

When they reached the house, Helen first went around to the back and stood staring at the view she had grown up with-ocean waves breaking on the rocks down below. Then she walked from room to room, marveling how big and clean everything looked. Nothing had changed since she’d left except for herself. It was hard to imagine what had burned in her to leave this place and go halfway around the world. She wanted to return to what she had been before she left, but better, smarter, more content.

“Come and look,” her mother said, and showed her the pile of magazines and newspapers with her photos. “This just came.” She held the magazine with the NVA boy soldier on the cover. Inside was an editorial announcing Darrow’s death with the picture Linh had shot of him in the Special Forces camp. “So horrible, so sad.”

Helen said nothing. If she told about her relationship with Darrow, it would boil down to the elements of a dime-store romance. How she had wanted to bring Darrow here, to meet her mother and see where she grew up.

“Please put them away for now.”

Her mom fidgeted with her hands, shy in front of her daughter. “What was it like there?”

“Scary and depressing. Alive. Parts were wonderful.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

No answer.

“I’m just so glad you’re back. I’m proud. People say things about Vietnam behind my back. But my brave girl went.”

Helen stared at the floor. “That means a lot to me.”

“I invited some of our friends over,” she said. “Everyone is so anxious to see that you’re in one piece.”

“Not just yet.”

Charlotte stopped in the middle of the room. “This part of life is important, too.” She bit her lip. “All of you acted like the war was the only real thing that mattered.”

Helen hugged her, then stretched out on the couch.

“Take your shoes off the sofa. Don’t be a lazy bones. Come see your room. I haven’t changed a thing.” The comforting assurance one gave an invalid, when everyone knew that nothing at all stayed unchanged. Her room still had the white-painted twin bed, the flocked coverlet with pastel flowers sewn on. The walls papered with the pictures of Indochina she had collected as a teenager-broad swaths of the monsoon across the plains, long sun-drenched valleys, two figures wearing woven conical hats sitting in a fishing boat in the watery distance. Unreal and movieish; had this bit of fakery really started her on her way to Vietnam? How impossibly naive she had been.

Helen laughed, and her mother’s face looked hopeful, but the laugh continued too long, became raucous and then bitter, and her mother’s face fell as she escaped from the room.

Beneath the pictures was the box of Darrow’s personal things from the Cholon apartment. Helen avoided the box for days, and then broke down one afternoon, tearing it open, savoring the faint, sweet-rotten smell of Saigon inside. As strange and unsanitary as a full-grown Cholon rat. She loved it now in direct proportion to how she hated it then. Helen sat by the box, transported back to her crooked apartment, the Buddha door, the creaky stairs, the faded lamp. She closed her eyes and dreamed she could hear the street noise outside, longing for that life in this silence and hum of air-conditioning.

The magazine had taken care of his official things in the hotel, but Darrow’s wife made a request for all his personal belongings. “Do what ever you want,” Gary said. Helen would have ignored the wife, but the idea of the boy made her pause. As a young girl, she had studied in detail everything that related to her father for some clue to herself.

She made her slow way through file after file of prints and negatives. Any combat photographer as far forward as Darrow ended up with huge numbers of unprintable photos-material so gruesome that no magazine would publish it. But the photographer had to take them, nonjudgmental until he returned to the darkroom. Looking through his whole oeuvre, she saw that he had gone from a mediocre photographer in his early days in the Congo and Middle East to what some called a genius. Something had come together for him by the time he arrived in Vietnam, and the place itself had spoken to him. An astonishing achievement bought at an astonishing price. Helen kept the gruesome photos back, selecting the ones surrounding his published spreads. He had been notorious for taking many rolls for each intended shot, and these showed his artistic method at work. A child should know that about his father.

She came across the photos done at Angkor, stunned by their loveliness. So unlike anything he had done before. A photo of Linh among a group of Cambodian workers. Although he was smiling, he looked too young for the pain in his eyes. Helen also kept out all the shots of herself. She included his cameras, his equipment, his fatigues, holding back only one shirt with his name on white tape above the breast pocket. The sum of his life fit in one box.

When family friends came over for a homecoming, Helen walked out wearing a cocktail dress and high heels, and only her crooked gait, unused to dress shoes, gave her away that she hadn’t just been off at a women’s college. When the conversation turned to the war, she changed the subject, told jokes, asked about neighbors’ children, vacations, anything to give the pretense that all was normal. She didn’t want to be treated like a quarantined animal.

A former tomboy, she cooked for the first time in her life. Whole days lost in the kitchen, poring over cookbooks, pages dusted in flour or glazed in sauce. She and her mother sat down to feasts and staggered away from the table. Her mother laughed, only the lines around her eyes giving away her worry. They had so much food they invited neighbors over, a family of Irish redheads; the mother, Gwen, owned a catering business. After she ate three pieces of Helen’s chocolate velvet cake, she sought Helen out in the kitchen, washing dishes. “This is so good. You should come work for me.”

“This is therapy for me.” The idea of the job so alien, so ridiculous to Helen, that she considered it.

But it was their teenage boy, Finn, who kept trying to get Helen’s attention, who kept her from pretending. The boy’s hair was a soft golden-red, his hands and feet puppyish, too big for his frame. Helen remembered that long-ago boy with the strawberry-blond hair, killed in that first ambush that Linh had saved her from.

“What was it like?”

Helen turned to him. “Don’t let them draft you. Go to Canada.”

“Well, I think service-” the father said.

“What kind of cocoa did you say you used?” Gwen interrupted.

Helen would not be deterred. “If you go, they will use you up like a piece of meat.”

The tightness in Gwen’s face revealed a conspiracy of women trying to keep the war away.

“Did you see real combat? Did you see anyone get killed?” the boy asked, tenacious.

So for Gwen and Gwen’s son, Helen opened the spout, ever so slightly. She talked, her voice low and flat, the words themselves enough, the words fire.

With a hollow drop of her heart, Charlotte noticed that it was the first time Helen seemed alive that day. After fifteen minutes, the room emptied except for the boy, listening rapt.

“They don’t learn,” Helen said, after he had left. “The pictures and the stories-we didn’t, either.”

Sometimes Charlotte entered a room she thought empty only to find Helen there, staring off into space, her face broken apart, her daughter the Picasso woman. Helen sat on the couch, legs curled up, tears rolling down her face, and all the mother could do was take her child in her arms, rock back and forth for hours, pretend her daughter was still a child and could be soothed, merely frightened of the dark.

Darrow’s wife requested Helen bring his belongings in person. Although Helen suspected some final score settling on the wife’s part, she had not yet decided what to do. The easiest thing was to give the box to Robert and have the magazine make arrangements, but still she held on to it.

At first the house and the small beach town that she had longed for while in Vietnam had seemed calcified, dead, as white and clean as bone. But slowly it came to life, or she came to life within it. But it wasn’t the life she wanted.

The sight of people going about their days, shopping in markets, eating in restaurants, playing with children in parks, laughing and drinking and talking, created a deep resentment inside her. Perfectly happy living their lives, Helen thought, which is all anyone should want, and yet how blind, how oblivious to the biggest story in the world. Didn’t they see that Vietnam was the center of the world at that moment? Seen from back home, her pride seemed monstrous. Vietnam monstrous and the acts committed there inconceivable. Her face burned at the thought of the risks she had taken for those photos, burned at the waste.

It was in the dead of night when she felt most herself. Come three or four o’clock, she would be wide-awake in her bed, pretending to herself that she had to get up for a mission, and she would try to remember details-the smell of the room, the temperature, her sleepiness-until they became so vivid she actually felt a fluttering of adrenaline inside of her. Sometimes she would carry it to the point of rising and going to the bathroom, washing her face, and looking into the mirror. Had she gone crazy?

A letter from Linh arrived. In it a picture of Linh and herself. When she unfolded the letter, a sheaf of gold rice stalks fell into her lap. The letter detailed his new activities as staff photographer. She didn’t know if it was his awkward use of written English, but the whole letter was disappointingly impersonal. Only the last line spoke to her so she could hear his voice: Each night I pray life is coming back to you, a piece at a time, just as on the burned hills the grass reappears. She studied the photo more closely. The day on the beach at Vung Tau. Linh staring not at the camera but at her. Of course. She had known but ignored what she knew. The war wouldn’t be over for her until she saw that grass reappear on those scarred hills.

This is what happened when one left one’s home-pieces of oneself scattered all over the world, no one place ever completely satisfied, always a nostalgia for the place left behind. Pieces of her in Vietnam, some in this place of bone. She brought the letter to her nose. The smell of Vietnam: a mix of jungle and wetness and spices and rot. A smell she hadn’t realized she missed.

But what could she do with such knowledge? Even to her, the idea of going back to Vietnam was madness. So she trudged on through the mystery of building a life. She started at Gwen’s catering business, baking cakes and pies. Woke up at dawn and went down to the shop early, made coffee and sat in the bright light of the kitchen. Gwen, heavy-handed, brought a cousin to buy rolls-a setup. His name was Tom, a real-estate agent, a former USC football player. They had made small talk over coffee and muffins, and he asked Helen out. Helen was not friendly. She took his number, not intending to use it.

But she wouldn’t give up trying to live a normal life. In the evening she ran on the beach and noticed a family playing Frisbee with a dog, and, in a burst of inspiration, she went down to the pound and picked up a golden retriever puppy. When she brought him home, spilling over in her arms like a too-large bouquet, her mother held the door open and laughed, shaking her head. “A dog? A dog! Why not? High time for a dog in this house.”

“Yeah, it is.” She stroked the gold velvet ears and tried to ignore her mother’s intent gaze.

“What’ll we name him?”

“Michael always wanted a dog named Duke.”

Her mother nodded. “Duke, then.”

“How come we never had one before?”

“I don’t think your father liked them. Didn’t he get bit when he was a kid? Something like that.”

“But you never thought of getting one after he was gone.”

“Life ended after that.”

The puppy whimpered to be let out nights; Helen up like a shot, carrying the dog outside on the lawn, standing sleepy, barefoot on the wet grass, staring up at the stars. She walked him up and down along empty sidewalks, enjoyed the upside-down quality of the world at night, the only state that matched what she was feeling inside.

After two weeks, Helen called Tom. He sounded surprised. “I thought we didn’t connect,” he said.

“We didn’t.”

A pause.

“What’re you up to?”

“Knocking away on that chip on my shoulder you talked about.”

He laughed.

“Come for dinner about seven, we’ll eat with my mom.” A chaperoned dinner to take the pressure off her.

“Why not?”

During dinner Helen played hostess, passing salad and dinner rolls, smiling at his jokes. Tom pleased her mother beyond words; she glowed, hopeful that this was a first step for her daughter. Helen snuck scraps under the table to Duke.

When Tom asked Helen about her photographs in Vietnam, she spoke of the beauty of the countryside. “It’s too bad you never saw it in person, Mom. It’s so beautiful. Maybe we’ll go after the war is over.”

Charlotte frowned. “Why would I ever set foot in such a place? A place where they killed my son?”

Helen rose and took her plate to the sink. After dinner, Charlotte suggested Tom and Helen take a walk along the beach. Driving down the coast highway, Helen insisted on stopping first at the liquor store for a bottle of scotch. She drank out of the bottle and turned Tom’s radio on loud. At the top of a hill, with the town spread out below, she moved her leg over the gearbox and around the shaft. Tom ran his hand along her knee as she jammed her foot down on the accelerator, bracing herself against the back of the seat so he couldn’t dislodge her, and the car raced down the curving road. Tom held the wheel and slammed on the brakes. “Are you crazy?”

“Just having fun.”

“Some fun. Getting us killed.”

“Didn’t it feel good, just a little? Kept you dying from boredom?”

They parked along the beach and walked in the sand barefoot, passing the bottle back and forth between them.

“You’re a little wild, huh?” he said.

“That’s me.”

“How long did you say you’d been back?”

“I didn’t.” She stopped and dug her feet into the cold and gritty sand. Waves in the moonlight sharp and hard as the blades of knives. “Six weeks, four days.”

Far up the beach, teenagers crowded around a large bonfire that threw light up on the cliffs, but where Tom and Helen stood it was dark and deserted.

“So what are you doing with your days?” he asked. He took a long pull from the bottle and let his fingers brush along hers when he handed it back.

“Baking for Gwen.” She laughed. “Cakes and cookies, buns and rolls.”

“No, long-term. When are you going to start doing photography again?”

“I’m done with that.”

“I told all my friends about you, all your covers. They’d seen your stuff and were impressed as hell. That’s why I came when you called, even though you were a jerk that day.”

“Wow.” His bluntness made her like him better.

“So why aren’t you working at a newspaper? Or covering another war? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

“I just went as a lark. It turned into something else. What do you do if you have a hazardous talent, like riding over waterfalls in a barrel? A talent dangerous to your health?” After the question came out of her mouth, she felt embarrassed.

He stopped and took a sip. “I don’t know. If I was that good at something, I know it’d be hard to stop. Baking… shit.”

Helen moved back into the cave of shadows at the base of the hillside, tumbled onto her back in the sand. Was that the simple answer, that Darrow couldn’t leave his work because he was good at it? That she loved the work more than this life that felt like a living death? No matter how she tried, the gears of her old life kept slipping; she could gain no traction. Her mind was always far away, whirring. She had not known how alive she was in Vietnam. How despite the fear and the anger, she had been awake in the deepest way, in a way that ordinary life could not compete with. She motioned Tom down and pulled him on top of her.

“All those guys over there made you a little crazy, huh? We can go to my place. I have a bed.”

“Baking’s not so bad. You have flour, butter, sugar. The smell of baking bread.” She shook her head, squirmed from under him, reached for the bottle nested in the sand, and took a long drink.

He grabbed the bottle away. “That’s enough. I don’t want you passing out on me.” He kissed her on the lips, the neck, fumbled with the buttons of her blouse.

She closed her eyes, but that made her head spin faster, so she opened them again. “There was this place on Tu Do that made the most wonderful croissants.” Despite the pulsing of the waves, the times in high school and college, despite the smoky taste of the scotch on her tongue, this wasn’t even a moment’s forgetfulness.

“Come on…”

“No.” She couldn’t remember why she thought this would work, why she sought him out. He had unbuttoned her blouse. For a brief moment the pulse of warmth began, a deep pull, but instead of distracting, the arousal opened a deep grief inside her.

Helen jerked open his belt buckle, but the scotch suddenly created a wave of nausea welling up in her, and she pushed at his chest to get him off, unable to bear another minute, which he at first mistook for passion, pressing down harder, her slaps growing more frantic, powerful, convulsed, until he moved off, and she rolled away, crouched on all fours, and heaved.

He sat on the sand next to her. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Nice.”

She sat with her knees up, her head on her arms, sucking down gulps of air.

He stood and took off his shirt, then his T-shirt. He walked to the waves, then came back. “Here,” he said, kneeling down, handing her his wet T-shirt to wipe her face. He sighed. “I don’t know what just happened.”

“I shouldn’t have called.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“I wanted to be the kind of girl you think of when you go off to war.”

“You’re the one who goes to war, remember?”

“We better go home.”

“I like you. But you’re not that kind of girl.”

The next day she took the box of Darrow’s belongings and boarded a flight for New York.

She did not think about what she would find, did not know what she was looking for. Not until later did she realize that the addition of facts would simply dilute her own store of memories without bringing him closer, that as she became the biographer of his life, Darrow himself would move further and further from her grasp. Although she knew him deeply, now she could discover only the surface of his life.

She drove out of the city, onto long, winding roads shaded by the dying yellow and red of fall. Although it was only late September, already there was a chill in the air, and the low sun cast a somber light on the lawns and houses. Circling streets aimlessly, unable to place Darrow in this suburban environment, she came upon his street name and turned. She planned to drive by the house a few times, to reconnoiter the area, but when she saw a long, rising lawn that led to a white Cape Cod, she stopped. How to reconcile this house with the crooked apartment in Cholon? Could the same man belong to both places?

Helen parked on the side of the road and watched as a coiffed brunette in a floral dress unloaded groceries from a car trunk. Her own jeans and army T-shirt with a khaki shirt on top suddenly seemed shabby. This place, this woman, were impossible to put together with the Darrow she knew. Was the excuse of war a way to go live another, a second life? Were there closets filled with his clothes inside? If she brought them to her nose, would she smell him? She got out of the car and struggled to lift the box, balancing it on her hip as she closed the car door.

The driveway dipped before it rose to the house. A small puddle filled with fallen leaves had formed from an earlier rain. Helen walked around it, stepping on the wet lawn, almost slipping in a hidden dip. The driveway was long, the woman too far away for Helen to see her face. Once she saw her close-up, she would know if Darrow had loved her.

As she walked up the gravel path, a small boy ran around the corner of the house with an Airedale chasing him. The boy laughed and shouted to his mother, the dog jumping and nipping him in mid air, and Helen stopped. His curly hair the exact brown shade of Darrow’s. Her legs went weak. Suddenly she did not want what she had come for. Nothing could be added; nothing would change her facts. The woman called out to the boy a name Helen couldn’t quite make out. Her blood pounded in her ears like waves, and she realized Darrow had never told her the boy’s name, had kept him unreal.

The child pointed his arm down the driveway toward Helen. The woman reached out for him, but he ducked away and began to run full speed down the driveway with her in chase. When they came within speaking distance, the woman stopped, and her face became hard, a cool stare. “Can I help you?”

“I’m Helen Adams. From Life. I have your… I have Sam’s things.”

“You’re late. You were supposed to be here hours ago.” The woman shielded herself as if a wind had come up. “I’m Lilly Darrow. Come,” she said, and walked back up to the house.

The interior was neat and dark, low ceilings and unlit Tiffany lamps, unused chintz-covered furniture. Gloomy, wood-carved antiques and marble-topped, sarcophagal tables, everything in perfect taste, fallow. It did not seem that a man had ever lived there, and certainly not Darrow. As they sat in the dim living room, Helen noticed Lilly’s face had a professional symmetry to it-a broad, pale forehead, tight smile. A face more to be admired than loved.

“Would you like tea?” she asked, and Helen, not listening, was at a loss until Lilly pointed to a china service. “I love having someone to entertain.”

“It’s too much…”

“Not after you flew across the country.”

Lilly lifted the tea tray and pushed at the swinging kitchen door. “Come on, if you want. It’s more comfortable in here.”

The light through the windows was murky, the sun hidden by tall pines that cast bluish, prone shadows on the back lawn. Copper pots hung from the kitchen walls. Stacks of dishes leaned in the glass-paned cabinets. She was right: Compared to the other room, this did feel more comfortable. Helen liked Lilly better for noticing the difference and admitting it. Her back was toward Helen while she filled the kettle. The fabric of her dress was expensive with a dull, heavy shimmer to the thread.

When the boy wandered in, Helen was unable to take her eyes from him. His brown hair was messed, a cowlick in front, the promise of his father’s heavy-lidded eyes and long, slender fingers.

“Go to your room, Sam. This friend of your father’s, who came all the way to see us. To bring you some of Daddy’s cameras.”

He looked at Helen with new interest. “Show them to me?”

Lilly interrupted before Helen could answer. “Not now. We’ll look later, okay? Now scoot.”

“That’s okay, I don’t mind.” She wanted the boy to stay, wanted the buffer of him.

“He never came here, you know,” Lilly said, taking out pastries from a box, and the evident effort that she had gone through belied her casualness. “We married in the city and lived in a small apartment before he left. My parents… live down the street. He told me family was important to him. So I made this home for him.”

“It’s lovely.”

“So he would have a home to come back to.” Lilly shook her head. “Someone to survive for.”

Helen said nothing. A feeling of claustrophobia, of wanting to escape, overcame her, and her hands fidgeted in her lap. As much as she hurt, she was lucky compared to this.

Lilly set down a series of forks and spoons at Helen’s place, put out individual pastries, berries and cream, small sandwiches, and sat down to pour. Up close, Lilly’s two front teeth, perfect otherwise, overlapped slightly. Helen hesitated, embarrassed that she did not know which fork to pick up.

“I was engaged to a law student from my hometown. But Sam… was so passionate about changing the world.” She picked up the fork farthest from the plate. “How could I not fall for him? I wanted to wait before we had children. Spend time alone.” She smiled and leaned forward, as if in confession. “I even thought of becoming a photographer. Going with him. But he insisted it was no place for a woman. He wanted a family.”

Helen used the small fork to tear apart her apple tart.

Lilly reached over and held Helen’s arm for emphasis. “I’m not naive. I understand things. He hated the war, and the two of you took solace in each other.”

Helen cleared her throat. “I brought everything I thought your son-”

“You’re the first one of them he talked of marrying, though.”

Them. So this was her purpose. Revenge posthumously. Helen put the tiny fork down and picked up the sandwich with her fingers. “He loved what he did.”

“Oh, yes.” Lilly stood and moved to the now dark window. She ran her hands over her hair and looked out into the dusk. A natural, unselfconscious gesture, it spoke of many afternoons spent alone. Helen could see only the pale forehead and curved line of her chin in the glow of the lamp. She imagined her as the young woman that Darrow had married. “He was ambitious, wasn’t he? That’s what I have to convince Sammy of. That he was a great man doing important work. That his death was a hero’s death.”

“Yes.” It took everything for Helen to remain seated in the room, not to run. A terrible mistake coming here; this woman twisting everything around until it was impossible to determine what was what.

“Every year he told me he was quitting. Each woman was the last. Finally I figured out that he was going to stay till he got killed.”

“We were about to leave.”

“I got divorce papers out of the blue. He wasn’t thinking straight.”

“He asked you in Saigon.”

“He never asked such a thing. We argued when he was coming home. What kind of father doesn’t see his son?”

“I came for the boy’s sake. You didn’t even know him. Everything that was most important about Sam, you didn’t know.”

“I’d say neither of us was his first love.” Lilly leaned back and spread her arms out, encompassing the room. “But at least I have this. His home. I’m his grieving widow. At least I have Sammy.”

“Yes.”

Lilly moved closer till Helen could smell her perfume, could see her eyes narrowed on her, and understood for the first time how angry she was, and how hard she was working at controlling that anger. “Women like you I can’t figure out. Was that little part of him really enough for you?”

Dizzy, Helen shook her head. “We had the war.”

“I loved him, you know. I loved him when he was himself. He lost himself over there, in that horrible little country, but that didn’t make me stop loving him.”

The kitchen had turned shadowy and cold. Helen shivered in her thin cotton shirt, she was always cold now, but Lilly had sweat across her pale, high forehead; she glowed with a mineral kind of heat. Finally Helen saw-this place had nothing to do with Darrow, except for the boy. It was their life, and the war inside it, that was real, and she had simply not understood.

“I hated you in Saigon,” Lilly said. She seemed weary from the long afternoon. “But I don’t anymore. You’ve lost more than I could ever take away.”

A month passed. Helen had returned to working in the bakery. Something had been solved in her mind regarding Darrow, and she lived with the past more easily. When Robert drove down from Los Angeles, and they walked arm in arm along the boardwalk in the cool, damp evening air, life almost seemed normal. The street along the beach was lined with slow-moving cars, teenagers cruising. Robert looked ten years younger than he had in Saigon.

“Peace has been kind to you,” Helen said.

“Can you believe we made it? Seems too good to be true,” he said. “Every morning I wake up, and I feel so grateful for the smallest things.”

She didn’t tell him about opening Linh’s letter. How the glow over the ocean was purple, the room dark, and as she opened the envelope, the pool of light from the reading lamp shone on the sheaf of gold rice stalks as they fell out onto her lap.

How instantly she was transported, and what relief she felt.

The paper on which Linh wrote had the faint outline of a lotus blossom in pale yellow, and his writing in black ink on top of the image reminded her of the streets of Saigon, the constant juxtaposition of beauty with necessity.

“It seems so far away.” She eyed the crawling line of cars. When the one nearest them backfired, she flinched.

“Remember the first night I took you to dinner? And you tried to free the ducks of Vietnam?”

“How could I have been so stupid?”

“I thought you were charming. And that you’d never last.”

“I went to see Darrow’s ex-wife.”

“Why?” He frowned, tired of her constant exhuming of the past.

“My whole experience was clouded over there. We were in a dream. It was so vivid, I thought it wasn’t real. But it was. Truer than anything here.”

“Peace is kind to everyone, Helen. Except you.”

She led Robert out to the sand, and they sat against a large rock, watching as the waves dissolved from view in the near dusk. The kelp had drifted in, and a strong brine smell blew down from the north part of the cove. “Nothing compared to nuoc mam, huh?” The fermented fish sauce smell was a staple of any local Saigon restaurant one entered. She grabbed Robert’s hand, intertwined her fingers with his. “It feels good to be with you. You know, someone who gets it. Don’t you miss it just a little?”

Robert sighed. “Saigon? Happy to have gone through it and survived.”

Helen rested her head on his shoulder. “I don’t mean the war. Of course not.”

“Come to work in L.A. The story Darrow and you did on Lan was a big success. They want a follow-up on her here in California.”

“Local?”

“I’m not sending you back to Vietnam, if that’s what you’re asking.” He had never been one of them, had not understood MacCrae, or even Darrow, for that matter. The war had never captured his imagination. “What happened in Saigon… what didn’t happen… things were crazy. But I thought maybe we could try seeing each other under normal circumstances.”

Helen gave a small laugh. “Is that what this is? Normal circumstances?”

“Yeah. Not a war zone.” He pulled back, irritated. “You know, I don’t buy the ‘weren’t those the days’ crap about the war. The war was shit, Saigon was shit, and we’re lucky to be out of it alive.”

“Sure.” She could not share, after all, waking up in the middle of the night and pretending that she needed to get up for a mission, could not share her midnight patrols of the neighborhood with Duke.

“I gave you the benefit of the doubt over there. That you were out of your element.”

“Have you heard from Linh?”

Robert was silent for a long minute. “A couple of times. He’s on staff. I offered him a transfer, American citizenship to boot. He turned me down.”

“I thought he married.”

“Linh? No, that’s not it. He’s either patriotic or really patriotic, if you know what I mean. Darrow always joked that he was working for Uncle Ho’s side.”

“Whatever he is, I’d trust him with my life.”

Robert said nothing.

“Do you remember that first night? When I left you at the restaurant? I thought you’d hate me, but you didn’t.”

“Didn’t we go to some lousy Chinese place… in Cholon? I don’t remember.” But, of course, he did remember each thing from that night, and he had hated her, but it didn’t hold.

“Remember Darrow saying they were lucky because there was always another war? I thought it was just macho posturing. But now I wish he was here so I could tell him I finally understand.”

They got up and walked back to the boardwalk. The sky overhead black, a pale moon casting a sterile light on the water, on the houses in the hills behind them.

“There are plenty of twenty-year-old guys thinking they’re immortal. You and I know better,” Robert said.

“I’ll take the assignment.”

“Good girl.”

She nodded and took his hand again, brought it to her lips. “Sometimes I wish I could just be back there an hour. Just enough so that I could really love all this again.”

That night she opened the window while she changed for bed. After seeing Robert, she was confident that the dreams would come that night. She undressed in the dark, listening to the sliding of the ocean as she pulled the white, veil-like nightgown over her head. She put her hair back chastely in an elastic. Only then did she turn on the light, look at the pictures on the walls that were already in her head, then quickly turn the light back off. The dreams had begun to go away, and when they did come, they were less intense, and she found she needed to jog her memory before she fell asleep to meet Darrow again in that vast darkness. But instead of Darrow, the dream of the children came to her. She was kneeling this time, an unknown man beside her, lying prone, and the group of Vietnamese children approached and circled the two of them, pressing in, circling around and around, touching, but again when she tried to speak with them, they turned their backs to her. Even while dreaming, she was trying to remember where the image had come from-it was a more threatening feeling than that day on the beach with Linh in Vung Tau-but she couldn’t place it.

The rehabilitation center was down in the Wilshire district, and Helen circled the hospital block a few times, finally parking a quarter mile away at a coffee shop. The day was hot, the air crackling dry with Santa Ana winds, the usual smog-stained haze replaced by a sharpness that etched the trees and buildings on the landscape. Helen sat in the restaurant, her appetite lost in the smell of grease, floor wax, and disinfectant. She tried to focus on the assignment, to think of Lan as just another story.

She was late as she muscled her camera bags onto her shoulders in the parking garage and pushed through the pounding sunlight, the sour smell of hot asphalt under her feet. On the children’s floor of the hospital, a whole platoon of doctors and therapists waited for her in their long, white, picture-ready coats. The head doctor on the case lectured about surgeries, using charts. His lab coat looked stiff and creased, as if it had just been taken out of a box. Samples of prosthetics had been laid out on a banquet table loosely covered by a long red tablecloth so that the display had the eerie feeling of an awards table, each flesh-colored appendage set apart and spotlighted from above.

“Where’s Lan?” she finally asked.

“I thought you should see her progress first,” the doctor said. He sulked at her lack of interest.

“How about I see her first,” Helen said. “We’ll talk after.”

The room grew quiet, the doctor coughed into his hand. “Well then, let’s go see her.”

In a quick decision to brief her on the run, the woman psychologist walked alongside Helen. She was short and made a little skip every third step to keep up. Each time she spoke, she bit her lower lip as if the coming words might be bitter. They passed rooms filled with children. “Lan’s by herself right now,” she whispered. “She’s had an aggression incident again with the other children.” The woman narrowed her eyes so they disappeared in the flesh of her full cheeks. “That’s not acceptable behavior. Biting.”

“It wasn’t ideal… her living conditions in Saigon.”

“But we’ve saved her,” the woman said.

“Actually we’re the ones who hurt her.”

The woman stroked her own cheek with a dimpled hand, as if the unpleasantness of Helen’s words might bring on a rash.

At the end of the hall, she stopped and opened a door. At first the room appeared empty, but then Helen saw Lan sitting at a low table in the corner, shaping a ball of clay. The adults formed a semicircle around the table, but Lan acted as if she heard nothing, did not move her eyes from the clay figure in front of her. Impossible to believe she was the same girl from Saigon-now filled out with rounded arms and cheeks, glossy hair tied in ponytails with pink yarn, wearing a pink Cinderella T-shirt and pants.

“Lan?” Helen said. “Remember me?”

The girl looked up with a heavy, bored look, as if bracing herself for more unwanted attention. Helen moved closer, bent down to hug her. Her skin smelled sweet and medicinal, like cough syrup. Close-up, it was obvious that her face was bloated, her eyes dry and hard. Helen wondered what medications she was on. Lan’s body remained limp in her arms.

Helen sat on a low plastic stool. The table was filled with toys, but Lan had attention for only the small ball of clay in her hands. She had the dull, listless behavior of an animal in the zoo. “You have a lot of toys,” Helen said.

Lan grabbed her hand. “You bring me candy?”

Helen laughed, relieved at the shared memory. The doctors standing around them made her feel she needed to offer something up. “I brought her candy in Saigon.”

Lan shook her head, impatient, with a sharp tilt of the chin. “Sam bring me candy. What you bring me now?”

“I came to take pictures again for the magazine.”

Lan yawned. “I’m hungry.”

The nurse stepped forward eagerly. “I’ll bring you back some lunch, sweetie.”

“I want hamburger,” Lan said to her retreating back as the door swung shut.

Helen looked from Lan to the doctors. “Should we start taking pictures?”

“What are you giving me?” Lan shouted.

Behind her the doctors moved off, whispering and marking their clipboards. Under her breath, Lan began to sing a tune, the words getting louder until they could be clearly heard: “ ‘There was a little honey from Kontum/Boy did she ever like boom, boom…’ ”

“No,” Helen said, bending down and hushing the girl. “Not in the hospital. Don’t let them hear you.” She felt a flush of parental embarrassment.

Lan shrugged and plucked at her hair, pulling out a few strands that she dropped on the floor.

“What do you want me to bring next time?” Helen said, figuring on bargaining with the child.

“A camera,” she said. “Sam promised me a camera, and he lied and goes to die instead.” The words froze Helen, and Lan noticed, becoming suddenly attentive. “He lied to you, too?”

“It was an accident, Lan. He didn’t want to die.”

“Mama says no accidents. I lose my leg because I was stupid girl.”

“That’s wrong. It wasn’t your fault.”

“I pick vegetables because they grow bigger and more easy than walking around to safe place.”

“It was an accident.”

The nurse came back carrying two cafeteria trays of food and put one down in front of each of them. She winked at Helen. “If you two finish your lunch maybe I can find you a dessert.”

Lan’s face turned red, her brow furrowed. “My mama’s right. No accidents. You’re stupid.”

Helen took a deep breath, suddenly tired of the whole idea of the shoot, the effort too hard; she just wanted to escape from the girl’s craziness. “You like America?” Helen asked, bending down and taking a camera out of its case.

“I want that camera.”

“This is mine. I’ll buy you your own.”

“I want to go home. Why can’t my parents visit?” Lan shoved the tray of food across the table, sending it flying over the edge and onto the floor. “I hate chicken. Lan is special girl, eat anything she want.” She jerked herself sideways on her stool, grabbing for the crutches against the wall, moving so quickly she lost her balance and fell.

Helen made no move to help her, and when Lan looked up and saw her sitting back, she cried louder as the nurse rushed forward and kneeled next to her.

“Don’t touch,” Lan screamed. “No touch me.”

Helen’s face beaded with sweat; she couldn’t breathe, the commotion bringing back the low, dark Red Cross room in Saigon, the close smell of urine and unwashed bodies.

Images clattered one after another in her head. Helen rose on unsteady legs as if rising from a heavy, drugged sleep. No matter what she did, she could not escape, that much was clear. Even a dangerous talent better than nothing.

She longed for cool air and quiet. Lan’s screams grew louder, more out of control, but Helen saw only the wounded children of Saigon in front of her, laid out on their beds sardine-style, the little boy in the courtyard eating bougainvillea blossoms. The camera in her hand shook. Lan rocked on the floor with the doctors kneeling around her like a wounded soldier attended by medics. Helen grabbed her camera bag and ducked out the door.

In the hallway, the cries muffled, Helen leaned against a cartoon rabbit painted on the wall and closed her eyes.

The nurse came out. “Sorry about that. Today’s a bad one.”

“She’s done this before?”

“Oh yeah. Back and forth. Shell shock for kids. Not pretty.”

“She wasn’t like that.”

“You don’t look so good yourself. Why don’t you lie down, and I’ll get a doctor.”

“That’s okay.” Helen moved toward the elevator.

“Aren’t you going to say good-bye?” the nurse said.

“I don’t want to upset her,” Helen mumbled as the elevator doors opened.

“I can tell her you’re coming back, right?” the nurse shouted, but Helen was already gone.

Helen and her mother walked below their house with Duke, along the crescent of beach where she had grown up; in the sand she took her first steps in, stumbling into her father’s arms; along the water where she and Michael spent innumerable summers building sand castles while their young mother sat and talked with the other mothers and prepared sandwiches and Kool-Aid for their lunches. They walked under the limestone cliffs, Duke’s gold body weaving in and out of boulders, where Helen and teenage friends had burned bonfires late at night and talked and drank warm beer, the whole point to pair off and go into the dark, lie back in the cool embrace of sand and explore with lips and tongues and hands, to allow a first kiss, hands under a blouse, a bra to be unhooked, gentle kisses and quick straightenings, and then return to the group at the fire, and all that sweetness, all those boys smelling of shampoo that would later be transformed into the shapes of body bags. They walked in the late afternoon, the sun saffron-colored, and Helen’s mother cried, her face punched-looking, pale and blotched, hands clutching.

“I forbid it. No,” she said. “It isn’t fair.”

“But it’s no good,” Helen said. “I don’t belong anywhere else right now.”

“No!”

“I need to go,” Helen said.

They walked past families having early dinners, small children and dogs running and chasing, Duke running and chasing, around picnic tables piled with food, people laughing and talking, the same people they used to be, and Helen stumbled, something sharp against her ankles, her balance upset, and without thought she was diving sideways, facedown, pitching over her shoulder in a combat roll into the sand, and when she looked up she saw it was a piece of line pulled taut to a fishing pole stuck at the water’s edge, and two frightened little boys turned from their dinners, afraid they were in trouble, and because it wasn’t a trip wire, because it was not an ambush with a mine or a grenade or death at the end, Helen lost her control, sobbed and screamed and pounded her hands into the sand that had cheated her, that had cheated all of them, and her mother froze, a premonition, she did not know this strange haunted woman at her feet, her movements as foreign as that far-off, floating, green country, and seeing with her own eyes the death of her little blond-haired girl who was as dead now as her son, she realized she had lost them all, she was powerless against this thing called Vietnam. The people at the picnic table stared, silent. A large-bellied man with a sandwich in his hand hesitated and reluctantly began to approach them, Duke with a ball in his mouth ran along the water, and the young mother ran to her two boys, pressing them into her hips, the reality of the war creeping up the sand, invading, at last coming home.