The Refugees(42)

“Hue.” She spoke the city’s name with the correct rising accent. “But you can’t actually smoke anything with it.”

“You went to Vietnam?” my father and I said at the same time.

“Last summer. I didn’t teach summer school and went backpacking instead. Sometimes”—she paused—“a girl just needs a vacation.”

“Did you think about me?” I said.

Sam shifted her weight on the couch, uncrossing and crossing her legs, the ankles and calves swollen. “Of course I thought about you.” She smiled at me as if I was one of her students. Then she looked at my father, who was studying the cottage cheese ceiling. “And you, too, Mr. P.”

“I will never go back.” He rapped his bottle of beer on the coffee table. “You do not know the Communists. I know the Communists.”

“They’re not so bad. They just want to move on with their lives.”

My father shook his head emphatically. “You are a foreigner. You know nothing. They take your money and say nice things to you.”

“Maybe you should go back,” Sam said quietly. “You can get closure.”

“I will never go back.” My father slashed his index finger across his throat and made a guttural noise. “If I go back, they will call me a war criminal. They will put me in reeducation, and you will never hear from me again.”

Sam pushed herself off the couch, rising before my -father got started about what evil the Communists had done or would do. He would tell these stories for an entire evening. “Excuse me,” Sam said. “I have to use the bathroom.”

After she left, my father turned to me and hissed, motioning to his belly and making a round curve in the air with his hand. I ignored him and got up to look around the living room for traces of a man. All I saw were the trappings of our life together. I’d given Sam everything when we divorced except half the money, but I hadn’t expected her to keep our mementos on display. Above the mantel were figurines of hula dancers from our honeymoon in Hawaii, and on a bookshelf were crystal paperweights in the shape of dolphins we’d bought in Puerto Vallarta. By the heater was the Robert Doisneau print I’d bought her in senior year, the black-and-white one with the man and woman kissing on a Parisian street.

Next to the paperweights was a lacquered jewelry box etched with mother-of-pearl, which I assumed she’d bought in Vietnam. We’d talked often about visiting, but I’d never really wanted to go. I wasn’t even born there, my mother having given birth to me at a refugee camp in Guam, where my father named me after the American adviser who’d given him the compass watch. I didn’t understand what drew Sam to Vietnam, except maybe a need to find closure of her own. Perhaps she’d found it. She seemed happy when she brought out two envelopes of photos from her trip and told us the stories behind them. “A beautiful country,” she said, which was what everyone said about it. “Poor and hot, but beautiful.”

Despite himself, my father grunted in pleasure as he studied the pictures. Sam had landed in Saigon and traveled north to Hue and Hanoi, with detours to Ha Long Bay and the mountains of Sapa. Most of these were places he’d only read about, since the war had kept his generation from seeing their own country. He passed me a picture of Sam on the deck of a boat, wearing a safari hat and a powder-blue North Face hiking jersey, the one I’d bought her for Christmas. Her freckles had faded to invisibility against her skin, pink from the sun, and she was leaning into a man with sandy-blond dreadlocks draped on his shoulders.

“Is this the father?” I jabbed at the man’s face with my finger.

She sighed. “Please don’t be stupid, Thomas.”

“It’s just a question.”

“You had a chance, Thomas. We had a chance.”

My father said, “Excuse me,” got up, and walked out the front door without another word. After the door closed, Sam shook her head and said, “Neither of you has changed one bit.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“How have you changed, Thomas? Besides your haircut?”

“You’re the one who’s changing.” My voice was loud. “You’re changing the subject.”

“A woman can have a baby by herself.” Her tone of voice didn’t rise as it used to when we fought, but stayed subdued, as if weighed down by the unborn child. “A woman doesn’t need a man to be the father of her child, Thomas.”

“You might as well say the earth is flat.”

“Oh, my God.” She stretched the words out sarcastically, imitating the way the students spoke in her classes, the ones she used to talk about over dinner. “What century are you living in?”

I wanted to ask her what a woman is without a husband, what a child is without a father, what a boy is without a man, but the questions wouldn’t come out. “Who’s the father?” I said.

“You don’t have any right to ask me that.”

Perhaps it was another teacher, or somebody she met on the Internet, or a stranger she got drunk with in a bar one night. Perhaps it was even some lucky Vietnamese tour guide. The thought of these other men made me drink the rest of the beer, not so much for the taste as to give me something to do besides throw the bottle into the television. When I was done, Sam got up and walked to the door, leaving me no choice but to follow. My foot was on the threshold when the unexpected sound of my name caused me to turn around, hopeful.