The Refugees(45)

My watchman’s jacket was thrown onto the armchair by the door, and in the breast pocket was an envelope full of cash that I had gotten from the bank during lunch yesterday. My plan had been to slide the unmarked envelope under her door that evening. I took the envelope out of the jacket and offered it to her.

“What’s that?” she said, arms folded above her belly.

“It’s enough to pay for the car.”

Sam looked at the envelope for a moment and hesitated. I kept myself very still. If I so much as shook the envelope or said another word, she’d refuse it and curse me on her way out. While she was making up her mind, the sight of her belly ring and the smooth, tight canopy of flesh it rested on transfixed me. I wondered if she’d named the baby yet, if she knew its sex, and, above all, if she’d told the man who was going to be the father.

“When I saw what you’d done to the car, part of me wanted to kill you,” Sam said, taking the envelope. “But another part of me thought you cared in some strange, screwed-up way that was completely your own.”

I stepped forward and put my hand on her belly.

“Mostly I wanted to kill you,” she said, frowning.

I leaned closer and put my other hand on her belly, the navel and the ring between my two hands. I waited for the baby to kick or to turn over in the womb, and when nothing happened, I knelt down and placed my ear against Sam’s belly. There was a life hidden there, a life that if I were to hold it in my hands would weigh almost nothing. When I spoke, it was so softly that only the stranger curled up behind the belly ring could hear. Then I said it once more, louder: “I can be the father.” Feeling Sam’s hand grip my shoulder, I said it a third time, just to make sure they both heard me right.

“Stand up, Thomas,” she said. “I want you to stand up.”

I stood up. We faced each other, her belly buffering us.

“Do you know what you’re saying?” she asked. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” I said. Sam bit her lip and looked down, but she didn’t back away. I saw a pattern of three age spots by her jawbone. They had not been there the year before, when we had drawn up the divorce agreement with pen and paper, without lawyers and with a bottle of wine. I traced the slope of her cheek to the jaw, where the age spots were arranged like the dots on a die. A floorboard creaking in my father’s room announced that he had crept out of bed and was undoubtedly standing against the door. Sam and I turned our heads to the sound, but we heard nothing more. He was waiting, just like us, for what was to come.





t was a most peculiar thing to do, or so everyone said on hearing the story of how Phuong’s father had named his second set of children after his first. Phuong was the eldest of these younger children, and for all of her twenty-three years she had believed that her father’s other children were much more blessed. Evidence of their good fortune was written in the terse letters sent home annually by the mother of Phuong’s namesake, the first Mrs. Ly, who enumerated each of her children’s accomplishments, height, and weight in bullet points. Phuong’s namesake, for example, was seven years older, fifteen centimeters taller, twenty kilos heavier, and, from the record in the photographs included with the letters, in possession of fairer, clearer skin; a thinner, straighter nose; and hair, clothing, shoes, and makeup that only became ever more fashionable as she graduated from a private girls’ school, then from an elite college, followed by medical school and then a residency in Chicago. Mr. Ly had laminated each of the photographs to protect them from humidity and fingerprints, keeping them neatly stacked on a side table by the couch in the living room.

The letters accompanying the photographs were the only communiqués that Phuong’s family received about the children, for over the course of some twenty-seven years’ absence, Phuong’s namesake and her two younger brothers had never written a word themselves. And so, when the first such letter finally arrived, it was the cause of a great deal of excitement. The letter was addressed to Mr. Ly, who, as the plenipotentiary of the house, always took it upon himself to open the mail. He sat on the couch and slit the envelope carefully, using one of the few relics from his past he had managed to keep, a silver letter opener with an ivory handle. Flanking him were Phuong and her mother, while his two teenage sons, Hanh and Phuc, sat on the armrests and craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the words their father read out loud. The letter was even shorter than the ones written by the ex-wife, merely announcing that Phuong’s half sister would be coming for a two-week vacation, and that she hoped to stay with them.

“Vivien?” Mrs. Ly said, reading the name signed at the bottom of the letter. “Is she too good to use the name you gave her?”

But Phuong knew instantly why her sister had taken upon herself a foreign name, and whose name it must have been: Vivien Leigh, star of Gone with the Wind, her father’s favorite film, as he had once told her in passing. Phuong had seen the film on a pirated videotape, and was seduced immediately by the glamour, beauty, and sadness of Scarlett O’Hara, heroine and embodiment of a doomed South. Was it too much to suppose that the ruined Confederacy, with its tragic sense of itself, bore more than a passing similarity to her father’s defeated southern Republic and its resentful remnants?

It was easy, then, in the weeks leading to Vivien’s arrival, for Phuong to pass her days at home and at work constructing scenarios of a noble, kindly sister, somewhat solemn and sad, but nevertheless gentle and patrician, who would immediately take to her and become the mentor and guide Phuong never had. Her first glimpse of Vivien at the airport only confirmed the appropriateness of such a movie star’s name for the young woman who paused at the terminal’s glass gates, her eyes hidden behind enormous sunglasses, her lips slightly parted in a glossy pout, pushing a cart loaded with her own weight in crimson luggage. As she jumped and waved to get Vivien’s attention, Phuong was thrilled to see that her sister bore utterly no resemblance to the throngs of local people waiting outside to greet the arrivals, hundreds of ordinary folk wearing drab clothes and fanning themselves under the sun.