The Refugees(51)
“I won’t bother you.” Phuong touched Vivien on the arm, sticky with perspiration. Their cabin was nearing the platform. “I’ll find a job. I’ll take care of myself. I’ll take care of you.”
Vivien snapped her purse shut, still crying. “I’m sorry, Phuong. When I return, I’m putting my life back together. I’ve got to pay off four credit cards and my student loans and hope my house won’t be taken from me.”
“But—”
“I won’t have time to worry about a little sister.” Now it was Vivien who seized Phuong’s hands with her own tear-dampened ones. “Can you understand that? Please?”
When the attendant opened the door, their father was waiting, disposable camera held to his eye, his wife standing behind him with the boys. The Ferris wheel rotated at its measured pace, slow enough for them to step out, Vivien first. A week later their father would develop the photograph, but it would take Phuong a moment to examine the laminated picture before she remembered what was absent underneath the clear plastic. Vivien was visible in the doorway, eyes moist and makeup smudged, but by an accident of timing or composition Phuong herself could not be seen.
While it had taken Vivien twenty-seven years to mail her first letter home, it took her only a month for the second missive. Phuong returned one evening from Nam Kha to find her parents and brothers clustered around the table in the living room, sifting through a stack of pictures that Vivien had enclosed. A smiling and cheerful Mr. Ly waved the letter at Phuong, a single sheet that she read sitting on the arm of the couch. The letter recounted Vivien’s wonderful memories, dining on a floating restaurant on the Saigon River, being fitted for a custom-made ao dai, riding on a pony cart around Lake Xuan Huong in Dalat, with the best day her arrival and the worst her departure. I looked out the window of the airplane until I couldn’t see the country anymore, she wrote. Everything’s so green. The moment the clouds covered it, all I wanted was to return. And so the letter went, her sister’s hypocrisy making Phuong so ill that it was all she could do not to tear the letter in half.
“Tomorrow I want you to have these pictures laminated,” Mr. Ly said, sorting through the photographs Vivien had sent. “We’ll make an album from them.”
“What for?” Phuong said, tossing the letter onto the table.
“What do you mean, what for?” Mr. Ly was incredulous. “So that we’ll have something to remember her by until she comes back.”
Phuong studied her father as he sat on the couch, surrounded by her mother and brothers, clutching the photographs as if they were equal to the hundred-dollar bills Vivien had given him. For the first time in her life she felt pity for him, certain that it was not just her father who would break his daughter’s heart, but the daughters who would one day break his. She contemplated telling him this truth, that Vivien was never going to return, and that one day, perhaps not soon, but eventually, Phuong would leave as well, for a world where she could fall in love with someone she didn’t know. It was merely a matter of momentum, and she now knew how to begin.
By nine the next morning she was alone in the house, the boys gone to school, her parents at work. She wore her sister’s gift, and over the lace donned a blouse and Capri pants. It would be best, she thought, to do what needed to be done outdoors, and so she placed a stool by the living room gate and a tin bucket on the pavement of the alley. When she opened the envelope of photographs, the first picture she saw featured her father and Vivien shivering in the Ice Lantern at the amusement park, their last stop that day. In the foyer, an attendant had handed them polyester parkas, hooded, knee-length, and in neon hues of yellow, pink, orange, and green. Even with the parkas, stepping from the foyer into the Ice Lantern itself was a shock, for it was in essence an enormous refrigerator, an echoing hall that offered a walking tour of the world’s tourist landmarks, rendered as ice sculptures no taller than a man’s height. Dazzling neon lights in the same spectrum of color as the parkas illuminated the sculptures, the scurrying crowds, and a pair of long chutes, also carved from ice, down which shrieking children slid.
“This is weird,” Vivien had said, hunching her shoulders from the cold as she stood before a miniature version of London’s Tower Bridge. It was in front of this bridge that Vivien and her father posed for the photograph, not far from the frozen pyramids of Egypt and the rimy Sphinx. While Phuong aimed Vivien’s camera, father and daughter wrapped their arms around each other’s waists. Phuong had taken the picture mechanically, not paying much attention to the small digital image after it flashed up on the camera’s screen. But now, holding the photograph as she sat on the stool, she could focus on its details. With their hoods over their heads, only her father’s and sister’s pale, triangular faces were visible, two white petals floating on lily pads of neon green. In the Ice Lantern’s glow, her sister’s face looked more like her father’s than her own, the symmetry rendering clear what Phuong could now say. Their father loved Vivien more than her.
The photograph ignited easily when Phuong lit it with a match. After she dropped the photo into the bucket, she watched it curl up and shrivel, remembering how Vivien had approached her after she took the picture and tried to make amends. “I never thought I’d say this here,” Vivien said, smiling as she clasped Phuong’s hand, “but I’m cold.” Even a month later, Phuong could feel the chilliness, and how she had shivered and turned away toward Egypt’s crystalline sand. She fed the fire with more photos and their heat warmed her, two dozen others disappearing until only one was left, of Vivien and Phuong at the airport on the morning of Vivien’s departure, Vivien with her arm around Phuong’s shoulder and flashing a V sign with her fingers.