The Mountains Sing(67)

I stared at her. She couldn’t be sane.

“You’re right.” She nodded. “I betrayed your father since I wasn’t strong enough to fight them.”

“What do you mean? Who are they?”

Clutching my shirt’s collar, she pulled me to her. “The enemy . . . a group of men . . . they captured me . . . they did horrible things to me. One of them . . . fathered the baby.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t accept what she’d just said.

My mother released me. She covered her face with her hands. “If you must know, the men were Vietnamese. They spoke the Southern dialect.”

I shut my eyes. I wanted everything to turn dark, get smaller, and disappear. Disappear and take me with it.

To this very day, I still wish I could go back to the moment my mother found me with her diary. I should have been able to figure out her reasons for aborting the baby from what I’d read. On the other hand, I was just a fifteen-year-old girl who hadn’t experienced her first kiss, who had had no idea, really, how babies were made.

“H??ng, I’m sorry you had to find out this way,” whispered my mother.

“I’m the one who’s sorry, Mama. I’m terrible . . . for doubting you. . . .” I gripped her hand. “Mama, in your diary, you said that you love me. I love you, too. And I need you.”

“Oh, my darling. You are my everything.”

We hugged each other, our tears flowing onto each other’s face.

“Mama, I need to understand. I want you to get better, so that we can be a family again. How long were you captured? And how did you escape?”

“Those monsters . . . they had me for a couple of days. I thought they’d kill me, but a soldier on their side took pity on me and helped me get away.”

“A soldier on their side?”

“Yes . . . a Southern Vietnamese soldier. During the night, he unbound me and led me into the jungle. He said he’d seen my diary, with your picture among the pages. He had a daughter of the same age.”

“What happened after he let you go?”

“I wandered among the trees, lost. I wanted to take my own life, but your voice and Grandma’s held me back. I don’t remember where I fainted, but when I came to, I was in a cave, surrounded by local people, who’d abandoned their village for the cave because of the bombings. One of them was a traditional healer. She cured my injuries with medicinal plants. During the month that I was there, she taught me many things about jungle medicine. When my physical injuries had been healed, I left the cave to join another medical unit.”

“Your pregnancy . . . when did you find out?”

“When I’d spent a few weeks at a new clinic. . . . At first I didn’t think about it when my bleeding didn’t come. When I noticed the changes in my body . . .”

I twirled the glass in my hand.

“When I was sure I was pregnant, I had to find my way back to the healer. I couldn’t bring the baby here. I couldn’t raise the child of our enemy. I didn’t want you, your father, or Grandma to find out.”

I bent my head, the baby’s blue face filling my vision, his faint cries throbbing in my chest. What would it feel like to hold him?

My mother swallowed hard. “The decision to terminate the pregnancy . . . it was the hardest I’d ever made. When I staggered out of the cave, I wanted to continue my mission, to find your father, H??ng . . . but I no longer had any strength. I realized that I’d been a fool, for thinking that I could brave the war and find him. During my long walk to return to Hà N?i, I wasn’t afraid of the bombs, but I was fearful that he would discover about my body being soiled, and that I’d killed an innocent soul. . . .”

I hugged my mother’s shoulders, unable to find a single word to console her.

“Sometimes I think your father doesn’t come back because he knows,” she sighed.

ARRIVING HOME, WE found a crowd of people in our living room. Grandma was wailing. She’d returned from work to see the front door wide open and chairs strewn across the floor.

Seeing Mama and me, she laughed and cried. She hugged me so tight, I struggled to breathe.

The next evening, I made Grandma and my mother go out with each other. They came back, their faces red, their eyes swollen. Grandma held a large oil lamp, which she’d just bought. She filled the lamp with oil, lit it, and placed it on a chair next to my mother’s bed. That night, and during years later, my mother would sleep with the lamp burning bright next to her.

But now she was no longer alone. She began talking to Uncle ??t, too. I heard their murmurs whenever I walked past their room in the evenings.

I often found myself wondering about the baby. Would I have been able to love him the way a sister was supposed to love her brother, or would I hate him because half of his blood had come from the man who had attempted to kill my mother’s soul?

Nightmares still tortured my mother, but she no longer kept herself isolated from us. After coming home from her factory, she cooked. She asked me about school and Grandma about life in the Old Quarter. She wheeled my uncle out for a walk and helped him exercise. One day, she brought packages of dried plants home. As she brewed a pot of those sliced roots, stems, flowers, and seeds, her tears fell. But she told me she had to conquer her demons: the medicine was for Uncle ??t, who’d told her his disability went beyond what the eyes could see, that he could no longer make a woman happy. My mother hoped the brew would help him; her recipe for treatment was among the many she’d learnt from her healer and recorded in her notebook.