Page 49 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

Tâm means “heart,” doesn’t it?

Gruesome drowning situation.

I’ll tell you the story sometime.

The truth arrived as a locomotive tearing through the density of brain matter, swift and determined. Still dripping with water from the shower, Vivi ran to the desk in the suite, fumbling with the drawers. On a piece of rose-scented stationery, she sketched a family tree.

Before he was their father, he wasTu?n, son of Huy and brother ofKi`êu.She calculated backward.Tu?nwas born in 1940;Ki`êu,some years after, though she couldn’t be certain how many. If their grandfather Huy was in his twenties in the 1940s, then he could have been born whenTâmwas a teenager. The timeline could have worked. Itdidwork.

And if their grandfather was the same Huy from the journals, he had to be the baby of the sunlight, of the drowned mother who didn’t drown, the orphan who was not really an orphan.Ng?cwas Huy’s aunt and adopted mother. And so: the beautiful and doomedTâmNguy?nwho never appeared on the shrine, who became a ghostly cautionary tale, was their great-grandmother. That was whyTu?nhad the letter and the sketch ofBlue Mirror.They weren’t mere discoveries. They were inheritances.

How long had her father known all this? Had he been unsnarling thismystery since childhood? Or did he discover both afterward, on one of his trips back toVi?tNam?

Vivi now recalled the singularity of their grandfather’s photograph on the family shrine. In Huy’s blurry, black-and-white portrait, she’d marked a handsome man with dark hair and light skin. Eyes that were lighter still. They could have been blue.

Even in her father, Vivi could occasionally detect an ethnic ambiguity that troubled her. Once winter arrived, his melanin would fade and he would become as pale as the other men about town. If he turned at the right angle toward the window, the gloam might transform his features into a marbled hardness that she might not, for a second, recognize. As a child, she shrugged off any cognitive dissonance she didn’t want to understand. They were all shades of the people who came before. Heritage, an endless mystery.

What did it mean to rediscover oneself in a river of names that, after all this time, finally gained shape? Vivi had read about the thrill that other seekers got when they stumbled on an astonishing entry on a genealogy site; how some might uproot photographs in an attic that told a story they couldn’t resist prying open.

Those clues were always just the beginning. Few could muster the will to drop a mystery once they’d discovered it. Vivi, least of all. She ran to find her sister.

For a moment, Jean resembledTâm’s description of her Chaton—auburn hair, intelligent green eyes. Vivi could ignore the standard-issue polo Jean wore and the Barbie-pink polish on her nails. The concierge desk disappeared. So too the desktop, the business cards, the murmuring trickle of guests across the lobby. Vivi saw only Justine Allard, tilting her head towardTâm, merriment and challenge piercing her gaze.

“There you are,” Jean said. Her voice broke the illusion. “The art scholar?”

“That’s me. Have you seen my sister?”

“She went tearing through the dining room early this morning.” Jean made a moue of disapproval. “There was a sightseeing tour. She hopped on it, I think.”

Vivi tapped her foot in frustration. Who knew when Calla would return?

Jean continued. “I was hoping to see you though. You asked about the archives for the summer of 1936.”

“You’ve found something?”

“There isn’t much. The original Allards sold the property not long after they bought it, so the folder on them is quite thin. But here’s the whole of it. Please return it after you are done.”

She slid a manila folder across the counter.

“I can’t thank you enough.”

“I looked upLý, after you mentioned him. His work is compelling. I likeTerrible Feastthe best.”

“Most do.”

It was a clever subversion of the Dutch still-life tradition, in which buck and fowl carcasses draped over butcher blocks as bloodied trophies from woodland hunts. InTerrible Feast, the animals were not so inert. They cocked their heads from a table set in front of a river, as if waking from a performance in which they had to play dead. The hunters were nowhere to be seen, but their arrows and cloaks were scattered among the landscape. Most saw the painting as a referendum on power and the ways we remain complicit in tropes of violence. Now the painting reminded Vivi of Marcel Allard and his love of hunting.

“My brother was an artist,” Jean said. “He painted landscapes too, but they weren’t anything like yourLý’s. I have always wanted to paint. But he was the talent, so I never thought I could compete.”

“Was it a competition?”

She laughed, rueful. “Isn’t it always, between siblings?”

“What does he do now?”

“He works in cryptocurrency. I don’t understand a word of it. He has not picked up a brush in years. All that wasted promise. He doesn’t even like his job.”

“What would you paint?”