Page 63 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

“I believe you, you know. I’m sorry I didn’t before.”

“I guess I wouldn’t have either, in your place. I still have my moments of relapse. You’ve seen them. I know I’m not a perfect sober citizen. But mostly, I’m okay.”

“Good.Good. I’m proud of you, Button.” She paused. “No, not just proud. I’m in awe of you.”

Calla pulled an envelope from the pocket of the robe and pushed it across the table to Vivi. “This had fallen behind the end table in his bedroom. When I opened the window to air the stink, the wind blew the envelope out. The letter is in Vietnamese. I ran it through a translation app. But you won’t need that.”

The envelope was unstamped and unsealed, thick with irregularly folded pages. The handwriting was the same as it’d ever been, slashing and hurried, slanting so far to the right that the letters seemed to topple along the invisible horizon of the baseline. The recipient’s address was unrecognizable to Vivi, except for the city. LongXuyên. The letter was dated the week before their father’s death.

Interstitial

June 4, 2022

EmKi`êu,

Do you remember chasing the hens in the yard? Even though Má told me not to, I used to think of them as pets. Your favorites were the tawny ones with their scraggly feathers, their impudent manners. I loved the old black hen,M?c. She was regal but mean; a real shit-giver. The day Ba slaughtered her, I cried for hours. You were napping, so you missed it all. The fall of his ax, the dull break of neckbones. He was furious that I was wasting tears onM?c.You are too old for this, he said. He forced me to pluck her myself. Afterward, I washed her bloodied feathers, then took them to our hiding place at the Old House near the ravine.

Sometimes I think this is the first moment when I learned cruelty. Ba would have called it survival. In a country with a past as violent as ours, the difference between the two can feel hair-thin.

These days, I start each morning with a memory. It’s as natural to me as clearing the phlegm before I speak. Is that what happens when we’re closer to the end than the beginning? This should depress me. But it also feels right that we must dwell in the lands we have built.

I received a call yesterday from an unknown number. I almost didn’t pick up. Even these decades later, my hand shakes when the phone rings. Each time, I wonder if it’s her. In my fantasies, we’re young again. She’s asking me what brand of cigarettes I want from the store, pushing Calla in the shopping cart as Vivian and I wait back at the house watching Rocky and Bullwinkle, this stupid American cartoon that Vivian couldn’t get enough of. I see May closing the car door with her hip, tucking that lock of hair back into her bun, driving down the country road back to us. Only to you can I admit this foolishness.

But it wasn’t her on the line. It was a distant cousin of hers, one still living in Cam Ranh. This cousin had recently suffered a deathbed crisis of conscience. She wanted to unburden herself. She said that May had been intending for months to return toVi?tNam. Not forever, but long enough for her to regather herself. That’s how the cousin put it—like May was a blanket that’d unraveled. This happened the year she disappeared. That night, May went to the airport with her passport. She was going to call me when she’d arrived back in Cam Ranh, when it was too late for me to stop her. Maybe she did call and we didn’t answer. Who knows? I never heard from her.

The cousin told me that May had hardly made it a week in Cam Ranh before she changed her mind. She missed her daughters and, in a lesser way, me. She wanted to return to Deer Creek and make things right again. Her family was adamantly against this. They reminded her that I was an old man, a drunken slug of a human who’d shrivel up the last of her youth. They encouraged her to send for her daughters and raise them inVi?tNam, far from the excesses of that godless country. She didn’t listen. She was going home to us. But, on the way to Tân Son Nh?t, there was an accident with a motorist. Her car flipped over into a dyke. May died immediately.

The family, collectively, made the decision not to tell me and my daughters what had happened. It’d be a mercy, they said, to be spared the horrors of her death. Plus, they didn’t know how to reach me. (They could have, of course, figured it out, as the cousin later did, but they wanted to wash their hands of me and mourn their beloved May without the taint of her disastrous marriage.) Almost a quarter of a century, they kept the silence. Decades, her people let us believe that May was still alive and evading us. Cruelty, again; cruelty, always.

Em, you can imagine that my first impulse would have been to grasp for my faithful companion, anger. But I didn’t rage. I thanked the cousin and set down the phone. There simply isn’t time to waste onblame. Instead, I’ll find a way to see both of my daughters and to tell them everything I know. Not just about their mother. About all the things I’ve fought to hide from them, including our grandmotherTâmand our troubled roots. My girls deserve this, and more.

Our family seems thrown upon a galaxy of secrets. We exist light-years from one another. But there must be a time when space contracts, when the universe becomes as small as a pinprick, and we are all together again. That’s what I dream that heaven is like.

Until we next meet—

AnhTu?n

Chapter 20

The rental car zoomed down the long drive, a shiny sedan that looked out of place among the dust of the farmhouse. From the porch, Vivi squinted, imagining her father’s maroon truck instead. The truck was gone now, totaled and likely disassembled in a junkyard somewhere off the highway. That clunker had spent decades huffing along, like an ancient horse coerced into labor, exhaust coughing from the back pipes, smelling like cigarettes and vanilla car deodorizer, glove compartment stuffed withTu?n’s speeding tickets. She felt a complicated rush of affection for the old truck. It’d gotten them where they needed to go for so many years but couldn’t manage to deliver their father safely in the end.

Calla tapped the side of the car door through the open window, then leapt out with bags of Chinese takeout. For a moment, Vivi saw her mother coming home from an errand. With each year, Calla looked more and more like May. Or maybe May’s memory had begun to elide with Calla’s aliveness.

“You’ll never guess who I ran into,” Calla called. “Scotty Patel. Remember that kid?”

Vivi had wiped a porch table and set it with plates and napkins. They dumped out piles of lo mein, fried chicken in a sticky sauce, green beans with puckered skins. Vivi felt as if she hadn’t eaten real food in days. They tucked in without ceremony, eating in that graceless way they used to, bent like long-necked giraffes toward their plates. Calla, who’d neverlearned to use chopsticks well, jabbed at the chicken with a flimsy plastic fork.

“He asked about you, Scotty. The flame still lives on.”

“We went to one dance in the seventh grade. He tried to kiss me but only managed to spit his gum into my mouth.”

“That’s all it took apparently. Scotty’s married to Maddie, that girl with the teeth and those tattoo chokers, remember her? They have, like, eighteen children. He’s in local politics now, elected as some bullshit commissioner or other. He was telling me that the town’s going through some sort of revival. They’re trying to position it as the next Asheville, an artistic getaway.”

“Deer Creek.” Vivi didn’t bother to stifle her incredulity.

“Scotty says we could make a fair profit on this house. When we sell it.”

“Times are a’changing.”