Page 71 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

Vivi’s excitement grew. If they did find the offering, it would change the entire course of art scholarship and her own professional prospects. There would be new articles, a resurgence of interest in the Vietnamese French painter. The art community would finally celebrateTâm’s courage and mourn her love story.

AndTâmwould be free, no longer living in the shadow of an assumed identity. But didTâmwant that version of freedom?

Vivi drowned a flash of misgiving, not as an art scholar, but as an ancestor. What ifTâmherself would have chosen to remain hidden, so that her art could exist without the influence of her biography? But contexts had changed since she’d died; minds were opened, laws changed. Surely, her secret couldn’t—shouldn’t—hold, so many generations later.

What did we owe to the men and women who came before us? The protection of silence or the cold and uncertain arena of public judgment? How could any person make that decision for another? When so many hands could lay claim to a story, who did that story ultimately belong to?

Calla gestured out the window. The peanut shells in her lap scattered onto the floor of the car. “Oh, Bee, look.”

They’d left the bedlam of the city behind, and, like the abrupt and cleansing silence in the aftermath of a storm, all became quiet in the car. Without the traffic, they were flying at high speed, airborne almost. The road took them west into the Mekong Delta, past canals and winding riverways studded with floating villages, past flat green fields and corridors of banana trees. The beauty—uncompromising and stalwart, even after centuries of turmoil—swarmed against them in a rush.

“I can’t believe—” Vivi stopped, not knowing how to finish the sentence.

I can’t believe we are finally here together.

I can’t believe I waited so long to come.

“I know,” Calla said, throwing an arm around Vivi’s shoulders, hauling her close. “I know!”

Chapter 23

Their uncle’s home lay on the outskirts of the city, nudged onto a heart-shaped patch of land accessible only by a zigzagging road that branched from the main thoroughfare. The structure was a tall, two-story Modernist fortress with a gray, curving exterior pocked with honeycomb openings for ventilation. Palm trees in various states of fruiting encircled the home.

After Ted dropped them off at the house in LongXuyên, they stood among cars and motorbikes parked in dubious formation, like a pile of Matchbox vehicles dumped onto a rug. They watched people stream in and out of the open doors. Kids with fisted sticks of sesame candy; young women in hair curlers calling requests from the balcony; men dragging crates of vegetables to the back of the house as a terrier yipped and weaved under their feet. There was a roiling urgency in the way they moved, as if trying to catch up to some future excitement just down the road.

Vivi whispered, “Are we sure this is the right address?”

Calla squinted at a scrap of paper. “This is it. Let’s talk to someone.”

An ancient woman was running a straw broom across the threshold with ferocious determination, kicking up clouds of dust that displaced into heaps in the yard. She paused every so often to shoot a quelling glare toward the younger kids edging their way toward the mud puddles. Cowed, they slunk away, back toward the shade of the house and the boredom that awaited them there.

When the sisters approached, the woman stopped sweeping. She was barefoot. In her ears were gleaming, hazelnut-sized diamonds. No longer stooped, a bright intelligence irradiating her gaze, she seemed younger than she had first appeared. Later, they’d learn that she was an especially spry ninety-year-old who’d preserved her vigor through that most honorable of elder duties—haranguing the wayward youths huddled under her matriarchal umbrella.

“You’re the photographers?” she demanded.

“No, we’re artists,” Calla said.

“Oh, really! That’s so much better. I always said there was something more permanent about a painting than a photograph. The couple will need a portrait to remember this day. Will you paint mine too? Money is no object, especially when it’s my son-in-law’s money.”

“Sure, of course,” Calla said.

Vivi broke in, jamming herself in front of Calla. “Sorry, no, we’re not here for a painting or a wedding—is it a wedding?”

“Is it a wedding!” The woman placed her broom against the doorjamb. “It’sthewedding. Tomorrow, my granddaughter is marrying her fiancé, at long last. We call him Canadian Evan. He’s even taller than you.”

“Congratulations,” the sisters murmured in unison.

“Yes, congratulations indeed,” the woman said wryly. “Khánhis nearly thirty. By the time I was her age, I’d had six children and the signs of chronic hernia. But of course, nowKhánhwill leave us for icy Toronto. We do not fare well outside of our homeland, you know. An orchid doesn’t bloom in the cold, does it? She’ll be back soon enough.”

The woman’s familiar manners unseated them, but they were drawn to her ease, the way she seemed to sweep them into her fold, another in the herd of bodies swarming the house.

“So who are you, if not the photographers or the painters?”

Calla opened her mouth, but, nervous that she’d find a way into another tangent, Vivi cut her off. “I’m ViviNguy?nand this is my sister Calla Howard.”

“CallaNguy?n,” Calla corrected. “We’reTu?nNguy?n’s children, visiting from overseas.”

Pleasure blossomed across the woman’s features. “You’re littleTu?n’s American children!”