Page 73 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

“We’re all adults here. And what family isn’t stained by a dalliance or two? I pity the family without a good, meaty secret nested somewhere in their bones. That’s where the humanity lives.”

Vivi didn’t know if she agreed. A secret had led them there, to this overfull kitchen, among voices that engraved into her mind with every passing moment. And yet, long ago, a secret had also broken the foundation of a family, torn a mother from her son, two beloved sisters from each other.

Secrets were a necessary rot, wells of the soul where spores flourished and spread, fed by darkness and fear and, sometimes, love. The draining of them, these deep and scattered wells, was grueling labor, the sort that depleted one’s emotional stores. Even after all this time, Vivi wondered if she and her sister could withstand the excavation of such secrets or if they would drown in them, unable to kick their way back to the light.

Chapter 24

After the cooking was done—piles of vermicelli cakes and golden circles of patê sô and salads with curls of shrimp on top—theNguy?nwomen crammed themselves into the main sitting room, loath to depart to their own homes. Vivi had the stray thought that, had things been different, their mother would have been wedged within this matriarchal clutch, too, animated by the comfort of familiar bodies quilted together without a trace of self-consciousness. Their father, drinking endless cups of tea on the back deck with his brother, shaking his legs to ward off mosquitoes.

Of course, this was another fantasy, a child’s fantasy. Their parents were dead. They were orphans. Vivi had never understood until recently how the thought of her mother—vanished, but never completely gone—had girded an underlying hope she’d nurtured since she was seven years old. She’d imagined, sometime in her life, at a moment when she least expected to, she might turn on a street corner and come upon May, decades older but still herself, still a mother to two heartsore sisters. But that’s the funny thing about hope. It’s a weed, easily pulled yet also built for proliferation. Where one dies, another crops up in an adjacent plot, proud and stubborn as ever.

Above them, fan blades shook the rafters in energetic loops. The women wilted on settees and lay on the floor, toes waggling toward the ceiling. Limbs on limbs, hands crossing unceremoniously to retrieve a magazine, a comb. Some of the cousins were paintingKhánh’s nails ina blush-pink shade. Aunts were arguing over the order of the next day’s bridal processional, slyly claiming dynastic hierarchy through the assignment of roles.

The steadfastness of family had always seemed a myth to Vivi. But now, she was seized with the realization of all she’d missed out on. What they’d all missed out on. Was it luck that made a family, or an instinct, a skill she could never hone? How did everyone else do it? For the first time, she wanted to put her mind to this question. That mind couldn’t help tugging toward Samuel and Phoebe.

Across the length of a sofa,BàAnh snored with her feet on a cushion, while Linh, sitting near her on the tile, asked Vivi and Calla eager questions about Wisconsin.

“I wish I could have seen it. Your home,” Linh said. “AnhTu?nspoke of it like a kind of promised land.”

The phrase gave Vivi pause. Whose promise? And when, for her father, had that promise been shattered? When his hand slid into the blades of a saw, one terrible, sunlit afternoon? When May pocketed her passport and walked out without a backward glance?

“Tell us about Wisconsin,”Khánhurged, glancing up from her polished nails.

Every opportunity to revisit Deer Creek, even if only in the imagination, gave the sisters a chance to retrieve the moments of the past and examine them. What did they want to share with this family, their family, who seemed to have only known the best version of their father?

In the end, through a silent negotiation of crooked eyebrows and meaningful gazes, the sisters chose to tell a fabular version of their childhoods. They described how the fog would edge onto the surface of the creek in early spring. The fiery tornado of maple leaves falling onto their anoraks as they walked home from school. Wolves howling in the night, great horned owls posted on fences, tufts lifted in fretful inquiry. Their LongXuyênrelatives were rapt.

Once the sisters began, they couldn’t stop. Vivi recalled the timeTu?npulled them from their beds to go fishing for brook trout; Calla describedhow May took them to the county fair, winning a giant stuffed badger for them with her unexpected ring toss skills. Together, they told a tale of Americana, of woodland enchantment and unremitting sisterhood. Vivi was surprised to find that this tale, hovering somewhere above the other, untold moments, was as true a recollection as the stories they didn’t want to tell. Narrative, after all that, was only a filter through which meaning—varied, contradictory, subversive—could sift. Easily picked up, easily discarded.

Calla had found a piece of paper and a pen and begun sketching the groups of women. The household pup, a mutt with a drool-slicked chin, came out from under the stairs and nestled up to her leg. Absentmindedly, she scratched behind its ears.

Looking over Calla’s shoulder, Vivi glimpsed gestural curves that suggested the sloping rhythms of domestic intimacy. It was the first original work she’d seen from Calla in a long time. AfterEnmeshment, Calla would not talk about her art. Even her closest friends complained that she’d become too private about her paintings. No one knew what inspired her anymore. Maybe she didn’t know herself. Vivi hadn’t been certain that Calla would ever work again.

“It’s good, Button.”

“I know.” Calla didn’t glance up from her page, but a tiny smile played at the edge of her mouth. Nothing was so hard-won, nor so sincere, as a sibling’s straightforward praise.

Linh disappeared into the hall and returned with a medium-sized canvas. “Your descriptions make his paintings come alive. I think you’d like this one.”

The painting depicted the farmhouse in Deer Creek, captured at sunset, when the shadows were most dramatic.Tu?nhad used a pronounced tenebrism technique to enhance the contrast between light and dark, casting a dappled spotlight onto the farmhouse roof. His primary tones were ochre and verdaccio green, which made it seem as if the painting had been dipped in the creek, coated with doleful nostalgia.

But, despite the faintly anachronistic technique, his was a faithfulportrait. The sisters spied the same saggy porch with the broken board, the shutters on the windows edged with hangnails of paint. In the drive, the maroon truck had been parked at an angle, its windows rolled halfway down. Far in the background, almost too far to catch, two small figures were leaping over a fence. It was unclear whether they were headed into the dark clutch of woods behind the farmhouse or back home.

“That’s us,” Vivi said. She turned to Calla, whose eyes had begun to fill. “Isn’t it?”

“Of course it’s us.”

The knowledge sunk like a bar of soap in the bath, edges softening. Their father, an artist. Failed or paused, on a long sabbatical. It was strange yet inevitable to discover this here, as if the most sacred part of him had been enshrined in his hometown. We are different people in different places. Context, the hand that shapes identity and, sometimes, remembrance.

Linh said, “He painted it during his final visit. This was before May left. Before his accident. He wanted us to have a piece of you girls.”

But why, Vivi wondered, hadn’t he brought them back toVi?tNam? Or told them about this other family waiting for them? They’d thought themselves alone in the world, three marbles jumbling around a dismal little house.

“We’ve never seen his paintings,” Calla said. Her fingertip hovered over the fence line. “He’s sort of got this epic Dutch Golden Age thing going on, right?”

“Rembrandt,” Vivi agreed, taking the canvas in her hands.

“I was thinking of the Flemish landscapists.”