Page 87 of Upstate

“I wish I could read the letters Billy sent from Vietnam,” Sam says. “You didn’t find that shoebox, did you?”

I shake my head. “Except for all the books, the house was pretty much empty when I bought it. Hazel’s letters only got left behind because they were hidden.”

“Lucky for me.” Sam picks up the next letter, eager for his story to continue. He gets to the bottom of the first page and looks up, smiling. “Mai’s pregnant with my mom here, isn’t she?”

I nod. His joy is sweet to see, but I know what’s coming when Billy brings Mai home. Instead of smiles, there’s grief in Sam’s eyes, and anger, too, when he finishes the letter.

“Holy shit, Audrey, this is so fucked up. I had no idea.”

“Your grandmother never talked about any of this?”

“Not once. The way she tells it, it’s like my grandfather didn’t exist before they met in Vietnam. When I went to Cornell, I found his picture in the 1966 yearbook, but that’s as far back into his history as I ever got. My mom said when she was growing up, there was this weird silence around her father’s childhood that gave her the feeling there was something shameful there. She’d be proud of him for siding with Mai against his family if she knew. I totally get why he’d pretend to be an orphan after his father pointed a gun at his pregnant wife, for fuck’s sake. It was hard enough for Bà to be an Asian immigrant in Albany. To get that kind of hate from her husband’s parents is despicable.”

“I wasn’t sure, from Hazel’s letter, how much Mai understood about what was happening that day.”

“Believe me, she didn’t need to know what they were saying to understand. She’s been here twice as long as she ever lived in Vietnam, but people still look at her and see a foreigner instead of a citizen. I’m mostly Dutch and Scottish, so people aren’t wrong, exactly, when they assume I’m white. Since Covid, though, whenever some farmer spouts off about the ‘China virus,’ I speak up and say, hey, I’m Asian, too.”

I remember the casual way Sam mentioned, the day we were setting up the electric fence, that his grandmother was Vietnamese. I hadn’t thought about the emotional toll it might take to reveal the part of himself that isn’t obvious on the surface.

“It’s not an excuse,” I say, “but Hazel’s father was traumatized, too.”

I watch Sam’s face fluctuate from scowl to sympathy as he reads about Hazel finding her father in the woods, and finding the bullet in his gun, too. Suddenly, a thought occurs to me. I scroll back through the flash pictures I took while the shelf was stuck. There, in the background, is a brassy glint. I kneel on the floor and reach into a cobwebby corner. My fingers pinch something slender and smooth. I hold up my discovery for Sam to examine.

“You don’t think this could be that same bullet, do you?”

“You’re freaking me out, Audrey.” Sam takes it from me. “It’s the right gauge, anyway, and Evelyn did put it in her pocket.”

“Is it still deadly?”

“In the right gun, it would be.” Sam helps me up off the floor. “I can’t believe how close my bà came to getting shot, and my mom, too.”

“You wouldn’t exist,” I say, struck by how the thought saddens me.

“It blows my mind how many things have to happen for any two people to meet, let alone create a new human together. Anyway, what happens next? I’m guessing this business with inheriting the house isn’t going to turn out well.”

“No, it’s not.”

I watch Sam’s eyes swing back and forth as his family falls apart in the space of a couple thousand words.

“What a waste,” he says, shaking his head. “Hazel had all those years to make things right with her brother, but she never did.”

When I read these letters, Hazel was the protagonist I identified with, not Billy. I feel the need to defend her. “Don’t forget, she was hemmed in by her secrets, too.”

“I guess so,” Sam says begrudgingly. “My grandfather made a good life for himself in Albany. He certainly didn’t need a house in Schuywich. I don’t know if it was loyalty to his wife or just stubborn pride that kept him from reconciling with his sister.”

“And now it’s too late,” I say.

“Hazel’s dead too, huh?” he asks.

“She must be, for the trust to have sold Red Barn Books.”

“Oh, hey, I just realized something. Here, where Hazel writes about her brother not coming to their father’s funeral?” He searches for the line. “I think this is when my grandfather was in the Philippines trying to get his in-laws out of a refugee camp. He couldn’t have gone to his father’s funeral even if he wanted to.”

“It’s so sad how they kept assuming the worst of each other.”

Sam’s face clouds over. “That’s what happens when there’s no trust.”

I figure he’s thinking about his girlfriend cheating on him while he was in the wilderness tracking down a pair of murderers. To change the subject, I ask, “Did Billy get Mai’s family out?”