Thirst dragged An Nhien
up out of the dark.
She opened her eyes to a
white ceiling, white lights, and the steady electronic pulse of machines beside
her ear. Her throat burned as if she’d swallowed a live coal, and her arms lay
so heavy it took several tries just to lift them.
“Water…”
The word scraped out of her
mouth, and she flinched. That wasn’t her voice. That cracked, gravelly sound,
like a radio with a busted speaker, belonged to some other woman speaking
through her.
The nurse on duty spun
around from her charts, face lighting up.
“Oh, thank God, she’s
awake! Doctor! Bed five is awake!”
She hurried to pour a cup
of water and cradled An Nhien’s head up for a few small sips. The water slid
down her raw throat, soothing and stinging at once.
People crowded around the
bed: penlights in her eyes, a blood-pressure cuff, questions. What’s your name?
Do you know where you are? An Nhien answered every one of them, though each
sentence burned all the way down her throat.
“Why does my voice sound
like this?”
The middle-aged doctor
pulled up a chair beside the bed.
“You’ve been unconscious
for many days. The gas you inhaled damaged your vocal cords. Your voice may
improve with time, but it’s unlikely to come all the way back.”
“Many days? How many?”
“Let’s take this slowly.
Tell me what you remember.”
An Nhien closed her eyes.
Memory returned in patches, like someone flipping through a notebook with pages
torn out. The steel door slamming shut. White mist crawling along the floor.
The small metal box with a single vial of serum inside. The needle punching
through the fabric of his trousers. Khai Minh crying out once.
And after that, a blank.
Flat, white, nothing left to turn.
“I remember up to the
moment I injected him. After that, nothing.”
“That gap is a side effect
of the toxin. Some patients recover the memory later. Some never do.”
“And him? The man who was
down there with me… how is he?”
“He woke a few days before
you. And there’s something you should know. His blood produced an antibody
against the toxin. We drew his plasma and made it into emergency doses for the
most critical patients. You’re lying here breathing right now partly because of
his blood.”
An Nhien lay very still.
She had put the only dose into him so that he would live. And that same blood
had circled back and hauled her out of death’s grip.
Then the most important
thing of all surfaced.
“Where’s my father? He
works security here. Does he know I’m in this room?”
The nurse changing the IV
bag went still, mid-motion. The doctor looked down at the chart and didn’t
answer right away. The silence lasted only a few seconds. It was long enough
for the dread to arrive ahead of any answer.
“Why isn’t anyone saying
anything?”
Still no answer. The
nurse’s eyes slid away, down toward the foot of the bed.
An Nhien followed them.
There, folded into a neat
square beside her feet, lay a security guard’s uniform jacket. The shoulders
had faded. The buttons were worn smooth. And on the breast, a name tag stitched
with three words she had known since she was small: Tran Huu Loc.
Her father never let that
jacket leave the security office. As long as I can still put it on, he used to
say, I can still feed you two.
An Nhien’s trembling hand
reached out and pulled the jacket into her lap. She worked her fingers down the
row of buttons, one by one, the way she used to fasten them for him before
every shift when she was a little girl. Tears fell onto the faded fabric and
spread in dark blots.
“What happened to my
father?”
A knock at the door. A young
security guard stepped in, uniform cap still in his hand. He was the one her
father had recommended for hire years ago, the one who used to drop by the
guard post to share a cup of tea with him. When he saw the jacket in An Nhien’s
lap, his eyes went red.
“The nurse called me the
moment you woke, so I swapped shifts and ran straight up. The jacket… I brought
it over for you the other day. It’s Uncle Loc’s.”
“Tell me. Where is my
father?”
“That night, he was the one
who found you both down in the basement. The door was locked tight, so he took
an iron bar and tore the whole thing off its hinges. He pulled you out first.
He was turning back for Mr. Lam when he went down. He breathed in more of
that gas than anyone, because he kept bending low, right over you, and he
wouldn’t fall back.”
The young man stopped and
swallowed hard.
“When they carried him out…
his hand was still curled, like he was reaching for your wrist.”
An Nhien folded over the
jacket, hugging it to her chest. She couldn’t even scream; her ruined throat
allowed her only broken scraps of sound that hurt worse than any sobbing.
Her father had spent his
whole life bowing his head to other people, so that his children could keep
theirs up. And even in dying, he had died bent over his child.
A long time later, she
lifted her head and wiped her face with the back of the hand still taped to an
IV line.
“Does Dong know?”
“No one’s had the heart to
tell him. He keeps asking why his father and sister haven’t come to see him.”
“Take me to my brother.”
The doctor tried to stop
her and lost. In the end, a nurse wheeled her across to the ward on the other
side.
Dong was sitting up in bed,
legs swinging without a moment’s rest, turning an empty milk carton over and
over in his hands. When he saw his sister, the boy broke into a grin. Then the
grin faded as he took in the wheelchair, and the bloodless white of her face.
“Are you sick? Why are you
in a wheelchair?”
“Just a little tired,
that’s all. Have you been good?”
“I’ve been good. But
where’s Dad? He promised to take me down to watch the soccer matches this
weekend. He hasn’t come in days.”
An Nhien took her brother’s
thin hand in hers. She had meant to lie. Dad’s on shift, Dad’s away for work.
But this fourteen-year-old boy had spent his whole life inside well-meant lies,
and she could not let him hear this one from strangers gossiping in a hallway.
“Dong. I need to tell you
something. Hold my hand tight, okay?”
“You’re scaring me.”
“Dad… Dad’s gone. He saved
me. He breathed in poison gas doing it. He’s gone, Dong.”
The boy stared at her, lips
working. Then the scream tore out of him. He hurled the milk carton against the
wall, hammered both fists on the bed rail, ripped at his IV line, his shriek
splitting the whole corridor open. Two nurses rushed in to pin his arms. An
Nhien threw herself out of the wheelchair and wrapped him up, held on while he
thrashed, while his flailing arm caught her across the face.
“Dad… I want Dad… give him
back…”
“I’m here. I’m still here.”
She pressed her cheek into
his tangled hair and spoke in that stranger’s voice that was no longer her own.
“I swear to you. As long as
I’m alive, you will never be alone. I swear it.”
The boy fought a while
longer, then went slack in her arms, the screaming crumbling into hiccuping sobs.
The two of them clung to each other in the middle of the hospital room, one
crying himself empty, the other with no tears left to cry.
By late afternoon, Dong had
drifted off under sedation. An Nhien sat with him a while longer, smoothing the
corner of his blanket straight, her father’s jacket across her knees. A family
of three, a father and his two children, and now only the two of them were
left. And the one still sleeping wasn’t old enough yet to understand everything
he had just lost.
She was sitting out in the
corridor when she overheard two visitors talking by the water cooler.
“Chilling, isn’t it? The
young master of this whole hospital, killing his own aunt?”
“That’s what they’re
saying. Body stuffed in a cold-storage unit, dead for days before anyone found
her. They’ve got him in custody now. Blind as he is, and that vicious.”
An Nhien turned to the
young guard standing beside her.
“Who are they talking
about?”
“Mr. Lam. Khai Minh.
They found Director Mai Ngoc’s body in a cold-storage unit on the Lam family’s
land. The police took him into custody right off his hospital bed. He’s at the
investigation unit now. The whole hospital’s been buzzing about it for days.”
An Nhien’s hands clamped
down on the armrests of the wheelchair.
Her memory of the basement
had a hole torn out of its end. But everything before that, she remembered down
to the last breath. That night, Khai Minh had been at her side from the moment
they stepped through that steel door to the moment she drove the needle into
his thigh. A man fighting for every minute of his own life in a room full of
poison gas does not kill anyone.
She flagged down a nurse
passing in the corridor.
“Could I get some cotton
and a bandage, please?”
“Whatever you need, just
tell me. I’ll do it for you.”
An Nhien didn’t wait. She
peeled back the tape on her hand and pulled the IV needle straight out. Blood
welled up; she pressed the cotton down over it, clenched her teeth, and pushed
herself up out of the wheelchair. The nurse lunged to catch her.
“What are you doing? You
haven’t been discharged! The doctor hasn’t cleared you!”
“Then tell the doctor for
me.”
An Nhien braced a hand
against the wall and walked, one step at a time, toward the elevator, her
father’s jacket still clutched against her chest.
“I’m going to the
investigation unit. They have the wrong man.”
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