Chapter 41: The Sister Who Walked Beside Him
It took Dinh Bac nearly a
year to make peace with light.
In the beginning, he couldn’t
go outside while the sun was up. Even the glare bouncing off a glass storefront
was enough to send pain knifing through his eyes. He wore dark glasses, used
eye drops, took nerve stabilizers on a strict clock.
Getting his sight back did not
make anything instantly easier.
For years, Dinh Bac had
measured distance with his ears and read approaching people by the sound of
their footsteps.
Now images arrived alongside
sounds, and the two streams of information rarely agreed.
A car far down the road looked
like it was hurtling straight at him.
A shallow front step yawned
like a pit.
The face across from him would
sometimes warp if he held his gaze on it too long.
Once, Dinh Bac stepped out of
the rehabilitation center and saw a figure in red on the far side of the
street. His entire body seized.
The old explosion roared back
through his skull.
He backed off the curb into the
road without registering the car bearing down on him.
Hoa wrenched him back onto the
sidewalk.
A horn ripped the street in
half.
“Are you trying to die?”
She shouted it.
Dinh Bac looked across the
street.
The figure in red was just a
woman under an umbrella, already disappearing into the crowd.
“I saw it wrong.”
“I know.”
“You can let go of my arm now.”
“When you’re steady on your
feet, I’ll let go.”
Dinh Bac moved to shake her
off, but pain spiked without warning behind his eyes. The street shattered into
overlapping sheets of light. He had to grip her shoulder to stay upright.
Hoa’s voice dropped at once,
all the heat gone out of it.
“Close your eyes.”
“I’m fine.”
“Close them.”
Dinh Bac obeyed.
“Now listen to me.”
She said.
“Just listen. The road is
behind you. The sidewalk is under your feet. And there is no one in red
anywhere on this street.”
His breathing slowly leveled
out.
When he opened his eyes, the
woman across the road was gone.
Only Hoa stood in front of him.
“Thank you.”
It was one of the rare times
those words left him unprompted.
Hoa released his arm.
“Starting tomorrow, I’m coming
with you on the outdoor sessions.”
“No need.”
“You nearly backed into a
moving car just now. Or did you miss that?”
“It won’t happen again.”
From the next day on, Hoa went
with him all the same.
At first, she kept strictly to
her role as liaison. She delivered his treatment schedules, arranged
interpreters, checked the paperwork for his studies, and made sure the
organization ran no test without his consent.
But little by little, the line
between her job and something more began to blur.
When pain woke Dinh Bac in the
middle of the night, she was the first person he called.
When he couldn’t read his
documents, she sat for hours reading every page aloud.
Once, finding him awake at dawn
after a sleepless night, she brought him coffee, then remembered the doctors
had banned stimulants and snatched it straight back out of his hand.
“Are you the organization’s
agent or my housekeeper?”
Dinh Bac asked.
“Neither.”
“Then why do you hover so
much?”
“Because you can’t be trusted
to keep yourself alive.”
Hoa set a glass of water in
front of him.
“Take your medicine.”
“I just did.”
“That was the eye medication.
This is for your nerves.”
Dinh Bac considered the scatter
of colored pills on the table.
“I’m starting to understand why
old people hate taking their medicine.”
“You’re not old yet.”
“No. But I’ve lived long
enough to find it exhausting.”
Hoa didn’t answer. She simply
stood there until every pill was gone.
Some time later, the
organization ordered his blood draws increased; Dinh Bac’s antibody counts were
fluctuating.
He agreed.
But by the fourth draw that
month, his body began to give out. That morning, Dinh Bac collapsed in the
middle of the training room.
When he came to, he could hear
Hoa arguing with the research director outside the door.
“You took more than the
protocol allows.”
“His numbers are at a critical
stage.”
“He’s anemic and running a
fever.”
“We’ll transfuse to
compensate.”
“He is a human being, not a
blood bag you can drain dry and top back up.”
“You’re letting emotion
interfere with the work, Miss Hoa.”
Hoa was silent for exactly one
second.
“If the work requires me to
stand by and watch you destroy the one person keeping this research alive, then
I’m not the one who’s lost perspective.”
The door opened.
She walked in, the tension not
yet gone from her face.
Dinh Bac lay on the bed,
watching her through a fogged field of vision.
“Were you just fighting because
of me?”
“No. Because protocol was
violated.”
“So not because of me?”
“No.”
“You’ve gotten worse at lying,
you know.”
Hoa pulled the blanket up over
him.
“If you have breath to spare
for this much talk, you can train again tomorrow.”
Dinh Bac let her have the lie.
The fever lasted two days.
On the second night he sank
into delirium, muttering broken fragments. Hoa sat by the bed, changing the
cold compress, checking his temperature.
Near dawn, Dinh Bac’s hand
suddenly closed around her wrist.
“An Nhien…”
Hoa went rigid.
His eyes stayed shut, his brow
knotted hard, like a man trapped inside a nightmare.
“Don’t inject me.”
His voice was a dry rasp.
Hoa couldn’t tell whether he
was back in Lab Seven, or building himself a different ending to that night.
“An Nhien…”
He called the name again.
“Don’t die.”
Hoa sat without moving.
His hand still circled her
wrist, not tight, but refusing to let go. She could have slipped free. Instead
she drew her chair closer.
“I’m here.”
She said it knowing the name he
was calling was not hers.
“No one is leaving you behind.”
Dinh Bac slowly went quiet.
Hoa sat by the bed until
morning.
By the time he woke, she had
changed clothes and stood by the window reading a report, as if the night had
never happened.
“Did I say anything in my
sleep?”
Dinh Bac asked.
“You had a fever. You rambled a
little. Nothing that made sense.”
“Did I call anyone’s name?”
Her fingers tightened, very
slightly, on the file in her hands.
“No.”
Dinh Bac watched her for a few
seconds. His eyes weren’t yet sharp enough to catch a change that small.
He didn’t ask again.
Through the months that
followed, Hoa stayed at his side.
Dinh Bac came, gradually, to
think of her as the only family he had left. He no longer went on alert at the
sound of her footsteps in the corridor, no longer flinched when she drew near.
There were evenings he even fell asleep while she sat beside him, reading
through her files.
And somewhere along the way,
without ever deciding to, Hoa had started putting his safety above her work.
She knew his medication
schedule better than her own meetings.
She knew he couldn’t tolerate
harsh white light, and that whenever he was under strain, his left eye blurred
before the right.
One evening, Dinh Bac stood at
the window. Beyond the glass lay a foreign city—no river like the one in Dong
Cang, no Vinh An Hospital, and not a single soul who knew he had ever been Lam
Khai Minh.
“Miss Hoa.”
“Mm.”
“When my eyes are stable, what
do you think I should do?”
“Study.”
“I’ve been out of school too
long.”
“All the more reason.”
“And after that?”
“Keep living.”
Dinh Bac watched the lights in
the distance.
“I didn’t come all this way
just to live.”
Hoa already knew what the next
sentence would be.
It still landed on her chest
like a weight.
“I have to find An Nhien and
Dong.”
He said.
“Wherever they are.”
Hoa stood behind him, looking
at the line of his back.
In that room, only a few steps
separated them.
But for the first time she
understood that someone could be absent from a room and still stand squarely
between two people.
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