Chapter 43: The Day He Came Back
The wheels
touched down and the cabin came alive at once, passengers shuffling into the
aisle, hauling bags out of the overhead bins.
Hoa didn’t
unbuckle. She watched Dinh Bac instead. He had turned toward the small oval
window the moment the plane began its descent, and he hadn’t said a word since.
Below them lay
Dong Cang.
From up here the
roads were nothing but thin scratches crossing over one another. Houses,
traffic, the river, and every last person who had ever passed through his life,
all of it shrunk down and tucked beneath a skin of cloud.
“Can you make it
out clearly?” Hoa asked.
“Clearly enough.”
“Any pain?”
“No. It just
doesn’t feel like mine yet.”
She let it go at
that. He could say what he liked, but the pain came when it wanted to, and in
six years she had never once seen him stop for it.
A car was already
waiting when they cleared the terminal.
The city slid
past the window. Some stretches he still knew by heart. Others had been rebuilt
so thoroughly he couldn’t place them at all. Ten years since the sky fell in on
his family, and Dong Cang had had ample time to change its clothes.
Only the grief
had kept its shape, and it had kept it inside the one man coming home to carry
it.
When the car
passed a road sign pointing toward Vinh An Hospital, the hand resting on his
knee slowly curled into a fist.
He didn’t ask the
driver to slow down. He didn’t turn his head to watch it go by.
“You can still
change your mind.”
Dinh Bac kept his
eyes on the road ahead.
“I spent six
years getting ready for today.”
“I’m afraid
you’re rushing it.”
“If I were
rushing, I’d have come back years ago.”
Hoa said nothing
more.
He hadn’t
returned to stand at a distance and watch Truong Sinh grow fat on everything it
had stripped from his family. He needed to be inside. He needed to know what
Minh Quan had done with Vinh An Hospital, with the money he’d taken, and with
MK-2, the project his parents had poured their lives into.
He was no longer
the blind young man called Lam Khai Minh.
He was Dinh Bac.
A man with no connection whatsoever to the Lam family. A man qualified enough
that Truong Sinh would open its own doors and invite him in.
As it happened,
the group was hiring for its data management division.
Dinh Bac
submitted an application. His academic record from overseas read like something
out of a dream, and it carried him through the first screening without so much
as a pause.
On the day of the
interview, he arrived early.
More than a dozen
people were already waiting in the corridor outside the recruitment room. He
picked a seat near the window, away from the harsh white ceiling lights.
He’d barely sat
down before the ache started behind his left eye. He took the bottle of pills
from his pocket, then left it unopened and simply closed his eyes for a few
seconds.
“Excuse me, could
you lift your foot for a moment?”
A woman’s voice,
right beside him. His eyes snapped open and his whole body locked.
The voice was low
and roughened, not quite the voice he carried in his memory. And yet, for
reasons he couldn’t name, one short sentence was enough to send his heart
slamming against his ribs.
She was bent
over, gathering up a sheaf of papers she’d dropped. One page had blown right up
against his shoe.
Dinh Bac drew his
foot back.
She picked it up
and straightened.
“Thank you.”
Dinh Bac looked
at her properly.
Around thirty.
Hair tied back at the nape of her neck. A face that had clearly been through
things. Her eyes looked tired, but they were bright, and they didn’t slide away
from his.
“You’re here for
the interview too?”
“Yes.”
There it was
again.
This time he
listened harder. Something in it brushed against something old, and yet it
wasn’t the girl from back then.
The An Nhien in
his memory had a clearer voice. When she got angry she talked fast, every word
aimed at cutting off whoever she was arguing with. The woman in front of him
spoke slowly, and that hoarseness never lifted.
His gaze dropped
to the applicant badge in her hand.
“Phuong Nga, is
it?”
Phuong Nga
glanced down at the badge and nodded.
“That’s right.
And you’re Dinh Bac?”
“I am.”
Phuong Nga’s
smile barely moved her mouth.
“Good luck in
there.”
“You too.”
She went back to
her seat.
Dinh Bac watched
her a few seconds longer than he should have before pulling his gaze away. His
fingers found the face of the blue watch under his cuff.
Not An Nhien.
Someone else entirely.
Six years. He had
lost count of the times he’d built her out of nothing, a shape in a crowd, the
set of someone’s shoulders, a voice half heard. Every time she surfaced in him,
his heart made room for a little hope.
And every time,
all that came back was the same drop through empty air.
The interview
room door opened. The recruiter called for Phuong Nga.
She stood, took
her file, and went in.
Dinh Bac had no
idea that the woman who had just walked past him was Tran An Nhien, the woman
he had spent six years trying to find.
Back then, after
Huu Loc’s death and the gas release in the basement of Vinh An Hospital, An
Nhien had understood that Dong Cang was finished for the two of them. She left.
She changed both their names and cut every thread that could lead Truong Sinh
back to her door.
Ten years of
drifting through places that weren’t hers, swallowing every bitter thing life
can serve up, and the young woman she’d been had been worn down into someone
quiet.
Ten years was
also long enough for the wounds to fade, inside and out.
An Nhien became a
woman called Phuong Nga. Dong became Huu Tu.
Only her
brother’s illness refused to change.
Huu Tu still
drifted in and out. On his good stretches he could talk and manage on his own,
near enough to normal. But when an episode took him, he thrashed and raged and
didn’t recognize the person sitting beside him, and it meant a hospital bed,
doctors watching him, sedatives going in.
The bills
climbed.
What she’d
scraped together during those years away was almost gone. She knew applying to
Truong Sinh was a dangerous choice. But the salary was enough to keep her
brother’s treatment going.
In ten years
Phuong Nga had lost her father, her city, and even the name he’d given her. She
could not lose Huu Tu too. He was the only family she had left in this world.
The interview
ended and she came out.
Dinh Bac was
still in the same seat. They looked at each other and exchanged a polite nod,
two strangers who had happened to cross paths on a day of job hunting.
Neither one
recognized the other.
Dinh Bac had
never once seen An Nhien’s face while he was Khai Minh.
And Phuong Nga
remembered a man with a completely different face, eyes drowned in darkness,
and a voice nothing like the one sitting across from her now.
Fate had brought
them back together in the middle of Dong Cang. And they walked straight past
each other in silence, under two names that had no place in the past.
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