Chapter 44: Memories of the Day She Left
The day her
father’s body came home, An Nhien was still in a hospital bed.
MK-2 had left her
memory full of holes. Sometimes she could see herself gripping Khai Minh’s
hand, the two of them running down a pitch-black corridor. Sometimes there was
only the alarm, fists hammering on a door, cold flooding into her lungs. Then
everything cut out as she went down.
She never knew
that her father, trying to reach his daughter, had thrown himself at that door
until it gave.
He got her out.
It cost him his life.
An Nhien was
barely off the critical list before she demanded to be discharged so she could
bury him. The doctors refused. Her vocal cords were badly damaged, her lungs
still weak; some days a few steps left her fighting for air.
She went anyway.
There was no one else left to stand at the head of her father’s funeral.
Dong sat in a
corner with his father’s jacket clutched to his chest. From the moment the
coffin was carried in, he hadn’t cried and he hadn’t spoken. Nobody could get a
word out of him.
Then they came to
close the lid, and he lunged.
“Don’t! Don’t
close it!”
Relatives caught
him and held on.
He fought them,
screaming for his father over and over.
“He still has
work tomorrow! Get up! Dad, get up!”
An Nhien got her
arms around her brother. Her throat was raw and her voice came out as barely
more than a rasp.
“Dong. Dad’s
gone.”
He twisted around
to look at her.
“He isn’t.”
“He isn’t coming
back.”
“You’re lying!”
Dong shoved her away,
and the strength in it was so sudden that An Nhien went down hard on the floor.
People rushed to
help her up. She shook her head and pushed herself upright on her own.
Dong hugged the
jacket tighter, and only then did the tears break.
“Dad said he’d never
leave me.”
Her lips trembled
but nothing came. Their father hadn’t wanted to leave either of them.
He just hadn’t
been given a road back.
After the
funeral, the bills started arriving. Her treatment, Dong’s medication, the
rent, the debts from the burial itself, all of it stacking into one thick sheaf
of paper.
An Nhien sat at
the table and added the numbers up, again and again, and still had no idea
where the money was supposed to come from.
She never got the
time to grieve her father.
Mornings at the
hospital with Dong. Afternoons chasing whatever short-term work she could find.
Nights coughing until her voice gave out entirely, her throat feeling like
someone had taken a blade to it.
Some nights she
jerked awake certain she’d heard the basement alarm.
She’d switch on
the light and find only an empty room, and Dong curled up asleep beside her.
The broken pieces
of memory kept circling back. She never could tell which parts were real and
which her panic had invented.
It was in the
middle of all this that word reached her: Lam Khai Minh had disappeared.
They said he’d
escaped during a hospital transfer and gone into the river. Days of searching
turned up nothing. No body was ever recovered, but almost no one believed he
could have survived.
An Nhien didn’t
cry. She didn’t feel any lighter either.
Khai Minh had
been cruel to her father and to her. He was the one who’d had her father fired,
who’d cost Dong his place in treatment, who had dragged her into the Lam
family’s dangerous secrets.
But Khai Minh was
also the one who’d given her father his job back, who had helped her while the
people closest to him were backing him toward a cliff.
She didn’t know
whether to hate him or grieve for him.
She only knew
there was a hollow where the feeling should have been.
Then everyone
tangled up in that night began to vanish, one after another. Her father was
under the ground. Khai Minh had been swallowed by the river. And she no longer
had the first idea where to take Dong.
The day before
she left Dong Cang, she brought her brother to their father’s grave.
The mound was
still new, the earth damp, no grass on it yet. An Nhien set down the flowers.
“Dad.”
Her voice was so
ruined that every word was a struggle to make out.
“I have to take
Dong away.”
Wind moved
through the cemetery. Dong kept his head down and said nothing.
She laid her palm
flat against the cold headstone.
“I don’t know
when I’ll be able to come back. But I promise you, I’ll keep him safe.”
She was quiet for
a long moment before she finished.
“Whatever it
takes, I won’t let anyone hurt him.”
They left the
cemetery and didn’t go back to the old house.
Tran An Nhien
disappeared from Dong Cang that day.
Ten years later,
Phuong Nga came back to the city.
Phuong Nga stayed
with Mr. Son, an old friend of her father’s, an elderly man living alone in a
small house at the far end of a narrow alley. He asked almost nothing about the
years she’d been gone, just cleared out a room for the two of them and told her
to stop worrying and stay.
Huu Tu was
admitted again to continue treatment.
Phuong Nga worked
through the day and went straight to the hospital when her shift ended. Some
days he was lucid and knew her before she’d even reached the door. Some days
she sat by the bed for hours and he looked at her like a stranger.
The morning her
acceptance letter from Truong Sinh arrived, she wasn’t as happy as she’d
expected to be.
Phuong Nga held
the page and read the salary and the benefits over and over. It was enough to
keep Tu in the hospital, and enough to start chipping away at the old debt. For
her, that already counted as luck.
On her first day
she was taken up to the data management division.
The supervisor
pointed at a desk by the window.
“You’re over
there. The other new hire will be on your team.”
Phuong Nga set her
bag down.
A moment later
the door opened.
Dinh Bac walked
in.
Phuong Nga
recognized the man from the interview and nodded a greeting.
“We meet again.”
He slowed to a
stop.
“Seems we both
got lucky.”
“I wouldn’t bet
on it. The unlucky one might be our team lead.”
He looked at her.
Phuong Nga tipped
her chin at the two towers of files smothering the desk.
“Day one and it’s
already like this. Whoever had this job before us probably ran for their life.”
Dinh Bac pulled
out a chair and sat.
“Finish the work and
there’s nothing left to run from.”
She let out a
soft laugh.
And there it was
again, that flicker of something familiar, moving through him and gone. Not
sharp enough to name. Not easy to dismiss either.
Phuong Nga looked
into his clear eyes and thought nothing at all of the blind man from years ago.
The Khai Minh in
her memory couldn’t see light. His voice had never had this low rasp in it. And
more than anything, he was dead.
She had no idea
that he was alive, and sitting less than an arm’s length away.
And Dinh Bac had
no idea that the girl he had spent ten years aching for had just smiled at him
under the name Phuong Nga.
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