The Lotus Eaters_ A Novel Part 32

"Come and look," her mother said, and showed her the pile of magazines and newspapers with her photos. "This just came." She held the magazine with the NVA boy soldier on the cover. Inside was an editorial announcing Darrow's death with the picture Linh had shot of him in the Special Forces camp. "So horrible, so sad."

Helen said nothing. If she told about her relationship with Darrow, it would boil down to the elements of a dime-store romance. How she had wanted to bring Darrow here, to meet her mother and see where she grew up.

"Please put them away for now."

Her mom fidgeted with her hands, shy in front of her daughter. "What was it like there?"

"Scary and depressing. Alive. Parts were wonderful."

"I can't imagine."

"Yeah."

"Did you find what you were looking for?"

No answer.

"I'm just so glad you're back. I'm proud. People say things about Vietnam behind my back. But my brave girl went."

Helen stared at the floor. "That means a lot to me."

"I invited some of our friends over," she said. "Everyone is so anxious to see that you're in one piece."

"Not just yet."

Charlotte stopped in the middle of the room. "This part of life is important, too."

She bit her lip. "All of you acted like the war was the only real thing that mattered."

Helen hugged her, then stretched out on the couch.

"Take your shoes off the sofa. Don't be a lazy bones. Come see your room. I haven't changed a thing." The comforting a.s.surance one gave an invalid, when everyone knew that nothing at all stayed unchanged. Her room still had the white-painted twin bed, the flocked coverlet with pastel flowers sewn on. The walls papered with the pictures of Indochina she had collected as a teenager--broad swaths of the monsoon across the plains, long sun-drenched valleys, two figures wearing woven conical hats sitting in a fishing boat in the watery distance. Unreal and movieish; had this bit of fakery really started her on her way to Vietnam? How impossibly naive she had been.

Helen laughed, and her mother's face looked hopeful, but the laugh continued too long, became raucous and then bitter, and her mother's face fell as she escaped from the room.

Beneath the pictures was the box of Darrow's personal things from the Cholon apartment. Helen avoided the box for days, and then broke down one afternoon, tearing it open, savoring the faint, sweet-rotten smell of Saigon inside. As strange and unsanitary as a full-grown Cholon rat. She loved it now in direct proportion to how she hated it then.

Helen sat by the box, transported back to her crooked apartment, the Buddha door, the creaky stairs, the faded lamp. She closed her eyes and dreamed she could hear the street noise outside, longing for that life in this silence and hum of air-conditioning.

The magazine had taken care of his official things in the hotel, but Darrow's wife made a request for all his personal belongings. "Do what ever you want," Gary said.

Helen would have ignored the wife, but the idea of the boy made her pause. As a young girl, she had studied in detail everything that related to her father for some clue to herself.

She made her slow way through file after file of prints and negatives. Any combat photographer as far forward as Darrow ended up with huge numbers of unprintable photos--material so gruesome that no magazine would publish it. But the photographer had to take them, nonjudgmental until he returned to the darkroom. Looking through his whole oeuvre, she saw that he had gone from a mediocre photographer in his early days in the Congo and Middle East to what some called a genius. Something had come together for him by the time he arrived in Vietnam, and the place itself had spoken to him. An astonishing achievement bought at an astonishing price. Helen kept the gruesome photos back, selecting the ones surrounding his published spreads. He had been notorious for taking many rolls for each intended shot, and these showed his artistic method at work. A child should know that about his father.

She came across the photos done at Angkor, stunned by their loveliness. So unlike anything he had done before. A photo of Linh among a group of Cambodian workers.

Although he was smiling, he looked too young for the pain in his eyes. Helen also kept out all the shots of herself. She included his cameras, his equipment, his fatigues, holding back only one shirt with his name on white tape above the breast pocket. The sum of his life fit in one box.

When family friends came over for a homecoming, Helen walked out wearing a over for a homecoming, Helen walked out wearing a c.o.c.ktail dress and high heels, and only her crooked gait, unused to dress shoes, gave her away that she hadn't just been off at a women's college. When the conversation turned to the war, she changed the subject, told jokes, asked about neighbors' children, vacations, anything to give the pretense that all was normal. She didn't want to be treated like a quarantined animal.

A former tomboy, she cooked for the first time in her life. Whole days lost in the kitchen, poring over cookbooks, pages dusted in flour or glazed in sauce. She and her mother sat down to feasts and staggered away from the table. Her mother laughed, only the lines around her eyes giving away her worry. They had so much food they invited neighbors over, a family of Irish redheads; the mother, Gwen, owned a catering business.

After she ate three pieces of Helen's chocolate velvet cake, she sought Helen out in the kitchen, washing dishes. "This is so good. You should come work for me."

"This is therapy for me." The idea of the job so alien, so ridiculous to Helen, that she considered it.

But it was their teenage boy, Finn, who kept trying to get Helen's attention, who kept her from pretending. The boy's hair was a soft golden-red, his hands and feet puppyish, too big for his frame. Helen remembered that long-ago boy with the strawberry-blond hair, killed in that first ambush that Linh had saved her from.

"What was it like?"

Helen turned to him. "Don't let them draft you. Go to Canada."

"Well, I think service--" the father said.

"What kind of cocoa did you say you used?" Gwen interrupted.

Helen would not be deterred. "If you go, they will use you up like a piece of meat."

The tightness in Gwen's face revealed a conspiracy of women trying to keep the war away.

"Did you see real combat? Did you see anyone get killed?" the boy asked, tenacious.

So for Gwen and Gwen's son, Helen opened the spout, ever so slightly. She talked, her voice low and flat, the words themselves enough, the words fire.

With a hollow drop of her heart, Charlotte noticed that it was the first time Helen seemed alive that day. After fifteen minutes, the room emptied except for the boy, listening rapt.

"They don't learn," Helen said, after he had left. "The pictures and the stories--we didn't, either."

Sometimes Charlotte entered a room she thought empty only to find Helen room she thought empty only to find Helen there, staring off into s.p.a.ce, her face broken apart, her daughter the Pica.s.so woman.

Helen sat on the couch, legs curled up, tears rolling down her face, and all the mother could do was take her child in her arms, rock back and forth for hours, pretend her daughter was still a child and could be soothed, merely frightened of the dark.

Darrow's wife requested Helen bring his belongings in person. Although Helen bring his belongings in person. Although Helen suspected some final score settling on the wife's part, she had not yet decided what to do.

The easiest thing was to give the box to Robert and have the magazine make arrangements, but still she held on to it.

At first the house and the small beach town that she had longed for while in Vietnam had seemed calcified, dead, as white and clean as bone. But slowly it came to life, or she came to life within it. But it wasn't the life she wanted.

The sight of people going about their days, shopping in markets, eating in restaurants, playing with children in parks, laughing and drinking and talking, created a deep resentment inside her. Perfectly happy living their lives, Helen thought, which is all anyone should want, and yet how blind, how oblivious to the biggest story in the world.

Didn't they see that Vietnam was the center of the world at that moment? Seen from back home, her pride seemed monstrous. Vietnam monstrous and the acts committed there inconceivable. Her face burned at the thought of the risks she had taken for those photos, burned at the waste.

It was in the dead of night when she felt most herself. Come three or four o'clock, she would be wide-awake in her bed, pretending to herself that she had to get up for a mission, and she would try to remember details--the smell of the room, the temperature, her sleepiness--until they became so vivid she actually felt a fluttering of adrenaline inside of her. Sometimes she would carry it to the point of rising and going to the bathroom, washing her face, and looking into the mirror. Had she gone crazy?

A letter from Linh arrived. In it a picture of Linh and herself. When she arrived. In it a picture of Linh and herself. When she unfolded the letter, a sheaf of gold rice stalks fell into her lap. The letter detailed his new activities as staff photographer. She didn't know if it was his awkward use of written English, but the whole letter was disappointingly impersonal. Only the last line spoke to her so she could hear his voice: Each night I pray life is coming back to you, a piece at a Each night I pray life is coming back to you, a piece at a time, just as on the burned hills the gra.s.s reappears. She studied the photo more closely.

The day on the beach at Vung Tau. Linh staring not at the camera but at her. Of course.

She had known but ignored what she knew. The war wouldn't be over for her until she saw that gra.s.s reappear on those scarred hills.

This is what happened when one left one's home--pieces of oneself scattered all over the world, no one place ever completely satisfied, always a nostalgia for the place left behind. Pieces of her in Vietnam, some in this place of bone. She brought the letter to her nose. The smell of Vietnam: a mix of jungle and wetness and spices and rot. A smell she hadn't realized she missed.

But what could she do with such knowledge? Even to her, the idea of going back to Vietnam was madness. So she trudged on through the mystery of building a life. She started at Gwen's catering business, baking cakes and pies. Woke up at dawn and went down to the shop early, made coffee and sat in the bright light of the kitchen. Gwen, heavy-handed, brought a cousin to buy rolls--a setup. His name was Tom, a real-estate agent, a former USC football player. They had made small talk over coffee and m.u.f.fins, and he asked Helen out. Helen was not friendly. She took his number, not intending to use it.

But she wouldn't give up trying to live a normal life. In the evening she ran on the beach and noticed a family playing Frisbee with a dog, and, in a burst of inspiration, she went down to the pound and picked up a golden retriever puppy. When she brought him home, spilling over in her arms like a too-large bouquet, her mother held the door open and laughed, shaking her head. "A dog? A dog! Why not? High time for a dog in this house."

"Yeah, it is." She stroked the gold velvet ears and tried to ignore her mother's intent gaze.

"What'll we name him?"

"Michael always wanted a dog named Duke."

Her mother nodded. "Duke, then."

"How come we never had one before?"

"I don't think your father liked them. Didn't he get bit when he was a kid?

Something like that."

"But you never thought of getting one after he was gone."

"Life ended after that."

The puppy whimpered to be let out nights; Helen up like a shot, carrying the dog outside on the lawn, standing sleepy, barefoot on the wet gra.s.s, staring up at the stars.

She walked him up and down along empty sidewalks, enjoyed the upside-down quality of the world at night, the only state that matched what she was feeling inside.

After two weeks, Helen called Tom. He sounded surprised. "I thought we didn't called Tom. He sounded surprised. "I thought we didn't connect," he said.

"We didn't."

A.

pause.

"What're you up to?"

"Knocking away on that chip on my shoulder you talked about."

He laughed.

"Come for dinner about seven, we'll eat with my mom." A chaperoned dinner to take the pressure off her.

"Why not?"

During dinner Helen played hostess, pa.s.sing salad and dinner rolls, smiling at his jokes. Tom pleased her mother beyond words; she glowed, hopeful that this was a first step for her daughter. Helen snuck sc.r.a.ps under the table to Duke.

When Tom asked Helen about her photographs in Vietnam, she spoke of the beauty of the countryside. "It's too bad you never saw it in person, Mom. It's so beautiful.

Maybe we'll go after the war is over."

Charlotte frowned. "Why would I ever set foot in such a place? A place where they killed my son?"

Helen rose and took her plate to the sink. After dinner, Charlotte suggested Tom and Helen take a walk along the beach. Driving down the coast highway, Helen insisted on stopping first at the liquor store for a bottle of scotch. She drank out of the bottle and turned Tom's radio on loud. At the top of a hill, with the town spread out below, she moved her leg over the gearbox and around the shaft. Tom ran his hand along her knee as she jammed her foot down on the accelerator, bracing herself against the back of the seat so he couldn't dislodge her, and the car raced down the curving road. Tom held the wheel and slammed on the brakes. "Are you crazy?"

"Just having fun."

"Some fun. Getting us killed."

"Didn't it feel good, just a little? Kept you dying from boredom?"

They parked along the beach and walked in the sand barefoot, pa.s.sing the bottle back and forth between them.

"You're a little wild, huh?" he said.

"That's me."

"How long did you say you'd been back?"

"I didn't." She stopped and dug her feet into the cold and gritty sand. Waves in the moonlight sharp and hard as the blades of knives. "Six weeks, four days."

Far up the beach, teenagers crowded around a large bonfire that threw light up on the cliffs, but where Tom and Helen stood it was dark and deserted.

"So what are you doing with your days?" he asked. He took a long pull from the bottle and let his fingers brush along hers when he handed it back.

"Baking for Gwen." She laughed. "Cakes and cookies, buns and rolls."

"No, long-term. When are you going to start doing photography again?"

"I'm done with that."

"I told all my friends about you, all your covers. They'd seen your stuff and were impressed as h.e.l.l. That's why I came when you called, even though you were a jerk that day."

"Wow." His bluntness made her like him better.

"So why aren't you working at a newspaper? Or covering another war? Isn't that what you're supposed to do?"

"I just went as a lark. It turned into something else. What do you do if you have a hazardous talent, like riding over waterfalls in a barrel? A talent dangerous to your health?" After the question came out of her mouth, she felt embarra.s.sed.

He stopped and took a sip. "I don't know. If I was that good at something, I know it'd be hard to stop. Baking... s.h.i.t."

Helen moved back into the cave of shadows at the base of the hillside, tumbled onto her back in the sand. Was that the simple answer, that Darrow couldn't leave his work because he was good at it? That she loved the work more than this life that felt like a living death? No matter how she tried, the gears of her old life kept slipping; she could gain no traction. Her mind was always far away, whirring. She had not known how alive she was in Vietnam. How despite the fear and the anger, she had been awake in the deepest way, in a way that ordinary life could not compete with. She motioned Tom down and pulled him on top of her.

"All those guys over there made you a little crazy, huh? We can go to my place. I have a bed."

"Baking's not so bad. You have flour, b.u.t.ter, sugar. The smell of baking bread."