Page 43 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

Thirteen and foolish, enviable in her boundless optimism.

When Huy was born, I could not stop marveling at the sight of my beautiful boy of the wide peacock eyes, the clear forehead, the bellowing cries. The soldier who did not like to hear the wordnohad been transferred back to France, unburdened by conscience or repercussion. His fate was not mine. I buried his filthy money in an urn I kept in the bedroom I shared with my son and my sister.

For a matter of weeks, I was happy. Or, if not happy, I’d found some measure of temporary peace.

But as my baby grew stronger, so did the toxic sap that had begun to coat my mind. It made me see things that weren’t there. Fear beatin my veins every time I looked at Huy. During our sleepless nights, I thought I saw in his expression the malignancy of his father. It was all I could do not to snatch him from his hammock—

ButNg?cadored him and looked after him like a doll, kissing his brow, showering upon him all the affection I could not. I tried not to resent my sister for so easily accessing the closeness that eluded me. My son grew robust under her nurturing. He laughed for the first time in her presence. When he cried out, it was for her. Even at her young age, she was more of a mother than I could ever be.

Once, as I bathed Huy, I allowed my boy to slip, ever so slightly, ever so slowly, into the water, until it seeped up to the edge of his nostrils and he let out an angry cry that burbled in the basin. I remember that his breath created round and pearly soap bubbles. I imagined what it might be like for him not to exist. My dreams, it seemed, had died at his conception.

Not a second later, I pulled him out of the basin, thumping his back to release the water.

Ng?cheard his cries and hurried in, taking him from my arms. She spoke into his ear with an intimacy that squeezed my heart, “Sweet baby. Auntie will never let anything happen to you.”

I watched Huy smile up at her, tentatively at first, then with instinctive trust. A blinding purity shone between the two of them. I thought of how I hadn’t been moved to give him even the fleeting comfort of my reassurance. Some people, like my sister, were meant to be parents; to guide children into adulthood with tenacity and wisdom. Others found parenthood to be no less than a living nightmare, a curse of relentless duty, one all the more potent because they had to pretend that it was a blessing.

I did not harm my son in any lasting way, but after the incident at the bath, I knew I had no future in my childhood home. My baby had no future with me. UntilNg?cmarried and began her own family, she would love Huy as her own. (What selfishness to shoulder herwith such a responsibility! Shame finds terrible ways to escape itself.) Even my parents, so distant and unaffectionate, would muster the familial loyalty to care for Huy better than me, with my demonic cargo of emotion. In time, I hoped our neighbors would forget me, and perhaps he would have a chance at normalcy.

My absence would be the most profound gift of his life. This is what I told myself.

A few days later, I kissed my son on his forehead and left him in his hammock. I thought he was sleeping, but when I looked back, his eyes were fixed on me. He was silent and baleful.

Before I left, I stuffed my pockets with half of the soldier’s money from the urn. I left the remainder for my family. They were at temple, crouched in obeisance before those heartless gods I’d ceased to depend on. I pictured them finding Huy when they returned.Ng?cwould hold him close, shaking with pity and anger. She’d wonder what kind of monster left her child behind.

She’d be right. I knew myself to be a monster. That’s what society told me I was. Maybe that is why I can’t stop painting them. They are me, I am them. In the end, my sister’s hatred was a consequence I would bear. I believed I had no choice.

To my son, I said, “Live in the light.”

I didn’t look back once at the house by the ravine. At the river, I removed my clothes. I rested them, along with my jewelry, on the bank. I left a brief letter. And the part of me that was a mother, a child of the delta, a girl pressed against the wall of a shed—that part died.

The rest of me, what little was left, took a pair of scissors I’d slipped into my pocket and clipped my hair to my nape. I shaped the style as best as I could in the reflection in the river. I wore the men’s clothes I’d taken from my father and hid away by the bank. I bound my breasts, small as they were, with lengths of cut-up rags and rubbed dirt on my face and limbs.

No one, not even me, could find any traces ofTâmlingering in the face I turned toward the world. At first, I disguised myself becauseI didn’t want anyone from my old life to find me. But why did I keep hiding, all those years later? Perhaps I was afraid of what I might discover once I stripped the disguise. Perhaps I understood that the path of a man would be smoother than that of a woman. But I was never a man; I was always a woman with a woman’s aching heart. A pretender.

After I left my hometown, I walked until I found the nearest train station. In Hanoi, I found work cleaning for hotels and brothels. During my rare moments of freedom, I continued to paint. It was the only instrument I found that could scrape that black sap from my soul. Years later, an instructor from the newly formed École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine saw my work and presented it to someone he knew in Paris. Soon, I was offered a scholarship at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Too late, my dreams had been delivered on a silver platter. But I seized them. I left my country and what family I knew behind.

On the banks of the Seine, I became K. P.Lý, anonsense assemblage of letters that meant absolutely nothing to me. I was exhausted of names with meaning. Sometimes I thought I’d never find myself again. In my dreams, I often saw my son’s eyes staring out at me from a void. Blue as sorrow. That was the one thing that never left me; the ancient despair in his gaze, like he understood already all the ways that humans fail one another.

May 19, 1943

Back in our Château des Miroirs, as I finished my story, the Chaton rubbed my back, her touch so gentle that it was all I could do to hold my sobs at bay.

“So now you know,” I said. “And you will think I’m the worst sort of woman.”

“I think you have survived with the tools at your disposal.”

It was a new way of looking at the matter, a moment of mercy Icontemplated like a strange map. What might my life have looked like, had I not been told to hate myself so completely? Had I been given grace, after all that was taken from me? Briefly, I saw a world where I did not have to hide. It shimmered beyond reach, but even the mirage of it felt miraculous.

“And all my secrets?”

“They will be mine too. Emil told me some of this. But not nearly enough, my poor Cheval.”

“My abandoned child—”

She kissed the star on my cheek again. “We will add a sun on this bench, for your Huy. If he is part of your story, then he is part of mine.”

What could I say to that? We nestled under the open window of the cottage, with the rasping admonitions of herons nearby, the faint wash of slate behind our eyelids. And I heard her whisper my name, like a liturgical chant:TâmNguy?n,TâmNguy?n. I have never been audacious enough to pray for forgiveness, and yet, for a moment, in her arms, it came to me anyway.