Page 95 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

“Find my mother’s offering.”

Nonsense, of course. Their family was as ordinary as any other; no hidden treasure was waiting. And Huy’s mother had drowned. These were all the ravings of a sick, unhappy man.Tu?nshoved the envelope in his suitcase and tried to forget about it.

Decades have passed since that moment. Decades of sitting on his father’s last words, then picking them up again, only to toss them back down in frustration. What more did Huy want from him, this father who hardly deigned to look his way afterKi`êu’saccident, this man chased by unconquerable monsters? WhyTu?n?

But one morning, three months beforeTu?n’s death, he opened the Forster Institute’s newsletter and found an article about an unexpected bequest from a moneyed collector in Chicago.He squinted at the pixelated image, familiar yet foreign. There was an unlocking sensation in his brain, but he couldn’t make out what lay beyond the door until, at last, he recognized the composition. The strokes. Thefeelingof it.

Blue Mirror, he repeated aloud.K. P. Lý.

He retrieved the sketch his father had given him and placed it next to his computer screen. Coincidence couldn’t account for what happened to him in that moment, nor luck, nor even fate. He was consumed by certainty, that absolute equanimity of knowing that you were exactly where you needed to be at that moment in time.

Fueled by this balm of certainty and his newfound sobriety,Tu?napplied himself more determinedly to the mystery than he had in years before.

Now, he’s closer to the century mark than he ever thought he’d be. There were countless moments when he should have died—when he heard the ominous tread of the VC by his head, felt his father’s blows onhis teenage body, watched his own hand squeezed to rice paper under the machinery that cared nothing for his mortality—but he never did. After eighty-two years, death has become less an enemy and more of a companion. It comes too swiftly all the same.

With each day, he feels the urgency to leave his daughters a legacy that they deserve. He’s read everything he can find about K. P.Lý; emailed scholars who might know more. But the search leaves him humble. He admits the possibility of failure. And he knows he can’t go to his girls with only half an idea. They deserve the full truth from him. Maybe the offering never belonged to their family after all.

Then, just last night, he had a dream that was also a homecoming. He was ten, hiding his belovedM?c’s feathers in the house by the ravine. A bird flew against the window, striking its wings once, twice, like a warning rap. He looked up just as a bolt of sunshine fell through the clouds, lighting up a worn tapestry on the wall. There, at its center, was a sundial woven in gold and silver thread, the same design as the sundial in the letter his father would give him before he passed. And all at once,Tu?n’smind jostled into place.

He remembered the Foreigner, he remembered painting dragons with her, her name—MadameLý—a freckle under her eye that his Vivian shared. The slumbering awareness inside of him turned over on its haunches and growled.

Tu?nhad woken in a sweat. Then he’d laughed. All that time, the answer had been in his own memory.

Now, on this waking June morning, he’s driving to Chicago in the dark. If he hurries, he’ll make it to Vivian’s apartment as the sun rises. After all, she was the one who first unlocked the mystery. Together with her sister, she is the key. He’d memorized her address long ago, hoping for an occasion to use it. Once he proves himself. Once his amends feel true enough for her.

The three of them, inVi?tNam, as he’s always wanted. He’ll tell hisgirls about May, how she was sad enough to leave, yet loved them enough to return.Ki`êu,Tâm, Huy, all of them, that frayed weave of names that they would mend together. They’ll go to the Old House, they’ll find the offering. He’ll prove that he can, this late in the game, be the father they deserve. It’s an impossible and cherished wish.

His eagerness presses against his foot, which presses against the pedal, too hard, too fast, he’s not even aware of it, the wind shushing its warning song, chipmunks scattering from the road as the car’s fender noses on. Continents, he’d travel to find her, his eldest, his most difficult and wounded girl. He’s only a few hours away now. He’ll knock on her door and he’ll say, just as May used to when Vivian was nestled into their bed like a chick in down,I have a story for you, darling, oh, I’ve got a really good story to tell.

When he looks up, there’s a deer standing in the road. It’s just a spotted fawn with shaky hairpin legs.Why isn’t it moving?The deer blinks its lashes slowly, with infinite patience, as if time were nothing more than a myth.Tu?nhas no choice except to swerve, but he’s going too fast, and his left arm has overcompensated as it sometimes does, pulling too hard, so the car flies past the shoulder, jumps a ditch, and barrels on. The deer vaunts to safety, none the worse for the encounter.

But forTu?n, it’s blue and blue and blue, soaring, joyful, all the many shades of hope that even he could not kill and the shades of despair too, neither complete without the other.

In his last seconds, he meets the end bravely, with the dignityKi`êuwould have wanted for him, the wonder his grandmother had summoned in her final breaths. He thinks of his daughters. He hopes they will see the world for what it can be, not what it is. Dawn’s breeze cools his flaming cheeks. And he smiles.

Hours later when they find him, before the muscles stiffen and his gaze slides,Tu?n—artist, brother, father—is still smiling. His mangled right hand rests on his chest, as if pledging to a promise that he’d only just remembered.