Читать книгу Fire Summer - Thuy Da Lam - Страница 12

AS NIGHT FELL over Ho Chi Minh City, the neon pink sign glowed: WINTER NIGHT CAFÉ. The xích lô had left Maia and JP in front of the garden café, where white plastic chairs and round tables were strewn around a stage under a sprawling starfruit tree. A skeletal kitten slinked through the Ochna integerrima hedge. Its mouth opened mutely.

“Your grandmother lives here?” JP asked.

Maia checked the address on the envelope and looked for a street number on the entrance. The wooden gate was a familiar sight though freshly painted in a different color. The hoàng mai hedge in summer bloom with bright red sepals and dark glossy berries was as she remembered. On stage, a girl in black tights crooned “Unforgettable” as the patrons smoked and sipped on iced café au lait.

“Here, Pōpoki,” JP called, and the scrawny orange stray tottered over. When he picked it up and scratched under its chin, it gazed at him fixedly with pale yellow eyes. “Look,” JP said. “The little fella has a protruding belly button.”

They entered the outdoor café, the kitten tottering behind. They sat at a peripheral table. The kitten clambered up onto JP’s lap and curled into a spiny orange ball.

The girl in black tights came over and smiled broadly at JP. “Hi, Big Guy! My name is Na. Bia Saigon? Bia Hơi? Bia Ôm?”

When Na returned with a Saigon beer and càphê sữa đá, JP invited her to join them. Na plopped into the chair beside JP and immediately intrigued him with her stories. Though her oblique black eyes, long wavy hair, and dark skin alluded to her mixed parentage, she did not speak of it.

Maia observed the waning gibbous moon through the starfruit tree and thought of her mission.

“Time to visit family and resolve whatever questions you might have.” The Independent Vietnam Coalition had agreed.

“I just have my grandmother’s last letter,” she had said.

The address was the only shred of evidence that linked her to the past. A flimsy, inconsequential piece of information she was allowed to carry with her. It was an address of a maternal grandmother she barely knew, an address the Coalition had thought no longer existed.

“Whatever you do,” the Coalition instructed, “be at the foot of the Vong Phu Mountain on the first night of the full moon.”

A shooting star flashed across the sky. Maia heard faint laughter and was reminded of her childhood when she had climbed the tree with the neighborhood kids. They would squeeze onto the narrow plank wedged between the V-shaped trunk, scared and exhilarated at the height and closeness to the sweet, tangy starfruit.

“You know why no customers?” Na asked when it was time to close the café. Her mischievous eyes surveyed the dark surroundings. “This place is haunted—” She stopped and looked toward the man-dug fishpond. She whispered, “Someone is here.” It could have been the different time zones, the mix of alcohol and caffeine, or Na’s easy laughter. Whatever it was, the threesome peered intently at the approaching shadow. “It’s coming!” Na let loose a string of shrill laughter. The kitten leaped from JP’s lap, baring its fangs as if hissing at the shadow.

“Xuan!” JP exclaimed. “It’s Xuan.”

“We should go,” Maia said. “It’s almost curfew.” She stood up, but JP had already risen, shaken hands with the tour guide, and pulled out a chair for him.

“Didn’t think we’d bump into you here,” JP said.

Na eyed Xuan. “You scared us.”

Maia picked up the skeletal kitten by the nape of its neck like a sack of bones and gathered it on her lap. “Na thought you were a ghost.”

“Nonsense,” Xuan said.

“So brave!” Na said. “You’ll be visited—”

“This place is haunted,” JP mimicked her. He had given up on a serious conversation with Na. She had talked openly about being the café’s singer-hostess, her likes and dislikes, and her dream of one day opening a café of her own. She had let him touch her smooth lineless palms and boasted their absence of fate’s grooves. But when he said he was hapa with a lineage from the Middle Kingdom and asked if her father was American, her face changed.

“Big Al from Love City works in passport,” she blurted out. She then clammed up and became cross. She preferred ghost stories, believed in the afterlife, and claimed to converse with spirits.

Maia shifted in her chair, aware of Xuan’s eyes.

Na began an unsettling story that had been told around Ox Alley since the abandoned property was first expropriated. A young official had relocated his widowed mother from the North and turned the cactus orchard into a popular outdoor nightspot, which, for reasons only a few knew, he called Winter Night Café. Once in the airy house, they felt another presence. At night, they would hear a woman chanting. The official’s elderly mother made repeated offerings and set up an altar shop next door, but the spirit would not leave. “The ghost,” Na whispered. “Her husband built the house for her.”

Maia’s breath stopped. Fragments of people, places, and her father’s stories surfaced. She remembered the two-story L-shaped house with a balcony overlooking her grandmother’s orchard. In the summer of fire when the North pushed south and central Vietnam dissolved in flames, her father evacuated the family and in-laws from the highlands to Saigon. He built a home for his wife and daughter in a pocket of verdant land, an oasis in the concrete city, he had inherited with his crippled kid brother. His mother-in-law moved into the groundskeeper’s cottage and cultivated purple dragon fruit.

The night air turned chilly in the outdoor café.

Maia heard JP’s question. “How did the woman die?”

Leaning forward, Na’s eyes narrowed. “No one knows.” The dark clouds of hair hovering over her high forehead made her appear impishly grand, looking down on them and conjuring up their lives. A slow smile possessed her lips. “Lovesick maybe.”

Xuan slammed his beer on the table. He fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette, lit it, and took a long drag. He settled into his chair, and for the rest of the night, he did not speak. They could not see that he was no longer watching them or that his eyes had softened. The beer toppled and rolled off the table onto the gravel, where the orange stray slinked over, sniffed, and lapped up the foamy liquid.

“What happened to the orchard keeper?” JP asked.

“Her younger daughter married the official,” Na said. “And they all moved to the River of Nine Dragons.”