“Tien is in Ho Chi Minh City, where we’ve been for three weeks. Not on a beach.” She looked up at him. I’m not some dilettante tourist soaking up local color, she wanted to say to him.
“We’ve been searching for Anh, the bar girl who was my friend and Tien’s mother.”
“Any progress?”
“Not until today. But the frustration of the search and my own ambivalence about finding Anh had pushed us to the edge a few days ago. The mother-daughter dance is a complicated one. The rhythm keeps changing and the steps get more intricate as you move through life.”
He smiled. “I know. I have three sisters. They each put
my mother through hell at one time or another. So now that there’s a real possibility she may find her mother, you’re thinking, who am I? Am I about to lose her?”
Mel nodded. “So much of how I define myself, so many of the choices I’ve made in my life, are tied to my being Tien’s mother. I am in a totally different place than I imagined for myself thirty years ago. When I was working in Saigon I thought I wanted nothing else than to be a war correspondent, someone who could translate the reality, the horror, the underbelly of war.”
“Any regrets that that’s not who you are now?”
“None. I didn’t understand then how deeply satisfying this life would be. So, no regrets. But costs—there have been costs.”
“Like not being a war correspondent.”
She nodded.
“Any others?”
She looked him in the eye, then reached into a deep part of herself.
“I didn’t marry.”
“Because of Tien?”
“I wanted a father for her as well as a husband for me. The man had to be both, and I didn’t find him. What about you? What have the costs been for you?”
She waited, hoping that his willingness to listen to her and his perceptiveness about how vulnerable she felt would translate into a willingness to let down the mask.
“After I arrived in Cambodia I lost touch with everything and everyone who had meant something in my life. Including you.”
“Why?” With this revelation of his, she was no longer the objective reporter.
“I was captured and imprisoned. By the time I was released four years later, I’d lost faith in humanity, and
in the God whose will I thought I was following. I descended into a dark and hopeless time in my life. I disappeared more thoroughly from those who loved me than when I had been in prison.”
One of the aides from the clinic stood at the bottom of the verandah stairs.
“Doc, the men are starting to arrive for the clinic hours. Will you be down soon?”
He seemed relieved to stop the revelations. It occurred to Mel that he had buried this part of his life and never spoken about it to anyone else.
“Look, it’s getting late to start down the mountain. Why don’t you spend the night here at the compound? We have plenty of room. We can have dinner when the clinic hours are over and continue our conversation. In fact, do you want to shadow me at the clinic?”
Mel smiled, accepted the invitation and followed him across the courtyard and up into the clinic.
The next two hours reminded her of the scenes she’d seen so many times at the orphanage. Phil bantered in Lahu as the men brought him their aches and pains, their faces lighting up as Phil bent to listen to their hearts or deftly probed a tender muscle. At times he turned to Mel to translate or explain—one man expressing worry about his son, who wanted to leave the village; another joking with Phil about his singing. Patients presented him with barter as payment—a scrawny white chicken, a net bag filled with cabbages, an embroidered cap, which Phil put on immediately.
What Mel witnessed was affection on both sides.
Dinner was communal, the entire staff at a long table in a large room in their quarters. Like Phil’s house, it was on stilts with an open porch overlooking the mountain. Mel enjoyed the give-and-take of conversation and was
surprised by Phil’s rapport with them all. She had only known him as a loner, forgetting that he had once been a Marine. She had assumed he preferred to work on his own, not willing to engage in the compromise and balancing of everyone’s needs that being part of a team required. But he seemed quite at home with the five people around the table.
After dinner, people dispersed to their own pursuits and Phil invited her back to the verandah for a continuation of their conversation. He didn’t seem ready to pick up where they had left off, so she asked a more comfortable question.
“What will you do with the MacArthur money?”
A wide grin stretched across his face, and she saw flickers of the energy and drive she remembered in the young Phil Coughlin.
“Oh, my God! Let me tell you what I’m going to do—operating rooms, more mobile clinics, fellowships to bring specialists here for short-term assignments.”
He grabbed a sheet of paper and sketched out the new building he had planned. His excitement was undisguised. The grant had unleashed the restraint he had practiced for years trying to make do with the most limited resources. He could accomplish so much that he had only dreamed of doing in the past.
As the evening deepened so did their conversation, meandering from one topic to another and eventually returning to how he had pulled himself out of the darkness. He talked about how he had stumbled upon the need among the hill tribes and why he ultimately decided to stay; the evolution of what he was trying to accomplish; his realization that he was on a mission to which he was passionately committed.
In all of what he described to Mel there was one thing glaringly missing. Like her, he had never married.
“My mother, the devoutly Catholic Margaret Mary Daly Coughlin held out hope for a while that I might enter the priesthood. In retrospect, what I’ve chosen to do with my life has been a kind of priesthood. I don’t think one can do this without the kind of single-minded devotion you find in those who take vows.”
“That single-mindedness is a two-edged sword,” Mel interjected. “It’s a strength, keeping us focused on the goal, but in the extreme, it also keeps us from letting anything or any
one
else share our attention.”
They continued to talk. Late in the night, the sky overhead brilliant with stars, they reached the moment Mel referred to as the “crossing-over” point. The moment of true intimacy when the layers of disguise have been peeled away and one reveals one’s deepest self. It was exhilarating and excruciating at the same time. For just as they bared their souls to one another and acknowledged what had occurred, they also realized that it was coming to an end. Morning was nearly upon them. Tien was waiting in Ho Chi Minh City; Sam was waiting for her article; the first of the patients were making their way up the mountain to the compound.
Phil wrapped her in an embrace as the first birds began their song in the trees below the verandah. They were emotionally spent; they had no more words. But they were friends.
Mel left the compound before the rest of the staff had awakened, her notebook full and her heart both joyful and bereft.
W
HEN SHE LANDED
at Tan Son Nhat, Tien was waiting in the arrivals lounge with a driver and the address she’d been given by the ministry. Mel understood the urgency, and despite her fatigue, didn’t object when Tien told her she wanted to go immediately to Anh.
The car headed to the northern outskirts of the city to a district that had been open land when Mel had last been in Saigon. It came to a stop at a tall gate, beyond which Mel and Tien could see what looked like parkland. They were confused and thought the driver had the wrong address, but he pointed out the road sign and the number on the gate.
Mel and Tien climbed out of the car and approached the gate. It was Mel who realized first where they were. She reached out for Tien’s hand as a soft moan escaped from her lips. Then, stepping ahead, they passed through the gate and into the cemetery. They followed a path of crushed white rock to the numbered row on the slip of paper that Tien had thought identified an apartment. When they reached the spot they found a polished stone set level with the earth.
Inscribed upon it was Anh’s name, the years of her birth and death, and the inscription “Mother of Beloved Daughter Tien.”
Tien knelt and touched the stone, tracing her own and her mother’s names. Mel knelt beside her and enfolded her daughter close to her heart as Tien’s tears began to fall, a curtain of water as steady as the monsoon.
W
HEN THEY RETURNED
to the hotel, Tien told Mel she wanted to go away for a few days. She had learned of a Buddhist monastery that offered retreats in Da Nang. Before they returned to the States she thought she needed time for solitude and meditation.
“I can leave this afternoon on a bus, if you don’t mind.”
“I’m fine. I have to write this profile for Sam and then I’m going to sleep for as long as I can. I think it’s just what you need.”
After she had seen Tien off on the bus, Mel holed up in her hotel room with her notebook, her laptop, and a carafe of tea. She typed nonstop for two hours composing a piece she called Reckoning For A Lifetime: The Costs That Will Not Be Recompensed.
The article began with a list, entitled “Expenditures For A Lifetime.”
When she finished, she opened the French doors and sat on the balcony. It was dusk, and in contrast to the silence and beauty of the night before, the cacophony of Ho Chi Minh City greeted her just over the hotel’s courtyard wall. She contemplated what she had just written and understood that to submit it for publication in the
Post
would be a betrayal of the trust Phil had placed in her.
She went back to the laptop, opened up her Gmail account and attached the article to an e-mail addressed not to Sam but to Phil.
“This is yours,” she wrote. “It belongs to no one else.”
She’d write another profile for the
Post
in the morning. But first, she desperately needed sleep.
Despite the sounds and lights of the city, she fell into a deep sleep immediately, brought on not only by her physical exhaustion but also by the lightening of a burden. She’d given something back to Phil in return for what he’d given her the night before on his verandah.
In the middle of the night she was awakened by an insistent and disorienting sound. It took her a moment to recognize the ring of her cell phone. It was Phil.
“Where are you?”
She gave him the name of the hotel.
“Stay there.”
She mumbled an agreement and then drifted back to sleep. Several hours later, still in bed, she heard the phone again and then a knock on the door.
“I’m here,” he said.
She opened the door, the phone still at her ear.
“I’ve lost enough in my life. Now that I have found you again, letting you go is not a cost I’m willing to bear.”
He reached out for her.
All the revelations from the night before flooded back and the emotional connection that had been forged between them suddenly was transformed into a physical one. Her body in its thin cotton nightgown molded itself to the solidity of his. He took her face in his hands and kissed her, his lips hungry and searching. He slid his arms down and slipped them under her, lifting her and carrying her back to the bed.
He saw that the other bed hadn’t been slept in.
“Your daughter?”
“Away at a monastery,” she murmured.
He sat by her side and she looked up at him.
“No one has ever understood me in the way you do. That article shook me to my core. How did you do that? How did you get me to reveal so much of myself?”
“I took a leap of faith.”
“How so?”
“I thought if I offered to peel back a layer of my own, you might reciprocate.”
“You were taking a risk.”
“I know. But I wanted to know who you were. Not for the article, but for myself. I’d always found you so compelling and that frightened me. I wanted to overcome my fear by understanding who you were.”
“And now you know.”
“I know
part
of you. There is still more to explore and discover.” She smiled as she began to unbutton his shirt.
He stretched out alongside her and kissed her again. Slowly, with great tenderness, they made love. For both of them it had been a long time since they had been with anyone. They savored every stage, holding back while they explored one another, delighting in the contours and hollows of each other’s bodies, reveling in the tactile explosion of skin to skin. When they finally came, it was with a deep and vibrant satisfaction. Once again Mel slept, this time wrapped in Phil’s arms, his lanky body spooned around her.