After Miles left, Van began checking the security alarm every time she entered the house. She had nightmares of the alarm failing, losing the password of her and Miles’s wedding date. Pressing those numbers made her remember his hand on her back, guiding her through dance steps. They had practiced in a ballroom class, then in his apartment, Eric Clapton singing “Wonderful To night” over and over. She didn’t tell Miles that the lyrics bothered her: Why must the woman only look wonderful
tonight?
The rooms hushed around her, the open fl oor plan stretching forth on the hardwood. Though they’d moved in almost three years earlier, she still felt vaguely like a house sitter. She was careful to keep the hand towels neat, her shoes lined up in the mudroom. She circled the fi rst fl oor, making sure the blinds were drawn, and turned on all the outdoor lights. She lingered in front of the tele vi sion, for going upstairs seemed almost unsafe, a yielding of territory. Someone could trap her there. She thought of places to hide, to buy herself time between the breach of the alarm and the arrival of police: behind the armoire in the bedroom corner; in the cedar chest in her closet. She could just fit into it, her small body folding into the tight darkness, the lid clamping down like a set of perfect teeth.
Van spent most of her time in the TV room, where she lay on the sofa between the windows so that someone standing in the backyard would not be able to see her. Only in bright daylight did she want to peek outside. It was always the same Ann Arbor subdivision, the houses as new and graceful as hers, with brushed- brick facades and wrought- iron sconces. Cars nested in garages. Streets rounded into cul- de- sacs. “Para- noi- a,” Miles sometimes sang softly when he caught Van squinting through a slit in the blinds.
Those first two weeks of Miles’s absence, Van had waited for someone to confront her. She was certain her coworkers would read in her face what had happened. She prepared answers. A business trip. A big case, confi dential. But the days went by and no one at her law offi ce asked her if she was okay. Her friends e-mailed their usual brief messages about work, pictures of their kids. Her sister Linny did not appear on her doorstep to crow about how much she’d always disliked Miles.
Van nearly convinced herself that he had been away on a business trip. It was almost easy to go along, letting her world split from that one day in February into separate versions of reality.
How little anyone knew of Van’s real life.
Even so, she kept checking the caller ID. She didn’t stop expecting to see Miles’s cell number, and hated how her heart jumped whenever the phone rang. But it hardly ever did. A week before he left, Miles had added their number to the national Do Not Call list. Van wondered if it was a planned courtesy, that she might exist untroubled by telemarketers while sitting down to her solo dinner.
She had not been the kind of teenager who could talk for hours on the phone with a friend; that realm had belonged to her sister. When she and Linny called each other they ended up using their father as an excuse: Who was going to visit him next? Had he said anything about Thanksgiving? How was he doing all alone in that house? He was the spool around which the thread of their conversations wound.
Van’s father didn’t like phones, not even to acknowledge birthdays. In college, she could go almost an entire quarter without hearing from him. His calls, when they came, seemed random. He would want to know where a friend of his could find good sushi in Ann Arbor. Or he’d ask, Do you remember where I put the pliers? Were there any D batteries in the house? As if she were still there, or should be.
But now he was reminding her to come home.
After twenty- eight years of stubbornness her father was finally taking his oath of citizenship, letting go at last of his refugee status and the green Permanent Resident Alien Card. He had taken the test, handed over his fi ngerprints, had his background checked— the last of all his friends to do so. To celebrate, he was throwing a party in the old style, the way all of the Vietnamese families in their town used to gather in the late seventies and eighties, fi nding relief in their free- flowing beer and language. It would be a reunion, a remembrance of their collective fl ight from Vietnam and settlement in America—1975 all over again. Van, who was born in a refugee camp three months after her parents arrived in the States, knew only her mother’s description of the dusty barracks and tents at Pendleton, and the startling cold of their fi rst winter in Michigan. She didn’t understand why her father would want to return to 1975. “It’s the last hurray,” he insisted when he fi rst told her his idea for the party. “We come a long way, baby.”
After Van had left for college her parents decided to live on separate floors of the house they’d had for twenty years, a sixties ranch in Wrightville, a suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan. They’d fallen into the arrangement after yet another petty argument— which potted dendrobium at the home and garden center looked the healthiest— blew up into a two-day fight. The Luongs had always done this, scratching at each other’s words as much out of habit as anything. But this time when Thuy
Luong told her husband to go sleep in the basement “like a dog,” he stayed there instead of slinking back upstairs. When Van went home for winter break she found that he had actually moved to the basement. He had shoved aside the old fold-out sofa they’d had since their first apartment in the States and set up a futon right in front of the big- screen TV, a clunky first generation model that would soon be replaced by newer and newer models, to which he’d add an elaborate sound system,
with speakers hidden inside wooden fi gurines of Vietnamese fishermen.
The basement had always been his domain. Van was going on nine when they moved into that house, and she had helped him partition off a section of the floor to create a studio for his company, Luong Inventions by Dinh Luong, for which he often ditched his “everyday money” jobs in tiling and construction. He kept his sketches tacked up on the faux- wood paneling, along with photographs of himself trying out his prototypes.His most successful invention— or least unsuccessful— was the
Luong Arm, a tong- like gadget devised to help short people reach items on a high shelf. He had sold more than a hundred Luong Arms to various friends in the Viet nam ese community. But the product had never been quite right— the mechanical grip could grab a light basket, but lost control with plates and glasses. When Van graduated from college, her father gave her a prototype as a gift, saying, Short girls have to take care of themselves.
In law school, when Miles fi rst came over to her apartment he had spied the Arm immediately. It lay on top of her kitchen cabinets, where Van had stored and forgotten it because she couldn’t see that high up.
Amused, Miles examined the Y-shaped instrument and held it like a divining rod. “Will this lead me to gold and riches?” He steered it toward her.
“It didn’t for my dad,” Van replied.
She showed Miles how it worked: put the wrist through the velcroed brace, hang on to the wand, and use the thumb to work the lever that opened and closed the tongs. Miles wanted to try it, aiming for a thin- necked vase in Van’s kitchen cupboard.
“Don’t,” she said. “It’s the only one I have.”
“I’ve got it.” He secured the grip and drew back slowly to set the vase on the counter. But it slipped from the Arm and crashed onto Van’s linoleum floor.
When Dinh Luong settled into the downstairs part of the house, he bought a set of safari- print sheets from JCPenney. The basement, with its low ceilings and movie- worthy darkness, was perfect for running Die Hard and Indiana Jones DVDs until he fell asleep. He got a mini- refrigerator to store his beer and bought a George Foreman grill from a garage sale. When he cooked he made turkey burgers with pickle, dipping each bite into nuoc mam sauce. When he got cold he used a space heater that made the basement smell like Linny’s old curling iron set on high. Van worried that her father would burn the whole house down but he had laughed at that. “I’m an inventor,” he said. “I’m not destroying— I’m making.”
Upstairs, Van’s mother and sister made changes too. They gathered up Dinh Luong’s infomercial orders— the food dehydrator, the vacuum sealer, the automatic shoe polisher— and left them on the basement steps. Mrs. Luong painted their bedroom lavender, and threw out the pile of Pop u lar Mechanics magazines her husband had saved in the bathroom. They didn’t ignore each other, didn’t quite divide the house in two, but it was clear to Van that they had come to some sort of resolution
about their space: they just didn’t want to have to see each other very often. Linny, a se nior in high school then, used the opportunity to spread out her clothes and music, stay out late while their parents were so distracted. Van was secretly glad that they hadn’t just given up and divorced.
In her mind they couldn’t— they were too conjoined, had known too many years together. Ornery as old house cats, they needed each other’s presence without ever admitting it. They could have gone on like that for decades, Van knew, living together but not together, meeting only occasionally when Van’s father needed to get some towels or utensils from upstairs or when Van’s mother needed to use the washer and dryer. And maybe they would have if Thuy Luong hadn’t collapsed in her best friend’s nail salon that May, 1994, nine years ago; Van was fi nishing her fi rst year at the University of Chicago and Linny was about to graduate from high school. At the hospital, the attending physician had been fairly sure that it was a stroke, rare for a forty-two-year-old, though they never knew for sure because Dinh Luong had refused an autopsy. She wouldn’t want it, he said, and the pronouncement gave a strange comfort to Van, made her think that in spite of all the arguments, her parents had known, after all, a river of intimacy. The fall after Mrs. Luong died, Linny started community college and moved into her own apartment, and their father returned to the upstairs part of the house for good.