30 Shine

“Mind, Wonders” by Ton'yah MaHogany Davis

We’re waiting in line for the mausoleum bathroom when Ba suddenly insists that we go find Mama in her perm shop. Audrey would say he didn’t “insist,” just “proposed,” because she’s majoring in English literature so she can make sure to never see us again, and because she hasn’t been home in a year. She forgets that Ba never insists on anything, so when he asks, looking at the ceiling, “Do you girls think we should find Mama?” you know he wants it bad.

“Good idea,” I say, stepping on Audrey’s sandal-bare toes to keep her from saying anything. She glares at me like, What are you doing, but I look right back at her like, So if you’re a student now, watch and learn.

She’s right, though. Ba has picked an impossible task: Hanoi Old Quarter bulges with hair salons, massage spas, trinket booths, arty cafes, spaces we understand only by studying their contents, not because we can read the signs. We’ll have to go up to every storefront and practically kiss the glass to find Mama.

We haven’t seen Mama since the security check line, where she tapped our guide Telly on the shoulder and asked whether she could just stay outside and take pictures.

“Of course, madam,” said Telly, without breaking his gentle stride, one eye on the white-suited guards who motioned us along. “Shall I take you back out of the line?”

“Don’t make trouble,” snapped Audrey. Mama flicked her eyes over to Audrey and then back to Telly, trotting to catch up.

“Yes, please,” Mama said—loudly, so we knew that she was inconveniencing Telly, and he was willing to be inconvenienced: Telly inclined his head blandly at her, took her arm, and ushered her out of the parade of mausoleum-goers.

Ba kept walking beside me as if nothing had happened. As soon as we’d gotten off the plane, I could tell that Ba wanted to reach for a graph paper notebook and continue his inventory of electronics parts he needed to order for his repairs, wanted to shrink from the unfamiliar city hurtling past the taxi window. Instead we ping-ponged from landmark to landmark in Telly’s sedan, Mama in the front seat deep in conversation with Telly, me in the middle, Audrey and Ba on either side of me. Ba’s eyes slid without purchase over every pagoda, church, and temple we visited; Audrey insisted on finding much to study in some unimportant piece of scaffolding, or signage, or sidewalk.

“Hands out of pockets,” a guard said to Ba, tapping a blue sign that also prohibited cameras, shorts above the knee, and speaking inside. Ba stiffened, took his hand from his pocket, threaded it loosely through my arm. We continued walking together through the roar of cool air at the mausoleum doorway without making the comment Audrey would have made, something like, “You’d think this guy was the Pope, the way they treat him.”

We began to ascend a large flight of red-carpeted stairs. Somehow Telly reappeared on our heels, climbing without breaking his stride. As we neared the top, Audrey whispered over her shoulder: “I hear it’s not even his real body.” She took a few more steps and said, “I hear they replaced it with—”

I put a finger to my lips but she shook her head. “No one can hear me.” A guard at the top of the staircase began to raise his hand.

“Madam, please,” said Telly, barely moving his mouth. He took Audrey’s elbow solicitously, gestured ahead with his other hand. “Let’s find your mother outside.”

Audrey looked at me like, Seriously? and I gave her a look that said You were talking, you go outside. She and Telly sped down the hallway, skirting past the other visitors in line, and skipping the embalmed body of Ho Chi Minh.

I wondered, as Ba and I continued on, whether I should have warned Telly that Audrey and Mama shouldn’t be left alone together. But perhaps he would have figured it out by now. “I am not a tour guide, but a guide,” is how he introduced himself. “A tour guide helps tourists take a picture and move on; a guide knows you, and you know them.”

And we were in front of the glass-cased body, and I was too afraid to raise my eyes much past his shoulders, and instead I studied his suit, once khaki, now a time-bleached beige, and I began to ease my eyes upwards, and we were quickly ushered past. I looked over my shoulder to try to get one last glimpse, but Ba, trailing slightly behind me, was in the way.

When we emerged from the mausoleum, the hot air draping upon us like a wet towel, we found Audrey standing at the rest point with her arms crossed, watching Mama and Telly wave from across the plaza.

“Don’t wait for me!” Audrey imitated Mama, high-pitched and frilly. “Telly will take me to find a perm salon.”

“It’s fine,” I said, watching Mama pause to take a photo of something—the guards, perhaps, or a panorama of the square. Her thin pink shirt stuck to her back in dark sweaty blooms.

“Oh, it’s fine?”

“Girls,” said Ba, vaguely, watching Telly wave down a taxi and open the door for Mama.

“I guess we go back to the hotel, then,” said Audrey.

“Can I go to the bathroom first?”

Audrey smirked. “Good luck.”

“Girls,” said Ba. His instinctive solution, the opposite of Audrey’s: reduce, retreat, reset.

That’s how we end up in the sluggish mausoleum bathroom line, where he thinks of another thing to do all together: finding Mama in her perm shop.

I can see Audrey hardening her lips against his request, so I widen my eyes at her like, Don’t you see that Ba is panicking because even on vacation she’s trying to run away?

“Okay, fine,” says Audrey, finally. She goes silent, narrows her eyes at me, but I can’t tell what she’s saying. The line for the women’s bathroom dwindles after five minutes that feel like twenty, and I, cursed with thirst and a tiny bladder, sidle into a stall, shirt over my nose, praying that my piss will run out before my lungs do.

***

How things actually work: it’s a Sunday morning in Richmond, BC, and your father can’t stop tinkering. He started fixing computers one day in 1988 and hasn’t stopped for twenty years, can’t fight the urge to wake up and glue some CPU fan to some hard drive. For every computer he fixes he earns $50, and that’s still not enough to keep the whole apartment room temperature in the winter, so he buys a space heater for you and your sister and an extra-heavy duvet for Mama. For his part, he works with his back against the wall that gets hot in their bedroom. (He says a badly-insulated pipe runs through there, from the pizza place downstairs.)

You and your sister Audrey used to play in their bedroom, imagining little cities on the motherboards, the three of you shimmied up against the hot wall and each other like a tray of buns, but you got over it. Now the two of you loll loose-limbed and nest-haired on the couch, a Simply Ming rerun burbling in the background. Your mother clacks around in the kitchen—whatever she’s doing, it apparently involves unstacking and restacking every plate and bowl your family owns. When Audrey is dead angry, she likes to say that Mama’s job is making herself feel busy.

Lunchtime comes and goes, and the only food in the house is the whole chicken on Ming Tsai’s cutting board. The kitchen sounds peter out, and in a few minutes you realize that Mama is standing over the two of you wearing this all-lips and no-eyes smile. From on your back looking up, her chin is sharp as a beak. She chirps that she’s going out, and you shouldn’t wait for her.

After she leaves, you and Audrey take bets to keep the dread at bay: manicure, pedicure, or hair? An outside shot: eyelash extensions? Eyebrow threading? Ming yields to a shopping channel and then the local news.

You’re not waiting but the wait balloons. You hear Ba shuffling to the bathroom and back to his office, and you bring him crackers and a pot of tea because he won’t remember to feed himself and he won’t eat anything that seems expensive. You don’t yet understand that you scorn the pristine finish of Mama’s hair, skin, nails specifically because of how proudly Ba wears his worn-through sweater every day, how Audrey idolizes him for it and as a result sees Mama as a dazzling vampire that sucks life from your father, chaining him to a pyre of hard disk drives, using his sweat to paint herself younger and younger. An image you don’t question until years later when Audrey reveals that Mama had once invited the two of you along; Audrey says that she refused out of respect for Ba.

“Where’s Mama?” Ba asks, as you hand him the tray of crackers, and you shrug. He scratches his head and ultimately turns back to the bare circuitry in front of him.

If you had to guess, you would say that Mama’s heart sinks every time she steps over the threshold of the apartment and remembers that the three of you still exist. Whereas Audrey spends her free time crafting barbs to hurl at Mama as soon as keys jangle at the lock. Audrey’s sly with words even at thirteen.

For example: “We were just thinking that you should get a manicure instead of helping with rent.”

Or: “The hairdresser didn’t ask where you got all that money?”

Or: “Who are you even dressing up for?”

Audrey is lucky that Mama is too glamorous to strike a child. Instead, Mama twists her red, contoured lips, spits a list of revenges: she’ll send Audrey to jail, she’ll burn Audrey’s books, she’ll make sure no one ever speaks to Audrey again. A black ringlet trembles against Mama’s cheek, a live wire that somehow doesn’t fray. You and Audrey both inherited this hair, so slippery-smooth that it’s constantly escaping from behind your ears. But unlike Mama, you carry a bit of Ba: your nails bulge a bit at the base; your skin is kid-soft but vaguely dull from summers spent watching daytime Dr. Phil.

Eventually Ba emerges from his office because their argument is disrupting his repairs. His big toes strain out from the tips of his socks. He asks Mama to please stop, that a salon visit once in a while is fine, but too much can be too much; he tells Audrey that she doesn’t need to worry about money, that he will instead. He inches cautiously between Mama and Audrey, and you hold your breath until Mama pushes past him and flutters down the hallway to their bedroom.

Years pass and eventually Audrey doesn’t even need to say anything when Mama walks in the door. Just a weary glance, and sometimes the lack thereof, sends Mama into a furor. “You are an evil child,” Mama accuses, because it’s easier to say than the alternative. By the time Audrey graduates high school Mama returns from her beauty-trips with a retort loaded in her throat, skin glassy, hair shimmering, lips glossed. As they argue you’re afraid it’ll all slide right off her head, revealing a gaunt specter with fangs.

***

We’ve only walked a few blocks through the Old Quarter, pressed our faces up against a few clothing and tailoring boutiques, before Audrey insists that we stop at a cafe. She steers us to one with a wooden slab of a door and a sun-dried flower box outside, half dirt and half brittle stems. Ba lingers on the sidewalk, gazing further down the street.

“Coffee is a diuretic,” I complain, even as she holds open the cafe door and urges us into the roast-scented vestibule. The most luminous spot inside is the mostly empty bakery case, whose crumbs and deflated croissants are spotlit by yellow fluorescents; shadows shroud the dining area.

“So don’t drink it,” she says. “I want to experience Vietnamese culture.”  Ba wanders his eyes up the staircase in the back of the cafe, then straight back out the door.

“Right, the culture,” I say. “How do you say iced coffee in Vietnamese, by the way?”

“Probably just iced coffee,” she says, poking me in the back. “Come on, I’ll pay.”

It’s the code we know: money makes the rules. The code that makes Ba the unchallenged king of the house, and the code that Mama flouts, that we punish her for breaking. Ba and I sit down on a lacquered wooden bench with flat blue cushions tied like saddles across its length. He pulls a small tulip table towards us while Audrey shifts from foot to foot in front of the counter, wallet in hand.

She has some campus job now—campus tour guide, actually, she told Telly in the car earlier. “And if I forget a fact,” she said, teasingly, “I just make it up.”

Which filled me with something hotter than envy. It is entirely like Audrey to fly past facts whereas I am consumed with pinning them to a spreading board before they molt into something unrecognizable. Example: when I was seven, I didn’t shit for 4 days at a school sleepaway camp because I was scared of the muddy camp bathrooms. When Audrey found out, she dragged me to the bathroom at 6am, right after the camp staff had swept the floors, lined a path to the first stall with toilet paper, and stood sentry outside the door until I was done. While washing my hands at the spigot outside, I watched her gather mounds of toilet paper over her arms and shoulders, studiously fold 5-piece segments into rectangles, and flush them down. The sunrise gilded the paper, the doorway, her flyaway hair. 

The next day, I knocked on the slats of her top bunk. “I need to go again,” I whispered.

“So go,” she said, sleepily. “You don’t need my help.”

But I did, so I couldn’t; she remembered it all wrong. She had unspooled the toilet paper, not me; and she had origamied it down the toilet, not me. I returned home, in a rush, with a dark ache in my gut.

***

Something else Audrey and I disagree on: she once speculated that Ba and Ma were only together because Ba felt guilty. “He thinks he owes her for lying,” she explained, her voice gravelly over the phone. The persistent ghoul of Ba’s unpaid debts: medical bills, from when his mother died, some placement fee he’d paid to an immigration kingpin who guaranteed his safe passage to Canada. Both of which he revealed to Mama only after they married, after she’d already plotted out a life of studying together during the day, relaxing in the evening, a dinner party every other weekend. They’d decided that Ba would finish his engineering degree first while Mama worked double shifts at a diner, and then eventually, someday, they would switch.

“He doesn’t think that,” I said reflexively. “Ba is with Mama because they’re loyal to each other.” Privately I wondered whether Mama still wanted to go back to school, and was reminded of something she’d say while tying my pigtails: they don’t have to be perfectly even, just not so lopsided that one can boss the other around. I pictured Audrey in her fifth-floor dormitory, receiver dangling loosely between her cheek and shoulder, feet propped up on the desk.

“Loyal, what loyal,” she laughed, her cackle traveling thousands of miles to shake me. “Who stays if they can find something better?” 

This was after Mama found out that Ba had taken out another loan to send Audrey to college. She went out for almost the entire day. I assumed it was the salon, but she had returned completely undecorated, sallow-faced, and instead asked Baba for a luxurious vacation for Christmas.

“Somewhere beautiful,” Mama said silkily, seeing Ba open his mouth to suggest some mediocre local destination, Granville Island or Victoria or Vancouver. “And far away. Somewhere like Korea, or Thailand.” Luckily, we’d already dropped Audrey off at the airport the day before, Toronto-bound, or else she’d already have inserted herself.

So Ba was on his own. “Mama, please be reasonable, we don’t have that kind of money,” he said, fidgeting with one of the worn elbows of his dark green sweater.

“Vietnam.” Reverent, urgent, like she’d just invented the country. “The girls at Golden Lotus miss Vietnam. They tell me all sorts of lovely things about it. Let’s go there.”

Ba looked at the floor. I knew he wanted to tiptoe away and hope that this version of Mama would burn itself out like a star; Audrey, too, would have tried to smother this new mania. Only I knew that in this mood, Mama would never let go. Any attempt to bar her from extravagance would just further convince her that she deserved to have it. The silence stretched for ten seconds and then snapped.

“Are you mentally disabled?” Mama said, her voice heavy like an unwrung towel. “You spend and spend on your daughters, without even a single cent for me?”

Ba stopped blinking, breathing, as if caught by a searchlight.

Mama stepped closer, her lips nearly brushing his cheek. “What kind of a husband are you?” she asked.

I couldn’t bring myself to watch the rest, even though I worried that if I left, no one would keep an accurate account of the fight. I just slunk out of the room and listened from against the hot wall. Ba estimated that he would need to fix 150 computers to afford the vacation. (I’d watched, earlier that day, some news about American banks, a montage of foreclosure signs, screens with red lines and sliding numbers, so I guessed he was underestimating even then.) Ma’s faux-candied voice telling him that he was a coward, spineless, lazy. Pushing each word across as if she was counting him loose change across a table.

I called Audrey that night, five times in a row, but Audrey didn’t call back until a few weeks later, which is when I gave her the recap, flight details, and itinerary, and she told me her Ba-feels-guilty theory.

“But still, he shouldn’t waste his money, he didn’t have to do that,” she concluded, outraged. As if she could conjure, from miles away, some solution that wasn’t this.

***

Audrey sets in front of us three “cà phê sữa đá” (she says this loudly and turns to give the barista a thumbs up) and pulls up a stool to sit across from us. Ba sizes up the brimming cups, calculating how long it will take the scalding liquid to cool to a gulpable temperature that would allow us to continue our search. Evidently Audrey can too, because she pulls on her dramatic eyes, her serious mouth.

“Ba, when I graduate, you should stop working,” she says, reaching across the table to grasp his hand in hers. “I’ll support the family.”

“What?” I almost snort a sip of coffee through my nose. “Aren’t you studying literature?”

Audrey withdraws one hand and shields the right side of her face, blinkering me out. “It doesn’t matter what I study, I’ll work hard enough so that you can stop fixing computers.”

Ba shakes his head. “Debts grow and grow,” he says, blowing on his coffee. “And anyway, if I wasn’t working, what would I do?”

Audrey raises her eyebrows at me like, Date around, probably, and I raise mine to say, You have no idea what you’re talking about.

“Relax, probably,” says Audrey, neutrally, resting her chin on her palm. “Get away from it all.”

“From what?” he asks.

Audrey’s eyes widen but she doesn’t have time to blurt anything because Telly comes down the stairs carrying an empty mug and a pastry-flaked saucer. I force my face into a smile as he approaches from across the room. 

“I thought it was you,” Telly says, grinning and spreading his arms in welcome. “Audrey, Celine. Mr. Cheung. You’re finding the city nice?”

“Yes,” says Audrey, flashing him a smile even though I know that she’s already forgotten his name. “Trying a Vietnamese specialty, ca phe sua da.” (She pronounces it differently this time.)

“Ah, ice coffee,” says Telly, kindly. “Delicious.”

Ba clears his throat, eyes trained on the tabletop. “Thank you—sorry—sir, which salon has my wife gone to?”

Telly claps a palm to his forehead. “I forgot you didn’t know!” he says. “30 Shine. Very nice salon chain. Extremely quick service, skillful technicians. Not too far from here. She should be almost done.”

He shows us on a map: a thirty minute walk. I repeat the streets and turns to myself until they beat against my teeth on their own. Telly keeps trying to explain other, more scenic routes that will take us by the lake or the Ta Hien Beer Street, but I tell him that we won’t need them.

“We’re not really a ‘see where things take us,’ family,” I say, which makes Telly laugh. “We stick to the script.”

“Only sometimes,” says Audrey, narrowing her eyes at me. “Only some of us.”

“Thank you so much,” says Ba, standing abruptly. He stiffly extends a hand to shake Telly’s, who clasps it with both of his own.

“Of course,” Telly says, inclining his head slightly. “I’m happy to show you around.” He shakes our hands, gives me a business card. “Anytime you are back in Hanoi.”

He leaves first, and we give him some time to disappear down the block before we get up as well, stacking our empty glasses in a plastic tub. I wonder, as Ba holds the door for me, what Telly thinks of this family that argued in whispers over most of his explanations. We are, I’m sure, the exact tourists that he despises, who are in Hanoi to take exactly one photo of each landmark, with us in frame, smiling, collecting evidence of having once been the people in the picture.

***

The salon is empty of all patrons once we get there. A woman perches like an apostrophe on a green plastic stool in the back, reading the news, but once we shake our heads confirming that we don’t need a haircut, she shakes the newspaper upright again and continues reading.

“Is this the wrong one?” asks Ba. I frantically retrace our steps in my mind.

“Definitely not,” Audrey says.

“She’ll be nearby,” I say, surveying one side of the street, then scanning the opposite direction. “She probably found somewhere to wait for us.”

“Definitely not,” Audrey says, and of course she’s right. We cast our eyes around half-heartedly; bikes stream past, sidewalks seethe with tour groups.

“I should have peed at the cafe,” I mutter, and Audrey laughs.

“Yeah, right,” she says. “You would hate that.”

I blink at her reference, but she’s not looking at me anymore, craning her neck to look through the next street. Ba looks more lost than before, staring expressionlessly at the white-bright 30 Shine marquee. I realize that he probably can’t tell a salon from a cafe; he’s never accompanied Mama to any of her appointments, barely looks up when she comes back sparkling.

Audrey and I went with her once, accidentally. She’d forgotten that we were in the backseat on our way to school, pulled into a strip mall, and parked the car right in front of Golden Lotus, swinging her legs out and slamming the car door behind her. Audrey and I watched her from our backseat theatre as she chatted animatedly with the nail technician who bent studiously over her feathered fingers.

“Do you think that she’d want these people to do her funeral nails?” mused Audrey, as Mama tossed back her head in laughter, “or do you think she’d be over the illusion of being rich by then?”

“Neither, maybe” I lied, realizing with a jolt that Audrey must think often about a time after Mama. “I think she would want us to paint them.”

Audrey rolled her eyes and slid further down in her seat. “Okay, sure.”

When Mama emerged, she stopped short at the sight of us, our heads popping out over the console like two scrawny mushrooms. As if she had hoped that we’d disappeared; as if the manicure had failed to turn her into a completely different person with a life free of burdens.

“You forgot us,” said Audrey when Mama opened the door, even though I gripped Audrey’s arm so hard it was spangled with purple the next day.

“Don’t talk to me like that,” said Mama, her voice a blade.

“Like what?”

Mama tilted her head, pretending to think. Inside the Golden Lotus, Mama’s nail technician craned her neck to see if we were having car trouble. Mama smiled her away and turned back to Audrey.

“Get out.”

Audrey didn’t move.

“Get out of my car,” said Mama, a coiled laugh hiding beneath her words.

“Your car, you didn’t even buy it,” said Audrey, but I could hear she was finally scared. Mama wrenched open the back door and leveled a red nail an inch from Audrey’s chest. Audrey slipped out of her seat and behind the wing of the door, slowly stepping out of its protective cover as Mama beckoned her.

“Don’t recognize anything, right?” said Mama softly, and then she reached behind Audrey to shut the door with a gentle thump, got into the car, and thumped shut her own.

I recognized everything, of course. By then I’d memorized every turn on the route. But Audrey read in the car, she played with her hair, she whispered jokes to me; she wouldn’t know the way home.

Later that night, as we lay head-to-toe in our bed, Audrey explained that she’d called 911 from the salon’s phone. A police officer drove her home in the back of the cruiser and dropped her off, and she’d called the school, impersonating Mama, telling them that Audrey was home sick and to please tell her sister Celine to take the bus home.

“The police?” I said. “Why didn’t you just call Ba?”

Hesitating: “I was going to see if they would arrest her.”

“Why?” I asked. My legs tingled with dread.

She hummed as if she was trying to figure out how much to tell me. “No one else is doing anything about her.”

I remember considering these words, not understanding what it meant to do something “about” Mama. Mama was Mama. We were us. If we dumped garlic and silver glitter over her head, if she was revealed to be a beautiful princess, something in us might disappear too. If we found her in a plush salon chair, saw her reflection in one of those vanity mirrors framed with naked lightbulbs, stared her right in the face for a minute before gasping, realizing that it was her, more beautiful than we’d ever seen, would she know us? Would she change her mind about it all, tell Audrey she’s smart and brave and tell me that I can stop memorizing every Nancy Drew detail? Or would she stand up in a diamond-cut rage, heated curlers clacking from her hair, toes splayed by foam separators and still sticky with polish, and call the police to come take her hunters away? She might disco in the blue and red flashing lights, the siren in the background.

“I guess Mama is doing something about Mama,” I said.

Audrey turned over impatiently, flapping the duvet, and I wondered if I should take it back. 

“Why didn’t you say anything?” she whispered.

I inhaled slowly, exhaled deeply, so she’d think I was asleep, so I wouldn’t have to explain that the mess scared me, that dirt indicated possible decay, that I was waiting, as always, for someone to lay down a pristine white carpet to light the path, to show me a blameless way to act.

***

Dream of this: You say, “Mama, stop.” Or, you say, “Give her another chance, she’ll say sorry.” Or you leave the school dropoff zone once you are dropped-off, and sneak out to Golden Lotus. Or you reach over Mama’s shoulder and you jerk the steering wheel to the right so she U-turns right back into the Golden Lotus parking lot. Or you jump out of the car and stand in front of it before Mama can start driving, telling Mama that she’ll have to run you over before she abandons Audrey like this. Or you open the car door as Mama barrels out of the Golden Lotus parking lot, somersaulting over to your sister like the spies in the movies. You barely scrape your elbow, and the wound is in the shape of a heart. You clasp Audrey by the shoulders and she swats at your head for drawing blood, like a total amateur. She already knows the way back home.

***

We walk for only a minute before passing a store with stacks of Vietnamese propaganda art printed on cardstock, and Audrey darts in to take a look. She’s probably looking for something to hang up in her dorm, because the posters say things like Firmly Grasping Gun to Safeguard the Revolution’s Results, Nixon Must Pay for Our Blood With His Blood, Vietnamese People Will Certainly Get Victory, if we are to believe their translations.

Ba pretends to be interested in the artwork because she is. He watches her reach to pay for a poster with a neat fan of plasticky notes. She drops the change into her back pocket without even counting it, turns to face us. “I’m going to bed.”

“You can’t,” I say automatically, even as she starts exiting the shop, sidling between the boxes of posters. 

“We’re not going to find her,” she says over her shoulder. I follow her as far as the doorway of the store because Ba hasn’t moved yet. “She’ll come back if she wants. You guys should come back too.”

“We can’t just leave her!”

Audrey stares at me. Like when I begged her not to go to college and to stay home with us. Like when I tell her that she can be the bigger person, that not every conversation with Mama has to be a fight. The corner of her mouth twitches as if she’s considering a response, but instead she turns on her heel, saunters away from us at a studiously casual pace. Under her arm, a poster—“Peace Not War,” reads the translation card—and despite everything, I want to laugh, I want to tell her, We all have our fantasies.

***

When Audrey moved away, I started on memorizing Mama, not because I needed to keep her the same way I needed to keep Audrey, but in case I was ever sitting in a police station filing a missing persons report for Ba, who would be unmoored if Mama never returned; or for Audrey, who would want justice and retribution. “No, she wouldn’t have lingered in the dairy aisle, because she says the stale refrigerated air makes her hair brittle,” I would say. Or: “No, she wouldn’t have left any fingerprints in the kitchen, she wears gloves when she washes dishes, else the soap will dry out her skin.” Or: “She might be at the salon, or she might be anywhere else; no one goes with her to the laundry room, or the kitchen, or the grocery store.”

But with Audrey gone, I kept mixing up the details, losing my spot as the neutral center. I let Audrey’s eyes tint mine: Mama defies reasoning. Mama is cruel to be cruel. Mama would be better off gone. Is she on vacation with us because she wants to be, or because anything is better than being with us at home? Is her hair sandwiched in highlight foil because she wants revenge on Ba or because she is trying to be someone she recognizes? I hear it’s not even her real body, that she swapped with a monster a long time ago. I fight Audrey’s voice, but the surveillance photographs muddle and blur.

“Ma’am,” the police chief would say, flipping closed a folder of evidence. “We can’t help you with this.”

Ba would murmur wild theories in his panic, like, “Maybe she went back to Hong Kong?” or “Maybe she ran out of gas on the highway?” But I would remind him that she wouldn’t have gone far, that she depends on him for everything, that she must be somewhere where she can be someone else but come back soon, a salon or a massage parlor or a spa, just let me think where someone like her would go. I would call Audrey on the police phone so she could help me brainstorm. I would call and call.

***

Ba leans quietly against the doorway of the poster shop, tracking Audrey down the sidewalk until she disappears into the throng.

“She’ll wait for us at the hotel,” I say, my throat knuckling, my bladder throbbing. “Can we find a bathroom first?”

I can see by his blank expression that he doesn’t want to say yes, can’t understand how we could further delay our search for Mama, and now Audrey. But he follows me, uncomplaining, into a cafe where I buy a bottle of water without bothering to use the proper word.

“Bathroom?” I say, wincing at my manners, and the cashier points without looking to the back of a long, poster-lined hallway. Ba trails patiently behind me, taking the bottle from me without my asking.

The door is locked; there is someone inside already. I cross my legs and set my lips, and Ba tucks a hand in the crook of my elbow. The poster in front of us reads, “VISIT HA LONG BAY, NORTHEAST VIETNAM.” Clods of tree-clad rock float in the turquoise cove.

“I would love to go there,” Ba says. “Looks like paradise.”

“That’s probably not how it looks in real life,” I say, surprised at his adventurous sentiment. I wonder whether Audrey will walk or just take a taxi. She has her own money now, after all; she can shape the world as she likes. “It’s all photoshop.”

“That’s fine,” he says. “I’ll see what they want me to see.”

The door swings open, a young man exits, and it is my turn.

***

It’s cleaner than I imagined. The floor is dry, the trash can is lidded. The mirror has been polished recently. I walk on my tiptoes as much as possible and line the seat with two layers of toilet paper and hover myself over the toilet. The overhead light is dim and white and strobing  so that my legs appear to quiver.

“You’re not really touching any of this if you think about it,” Audrey said to me at camp, through a gap in the splintery wooden stall. “Even without the toilet paper, your shoes are touching the ground, and your socks are in your shoes, then your feet.”

“But my butt is almost on the toilet,” I said. “There’s nothing between me and the seat.”

She thought for a moment. “Well, there’s your skin, and then your meat, and then your bones, and then whatever’s inside your bones.”

“I don’t want it to touch my skin.”

“Okay, so stand on the toilet or something.”

“Gross,” I said. How to explain to her that I would pay hundreds of Ba’s dollars for a pristine bathroom, one that I was the first to use, ever; and if not that, our home toilet. My preferences: no dirt, and if any, then familiar dirt. It was, I was certain, how everyone else experienced the world, and it was only Audrey who insisted on making aliens of family, and finding comfort in the unfamiliar.

Now, as I pull up my pants, flush with one finger shrouded in a paper towel (touching skin, touching meat, touching bone), lather my hands with soap, I think of Audrey in our hotel. I wonder whether she is waiting for us, coiled at the door, ready to pounce. What I fear she will say to me coming back in: I pave your every path, and you spend your time on Mama, Ba, peacekeeping when you could be taking my side? Who taught you to use a public toilet? Who put an extra layer between you and the world?

I would shake my head at her like That’s not how this works. And she would sneer like Loyal, what loyal. Who stays—

I splash cold water on my face, dab it off with a paper towel.

***

When I come back out of the bathroom, I don’t see Ba sitting at any of the cafe tables. Rushing out the swinging door, I burst into a crowded stream of pedestrians who part around me as if I am an inanimate obstacle. I flatten myself against the flower box and dredge my phone from my backpack, but I’m not sure who I should call: Mama, with her head fresh out of a dryer dome, wandering the streets free and lovely. Ba, who is probably too preoccupied with his singular task to notice anything, and certainly would not have returned to the hotel without Mama anyway. Audrey, who’ll order me to just come back, that I shouldn’t even be searching, what’s the use anyway? I fume, eyes prickling, at the unfairness of looking for all of them while none of them are looking for me.

Telly knows where Mama is, I think, stupidly, fumbling for his business card, wondering in a haze whether I should also call the police. The dial tone drones vigorously until his recorded voice greets me in Vietnamese and presumably asks me to leave a message. “Telly, hi, Celine, if you—if this is okay,” I say, and I can already hear Audrey mocking me, squeaky and dumb as a mouse. “Where is—”

There are so many things that I could be looking for. A dusty computer repair shop; another 30 Shine; a straight path back to the hotel, Ha Long Bay. I could reveal my entire archive of Ba or Mama or Audrey and it wouldn’t conjure a single whole person, couldn’t fill a wanted poster with a coherent picture, couldn’t reconcile how they wanted to be seen. And what would Telly know? “Madam,” he would say, pushing my shaky photographs back across the table. “I don’t know you, I don’t know these people.” I take the photos, stammering, and describe the family I seek.

A man with narrow shoulders, a threadbare sweater, with his face upturned in the glow of a storefront, his glasses washed white by the lights inside. His hands are interlaced behind his back; he smiles at what he sees.

A woman with tight curls, with day-after-perm tension and spring, that with some time will mellow into waves. Her wet fingertips glisten from across the table, a smooth coat of pink on each; I hold the jar of polish and the brush. 

A girl, arms crossed and jaw set, the same pinched and defiant face I watched shrinking through the rear window on my way to school. She swathes herself in toilet paper, in a college degree, and in skin and meat and bone. She backs away slowly, lifts her chin at me like Time to go. So I walk towards her, and then I run.

About the author

Anita Lo lives in New York City. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. 

about the artist

Ton'yah MaHogany Davis is a painter, both pleased and obsessed with color. She started as a portraitist who worked exclusively with graphite but took the leap in 2015 into acrylic work. Davis first struggled with rendering and blending, which made her fearful that her drawing skills would never transfer, but she decided that practice would be her best friend. For 10 years, she's applied self-actualized knowledge, best practices from art classes under her Fine Arts degree, and experimentation to become the painter she's proud of today. In true Sagittarian fashion, Davis is not satisfied. She's challenged herself to explore and explain her identity in her work and grossly improve on her technical skills. She is also finding she wants more community and collaboration, and so she relishes in the idea of painting to friends' music or poetry.