Betrayals. Carla Neggers

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      She stared out the window, refusing to look at her father. She had been reading books and renting videotapes about the Vietnam War and the country of her birth, even trying to learn some Vietnamese. Her father told her it was normal to be confused at fourteen, urged her to concentrate just on being herself. But who was that? Sometimes she didn’t know. And sometimes she hated herself for not being satisfied when so many other Amerasians suffered prejudice, cruelty and extreme poverty. They had never slept in a decent bed or felt the safety and security she took for granted. Sometimes she hated herself for not being more satisfied. She was so lucky. Why did she want more?

      “Are you even going to tell me where you’re going?” she asked.

      Jared hesitated, not knowing what to say to his daughter. He hadn’t since The Score had come out and she’d seen the picture of Rebecca, him and herself as an infant. Then the man who had shot him and left him for dead in Saigon had shown up on his doorstep, and that changed everything. Initially Jared hadn’t recognized the scarred face, but then he saw the shock of white hair and the deadness of his soft brown eyes. And he’d remembered. Screams, pain, grief, his own paralyzing fear on that hot, tragic and violent night fourteen years ago in Saigon, when he’d lost Tam…and Rebecca.

      He wasn’t going to lose Mai.

      Finally, he told her, “I’m going to Boston.”

      She whipped around. “Boston! But Dad—”

      “Not a word, Mai. You’re not coming with me. Be glad I’ve told you anything at all.”

      He could see her restraining herself from the fit she might have thrown a year ago, but she was maturing. She pulled in her lower lip and turned back to the window. She had wanted to go to Boston for years. It was the city where the Winstons had lived for generations, and where her father had grown up. And it was where he had taken her, so briefly, after their escape from Saigon. Jared tried to understand. She felt a part of her was in Boston where her father had grown up, and in Saigon, where her mother had lived and Mai herself had been born. But these were places she couldn’t get to on her own. And Jared refused to take her.

      “Are you going to see Rebecca Blackburn?” she asked.

      Not if he could help it. Or, he was positive, if she could. The hardest he’d laughed in years was when he saw the 60 Minutes piece on Junk Mind and found out Rebecca Blackburn was rolling in money. Served her right, reverse snob she’d always been. But he hated how much he’d hurt her, and seeing her again would only dredge up all that old pain.

      He told his daughter, “I doubt it.”

      He had never told Mai about Rebecca’s role in getting them both out of Saigon, nor about the famous photograph of them. She had cursed and screamed at him when he’d showed it to her in The Score, and he hadn’t resented her anger. He’d have been angry, too. Rebecca, he’d explained inadequately, had been a friend.

      “Then who are you going to see?” his daughter asked.

      “Mai—cut me some slack, all right? We’ll talk another time. I promise. But not right now.”

      “I just…”

      “I know, kid.”

      He parked in front of his father’s house and gathered her into his arms, wanting to hold her forever, knowing he couldn’t. “You mean everything to me, Mai,” he said. “I’m not doing this to hurt you.”

      “I trust you, Dad. You know that.”

      “Good. Then sit tight and let Granddad spoil you for a few days. I’ll call you. And I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

      She tried to smile. “Okay.”

      “Now go on.”

      “Aren’t you coming in?”

      He shook his head. If Mai couldn’t wrangle an explanation out of him, Wesley Sloan just might. His daughter seemed to understand his reluctance, and she hugged him, made him promise again to call, grabbed her satchel and jumped out of the car. He watched her until she turned back at the front door and waved goodbye. He waved back, until finally she disappeared inside.

      He headed out of the quiet hills of Tiberon back down to the Golden Gate Bridge and up to Russian Hill, where his house was quiet and lonely without Mai. With grim efficiency, he cleaned and loaded the gun he’d often prayed he’d never have to use. And he sat in his front room, with its fantastic view of San Francisco Bay, and watched the fog swirl in, half wishing the white-haired man would come back. If Mai hadn’t been there, Jared didn’t know what he’d have done, but he’d lived the last fourteen years so that 1975 didn’t have to be her pain, as well.

      He clenched his teeth. “It’s not going to be.”

      But it already was, he realized, and pushed the heavy thought aside.

      The next available flight to Boston left at 8:37 a.m.

      He’d be on it.

      Eight

      Rebecca decided not to return to her studio after her conversation with her grandfather, and retreated to her room on the third floor, overlooking pretty tree-lined West Cedar Street. She had thought she’d never see the day she became one of Thomas Blackburn’s boarders. He’d started taking them in years ago, foreign students mostly. He charged them modest rents in exchange for a furnished room, a shared bath, and parlor and kitchen privileges, and he encouraged them to invite him to dinner when they were cooking something interesting and to discuss politics whenever they pleased. His current crop of boarders included a Nigerian doctoral candidate in economics, a Greek medical student, two Chinese physics students and Rebecca, who could have afforded to renovate the Beacon Hill house with its ancient plumbing and tattered drapes and upholstery and put them all up in decent apartments. But her grandfather and the boarders had their pride, and she didn’t see any need to spend money renting a proper apartment in the city with among the nation’s highest rents when she could stay with family, until she figured out if Boston was where she wanted to be.

      The silver light of late afternoon angled through the paned window, and Rebecca pulled up an antique Windsor chair, in need of repair, and stared down at the street. Her grandfather had put her in her old bedroom, with the twin bed she’d had as a child, the marble-topped dresser with its puppy-chewed leg, the worn Persian carpet Eliza Blackburn supposedly had had shipped from Canton in 1798. Thomas had insisted upon the valuable carpet remaining in the upstairs bedroom, where it always had been; Eliza, he’d said, had been a practical woman and had intended her furnishings be used. Rebecca had quoted his words back to him when she’d spilled tempera paint on the carpet. She could still see the faded red and yellow stains. Her own furniture and things were either in storage or up at the old lighthouse she’d bought on an island off the coast of Maine. When the rest of the small, uninhabited island had gone up for sale, she’d bought it, too. She liked owning land, knowing she had places she could go pitch a tent.

      She felt unsettled and raw. Looking at the quiet street, she could see herself at seven leaning out the window and nailing twelve-year-old Jared with her squirt gun for harassing her. “You’ll fall, you idiot,” he’d yelled, and she’d laughed and got him again.

      She heard the telephone ringing downstairs. Then there was a quiet knock on the door. “Rebecca?” СКАЧАТЬ