The Boat

THE STORM CAME ON QUICKLY. The crosswind surged in, filtering through the apertures in the rotten wood, sounding like a chorus of low moans. The boat began to rock. Hugging a beam at the top of the hatch, Mai looked out and her breath stopped: the boat had heeled so steeply that all she saw was an enormous wall of black-green water bearing down; she shut her eyes, opened them again – now the gunwale had crested the water – the ocean completely vanished-and it was as though they were soaring through the air, the sky around them dark and inky and shifting.

A body collided into hers, slammed her against the side of the hatch door. The boat righted and she slipped again, skidding in jets of water down the companionway. The hatch banged shut. Other bodies – she was on top of them – thighs and ribs and arms and heads-jammed this way and that with each groaning tilt, writhing toward space as though impelling the boat to heave to, back into the wind. The rocking got worse. Light was failing fast now and inside the hold it had become uncannily dim.

Inches away from Mai's face, a cross-legged man tipped forward, coughed once into his hands, then keeled back onto his elbows. His face was expressionless. When the smell arrived she realized he had vomited. In the swaying half dark, people pitched forward and back, one by one, adding to the slosh of salt- water and urine in the bilge. People threw up in plastic bags, which they then passed on, hand to hand, until the parcel reached someone next to a scupper.

"Here."

Mai pinched the bag, tried to squeeze it out through the draining slit, but her fingers lost their hold as the boat bucked. The thin yellow juice sprayed into her lap.

On the steps below her, an infant started crying: short choking bursts.

Instantly she looked for Truong – there he was, knees drawn up to his chin, face as smooth and impassive as that of a ceramic toy soldier. Their eyes met. Nothing she could do. He was wedged between an older couple at the bottom of the steps. Where was Quyen? She shook off the automatic anxiety.

Finally the storm arrived in force. The remaining light drained out of the hold. Wind screamed through the cracks. She felt the panicked limbs, people clawing for direction, sudden slaps of ice-cold water, the banging and shapeless shouts from the deck above. The whole world reeled. Everywhere the stink of vomit. Her stomach forced up, squashed through her throat. So this was what it was like, she thought, the moment before death.

She closed her eyes, swallowed compulsively; tried to close out the crawling blackness, the howl of the wind. She tried to recall her father's stories – storms at sea, waves ten, fifteen meters high! – but they rang shallow against what she'd just seen: those dense roaring slabs of water, sky churning overhead like a puddle being mucked with a stick. She was crammed in by a boatload of human bodies, thinking of her father and becoming overwhelmed, slowly, with loneliness. As much loneliness as fear. Concentrate, she told herself. And she did – forcing herself to concentrate, if not – if she was unable to – on the thought of her family, then on the contact of flesh pressed against her on every side, the human warmth, feeling every square inch of skin against her body and through it the shared consciousness of –  what? Death? Fear? Surrender? She stayed in that human cocoon, heaving and rolling, concentrating, until it was over.

***

She opened her eyes. A procession of people stepping over her, measuredly, as though hypnotized, up the companionway and onto the deck. She got up and followed them.

The night sky was starless. Only moonlight illuminated everything, emanating from a moon low and yellow and pocked, larger than she had ever seen it before. Its surface appeared to her as clear and as close as the ridges of a mountain from a valley. Pearly light bathed the stunned and salt-specked faces of the hundred people on deck, all of whom had expected to die but were instead granted this eery reprieve.

Nobody talked. Night, empty of sound, held every soul in thrall – the retching, the complaint of babies, the nervous breathings, now all muted. The world seemed alien, somehow beyond the reach of Mai's mind – to be beneath the giant moon, and have nothing but space, and silence, all around.

A fog rolled over the water.

Mai looked sternward and saw Quyen slumped, arms outstretched, collapsed to one knee. Her head lolled against her left shoulder. Her forearms were bleeding from rope burn – she must have been stranded on deck when the storm came in; someone had strapped her, spread-eagled, to a low horizontal spar, and saved her life.

Mai searched for Truong.

From below deck there now came a humming of prayer. Then someone gasped-Mai swung to find a face, then several, turning pale, hands to mouths beneath stupefied eyes.

"Do you hear?"

"What is it?"

"Be quiet! Be quiet!" an urgent voice commanded. "Listen."

But when the noise on the boat ceased, there still came from every direction the sound of people whispering, hundreds of people, thousands, the musical fall and rise of their native tongue. Barely intelligible. Sometimes right next to Mai's ear and she would whip around – but there would be nothing except the close, gray fog.

In a whisper, "It's nothing-the wind, that's all."

"Who's there?" someone demanded loudly, unsteadily, from the prow.

No answer, just the lapping of low murmurs.

On the foredeck, a man turned to his companion.

"Here?"

The second man nodded. Beneath the moonlight Mai recognized him. It was Anh Phuoc, the leader of the boat. He was, Quyen had told her, one of those mythic figures who'd already made his escape and yet returned, again and again, to help others.

He nodded and looked out into the haze.

And now she realized where they were – where they must be. Everyone had heard about these places. They had ventured into the fields of the dead, those plots of ocean where thousands had capsized with their scows and drowned. They stared into the fog. All drawn into a shared imagination, each in some space of unthinking as though they had leapt overboard, some madness possessing them, puncturing the glassy surface of the water and then plunged into black syrup, coming up into breath but panicked, disoriented, flailing in a viscid space without reference or light or sound.

"Try to sleep."

It was Quyen; she had untangled herself from her station and crawled forward. Mai turned to her, then looked away. There was a sort of death in her face.

 "I saw Truong, down – " Mai began, then saw that he had appeared silently behind his mother. He stood close by Quyen without touching her. For a moment Mai was seized with a desire to take the boy up and press him hard against her chest, to keep him-his stillness, self-containment, whatever it was about him – close to her. But she, too, was contained, and didn't move. She began to smell incense from the hold. People praying to their ancestors. It lightened her head. A dim thought struggled, stabilized, in her mind – maybe the voices on the water were those of their ancestors. Maybe, she thought, they were answering their prayers. What did they know? What were they so desperate to communicate?

"It's over now."

She let herself pretend Quyen was speaking to her and not to Truong.

"The storm's over, Child. Try to sleep."

Mai submitted, and when she closed her eyes, knowing they were both beside her, she found the hum of the phantom voices almost lulling – almost like the wash, when she dozed off, of a monsoon starting, or a wedding, dim-sounding on distant midday streets. A sea wind bearing men's voices up from the wharf. At times she thought she almost recognized a voice. When her eyes opened a second later it was morning: the moon had disappeared and the cloud streaks were already blue-bruised against a sky the color of skin.

***

THE FIRST FIVE DAYS they'd traveled on flat seas. It had been hot, and Mai had faced the choice of being on deck and burnt by the sun or being below in the oven-heated hold. In the beginning people swam in the ocean, trailing ropes off the slow-moving junk, but afterward the salt on their bodies cooked their skin like crispy pork.

She spent as much time as she could bear out of the hold, which simmered the excrement of a hundred people. Their boat was especially crowded, Quyen had explained, because it carried two human loads: another boat organized by the same guide had at the last minute been confiscated by the Communists.

Each family kept mostly to itself. Mai was alone. She stayed close to Quyen and Quyen's six-year-old son, Truong. He was a skinny child with an unusually bony frame and a head too big for his body. His eyes, black and preternaturally calm, were too big for his head. He spoke in a watery voice – rarely – and, as far as Mai could tell, never smiled. He was like an old man crushed into the rude shape of a boy. It was strange, she thought, that such a child could have issued from Quyen-warm and mischievous Quyen.

When Mai first met him they'd been gliding – silently, under cover of night – through a port full of enemies. Even then his demeanor had been improbably blank. The war had that to answer for too, she'd thought-the stone-hard face of a child barely six years old. Only when the boat shifted and his body leaned into hers had she felt, astonishingly, his heartbeat through his trunk – an electric flurry racing through the concavities of his back, stomach and chest. His body furious with life. He was engaged in some inward working out, she realized, and in that instant she'd grasped that nothing – nothing – was more important than her trying to see whatever it was he was seeing behind his dark, flat eyes.

Two nights later, as Mai had been trying to sleep on deck, the song began. The faint voice drifted out of the hold with a familiar undertow. It was an old Vietnamese folk song:

I never thought to be a soldier's wife,

You were not born to foreign lands preside;

Why do the streams and hills our love divide?

Why are we destined for this faithless life?

In the shade of the hibiscus hedge her mother had once sung the same words to her during the years her father was away at war. The hibiscus flowers outside their kitchen in Phu Vinh, which bloomed only for a single day. And though dusk came, her mother would keep singing the soldier's wife's lament, her long black hair falling over Mai's face soft as a mosquito net, and Mai would trace the darkening red of the flowers through that curtain of hair.

Mai followed the song into the hold. She stopped at the bottom of the companionway steps; in the darkness she could just make out Quyen's form, lying on her side in front of Truong as though shielding him. Her voice was thin, attenuated in some way, stripped of vibrato. It didn't slide up to notes the way traditional singers' did. Mai stood on the dark steps and listened:

The path of wind and rain is yours to take,

While mine does mourn an empty room and bed;

We reach to touch each other, but instead...

Her mother, who had waited each time her husband went to sea, again when he left to fight the Communists, and then – five years later – when he left once more, to report for reeducation camp. That was supposed to have been the last time. He was supposed to have been gone for ten days – the prescribed sentence for low-ranked soldiers. Mai remembered: on the eleventh day the streets were swept, washed, festooned with lanterns – women in their best and brightest outfits. The war had been lost, their husbands and fathers were coming home. Mai and Loc wore clothes their mother had borrowed. All through the afternoon they'd waited, through the night, too, the lanterns growing more and more dazzling, the congee and suckling pig cold, congealed. The next morning Mai's mother sent for word but received none. What could she – could any of them – do?

Overcome with feeling, Mai wanted to ask Quyen to stop singing – not to stop singing. Never to stop. How could she explain it all? Afterward, she had seen her mother caught on that cruel grade of time, growing old, aging more in months than she had in years – and yet she had given no comfort to her. She had been a daughter selfish with her own loss. From that day on, she never again heard her mother sing.

Squatting down, Mai dried her eyes with her sleeves. The song continued. With a shock, Mai realized Quyen's mouth was not moving. She was asleep. The singing cut off as Truong lifted, turned his head, staring at Mai with large obsidian eyes. Stunned, she said nothing. She looked back at his pale face, the slight, girlish curve beneath his nose to his lips. The intentness of his gaze. Then, slowly, she felt whatever turmoil broke and banked inside her becoming still. Watching her the whole time, Truong opened his mouth and took a deep breath:

You took my love southeast before I asked

Whereto you went, and when you should return;

Oh warring soul! through bitter years you learned

To treat your sacred life like leaves of grass.

Quyen stirred. Her eyelids still closed, she murmured, "Yes, you miss your father too. Don't you, my prince?"

He stopped singing. Shadows sifted in the darkness.

***

HERE WAS HOW IT BEGAN: her mother brought her through the dim kitchen into the yard. Her father had been released, three months prior, from reeducation camp, and immediately admitted into the hospital in Vinh Long. He had gone blind. The doctors were baffled because they could identify no physical  abnormality, no root cause. His reeducation had blinded him. Mai, in the meantime, continued trundling every day from corner to corner, selling cut tobacco to supplement their family income. Her father's sickness was not unlike the war: something always happening elsewhere while she was forced on with her daily routine.

That day had been a slow one and she'd come home early. In the yard, beneath branches of mastic and white storax flowers, next to the deciduated hibiscus hedge, her mother had hooked her fingers under her waistband and handed her a damp bundle of money. The ink faded from the sweat of counting and recounting.

"Child can spend it however Child likes but try to keep, nha?"

Knowing her mother's usual frugality, Mai struggled to respond but her mother said nothing more, wiping her hands stiffly on her pajama pants and turning back into the house.

Two days later she told Mai to go visit her father at the hospital.

"Child is a good child," he told her after a long silence, his eyes fixed on some invisible locus in the air. He'd barely reacted when she came in and greeted him – it was only her second visit since he'd returned from reeducation camp. What had they done to him there? She remembered him being gaunt three months ago, when he'd first returned, but now his whole face was sunken – as though its foundation had finally disintegrated, leaving his features to their slow inward collapse. His eyes extruded from their deep-set sockets like black stones.

"How is Ba?"

"Ba is unwell," he said, rubbing his stubbled chin. He spoke to her as if to a servant. He didn't even look in her direction.

Mai hesitated. "Can Ba see?"

He didn't seem blind to her. She'd always imagined blindness to be a blacking out – but what if it wasn't? What if he could see – his eyes seemed outwardly unchanged – but had now chosen not to? What if his eyes were already looking elsewhere?

She said, "Ba will get better."

"Child is a big girl now. How old is Child now?"

"Sixteen."

"Heavens," he cried. Then jokingly, "So Child has a boyfriend, ha?"

Mai blushed and her father's hand searched for her head, patted it. Instinctively she twisted her cheek up into his rough palm. She'd come with so much to say – so much to ask – but he might as well have been deaf as blind. He laughed humorlessly. "At sixteen, Ba had to look after Ba's whole family."

Mai didn't reply. She felt insolent looking at his face when he didn't look back.

"Look after your mother," he said.

Look at me, she wanted to say. She considered moving into his fixed line of sight but didn't dare. Just once, she thought. Just look at me once, Ba, and I'll do anything you say.

"And obey her, nha?"

"Yes, Ba."

He gave a single nod, then smiled, but it was nothing more than a flexing of his lips.

"Obey your mother. Promise, nha?"

"Yes, Ba."

"Child." His voice lowered conspiratorially and, her breath quickening, Mai stooped down closer to him. He was going to talk to her. Once, that had been her whole life. He smelt like rusted pipes. "Stop it," he whispered. She held her breath, watching his eyes. They were still locked in midair. "Stop crying, Child."

She held herself still as he patted her head again.

"Good girl," he said.

The next day her mother put her on a bus to Rach Gia. It was a five-hour trip, she was told. Here was a plastic bag for motion sickness. In the market she would be picked up by an uncle she had never met. "Give this to him," her mother said, and pressed a fold of paper, torn from an exercise book, into her confused hands. Just before she got on the bus, her little brother, Loc, tugged at her shirt and asked if she minded if he used her bicycle.

"Use your own bicycle."

She boarded. Watched the two of them through the scuffed, stained window. Then, on the street, her mother raised one hand from her thigh in a hesitant motion, as though halfway hailing a cyclo.

"Ma?"

Mai pushed through the scree of indifferent bodies and rushed out to her mother. She stood there, breathing hard, sensing the larger finality in their parting. Her mother asked if she still had the money. Yes. Remember not to let anybody see it. Yes. Her mother smiled abstractedly, then brought her hand onto Mai's head and eased down, combing hair between her fingers.

"Child," she said softly, "remember, nha? Put your hat on when Child gets off."

Mai stammered, "Child hasn't said good-bye to Ba."

Her mother's hand followed the contours of her skull down into the inlet of her neck, a single motion. "Don't worry," she said. "Ma will say. For Child."

As the bus pulled out, a residue of memory surfaced in Mai's mind. Seeing her father off the first time – seven years ago, when he left for the war – her mother had clung fast to his elbow, her body turned completely into his, her face creased as though it were having trouble holding together a coherent emotion. But the second time – five years later, at the end of the war – her face had completely smoothed itself over. It had learned how to be expressionless.

Mai looked out of the back window-searching for her mother's face-but the street, like a wound, had closed over the space where it had been.

***

AFTER HEARING HIM SING, Mai caught herself, time and time again, searching for Truong. She was most at ease sitting in the shade of the hatch door, facing the prow, watching him with the other children. The only structure on the foredeck was the pilothouse and the children played in a small clearing behind it – a concession of territory from the adults teeming all around. Many of the children were twice Truong's age. He played with them laconically, indifferently, often leaving a game halfway through when he was bored, inevitably pulling a small group along – eager for him to dictate a new game.

Unlike the others he didn't constantly look around to find his family. He lived in a space of his own absorption. Quyen, too, seemed content to let him be. Hemmed in always by dozens of other sweaty, salt-gritted bodies, Mai watched him, stealing solace, marveling at how he could be in the sun all day and remain so pale.

It seemed impossible she'd known him only a few days.

According to Quyen, Truong's father – her husband – had already made his escape. She told Mai that he had arrived safely in Pulau Bidong, one of the larger Malaysian refugee camps, eight months ago. He was waiting for them there.

Why hadn't they traveled together?

"We are going to America," Quyen continued, passing over Mai's question. "My husband has already rejected one offer from Canada. He says he has made friends in the Red Crescent."

"Red Crescent?"

"Do you have any family there?"

After a while Quyen, misreading Mai's silence, continued, "You are probably going to Australia, no? Many people are going there now."

"No. I don't know."

"You don't know?" She pursed her lips in mock decision: "Then Mai will come with us."

"Thoi," started Mai uncertainly.

"You must come. That one likes you," Quyen said, gesturing at Truong. "He talks about you all the time."

Mai flushed with pleasure, not fully understanding why – as she knew Quyen was lying. "He is very good," she said. "Very patient."

"Yes," Quyen replied. She reflected for a moment. "Like his father."

"And who has ever heard of a young boy who can sing like that? It's a miracle. He will make you rich one day."

"Thoi, don't joke."

She looked at her friend, surprised. "I am not joking."

Together they turned toward him. He stood skinny and erect, his clothes hanging from his limbs as though from a denuded tree's branches. His hands directing the ragtag crew to throw their sandals into a pile. Mai wondered briefly if it made Quyen proud – seeing all those children scrambling to obey her son. The game was one her brother used to play. Relaxing her mind, Mai could almost fool herself into thinking he was there, little Loc, springing away as the designated dragon swung around to protect his treasure hoard. He was about the same age as Truong. Her thoughts started to drift back to her last meeting with her father, at the hospital, when Quyen interrupted:

"That one was an accident."

Mai immediately blushed, said nothing.

"He slid out in the middle of the war."

How could she could joke about such a thing? Mai still remembered her father's photo on the altar those five years, the incense and prayer, the hurt daily refreshing in her mother.

"You must miss him," said Mai. "Truong's father."

Quyen nodded.

"When were you married?"

"Nineteen seventy-two," Quyen answered, "in the middle of everything." For a moment her expression emptied out, making her seem younger. "I was your age then."

"Maybe more accidents will happen," Mai said, swallowing quickly through her words, "when you see him again. When we reach land."

Quyen snorted, then started laughing. Her face had recom-posed itself now – was again knowing, shrewd, self-aware. She was pretty when she laughed. "Maybe," she said. She prodded Mai. "And what about you?"

But the mention of land – coming even from her own mouth – canceled out any joke for Mai. She had been trying not to think about it. From every quarter everyone now discussed, obsessively, their situation: they were on a broken-down junk, stranded in the Eastern Sea – here, or maybe here – an easy target for pirates – everyone knew about the pirates, had heard stories of boats being robbed and then rammed, of women being taken, used, dumped. On top of that they were starving, some of them beginning to get sick. No one, however, gave voice to the main fear: that they might not make it.

Mai pushed the dread down. Desperate to change the subject, she said the first thing that came to mind. "Wasn't it dangerous to escape," she asked, "with Truong so young?"

Her laughter subsiding, Quyen settled into a smile. "It was because of him," she said at last, "that I decided to escape." The smile hardened on her mouth.

They both turned toward him again. It had been three days. Watching him – letting in the thought of another day, and after that, another – Mai realized that Quyen's determination, as much as she tried to take part in it, felt increasingly superficial to her. She studied the boy's face. Above his awkward body it remained as stony and impassive as ever.

***

IN RACH GIA, IN THE MILLING MARKET, Mai had been met by a man with a skewed look who talked to a spot behind her shoulder. He called her name by the coriander-selling place. She was waiting for him, her hat on, next to a grease stand, petrols and oils and lubricants spread out like lunch condiments.

"Mai," she heard, "Mai, ha?" and, still sick from the lurching bus trip-it had been her first ride in an automobile-she was swept up by this man who hugged her, turning her this way and that.

"Child has the letter?" he grunted into her ear.

She was confused. He said it again, thrust her out at arm's length and glared straight at her for the first time. She tried hard not to cry.

"Heavens," he said, hastily letting go of her and stepping back. His face spread in an open, unnatural smile before he walked away. All at once Mai remembered her mother's instructions. The folded paper. She ran after him and pressed it into his hand. He read it, furtively, refolded it into a tiny square, and then he was Uncle again.

***

The first hiding place was behind a house by the river. Uncle told her to climb to the top of a plank bed and stay there, don't go anywhere. She lay with the corrugated aluminium roof just a few thumbs above her head, and in the middle of the day the heat was unbearable. The wooden boards beneath her became darkened and tender with her sweat.

A few days later Uncle came to get her – it was after the worst of the afternoon heat – and made her memorize a name and address in Rach Gia in case anyone asked her questions. She felt light-headed standing up.

"When Child reaches land," he told her, "write to Child's mother. She will say what to do next." She nodded dumbly. It was the first and final confirmation of her life's new plan: she was leaving on a boat. He looked at her and sighed. "She said nothing for Child's own protection." He gave her another abbreviated hug. "Does Child understand?" He wasn't, in all likelihood, her real uncle – she knew that now – but still, when he left, she felt in her stomach a deep-seated fluster. It was the last she saw of him.

The second hiding place was a boat anchored beneath a bridge on the Loc Thang river. Mai stayed down below deck for days and days, with sixty people maybe, among cargo sacks of sweet potatoes. No one talked; every sound in the dark was rat-made. She caught herself whimpering and covered her mouth. Once in a while the owner brought a few kilos of rice and they cooked it with potatoes over low kerosene flames and ate, salting their bit, chewing quietly. People coughed into their sleeves to muffle the sound. Parents fed their babies sleeping pills.

One night the owner appeared with another man who came in and tapped her on the shoulder. He tapped five other people as well. They all followed him out of the boat into the hot dark strange openness. A rower waited nearby and after some hesitation and muted dissent they climbed into his canoe, sitting one behind the other, Mai in the middle. The new man – the guide – instructed the rower to cross to the other side of the river. But he didn't, he kept on paddling downstream for what seemed to Mai like hours and hours. At one point she found herself falling asleep. She woke to the sound of wood tapping hollowly against wood. They were pushing into the midst of a dark cluster of houseboats. The rower stopped, secured a lanyard to one of the boats and leapt aboard. He lit a small lantern and began passing large drums reeking of diesel into the canoe. Moments later they moored against the riverbank. The rower crept onshore with a hoe and exhumed something long and gray from beneath a coconut grove.

"Detachable sail," someone whispered.

Mai turned around. The speaker was a young woman. She sounded as though she might have been pointing out bad produce at a market stall.

"It's a detachable sail," the woman repeated.

Mai began asking her what that was when the rower turned, silencing them both with a glare. A moment later Mai felt a cupped hand against her ear.

"My name is Chi Quyen." The woman used the word Chi, for "older sister." She reclined, smiling grimly but not unkindly, then leaned forward again, "Chi too is by herself."

Mai nodded. Shyly, she lifted a finger and crossed her lips.

For a long time they glided soundlessly, close to shore, and then they entered a thick bed of reeds. They stopped. The rower turned around, shook his heavy head and made the sign for no talking. It was dark. He struck a match and lit an incense stick and planted it in the front tip of the canoe. After a while Mai became confused. No one else seemed to be praying. When the stick burned down the guide asked the rower, in a low voice, to light another one. At least an hour passed. Occasionally Mai made out the rower's profile, hard and somber. She took the dark smell of sandalwood into her body.

The canoe swayed. "Maybe they're waiting," a new voice whispered gruffly. "Move out of the reeds so they can see the signal." "Keep your head down!" the rower spat.

At that moment Mai realized the incense stick – its dim glow, its smoke, perhaps – was their signal.

Someone else said, "They won't wait."

"Move out of the reeds," the man repeated.

Mai felt a hot breath in her ear: "If they come, follow Chi, nha? Jump out and swim into the reeds. You can swim, no?"

"If who comes?"

"Fuck your mother, I said keep your head down!"

Someone behind her hissed and the canoe rocked wildly from side to side. The rower whirled around. Then, through the reeds, a light like a car beam flashed on and off. Fumbling, the rower lit a new incense stick, planted it at the canoe tip and paddled, swiftly and silently, back out. They saw it ahead, barely visible in the weird, weakly thrown light from the banks. An old fishing trawler, smaller than she'd imagined – maybe fifteen meters long – sitting low in the water. It inched forward with a diesel growl. A square pilothouse rose up from the foredeck, a large derrick-crane straddling its back deck, and the boat's mid-section congested with short masts and cable rigs. Two big eyes painted on the bow. The canoe drew alongside and three men leaned over the gunwale above them and pulled them up, wrist by wrist. Everyone was aboard within a minute. Before being ushered down the hatch, Mai looked back and saw the canoe, abandoned in the boat's wake, rocking on the dark river.

Inside the hold, the stench was incredible, almost eye-watering. The smell of urine and human waste, sweat and vomit. The black space full of people, bodies upon bodies, eyes and eyes and eyes and if she'd thought the first boat was crowded, here she could hardly breathe, let alone move. Later she counted at least two hundred people, squashed into a space meant for fifteen. No place to sit, nor even put a foot down; she found a crossbeam near the hatchway and hooked her arm over it. Luckily it was next to a scupper where the air came through.

Quyen settled on the step below her, whispering to a young boy. She caught Mai's eye and smiled firmly.

The boat continued its creeping pace. People padded the engines with their clothes to reduce the noise.

"Quiet," an angry voice shushed downward. "We're near the gate."

But no one had been speaking. Through the scupper Mai peered into the night: their boat was gliding into a busy port. Pressed hard beneath her was the body of the boy Quyen had been talking to.

"Natural gate a hundred meters long," she heard suddenly. The water carried the low sound clearly. Then she realized the voice came from above deck, so subdued the person might have been talking to himself. "About ten meters wide. On the rising tide."

Then another voice under the wind, "Viet Cong . . . manned with two M30S – " "Automatic, no?"

"Machine guns."

"What did Phuoc say about the permit?"

In the darkness, thought Mai, to feel against you the urgent flutter of a child's heart. The hopped-up fragility of it.

A tense sigh, "Even with the permit."

"Leave at night and they shoot. They shoot anything."

The speakers paused for a short while. Then a voice said, "We'll find out soon enough."

She settled forward against the young boy, not wanting to hear any more. Trying to block it all out: the voices, the smell. It was unnerving to think of all those other bodies in the darkness. Black shapes in the blackness, merging like shadows on the surface of oil. She crouched there, in the silence, beneath the hatchway. Spying on the bay through the scupper. Gradually, inevitably, the dark thoughts came. Here, in the dead of night, contorted inside the black underbelly of a junk – she was being drawn out into an endless waste. What did she know about the sea? She was the daughter of a fisherman and yet it terrified her. She watched as Quyen reached back and with a surprisingly practiced gesture pressed her palm against the boy's forehead. From above, watching the set of his grim face, Mai thought of her father. Their last meeting. His blindness. He'd taught her not to blame the war but how could she not? – all the power of his own sight seemed still intent on it.

Through the crack of the scupper the land lights, like mere tricks of her eyes, were extinguished one by one. Someone cut the engines.

She pulled the young boy's body closer to her; it squirmed like a restless animal's.

"Truong," a voice whispered sharply from beneath them.

She peered down. It was Quyen.

"Don't be a nuisance, Child." Quyen looked up at Mai, then said ruefully, "This is my little brat. Truong."

"Yours?" Mai frowned. "But – "

From the deepest part of the hold, several voices shushed them. In the silence that followed, even the tidal backwash seemed loud against the hull. Then a grind of something against the boat. Mai had never heard a sound so sudden and hideous.

"What is it?" "A mine? I heard they put mines – "

The metal shrieked each minute movement of the boat.

"Heavens!"

"But boats pass here, must pass here every day – "

Fiercely: "Quiet!"

The sound sheared off – leaving behind a deep, capacious silence. Mai stiffening at every creak of the boat, every dash of water against its rotten sidewood. Then, without warning, the call and fade of a faraway voice. She crushed her cheek against the crown of the young boy's head and for the first time felt him respond – both of his small fists clamping her forearm. She shut her eyes and trained herself to his frenzied heartbeat, as though its pulse – its fine-knitting rhythm – carried the only possible thread of their escape. Long minutes passed. The boat glided on, pointed headfirst into the swell. Finally the fierce voice coughed:

"We're safe for now."

Murmurs rose up. The hatch was lifted. Under the sudden starlight Mai could see the whole of the boy's face, arching up to meet the fresh air.

"Child," said Quyen, "greet Chi. Properly."

He looked up at Mai – his eyes black and clear and unblinking. "Chao Chi," he said in his reed-thin voice.

All around them people's faces were untensing, bodies and voices stirring in restless relief. But Mai, clutching this strange young boy, found herself shivering in the warm night, relief only a sharp and unexpected condensation in her eyes.

***

ONCE THE STORM PASSED, six days out, everything changed.

Fishermen on the boat agreed that this storm had come on faster than any they'd ever experienced. It destroyed the caulking and much of the planking on the hull. The inboard was flooded, and soon afterward, both engines cut out completely.

What food had been left was spoiled. Water was short. Anh Phuoc, whose authority was never questioned, took charge of rationing the remaining supply, doling it out first to children, then the infirm, then everyone else. It amounted to a couple of wet mouthfuls a day.

The heat was unbearable. Before long the first body was cast overboard. Already a handful of people had been lost during the storm, but this was the first casualty witnessed by the entire boat. To the terrible drawn-out note of a woman's keening the bundle was tossed, a meek splash, into the water.

Like everyone else, Mai looked away.

After the storm it seemed to Mai that a film had been stripped from the world. Everything became more intense – the sun hotter, the light more vivid, the sea darker, every word a discordant affront to the new silence. The storm had forced people into their privacies: the presence of others now assailed each person's solitude in facing up to the experience of it. Children turned introverted, playing as though conducting conversations with themselves.

Even time took on a false depth: the six days before the storm stretched out, merged with memory, until it seemed as though everything that had ever happened had happened on the boat.

A man burned his clothes to let up smoke. He was quickly set upon, the fire smothered – the longer they drifted the more fearful they became of pirates. That night another bundle was thrown overboard. Minutes later they heard a thrashing in the water. It was too dark to see anything, yet, still, everyone averted their gaze.

Thirst set in. Some people trapped their own urine. Some, desperate for drinkable water, even allowed themselves the quick amnesia and prayed for another storm. It was fantastic to be surrounded by so much water and yet be dehydrated. Mai soon realized she wouldn't make it. The day following the storm she imitated some of the other youth, hauling up a bucket tied to the bowline. Under the noon sun the seawater was the color of amethyst.

She drank it. It was all right at first. It was bliss. Then her throat started scalding and she wanted to claw it out.

"You stupid girl," Quyen reproached her, demonstrating how to use her fingers to induce vomiting. She hugged her fiercely. "Heavens, you can't wait? We're almost there."

But what did Quyen know? Mai had heard – how could she possibly have not? – that other boats had successfully made the crossing in two days. She tried to sleep, to slide beneath the raw scour of pain in her throat. They'd been out seven days. How much longer? Her father was persistent in her thoughts now – all those weeks, even months, he'd spent on this same sea, in trawlers much like this one. He'd been here before her.

That afternoon, when she awoke, her muscles felt as though they had turned to liquid. She could feel her heart beating slurpily. She followed the weakening palpitations, counterpoint-ing them to the creak and strain of the boat, the occasional luff of the sail. The sun brilliant but without heat. She was even thirstier than before.

"I'm not going to make it," she said. Saying it touched the panic, brought it alive.

"Don't speak," said Quyen. "Go back to sleep."

Mai struggled into a half-upright position. She made out a small group of children next to the bulwark, then pressed her imagination to find him again, little Loc, turning with a snarl as he growled, "Dragon!" She smiled, bit back tears. Behind him, her old school friend Huong was selling beef noodles in front of the damp stink-shaded fish market. Straight through the market she followed her daily route, picking up speed, past fabric stalls and coffee yards, the dusty soccer field where sons of fishermen and truck drivers broke off from the game to buy cigarettes, and then to the wharf, her main place of business, among the taut hard bodies crating boxes, the smell of fish sauce, the rattling talk of men and the gleaming blue backs of silver fish, ice pallets, copper weighing scales bright in the sun, the bustle of docking and undocking, loading and unloading –

A bare-chested man turned around and looked directly at her.

"Ba?"

It filled her with joy to see him like that again: young and strong, his eyes clear and dead straight. He looked like he did in the altar photograph. It was her father before the war, before reeducation, hospitalization. Back when to be seen by him was to be hoisted onto his shoulders, gripped by the ankles. His hands tough, saltish with the smell of wet rope. She moved toward him, she was smiling, but he was stern.

"Child promised," he said.

During his long absences at sea she had lived incompletely, waiting for him to come back so they could tell to each other each moment of their time apart. He spoiled her, her mother said. Her mother was right and yet it changed nothing: still he went away and still, each time, Mai waited.

Her sudden, fervent anger startled her.

"Why send Child away? Child obeyed Ba." Her mind sparked off the words in terrific directions. "Child could have waited for Ba to get better." They had promised each other. He had left for ten days and returned, strange and newly blind, after two years. A thought connected with another: "It was Ba who left Child."

He stood there, tar-faced, empty-eyed, looking straight at her. She lifted her hands to her mouth, unable to believe what she had just said. The words still searing the length of her throat.

"Child is sorry," she whispered. "Ba and Ma sacrificed everything for Child. Child knows. Child is stupid."

He would leap off the boat and swing her into the crook of his arm, up onto his shoulders. Her mother fretting her hands dry on her silken pants, smiling nervously. I can't get it off me, he would say. His hands quivering on either side of Mai's rib cage – It's stuck, I can't get this little beetle off me!

She missed him with an ache that was worse, even, than the thirst had been. All she'd ever known to want was his return. So she would enjoy the gift of his returning, and not be stupid.

"Child is sorry."

He didn't respond.

"Child is sorry, Ba."

"Mai."

He was shaking her. She said again, "Child is sorry," then she felt fingers groping around in her mouth, a polluting smell and then her eyes refocused and she realized it was not her father she saw but Truong, standing gaunt over her.

"Thank heavens," came Quyen's murmur.

Looking at him she finally understood, with a deep internal tremor, what it was that had drawn her to the boy all this time. It was not, as she had first assumed, his age – his awkward build. Nothing at all to do with Loc. It was his face. The expression on his face was the same expression she had seen on her father's face, every day, since he'd returned from reeducation. It was a face dead of surprise.

She gasped as the pain flooded back into her body. She was awake again, cold.

"Mai's fever is gone," Quyen said. She smiled at Mai, a smile of bright industry-such a smile as Mai had never hoped to see again. Unexpectedly she was reminded of her mother, and, to her even greater surprise, she found herself breaking into tears.

"Good," whispered Quyen. "That's good."

Mai wiped her eyes, her mouth, with the hem of her shirt. "I'm thirsty," she said. She looked around for Truong but he seemed to have slipped away.

"You should be. You slept almost two days."

It was evening. She stood up, Quyen helping her. Her legs giving at first. Slowly she climbed up the hatch. On deck she shielded her eyes against the sunset. An incandescent red sky veered into the dark ocean. Rows and rows of the same sun-blotched, peeling faces looked out at nothing.

"Everyone's up here," Quyen whispered, "because down there are all the sick people."

"Sick people?"

Mai checked the deck, then searched it again with growing unease. He'd been standing over her. Keeping her voice even, she asked, "Where is Truong?"

"Truong? I don't know." "But I saw him – when I woke up."

Quyen considered her carefully. "He was very worried about you, you know."

He wasn't in the clearing with the other children. Mai shuffled into the morass of arms and legs, heading for the pilothouse. Nobody made way for her. At that moment Truong emerged from the companionway. She almost cried out aloud when she saw him – gone was the pale, delicate-faced boy she'd remembered: now his lips were bloated, the skin of his cheeks brown, chapped in the pattern of bruised glass. An awful new wateriness in his gaze. He stood there warily as though summoned for punishment. Mai mustered her voice:

"Is Child well?"

"Yes. Are you better?"

"Truong, speak properly!" scolded Quyen.

"How is Chi Mai?"

"Well. Better." She leaned toward him, probing the viscosity of his eyes. His face's swollenness gave it a sleepy aspect.

"Ma said Chi Mai was very sick."

"Chi is better now."

"Tan and An were more sick than Chi," he said. "But Ma says they were lucky."

Mai smiled at Quyen; she hadn't heard him talk so much before. His voice came out scratchy but steady. He stood before them in a waiting stance: legs together, hands by his sides.

"Chi is glad for them."

"They died," he said. When Mai didn't respond he went on: "I saw the shark. All the uncles tried to catch it with that" – he pointed to a cable hanging off the derrick-crane – "but it was too fast."

"Truong!"

His eyes flicked to his mother. Then he said: "Fourteen people died while Chi Mai was sleeping."

"Child!"

He balled up his hands by his sides, then opened them again. "Chi Mai isn't sick anymore, ha?"

"That's right," Mai and Quyen said together.

It was difficult to reconcile him with his frail, wasting body. Seeing him, Mai's own body felt its full exhaustion. "Now . . . let's see ..." She lifted one hand until it hovered between them, palm down. "Child wants to play slaps?"

His black eyes stared at her with something akin to pity.

"Pretend this is the shark," she exclaimed. Quyen glanced up at her. Immediately – horrified, shocked by herself – Mai pulled back her hand. "Chi is just joking."

Later that evening, a young teenage girl with chicken legs wandered over to the gunwale and in a motion like a bow that didn't stop, toppled gracefully over the side.

"Wait!" someone cried.

"Let her be," another person said. "If she wants to, let her be."

"Heavens, someone save her. Someone!"

The first man stumbled to his feet, wild-eyed.

"You do it. Go on. Jump."

He stood like a scarecrow, frozen. Everyone watched him. He walked to the side and looked down at the shiny, dusk-reflecting water.

"I can't see her," he said.

"She must not have any family," Quyen whispered to Mai.

"She has the right idea," another low voice said. "Is there any better way to go?"

"Thoi," Anh Phuoc said, coming over. "Thoi, that's enough."

***

REEDUCATION  CAMP.  For two years those two words had framed the entirety of her imaginative life. Her father, of course, hadn't talked about it when he returned – nor her mother. Now, for the first time, someone talked to her about it. Anh Phuoc had fought in the same regiment as her father – had been sentenced to a camp in the same district. No, he hadn't known him. By the time the Communists took Ban Me Thuot in March 1975, the Americans were long gone and the Southern regiments in tatters – soldiers deserting, taking cover as civilians, fleeing into the jungles. Escape on every man's mind. Soon they all learned there was no escaping the Communists: not in the country they now controlled. They were skilled, he said, at turning north against south, village against village. He fell quiet.

Mai waited. She watched him remembering. Nine days had passed and now she noticed how severely he had aged: his eyes gone saggy, his skin mottled with dark sun spots.

"In the camps," he said, "they do what they do best. They take a man – and then they turn him against things."

From the back deck a middle-aged woman started wading in their direction through the sprawl of bodies. She held the port gunwale with both hands for balance.

"Husbands against wives," he went on. "Children against parents. Your only chance is to denounce everyone, and everything, they tell you to."

The woman reached them. She made her complaint in a hoarse voice. She was owed water. She had tendered hers to another child who had collapsed, she said, and pointed aft. Anh Phuoc held Mai's eyes for a second, then followed the woman.

Her father wouldn't have denounced her – she was sure of that. Not in his own heart. But again she understood how necessary it was to stay on the surface of things. Because beneath the surface was either dread or delirium. As more and more bundles were thrown overboard she taught herself not to look – not to think of the bundles as human – she resisted the impulse to identify which families had been depleted. She seized distraction from the immediate things: the weather, the next swallow of water, the ever-forward draw of time.

"Mai!"

It was Anh Phuoc. She stood up, hauled herself on weak legs along the gunwale, toward the rear of the boat. Past the hatch she suddenly saw Truong – propped up against the rusty mast of the derrick-crane, his chin drooping onto his chest, arms bony and limp by his sides.

Mai leapt forward, swiping her elbows and knees from side to side to clear space. The surrounding people watched listlessly.

"Water!"

No one reacted. She looked around and spotted an army flask – grabbed it, swiveled the cap open, held it to his mouth. A thin trickle ran over his rubbery lips before the flask was snatched away. She looked up and saw a man's face, twisted in hate the moment he struck her, his knuckles hard as a bottle against her cheek. She fell over and covered Truong's body.

"She stole water."

"I'll pay it back," said Anh Phuoc roughly.

Truong started coughing. Mai sat back, her cheek burning, and mumbled apology in the direction of the man. He was picking the flask up from the ground. People glanced over, disturbed by the waste. There had been a minor outcry the previous evening when a woman – an actress, people said – had used the last of her ration to wash her face.

Truong squinted up at Mai. Everything about him: the dark sore of his face, his disproportioned, skeletal limbs, seemed to be ceding its sense of solidity. She touched his blistered cheek with her fingers – was reminded of the sting on her own cheek from the man's blow.

"Ma," he wheezed.

"It's alright," she said. "Ma is coming. Chi is here." "Where's Quyen?" asked Anh Phuoc. He stood up quickly and walked off.

Truong said, "Child wanted to count the people."

He coughed again, the air scraping through his throat. Watching him, a helpless feeling welled up within Mai and started to coalesce at the front of her skull. "Child," she whispered.

Quyen arrived. She seemed to be moving within a slower state, her face drawn, hair tangled. She saw Truong and bent down to him. "Look," she murmured, "you hurt yourself."

"He fainted," said Mai.

"Why didn't Child stay with Ma?"

"I don't like it down there," he said.

"Oh, Mai," Quyen exclaimed, turning to her. "Are you all right?"

"He shouldn't be in the sun. He needs more water."

"It's too dark to count down there," Truong said. He brought up his arms, dangled them loosely over his knees. An old man's pose. Quyen squatted down and enfolded him, clinching him between her elbows, raking one hand through his hair and cupping his forehead with the other.

"I was so tired," said Quyen. "Thank you."

"He needs more water."

"Does Child know?" She was speaking to Truong. "Does Child know how lucky he is? To have Chi Mai look after him?"

Anh Phuoc leaned down close to both of them. "Come with me," he muttered. They followed him forward to the pilothouse, everyone watching as they passed. Once inside he closed the door. Carefully, he measured out a capful of water from a plastic carton and administered it into Truong's mouth.

The sight – even the smell – of the water roused an appalling ache in Mai's stomach, but she said nothing.

"Good boy," said Anh Phuoc.

Quyen's eyes followed the carton. "Is that all there is?"

Holding the tiller with one hand, he reached down and opened the cupboard beneath it. Three plastic white cartons.

"That's all," he said, "unless it rains."

"How long will it last?"

"Another day. Two at the most."

Her temple still aching, Mai looked out of the pilothouse windows. From up here she could see the full length and breadth of the boat: every inch of it clogged with rags and black-tufted heads and sunburned flesh. Up here would be the best place to count people. She wrenched her eyes away from the water carton and looked out instead at the sky. Not a cloud in sight. But the sky was full of deceit – it looked the same everywhere. She looked at the horizon, long and pale and eye-level all around them. Whatever direction she looked, it fell away into more water.

***

THE TENTH DAY DAWNED. Engines dead, the boat drifted on. Gray shadows strafing the water behind it. The detachable sail hoisted onto a short mast's yard and men taking turns, croaking directions to each other as they tried to steer the boat, as best they could, to the south.

Mai watched Truong with renewed intensity. Since Mai's recovery Quyen had kept to herself, remaining huddled, during the day as well as night, underneath the companionway stairs where they all slept. That morning Mai had found her sitting in the slatted light, staring vacantly into the dark hold. Squeezed between two old women.

"How is Truong?" Quyen asked her quietly.

Mai said, "I keep telling him to come down."

"He doesn't like it down here."

Mai nodded, not knowing what to say.

Quyen dropped her chin and closed her eyes. Mai looked her over. She didn't look sick.

"Is Chi alright?"

Quyen nodded almost impatiently. One of the women beside her spat into her hands. When Quyen looked up her face was distant, drawn in unsparing lines.

"Look after him, nha? Please."

Above deck, each hour stretched out its hot minutes. Mai lay on her back under the derrick-crane, her head against someone's shin, limbs interwoven with her neighbors'. Truong wedged beside her. The crane cast a shadow that inched up their bodies. She threw her sleeve over her face to ward off the sweltering sun. At one point a wind blew in and the boat began to sway, lightly, in the water. She was riding her father's shoulders. Her mother watching them happily. Whenever he was home he brought with him some quality that filled her mother so there was enough left, sometimes, for her to be happy.

Truong started singing. Softly – to himself – so softly she wouldn't have heard him if her ear hadn't been inches from his mouth. She gradually shifted her arm down so she could hear better. He sang the ballad from the third night. She listened, hardly daring to breathe, watching the now-darkening sky knitting together the rigs and cables of the crane above them as though they were the branches of trees.

When he finished, the silence that surged in afterward was unbearable. Mai reached across her body and gently took hold of his arm.

"Who taught Child how to sing like that?"

He didn't answer.

***

THE NEXT MORNING, back below deck, she woke up to find a puddle of vomit next to his curled-up, sleeping body. It gleamed gray in the early light of dawn.

"The child has the sickness," a voice said without a second thought. It was one of the old women who had camped with them beneath the companionway stairs. The hatch was open and light flowed in like a mist, dimly illumining the three other bodies entangled in their nook. The deeper recess of the hold remained black.

"No, he doesn't," said Mai.

"Poor child. He is not the last. Such a pity."

"Be quiet!" Mai covered her mouth, abashed, but no one reproached her. Several bodies stirred on the other side of the stairs.

Barely awake, Quyen rolled over to her son and propped herself up on an elbow. She brushed his cheek with her knuckles. For a second, in the half-light, Mai thought she saw an expression of horror move across her friend's face.

"Child is sorry," Mai murmured to the old woman.

Truong's eyes were glazed when he opened them. He looked like a burnt ghost. He leaned over, away from his mother, and dry-retched. There was nothing left in him to expel. Another of their neighbors, a man who smelled of stale tobacco, averted his legs casually.

"What it can do to you," the old woman said, her gums stained crimson from chewing betel leaves, "the ocean."

"Does Child's stomach hurt?" asked Mai.

"Yes."

"What it can steal from you and never give back. My husband, both my daughters." "It's just a stomach-ache," said Quyen, then looked up as though daring the old woman – or anyone – to disagree. A gang of eyes, unmoving, inexpressive, watched them from the shadows.

That evening, Anh Phuoc ladled out the last rations of water. He shuffled wearily through the boat, repeating the same account to anyone who stopped him, intoning his interlocutors' names as though that were the only consolation left him to offer them. Weak moans and thick silences trailed him.

When Mai poured her ration into Truong's cup, Quyen frowned, and then flinched away. "Thank you," she said at last. For the first time she used the word for "younger sister."

"It's nothing. I already took a sip."

"Poor child," repeated the old woman, shaking her head.

Truong took some water in, then coughed some of it out. People looked over. In the dusk light his face was pallid and shiny.

He opened his mouth. "Ma," he said.

"I'm here," said Quyen.

"Ma."

Quyen bit her lips, wiped the sweat from Truong's brow with a corner of her shirt. Finally his eyes focused and he seemed to look straight at Mai.

"It's so hot," he said.

"Thoi," said Quyen, dabbing above his eyes, around his hairline.

"I want to go up."

"Sleep, my beloved. My little prince. Sleep."

Mai wanted desperately to say something to him-something useful, or comforting-but no words came. She got up to close the hatch door.

The old woman took out a betel leaf and inserted it into the slit of her toothless mouth.

***

HIS SICKNESS FOLLOWED the usual course. Muscle soreness and nausea in the early stages. That evening his blisters began to rise, some of them bleeding pus. He became too weak to swallow water.

In the middle of the night, Mai woke to find Truong half draped over her stomach. His weight on her so light as to be almost imperceptible, as though his body were already nothing more than bones and air. "Everything will be fine," she whispered into the darkness, her thoughts, still interlaced with dream, scattered remotely across space and gray sea. Back home she'd slept on the same mat as Loc. Her mother by the opposite wall. She reached down and touched Truong's brow.

He stirred awake.

"Is Child alright?"

"I want to go up."

The skin on his face was hot and moist. Mai lifted her eyes and noticed Quyen, mashed in the shadow of the companionway steps, staring at both of them.

"Take him," she said dully.

Mai found a spot for them by the pilothouse, surrounded by sleeping families. When dawn came, Truong's head slid with a slight thud onto the planking. Half asleep, Mai sought his shoulder, shook it. His body gave no response. She sat up and shook him again. His clothes stiff with dried sweat. Nothing.

"Truong," whispered Mai, feeling the worry build within her. She poked his cheek. It was still warm – thank heavens! – it was still warm. She checked his forehead: hotter than it had been last night. He was boiling up. His breath shallow and short. With agonizing effort she cradled his slight, inert body and bore him up the stairs into the pilothouse.

Anh Phuoc was slumped underneath the tiller, sleeping. Three infants were laid out side by side on the floor, swaddled in rags.

He woke up. "What is it?" He saw Truong in her arms. "Where's Quyen?"

She laid him down. Then she turned to find Quyen.

"Wait." Anh Phuoc got up, surveyed the boat through the windows, then retrieved a flask from behind the bank of gauges. He unscrewed the cap and poured a tiny trickle of water into a cup. "This was for them," he said, gesturing at the motionless babies. "How they've lasted twelve days I don't know." He screwed the flask cap back on and then, with tremendous care, handed her the cup. "But they won't make it either." He paused. "Let me find Quyen."

Truong wouldn't wake up. Mai dipped one finger into the cup, traced it along the inner line of his lips. Once it dried she dipped her finger again, ran it across his lips again. She did this over and over. One time she thought she saw his throat twitch. His face – vthe burnt, blistered skin, its spots and scabs – the deeper she looked, the more his features dissociated from one another until what she looked into, as she tended him, was not a face, but a brown and blasted landscape. Like a slow fire it drew the air from her lungs.

Commotion on deck. Someone shouting. She jolted awake, checked Truong – he was still unconscious, his fever holding. A weird tension suffusing the air. Another death? Mai opened the pilothouse door and asked a nearby woman what was happening.

"They saw whales," the woman said.

"Whales?"

"And then land birds."

It was as though she were sick again, her heart shocked out of its usual rhythm. "Land? They saw land?"

The woman shrugged.

All at once Quyen burst out of the hold, her hair disheveled and her eyes watery and red. She spotted Mai.

"Here!" Mai called out excitedly. "Chi Quyen, here!" She stood on tiptoes and scanned all the horizon she could see. Nothing. She looked again. "Someone said they saw land," she announced aloud. Realizing people were scowling at her, she turned toward Quyen. Too late she caught a new, rough aspect in her eyes. Quyen strode up into Mai's face.

"Where's my son?" She pushed into the pilothouse. Mai stumbled back, tripping over the doorsill.

Inside, Quyen saw Truong and rushed toward him, lowering her head to his. She emitted a throaty cry and twisted around to face Mai.

"Stay away," she declared. "You've done enough!" Her voice was strained, on the verge of shrillness.

"Chi," gasped Mai.

"I've changed my mind," Quyen went on, the pitch of her words wavering. Her expression was wild, now – cunning. "He's my son! Not yours – mine!"

"Thoi," a man's voice interjected.

Mai spun and saw Anh Phuoc in the doorway.

"What's the matter?"

Quyen glared at him. He waited for her to speak. Finally, her tone gone sullen, she said, "She took my son."

He sighed. "Mai was looking after him."

Quyen stared at him, incredulous, then started laughing. She clamped both hands over her mouth. Then, as though in embarrassment, she dipped her head, nuzzling Truong's chest like an animal. Mai watched it all. The thick dense knot back behind her temple. Quyen's body shuddered in tight bursts awhile, then, slowly, hitchingly, it began to calm. It seemed for a moment as though Quyen might never look up again. When she did, her face was utterly blanched of expression.

"Mai wouldn't hurt Truong," said Anh Phuoc tiredly. "She loves him."

Quyen threw him a spent smile. "I know." But she didn't look at Mai. Instead, she turned and again bent over the unconscious shape of her son. That was when she began to cry – silently at first, inside her body, but then, breath by breath, letting out her wail until the whole boat could hear.

***

HE WAS HER SHAME and yet she loved him. What did that make her? She had conceived him when she was young, and passed him off to her aunt in Da Lat to raise, and then she had gotten married. With the war and all its disturbances, she had never gone back to visit him. Worse, she had never told her husband.

"He would leave me," she told Mai. "He will."

But she couldn't abandon her only son – not to the Communists – not if she could find a way out of the country. Even if he didn't want to leave, and even if he didn't know her. Her aunt had balked, and Quyen had been forced to abduct him. She'd been wrong to have him – she knew that – but she'd been even more wrong to give him away. Surely, she thought, she was right to take him with her. Then, when she saw him weakening-then falling sick-she realized that perhaps he was being punished for her shame. Whether he lived or died- perhaps it wasn 't for her to decide.

She begged Mai to forgive her.

Mai didn't say anything.

"He doesn't love his own mother," said Quyen.

"That's not true."

Quyen leaned down and unstuck his hair from his forehead, and parted it. They'd moved him back down into the hold, under the companionway stairs, for shade.

Quyen sniffed. "It's fair. What kind of mother watches that happen to her only son-and does nothing?"

"You were sick."

Quyen turned to her with a strange, shy expression, then lowered her gaze.

"I knew you would take care of him," she said.

"Of course."

"No." She looked down at her son's fevered face. "Forgive me. It was more than that. My thoughts were mad." She gave out a noise like a hollow chuckle. "I thought of asking you ..." she said. "I was going to ask you to take him in-to pretend he was your son." She shook her head in wonderment. "He likes you so much. Yes. I thought – just until I could tell my husband the truth."

Mai remained quiet, her mind turbulent.

Quyen sniffed again. "Thoi," she declared. "Enough!" Caressing her forearm-still scored with rope marks from the storm six days ago – she smiled into the air. "It's my fault."

"Chi."

"Whatever happens to him."

Mai stared down, unsteadily, at the marred, exposed field of Truong's face.

"You don't have to answer," Quyen continued in her bright voice. "Whatever happens, I deserve it."

***

HE ENTERED INTO THE WORST of it that afternoon, moving fitfully into and out of sleep. His breath short, irregular. Their neighbors kindly made some space for him to lie down. When some children came to visit, Quyen rebuffed them without even looking. Mai sat silently opposite them, next to the old betel-gummed woman, transfixed by her friend's intensity.

Then, at the end of the afternoon – after five long hours – Truong's small body suddenly unclenched and his breath eased. The lines on his forehead cleared. It seemed, unbelievably, that he had prevailed.

"It's over," Mai said joyfully. "Chi, the fever has broken."

Quyen cradled him in her lap, rocking him lightly. "Yes, yes, yes, yes," she sighed, "Sleep, my beloved." His clothes were soaked with sweat. For a fleeting moment, as Mai saw his face unfastened from its distress, the fantasy crossed her mind that he was dead. She shook it off. Quyen's hair fell over her son's face. They both appeared to her strangely now, as if at an increasing remove, as if she were trying to hold them in view through the stained, swaying window of a bus.

Truong hiccuped, opened his eyes and rasped, "Ma has some water?" With an almost inaudible moan Quyen hunched over and showered his brow with kisses. Outside the evening was falling, the last of the light sallow on his skin. After a while Truong gathered his breath again.

"Ma will sing to Child?"

"Sing for the poor child," said the old woman.

Quyen nodded. She started singing: a Southern lullaby Mai hadn't heard for years, her voice more tender than Mai had imagined it could be.

Truong shook his head weakly. "No – not that one." He made an effort to swallow. "My favorite song."

"Your favorite song," repeated Quyen. She bit her lip, frowning, then swung around mutely, strickenly, to Mai.

Mai reached out to stroke Truong's hair. She said, "But Child must sleep, nha?” She waited for him to completely shut his eyes. Quyen found her hand and held it. Mai cleared her throat, then, surprised to find her voice even lower, hoarser than Quyen's, she started singing:

I am the vigil moon that sheds you light

My soul abides within the Thousand Peaks;

Where drunk with wine and Long-Tuyen sword you seek

And slaughter all the leopards of the night.

And in the steps of Gioi Tu, seize Lau-Lan

And quash the Man-Khe rivers into one.

You wear the scarlet shadow of the sun:

And yet your steed is whiter than my palm...

Abruptly her voice broke off, then she swallowed, picked up the thread of melody again, and sang it through, her voice as hard as Quyen's face was tender, her voice resolute and unwavering, sang it through to the very end.

The old woman nodded to herself.

***

THE NEXT MORNING  – the morning of their thirteenth day – a couple of the fishermen sighted land. A swell of excitement, like a weak current, ran through the boat. People looked at one another as though for the first time.

"We made it," someone quietly announced, returning from deck. He paused on the companionway, his head silhouetted against the sunlight. In the glare, Mai couldn't make out his face. He said, "We're safe now." The words deep in his throat.

Quyen and Truong were underneath the stairs. Mai had left them to themselves during the night. Now, with those others strong enough, Mai followed the man above deck. Outside, the dawn sun steeped through her, as though her body were made of paper. Dizziness overwhelmed her when she saw the half-empty deck – had they been so depleted? She thought, with an odd pang, of Truong, his incessant counting. Then she saw the prow, teeming with people, all peering ahead, attitudes stalled in their necks and shoulders. She made her way forward, then spotted, far ahead, the tiny breakers on the reefs, and behind those, the white sand like a bared smile. Birds hanging in midair over the water.

During the night she had come to her decision. Her thoughts starting always with Truong and ending always with her father, upright in his hospital bed, staring at some invisible situation in front of him. A street with its lights turned off. She came into morning feeling a bone-deep ache through her body. The boat would land – they would all land – Mai would write to her family, and wait for them, and then she would look after Truong as if he were her own child. The decision dissolved within her, rose up with the force of joy. She would tell Quyen. She would look after him, completely, unconditionally, and try not to think about the moment when Quyen might ask her to stop.

Nearly weightless in her body, Mai descended the companion-way. When she reached the bottom she spun and searched behind the stairs. There they were. The hold awash with low talk.

"Chi Quyen."

She was about to call out again when she sensed something amiss. Quyen's back-folded over Truong's sleeping form-it was too stiff. The posture too awkward.

Mai moved closer. "Chi?" she asked.

Quyen's crouched torso expanded, took in air. Without turning around she said, "What will I do now?" Her voice brute, flat.

Mai squatted down. Her heart tripping faster and faster, up into her throat.

Quyen said, "He didn't."

She said, "All night. He wouldn't wake up."

She was wrong, thought Mai. What did she know, thought Mai. When she'd left last night, Truong had been recovering. He'd been fine. He'd been asking Mai, over and over, to sing to him. What could have happened?

Quyen shifted to one side. He was bundled up in a blanket. The bundle tapered at one end – where his legs must have been. Mai could see no part of him. How could this be the end of it? She wrung the heels of her hands into her eyes, as if the fault lay with them. Then she felt Quyen's face, cool with shock, next to her own, rough and wet and cool against her knuckles, speaking into her ear. At first she recoiled from Quyen's touch. What was she saying? She was asking Mai for help. She was asking Mai to help her carry him. It was time, she said. Time, which had distended every moment on the boat – until there had seemed to be no shape to it – seemed now to snap violently shut, crushing all things into this one task. They were standing – when had they gotten up? – then they were kneeling, facing each other over the length of him. Quyen circumspect in her movements, as though loath to take up any more space than her son now needed. She seemed not to see anything she looked at. Together, the two of them brought the bundle aft, through the shifting, silent crowd, past the derrick-crane, where a group of the strongest men waited. There, the wind turned a corner of the blanket over and revealed the small head, the ash beauty of his face, the new dark slickness of his skin. With a shudder Quyen fell to it and pressed and rubbed her lips against his cheek.

Anh Phuoc, standing with three other men, waited for Quyen to finish before touching her shoulder.

He said, to no one in particular, "We'll make land soon." As though this were an order, Mai took Quyen's arm and led her the full span of the boat to the prow. Again, the crowd parted for them. They stood together in silence, the spray moistening their faces as they looked forward, focusing all their sight and thought on that blurry peninsula ahead, that impossible place, so that they would not be forced to behold the men at the back of the boat peeling the blanket off, swinging the small body once, twice, three times before letting go, tossing him as far behind the boat as possible so he would be out of sight when the sharks attacked.