her good-bye, I’d held her too tightly, and she had kissed both my hands.
“Don’t worry, maman,” she’d said as I wiped away tears. “A trip away is good for you, because you can be quite shy. That’s what Papa says, isn’t it.”
“He does at times,” I said. “But sometimes husbands don’t know everything about their wives.”
“I see,” she’d said pensively. “I’ll be here when you return.”
I looked at the picture of Lucie and rubbed my index finger over it. Girls had been a burden in my family, but Lucie was a gift. That tiny seed, which I’d prayed would implant inside me, had brought me marriage, a ticket out of America, and now this life.
I placed the picture back in my bag, next to my engraved silver cigarette case. Having grown up covered in tobacco, I didn’t find smoking the least bit appealing, but Trieu had packed it in my purse for the journey, saying that someone important might ask me for a cigarette, and it was only polite to be ready. You never knew who you might encounter on the journey south in the first-class car.
I took a cigarette out and spun it slowly between my fingers, thinking of my father, who rolled his own using the tobacco he grew on our farm. It was why I never smoked. The acrid smell always reminded me of him, of home. Still, I found myself pulling a cigarette out, lighting it, and placing it between my lips.
Inhaling just a tiny bit, I thought of my mother walking through my father’s smoke rings, usually with a pregnant belly leading the way, muttering to herself in French. Seven thousand three hundred nautical miles. That’s how far Hanoi was from Blacksburg, Virginia. It was one of the first things I’d calculated when Victor had told me we finally had the family’s blessing to go. It was twice as far as Paris. I had thrown my arms around him and tried not to cry tears of joy. I’d saved myself in Paris, but with Hanoi, it felt as if he were saving me. I knew that living in Hanoi wouldn’t prevent my being tracked down by Dorothy Davis. I wasn’t on the moon. But the odds of my running into someone from Blacksburg, Virginia, in Hanoi were nil. There were fewer than a hundred Americans in the whole colony. It was yet another chance for reinvention.
As I took a real pull on the cigarette, the train started to move, accelerating as it left the city. Once Hanoi was far behind us, the train chugged toward the coast, hugging it like a frightened child. I watched rolling green hills slowly appearing as we rumbled through small villages and then flat vistas returning before we reached another part of the country that was cut into rice paddies.
After we left the town of Hue, nearly 350 miles from Hanoi, the rickety fishing boats bobbing a few feet from shore multiplied and the land grew hillier again, making it feel on many turns as if the train might pitch itself into the sea. The waves were small and soft, slapping rhythmically against the side of the boats below. Past Hue, the overgrown foliage alongside the tracks found its way in through the windows, to the delight of the only child in my car. I fell asleep to the sound of his mother scolding him. It had been hard to leave Lucie again after my days of oblivion, but hearing the voice of a child I didn’t have to tend to reminded me that it was good for a woman to be alone sometimes.
I didn’t wake up until we were traversing the Hai Van Pass, the high, scenic mountain pass that protrudes into the East Sea, Bien Dong, as the natives called it. The crossing meant that the end of the first train leg was near. The mist covering the pass dissipated quickly as we chugged out of it, and I soon saw small, white-sand beaches, deserted except for fishing boats. Then more miles of rice paddies, and soon after that, Tourane, where the track ended abruptly.
After the long train ride, I was happy to switch to a car for the next 335 miles. Perhaps because of my American heritage, long distances exhilarated me, even more so with a change of perspective.
My driver was a middle-aged man with prematurely white hair and a white driving suit to match who told me his name was Xuan. He said he’d driven Victor