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  I turned the scanner's volume to low. "I've been working on an investigative piece," I lied.

  "An investigative piece," she repeated, but didn't pursue it. "Did you listen to my message?"

  "Yes." I was already growing impatient. "I'm going to see you in a couple of weeks. I thought we talked about it—"

  "This time I hope you mean it," she interrupted. "You've promised to make it home before and something always comes up. Expectations have consequences if you can't fulfill them. Today it's me. Tomorrow it could be someone important."

  I lay back down on the couch, in no mood for my mother's lecturing.

  "I have news about Thea Pierson," she said. "Do you want to hear it?"

  "Depends."

  "Am I being intrusive again? Is that the problem?"

  "What is it you want to tell me?"

  "She's moving to St. Louis."

  My mother paused, listening for a reaction.

  "What do you mean she's moving to St. Louis?"

  "She's there as we speak, on a one-year program at SLU Hospital." I heard the strike of a match, her deep inhale. "It's something they do before medical school."

  "Really?" I tried not to sound interested.

  "Yes, really. She called last night."

  "Why St. Louis?" I sat up and turned the scanner off.

  "Don't ask me, Gordie. She certainly had a choice. With her record, she could have gone anywhere."

  I stretched the phone cord to the bathroom, a few steps away in my tiny apartment, and leaned over the sink to check my reaction up close in the bathroom mirror. Small wrinkles had formed between my eyebrows.

  "She still cares," my mother said.

  "What does it matter?" I asked.

  "Trust me," she said. "She hasn't given up on you."

  Thea was born Thuy Linh, one of the few but dot, children of a Vietnamese mother and an American GI, whose father returned to Saigon to claim her. She was four years old when the plane touched down at Columbia Regional Airport. Her father, Daniel Pierson, had used an old Army officer connection to doctor her birth certificate and change her age to two. He figured Thea could use the extra couple of years. She'd start school late, catch up with the language.

  Daniel Pierson was a single man, a third-year doctoral student in public policy, and he must have been lonely when he picked up the phone and dialed an old friend at the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He said he had a daughter by a Vietnamese woman, and what would it take to gain custody? Depends on the woman, his old friend said.

  Unlike many new immigrants growing up in America, Thea had no access to her culture and no contact with the country of her birth. The nearest Vietnamese community was on South Grand in St. Louis, an hour and a half away. She said she didn't know about South Grand until she moved there many years later. In Columbia, bui doi was just another foreign term.

  Not until the sixth grade did she begin to take note of herself. She put pictures on the mirror of other girls in her class—goldilocks, freckle face, and button nose—class pictures with marbled blue backgrounds. She looked at them and back at her reflection, trying to will her stubborn face to do what it couldn't do.

  On the Fourth of July, 1979, she returned from the town parade and started a letter to her mother. "My name is Thea Pierson," it began. "You knew me when I was a little girl, and now I would like to know you."

  She wrote of friends, school, American things; marching bands and colorful floats, Shriners doing figure eights in mini antique cars; her house, a cat named Ringo who got in through the basement and stayed. It was a long letter that grew by the day, written at school in the margins of books, copied over before bed on a wide-ruled notepad as she lay on her stomach with her feet in the air. It never occurred to her that her mother might not read English.

  In the mornings she went to the county library and ripped out pictures of boat people from Life magazine, sneaked them into a book, and stapled them to her letter in the girls' room. She read about the Vietnamese living in New Orleans, East Texas, the Mississippi Delta, where it was hot and wet like Vietnam, where shrimp and rice were farmed, wrote about them as if she had been there. By early August, her letter nearly filled the notepad.

  Then, a week before Labor Day, around dinnertime, in the middle of another late summer thundershower, her father received a phone call from the same friend at the INS who had originally helped with the papers. Thea's mother had died several months before.

  "It was my fault," she told me later. "How could it not be? I started the letter too late."

  "But you couldn't have known," I said.

  "She was my mother. We had that connection. She was probably waiting for me to write her, expecting it every day," she said. "But I didn't even think about it."

  The morning after the phone call, Thea ripped up the letter and put the pieces in a large serving bowl, cut off a lock of her long hair and placed it in the middle. She went to a card shop downtown and bought two fat candles—one red and one yellow, the colors of the South Vietnamese flag—and made a little shrine on her bedside table.

  Growing up in Columbia, Thea became a curiosity. She was one of only two Asian students at Columbia Central, and classmates invited her home to show her off, took her to the mall and dressed her up, talked to her as if she were their child. When the novelty wore off, she found herself alone once again. But she was resourceful. She had a breeziness about her, moving with ease from circle to circle, hiding the wounds of abandonment.

  I first met her in biology. We dissected a fetal pig together. I did n't expect to like her because I saw who her friends were. They wore Grateful Dead shirts and leather strips around their ankles, Birkenstocks and cut-off jeans; their heads nodded as they walked. They dropped acid and skipped along the bluffs over the Missouri, sold dope to fraternity boys, stared holes into the tables at Taco Bell.

  "I know you," she said, snipping open the bag and filling the air between us with the smell of formaldehyde. "You're the shyest boy in the school."

  I got an A on the lab, my first, and found myself saying things to her that I had never told anyone. We went to my favorite deli and bought sandwiches—roast beef on rye with cole slaw and Russian dressing—cut along the Katy Trail to my house where we watched the soaps, drinking sixteen-ounce Dr Peppers with a big bag of Doritos. We must have done that every day for months and into the summer, slumped with our backs against the sofa on the plush orange rug in the living room. I felt my elbow on her waist and I held it there, pressing against her until it seemed dangerous.

  She was tall, from her father—we stood eye to eye—long-limbed and willowy. Her light dresses moved with her as she walked, revealing a thin strap, white cotton against her skin, a curve of the hip, a clavicle. I studied her smile, her gestures, the formality with which she spoke, until I could see her mouth and hands in the darkness and hear her voice over the traffic of my mind.

  I didn't kiss Thea that first year. She left the circle of Deadheads and spent all of her time with me. She stayed over at night, sometimes for the whole weekend when her father was away, sleeping in my bed while I lay on the living room couch with her image flickering above me as I drifted off.

  We talked about my father and her mother and growing up without them. I told her about Wichita, Dallas, Chicago, far-flung places I knew from my mother's stories and a few vague memories. She said one day she'd like to go to Vietnam and look for her relatives.

  "When?" I asked.

  "When I'm ready," she said.

  And that was all. She knew next to nothing about her mother, had no photographs or memories of her mother's face, and would not have known where to start had she wanted to invent a life for her. Daniel Pierson would say only that Thea's mother lived in Saigon, that he knew her briefly, that his memory had been scattered by the war. She gave Thea up for adoption in 1972, the same year my father died.

  "So both of us are orphans," Thea told me.

  I had never thought of myself as an orphan
before, but coming from Thea it sounded true. We were orphans. That was our bond.

  When we graduated high school, she took a summer job as a candy striper at the university hospital while I worked as a copy boy for the Columbia Pioneer. Soon, with her father running a conference in D.C., she was spending nearly every night at our house, and life at 102 La Grange was too good to be true: Thea and I under the same roof, making hamburgers and homemade chicken fingers and the most delightfully unhealthy meals, going to Cajun Stella's for oysters on the half shell and blues at the amphitheater.

  My mother, for the most part, made a great effort to stay out of our way. Early in the summer, though, she couldn't help but meddle. She cooked us casseroles, stayed up late, actually bought board games for the three of us to play. She said there were shades of her relationship with my father in my friendship with Thea, and went so far as to make copies of some old Western Union telegrams from one of my father's tours in the Navy. She left them on my desk so I could glimpse their own great love affair. For years I kept "AT SEA WITHOUT YOU," wired by my father in 1960 from the Midway Islands, in a tiny compartment in my wallet.

  As the summer wore on, my mother got the sense that we'd rather be alone and she disappeared, communicating mostly by notes and long, friendly messages on the answering machine. She worked all day and volunteered nights for the university's Gilbert and Sullivan Society, helping with costumes (her mother had been a seamstress in Greencastle, Indiana) for a summer-stock run of H.M.S. Pinafore.

  Meanwhile, Thea's touch was coloring the house. Each day I'd come back from work to find something new—a polished candlestick, a linen lampshade where a plastic one had been, plants in all the windows: African violets and daisies in the living room, begonias and English ivy in a box by the kitchen sink, an amaryllis on the sill in my mother's room. I found a hanging fuchsia in the bathroom one day and a tree with red peppers sitting on my desk.

  With Thea around I became aware of the dreariness of our house: walls and moldings in need of paint, heavy gray curtains that blocked out the light, yellowing antimacassars on the living room couch, chairs that needed recaning. As clean as she kept it, my mother was content with the same old decor. Things I had once considered cheerful, like the orange rug she had installed when we moved in and the Bavarian cuckoo clock that no longer worked, now seemed grim.

  One Saturday in August, a day after we had gone out with my mother for her birthday, Thea left the house to do an early round at the hospital. I had the day off and spent the morning in the garage making room for back copies of the Washington Post, a new addition to my newspaper collection. At lunchtime I walked to the deli and thought I might order a roast beef on rye with cole slaw and Russian dressing but, remembering the sanctity of that sandwich, to be shared with Thea only, decided on a turkey and onion instead. Rather than cutting through the Katy Trail, I took the long route home, along Maple to Eighth, then down to Stadium and La Grange.

  At the corner of Eighth and Maple was a small nursery called College Gardens dealing mostly in house plants. I bought my mother a ficus there once, which died the summer we went to Florida when our boarders neglected to water it.

  It must have been the red and white of her candy striper uniform that caught my eye. Leaning on her elbows with her chin in her hands, moving her head from side to side coquettishly, at the window of a little shack by the greenhouse, was Thea. She was turned in the direction of a ponytailed garden clerk, who moved busily about in his hut. I crossed the street and ducked behind a car.

  He was tall and blond with a scruffy beard and a tie-dyed shirt under his green garden smock. I couldn't hear what he was saying but it must have been amusing because Thea was laughing, clapping her hands together. When a customer stepped up to the shack hauling a rubber tree, Thea straightened and began to turn.

  I walked hastily down Eighth, my mind a blank. At home I went directly to bed.

  My mother came into the room sometime after six.

  "Thea called about a half hour ago," she said. "She won't be back for dinner."

  All night I waited for Thea to come home. When my mother turned in, I sat on the living room couch with the lights off waiting for the sound of a key in the door. A few times that summer Thea had slept at her own house to watch over things for her father. Now I knew why.

  I went to the bedroom and buried my nose in the pillow where she had slept all summer. It smelled like Florida.

  The night before at my mother's birthday dinner, Thea had said that with us she had finally found a sense of belonging. Now I imagined the garden clerk with his ponytail and tie-dyed shirt, leaning down and kissing Thea full on the lips, taking her hand, whisking her away.

  At four in the morning, still awake, I went outside and sat on the front steps, where I fell asleep in the humid August air until the thump of the Sunday paper woke me and sent me back to my bedroom.

  Not until noon, just as I was getting up, did Thea finally call, inviting my mother and me to lunch downtown.

  "I'm sorry we missed each other last night," she began to say.

  "Mother's busy," I said. "I'll meet you at Booche's in an hour."

  Booche's was an old pool hall with warped cue sticks and excellent hamburgers just off the main drag on Ninth Street.

  "Should we get a table?" she asked, hugging me as I walked in.

  The pool hall was frigid, and I was sweating from the walk over. They always kept the a.c. too high in the summertime.

  "Where were you last night?"

  We took our places at the window seat. She looked at me steadily.

  "I was out with a friend."

  "What kind of a friend?" The nerves tightened my throat.

  "Someone I knew from before," she said. "He used to live here but he moved away when his parents got divorced." She looked into her lap, where her hands were folded. "I saw him at Schnucks about a month ago and he told me he was working at the nursery."

  "So that's where you've been getting the plants, isn't it?" I shifted in my seat.

  She nodded yes, matter-of-factly. "Stuart gave them to me as gifts," she said, as if there were nothing wrong. "Every time I stopped by, he wouldn't let me leave unless I took something. I told him about you and Lorraine and the house and everything. He said it was his pleasure."

  "His pleasure?" I raised my voice. "Stealing from his workplace!"

  "It's his father's nursery," she said, as if that explained everything. "All those plants are his to give away."

  I felt myself slouching.

  "You'd like him a lot," she said.

  "Oh, sure. I imagine I'd really like him."

  "No, I mean it, Gordie. The three of us should go out sometime."

  As the burgers arrived I excused myself, saying there was something I needed to do. I walked out of Booche's and over to Fifth, crossed Stadium, then four more blocks to my house. My mother was gone but the car was still there, so I loaded up the Gremlin with Thea's plants and drove them over to the nursery. I took them out one by one—begonias, violets, daisies and ivy, the amaryllis, the pepper tree, the hanging fuchsia, the orange tree, and the camellia—and left them at the little hut by the greenhouse.

  "Do you have an employee here named Stuart?" I asked another ponytailed garden clerk who had come over to assist me. "Tell him I have no use for these plants."

  For the rest of the summer I ignored Thea's calls. My mother's plea for me to be reasonable had no effect, and as college began, all of my energies focused on proving myself. I would be a student and after that a journalist. Nothing else mattered.

  Clearly I had not been ready for the complexities of love, but one day I knew I would find the pure perfect woman, and I'd show Thea Pierson what a mistake she had made.

  "Thea would like to call you," my mother said, bringing me back to the present.

  "Why's that?" I was pacing. "I haven't spoken with her in four years."

  "I don't know, Gordie. She still talks about you. She says she'll never understand wh
at happened. One day you were the best of friends. The next you were leaving the house any time she stopped by."

  I had never given my mother a proper explanation. I'd simply said we'd had a sudden falling out. "It's probably for the best anyway. I need to concentrate on more important things."

  But my mother had kept in touch with her, mostly by mail, when Thea went off to Brown University and then to summer in-ternships at NIH in D.C. and the Houston Medical Center. She'd leave Thea's letters open on the dinette table hoping that I'd read them. And I did, of course, but there was never any mention of boyfriends and only good-natured questions about me.

  Every once in a while I'd see Thea's father, around campus or eating alone at a restaurant bar, his face buried in the Nation or the New York Review of Books, and inevitably I'd think about her.

  "She doesn't know anyone in St. Louis," my mother said. "I think it would be decent of you to make her feel welcome."

  "I don't know anyone in St. Louis either." I thought of Alicia Whiting, also alone, but in her well-appointed house, her show dog curled at her feet.

  "That's not the point, Gordie. She's a stranger in the city, and a woman. Certain things you have to do for the sake of decency."

  "I'm extremely busy," I said. "It's not like I work a nine-to-five job."

  "Well, I've given her your number," my mother said, and with that she hung up.

  4

  I CAME IN TO WORK early Sunday morning feeling out of balance. I needed to clear my head, so I sat at my desk and read the New York Times and the Independent from cover to cover, concentrating on every detail, as if trying to commit the stories to memory.

  Nineteen eighty-nine had become the year of foreign news. The civil war in Nicaragua was over, the Soviets were out of Afghanistan, Solidarity had been legalized in Poland, paving the way for democratic reform. Hungary had moved to socialism without a show of force from the Soviet government. And for six weeks in May and early June, China had seemed headed for reform as well.