Lost And Found

This is a story I wrote for a contest in which it had to involve a supernatural element and "souvenirs of war." This story and The Smokers' Club are probably the two short stories that I'm proudest of. Unfortunately, when I submitted this story, I sent it to the wrong email address and it wasn't considered.

LOST AND FOUND

She was cold. It was a cold that couldn’t be explained by the winter storm that was lashing the Oregon coast, where she lived just a few hundred feet from the ocean. Wind and rain had battered the coast for days. The power had gone out the night before and without heat, there was a chill in the air. But this was a different kind of cold. This cold permeated her skin and seeped into her bones. It enveloped her like a shroud. No matter how much she burrowed into the covers, she couldn’t escape it. She’d felt this way for three months. Ever since her father died.

Two years before, her father moved into the spare bedroom. He didn’t do it because he wanted to. She didn’t accept him because she wanted to. The mere act of her father moving in acknowledged the inevitability of the future. Doug Lundstrom had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given three to six months to live. Upon receiving the news, he had sold his house in Sacramento and moved up to Becky’s Oregon home so that she could take care of him as he died.

Becky’s mother walked out on her family years earlier when Becky was only seven. From that point on, the remaining members of the family formed a team of two. They were always there for each other. Even during the troubled high school years, Becky had always been able to rely on her father to help and support her. She had never rebelled against his firm and caring guidance and as she eased into adulthood, he provided her with the freedom to find her way. Where that took her was to the windswept and rainy Oregon coast and a teaching job in a preschool.

The job didn’t pay great, but it was what she wanted to do and, with some help from her father, Becky had been able to purchase a small two bedroom home that overlooked the ocean. One hundred feet in front of her home, Highway 1 etched its way along the coast and three hundred feet beyond the ribbon of gray, the fringes of the Pacific Ocean crashed on the beach and rocks that she could see from the windows and deck of her home. Not a day went by without Becky stopping at some point, looking at the view, and thanking her god for the opportunity to live in her own paradise.

There really wasn’t any doubt that Doug would move in with her once he received his diagnosis. The bond that they had developed was strong. Becky would take care of him and help him die. There was nobody else who would and she couldn’t imagine him dying alone. What the two of them didn’t realize was that he would defy the prognosis he was given. Those few months stretched into two years. That time gave them both the opportunity to share with each other things they had never discussed. By the time he died, Becky loved her father without regret. What she didn’t realize was that there was one secret that he hadn’t been able to tell her.

* * *

“What the hell,” she mumbled to herself as she threw the covers off and pushed them down to the foot of the bed. If she was going to be cold, she was going to be cold. Becky got up and looked out the window admiring the view for the first time that day. It looked as though the storm was finally petering out. She could see clear sky at the edges of the horizon. Clouds still filled the sky over her home and a fine mist was falling. The wind blew hard enough to bend the trees that dotted the coastline in front of her. The dynamic environment of the Oregon Coast had yet to bore her.

The power came on as Becky shrugged into her robe and went out to the kitchen. She started a pot of coffee, realizing as she did so that she was making it the way her dad had liked it--black and thick. He had developed a taste for bad coffee while he was fighting the communists in Vietnam. When he moved in, it only took a day or two for her to realize that he wasn’t going to drink her weak imitation of coffee. Without argument, she began to make it the way he liked, and found herself getting used to it. Now, with him gone, she had continued making it the same. She was unwilling to change back to the way things were before he had arrived. To do so, would be to accept his passing.

Absentmindedly reaching for a coffee cup on the counter, Becky’s hand brushed against a piece of paper leaning against the cup. She looked down and saw the face of a little girl staring back at her. To Becky, the girl looked as though she was of Asian descent. Her hair was black, as black as the darkest sky at midnight. She had eyes that matched. They were deep, deep circles of darkness looking out from a face that was lit up with a smile. The kind of smile an infant may have after being tickled. Two lonely front teeth poked out.

“Huh?” she found herself muttering out loud. “Where’d that come from?” The picture hadn’t been there the night before, and she hadn’t noticed it when she first entered the kitchen. Becky picked up the picture and looked at it, trying to figure out how it could have got there. She had never seen it before. A chill went down her back. Had somebody been in her house while she slept?

Becky turned the picture over to see if there was any clue on the back. There, in her dad’s almost illegible scrawl, was written, “Becky, find her.”

In the back of Becky’s mind an itch began to form. It was a lot like an itch she felt sometimes when she was out in public. Every once in awhile, while sitting in a crowded movie theater or walking through a shopping mall, a paranoid thought would enter her mind and she would become convinced that, at any minute, a madman would enter with a gun and begin shooting. The back corner of her head would start to itch, right where she imagined the bullet would enter her brain and snuff out her life.

This time, though, it wasn’t the itch of a bullet she felt. Instead, a different itch arose and suddenly she saw images, quickly one after another. The first was of a young man, who she realized was her father. He was lying on the ground in a jungle, shooting a gun at some unseen target, and screaming as he did so. She could see that he was frightened and that tears were running down his cheeks. The second image was of the same man, hugging a Vietnamese woman, and smiling at the camera. The woman was beautiful. Her oval face, framed by long black hair that reached down beyond her hips, was lit up with a smile and luminous eyes that seemed to reach deep into Becky’s soul. That image was quickly replaced by the sight of the same woman, holding a baby who looked like the one in the picture Becky now held. The woman was screaming and crying, and holding one arm out between the poles of a wrought iron fence, while the baby wrapped her arms around the woman’s neck. The woman no longer looked quite so beautiful. Instead, she looked scared. No, not scared. She looked terrified. The image quickly switched to one of Becky’s dad boarding a helicopter on the roof of a building. He looked back briefly, feebly waved, and then disappeared into the bowels of the chopper.

“You’re my sister,” Becky whispered, looking at the picture. The idea had itched and scratched its way from the farthest corner of her mind. It wasn’t a bullet from a gun, but it exploded into her consciousness nonetheless. She had a sister she never knew existed. The question of how the picture got there no longer mattered. She knew though that there was something she had to do. Somehow, somewhere her dad was still there with her and asking Becky to do something. She turned the picture back over and looked again. The words remained. “Becky, find her.” How?

Over the next few days, Becky found herself staring at that picture over and over again, trying to figure out how to find the girl in it. How could she possibly find somebody who had been born thirty years ago in a country halfway around the world with nothing more than a baby picture? She would sit for hours and stare at the picture, absentmindedly scratching the spot on her head where the itch had started when she first found the picture.

Three days later, while she was drinking her morning coffee, black and thick, the itch returned. It caught her by surprise again, but there were no images this time. Instead, there was just a thought, a formation of words on the movie screen of her mind. She thought it was her own, but she wouldn’t have been surprised if the same power that had given her the images also gave her the thought. It was simply this, “Talk to Joe.”

“Of course,” she muttered to herself. Joe was her dad’s only true friend. He had come up to Oregon from southern California every few months during the last couple of years. Joe and her father would sit out on her deck for hours, drinking beer and reliving the past, talking about old friends and telling stories. Joe had served in Vietnam with her father and saved his life at one point, killing a North Vietnamese soldier who had wounded him and was about to fire the killing shot. If anybody knew about the baby in the picture, it would be Joe.

“Joe,” she said, after she reached him by phone, “there’s something I need to talk to you about. Can you come up here?”

“I’d love to,” he replied. “But, I don’t think I can get up there for a couple of months. What’s going on?”

“It’s about dad. I’d rather not tell you over the phone. There’s something I need to show you. It’s important.”

“I don’t know. I’ll see what I can do, but . . .”

“I’ll pay your way, Joe. Please,” she pleaded.

When he arrived at her front door three days later, delayed by a winter storm that closed the Portland airport, Becky sat him down at her kitchen table and poured him a cup of coffee, black and thick. “Here it is,” Becky said to him, reaching over to the space between the napkin holder and the wall where she had left the picture. Her fingers reached in between and found nothing. She moved the napkins away and looked. There was no picture. Becky was sure she had left the picture in that spot just a couple of hours before Joe got there. She turned the kitchen upside down and couldn’t find it. Just as quickly as the picture had appeared, it had now disappeared.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Joe, you aren’t going to believe this without the picture.”

“What’s going on, Becky? Just tell me. You’d be surprised at what I believe these days.”

“The other day I found a picture, here on the counter. It was a picture of a little Vietnamese girl. I’d never seen it before. On the back, in my dad’s handwriting, it said ‘Becky, find her.’ I’m sure that little girl is my sister, that my dad fathered her while in Vietnam. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do. Then I realized you must know about her,” Becky said, looking at Joe. She felt as though she was about to cry. She was convinced that Joe would think she had gone batty. That the death of her father had pushed her over the edge.

Joe was silent for a moment, pondering Becky’s words. “Your dad had a child in Vietnam,” he said slowly, not sure how to proceed. “He didn’t tell you?”

“No. He never talked about Vietnam. Never. I tried to talk to him about it, but he would never talk about it. He just wouldn’t. It was the only thing he couldn’t talk to me about.”

“This is going to sound heartless,” Joe said, “but you have to understand what war does to a man. It can take your heart and your soul and rip them to shreds. You become bitter and cynical. Attachment becomes dangerous and you say things, think things, do things, to create distance. Do you understand? Don’t judge your dad by what I’m about to tell you, okay?”

“Okay,” she replied, now wondering if she wanted this conversation to continue.

“O-o-o-o-h,” Joe sighed. “He loved that woman, her name was Anh. He hated the war. Hated it. But he loved Anh. She was the only good thing about that fuckin’ war that he had. God, she was beautiful and wonderful. And then with the evacuation, he lost her. Over the years, he began to refer to the little girl as his ‘souvenir of war.’ Only it wasn’t a souvenir that he had been able to keep. It was one that he had to leave behind. It tore him up to have to leave them both behind when we evacuated from Saigon in ’75. But he had no choice.”

“That’s awful.”

“Oh, it was. It took years for him to get over it. Every once in awhile, when we were drunk enough and had used up all of our other memories, he’d stop and wonder if she had survived and what her life must be like. A few years ago, he mentioned going back and trying to find her, but then he got the diagnosis and lost his opportunity.”

There was silence for a moment or two. Becky wasn’t alarmed by what Joe had told her. Her father’s silence about the war had told her everything she needed to know. It had scarred him. Although he had been an attentive father and did everything to care for her and make sure she made the right choices, there were times when he was so removed from her that she wanted to reach out and shake him and bring him back to her. She had little doubt now, looking back with the wisdom of maturity and the past couple of years of close contact with her father, that he had struggled with the demons brought on by his war experience. It did sound cruel that he referred to that beautiful little girl in the picture as a souvenir, but she understood. Just as he occasionally pushed Becky away, he needed to push the little girl away, as far away as he could. Otherwise, the wounds that he had sewn shut might re-open. From his grave, he appeared to be trying to draw the little girl back.

“Do you believe me?” she found herself asking Joe.

“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “You can’t understand this because you’ve never had to fight for your life. You’ve never gone through a war. But war does something to a person. After you’ve seen the guy next to you die for an incredibly stupid reason, you have to believe there’s something else. Otherwise you give into the futility of war. I walked into Vietnam not believing in God. But you know what? That saying about there being no atheists in foxholes. It’s true.

“I walked out believing in the whole thing,” continued Joe. “There’s a God. We have souls. There’s an afterlife. And, sometimes when you die, if you have unfinished business? Your soul isn’t at rest and you haven’t found peace. Some people, when they die, that anguish lives on. That’s what a ghost is. It’s an anguished soul. A soul that needs to find peace.

“To answer your question, hell yeah, I believe you. I knew your dad had a void. I’m just surprised it took this long for him to reveal it to you.”

“What do I do now?”

“Find her. Just like it said.”

“Will you help me? I don’t know where to start.”

“Yeah, I can help. I’ve got some contacts in the Defense Department and there are old vets going back to Vietnam all the time to find their lost kids, the ones they fathered while they were there. Hell, a lot of those kids ended up over here eventually. For all we know, she could be living in the next town over. If she’s alive, I’ll find her.”

“Thanks, Joe,” she said, getting up to give him a hug.

“No problem. I’m doing it for your dad,” he said. “Can I have another cup of that coffee? It’s the best coffee I’ve had in years.”

In the next few weeks, Joe’s contacts paid off, in spades. Just over a month after Becky shared her story with him, she received an envelope from him via Federal Express. At first she couldn’t open it, convinced that enclosed was the evidence of the early death of the sister she never knew she had. The coldness she still felt intensified as she looked at the envelope. Stalling, Becky got up and poured herself another cup of coffee. She sat back down and picked up the envelope, turning it over and over in her hands.

Finally, she undid the clasp on the back and slid her finger under the flap, tearing it open. She looked inside and saw a piece of paper and a picture. Excitedly, Becky dumped the contents out on the table. Staring up at her was a Vietnamese woman who appeared to be in her mid-thirties. She had long, straight hair that was blacker than the darkest midnight, much like the hair of the woman who had flashed across Becky’s memory a few weeks prior. Her eyes stared out of the picture and pierced Becky’s soul. The woman was breathtaking in her simple beauty.
Becky picked up the page that had also fallen out of the envelope. On it was a handwritten note from Joe.

Becky,
Enclosed is a picture of your sister. Her name is Hanh Phuc Nguyen (Hanh Phuc means ‘blessing from above’). Her mother, Anh Nguyen, died shortly after we left Vietnam. Hanh Phuc became a refugee and was adopted by a family in Minnesota who renamed her Vicki. She does not know about you or your father. Below, I have written down her address and phone number if you decide you want to contact her. Good luck!
Joe

“My God!” Becky exclaimed, dropping the note to the table. She placed the picture in front of her and stared at it. She looked to the letter and read it again. She glanced at the picture again and then re-read the letter. “What do I do?” she found herself asking out loud. Hours later, after walking out to her deck and watching the ocean waves crash on the beach for what seemed like an eternity, she had her answer, but first she needed to make a call.

“Is Joe there?” Becky asked after a woman, whose voice she didn’t recognize, answered the phone.

“No, who’s this?”

“Becky Lundstrom. Who’s this?”

“I’m his sister. How do you know Joe?”

“My father served with him in Vietnam. What’s going on?”

“Joe died last night.”

“No!” Becky screamed into the phone. “How? When?”

“He died in his sleep, peacefully, thank God.”

“I’m so sorry, I . . . I . . .” Becky began crying as she slid down to the floor. That itch in the back corner of her head had returned, and it was showing her something she didn’t want to see. In her mind, a series of images flashed by. First, came the picture of the little girl, followed by an image of Joe sitting at her kitchen table and her searching frantically for the picture. Then, her mind was filled with the picture of Hanh Phuc as an adult, followed by an image of Joe, lying in bed, peacefully. Each link in the chain leading her to the sister she never knew she had disappeared as soon as the next link appeared. Was it really possible? Had Joe died because he helped her? Becky shook her head until the itch went away, unwilling to seriously consider the possibility.

“Is there anything I can do for you,” she heard the woman on the other end of the phone ask.

“No. No. I’ll be fine. Is there anything that I can do for you,” Becky asked.

“Pray for Joe and his family. That’s all we can do now,” the woman said, her voice beginning to tremble.

“I’ll do that. Thank you for letting me know,” Becky said as she hung up the phone.

That night, Becky left the picture and letter on the kitchen counter next to her coffee cup. When she got up the next morning and reached for the cup to fill with coffee, black and thick, she discovered that both documents were gone. Another link in the chain had disappeared. She gasped and glanced up. There sitting at the kitchen table was her father. Before she could say or do anything, he raised his own cup to her as if in toast and nodded his head to her, ever so slightly. And disappeared. When Becky looked down, where she had left the picture, there was a single red rose and a small piece of paper. On the paper, in her father’s almost illegible scrawl, was written, “Sleep peacefully.”

Twenty four hours later, the cold that had seeped into her bones was finally gone, and Becky Lundstrom found herself on an airplane headed east towards Minnesota, hoping that she wasn’t the next link in the chain.