He couldn’t figure out, as the dragon boat made wings upon the sleepy river, when his adult life began. Twice he’d been married. God, how he’d been married! A good dozen years each time. Once, after college. Enmeshed with the past, awakened by her hand out of dreams of childhood or war, he never quite learned how to love her—Gretchen, who might have saved him if she hadn’t called it quits. Once, just after his fortieth birthday. At the top of his game—with a start-up taking off, with cars and jaunts overseas and fly-fishing on the Bitterroot, with good buddies and women of the month—he flung it all away. He wondered now: for what? A vision of himself as the family guy his dad never was? Or a vision of himself and Gina? His blurry picture of the two of them, each nurturing what the other lacked, had sharpened over time into a map of their lives together, all the small rips converging.
     A hand tugged his. She patted a spot on the thwart in front of him, in the shade. The morning wasn’t hot yet. He liked the sun, after winning last night’s tussle over the A/C, but stumbled next to her under the canopy behind her brother.
     “What you think?”
     Each day, as regular as summer afternoon rains in the mountains, she’d ask him that. How could he tell her about the years before they courted? He didn’t want to walk with her down that path, where wait-a-minute vines would snag him and phantoms would deny he was free and whole. He tried to fob her off with a joke. She didn’t smile. Girlfrien’, she’d say, you think girlfrien’. Would she be jealous if she knew what he was really thinking? If she knew what, as their honeymoon waned, he was puzzling over? Would she want him at all?
     “Sweetheart,” he said, “I’m watching the river. I haven’t been here in a long time. It’s pretty.”
     He gestured toward the gleaming reach. It didn’t seem to move, even where the island parted it. A dark figure leaned forward in a sampan, a hillock of greens behind her, dipping her pole into rippled slate. He’d first seen the women of Hue from a bouncing jeep on Palm Sunday. They walked or pedaled to church bearing light-green fronds, their white ao dai opening and closing like petals under a parchment sky portending rain. He wondered, Do they still do that? He’d have to ask Linh. She herself was a Hue girl, a believer in Maria Mother, in signs and miracles.
     Her flower-irises questioned him. He said the words for island, boat. He remembered the Île St. Louis which like a thousand things he couldn’t explain to her. Would they ever go to Paris? Would he, one last time, go to Paris? A tremor flowed down his arm into his motioning hand. It trembled.  He rested it on his thigh. He focused on the island, on its palms and homes and boats, its shadows and colors. It looked as unchanging as a postcard, though like the low city around it, it had been battered and grown back.
     “My uncle house there.” She pointed at the right bank toward the Citadel. “I learn tailor.” Her fingers tapped the dictionary’s micro-keyboard. “Ah-pren-tice.”
     “I know,” he said. “Two years.”
     “Two year I no see my family. Only Tet.”
     He knew that too. She’d painted her life for him, throughout their honeymoon, in swerves of talk. Between the broad swathes there were spaces touched only by filigree strokes like ideograms on ancient tombs and monuments, indecipherable. She knew little about him beyond his legend. Her family’s savior. He was the American who’d come back: the Army adviser who’d sought out his Vietnamese protégé. Little did she know what a fluky impulse he’d acted on. His grand return was really an escape from Gina in search of a younger self living intensely, unmarked by success or failure or fear of growing old. He’d found Lieutenant Ky in Hue by accident. Or rather the wizened man who once was Lieutenant Ky, handsome and optimistic, had recognized him. Exiled to a New Life Hamlet—punishment, after release from re-education camp, for having believed Americans—he and his family scrabbled to grow food and a little cash out of jungle soil. When his fruit trees weren’t bearing, and he’d checked his snares in the forest, he rode his clunky Chinese bike eight kilometers into the city. There he offered his shabby self as a guide to promising tourists, solitary ones and couples who stood out from backpackers and tour groups.
     Seeking a ghost back then he’d found a different one. He accepted Ky’s invitation and arrived at Hoa Binh on the second day of Tet. He was soaked and shivering after clinging to the back of a motorbike and crossing the Perfume River twice, the second time on a sampan poled by an old woman. They climbed a muddy trail up to the hamlet. There, waiting at the crest, stood Ky, a streaming see-through raincoat revealing his best clothes. Next to him a girl held two umbrellas. Linh.  Ky’s daughter; his own unimaginable wife. Then he was forty-five, married, and the girl was twenty. He barely noticed her. She and her sisters were a vision of painted toenails and lipstick and immaculate pajamas, making him wonder only: how did they do it in that village of rain-beaten trees and mud paths? He played himself: honored guest, local event. He ate as little of the loaf of fatty pale banh chung as politeness allowed. Then he negotiated the parting favor that he had known would be asked, though the nature of it threw him. Would he adopt the youngest child? Ky and his wife beseeched. Only this boy, a shy thirteen-year-old with bowed head, still had a chance to escape and be educated. He said he’d consult Gina. He’d write back. Out of sympathy, embarrassment and relief at the prospect of taking a hot shower at the Century Riverside, he folded three fifties and slipped them in Ky’s chest pocket. The ex-lieutenant and his wife, stepping out from the overhang of their hut, followed his retreat into the downpour with streaming eyes and crumpled faces.
     Yeah, that was how it started: with a gift half of what he’d spend, carefree, on a night out with Gina. Then came wheedling letters, scratched on tissue-thin airmail envelopes. He had to decide about them before they became begging letters to toss. One Friday afternoon—most of which he’d spent with his EA, Lois, not in the office—he wrote a check that Lois mailed. Perhaps if he’d worked all day he wouldn’t have troubled. The checks and his perfunctory replies to letters, later e-mails, wouldn’t have become a habit, an affirmation of kinship. And he wouldn’t have been here. He wouldn’t have been sitting thigh to thigh with Linh. He wouldn’t have been chatting with this young man who for years had been calling him Dad, ever since Ky’s death. He wouldn’t have been gazing at patterns of sunlight on the Perfume River, shifting mirages that baffled his good eye and sparked pixels in the blind one.
     Her cell phone, muffled in her silk purse, played a ringtone from a song by Britney Spears. He hadn’t recognized it the first time he heard it. He decoded the name only after Linh repeated it impatiently (didn’t he know a famous singer from his own country?). Now, listening and speaking to some faraway person, she smiled.
     He caught her eye. He said in Vietnamese, “Mother?” She nodded in delight and chattered on. She’d stayed in touch with Ba Canh throughout their time together. At thirty-two, though she’d tied her life to America as her dad had done, she adored her mom. No wonder she’d missed her family, while learning to be a seamstress, before she joined them in Ho Chi Minh City. Their flat there was a long single floor like a shotgun house, with the metal grille in front rolled up in daytime admitting the sights and sounds of the narrow street, its fumes of exhaust and food—that good old Saigon funk. The five of them slept in a row on mats. In the curtained-off bathroom, the size of a plane lavatory, a green bucket floated in a tub of water beside a hole in the floor.
     It was a better life, of sorts, in which he was complicit. It was his money that had sent Phong to a private school in Hue, where he mingled with the sons of Communist officials and burgeoning capitalists, sometimes one and the same. Then—a bright kid, as bright as his own kids but without their advantages—he aced his exams and got into the best university. Ba Canh couldn’t let her youngest child live so far away without anyone to cook for him. A widow, head of the family in spite of her shy willowy presence, she pulled everyone with her to the city they called Saigon. He’d paid for that too. So his legend grew, and Ba Canh said God had sent him to her family. How could they have known how modest the sums he sent were? How could he have known that they would bind him? A year ago he went to Phong’s graduation because, sure, it was his duty. Yet he went also because he was divorced, lost, still in shock from the most violent thing that had ever happened to him, worse than anything in the war. The crash had blinded him. His right eye had come back fast, the left not at all—its field of vision not quite black, but dark like a TV screen between channels, except for the sparkles that teased it in bright light. Ba Canh said it was fate. She didn’t mean his accident. She meant: here you are. You need a faithful wife to care for you, and daughter number two, who has rejected suitors for years, needs a husband. A good man like you.
     Linh passed the Motorola to her brother. She grasped his hand, happy. He liked her constant reaching for him. He liked the way she burst into folksongs from her childhood, unselfconsciously. Yet as the boat with its fierce painted head, yellow and red, growled on toward its destination, he wondered where he was going. She was a citified peasant girl whose schooling, upriver in the boondocks, had ended with eighth grade. Every detail of their time together from their courtship on was clear to him, yet the arc from then to now felt dreamy and confusing. How had he chosen her? Had he chosen her? What a welter of crossroads he’d faced in his life! How could all of them have conjured this moment, this feeling of being enchanted or shanghaied, floating toward a rendezvous he’d made without knowing it? He slipped his hand from hers as from a handcuff. He pictured his silver Freedom Bird rising from Tan Son Nhat, banking seaward. And he imagined her in her family’s cramped flat, a cloister, as the year of waiting for her visa wore on, wondering why his e-mails popped up less often on the blue-and-white screen of the laptop he’d bought her, why he kept forgetting to refill his phone card.
     She took his hand back. She stroked it and then, as a tremor started, her fingers tightened. Before he could say it himself she said, “Coffee.”
     “Yeah, I always drink too much coffee.” Her worried eyes met his grin. She never drank coffee, a luxury, and believed what he said were its effects on him.
     “Dad, are you nervous again?” Phong swiveled to face them. “Maybe you should drink tea.”
     “Maybe I should drink whiskey with a snake in the bottle.”
     Phong’s alert thoughtful face broke open in a smile. He was a good-looking kid, almost handsome, if only he’d drop the fashion of brushing his hair straight up with some kind of Brylcreem.
     “You always make jokes, Dad.”
     “You always laugh at my jokes. That’s why you’re a good son.”
     He shook his head, laughing again, embarrassed. Linh looked on, not catching the English. She loved her younger brother. She wasn’t envious of his education. She wasn’t even jealous of the long relationship he’d had with this storied American who so quickly, so recently had become her lover. By marrying her he had tangled the lines of kinship, his godson now his brother-in-law. At first Phong had been mortified by his mother’s matchmaking. Now, relaxed, he was the translator, the go-between. He also was slipping away. His godfather’s desire for his sister, his reliance on Phong to help with the courtship and light the labyrinth leading to marriage papers at the judiciary office in Hue—all this had dispelled the vestiges of awe clinging  to him. And now the thirteen-year-old who once had dared not look at him was engaged. A bond he’d slowly come to view as lifelong, firmer than the troubled love between him and his American sons, was loosening. Sure, there would be affection, there would be duty—Phong’s once laughable declaration that he’d take care of him in his old age. But first one woman, Linh, and then a second had stepped between them.
     The boat put-putted onward. Already they’d passed the Happiness and Grace Tower, which reached high above the Old Woman Pagoda. He had gone there once during the war in spite of the monks’ cold stares. The feeling of having moved through this country at will as an invader—young, strong, hardly aware of what he was taking in yet bent upon tasting what he could, including the women—was something he had to strain to recall. Even the youthful forty-five-year-old who’d hopped on motorbikes without a qualm, who’d have strayed with the girls of Dong Khoi Street if his wedding band weren’t an amulet—even he had become a foreigner. What country was he moving through now?
     The tombs of the last dynasty, which had petered out with a half-French playboy, spread out along the banks of his imagination. They couldn’t be seen from the river. The river remained prosaic, with its languid small traffic and fishing boats and a gravel operation near the oxbow that looped around the tomb of Minh Mang. There had been no gravel works when the boat dropped Ky and him off. In the gray humidity of an afternoon threatening rain they wheeled their bikes on the rutted path to the ticket booth. In the first courtyard there was no one except mandarins. Gray in their robes and formal hats, hands clasped, their oval eyelids carved shut, they were serenely not there. The gray-green air smelled of decay. Above the steps to the pagoda a UNESCO sign promised restoration.  Under the tiles and dragon corner pieces, flanking Buddha, dim-silver cranes evoked long life. From the opposite courtyard voices rose. A knot of Japanese listened fidgeting to a middle-aged sylph wearing a pink ao dai. She was speaking British-accented English. Minh Mang, she explained, had been unjust.  He had oppressed the people. While making plans to secure his empire forever against constant rebellions he’d died suddenly.
     The slim channel of the oxbow floated closer. He pointed. “Your father took me there. We went to see Minh Mang’s tomb.”
     Linh fixed her wondering eyes on him. Phong said, “Why did you want to go there?”
     “It’s a famous place. Didn’t they teach you about Minh Mang at school? Don’t people in Hue remember him?”
     “Maybe.” Phong gave a short laugh. “Maybe for tourists. That was a long time ago, Dad. People want to live better now. They don’t care about old times.”
     He remembered the island where the river met the South China Sea. During the war he’d walked there among low mounds of sand planted with joss sticks. The graves were raked. Villagers had defended them against wind and rain, unfurlings of the sea during typhoons.
     “But they care about family.”
     “Of course.”
     The boy who was their pilot sat aft, next to a red jerrycan, his mind lost in whatever—video games, perhaps, anything but the boring job of a kid who’d never known war. The boat’s dragon prow pointed west toward the foothills. Rising from the brown river, the land spread out into elephant grass and tangled scrub whose different greens under the high sun looked drained of color, monotone. Sweat teased his pores. A punch to his lumbar area—what he felt after sitting too long without support—made him want to stretch, stand up, walk off the boat. His fault, this idea: a romantic cruise up the misnamed Perfume River. But it was her destination, and he was tired of Vietnam, tired of her whims. He’d let her choose their honeymoon, all places she’d never seen in her own country: Dalat, Nha Trang, Hanoi, Halong Bay. At dusk in the 36 Streets he’d made a still spot in the flowing throng as she went from shoe shop to shoe shop, for forty minutes, looking to replace the white platforms that he’d warned would hurt her feet. He’d thought, as the senior partner, that kindness and patience were his to bestow. But really, hadn’t she been staking out her ground? Wasn’t she stronger than he’d ever imagined?
     “Hot?” she said.
     Under the thick hair draping her back, typical of Hue girls, she must have been feeling the heat herself. She couldn’t have been pleased that their cruise would end with a walk in the sun that was her olive-gold complexion’s enemy. Her voice conveyed sympathy but a curlicue had formed by the corner of her mouth. He knew what that expression meant. He’d noticed it first in a stroke of light from the bathroom door, their second night together, when his jetlag and their nonstop wedding day crashed over him like a wave. She was so untraveled that she hadn’t a clue. All she knew, gazing at his humped recumbent flesh, was thwarted desire. How long had that contemptuous gaze touched him? A moment? It didn’t matter. He couldn’t forget it, any more than a kid could forget his hand in the grip of a direct-current outlet.
     He didn’t answer. His anger felt like prickly heat. It made him forget the ache in his back. He even felt indifferent as the boat chugged under the bridge built for the new Highway 1 bypass, a marker of time he hadn’t wished to see, unlike the red-capped white kilometer posts that the Vietnamese were content to leave where the French had set them. Their pilot, confused beneath the New York Giants cap some tourist had given him, nosed his dragon into a low-hanging tree where there used to be a cleared landing. Ky’s children clambered up the remains of the path he himself had charged up in ’96. Dry at the surface, the reddish soil crumbled beneath his Nikes, escaping him. He loathed his fear—the dread of losing his balance, toppling, succumbing to darkness. At the top he looked across the river to orient himself. In the haze he spotted a boulder, once painted red and white in honor of the Marines, on the slope of the saddleback hill that had been Firebase Birmingham.
     “Dad, are you tired?”
     He swung around. Phong, whose forehead was moist as if he’d been playing one of his Sunday afternoon soccer games, gazed at him.
     “Your face is, how you say, blush. You want to sit down?”
     Linh reached for his hand, motioning him to sit down with her.
     “Are you tired, my husband?”
     “No! Just leave me alone. I’m OK.”
     He strode to the raw-looking gray of the new road, waiting until Phong caught up before he glanced back looking for Linh. They were silent until they reached the lane, also newly paved, which bisected the shade of Hoa Binh.
     “Why you say that my sister?” His grammar loosened when he was upset. He didn’t look angry—just puzzled, hurt, his Adam’s apple and cheekbones seeming to swell.
     “Because I’m stupid. Where is Em Linh?”
     “She go different way.”
     Behind there was only scrub, green-tawny. In the middle distance the grassy humps of Birmingham rose.  Beyond, dark-green ridges marched, their peaks erased of any sign of the landing zones and bases that once had named them.
     “I’ll go look for her.”
     “No, no, she come back. You go with me, Dad. OK?”
     His upper chest and throat felt squeezed. Phong was his favorite son, even though he shared him with Ky’s ghost. He had the best mix of good nature and brightness. For his age he was mature, unnervingly mature, as when he read his godfather’s mind and tried to soothe him.
     They entered the village.
     “My family’s house. Do you remember?”
     Ten meters from the one-car lane, shaded by trees, it struck no chord. It could have been a derelict shed on an Appalachian farm.
     “Shall we go inside?”
     “Later. I have to go to Hoa Binh local government.”
     Since the family’s move to Saigon, none of them had changed their official residence. Phong needed to sort out paperwork in preparation for that still disconcerting event, his marriage. What tied them to this place? It had been the site of humiliation for a once-young man and a once-young woman who’d chosen badly in love, in war. He couldn’t imagine their early years, so much harder than ’96. Back then the sisters had climbed to the boulder-circled peak of Nui Khe. There, crouched in the wind, they picked up brass, the casings of flares and mortars, any remains of the battle for Hill 618 that they could carry. For two weeks at a time Linh went with Ky into the forest, checking animal traps and fishing. At night he told her stories so she wouldn’t feel afraid. So Linh had confided to him matter-of-factly as if to say: yes, this was my life, you should know about it.
     Phong stepped into a low concrete building—another new thing—painted the yellow of the star in Vietnam’s flag. An official and a man in boots resembling Doc Martens bantered across a wood counter. In a side office: smiles of recognition, dinky cups of tea, catching up. The woman withdrew, her pleasure at seeing Phong softening the uniform of her dark skirt, white blouse and pulled-back hair. Forgotten, he sipped the pale brew.  He wasn’t used to taking a back seat in his godson’s life but Phong was enjoying himself, chatting on equal terms with a bureaucrat twice his age.
     Outside, draping the sun, clouds shed a diffuse brightness. A thunderstorm, one of the summer afternoon showers that cooled the mountains and foothills west of Hue, would be good. He’d begun sweating inside the office. Phong looked cool.
     “Is that man a friend of yours?”
     “No, he knows my family.”
     “You talked a lot.”
     “He wants to know about my family. He wants to know about me. Many people have left Hoa Binh, but I think I am most successful.”
     Phong had never boasted to him before. He wasn’t boasting now. Having returned to his birthplace, having just been promoted to marketing manager, he had taken Hoa Binh’s measure. He’d outgrown it.
     “Of course you’re the most successful.”
     “Because of you, Dad. You know, when I tell my friends about you, I say you are the man who changed my life.”
     The words were a blessing but unawares Phong had blessed him in parting. Marriage, a baby, the need to be his own man—all those things would nudge their relationship into the past.
     They approached the lane’s gray smudge.
     He asked, meaning to be casual but sounding breathy, “Where is your sister?”
     A woman in lavender pajamas, her gray hair in a bun, darted out from a house.  She clasped Phong’s hand in both of hers. After a burst of talk her shy black smile took in the American.
     “That’s Auntie Huong. She’s my family’s neighbor long time. She keeps the key of our house. She gave the key to Linh.”
     They crossed the lane. The village—he felt dumb for not having figured this out before—was a web of relationships stretching back in time. It touched him only tenuously. Why had he thought he could simply step into it, enter the hearts of people he didn’t understand in their fullness any more than they understood him?
     He stumbled on something, a wait-a-minute vine, in the overgrown yard of the home that Ky had built and rebuilt by hand. Phong gripped his arm as he picked himself up.
     “Dad, are you OK? Do you want to see doctor in Hue?”
     Linh, coming out of the house, ran up to him. “Anh Chris!” She pressed her head to his chest. Why were there half-dried tears on her face? All he had done was trip. There’d been no stagger, no spooky reluctance of his muscles to do as he wanted. That had happened only a few times, most recently yesterday in the hotel’s breakfast room. The upshot of too much coffee and excitement and fatigue—so he hoped next month the bored neurologist would inform him.
     He ducked as he entered the dimness. Patches of thatch sagged from the roof between stained old bamboo poles punctuated with lengths of PVC.
     “Do you remember?” Phong twitched back a musty cloth, revealing a space smaller than his condo’s walk-in closet. “My parents’ bedroom.”
     The kids must have slept on the other side of the central hall. At the back of the hall, on a shelf, the family altar gleamed. Phong stood before it. He planted an incense stick in the basin of sand before Ky’s photograph and bowed his head. Then Linh dropped his hand and took her brother’s place. Her shoulders shook. Her soft sobs made him think of her cries, like suppressed hiccups, when the fooling around she’d started on the train to Hue went too far. She changed positions, unzipping him. When he groaned she clapped her hand on his mouth, her other hand still moving, and caught his heaving in the rough thin blanket.
     She scraped a match. She passed him a stick with a tiny glowing head; it quivered like a divining rod. The altar was a jumble: fragments of burned fake money and incense, fruit pits, a small mirror, postcard-sized pictures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Ky’s framed photo, sepia in the half-light, looked as he’d seen him in those moments in ’96 when Ky had let his game face fade. He wondered why there was no photo of the young lieutenant. He remembered the picture of him in his casket which Phong had mailed among other pictures of the funeral. He remembered a girl all in white under her transparent raincoat at the cemetery: a windblown blade of hair on her forehead, her wet face tilted toward the sky, grimacing. Back in 2000 he couldn’t send money fast. He read between the lines of Phong’s two faxes. The family of a poor man unconscious in Hue’s hospital would have hoped, prayed but known better than to expect anything more than nurses’ and doctors’ curt words. Ky had woken up long enough to say, dying, Troi oi! And if  the family’s savior had been there, if he’d given Ba Canh a hundred dollars for each doctor, would it have changed the karma of a cerebral hemorrhage?
     He was alone. The cracks in the thatch had grown dim. There was a sound of far-off artillery, harmless. Linh and Phong were standing under the trees Ky had planted, which caught most of the pattering. They were smiling.
     “That is our memory house. Some people want to buy the land but my family will not sell. Not yet. Do you remember these trees, Dad?”
     “Kind of. Your father showed me some of the fruit but I’ve forgotten the names.”
     “This one is breadfruit. There is orange tree, there is lemon—you know from Florida. Over there, that is star apple. And this…” He screwed up his face. “I forget the name.”
     There was a moment when they all stood together in the ruined garden like a family, remembering.
     “My father wasn’t lucky, was he?”
     “No.” He saw the arc of Ky’s life. He saw the lieutenant, ambitious in pressed fatigues and brand-new jungle boots, when they first met. God knows, he’d aimed high and taken in everything his American adviser told him. He had executed well, even bravely. Then he’d tumbled, tumbled hard into the gulag, cut short at thirty with only his family to live for. That last duty Ky performed better than anyone he knew.
     Phong glanced at his watch. “I go see Mr. Hoan, he has car to take us back.”
     Linh took his hands. She looked up at him. “My husband,” she said. “We go?”
     A muscle in his forearm trembled. He pulled away before she felt it and smiled. “Sweetheart, I forgot something inside. One minute.”
     The darkness for an instant made his bad eye equal. Vague strokes of light crisscrossed the woven walls; then they brightened with sunshine. He stared at the altar, searching. There it was: his photo next to Ky’s behind a grove of incense sticks, one still smoking, pluming up pale into the dimness.  There could be worse fates than that, couldn’t there?
     “Come.”
     The rain had stopped. His tremor stopped, too. He stepped out into light, following the shadow of his wife, who didn’t pause but glanced back at him, smiling as if at a child.