The Red Lotus Read online

  Still, she offered it as a possibility—and realized as soon as she had spoken that it had been a mistake. Toril and the two CSCD officers shared a glance, and she knew the look well: she shared it with doctors and nurses weekly when a patient or a patient’s parents or friends were lying to themselves.

  Nevertheless, the captain indulged her and said, “At this point? Anything’s possible.”

  And maybe it was those two words—anything’s possible—but another revelation was beginning to appear through the mist in her mind, racing like a distant corsair on the horizon, and just as unnerving. This one, however, didn’t strike her as quite so delusional. “Or,” she began, speaking to all of them in the little hotel’s living room, at once light-headed with anxiety at the idea and resolute as she tried to bring it into focus, “Austin did lie. But he lied because he needed an excuse to come here. To come to this part of Vietnam.”

  8

  The term came back to her once again: pattern recognition. When it wasn’t, for instance, a broken leg on a stoned college student who fell down a flight of stairs or (worse) a half dozen broken bones on a half dozen high school musicians whose van had just been rammed by a dump truck at the intersection of Twenty-Seventh and Third, it was about deciphering the clues. It was harder in the small hours of the morning and it was harder when you were exhausted and it was harder when the ER was in chaos. Those were the moments when she—when any ER doctor—was most likely to miss something and make a mistake. And right now, she was feeling far more like a patient than a doctor, and she needed to flip the tables and force herself to think clearly. To see what was really before her: what was fact and what was (and she cursed herself for using this word, but it fit) hypochondria. She needed to separate the real from the imagined.

  Before the police captain left the small hotel, Alexis had gone upstairs to her room and retrieved the energy gels she had found on the road and given them to him inside the plastic bag. She had used her phone to show the officers the images of the spot where she had discovered them, and then airdropped the photos of the topography onto the captain’s phone. She’d told him precisely how many kilometers they were from the hotel when she had lifted them from the asphalt. She’d also brought downstairs Austin’s passport, and the day manager for the little hotel made photocopies of every page for both the police and the FBI attaché. She’d turned over to the police his laptop and his tablet.

  After the two officers had left, Alexis asked Toril if she could have a moment alone with her. Toril said yes, and the two women walked out into the morning heat and stood beneath the trees on the eastern edge of that enticing infinity pool.

  “It’s nighttime now in the Berkshires,” Alexis began. “When we were inside, you said the embassy was going to call Austin’s parents. He’s been gone nearly twenty-four hours. I want to pick up the phone and call them myself. Pull them from whatever they’re watching on TV and ask, ‘What the hell? Who is your son really?’ Ask the dad, ‘Did you lie or did your son?’ ”

  “Yes, you could do that, but you’ve never even met them. At this point, why go there?”

  “Because I want to. Because I want to know the truth.”

  “Let’s assume that Austin…exaggerated. If he did, he had his reasons for telling you one thing—”

  “For lying,” she corrected Toril.

  “Okay. For lying. And there are lots of reasons why he might have lied that have nothing to do with his disappearance. I think everyone’s first instinct inside was the right one. Occam’s razor: the most likely explanation is probably the correct explanation. For whatever the reason, he was ashamed of his father’s service record. That may be all there is to it.”

  “I know. It makes me a little sad that he wouldn’t tell me the truth, if that’s all there is to it. But…”

  “Go ahead.”

  “But it’s also possible that there’s a link between his lying and the fact he’s gone missing.”

  The attaché sighed and adjusted the cuffs on her blouse. “Which is precisely why you shouldn’t follow up and we should. Or, to be precise, why we will support Captain Nguyen when his team follows up. The CSCD knows what they’re doing. They’re good, Alexis. They’re really good.”

  “We were supposed to fly home tomorrow. Tomorrow night. Austin, me. Some of the others on the bike tour. Ride in the morning, have a farewell brunch, and start the long trip back to America.”

  Toril seemed to think about this. “We should know more before then. We should know more by tonight,” she said finally, but her tone was utterly without conviction.

  * * *

  . . .

  Alexis dabbed at the beads of perspiration on her forehead and watched the black SUV drive away, wondering if she’d ever see Toril again. She knew she would hear from her. She wandered around the villa to the patio off the dining room, thinking, her mind conjuring accidents and abductions, but also conspiratorial eddies that lived in the undertow she could feel but never quite see.

  Finally, she decided to get it over with and phone her mother. It was well after dinnertime in New Jersey now—or lower Manhattan if she’d had a client dinner—but her mother would still be awake. The skies had grown overcast, formless and gray, and already the air was sticky. As one, the rest of the bike tour had chosen not to check out of the hotel and ride south as planned to their final destination and their final night as a pack. They wanted to stay with her in Hoi An, and it was only at her urging that the rest of them had gone with Giang and Colleen for a short ride in the area, while Scott remained back at the hotel to assist Alexis in any way that he could. But they all seemed genuinely desirous of remaining here and waiting for news of their missing compatriot.

  Her mother picked up the phone on the third ring and began, “Alexis, what’s happened? You’re still in Vietnam, aren’t you?”

  “I am,” she said, “and, yes, something has happened. Are you alone? Home?”

  “Yes, I’m alone and, yes, I’m home. Talk to me.”

  And so Alexis did. She told her mother most of what she knew, a sort of Reader’s Digest condensed version, fending off her mother’s interruptions—her questions, her incessant need for clarifications—as if she were fencing, and eventually reached the present: that she was standing alone on the patio of a stylish boutique hotel in Hoi An and there was little she could do now but wait. She had chosen not to tell her that it seemed Austin had lied to her about his family, both because she didn’t have any answers yet to explain why he would, and because she was hoping to avoid the inevitable judgment it would elicit, a condescension that Alexis knew she would feel even through the satellites and cell towers—a gossamer of thin or even non-existent air—that linked them. Perhaps if her father were still alive and on the phone, too, she would have told them. He might not have had helpful advice, but at least he would have been sympathetic.

  “Will you still start home tomorrow night?” her mother asked her when she was done.

  “I don’t know. But I doubt it. I hope to know more later today.”

  “What are the people like? The people on the bike tour with you?”

  “They’re fine. Two single women older than me from the Midwest. A nice couple from North Carolina. A husband-and-wife pair of very athletic accountants.”

  “What do the others do? The ones who aren’t accountants.”

  “As in for a living?”

  “Yes.”

  “The couple from North Carolina are retired. Now, it seems, they travel. The other two? Talia is head of ethics and compliance for some pharmaceutical company in St. Louis. Sheri is a lawyer.”

  “Good, enlist her right now to—”

  “No, there is nothing to enlist her to do,” Alexis said. “She’s about to leave on her bike with everyone else. They’re going to go for a short ride.”

  “Well, I can make some calls at this end. The FB
I, the American embassy.”

  “The FBI attaché was just here. I told you that. She came because I called the American consulate.”

  “I can call someone in Washington.”

  “No. You can’t. Or you shouldn’t. Trust me, there’s no one you can call in America.”

  “There’s always something more you can do. You know that. It’s like a political campaign. There’s always one more phone call you can make, always one more house you can visit, always one more door—”

  “Not this time. I’m sorry, but sometimes there just isn’t. Sometimes—” And she stopped herself, not because she had had an epiphany about Austin and what might have happened to him, but because she was recalling one of those moments when someone had died in her little cubicle because there was just nothing more that she or anyone else in the ER could do. People died. Rain fell. The leaves changed. “Sometimes,” she continued, “you just have to accept the fact that it’s either someone else’s responsibility now or you’ve done all you can. You do nothing. You wait.”

  “Is that what you do when someone comes into the hospital and—”

  “Yes. Sometimes you do nothing because there’s nothing more you can do,” she said. She watched a mosquito land on the back of her free hand and blew him away. She recalled the Hollywood codes she’d been part of over the years. When someone’s mother or daughter, father or son, was dead and not coming back, but their family was in the ER, sometimes you worked and worked to try and resuscitate the body even though it was beyond repair. They called it a Hollywood code because it was little more than bad acting. It wasn’t really calculated: no one ever said, Let’s pretend to do something because the stiff’s husband is eight feet away. It was only when you were done, sometimes hours later when you were having a cup of coffee or staring aimlessly at your locker, that someone would mumble, Hollywood code. And you’d murmur, despondent that someone had died, Yup, he was always a doubtful.

  “Alexis,” her mother said.

  “Mom.”

  “Are you—”

  “No. I’m not. Of course not. It’s been years. I’m fine. Or I’m as fine as I can be, under the circumstances.”

  Somewhere in the trees on the property was a bird whose call sounded something like a monkey’s, and she looked out toward the lush jungle and tried to spot it, but she couldn’t.

  “What do his parents think? What are they doing?” her mother asked.

  She heard human chatter as well. It was coming through the screens in the French doors. It was Talia and the Coopers. They were talking about water bottles and energy gels because they were gearing up for their ride. She considered running upstairs and offering them Austin’s unopened gels since it didn’t seem like he was going to need them, even if they found him or (miraculously) he returned that very moment. But her mother was repeating her questions, her tone growing adamant.

  “I haven’t reached them,” she answered.

  “You haven’t reached them?” It was one of her mother’s favorite ways to prod her: to change a pronoun but essentially repeat exactly what her daughter had just said, transforming the statement into a question. You haven’t studied for the MCATS? You haven’t called the landlord? You haven’t asked anyone about a different schedule?

  You haven’t called your therapist? You’re a doctor, for God’s sake!

  Haven’t. If she were ever to make a list of her least favorite contractions, haven’t would win. Even on the other side of the planet, Alexis could see her mother shaking her head in disdain as she spoke.

  “No,” she replied simply. “I’ve left them messages.”

  “And they haven’t called back? Good God, you’re in Vietnam. I’m in New Jersey. Give me their number. I’ll call them right now.”

  “You don’t need to do that. The consulate here is—”

  “I do need to,” her mother said, cutting her off. “I want to help. It’s not a big deal. It will take five minutes.”

  “Five minutes? Seriously? You’re going to call people you’ve never met and tell them their son is missing in Vietnam and you think it will take five minutes? If you managed that call in five minutes, it would be…”

  “It would be what?”

  “It would be a case study in cruelty. Besides, the FBI is on it. The American consulate is on it. They’re calling.”

  “Cruelty.”

  “Yes.”

  “I was only trying to be efficient.”

  She felt a raindrop on her shoulder and another on her upper arm, and so she ducked inside. She was relieved the other cyclists hadn’t set off yet. If they waited fifteen minutes, the rain might be done for the morning. Perhaps for the day. And they’d be spared.

  “I know,” she told her mother, regretting the way she had snapped at her, but only because it wasn’t worth the energy it had demanded—and would demand in remorse. Her mother was who she was. Not once had she asked her daughter how she was feeling, not once had she expressed any sympathy that the man that her child had been dating for over six months had disappeared. Her mother had started to ask if her anxiety had led her to resume cutting herself, which perhaps was as close to empathy as her mother got—at least overtly. But Alexis was done with that and reassured herself that she had been for years. “I get it.” Then she said good-bye and told her mother that she would call her in the morning in New Jersey—before bed in Vietnam. She said she would know more by then.

  “It’s okay to wake me up,” her mother said. “Call me the minute you get any news.”

  “Sure,” she agreed, though she understood that she had kept from her mother the absolute latest news: the sad truth that the man she had been dating, that man she had texted into the black hole of his vanished cell phone the words I love you, was, for whatever the reasons, a liar.

  9

  And once more Alexis was at the infinity pool, alone with her magazines and her phone, once again anxious and unable to focus. It wasn’t a revelation to her that she was most grounded in the madness of the emergency room—a world that demanded she work fast and solve problems quickly, and that her attention invariably be on someone else—but the realization had never been more clear to her than in the last twenty-four hours in Vietnam, when most of the time all she could do was sit and wonder and wait. It didn’t help that Austin’s parents hadn’t called back, but it was clear from her conversation with the FBI attaché that it was unlikely they would now that the FBI was handling it.

  She considered going to her room and getting into her bathing suit. She might as well swim. A little exercise always helped. But that seemed frivolous. And she felt the need to be dressed, just in case.

  Though just in case of what, she couldn’t say. The hotel was empty now of everyone but the housekeeping staff and two people in the kitchen who had little to do since there were no guests but the bicyclists, and all but one of them had gone for a ride and wouldn’t return until midafternoon. She didn’t expect the police would be back anytime soon.

  And so she compromised. She slipped off her sandals and pulled her dress up to midthigh, and sat on the tile with her legs extended into the warm water of the swimming pool. She studied her toes and noticed that already she needed a pedicure.

  Austin, she knew, had very hairy toes, which was a sign of excellent cardiac health. It meant that he had good circulation. She had teased him about it one of the first times they had been together in bed.

  Earlier that week, they’d biked past a life-size wooden stand of a woman in a tight blue dress that fell to her knees and a matching cap—a uniform that looked like it belonged on a flight attendant but judging by the red cross on her cap was apparently supposed to be that of a medical professional of some sort—and Giang had explained it was the sign for a Western or American pharmacy. The stand was in front of a shack, and Austin had joked that the patients at their own hospital would be better se
rved if the doctors and nurses there dressed like the woman in the ad stanchion instead of in scrubs.

  Now she heard the patio door opening and the efficient young chef who made them their eggs—omelets and scrambled and even Benedict for the two accountants—was approaching with a tray of thin coconut cookies, a teapot, and a cup and saucer. She started to stand, but he shook his head and called out to her to relax, to stay where she was. He knelt beside her, and even in his pants and a crisp white shirt, he was so thin and bony that she thought him birdlike. Based on his skill, she guessed he was nearing thirty; but a part of her thought he looked barely twenty-five.

  “I thought you should eat,” he said.

  She gave him a half smile. He could have sent out an assistant or bellman with the tray, but he had brought it himself. “You’re right. I probably should. Thank you.”

  He told her the tea was steeped and ready, and asked her if there was anything else she needed. She told him no, though of course there was actually a very great deal that she needed.

  He pointed at the pair of decorative ponds near the pool. “If you’d been here in June, the lotus flowers would have been in bloom. They’re my favorite part of the gardens.”

  “I’ve had lotus soup and lotus tea. They were delicious.”

  “My grandmother won’t eat them.”

  “Lotus flowers?”

  “She thinks they’re sacred. Especially the red lotus.”

  “I’m not surprised. I saw so many crypts in the city of the dead outside of Hue with beautiful lotus flowers carved on them.”

  He touched his chest. “The heart. They heal a broken heart—but not medicinally. Spiritually. Hers are so beautiful. Here at this villa, in our ponds, we have white ones and red ones. She grows only the red ones.”