Gone

The reporter traveled to Vietnam two days before what would have been his mother's 102nd birthday. He'd thought she would reach one hundred but she passed away in her sleep at ninety-eight, five years after his ninety-four-year-old father died. For no good reason, he thought of them. Perhaps because he remembered how they had watched news reports about the Vietnam War every evening. Perhaps because he knew his mother would scold him for visiting the country. Her opinions rarely altered. She believed in the war against Communism. The Vietnamese had been the enemy then; she'd consider them the enemy now.

November. Three months before her ninety-ninth birthday. She ate a breakfast of two scrambled eggs and wheat toast, took a nap and never woke up. Better than his father, who died in a hospital of various ailments his doctor attributed to old age. At his mother's memorial Mass, he joked that she knew she was in for a long flight and since she didn't care for airline food she was determined to have a good breakfast. She remained steadfastly polite to the end. Thank you, she said when he brought her breakfast that morning, the tone of her deep voice less that of a mother to son than a restaurant customer with her favorite waiter. He did not cry when he stood by her bed and stared at her body. She was curled on her left side, eyes closed. That night, he sat in the living room and listened to night sounds, aware of her absence. He had anticipated she'd leave a lingering presence, but she left nothing other than a sweater she had on when she died and the coroner did not take, the collar of which smelled vaguely of face cream. She had suffered from dementia during the time he cared for her and although he could not pinpoint the moment, by the time she died he thought he had already grieved for her.

Noi Bai Hanoi International Airport was much bigger than he expected. He landed at midnight after flying thirteen hours from California with a two-hour layover in Tokyo. A driver from his hotel never came to pick him up. A man in the airport lobby saw him pacing. He approached, flashed what appeared to be a business ID badge that he shoved in his pocket before the reporter could read it, and said he managed a taxi company. Do you need a ride?

The man led him up three flights of stairs to an empty parking lot and spoke into a phone. A few minutes later a plain two-door car pulled up. Nothing about it suggested to the reporter that it was a taxi. He got in the back. The man sat next to the driver in the passenger seat. Why, the reporter wondered, would he get in? Didn't he need to stay at the airport to solicit other customers? He looked at the dashboard for a meter but didn't see one. When they approached a tollbooth the man asked for his wallet. I'm not giving you my wallet, the reporter said. The man grew insistent and grabbed at the reporter. The reporter jerked away, striking the man's hand, and hurried out of the car and the man yelled at him and the reporter ran toward the airport. A taxi passed him and stopped. Twenty minutes later, he reached his hotel in Hanoi's Old Town district.

He slept just a few hours before he found himself staring at the ceiling, wide awake with jet lag. Outside his window, he saw the mildewed facades of French colonial buildings and laundry lines laced across balconies. His mother had been an artist and he thought she would have seen the balconies and the limp shirts and pants suspended from twine as potential images for a painting. If she were alive she would have insisted he call her to know he had arrived safely. I don't care that you're sixty-two, she would have said, you call. He imagined telling her...