I thought about how expensive this call was going to be, how I didn’t have the money to pay five thousand lire a minute for breathing lessons, but then I decided I didn’t care.
“Are you following what’s happening in Saigon?” I asked when I could speak in complete sentences.
“I am,” she said, and I thought I could hear the burn of her cigarette. A long, deep inhale.
“Did you see the footage? The tanks rolling in?”
“It’s just awful.”
“And all those people trying to get out?”
“Yes,” she said.
I was quiet for a moment. Long enough that she worried we’d been disconnected. “You still there?”
“I’m here,” I said. I was desperately trying to figure out how to put everything I was thinking and feeling into words, and finally, I just said it. “Lenny dying over there was supposed to mean something.”
“I know,” she whispered.
“And now it’s, like, what was the point?”
She didn’t argue with me. In fact, I thought I could hear her crying on the other end of the line.
“You know what the worst part is?” I asked.
“What?”
“I can’t even tell if the communists are the bad guys anymore.”
“Eileen,” said my mother in the same scandalized tone she’d use if I swore in front of her.
“It’s true,” I said. “I know we were told that the world was going to implode if Vietnam fell to the communists, but I’m sitting on this island where a third of the population voted communist in the last election, and the people here, they don’t seem much different than people anywhere.”
“Is it really a third?”
“Yeah,” I said. “My Italian teacher’s definitely a member of the party. And I’m pretty sure my landlord is. And maybe my hairdresser.”
“Do you ever feel unsafe?” my mother asked me.
“No,” I said. “I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make. I feel fine all the time. Everyone’s been great. If anything, I worry we’re the ones who are making things unsafe.”
“How so?”
I told her about theChartridgeand how, after the grounding, everyone in the command had tried to keep the lid on it.
“The people on the island had no idea?” my mother asked.
“Right, but it could have really affected them, you know? I mean, it might already have affected them.” And then, because I had apparently decided I was going to spend every single centesimo I had, I told her about the babies who’d been born without skulls.
“Jesus, Eileen,” said my mother. “That’s terrible.”
“I know.”
“What does Paul say?”
“He thinks I need a hobby,” I said.
“Are things okay between you two?” my mother asked.
