LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Come,” her grandfather said, “let’s have some coffee and talk.”

      Talk? She wondered if he meant his version of “talk” or hers. Rebecca didn’t say a word.

      He heated the morning’s leftover coffee in a pan, filled two cups with the rancid stuff, added milk from a jug and handed one to Rebecca, then returned to the garden and fell absently into one of the old Adirondack chairs he’d had outside for as long as she could remember. She sat across from him and tried the coffee. Worse than rotgut. But she didn’t complain, watching her grandfather as he studied her. She could guess what he saw: a talented, rich woman of almost thirty-four settled neither in life nor in love. But could he guess what she saw? A man of seventy-nine, lanky and white-haired, not so straight-backed as he’d once been, not so proud and cocksure. Yet he still radiated the strength of character that came with the knowledge, the terrible self-understanding, that he’d made mistakes. Awful mistakes. His arrogance had left him childless, his six grandchildren fatherless and his daughter-in-law a widow at twenty-eight, and no man should have to live with that. But he had, for twenty-six years.

      His thin hair lifted in a cool breeze, and he asked, “Why did you come to me?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “Don’t dissemble, Rebecca. You do know.”

      She looked away. “When Sofi told me about the pictures,” she began slowly, “my first reaction was anger and embarrassment at having the past dredged up again. I didn’t even want to see a copy of The Score. But then…” She sighed, turning back to her grandfather. “I wondered if this wasn’t the opportunity for us to talk. We never have, you know. Not about Saigon in 1975, and not about the Mekong Delta in 1963.”

      “Rebecca—”

      “Grandfather, have you ever lied to me?”

      He didn’t hesitate. “No. Except about the cat…”

      “Never mind the cat. About Vietnam.”

      “No, Rebecca. I never lied to you.”

      She leaned forward. “But you haven’t told me everything, either, have you?”

      “My mistakes and my triumphs are my own to live with, not yours. If you’re asking me do I have regrets, I’ll answer you. Yes. Yes, I have many regrets. And not only about your father and Benjamin. I’ve been to the Vietnam Memorial, and I’ve looked at those fifty-eight thousand names and thought about the men and women and children I knew in Indochina who are all dead. And I’ve asked myself what I might have done differently during my years there to prevent what came later. More arrogance on my part, perhaps. But perhaps not. The point is, I’ll never know. If I’ve learned anything in my study of history and my seventy-nine years on this planet, it’s that we have no power to change what’s past.”

      Rebecca didn’t listen easily to his words. “What about the future?”

      He pulled his thin lips together. “I don’t have a crystal ball. I’ve often wished I did. We can only do our best and carry on.”

      “That’s it, then?”

      “There’s nothing I can tell you that will change anything.”

      “Grandfather,” Rebecca said, controlling her impatience, “I’m tired of ‘carrying on’ without all the facts. That my picture can still make the front page of a supermarket tabloid just reminds me that 1963 and 1975 aren’t going away. They’re going to keep haunting us—me. And I have a right to know the whole truth.”

      “Study your history,” Thomas Blackburn said stonily. “You’ll discover that no one ever knows the ‘whole’ truth.”

      She swallowed hard and gritted her teeth, but suspected he could tell how angry and frustrated she was. “What do you want me to do, pretend my picture’s not plastered across millions of newspapers?”

      “No, Rebecca,” he said, climbing to his feet. “Never pretend nothing’s never happened.”

      Without another word, he turned back to his wilted seedlings, and Rebecca sighed to herself, wondering why she’d sought out her grandfather for advice and information, why she’d thought anything had changed. She had hoped the tabloid publicity and the simple fact that she was an adult—not the eight-year-old who’d lost her father or the twenty-year-old who’d lost her first lover—would prompt him to talk to her. There were so many gaps in her understanding of his years in Indochina, his ill-fated company, the scandal that had brought him down and changed her own life forever.

      But she should have known better. Over the years, she had come to learn that if Thomas Blackburn only dealt in the truth, it was handed out precious little at a time.

      Seven

      Mai Sloan rode beside her father with her arms crossed as they drove over the Golden Gate Bridge and up into the hills of Marin County, where her grandfather lived. She hadn’t spoken since they’d left the house. She had refused to pack, so Jared had thrown things haphazardly into a big canvas satchel and said if she ran out of socks or didn’t have clothes that matched, tough. She’d yelled he wasn’t being fair, and he’d said too bad, life wasn’t fair and she might as well learn that now. Usually he made an effort to explain why he’d made a particular decision, but not this time. He’d just told her to get her things together, she was spending a few days with her grandfather. Nothing she’d said—not even when she’d called him a dictator—softened that lock-jawed look of his.

      She continued to sulk as they cleared the state-of-the-art security system at Wesley Sloan’s very private home in Tiberon, overlooking San Francisco Bay. Ordinarily Mai would have jumped at the chance to spend a few days there. Granddad had everything. But her father had pulled her from school and refused to tell her what was going on—refused to discuss the white-haired man with the scarred face he’d run off with a gun she hadn’t even known he owned. Was the stranger some nut out to kidnap a Winston-Sloan? Was he connected with the motorcycle gang? What? Jared wouldn’t say. He only instructed her not to leave her grandfather’s property, even to go to school.

      “Quit pouting, Mai,” he said unsympathetically as they headed up Wesley Sloan’s driveway. “Some things you just have to swallow.”

      “I have to swallow more than most!”

      “Not true. You’re one lucky kid.”

      “Oh, I know,” she snapped back. “I could be begging in the streets of Ho Chi Minh City like hundreds of other Amerasians left behind in Vietnam. Compared to them I don’t have a thing to complain about. I should always smile and take whatever anyone dishes out, especially my own father, since so many of us don’t have fathers.”

      Jared sighed. “You have the right to complain about whatever you want to complain about. Your pain is yours. Just don’t expect me to indulge self-pity. And you’re the one who insists on measuring your life against that of the Amerasians who didn’t get out of Vietnam. You can have empathy for their plight without feeling guilty because you’re here and they’re not.”

      She stared out the window, refusing to look at her father. She had been reading books and renting videotapes about the Vietnam War and the country of her birth, even trying to learn some Vietnamese. Her father told her it was normal to be confused at fourteen, urged her to concentrate just on being herself. But who was that? Sometimes she didn’t know. And sometimes she hated herself for not being satisfied when so many other Amerasians suffered prejudice, cruelty and extreme poverty. They had never slept in a decent bed or felt the safety and security she took for granted. Sometimes she hated herself for not being more satisfied. She was so lucky. Why did she want more?

      “Are you even going to tell me where you’re going?” she asked.

      Jared hesitated, not knowing what to say to his daughter. He hadn’t since The Score had come out and she’d seen the picture of Rebecca, him and herself as an infant. Then the man who had shot him and left

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