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Of course, Ilooked for her. Not immediately. That last message, the accusation I was scaring her, was crystal clear. I would have preferred that she spoke to me, that we’d had one final conversation, an opportunity to explain, although I am self-aware enough to realize that Liss would have qualified any further explanations as pleadings, and that route was off the table. I understood the situation we were in, of course I did, but the way it ended was a shock to my system.
Ann Arbor was bleak that winter and Liss would have been impressed by how much time I spent at the library studying and contemplating my future. “It’s all planned out for you,” she’d reminded me throughout the fall, whenever I marveled at her determination to create a future of her own design, aided by nothing but the sheer force of her will. Liss would never accept a life that had been mapped out by others.
In April I graduated on a raw, gray day that bore no similarities to the spring days we’d spent roaming around campus on a quest for ice cream or locations for photo sessions or merely basking in one another’s company and conversation. I missed that more than anything, her bubbling, effusive chatter on anything and everything. Liss was equal parts silly and pensive, unyielding and vulnerable, and always unabashedly herself. I’d never known anyone with her wit or her spirit and her absence left an outsize hole in my final semester. I emailed her once or twice, to no avail.
As I packed up my apartment a few weeks after commencement, I made one final attempt to learn what had become of her.
I visited Rachael Zick’s office in Tisch Hall, knocking on the door.
“Come in,” her voice rang out, and I pushed the door tentatively.
“Why, Nao Kao, hello!” she exclaimed in surprise, though I quickly realized it was more likely alarm.
“Dr. Zick, Rachael,” I began as she stared at me uncomfortably. “I’m leaving Ann Arbor next week and thought to pay my respects before I do.” My words were too formal, but it was a start.
“You might have emailed. Or scheduled an appointment with my assistant.”
“Yes, I see. I apologize.”
“Best of luck to you, Nao Kao. I’m sure you’ll do well for yourself back in Laos.”
“Thank you. One more thing, if I might ask?”
She arched her back and sat up straighter, like a cat preparing to pounce.
“Please give my regards to Liss.”
“Liss?”
“Yes, please.”
“I’d prefer not to, Nao Kao. I’m sure you’re aware she’s left Ann Arbor and she’s quite happy now. Work she enjoys and she’s back together with that lovely boy, Jake. I’m not sure you met him?”
I stood mutely in the doorway as her words sunk in. Liss spoke of him only once, and then only to tell me they were on the verge of breaking up.
I stared at Rachael Zick, ramrod straight in her ergonomically correct chair and tried to picture her as the warm hostess I’d first encountered. The distance was too great.
“I understand. Thank you, again, for the kindness you showed me in the past. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Nao Kao. Please give my regards to your wife.”
I fled the building then, anger and heartache surging through my veins, bested only by the humiliation of the final knife twist.
Eventually, I felt it may have been a kindness of sorts, for I never wondered if Liss received my message or if she would contact me. I returned home and plunged headlong into the life that was waiting for me. The twins shied from me until their younger sister was born; she made us a family and life proceeded apace. Birthdays and vacations, family dinner, and smiling portraits – on the surface, all was right. Beneath it, we never recovered from the two-year separation, the battles we’d been left to fight individually. The gales.
The wife who, as I’d told Liss once, had been a nice, normal girl, became a nice woman. Still, our lives ran parallel paths more often than intersecting ones. Determined to make the most of my time in the U.S., I grasped for every brass ring in front of me once I returned, accumulating titles, honors, and awards, theoretically fulfilled, but always searching for something that eluded me. A few times I searched for her, Liss Miller, Melissa Miller, Melissa Claire Miller, whatever iteration of her name I thought might yield a trace of her. Nothing. She might never have existed except in my memory.
EPILOGUE
~
LISS
Nao Kao hadsaid he would meet me at the airport if his schedule permitted, even if it meant jostling for space alongside the tuk-tuk drivers and cabbies hoping for a fare. I had been told the pandemic thinned their ranks, but that those who survived are more aggressive than in the past. “Schedule permitting” sounded like a get out of jail free card, and particularly given the hours it took to wind my way through the new pandemic protocols – verification of vaccination status in one line, which fed into verification of a negative PCR test in another, which led to an interminable wait for a rapid test on arrival – to say nothing of the usual passport-baggage-customs procedures, I couldn’t blame him for abandoning whatever vigil he may have held through the early morning hours.
When I finally stepped into the din of the arrival hall, a man with my name on a placard pushed his way forward as soon as I was visible to the assembled crowd of friends and families eager for long-awaited reunions, and the jostling mob of tuk-tuk and cab drivers. The man with my name on his sign guided me carefully by the elbow out through the airport doors, and I thought again how much of my life was predicated on an inherent trust in the goodness of humankind. So many times had I followed strangers with whom I could exchange not a single spoken word through doors like these, into places unknown. As the glass panes slid open, the dewy air of dawn walloped me, the heat of the early hour holding the faintest clue of what was yet to come. As the waves of steam wafted up from the pavement, I appreciated again the discomforts borne by the millions without complaint. I had arrived at my destination, if ever that was in doubt.
Put it down to intuition, but I knew immediately, of course. Hope and fear are opposite sides of the same coin and, like salt and pepper, you can’t pass one without the other. The million times I asked myself in flight whether he would be there, I had been tossing that coin up in the air. In the close, humid air of the international arrivals hall, the coin landed and I had my answer.
