“But Charlie’s not typical!” she said, feeling a little panic set it. It felt like turning him out, setting him free—free of her care, her help. “He landed in the hospital, almost intubated! Very recently!”
Scott was shaking his head. “Not because his asthma is more critical than most, because he’s out of shape. Listen, an average kid with good lung capacity could exert himself and be weak and winded for a while, then recover. A kid with exercise-induced asthma is going to collapse, maybe suffer worse consequences. Charlie has been kept still too long, Lin Su. It was necessary, I understand. Now he has to build his strength, then he has to maintain his stamina. He stays on medication, uses his inhaler once a day, or maybe before or after some monitored exercise, improves his capacity slowly...”
“I have no idea how I’m supposed to do that,” she complained. “I’m working, and he’s in school all day...”
“Stop,” Scott said. “Charlie can have a better experience, a safer life. There are Olympic athletes with asthma. They control it with medication and training. Charlie can...”
“Oh, it’s him!” she said. “This is his idea!”
“Whose?” Scott asked.
“Blake Smiley! That first day Charlie rode his bike and got severely short of breath, Blake told him to research famous athletes with asthma! This is his idea! Why doesn’t he stay out of my business?”
Scott frowned. “It wasn’t Blake’s idea, as a matter of fact, but if it had been I would have agreed. I know Charlie and his asthma is the center of your universe but we have many patients who have to be rehabbed, build their strength again to avoid relapse—heart patients, patients with muscle and bone repairs, transplant patients. I guarantee if you sit in front of a TV for two years, even you will have to start over with rehab to get back in shape. Charlie needs to be stronger. And if you have trouble figuring out a plan, Winnie’s house sits between two professional trainers—Blake and Spencer. Spencer is the athletic director at the high school and I volunteer as his football team doctor. Either one of them would help you develop a program for Charlie. You could consider it professional help.”
“Will you be monitoring this program, as well?” she asked.
“I’ll always be around. I’ll continue to look in on Winnie every week and if you’d like I can try to time my visits for afternoon, when school is out.”
“That might help. Let me read about this a little,” she said, holding out her hand for the pamphlet.
“Read about it. And maybe talk to either Blake or Spencer about beginning a training protocol for a kid who hasn’t been active all this life.”
“Sure,” she said. “Thanks.”
“You’re not losing control, Lin Su. You’re helping to manage a chronic condition.”
Somehow that wasn’t how it felt. “I understand,” she said.
* * *
Sunday morning Charlie saw Blake go out on his deck with his bike, pick it up and carry it down the stairs to the beach and lean it against the stair rail to put on his helmet. When he looked around, Charlie waved.
Perfect. Blake would be gone at least two hours, probably more. His mother was in Winnie’s bedroom. The door was ajar, which meant they weren’t doing anything too serious—probably some exercises or morning tidying. She expected him to keep himself quiet and busy. He grabbed his laptop and slipped out onto the deck and down the stairs.
Since he had to leave his laptop home and was always in very close company with his mother and others after school, his espionage was really suffering. Besides that, Lin Su was seriously researching something about asthma on the laptop when he wasn’t using it. Whatever she was learning was bound to restrict his activities—that was always the end result.
He walked down the beach stairs about halfway. Troy and Grace were in their little apartment, windows open to admit the cool fall air, so he went to Blake’s house. He went up the stairs almost to the top and sat down. He didn’t have to be out of sight, but he didn’t want his mother or anyone sneaking up on him. What he was doing took time and concentration. He flipped open the computer and logged on.
Charlie had already established a free email address with a password his mother would never guess. When he researched public records and other sites, like Finding Your Vietnamese Family, he always cleared his cache so if his mother checked his browsing history, it wouldn’t show up. He’d also set up a phony Facebook page with some picture he’d lifted off the internet and a name she wouldn’t recognize. He’d sent an email to Gordon Simmons, his adoptive grandfather, but had not received a response. Gordon would be at least seventy now and he certainly hadn’t turned up on Facebook.
But his younger daughter had. Leigh Simmons, college professor at Rutgers, was apparently beloved by current and former students. She was also on sabbatical for the fall semester. He’d tried to “friend” her, but he couldn’t reel her in—she didn’t know him. Or maybe she wasn’t paying much attention to her Facebook page while she was away. He’d sent her a message, which he understood would probably be lost in a buried file or ignored. He’d sent it to the faculty email address on their website.
Dear Leigh Simmons, my name is Charlie and I think my mother, Lin Su, could be your adopted sister. She was adopted when she was three, is Vietnamese and Caucasian American. She left home at eighteen. Do we have a connection?
An answer came back right away.
I’m sorry I missed your email. I’m traveling on sabbatical until late October and will only have limited access to email. If you need information directly, please contact my assistant...
He hadn’t bothered the assistant and hadn’t heard back from Leigh, of course. He was surfing the internet in search of old family pictures or news from the Simmons family. From newspaper clippings he’d learned that his grandparents divorced shortly after he was born and found pictures of Leigh Simmons in yearbooks and newspapers—her work in anthropology and writing on international human rights was apparently lauded. Even if she turned out not to be an adopted relative, she sounded like someone he’d like to meet.
“Looking at porn?”
Charlie almost jumped out of his skin and slammed the laptop shut. Blake was standing right behind him. He was helmetless now and in his stocking feet, eating an apple with one hand and holding a plastic bag of fruit in the other.
“Jeez, you are looking at porn!” Blake said.
“No, I’m not!”
“Well, then, what’s up? You panicked just then.”
“Never mind,” Charlie said. “What are you doing sneaking up on people like that?”
“Aren’t you on my property? Not that I mind, but Jesus, cut me a break. I’m not exactly spying on you.”
“What are you doing here? I saw you leave!”
He held up the apples. “I rode to the orchard on the other side of 101. The fruit stand.” He sat down next to Charlie. He fished an apple out of the bag and handed it to him. “Whatcha doin’?”
“Nothing,” he said, taking the apple.
Blake laughed. “You sound guiltier by the second.”
“I don’t need my mom to freak,” Charlie said.
Blake chuckled. “Okay, there are some things a guy wants to know that he can’t really ask his mom, that’s understood. Unless you’re researching building a bomb, I’m pretty trustworthy.”
“You’re saying you can keep your mouth shut? If it’s not a bomb?”
“Or a crime,” Blake said. “If you ask me to keep a confidence about something that’s not dangerous to yourself or others, I’m good for it.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yeah, probably,” he said, taking another big bite of apple.
Charlie gave him a kind of naughty smile. Blake must think he was looking up things like testosterone and wet dreams and the average age a guy loses his virgin
ity. He’d already done all that. “My mother is Amerasian. She doesn’t want to talk too much about her family history. Or mine. I don’t think my biological father is really dead and I think it’s possible her Vietnamese mother isn’t, either. Vietnamese refugees were scattered all over the place. A lot of countries accepted them and families didn’t all go to one place. Some spent decades finding each other. My mother’s father couldn’t have been a soldier—she’s too young for that. Saigon fell and all the Americans left by 1975 but her grandfather could have been a GI. I’m trying to find out who I am.”
Blake stopped chewing for a moment. He started again slowly, finally swallowing. “Whoa.”
“Yeah, you can’t tell her. When the Vietnamese part of her goes nuts, it’s really scary. I’m not real sure how much Vietnamese she really knows, but I’m sure she knows all the swear words. Her temper is stored in the Asian parts.”
“Listen, Charlie, she probably just wants to hold on to that information until you’re a little older, more mature and able to deal with the facts in a grown-up way.”
“No, I played that card. She said there are some things better left buried, and she said a lot of it in another language.”
“Aw, man,” Blake said, resting his head in his hand.
“Well, it’s not a bomb,” Charlie said.
“It sort of is,” Blake corrected. “Why can’t you just look up stuff like how often a guy thinks about sex in a day? Like a normal fourteen-year-old.”
“How often does he?” Charlie asked.
“It’s perfectly ridiculous how often,” Blake said, sounding a little weary.
Eight
So, there was a lot more to Charlie and Lin Su than a struggling single mother and a kid with asthma. Blake decided to get his own laptop out and do a little research. Saigon fell three years before Blake was born, eight years before Lin Su was born... The United States had evacuated all military and civilian Americans in 1975; almost all POWs had been returned before that and only a small number didn’t make it out with that group. By 1980 there were only a handful of Americans left in Vietnam.
Lin Su had told Charlie that her mother immigrated, sponsored by a church. Lin Su was born in the United States. She didn’t know who her father was but her mother said he was American. Her mother, in ill health, gave up Lin Su and she was adopted by an American family at the age of three. That same family, disapproving of her pregnancy at eighteen, told her she was on her own if she insisted on having the baby—Charlie.
What Charlie said made sense—if Lin Sue was born in 1982 or ’83 her father could not have been an American serviceman. Her mother’s father could have been a GI, however, if Lin Su’s mother had been conceived between 1960 and 1967.
From the time of Lin Su’s mother’s birth till now, fifty years of mystery? Or cover-up?
I think people deserve to know where they came from, if possible, Charlie had told Blake.
Blake couldn’t argue with that logic. But he knew a little too much about where he came from and it hadn’t done that much good. Though he had loved his mother devotedly, helplessly, there had been so many times he had wished he’d been given up for adoption. He might not be who he was today, however, had that happened.
Listen, I can keep my mouth shut but I can’t help you with this because you’re defying your mother, Blake told Charlie.
I understand. Just don’t tell her. It could take me years to figure out, especially behind her back, so don’t tell her and jam me up.
Now the information, what little there was, sat like a boulder in his gut and he couldn’t look at Lin Su in the same way. She wasn’t just a single mother of a sick kid soldiering on despite debt and difficulty. Now she was the daughter of a refugee who had been spirited out of a war-torn country as a teenager who then became a mother who couldn’t care for her child. Lin Su had been adopted by the new family who took her in. And then she was cast out when the same thing happened to her. When she found herself alone and pregnant. Oh, God, she wasn’t just a little complicated like he thought. She was as complicated as he was, and probably in a lot of the same ways.
He tried to behave normally around her but was conscious of the fact that meeting her eyes wasn’t easy. He tried to be around as much as ever, which meant at least showing up for a few minutes after school to check in with his neighbors and get the latest updates from Charlie and Winnie, but covering his concern wasn’t smooth. Even though her laugh seemed to come quicker these days, which probably had everything to do with being out of that crappy trailer, his laugh was a little stunted.
“Blake, are you feeling well?” she asked him.
“Fine, why do you ask?”
“You’re a little quiet. You seem preoccupied.”
“Ah, that. It’s just the race coming up. I think that happens to me.”
“Oh, of course,” she said, smiling. “Tahoe, right?”
“Right.”
“Charlie can’t stop talking about it.”
* * *
It was at the end of the week, Friday afternoon while Winnie napped, that Lin Su paid Blake a visit. She went to his front door and rang the bell rather than adopting their casual habit of trotting up the beach stairs, something they only did as neighbors if someone was out on the deck. “Well, this is a surprise,” he said. “Need a hand with something?”
“No. I mean, possibly. If you have a minute, I’d like to talk to you about Charlie.”
“Is he okay?” he asked, holding the door open for her.
“He’s great actually. The new apartment, new school, new friends here on the beach—it’s all working very well for Charlie. For me, too. But I could use some advice. Assistance?”
“Come in and tell me what’s up,” he said. Then he held his breath. What was he to say if she was concerned about Charlie researching his roots? He pulled out a chair at his dining table for her and pushed his papers aside. He’d been gathering up some of his records, getting ready for business meetings next week.
“Well, Scott Grant had a talk with me. A pretty stern talk. He said Charlie has to start strength and endurance training. Charlie has to get control over his asthma to avoid serious attacks like the one he had when he was chased by those creeps from the trailer park. I’ve been reading and it appears this is good advice. I have some ideas and I think I’ve learned plenty, but I’m no expert. Plus, Charlie isn’t always happy to take my advice. It was Scott who suggested I ask you, so if this is a huge imposition you have him to blame. And please be honest.”
Blake started grinning by the time Lin Su had the first sentence out of her mouth and just couldn’t suppress his delight. “Where would you like me to start?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve read suggested protocols for this kind of thing but...” She shrugged. “Look, I’m okay in rehab, following instructions, but this is different. It’s Charlie and my instincts want to keep him still and quiet.”
“Then let me work up a protocol for him. I’m good at that sort of thing. All you have to do is explain what Dr. Grant suggested and send him to me. I’ll be here next week, then I’m gone for a week but we can get Troy as a backup. I’ll talk to him. We just have to monitor workouts, take times, keep a running record. Not complicated.”
“Maybe I could do that,” she said.
He shook his head but he was smiling. “Step back, Mom. You’re not doing anything wrong.” He stood and went to the refrigerator, pouring her a drink and taking it to her without asking. “Tea and lime. You’ll love it.” He put it in front of her. “Send Charlie over to see me sometime before he has dinner. I’ll talk to him about a routine.”
“I should come with him...”
“Let him do this, Lin Su. Let him manage his program, his routine and his goals. Let him have control of this.”
“But
you have to be in control!” she insisted.
“I won’t be in control, I’ll be a trainer. A coach. I’ll watch his vitals and reactions, slow him down when it’s warranted, push him harder when that’s warranted. But Charlie should feel this belongs to him.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Nothing fancy,” he promised. “Treadmill, bike, elliptical. We’ll work up to some weights. Your timing is good—my trainer is coming on Sunday. She’s very talented, especially with young people. She runs a training institute in Boulder and gets Olympic contenders in their early years for workshops and summer sessions.”
“You’re preparing for your race! This must be inconvenient!”
Blake couldn’t help but laugh outright. “You’d do anything to get out of this, wouldn’t you? I just told you it was perfect timing. I’ll be starting at 4:00 a.m. every day. Charlie isn’t going to intrude on my training at all. I’m excited about this. I think this is an excellent thing to do.”
“I wouldn’t want to take your focus off your race...”
“Lin Su, this is what I do. When I’m done racing, it’s part of my long-term plan to be a full-time trainer, maybe with a training facility of my own.”
She frowned. “I’m not sure I know what you do. I mean, I know you’re a professional athlete but...” She shrugged.
“Well... I do a lot of things now, but...” He took a breath. “I was on the high school track team and was able to use that to get help with college tuition. I thought that would be the extent of it but I kept racing. I raced after college, picked up some medals, kept racing. I got a job in a lab where they liked athletes so I trained while I worked, kept entering races, won a few, took a couple of years off work to go to the world championships, picked up a couple of medals and moved up to training for the Ironman races. That’s where I started making a living at it. Racing has been my primary job for five years...more like six.”
“Charlie says you have world records,” she said.