Dragon House Read Online Free PDF Page A

do-over,” he said, noting lights in the distance.
    Iris set her Vietnam guidebook down. “What?”
    “One do-over in life. Is that too much to ask?”
    “No, I don’t think so.”
    “I’d give everything I have for that chance.”
    She saw the bitterness of his expression and wondered if her father had experienced the same thought. “It isn’t right . . . what happened to you.”
    He drank deeply. “I used to love you. Imagine that.”
    “We were kids. And I—”
    “Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter anyway.”
    “If you’d been older, things might have been different.”
    He shrugged, then awkwardly repositioned himself in the seat. “I won’t get in your way.”
    “I want your help, Noah. I could really use your help.”
    Despite the beer and the painkillers, his stump ached and he continued to shift in his seat, glancing away from her. Ho Chi Minh City was coming to life below. Lights flickered like stars, as if the world had been turned upside down. “Do you still believe in good?” he asked.
    She nodded. “My father was doing something good. He spent the last two years of his life doing it. He believed in it. And I’m here because I believe in it.”
    “I believed in the tooth fairy. In Santa Claus. In going to war. Shouldn’t we know, instead of believe?”
    Iris didn’t begrudge Noah his bitterness, because as a girl she’d shared it on many occasions. Still, her eyes found his and she said, “I know that I love my father and my mother. I know we’re going to land soon, and that I’m scared to death about what I’ll find. And I believe in good. Because if there wasn’t any good in the world . . . well . . . then there wouldn’t be any music, or books, or children. And to me, at least, sometimes those things . . . they . . . they pull me through the pain.”
    Noah mused over her words, finishing the last of his beer. To him, pain was impenetrable—an ocean that he couldn’t swim across, a mountain that he could never summit. “We’re here,” he said, watching the runway rise toward him, wishing that he were like Iris, who had only lakes and hills before her.
     
     
    FROM THE ROOFTOP BAR OF THE Rex Hotel, Ho Chi Minh City resembled some sort of carnival ride. Neon signs flickered. The headlights of countless motor scooters illuminated French-colonial buildings and treelined boulevards. Women—clad in everything from traditional full-length dresses to Donna Karan knockoffs to tank tops—strode down sidewalks bordering art galleries, massage parlors, sushi restaurants, and nondescript government buildings.
    The symphony of the city—a combination of horns and screeches and beeps—rose to mingle with the sounds of a band that played in the bar. The lead singer did his best rendition of “Hotel California,” his Vietnamese accent giving the song a surreal quality never heard on a Western radio. Seven Rex Hotel employees attended to a handful of occupied tables. Near the edge of the balcony, a young Australian couple sat with a pair of Vietnamese street children. The children’s tattered clothing—short-sleeved shirts, shorts, and sandals—would have looked at home on a scarecrow. The boy’s features were as disheveled as his clothes. His dark hair jutted out in odd directions. His eyebrows were thick and nearly touched. His face was wide and dirty, his teeth crooked and stained. Most prominent, his left forearm ended in an ugly stump. The girl, ten and a half years old and slightly older than the boy, wore her hair in short pigtails. Her face was the opposite of her companion’s—narrow and delicate. Her smile was balanced, her nose rounded with slightly flaring nostrils. Both children were small for their ages, the result of lifelong malnutrition.
    The girl, Mai, studied the game before her. It was Connect Four, which featured a yellow, upright board designed to accommodate falling checkerlike pieces. The black and red pieces were dropped by opposing players until