I peeled it back at the kitchen table. When I saw what my father had carried home and hidden in that locker for fifty years, I had to set it down, because it was a child’s sandal.
One sandal. Small enough to sit in my palm. Blue plastic strap, worn through on one side and mended with wire.
Under it was a school notebook with a paper cover, soft as cloth, filled front to back in a language I could not read. Under that, folded twice, a page torn from his own pocket notebook, dated the fourth of June, 1971, two years after he came home.
Her name is Tran Thi Lien and she was six years old and I have her sandal. I pulled her out of the canal at Bien Hoa and I could not find one person belonging to her before we moved out. If I ever get the nerve I am going back to look, because I am the only one still alive who saw where she came from.
He never got the nerve. He was quiet for fifty-four years and this is the whole reason.
My sister and I spent eleven months on it. There is a network of people who do this, and one of them is a retired Army records clerk in San Antonio who does it for nothing and would not take a dime from us.
Tran Thi Lien is sixty-one. She lives outside Houston. Three grown children, a nail salon, a husband who came over in 1981.
She remembered the canal. She remembered a soldier. She did not remember his face and has thought about him her entire life, and she told us through her daughter that she had always assumed he was killed later, because that is what happened to people then.
She was taken in by a woman two villages over who was not related to her. That woman kept her alive. That is why he could not find anybody belonging to her. By the time he went looking, nobody belonging to her was left.
We drove to Houston in October with the sandal and the notebook.
The notebook is hers. It was her older brother’s schoolwork. She had not seen his handwriting in fifty-six years, and she held it against her chest in a strip mall parking lot and her daughter had to hold her up.
She asked me what my father was like. I said quiet. She said that made sense.
She kept the notebook. She would not keep the sandal. She said it was his to carry, and she put it back in my hands and folded my fingers over it.
It is in the footlocker where he kept it, in my house now, panel back over it, and I do not show it to people.
She came up for Thanksgiving last year with two of her kids. She stood in front of his photograph a long time and said something in Vietnamese that her daughter would not translate, and I did not ask again.
My father thought he had failed her and carried the proof of it in the bottom of a box for fifty years. He had saved her life. The only thing he got wrong was believing he had to be the one to tell her so.