“From the state bar,” she said, handing Nina the white envelope.
Her bar-exam results. Only half the law-school graduates passed on their first try.
Nina returned to her cubbyhole law-clerk’s office, shut the door firmly, and leaned against it. She had taken the bar over a grueling two-day period in July and now, five months later, Santa and his reindeer decorated her window. Outside, the dark had begun to crawl over the cottages, shops, and shiny cars, bringing on the twinkling Christmas lights of Carmel.
During that long wait for the results, as she toiled through her daily life, she had thought so many times: Will I make it? She had never felt sure that the years of work would pay off. She never had enough time for the homework, and she had sometimes fallen asleep during the endless night classes. The devilishly difficult bar exam had seemed like a plot to keep out as many people as possible. She sat down in her worn chair, taking the load off her weak knees, swiveled back and forth, and stared at the envelope.
“The time has come,” she thought, “to believe impossible things.” She tore the thing open.
“… pleased to announce… welcome you to the bar… ceremony in San Francisco…”
“I passed! I passed!” She emerged into the hall again, where Anne waited inches from her door and threw her arms around her.
“Good work!” Anne said. Nina ran down the hall to Klaus’s office. The old man had heard the commotion and was already hobbling toward her across his fine Isfahan rug, his face wreathed in smiles. He held her tight, his slight bony body seeming to send waves of strength through her.
“Congratulations, Counselor,” he said, and hearing this word, which meant everything to her, Nina realized it was true at last. She was a lawyer.
Handing her a handkerchief, Klaus sat her down on his leather couch. From his desk drawer he produced a big bottle of scotch and a tray full of etched shot glasses. The rest of the lawyers and staff of the small firm had streamed into the room, beaming, nobody talking yet while Klaus poured the shots with a hand that trembled only slightly.
“I would like to propose a toast,” he said quietly. “To our new member of the bar, who I know will bring honor to our difficult and rewarding profession.”
Then they were drinking to her and clapping her on the back and hugging her.
When everyone else had left and only Nina and Klaus remained, she asked, “Klaus?”
“Yes, my dear?”
“Do you think-that is, can I-”
“Of course you can. You may turn out better than any of us. Perhaps because you have had the hardest struggle, working, studying, raising your little boy the whole time.”
“I’ll never let you down. I promise,” Nina said. “You gave me my job and helped me all the way. I’ll always look up to you as my example.”
“Don’t think about me,” Klaus said. “I am the past and you are the future. Just try to relieve a little of the suffering in this world with your skills. I know you’ll never disgrace us. Now, go get your little boy and go home.”
“I’m so happy. But also afraid.”
“You can handle it.”
Before she left, she bent over and kissed his withered cheek.
“I’ll make you proud of me,” she said.
8
O N HER WAY OUT of Tahoe again on Monday morning in the white subcompact the insurance company had laid on her, Nina drove past the lot on Highway 50 where the Vangs’ Blue Star Market had once conducted business: ragged wooden fencing, a chipped construction sign, and disturbed dirt had reclaimed their space, as though the dreams of the Vang family had never existed. On both sides of this neat emptiness, small businesses-a hair salon, a video store-carried on as though arson and death didn’t exist and the world remained a just and benign place.
She had an appointment to meet Dr. Mai at the Strawberry Lodge, a half hour from Tahoe on the highway to San Francisco, a meeting place that would preclude the worst part of his drive. The Vangs wouldn’t be there, he had explained on the phone when she called him at his home in Fresno on Sunday night. She became insistent. He became gruff. No Vangs. He would drive up to meet her alone. She would have to take what she could get on this Monday morning: the Vangs’ elderly adviser.
Just before Echo Summit, at the famous place in the road where the cliff drops a couple of thousand feet and tourists coming the other way catch their first glimpse of the lake, she pulled over at the lookout and stood by the edge, wind whipping her hair, a few drops of rain hitting sideways. September snow had fallen the night before on the granite summits all around the lake, which appeared only as a vague gray line far away. From her seven-thousand-foot vantage, she looked down at Christmas Valley, a solid green forest with a hint of the single main road that snaked through it. Eighty miles west in the San Joaquin Valley where Dr. Mai lived, people would be complaining about the heat of late summer, but up here she needed her warm jacket.
Nina had first met Kao Vang about a month before, in early August. He came into her office for a free consultation.
He and his family had fled from the middle hills of Laos as refugees in the early eighties. Nina had never heard of his hill people. Later, after she took the case, she read up on the subject, learning that the Hmong were an ancient people who had supported the U.S. during the Vietnam War. For this assistance, the Communists punished them after taking over the country in 1975. Every year, the Hmong came before the U.N. to request that observers be sent to the remaining refugee camps to investigate reports of systematic arrests, beatings, and murders, but with so many trouble spots in the world, this was a backwater that had receded into history.
Still, in recent years life had improved for the Hmong, and many longtime refugees returned to their homeland. The lucky ones returned with American money in hand for themselves and their extended families, which went a very long way.
What Nina saw on that first day was a small, slight, youngish man in new jogging shoes who spoke very little English and didn’t crack a smile. Kao Vang’s shy wife, slightly built, with bright, intelligent eyes, sat lightly on the edge of the chair beside him. Her name was See, she told Nina, but after that she didn’t speak at all. Their young son, Boun, and another fellow had come with them, a gnarled older man wearing some sort of tribal vestments, who said he was from Kao’s church.
Later she learned that Dr. Mai, the older man, had connections to no church and no normal medical practice. He was some sort of shaman. The culture was simply so different that they had tried to put her at ease by presenting themselves in terms she could understand.
They arrived early for their appointment and sat up straight in the client chairs, speaking in low tones to one another. Sandy went back to her filing. The Hmong language sounded very, very foreign. When Nina came out to greet them, she felt the hesitation before her hand was grasped by the older man. She brought them into her office and shut the door. They emanated a simplicity and formality that made small talk impossible.
Dr. Mai talked. Often he asked Kao a question and translated Kao’s response. See Vang listened, her hands in the lap of her long skirt, crossing and recrossing delicate feet that ended in rubber thongs.