Her Here

by Amanda Dennis

  —In the street, I said slowly, words from my lips like insects.

  —Yes, he said. I thought we would see. And that it would stay here. In Vietnam.

  As the air left his body, I thought I saw something in his face like desire. I thought he might hug me. Then the tenderness, desire, whatever it was, fled.

  —On the street, he said, defensive again. Like you wanted, like you begged—

  —Begged? I frowned.

  —You said please: you begged.

  The word grated against me. Begged.

  —I didn’t—

  —Fuck it, Ella. What is wrong with you? I knew I shouldn’t’ve—fuck.

  His eyes narrowed. From opposite sides of the bed, we stared. Then Seb looked down.

  —Look, we had a lot to drink.

  —That has nothing to do with it! I hissed.

  —At some point you decided the bar was a brothel, he continued in the same tone, not angry, but incriminating. You thought the men were after you. You freaked out and ran.

  I sighed. He was narrating things, as if I’d been too drunk to know what was going on.

  —You left first, I said. You left me alone in the bar with those men while you went to go fuck someone. Don’t make me feel like I’m crazy.

  My skin was burning.

  —You’re perverse, he said. It happened once, in Chiang Mai. Doesn’t mean it happens all the time.

  —And at the beach, Pattaya? I asked, mocking. Never there?

  —Fuck you, Ella. For Christ’s sake, I never should have—

  —What? You never should have what?

  —What?

  —What were you going to say?

  —I don’t know.

  —You’re making this up. You’re sick.

  —No! His voice rose sharply. You’re sick. God, I knew better—

  —You’re making me believe things. You held me against a wall because—

  —Because you begged me to—

  —Stop saying that!

  My voice had gone shrill. It echoed between the bare walls and floor. I saw Seb start to shush me and then think better of it. I felt the tension in his body on the other side of the room. The water in the orchid vase trembled, then silence.

  —Look, he said, so earnestly that I trusted him again, I’d never take advantage of you.

  Then, before I could answer, something flashed across his eyes. He muttered:

  —If I didn’t care, I would’ve done it a long time ago. Not like I didn’t have the chance.

  The air left my lungs. The room felt suffocating.

  —Turn on the fan, I said.

  He ignored me.

  —I thought it would help you. I thought we could leave it here.

  —Help me?

  —You wanted—

  I’d lost the thread, remembered only vaguely about the woman in the alley. Why weren’t we speaking of her? And Seb was adopting some strange idiolect, full of euphemism.

  —There was the woman, I reminded him.

  —What woman?

  I thought back to the alley, the mosaic, the humidity, the amplified sound of men’s shoes.

  —The woman at the bar? The proprietress, he added, trying to make a joke of it.

  —The young one, I said, frustrated that he wouldn’t talk about it.

  —I know that’s what you think I was doing upstairs. It’s your dirty imagination.

  —No, I said evenly. The girl in the street—in the alley. She was hurt.

  A smile appeared and disappeared from his lips in the same instant.

  —What are you talking about?

  —You saw it first. You covered my mouth.

  —You’re being crazy. Let’s talk in the morning. You’ll be calmer. You’ll remember.

  —I remember fine. You’re the one who won’t talk about it.

  —We are talking! When all I want to do is sleep! Let’s give it up for tonight. You’re not acting right.

  He squinted at me, as if a better view might help him make sense of me. I sensed his anger and something stronger, like disgust—at himself or at me, I wasn’t sure. I thought again of the girl.

  —It was horrible, I said listlessly.

  —For God’s sake, I regret it, too, okay?

  —Four men, maybe more. It was so dark, hard to count.

  —What? What are you talking about?

  Seb’s eyes grew large. He began to back away slowly from his edge of the bed.

  —You remember. It was horrible to watch, to hear. They took turns. They spit—

  I tried to cover my face with the crook of my elbow. My nose was stuffed up.

  —Jesus, Ella. What do you want from me?

  —I want to know why you—

  —You want to know why? Why? I felt sorry for you. I was drunk. That’s why.

  Then Seb’s indignation evaporated, and a taunting smile took its place on his lips.

  —You want to play it this way—you’re kinkier than I thought. He laughed. But let’s give up for tonight, yeah?

  My head was pounding. Seconds passed before I could choke out the necessary words.

  —A girl, I said. We saw her. You were making sure I didn’t scream. …

  I couldn’t get the rest out, not from tears but from something else, something volatile in me. I saw the fleshy face of the man at the bar leaning over me as I lay among the overturned bins. He lifted me over his shoulder. My head hanging, I saw the world upside down. I stared at the bed, wanting the visions to stop. My body felt strange.

  —What if it—what if it was me? I whispered, vague horror obscuring the room.

  Seb cracked a strange smile.

  —What if it was you? he taunted me, an edge to his voice. Part of you wants it. I feel it in you, he whispered.

  Some force was goading him on, some ancient hurt. I froze in the sticky heat of the night, searched his face for any sign of the old kindness. Light sparked off the vase. Adrenaline coursed through me. It was a mistake to look up again. When I did, I saw only parts of a person: gray eyes in shadow, arms crossed complacently, as if none of this mattered. Then images of the girl, legs folded beneath her. I remember only a tightness before, in my right arm, and a trembling after, shuddering with the shock of sudden effort. Blood racing the surface. Skin very hot. No memory of contact, just water moving down the wall with terrible slowness, and Seb’s face ashen, devoid of smugness. He stood very still, staring at the mark on the wall. But for a few inches, he might have been killed. Neither of us moved. We watched each other with gaping mouths.

  In the morning, Seb was gone, glass shards glittering hard on the cherrywood floor.

  34

  SIOBHÁN IS LATE FOR THE FIRST TIME since I’ve known her. When she arrives, she is restless, not knowing where to put her hands. She doesn’t feel like coffee, so we walk along the river, though the sky is threatening rain.

  My suspicion is that Siobhán has known all along where Ella went at the end of July. I want to know why she didn’t tell me everything at the start, why she chose to undermine our search. But now, with her discomfort so obvious, my nerve dissolves. There’s only the instinct to shield her, to reassure her that her daughter hadn’t lost hold of all that is beautiful and real.

  —Let me read you something, I say, showing her to a bench. Ella is safe here, delighted by everything.

  I sit beside Siobhán and take the black journal from my bag. To comfort her, or myself, or to protect Ella the only way I can, I flip pages, taking her back in time up the coast of the South China Sea. I read to Siobhán from the book to comfort her, like a mother to a child.

  —May 11. North of Ninh Hoa there is an outpost for travelers, palm-thatched huts on the beach. Once upon a time, the owner, from Dalmatia, built himself a wooden sailboat and sailed until he stopped and lived. Seb and I played “beached” in blue dusk. We swam out, pretended we were dead, and let the waves wash our bodies to shore. Whoever is beached first wins. You’re on your honor. No swimming. No
breaking out of jellyfish pose—Seb calls it the “dead whale position.” Tides turn you, just your body, wave-tossed. My body wouldn’t stick to shore. Tumble-dried in the shallows and scrambled in sand. I looked over at Seb, still bobbing. I stood and declared myself the victor. We changed for dinner and gathered on the terrace, talking with travelers from Italy, Switzerland, Ireland, Denmark. Then we moved off to a terrace closer to the sea. He’s at a table with a lantern. I’m in a chaise longue, borrowing his light. We’re writing to capture these days. Days that will soon become others. Leather binding on his book is worn. The moon is full, marbled. It leaves pale streaks on the water. Waves are crashing, softly now.

  Siobhán tries, like me, to be objective, but we’re in love with Ella—Ella who exploded into living, without knowing where she ended and where the world began. Siobhán is smiling, so I go on to describe how Ella loved one of Lek’s photographs, the one that won the Bangkok Prize. I’m saying how elated Ella was when Béa surprised her, buying her a print, when Siobhán stops abruptly and clasps my hand. She drags me up the rue du Vieille Temple, weaving among tourists in raincoats. My first thought is that she has forgotten something: to lock the house, to shut off a gas burner. We walk too hurriedly to speak. Fat drops fall, spattering the sidewalk and the street, but we’re safe inside the Ormeau’s back room by the time the sky opens. Rain flies against the pane of the high skylight.

  From a large drawer, Siobhán takes a frame wrapped in newspaper. The black-and-white newsprint is of a long-tail piercing a river silvered by sunlight, the back of a rower straining at the oars. I remember her writing: Rower’s brimmed hat is a silver moon in sunlight. Oar spinning eddies. River ripples like muscle. River rower. Perfect. Siobhán and I agree that the photo is deft, classical. Most exciting, though, is the chance to see what Ella saw, to compare her descriptions against a sort of real. Our worlds are so separate—materially—except for the journals.

  Siobhán explains how the print traveled from Chiang Rai with the other journals. Ella’s adoptive mother, finding it melancholy, asked that it be sent to Siobhán.

  Taking advantage of Siobhán’s stable mood, I ask directly if Ella visited her the summer before she disappeared.

  —Why would you think that? Siobhán spins to face me, genuinely surprised.

  I remind her of the break in the journals at the end of July.

  —Ten days. Ella leaves and goes I don’t know where. She needed help. …

  —You thought she came to me? Siobhán says. Because I didn’t tell you about the calls, you think I could—that I could have met her and not told you?

  I nod.

  —I wouldn’t hide that from you, she says evenly. As for Ella, home was the mother who raised her. It’s as it should be. Besides, she wouldn’t have come to me in her situation.

  Siobhán is testing me. She wants to know if I know. My dream from the Loire shudders back to me. Even then I knew. But how? The journals never say. Ella’s words swerve around an empty center, the secret that sets the code. Now that I know, it is obvious: I came back empty, scraped clean of futures. It’s not a metaphor.

  —Her decision was going to be different from yours, I say.

  Siobhán refuses to look at me, but from her lack of surprise it’s clear she knows.

  —Why didn’t you tell me? Why keep secrets if I’m doing this for you?

  As I speak, I’m torn between fury at Siobhán—thinking her deranged for asking me to find a missing person while withholding crucial information—and anticipation of her response: everything I learn I should glean from the journals. The idea is to live in them to discover what happened. Siobhán, following her own thought, says with sudden feeling:

  —She could have come to me! I would have helped her if she’d asked me.

  —She went to the United States, I say, still seeking confirmation.

  Siobhán nods, annoyed, perhaps, to have to disclose any information at all.

  —Same-day ticket, almost ten thousand dollars on her credit card. Her adoptive father told me.

  Ella gives no record of this. Ten days of turbulence. Nothing. In the green journal, far into Ella’s delusions, there is mention of a child figure I’d read as fantasy, a metaphor for something, the source of which I couldn’t fathom. I ask Siobhán:

  —Did she go through with it? There was no child?

  —As far as anyone knows, Siobhán says.

  —You’re not sure? I ask, mistrust rising. Do you know or not? Aren’t there records?

  —Probably, yes. Only her adoptive mother was with her. Her adoptive father was out of town. They were, I think, separating. I don’t know. As you’re aware, we don’t speak anymore, Siobhán says, her cadence suggesting closure. I thought you might illuminate the situation.

  I look at the skylight, rain still shaking down from the sky. It feels as if the city and world are flooded.

  —How can I find her if I don’t have all the information? I ask.

  —It’s better that you learn from Ella than from anyone else, Siobhán says. And you did.

  When the rain stops, Siobhán offers to walk me part of the way home. As we’re leaving the park in front of the Ormeau, air heavy from the storm, I let myself imagine that Ella had come to Paris, and that she is here, holding the park’s gate open for Siobhán instead of me.

  35

  The house was full when I returned from Vietnam. Aurelia had been back awhile, and the native photographer was staying in my room. He moved his things to the spare room when I came back but was so spooked by the laughing Buddhas that he slept on the living room couch, which he assured us was insanely comfortable. Having him there was like having a radio on for background noise. He’d go on about something, and Aurelia and I would exchange glances, smiles behind our eyes. The rock garden he promised never materialized, but he made us coffee in the mornings, and the three of us fell into a comfortable routine.

  I knew that sooner or later I would have to see Seb. In the weeks since our return, we had managed not to encounter each other outside of work. At the start-of-semester faculty meeting, he’d smiled stiffly across the room, a stranger in a blue shirt and tie. There was a tender fear of running into the real Seb, white T-shirt and dusty sandals, but Anthony, who would have insisted on a group dinner, wasn’t back yet. I didn’t go out much. It was a time of tiredness. I told Aurelia about it. Freakish fatigue, she said. She had it all the time. Lek had told her that certain people can feel the monsoons coming. They grow tired in every limb, preparing for the season in which one turns inward, retreating from the outer world. The monsoons are for meditation, contemplation, gestation, our bodies following the rhythm of the rice crop, seedlings germinating under the flooded fields.

  On the day of Lek’s photography exhibition, I was sick to my stomach all morning at the thought of seeing Seb. I craved reconciliation, but it was impossible. I was nervous, confused, couldn’t trust myself. After work, I crawled into bed, but the native photographer dragged me out again, wanting my opinion on his latest photo series. The pattern of his Hawaiian shirt gave me such bad vertigo that I leaned on him until I reached the couch.

  —You’re not sick? he asked me.

  —Aurelia says it’s anticipatory monsoon fatigue.

  He frowned, then went about setting up the display on his laptop. His photo series was of rice planting, for which he’d spent long days knee-deep in rice paddies with the farmers.

  —Shouldn’t we go to town? Aurelia said, coming into the living room.

  —Art opening not opera. Come look. It’ll be quick.

  He was excited, proud. Images filled the screen: rice seedlings in blurred bundles, a woman with longing eyes in red rubber boots, a metal bucket she must have been swinging, a farmer’s hands, gesturing, fuzzed in whitish haze. The native photographer cursed under his breath. He clicked faster, searching for an exception, one clear image, without the blurring.

  —Could be the gear, he said, looking at the digital camera attached to his la
ptop.

  —Technology’s just a tool, Aurelia said, opening a can of Pepsi Max. People feel what you see. It doesn’t matter what you use.

  Aurelia’s wisdom always caught me by surprise.

  The native photographer was saying that if the blurs had been more visible in the digital camera display, he could have corrected for them. I thought of his archive in the United States, his parents indexing image files, following his instructions. He hated that things could be lost. I sympathized with the desire to capture everything, to fit what’s fleeting into frames of view. But I also loved that the farmers, the seedlings, and the fields had flooded his aperture in rebellion, insisting on their right to be lost, unfixed. Since my return, the world seemed unstable, colors richer, smells stronger, everything watery and out of focus. Overcome by frustration, the native photographer slammed his fist on the coffee table, rattling our wall of glass.

  LEK’S PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION WAS HELD in an old warehouse by the river, which Béa had converted. She’d set up plywood partitions from which the prints could hang. This had the effect of making the exhibition resemble a sort of labyrinth; viewers would enter the plywood enclosures to see the photographs. She hoped it would work.

  By the time we arrived, the makeshift gallery was crowded. I found it exhausting to greet everybody. Soraya was circulating with a microphone, trailed by two cameramen. Lek seemed very nervous. He was shy, he’d said once, and considered it bad luck to be the center of attention. He made a stiff wai and signaled to Aurelia with a pack of rolling tobacco. They reappeared outside, through the windowpanes, pacing together against the electric blue sky.

  Muay caught my arm, breathless. On my first day back at the university, she’d come to see me. You’ve gotten ugly, she said, laughing brightly. I understood it was my tan—an old joke between us—but I began to tremble. Oh, you think it’s lovely, Muay went on, not noticing. You look like a farmer. Open it! She’d gotten me Walpola Sri Rahula’s introduction to the Pali suttas. I smelled the pages near the binding, the way I did with all new books, even the journals, thanked her for the gift, and then began to cry. Her face took on a look of concern and worry as she comforted me. I tried to reassure her that I was just very tired.