Across the Deep

by Lisa McGuinness

  “Not strange.” Simone pointed up toward heaven.

  Aanwat

  Aanwat paused and leaned against the warm stone of a high-rise office building, allowing the sun to warm his face for a moment as cars and pedestrians passed him in a stream of foreign humanity. He closed his eyes against the glare and reflected on how he had gotten into this strange situation. When he’d left home and gone to Chiang Rai to get away from his family and all the drugs, he thought everything would be better. And it had been once he’d met Gan and gotten the job cleaning the karaoke. He finally had somewhere off the street to sleep. He no longer had to curl up in doorways to sleep at night—as out of sight as possible but still at hand if anyone with ill intentions had come across him.

  A feeling of nostalgia washed over him when he thought back to the gangly boy he was then. But life at the karaoke had gradually sucked him in, and before he knew it, he liked the power and was taking money for girls. He hadn’t actually given it a second thought until Suda had arrived. She had been the youngest girl there by far. He had found himself worrying about her and didn’t like the thought of her having to go with the men who frequented the services of their business. But he had no control over the situation. Gan was the boss, and Aanwat reminded himself that people with no documents were easy to replace. So, he didn’t make waves. He did his job and after a while, he became resigned. He did what he could to steer the worst customers away from Suda, but even that didn’t always work.

  Now he was in San Francisco, walking down the street in a neighborhood worse than theirs in Chiang Rai. He passed glaring traffic lights and a raucous group of drunken men pouring out of a corner bar. He had to step over vomit on the sidewalk as he made his way back to his hotel.

  The Tenderloin hotel, where Aanwat was staying, was run down, faded, and gritty compared to some of the luxurious interiors he’d seen through hotel windows as he’d walked around San Francisco, tourist map in hand. But at least the hotel was warm. The fog and wind were killing him, and he hated both with a passion he didn’t know he could feel toward weather. He didn’t have warm clothes and out of desperation had bought a ridiculous, touristy sweatshirt that proclaimed he loved San Francisco off of a street vendor to ward off the chill.

  He rubbed his eyes, trying to erase the memory of what got him here in the first place. He wished he could make the whole thing disappear. If he could have rewound the last months, he would have done it in a second. He no longer wanted the extra money he had dreamed of. It was tainted now. He sighed, weary.

  But time didn’t rewind, and he was in it now, so he began searching for Suda at Thai massage parlors and nail shops that employed young women from Thailand. He told them his sister had run away, and he was worried for her safety. He’d shown them all a photo of her, but so far had gotten nowhere.

  San Francisco wasn’t the largest city in the world, but trying to find Suda here was like trying to find a particular seashell on an overcrowded beach, and Gan wanted results. He’d already been blamed for one mistake and needed to fix it to show that he could be in the game with the organization here. Gan had sold Suda for fifty thousand American dollars, and it was either come up with her or return the money. And he didn’t have the money to return. So, it was up to Aanwat to find her.

  Gan was supposed to have had seven girls delivered to the shipping container to be sent over, but most of the group had been grabbed the day before by some human rights organization. He had no idea how they’d gotten wind of the plan, but they had. And now, even though he had nothing to do with the mishap, Aanwat had been blamed for not sending enough girls; a mistake that was costing the organization both money and their reputation to deliver.

  The whole operation had been cursed from the beginning. The one girl who did get delivered being Suda was just the worst of it for Aanwat. He hadn’t planned to know any of them. He could have lived with it if they had been strangers, but he looked up when he heard his name spoken with a tone of shock and horror and saw her.

  He shook his head and closed his eyes for a moment. He never meant to hurt her.

  He imagined he saw her several times a day, but when he chased down the various petite young women with silky black hair, they invariably were someone else. He even went so far as to grab the arm of one passing woman, but when she whirled around, fear and confusion on her face, it wasn’t Suda, with her dramatic cheekbones and particular hill tribe beauty, but a stranger instead.

  Days and then weeks passed, the search continued, and Aanwat was becoming increasingly afraid. The previous day, the local boss had taken him out for a meal, and Aanwat couldn’t help but notice the gun slipped into the back of his jeans. His heart had raced at the sight, but he tried to keep his face impassive, correctly assuming that portraying confidence in his ability to find Suda would at least temporarily prevent him from ending up on the recipient end of a bullet.

  They didn’t care about one girl; they’d made that clear. It was the fact that she had disappeared out of a locked container that had their attention. They needed to know who had let her out, because that information would tell them if someone was working against them from the inside. Learning that was important enough to the local boss to keep Aanwat searching until he found her.

  With every passing day, he worried that she was further away. Maybe she wasn’t even in the city anymore. He almost hoped so. If he failed, maybe he could simply go back to Chiang Rai and gradually regain Gan’s trust. He just didn’t want to be killed.

  Then again, another idea materialized. If he could find her, they could disappear together. He began to turn the idea over in his mind. There had always been something special about her. He’d felt it from the first moment he had seen her dragged into the karaoke when she was just a girl—frightened but not resigned. Besides, he might need to vanish himself soon if he wasn’t able to come up with Suda, so why not plan to disappear with her, if he could? She would be the best link to his past. Someone who understood where they had come from.

  He had missed his chance back in Thailand where she had been accessibly tucked into her room at the karaoke. It would have been easier to run away with her there. They could have gone to Bangkok and lived on a boat in one of the floating markets. He could fish, and she could sell trinkets. He’d never been there, but he’d heard about it and had wanted to go ever since. But instead he’d been a coward and shoved her into the shipping container. He had no idea what to do.

  Or maybe he could stay and gain the trust of the organization in San Francisco. A few of the men on the inside had been born in the United States to Thai parents. They hardly gave him the time of day, but perhaps he could do some small jobs for them to show them he could be helpful. Some of them spoke Thai with an American accent, which he found odd. But he’d understood well enough when he’d heard them joke that they could fill Suda’s missing spot with him. He’d laughed with them at the moment, pretending they were messing around, but he was deeply afraid they actually meant it.

  Claire

  Claire’s home life had become what she’d always dreamed of: the pleasant anticipation of a cooked meal; a refrigerator filled with actual nutritious food instead of a single expired carton of yogurt; music from her mother’s youth emanating from a music app; humming—actual bona fide humming.

  Her mother was around more, alert, and keeping herself looking fresh and pretty. She actually cooked food. Nick seemed to be at their apartment more and more often until it felt almost normal to come home to dinner cooking and the two of them in the kitchen, drinking wine and whispering.

  That night, Nick—who seemed to actually work during the day—had his jacket thrown over the nearest chair.

  “Hey, beautiful girl,” Nick called from the kitchen when they heard her clatter in, backpack slung over her shoulder.

  “How was your day?” followed up her mom’s voice.

  “Good, thanks,” Claire said, heading to her room to
drop her stuff. On the way, she spied a stack of brand new novels.

  “What’s with the books?” she asked her mom.

  “Nick knows how much I love to read, so he set up an account at my favorite bookstore. Now I can pop in and buy novels whenever I want to. Can you believe it?” Her mom beamed. She actually beamed, Claire noticed. Her eagerness and excitement was almost embarrassing for Claire to witness. Could she be bought so easily?

  “I put you on the account, too.” Nick told her. “I’ve noticed you have your nose in a book more often than not.”

  “Wow,” Claire almost beamed as well but checked herself in time to prevent her own self-contempt. “Thank you,” she said, her good manners kicking in, in spite of her wariness about anything that seemed too good to be true. Still, she decided to buy a few books soon so she could sell or trade them if things went south again. Already she’d started hiding nonperishable food in her room, too. You just never knew, she reminded herself before she tucked a can of tuna under her socks in a drawer.

  Months sailed by before the first crack in the foundation of her newfound security appeared. She arrived home after school to find Nick there earlier than usual and her mother looking angry. They were arguing in the kitchen rather than cooking dinner, and neither said a word to her when she walked in the door.

  She snuck into her bedroom and ate one of the granola bars from the box she’d hidden in her closet for dinner. Anxiety churned in her stomach that night as she occasionally heard angry words through the walls of her room. She was simultaneously irritated with her mother for potentially blowing their good deal and protective of her because, based on Nick’s smooth cajoling voice, it seemed he was trying to bully her mom into doing something she didn’t want to do. Ear pressed to her bedroom door, Claire tried to hear exactly what was being said, but couldn’t make out the words. Finally, she gave up, climbed into bed, and pulled the covers over her head to tune out the sounds of discord.

  The next morning, she found her mother asleep on the couch and no sign of Nick. She quietly gathered her homework, slipped into the bathroom to get ready for school, and tiptoed out.

  She tried to forget her fears while she was at school, but anxiety stole into her mind whenever she didn’t purposefully keep it at bay with an algebraic equation or the recitation of the elements in the periodic table.

  That afternoon when Claire warily opened the front door and peeked inside, she found no sign of Nick and, more worrisome to Claire, no sign of dinner.

  “Mom?” she called out tentatively into the quiet apartment.

  “In here,” she received a reply.

  Claire sucked in her breath, her heart seizing at the slur she could hear in her mother’s words. Claire dropped her backpack in her bedroom and then cautiously looked into her mother’s—afraid of what she would find. Claire stood perfectly still in the doorway, allowing no worry to show on her face while inside she cried out. Her mom was sitting on the bed; hand clutching a tall drinking glass full of what Claire surmised was her old go-to, rum and Coke. There was no Nick, no dinner cooking, and no wine glass being sipped over banter. Her mother wore the same clothes she had had on the night before, clearly having not changed since she awoke. Claire was afraid to approach her—not wanting to confirm the drunken state she already knew from the familiar tableau.

  That night she didn’t dare dip into her stash of squirreled-

  away food. She would keep everything for now in case she had to sustain herself on the secret cache for a while.

  By day three, when there was still no sign of either Nick or food, and her mother looked downright unkempt, Claire felt both fear and contemptuous pity for her. Why couldn’t she just hold it together? Was that too much to ask? Claire wondered. Finally, she gathered her courage and asked what had happened.

  “He wanted me to entertain one of his friends,” her mother said bitterly, using air quotes around the word entertain.

  “Entertain?” asked Claire. That didn’t sound bad. “Like as in having someone over to dinner?” She wasn’t sure why that would be something to be angry about. Her friends’ parents had people over to dinner all the time.

  Her mother snorted. “No, not as in ‘having someone over to dinner.’ He wanted me to help him close a deal another way.” Claire understood from the tone that she was definitely not open to further discussion about it.

  “Um, speaking of dinner, is there something I can make for us to eat?” Claire asked, hoping that offering to cook would not only allow her to get fed but also make her mom feel better.

  “Food? Nope. Who do you think was bringing the groceries every night?”

  “Nick was bringing the groceries every night?”

  “Ding, ding, ding!” her mother said, and Claire felt like an idiot for not realizing it before.

  On day four, her mother had clearly acquiesced. When Claire came home, food was cooking, Nick was in the kitchen with her mother, but somehow the tone had shifted. The flushed happy look on her mother’s face was gone even though Nick kept hugging her and calling her “his darling.”

  Claire had no idea exactly what was going on, but she wasn’t sure she was happy to have Nick back.

  Her mother’s wardrobe began to subtly shift from jeans and T-shirts—thin from having been washed many times—to low-cut dresses that allowed her breasts to bulge revealingly. She went out with Nick on weeknights more and more often. There was still food in the apartment, but in the form of frozen boxes stacked on the freezer shelves. Her mom—doused in perfume—seemed more liquid lately, not quite like when she used to be glazed during the day, but somehow not herself. Claire wanted to hug her and beg her to stay home, like she had when she was little, but Claire couldn’t figure out why she had her hackles up. After all, it wasn’t as if she had been an ideal, caring mother before. But this new lipsticked version of her mother made Claire uncomfortable in a different way.

  Alone again that night, Claire defrosted prepackaged macaroni and cheese from Trader Joe’s for dinner. When the microwave dinged, she brought the food to the table and ate while she read her history chapter. The apartment was too quiet, with only the hum of the refrigerator and the sound of traffic to keep her company. Even when her mother had been passed out on the couch, Claire thought, at least she had been at home.

  And then one night, she didn’t come home at all.

  Claire had always had a difficult time sleeping when her mother was out, and this particular night she had lain awake, tensing with every creak of shifting floorboards and every sound of raised voices from the street outside. At last she heard the familiar key in the lock, and the door clicked open. The sound of gentle footsteps heading to her mother’s room lulled her into an easy sleep. But morning told another story.

  Claire slipped out of her room, ready to grab breakfast before school, but instead of her mother sitting at the table in her familiar, threadbare bathrobe, Nick was there alone, looking rumpled in a wrinkled suit. Seeming testy, he stared at his phone and scowled while he ate a bowl of cereal.

  “Where’s Mom?” Claire asked when she emerged from her room.

  “No, ‘Good morning’?” Nick asked without looking away from the screen. His shirt collar was open, and Claire could see a pulse at his throat. She had never noticed it before and found it repulsive for no clear reason. She looked away.

  “Sorry, and good morning. Where’s Mom?”

  “She slept over at a friend’s house last night. I told her I would come take care of you and that she shouldn’t worry. She deserves a night off after all; don’t you think?” He said it in an offhand way, meant to cajole Claire into agreeing, but Claire looked at him warily.

  “Don’t sweat it, beautiful girl,” he said in a lighter tone this time, but the nickname he’d taken to using for her only served to make her anxious.

  “When will she be back?”

  “I’m sure
she’ll get home while you’re at school, so off you go,” he waved his hand dismissively as if to shoo her out the door. She gathered her homework and books and then took off like a shot, but her mind was spinning.

  “What friend was he talking about? Her mother had hardly any friends and absolutely no one whom she’d want to spend the night with. Something weird was going on, and Claire didn’t like it.

  Simone and Hailey

  Simone efficiently used one hand to crack egg after egg into a steel bowl, while with the other, she whisked them into a froth. She was a fanatic about using only free-range eggs, with silky yokes that were more orange than yellow. Simone wore her “concentration face” as Claire had come to think of it. She could tell Simone’s mind was far away, and she wondered where she was and whom she was worrying about now. Or, maybe she wasn’t thinking about the bakery or any of the residents. Maybe she was thinking about a guy, Claire mused. She’d noticed Chai had been hanging around an awful lot recently.

  They all loved to chide Simone about her love life—or lack thereof—because she consistently seemed to find one or another reason to stop seeing men after a few dates. It wasn’t for lack of interest on the man’s part. Claire had heard her getting hit on or flirted with more times than she could count when Simone worked the register.

  “Simone!” Claire heard Grace nag her. “What about him? You know, when he brought up that movie and said maybe you two should go together, he wasn’t just making conversation to pass the time until his coffee was ready.”

  “What? Who?”

  “That cute dark-haired guy who comes in all the time and casually maneuvers it so that you’re the one who takes his order.”

  “Marco? I don’t think so,” Simone waved her off. “He’s just friendly.”