Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  “Where’s Lawrence?” Simon asked suddenly.

  Joanna let down one side of his mosquito net. The room was sticky hot, dark around the edges, the chaos of toys on the floor like a Lilliputian battleground. “At his flat.” She tried to sound matter-of-fact.

  “Still?” Simon counted on his fingers. One. Two. Nights and days. “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” Joanna studied the narrow wedge of light streaming down over Kamla’s hands, clasped on the turn of sheet at her waist. If Kamla were praying she would hold her hands so, but Kamla was not praying. Her eyes, like a Siamese cat’s, reflected the light. She watched Joanna intently.

  “I don’t know,” she repeated, meeting the girl’s unflinching gaze.

  “He said he’d be back,” Simon said.

  “Yes.” She sat on the edge of Kamla’s bed and stroked the girl’s fingers. They unfurled like leaves and held her. Joanna closed her eyes, remembering that morning in Kashgar, looking up from Simon’s letter to see Kamla and Lawrence silhouetted against the sky. Then, again, the day before yesterday morning, the two of them whirling and laughing with Simon.

  As she leaned forward and kissed Kamla’s cheek the mingled scents of coconut oil and Pepsodent engulfed her. She drew back to find Kamla smiling past her.

  Lawrence stood in the hallway.

  He asked, “Am I too late to say g’night?”

  “I thought you’d decided to stay away,” she said when they were alone.

  “Thought, or wished?” He sat at the chess table fingering a black knight. Joanna handed him a glass of Scotch.

  “Why didn’t you?” she asked.

  He shrugged and drank. “If I wanted to escape you, Jo, I’d have done it long before this.”

  “I know, but…” She didn’t know what she was asking. Aidan seemed to be watching from a dozen directions. She wished she could muster the nerve to clear out all these photographs, but she kept imagining him walking through the door and finding himself erased.

  “I don’t see how you stand it,” she said. “Me. This. Him.” She pointed at the picture of Aidan and Lawrence grinning down from that Burmese elephant. “Don’t you wish you’d never met him!”

  “Are you talking to me, or yourself?” he persisted.

  She sat down hard on the sofa and passed a hand over her face. The muscles around her eyes throbbed as she felt Lawrence’s attention tighten.

  “The children,” she said. “If I hadn’t adopted Kamla, you would have done it yourself. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Why does it matter?”

  “And if anything happened to me now, you’d take Simon in a flash.”

  “Joanna—”

  “Aidan wouldn’t.”

  “What?” Lawrence dropped his hand, sending the chess piece skittering across the stone floor.

  “I always thought if I died, Aidan would either pack Simon off to boarding school or find some woman to look after him. A nanny or governess or a quick wife. You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

  “But, Jo, neither would he, unless—”

  “Yes, unless he was so preoccupied with the more important business of his life, which he would be, of course, because he always has been.”

  “Wasn’t that why you married him?” His eyes drilled into her. “Because he’s so damned impressive?”

  She looked down and saw the darkness of tears spattering her gray skirt. Then she felt Lawrence’s hands on her shoulders.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not here to take you away from him.”

  If only you could, she thought.

  4

  It was August before they were able to secure an appointment with the U.S. Ambassador. Robert Minton had been on home leave. “Twelve weeks gone, and I’m buried,” he remarked, continuing to sort through a pile of correspondence as they seated themselves in front of his desk.

  Joanna glanced at Lawrence. He gave her an encouraging nod. “I’d actually appreciate your full attention,” she said.

  The Ambassador, a balding, middle-aged man with fleshy lips and a large square jaw, hesitated without looking up, then slowly, deliberately pushed the pile of papers aside and folded his hands in front of him. The tip of his tongue appeared, snakelike, and circled his mouth. At last he lifted his eyes, two chips of slate embedded in the lenses of his spectacles. “It’s good to see you again, Mrs. Shaw. I was relieved to hear you got back safely.”

  “Unfortunately, my husband did not.”

  “No. I realize that. And I wish I had something reassuring to tell you.

  “I’m beyond reassurance, Ambassador. I just want to know what’s being done to find him.”

  “Everything we can do, but as you know, that’s not a lot.” Minton rolled his jaw from side to side before he spoke. “The border posts in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nepal all have been issued a description of your husband. We’re hoping he makes his own way out. If he does, you’ll know it as soon as we do.”

  She curled her fingers around the arms of her chair. “Did you see Mr. Hoover when you were back in the States? Pay your respects to the Un-American Activities Committee?”

  Minton pushed his glasses up the bulge of his nose, letting her outburst drift between them like a noxious fume. At length he cleared his throat and spoke calmly. “I’m going to tell you something that is not yet common knowledge, but it will be in a matter of days. Moreover, it’s likely to hang over our foreign policy for the foreseeable future. I’m telling you this, Mrs. Shaw, because it is our belief that your husband knew full well the risks he was running, and that he chose to remain in China even as the borders were closing. I’m telling you this so you understand just how dangerous the game has become, so you understand that any further attempt at a rescue mission is now out of the question.”

  He paused, settling a reproachful gaze on each of them in turn. “This is all, of course, strictly confidential.”

  Joanna heard Lawrence shift in his seat, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at him.

  “Last week the Soviets detonated an atomic test at Semipalatinsk, roughly five hundred miles from Tihwa.” Minton moistened his lips again, squinting slightly, eyes on Lawrence. “I don’t have to tell you what this does to the politics of the region. Mao’s troops are at the eastern border of Sinkiang right now, and virtually every outpost in China is surrendering without a shot. There are no longer any safe air routes out of the country. Yours, in fact, was one of the last flights out. Mr. Weller, who I understand entertained you when you were in Tihwa, has been forced to travel out using the same route you took in—over the Karakorams. He’s been incommunicado for nearly a month.”

  Joanna felt a deliberate pressure against her ankle. Don’t, Lawrence was warning her. Don’t let him get to you. But she couldn’t help it. “What about Weller’s scheme to preserve America’s ‘sphere of influence’ through a ‘third force’ of rebels?”

  “I’m hardly an expert on Sinkiangese politics,” Minton said crisply. “And I wouldn’t presume to speak for Dan Weller.”

  She said, “Why don’t you just tell me what they’re saying about Aidan in Washington?”

  At that Minton actually smiled. “Look, I’m sympathetic, honestly, but your husband is not the only American trapped in China. And nobody, including his own employers—including you, unless I’m mistaken—has the slightest idea what he was doing there.”

  “He’s a journalist. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out what he was doing.”

  “Is that why you went chasing over the mountains after him? To support his journalistic zeal?” There it was. The petulant thrust of the jaw. She’d defied him. Worse, she’d ignored his authority.

  Lawrence leaned forward. “The lady and her husband are American citizens. She came to you for help.”

  Minton pulled off his glasses with a motion so premeditated that whatever he said next would have been galling. But his new deflection knocked Joanna completely off guard. “I understand you came out of C
hina with a native child in your custody.”

  “Kamla—?” She looked at Lawrence, who gave her back a slow, grim nod, and she thought of their showdown with that Chinese garrison commander before Lawrence handed over his Sten gun. Again she sensed the undercurrents of a game she couldn’t quite grasp. “I’ve adopted her,” she told the ambassador. “If that’s what you mean.”

  “There’s no indication of that in your State Department file,” Minton said.

  “But Weller drew up the papers himself! He gave us emergency visas…”

  “I checked your file this morning, Mrs. Shaw. Consul Weller’s report doesn’t mention any adoption. And now that China’s closed—”

  “I’ll wager she’d let you have a look at those papers,” Lawrence said.

  Minton breathed on the lenses of his spectacles and wiped them with a white monogrammed handkerchief. He conspicuously ignored Lawrence’s interruption. “You must be aware, Mrs. Shaw, that India’s border is a great deal more porous than America’s—which is potentially good news for your husband—but right now there are hundreds of thousands of Chinese applying for asylum in the States. Even among those who have American sponsors, there are no guarantees.”

  “Are you saying Weller’s signature is no good?” Lawrence asked.

  “I’m merely making Mrs. Shaw aware of the circumstances,” Minton replied, still not looking at him.

  “Considering that Weller himself is incommunicado and you wouldn’t presume to speak for him”—Lawrence wasn’t bothering to conceal his anger now—“you seem remarkably certain of these particular circumstances.”

  Joanna reached for his arm. Her hand trembled, but her voice held steady. “No, Lawrence,” she said. “You don’t understand. This is nothing personal, is it Mr. Ambassador? It’s just policy. Like the State Department’s attitude toward refugees. Did you ever read my husband’s articles about the ships full of European Jews that came within spitting distance of Miami during the war, but were refused permission to dock? Quotas, you see, and, of course, some of those refugees might have been Communist! Most of them wound up dying in Hitler’s camps, but I’m sure they understood. Nothing personal.”

  “I don’t make the rules, Mrs. Shaw.”

  “I’m so relieved to hear that. For your sake. Otherwise, someone might just blame you.” She stood, still gripping Lawrence’s arm. Though she didn’t dare catch his eye she could feel him silently warning her, this is your show, your country. Your bleeding husband.

  In the car the steering wheel felt molten under her bare hands. Perspiration blurred her vision and streamed between her shoulder blades. Lawrence sat quietly in the passenger seat as they drove out of the embassy compound past the Marines in their stifling white uniforms, the limp folds of an enormous American flag. Everything here looked bleached and shrunken, as if it had been irradiated, yet outside the embassy gates the world remained unchanged. Bicycles and tongas plowed the parched avenue; families squatted with parcels and children in whatever shade they could find; three policemen pushed a manacled boy into the back of a lorry. Joanna wondered what had possessed her to think Minton would help.

  Finally Lawrence spoke. “He’s either covering up for Weller or he’s afraid he’ll be accused of aiding a Communist himself. Kamla’s just a bargaining chip, Jo. He wants you to stop asking questions.”

  “What does it matter?” She refused to look at him. “He said it himself. The only way I get Aidan back is if he finds his own way out. If he does, this is where he’ll expect to find me. And nobody’s going to take Kamla away from me as long as we stay here.”

  “In India, you mean?”

  They entered a roundabout. A truck decked in political banners pulled in front of them. Bawdy music blared from its loudspeakers, and a multicolored icon of the goddess Durga rode her tiger on the cab’s roof. Durga, the beautiful goddess of destruction, mascot for the Hindu nationalists. “Look at this place,” she said. “Think what this country’s gone through since Partition. Yet through it all, and in this infernal climate, these people keep on trudging, smiling, working, believing…” She veered onto Ratendone Road. “It makes Minton’s game-playing seem so infantile it shames me.”

  Lawrence’s voice came at her sideways. “You have nothing to be ashamed of, Jo.”

  “I have everything to be ashamed of. And you, of all people—”

  “I said you have nothing to be ashamed of.”

  She stared straight ahead, unwilling to accept his emphasis. Halfway down the street sat a modest rectangular house encircled by whitewashed walls and rendered even more anonymous than usual by the midday dust and glare. Aidan had signed a three-year lease on this house. Lawrence had paid out the first year. Musical chairs, change partners and dance. By default, this was home. During the war Joanna had met any number of women whose husbands were missing in action. These women, too, got up every morning and washed their faces, made their beds, put their shoes on. They worked. They raised their children, took lovers. They marched in place, and some remarried, even while they waited. It happened.

  She pulled into the drive and parked in a wedge of shade. Across the garden the children sat cross-legged on the grass. They were playing a board game, and Simon, intent on his move, didn’t even look up. But Kamla did. Her gaze was slow and long, inquisitive. It was not, ever, the gaze of a child.

  “I talked to Hari yesterday.” Joanna pulled the keys from the ignition but made no move to get out of the car. “All’s forgiven. He wants me to come back to run Safe Haven. Says he’s gotten approval to pay me if I’ll agree to a year.”

  After a pause, Lawrence said, “What did you tell him?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “I don’t see Minton’s given me much choice.”

  “But if it weren’t for that—?”

  “You mean if it weren’t for him, for Aidan, for Kamla—for you?” She looked at him, the dusty light illuminating his gray eye, softening the green. The irresistible desiderium incogniti.

  She started to get out of the car, then stopped. Meeting Kamla’s unswerving gaze she said, “I’ve got to keep going.”

  5

  Exile. Perhaps it seems odd that I should view the world of the nursery in such a way, but I had never known, could never have begun to imagine the kind of childhood that I was now expected to embrace. Toys, games, the simple liberty of play were foreign luxuries. Even the architecture of a house in which children were given a room apart banged on my heart like an insult. I was not a child. Not like Simon. I might lie beside him. I might hold his hand and listen to his pattering talk with curiosity, growing affection. I might even follow him through the labyrinth of tunnels he loved to build from towels and pillows and blankets and chairs, winding through the false darkness of play to a nest of imagined safety. But I knew what he still was fending off—the truth that we builders, we players, we children, are ourselves mere playthings of the gods.

  As far as Simon was concerned, I was his new sister and disciple in the laws and pleasures of childhood. “Hide-and-seek!” he would cry, dashing around a corner. “You’re it!”

  It. The term baffled me. I would sit, waiting, immobile as a thing, an object, not human, an “it.” Simon at last would emerge from hiding, his face twitching with hurt and anger.

  “Why didn’t you come after me?”

  “You say I am it.”

  “That means you have to find me. I hide, you seek. That’s the game.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a game, Kammy. What do you mean, why? For fun!”

  It took Simon a long time to explain the word fun to me. My lessons consisted of more hide-and-seek, tag, and catch, and blindman’s bluff. Fun, I learned, meant chasing lizards with Nagu’s sons in the wild lands behind the compound, fashioning slingshots out of twigs and rubber bands, shooting pebbles at termite mounds, or sending paper boats down the flooded avenue after the rains. Fun was pretending to fall asleep aft
er Mem and Lawrence put us to bed, then huddling together with flashlight and comic book under the tented sheet while the monsoon raged outside.

  Fun, Simon taught me, was what we must do to protect and keep ourselves separate from the grown-ups. It was our defense. As I was now Simon’s ally in childhood, fun was my responsibility. Mem and Lawrence were not.

  But sometimes we played in the grown-ups’ territory. Especially, by Simon’s choice, in his father’s domain. When Mem and Lawrence were out, as they were many hours each day, and we were left at home with Nagu and the cook, which is to say we were left to our own devices, Simon would insist we play with his father’s chess pieces, or set the phonograph spinning with his father’s recordings of American band music—Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman were names I came to know from the album covers. We played at dancing. We typed declarations about gods and monsters (Krishna is great! Kali kills. Mickey Mouse is mighty!’) on the tall Underwood typewriter his father had left in Mem’s bedroom. And we played what Simon called “dress-up” with clothes from his parents’ closets.

  I would twist my hair up in combs and put on my favorite dress of Mem’s—a long red silk evening gown with a high collar and deep throat, sleeveless and slinky. Simon said she used to wear it when she and his father attended formal dinners. I had never seen her wear it, but it carried her carnation scent from the other clothes in her closet, which I was careful not to disturb.

  Simon took no such care. He entered his father’s closet like a rummaging goat, pushing coats and jackets aside, pulling sweaters over his head, stepping grandly in shoes that he said were made of the skins of “crocodiles, snakes, and lizards from all over Asia.” His father had told him so. When Simon put on the white dinner jacket and black trousers that his father had worn to accompany Mem in her red dress, the jacket came to his knees, and the legs of the trousers puddled at his feet, but the shoulders and waist were not enormous. His father must have been even taller and slimmer, I thought, than he appeared in photographs.