Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  What can I say when people ask me things like that, Mrs. Shaw? I don’t mean or want to hurt you. Please believe that these are not my own questions, but as they are being thrown about, many of them in the press, I thought you should know. I thought you might even know the answers. Alice was my sister. Can you tell me what’s true?

  Lawrence reread the letter twice. Eldon was one of the first friends back in the States Joanna had contacted upon her return to Delhi, and the only one who had urged her to keep her hopes up. He ’d also warned her she was better off out of the country, given the climate in Washington, but promised to keep quietly digging for any information that might help locate Aidan. According to Joanna, Eldon had as many contacts in Washington as Aidan did. “If anyone knows anything, Ben will find out.” Since then, Eldon had sent a Christmas card saying he was still digging. He hadn’t mentioned Grace Darling.

  What’s true? Lawrence had no idea. But one thing was certain. Joanna’s precarious equilibrium would shatter if she saw this letter.

  Was it true she and your husband were on their way to meet with other Reds in a secret camp near the Soviet border? Was it true they were having an affair?

  He folded the pale blue sheet and hid it under a pile of his own correspondence.

  For a month it was that simple.

  Then one morning, after he’d returned from his rounds and was about to bullshit his way through yet another “update” to Jack, he heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Not the heavy thump of Mrs. D’Costa or the light drag of the sweeper, but a quiet, tentative tread that stopped and started. And stopped directly in front of his door.

  Lawrence didn’t entertain visitors. There was too much potentially compromising material in the flat, and even if much of it was encrypted, even if most of it served no purpose, he was responsible for protecting the identities of the drivers and hotel clerks, travel agents and relief workers who had become his key informants. So, from the first, he’d warned Joanna that the flat would insult her feminine sensibilities. She’d replied that she would feel “sordid” meeting him there, in any case, and because this suited his own constraints, he’d let her nonsensical reasoning slide. The children had begged more emphatically to see his “secret hideaway” but he held his ground even with them, claiming that no room was as stuffy, messy, and boring as an office where a writer sat all day. Eventually they, too, quit asking.

  “Lawrence?” Joanna sounded as if she were leaning her face against the door. “You’d better let me in.”

  He quickly shoved his paperwork out of sight. Stacks of books teetered in the corners. The charpoy was covered with maps, and dust motes shimmered in the sunlight between the blinds. The place was hot and close and every bit as uninviting as advertised.

  He opened the door. She held a paper parcel in one hand, her straw hat in the other. Her face was drawn, eyes wet. The parcel he recognized as a bottle from the government liquor store.

  “What is it? What’s happened?”

  “April fools,” she said tonelessly and kicked the door shut behind her. She dropped her hat on the floor. She tore off the newsprint and held up the bottle. Indian whiskey. “It’s been nine months!”

  Her hand trembled as she passed him the bottle, then reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out the insurance policy they’d found in Aidan’s closet.

  Lawrence set the bottle down and folded her in his arms. Her whole body was shaking. Suddenly she lifted her face and kissed him so hard he tasted blood. He felt her nails dig into his scalp, then her hands fumbling with his belt.

  “Joanna!”

  But she would not stop. She was out of her shoes, yanked her hair from its clasp, with one sweep cleared the bed. She pulled her shift off over her head. He smelled carnations as she buried her face and fists in his skin. He loved her because and in spite of those fists.

  Afterward, she lay with her back to him. The corrugations of her ribs expanded and contracted as he curled himself around her, and he sensed that her eyes were open as he skated his palm over her shoulder, but she would not look at him.

  “What happens,” she asked finally, “if I declare him dead, and he’s alive?”

  Lawrence rolled away from her. A horn blared in the street. Soon the children would need to be fetched from school. It was more than hot enough for a swim. Then there would be supper, reading, the evening routine. He stared at the unopened bottle of whiskey on the floor.

  “No one’s forcing you to declare him dead. If it’s the money—”

  “I love you, Lawrence. But that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped loving him.”

  “I know that.”

  She sat up. “I shouldn’t have come here. I shouldn’t have looked at the calendar. I shouldn’t think.” She got up, collected her clothes, and disappeared into his squalid toilet. He pulled on his shirt and trousers.

  When she emerged, she was dressed, her face composed.

  “I warned you,” he said. “It’s not the Ritz.”

  “You warned me,” she said, and came to him where he sat on the edge of the bed. She kissed his forehead. “I’m sorry. Time… I saw the date, and I just felt blindsided.”

  “I know.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you if—”

  “I’m not going anywhere, Joanna.”

  Hands on his shoulders, she sighed. Then a catch in her throat made him look up. Her eyes were fixed on his desk. At first he thought he’d left out the letter from Alice James’s sister. But no, the desk held only a shambles of books and, pushed to the corner, his photograph of Davey.

  Lawrence knew the picture by heart. Tracy had taken it. Davey at the beach, ocean at his back, age six with arms outstretched for the ball that Lawrence, out of frame, had just thrown. The boy wore a white short-sleeve shirt with the collar wings askew. His mouth was open, head tipped back, the sun full on his wafer-round face. He was so skinny, with jet-black hair and high, wide cheekbones. Light danced in his eyes, and he had written his name in red grease pencil on a diagonal over his chest. A child’s hand.

  Joanna moved toward the desk as if drawn by a wire. She picked up the picture, placed a fingertip against the glass. “He’s beautiful,” she said gently. “Such bright black eyes.”

  “That’s his mother’s doing.”

  “Ah.” She rubbed her lips together. Then, finally, “What happened, Lawrence?”

  “You don’t need to know that.”

  “You know everything about me.”

  “Do I?”

  “Please. I think I do need to know.”

  He sat forward, hands between his knees. “It’ll take some of that.” He pointed at the whiskey. She placed the picture in his hands and returned to the bathroom. Through the open door he watched her rinse out the single glass he kept there. She came back, filled the glass with the thick amber liquid, and sat down beside him. He drank deeply, then handed her the glass. She did the same.

  “My parents were country people,” he began. “My father was born in the outback, and my mother grew up there. They hated city life, needed space to think, to function. That’s one thing you need to know, I guess. Another is that my father, Charlie, was cheap. It didn’t matter that we had one of the biggest ranches in New South Wales. Or maybe that’s what made him so frugal, always saving against the next drought. The war only made it worse. The rationing, the loss of me and my brother as hands when we went off to serve—the loss of me permanently, as it turned out. Even after the war ended he continued to skimp, especially on petrol. Tracy and Davey and I lived in Sydney, about six hundred miles from the ranch. When my parents came to visit they drove an old Morris touring car that they’d bought when I was about five. A huge thing, high off the ground, and difficult to maneuver. You could hardly see out the rear window, the glass was so scratched, and it burned fuel like the devil, but my father refused to pay out the money for a new, more efficient model. Instead, he had this inventive trick of turning off the motor on every downhill slope. They only came to visit us once
a year, and the only reason they did that was because my father had figured out he could coast halfway.”

  Joanna refilled the glass. She didn’t say anything, but Lawrence could see her brow knitting. “You need to know all of this,” he said. “Otherwise it won’t make sense.”

  She nodded and handed him the glass. He rolled it between his hands. “Like I said, my parents didn’t belong in the city. Though they hardly spoke, let alone argue at home, they bickered constantly when they came to visit. Part of the problem was that our house, a quaint little cottage in Pennant Hills, really wasn’t big enough for guests. Another was that Tracy had her hands full with Davey and, truth be told, she thought my father overbearing and my mother broken-spirited, which was about right, although living in the outback seemed to have that effect on most couples I knew. Tracy was a nurse from Melbourne and couldn’t live without her friends and parties, so she and my parents had little in common, and I wasn’t much help, being at the office all day. My father was too cheap to consider staying elsewhere, but my mother especially hated the crowding, the sense that they were imposing, and so every morning she would urge him to take her out for a drive. Of course, he didn’t want to spend the petrol.”

  He emptied the glass feeling the whiskey like a lick of flame. “All right. Now you need to picture the setting. Our house sat on a knoll with a long driveway to one side that sloped at about a twenty-degree angle down to the street. A privet hedge tall as our house ran alongside. It was a good neighborhood, lots of families, kids out morning and night, especially during warm weather, everyone looking out for each other, you know?”

  Joanna nodded.

  “I had to be at the office at nine, but Davey was an early riser, so I liked to play with him a bit before heading off. And my parents, being farmers, were up at dawn, too.

  “At breakfast that morning I remember my father was on a tear over the price of coffee and tea, insisting that Tracy and I threw money away, and he could live like a prince on half what we spent in a month, and perhaps what he and my mother should do this day was prove to us that our neighborhood grocer, a nice Greek fellow, was stealing us blind. My mother said, actually, what they should do was shop for a new car, since the Morris had been making strange noises ever since they left the ranch. Davey and I escaped to the sidewalk. He’d seen some older boys playing American baseball and wanted to learn how to pitch, and I’d played a bit with some of the soldiers I met in the war, so the day before, I’d bought him a Spalding baseball and mitt. Now out front I showed him how to pull back his arm, then snap it forward.”

  He winced, remembering Davey’s laughter as he let the ball fly, his own pride at the power of his son’s right arm. Joanna’s hand rested on his knee, but he couldn’t feel the weight of it. He couldn’t physically feel anything.

  “A dog was barking. Blackie, the neighbor’s German shepherd. And the trolley went by, packed with morning commuters. Down the block I saw Davey’s friend, Paul Grant, who was a little older but looked up to Davey because he was so much more athletic than Paul. Maybe I heard our screen door. I think I did. It was a hot morning, and the sun was in my eyes as I threw the ball back. It fell short, and Davey ran forward to catch it. Henry Colson, an engineer who lived across the street, stopped and called out, ‘You want to be a Yankee when you grow up, son?’ But Davey paid no attention. He had such power of concentration, when he put his mind to something, the rest of the world disappeared.”

  He refilled the glass for himself this time. The whiskey blurred the image in his head, as if he were looking at it through heat waves. “Davey was only seven years old, but he was throwing long, and I kept backing up, and he kept coming forward. I was on the wrong side of that privet hedge. I could barely see our roof up there over the top of it, and it stretched all the way down to end just short of the sidewalk.”

  “Oh!” Joanna’s voice curled in her throat. “I know—”

  “You see it, do you? How we were both so caught up in our game? As Davey pulled back his arm again, I saw Paul racing forward, hands in the air, screaming. I thought it was a ploy to distract Davey, kid stuff. Dimly, in the back of my mind, I knew that wasn’t like Paul. He was a galoshes sort of lad—earnest, kind. But he was too far down the street, and I couldn’t hear him, couldn’t see his expression, and Davey had his back to him. Davey was facing me.”

  He felt his voice floating away from him. “Suddenly, just before he let go of the ball, I realized he was standing in the middle of the driveway. I had my mouth open, my hand pushing the air for him to back up, just in case. The angle of the drive made it impossible to see a child standing at the bottom when you were driving in reverse. I’d had a fright with Paul once when he was little, so I knew. I knew.” He shut his eyes but could not escape. “The warning never got past my lips. I saw a flash of sun on steel, and then the Morris’s gray rear fender slammed into Davey’s shoulder, knocking him to the pavement.

  “My father was letting the car coast to the street before starting the engine. That’s why we didn’t hear it. And sitting so high, with that useless rear window and the angle of the drive, he never saw—”

  Joanna’s face was a mess of tears. She pleaded with her eyes for him to stop. He said, “The left rear tire of that heavy old car crushed my boy’s pelvis and spine. Charlie stepped on the brake while the weight was still on him. He said later he thought he’d hit a cat or a squirrel.” Lawrence stared at one of the many cracks in the wall. “Davey was conscious, but we didn’t dare move him, and it took nearly an hour for the ambulance to come. By then it was too late.”

  There was a long silence. He could feel her eyes on him, but refused to look at her. “Now your curiosity is satisfied.”

  The coldness of his rebuke curled between them, refusing comfort from any quarter, but Joanna chose this time to reach past it. She pulled him into her arms, and for several minutes they held each other, rocking back and forth until finally they came to rest in the belly of his bed. After that they lay without moving or speaking. Together they let the clamor and heat of New Delhi roll over them.

  3

  With the arrival of summer and school holidays, Lawrence took Simon and me to the Cecil or Jai Mahal hotel to swim almost every morning. The groups seated around these pools included rich firenghi and high-caste Indians alike, but usually the two did not mingle, and as the only white family with a native child, we drew stares and whispers from both sides.

  Sometimes the comments carried over the water: “A touch of the tar brush,” or “Charity case.” Unlike Mem, Lawrence did not ignore these remarks. Instead, he would address me loudly, in his most proud voice. “Princess Kamla of Kashgaria, would you and young Simon care for a swim?” Then everyone on the pool terrace would look as I stared gravely back at them.

  The game did not fool me. Were it not for Lawrence, I would have been shown the gate regardless of my regal bearing. From this point on, however, the test was between Simon and me. For we had to cross the blistering concrete on our bare feet without a whimper. We were to step gracefully into the pool, looking neither to right nor left, and only when the cold blue water closed above our heads were we allowed to scream.

  Simon took full advantage of this self-granted permission. I would hear his yells underneath the surface muted as the mumblings of a flea, but when I opened my eyes his mad dancing made him look more like a scrawny underwater Shiva. Simon loved the game of playacting, first appearing so solemn and controlled, then erupting into this clownish performance. He’d puff out his cheeks and cock his arms, put his finger to his head like a gun. Once he yanked down his swim trunks and waggled his naked bottom at me, just barely getting the suit back up before he ran out of breath.

  I played along with these antics at first, but it didn’t seem wise to encourage him and so, soon, I began to pull back into myself. While he pranced on his underwater stage, I would go into hiding. Even before I learned to swim, I could lie flat on the shallow bottom and watch the scattered patterns of lig
ht break along the pool’s surface.

  “You must be half fish to stay under so long,” Lawrence said more than once. His frown told me he disapproved, that my time underwater alarmed him, but then, stepping to the side of the pool, he would correct himself, saluting me: “Half royal fish.” And he would swing out his arms, sunshine catching in the hairs that covered his shoulders and chest. Bouncing on his knees, every muscle tensed, he would propel himself into a dive that carried him clear to the other end.

  And then I would join with Simon in a chorus of pleas for Lawrence to give us our daily lesson. That summer I mastered the front crawl, and Simon and I both learned to perform a passable racing dive. And I pretended to believe Lawrence, that the raised eyebrows and whispers that followed me each time we crossed the hotel lawn indicated awe and admiration rather than disgust.

  “Your beauty and grace, Your Majesty, drives ordinary mortals mad with envy. ’Ave pity on ’em for they’ll never know the ’alf of you.”

  I can still see him, one large white towel wrapped around his waist, another turbaned around his head, as he clasped his hands and fell to his knees, gazing up at me with his push-pull eyes as if I had the world to offer him.

  By July Delhi had cracked open, baking before the monsoon’s deluge, which week after week refused to come. Mem and Lawrence decided we all needed “a change of pace,” so we climbed into Mem’s green Austin one morning before dawn and drove north all day across the searing plains and up into the foothills to the hill town Kausali. Lawrence called it a birthday trip, as Simon was just turning ten and Mem had suggested we celebrate my birthday at the same time. Of course, we did not know my true birthday. Only my father had ever made an occasion of this event, but he had done this with gifts brought home from afar, weeks or months after the actual date, and my years in the flash house had erased any notion I might once have had of the season of my birth. In any case, Simon’s generous soul exulted in sharing his special day with me, and Lawrence joked that it was a good thing; if they’d had to foot the bill for two separate parties, he and Mem couldn’t have afforded this trip to the mountains.