She wept then, great tearing angry sobs. She cried the way she had never cried in front of Robert, or in front of anyone, or perhaps ever at all, making ugly noises.
“What can I do?” he asked, his arms around her now. “What can I do?”
Send us home, she wanted to say, but she realized that she didn’t even want that now. She didn’t want to live in room 510, but she also didn’t want to live in a world without it. She could not leave her children; she could not take them from their father. It was an impasse, a smooth unclimbable wall with misery on both sides.
“Jenny,” he said into her hair. “It’s all right, it’ll be all right.”
Another name she hadn’t chosen for herself. She was Mum to her children, and Madame to the servants; in this room she was Jenny. Selfish, careless Jenny. She felt like Laura, weeping for the broken toy that she’d been explicitly warned to treat gently. You knew better. Genevieve had known better, and yet she’d gone ahead, a stupid Pandora lifting the lid on the box of evils, and now everything was ruined and wrong.
“It will only be difficult for a short time.” His lips at her ear. “We’ll get through it together.”
After she finally stopped crying, she felt a profound emptiness, a sterile soundless peace like the surface of the moon.
“My brave little Green Buddha,” said Max.
“Emerald Buddha,” she murmured automatically.
“My precious Emerald Buddha,” he said. His fingers worked the buttons of her dress front, his warm hand slid inside. “You’ve waited so long, for me to break you free from your hard, drab life.”
My life wasn’t always hard and drab, she thought but didn’t say, lifting her face to his as the fabric dropped away from her shoulder. And you didn’t break me free. I fell.
* * *
As Noi walked back to the house with the filled basket of clean folded laundry, Somchit was suddenly there. Behind him, the Mercedes in the driveway. She had failed to hear him return, the radio music to blame, her own happy singing along.
He laid his hand on her arm and she jerked away, nearly dropping the basket, walking faster. Just a few more feet and she’d be at the terrace; he wouldn’t follow her inside.
“Why won’t you be friendly?” he said.
He moved in front of her, blocking her path to the house, feinting and dodging as she tried to get by. He laughed, as though they were playing a game.
“Just one kiss,” he said. She could smell the alcohol on his breath.
How had she ever found beauty in the midnight black of his irises? Had she really once traced her fingertip along the rim of his ear reverently over and over for minutes, loving its curve? She couldn’t imagine it now. His face was too round, his legs too short. His eyes were beady and his ears were just ears, not beautiful in any way, and she had no desire to touch them.
“Come for a drive,” he said, stepping near, closing a hand over her wrist. “We can have a picnic.”
She pulled away, threw the basket at him, turned and ran. Away from the house, away from the moist creased palm and stubby fingers, toward the Quarters, up the ladder-steps and into her room. She closed the door and sat with her back against it, pressed her feet hard against the floorboards, felt his heavy steps shaking the structure.
“Noi-Noi-Noi,” he said. Leaning his weight against the door. “Let me in.”
“Go away,” she said, pushing back with all her might.
He put his head through the window.
“Lotus petal,” he wheedled. “Why won’t you be nice?”
“I won’t tell your wife that you’ve given me a baby,” she hissed, grateful that the window was too small to permit him to climb through. “That’s how nice I’ll be.”
Instantly she regretted having said it.
His head disappeared from the window and he thudded his whole body weight against the door. She pressed her hands and feet and bottom against the floor as hard as she could, but each blow scooted her forward and widened the gap between door and frame. Somchit’s hand slipped through; then his elbow was curling around the door and his fingers clutching at her while she leaned as far away as she could. Now his head and whole arm up to the shoulder were through. He would soon be in the room.
Suddenly he disappeared, Noi’s head bouncing back against the wood as the door shut behind her with a bang.
“Worthless dog.” Daeng’s voice. “Get out of here.” Then she hissed, “Have you been drinking?”
“Not much,” he said.
“You have to collect Madame soon,” said Daeng. She sounded alarmed. “She must not smell the alcohol. Go ask Choy to cut some phak chi from my kitchen pots for you to chew. Go.”
Vibrations of his feet stamping down the stairs. Noi waited a minute, then got to her feet and opened the door. Daeng was standing on the landing outside, looking across the garden in the direction Somchit had gone.
“Did he seem very drunk to you?” she said.
“I’m—not sure,” said Noi. She had no idea how to assess drunkenness.
“Tch.” Daeng made an impatient noise with her tongue. “Maybe it would be better to find someone else to drive.” As she said that, they both heard the Mercedes starting up, the squeak of the gate being pulled open. “Where is he going?” said Daeng. She shook her head. “My unlucky daughter.” She turned back to Noi and her features sharpened. She looked Noi up and down and said bluntly, “When did you last bleed?”
Noi put her face into her hands.
“Stupid girl.”
“I don’t know what to do,” said Noi.
“Go home,” said Daeng. “Have the life you would have had if you never came here.”
“I can’t,” said Noi, weeping into her hands. She knew that her family would welcome the child; there would be no shame to a baby, however it arrived—especially if it was a boy. But her family needed her wages. If Noi went home, she would be bringing two more mouths to join her parents and little sister and brothers, her grandparents and aunts and uncles, while also ensuring the loss of the house where they lived and the land that fed them all. How could a millet seed have the power to put so many lives in jeopardy?
“I didn’t know Somchit was married,” Noi choked out. “I’m so sorry.”
Daeng said nothing for a minute. Then she spoke in a low voice. “I was young once. I know what it is, believing whatever is promised to you.” She reached out, took Noi’s chin between her fingers, shook it. “Stop crying. Look at me.” Noi took her hands down from her face. “There is another way,” said Daeng. Her eyes were bright black stones. “I have medicine you can take. Do you understand?” Still jerking with sobs, Noi nodded. “It would not be killing,” said Daeng. Of course not: no good Buddhist would advocate that. “It would make your womb unfriendly, that’s all.” Daeng released Noi’s chin. With a glance downward at Noi’s belly, she said, “You don’t have much time. You decide soon. Now, go rewash the laundry you dropped in the mud.”
* * *
Afterward, they lay on their backs, looking up at the ceiling. Genevieve turned her head to look at him, his brown eyes very close, a fine network of lines branching from their corners. Was this the face she would wake to for the rest of her life? Other women had done it, divorced. They disappeared from social circles, weren’t spoken of above a whisper. Could she be one of those, an object of pity banished to a universe untraveled by anyone she knew? Max had a small bump on the bridge of his nose. She put a finger out and pushed there, finding the bone, then took her finger away and watched as the pale mark left behind filled itself again with pink.
He kissed her lightly, then turned on his side and pulled her against him, her back along his front, and draped an arm over her. Their bodies fit together perfectly.
“Max,” she said, her voice an octave lower than usual from the crying. “Is there really a dam?”
He didn’t answer right away. “What makes you ask that?”
“Let me put it this way: Should I believe in the
dam?”
Another little pause.
“Yes,” he said, his breath lifting the hair by her ear. She closed her eyes; she could feel the heat of him through the sheet, all the way down her back. “Yes, I think it best that you do.”
Chapter Thirty
HIS SHOULDER tingled with that maddening feeling of needing to be evened. It was beginning to pulse, in a ragged shape where his usual sparring opponent had rudely bumped against him while they were getting into position for the stretches. Philip had staggered backward but not fallen, had coughed up an automatic Pardon me. Ever since, that shoulder had been feeling heavy and wrong. Philip reached up to his left shoulder to press it; out of the corner of his eye he saw the boy watching him with a smile. He must think Philip was rubbing the sore place. But it wasn’t sore; it was urgent, which was far worse.
He tried to put it out of his mind during the stretches. He counted the seconds—one one thousand, two one thousand—as he pressed his forehead to his knee. The counting didn’t help. He hadn’t really expected that it would. Counting rarely helped with the need to even things out. By the time the slow-motion exercises ended and it was time for the short break before sparring, the urgency had expanded to fill Philip’s mind. It was all he could think about: things needed to be evened out.
He didn’t mean to do it—what insanity, to provoke his nemesis intentionally—but the thing got itself done. As the boy crossed in front of Philip, Philip bumped him hard, his non-tingly shoulder meeting the shoulder of the other boy with a jolt that sent them both reeling. Philip barely had time to savor the relief that rolled through him before the boy hurled himself at him.
Philip went down on his back in the dirt, the boy straddling his torso while he punched Philip’s face and chest. There was a warm taste of snot and blood and a choke of dust, and then the boy leaned forward and took Philip’s head in both of his hands, gripping and twisting the ears painfully as he lifted Philip’s skull and banged it back against the ground.
Philip found his arms free, loose beside his body, and he thought something like, I suppose these could be useful. He thrust them up against the boy’s inner forearms, pressed them outward, hard. The boy’s hands came away from Philip’s head, and he fell forward just as Philip doubled his knees to catch him, then gave a mighty push. The boy flew backward.
Now Philip was on top of the boy, punching him hard on his bony chest, kneeling on the boy’s upper arms with all his Nitnoy weight, the bone on each side rolling under his kneecaps. Philip took the boy’s head between his hands and lifted it, then banged it back into the dirt. Turnabout is fair play, as his father would say.
It seemed to go on forever, the roaring in Philip’s ears, the blood drooling from his lip onto the boy’s neck and face, before someone had hold of Philip’s collar and was lifting him, the cotton coat rising up under his chin and choking him a little. He was dropped onto his bottom a short distance away from where the other boy lay on his back coughing.
It was the judo master who had pulled him off. He motioned to Philip to stand, lifted Philip’s head with one hand beneath his chin, looked at the skin of his neck. Examined his ears, pulling them forward and peering at them as if to be sure they were still properly attached. Then he put his hand in the middle of Philip’s upper back and pushed him toward the side of the yard with a gruff command, chopping a hand at the other boy, who got to his feet. The two of them trudged over together toward the tree where Philip’s cloth bag with the water bottles lay. The two boys squatted as far as possible from each other, within the blot of shade.
Philip opened the bag and took out one of the bottles, while the other boy gingerly pressed each nostril in turn and blew bloody mucus onto the dirt. Philip drank a mouthful, then shut his eyes tight, tipped back his head, and poured some water over his face. He saw the boy watching. Their eyes met and the boy lifted a hand; Philip flinched but the boy only brought the hand in front of his own mouth and held it there, fingers curled toward his lips, as though he were going to bite into an invisible apple. He smiled broadly, and Philip understood: he was saying that Philip looked funny with his swollen lip. Philip put down the water bottle and lifted his own hands to his head and made spiky fingers, to show the other boy what he looked like with his muddy-bloody hair standing up. The boy laughed. “Buhn,” he said, pointing to himself. “Philip,” said Philip. He pulled the other bottle out of the bag and held it out.
They watched the sparring together, squatting beside each other in the Thai way, drinking the water. Philip hurt all over but he felt a rising elation. He had defended himself. He had beaten the other boy. He realized another thing also: This was the end of judo—or Thai boxing, or whatever these lessons had actually been. Once his mother got a look at him, he would never have to come back.
He hoped that it would be his father who came today to collect him. It had been an honorable fight; his father would understand. He might even be proud. And surely the universe would see fit to reward Philip with ice cream today.
When the lesson ended, Buhn stood up, capped the empty bottle carefully and handed it back to Philip, then made a wai, which Philip returned. As the boys dispersed, Buhn called something to Philip in Thai. No chorus of laughter or Nitnoy followed from the others, so the words must have been at least neutral. Maybe See you next week. Maybe Good fight. Or Good luck when your mother sees you. In boy-speak any of that would be intimate as a kiss. Philip realized that he hadn’t heard Nitnoy all day.
It began to rain as Philip stood alone at the edge of the street, holding the cloth bag with the empty bottles, waiting for the Mercedes. All of the other boys had left; the master had gone into the building at the back of the lot and shut the door. Philip amused himself by walking along the edge of the road, a few feet this way, a few feet that, one foot in front of the other as though on a tightrope. The rain collected on his neck and ran down inside his collar. If I count to twenty and look up, the car will be here, he told himself. If I count to forty.
The rain stopped, leaving the late-afternoon sun low in the sky. Philip sat right down on the dirt at the edge of the road. His upper lip was so swollen that if he looked straight down, he could see the blurry edge of it. He touched it gently: it felt huge, alien. He wanted very much to see it in a mirror, but that would have to wait for home. His body had consolidated into a symphony of pain, his lip a dull, throbbing bass line, the scratches on his neck a shrill pizzicato. Despite that, he felt good. The soreness encompassed his whole body evenly, no one place more painful than any other.
They had never been so late coming to get him before. He looked up the empty block, toward the big busy street from which the Mercedes always came. Perhaps it was caught in a traffic jam on that street. Perhaps it was sitting just out of view, its side light blinking and blinking, unable to make the turn through the solid unyielding lanes of cars. He decided he’d walk to the corner, just to see.
PART 4
2019
Chapter Thirty-One
BEATRICE’S TEXT came when Laura was making the midmorning pilgrimage to the hospital, carrying her coffee past the corner kiosk near the zoo. A new flyer had been stapled willy-nilly across all of the others, bearing a vivid color-printed image of a stuffed pink pig, with the caption LOST: MY THREE-YEAR-OLD’S BEST FRIEND—REWARD $50. The alert rang from Laura’s pocket, and she dug her phone out.
He’s awake. The doctors are taking his breathing tube out now.
Laura ran the rest of the way to the Metro, down the steps and onto a train, her mind percolating with questions. When had he gotten better? She’d been at the hospital every day except for yesterday, which she’d spent in the studio making the painting that remained half-scraped. But she’d kept her phone with her the whole time. Why had no one called her?
When she arrived at the ICU breathless, the nurse buzzed her in with a smile. Bea was in the hallway outside Philip’s room talking to the doctors, both the older, rarely glimpsed one and the younger, haggard one. The docto
rs smiled at Laura and recapped, without impatience. He’s got a good strong cough—his heart’s improved on the medications—looks like he might do okay. The curtain was pulled across inside the glass doors of Philip’s room; in gaps between the panels of cloth, Laura could see the motion of nurses whisking past.
The doctors’ air of celebration revealed the concern they’d downplayed before, made clear how very ill Philip had been. Their codicil Do you have any questions? was for once not perfunctory; they seemed to want to prolong the happy moment. When they’d finally run out of things to say, they pressed the button on the wall to open the double doors of the ICU and shooed Bea and Laura out toward the waiting room with the promise that they could come back in to see him together when the nurses are done with him.
In the corridor, Bea turned to Laura, who steeled herself.
But Bea was laughing. “You were right, Lolo,” she said. “It is Philip.”
Laura felt her own mouth gaping, a slack jaw of surprise. “Why did they call you, and not me?” she asked, a beat behind, still working out the questions she’d had on the way.
“I was already here,” said Bea. “I’ve been here every morning. I leave before you get here. Didn’t you hear me? You were right. Look.”
Bea put out her hand, opened it to show a plastic toy nestled there: a prancing red horse tossing its head, one hoof raised.
“I had no idea you kept one of those,” said Laura, taking the figure, turning it between her fingertips. For a mass-produced object, the horse was beautiful work, the bell-shaped hooves, the separate curling locks of mane and tail.
“I kept them all,” said Bea.
Laura hadn’t even known she’d held this memory, but it sprang perfect into her mind: pulling a cellophane strip around the sides of a small box to unroof it, plunging forefinger and thumb into the opaque white sugar beads within, rooting around to find the treasure. Usually a monkey or lion; very rarely a horse. The Preston children had been obsessed for a season, ears cocked for that specific vendor’s bicycle bell outside the garden wall, spending whole allowances. Laura’s two horses had been her most precious possessions until Bea said they were stupid and that she’d thrown her own collection away.
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