“No,” said Genevieve. But she couldn’t think of where they should go, to find her husband and son.
She’d never taken a tuk-tuk at night; without window glass between her and the dark streets, the city seemed frighteningly close. They idled at a stoplight, the open sides of the vehicle not ten feet from the people on the wet sidewalks.
“Master mai ru,” said Sarah again.
Genevieve still had no idea what that meant. But they were already pulling into the gate at 9 Soi Nine. Genevieve would have to find out whatever Robert was, or would be, later.
Chapter Thirty-Four
WHEN HE finally understood the situation, Robert was still holding his briefcase, standing in the entry to the party room, whose door was wide open despite the air-conditioning. All the ground-floor lights had been on when he’d pulled into the driveway, and two police vehicles had stood one behind the other in his usual spot; he’d had to park in the place usually occupied by Genevieve’s car.
“Our driver took him to his judo lesson at two,” Genevieve told the policeman. She looked terrible, her hair disarrayed and dots and flakes of mascara on her cheeks.
Robert asked, “Was I supposed to collect him today?”
Genevieve didn’t look at him. She gave the address of the judo lesson, and the policeman’s eyebrows rose. He spoke in Thai and two of the uniformed men left.
“They will go there now to look,” he told the Prestons.
“We should go too,” said Genevieve, rising. “He’ll be scared.”
“Not a good place at night, Madame,” said the policeman, frowning.
“All the more reason,” said Genevieve, going past him through the door and getting into the Mercedes. She still hadn’t looked directly at Robert.
Until he saw the empty street beside the judo lot, Robert didn’t realize how clearly he’d been visualizing Philip there. How much he’d expected to see him sitting on the grass or on the packed dirt, his back against one of the trees and legs tucked up, stolidly watching the street, or face pressed against his knees, sobbing. Waiting and whole and safe. But there was no one out in the street at all, just a yellow soi dog snuffling in the gutter who lifted a wary head as the car went by.
The police had arrived already. Their headlamps were lighting up the judo yard and the small house at the back of the property, where the policemen stood talking to the judo master. He was shaking his head no—no in response to whatever they were asking, cutting the air with one flattened hand. Robert felt the car jolt, looked to the passenger seat and saw it was empty, then saw Genevieve running across the dirt toward the little house. He got out of the car and followed her.
“Where is he?” she was shouting at the judo instructor, who looked up at her, blinking in the glare of the headlamps. “Where is he?”
“Not here,” he said in English. The flat of his hand, slicing again. “Not here.”
The policemen translated. Philip had been there that day; during the lesson, he had fought with another boy. The judo instructor made a punch with one fist into his other hand, then put fingertips to his eye, his lips. The fighting stopped and the judo lesson finished, everything the same. Everything the same as always. The instructor didn’t see Philip leave. When he last saw him, Philip was waiting by the side of the road for the white car. The judo master didn’t see the white car come. When the judo master went inside the house, the boy was waiting by the road; when the judo master came out again later, the boy was gone.
The policemen looked through the small house, pulled open every box and cabinet, any place a small boy could be hiding, and places smaller than that. They walked the judo yard with their flashlights, foot by foot. A burst of Thai from the perimeter and the head policeman went over, toward a cluster of flashlight beams trained on a spot under a tree. The judo instructor was brought over to look; he stood remonstrating, making motions to his nose and outward, like taking a mask off over and over.
The policeman came over to where the parents stood.
“There is blood under the tree,” he explained. The Americans stood expressionless. He gestured at the judo instructor. “He claims it is from the nose of the boy your son punched.”
“Philip wouldn’t punch anyone,” said Genevieve.
Through his agony of fear, Robert felt a lancination of pride: Good for him.
The judo instructor was wrestled roughly, objecting loudly, into the back of the police car.
“You’re taking him away?” Genevieve exclaimed as the car pulled out of the yard. Panicked, as if the man, the last known to see Philip, were a bloodhound they needed to keep here, as if he could be put on the scent to track their son to wherever he’d gone.
“We’ll find out what he knows,” said the policeman, without a smile.
The remaining policemen banged on the shutters of the houses on the street one after another, rousing occupants who listened to the questions, squinted at the farang couple standing together and apart, then one after another shook their heads.
“No one remembers seeing him,” said the head policeman, coming back to the Prestons.
“He’s a resourceful boy,” said Robert. “When no one came for him, he might have walked to find a telephone.”
They walked slowly the way they’d come, the way Philip might have walked. As they approached the large street, Genevieve gave a cry and her pace hastened. She ran right through a crush of smashed fruit to the edge of the curb, and would have stepped off into traffic but Robert reached her first, held her back. The policeman followed her pointing finger, putting his hand up to stop the cars, a chorus of honking rippling around him as he retrieved something from the roadway and brought it back.
Seeing it, Genevieve started to cry.
“What is it?” said Robert. Dirty patterned cloth; he couldn’t make out the shape. Was it a shirt? But Philip would have been wearing his white judo outfit with no shirt underneath.
“It’s the bag he carried the water bottles in,” said Genevieve.
The policeman peeled the damp fabric apart. They could all hear the tinkle of broken glass.
They drove to the hospitals, Fifth Field and the Australian Nursing Home and then the Thai ones. None of them had treated an American boy from an accident that day. Genevieve pushed past the nurses as though she didn’t believe them, stalked through all of the treatment rooms and out again to the front where the cars were parked.
“Where else?” she asked. “Where else?”
“Genevieve,” said Robert. “Where’s your car?”
Genevieve looked blank.
“Your car. It wasn’t at home,” said Robert.
“Sam had it,” said Genevieve. “He drove Philip to judo at two.”
Robert turned to the police. “Our other car is missing,” he said. “Our driver Somchit had it this afternoon. It’s just like this one, and the license plate number is almost the same—a three at the end instead of a two.”
The policeman wrote down the car make and model, the license plate number, Somchit’s name and description.
“Maybe he did collect Philip,” said Robert.
“But he didn’t take him home.” Genevieve looked alert, like a dog listening to a far-off noise. “Where would he take him? Where would they go?”
“We will keep looking,” the policeman told Robert. “You go home.” He repeated himself gently to Genevieve. “You go home, Madame. You can do nothing more tonight.”
Something in Genevieve went slack then, like a puppet string had been cut. She slumped where she stood and Robert put his arm around her, folded her gently onto the front seat of his car, scooping a trapped frill of skirt inside before shutting the door. They drove home in silence. Robert shut off the engine and got out, went around to open the passenger door.
Genevieve didn’t move; she was looking down, her hair loose around her face, putting it into shadow. He squatted before her, put his hands on her hands where they were knitted together in her lap.
“What do
we do now?” she said, a reed of sorrow in her voice.
“I don’t know,” he said. He stood, and after a moment she swiveled slowly, like a very old person, to put her legs out of the car. She gave him her hand to help her out, but dropped it again as they walked toward the house. At the bottom of the front steps she turned back toward him. She looked at once much younger and much older than herself, like an exhausted teenager.
“Where were you?” she said.
“At a bar,” he said.
She nodded and turned back. He watched as she climbed the steps away from him. The door opened, a bright slice of interior widening to admit her, then sealed up again.
Chapter Thirty-Five
IT WAS very busy during the first few days, lots of grownups in the house, people from the parties whom the children had never seen in ordinary dress, men standing with a hand in a pocket jingling change, wives with their hair under scarves. Once or twice the ambassador himself. They congregated in the party room as if it were a joyless version of one of the weekend parties, no music or fancy food and voices hushed. Mum sat inert on one of the sofas while the women bossed the servants to produce drinks and sandwiches, bending sad gazes on Laura and Bea as they passed them.
Philip wasn’t home and their mother’s Mercedes was missing from the driveway. There was no sign of Somchit. No one explained. It was obvious to Bea that Somchit must have crashed the car, which explained two of the three absences, but how that related to Philip wasn’t clear.
Bea cornered Noi alone to ask, “Where is Philip?” She stood straight to receive the answer, as if to proclaim that she was adult enough to hear it: he’d been injured, he was sick, he’d been horribly naughty and sent to live with grandparents.
“They looking,” said Noi.
On the second day a policeman was escorted into the party room by Choy, his appearance banishing the low chatter; he strode down the long room toward Mum and Dad on the sofa, made a wai. The other grownups withdrew to the other end of the room, to stare over the rims of their drinks and pretend not to listen.
“We have verified the story of the fight,” the policeman said. His ears stood straight out from his head, like the Pinocchio illustration in Bea’s old storybook. “The other boys agree that Philip stayed afterward, to the end of the lesson. At four-thirty, he was waiting by the road. At six, he was no longer there.” What fight? thought Bea. “We have not been able to find your car.”
“It can’t be that hard to find a Mercedes in Bangkok,” said Dad.
“Your driver may have left the city,” said the policeman. “He was not at his home, and his family and friends do not know where he is.”
“They could be hiding him,” Mum said. She stood, shakily. “His family and friends. Did you actually interrogate them?” Her voice was loud, aggressive. “I don’t care how un-Thai it is. Have you been forceful enough to get the truth?”
“We have not been excessively polite,” said the policeman. Calm, although Mum had basically been shouting at him. “We are looking for him. We are continuing to seek witnesses.” He made a deep wai before leaving.
Her mother’s rudeness to the policeman; that was a first. It was followed by a ream of other firsts, spilling off one after another like pages from a stack. One of the ladies going over as the policeman left, crying Oh, my dear, arms open for an embrace, and Mum pushing her away, actually shoving her so that the woman staggered, then walking right out of the room. In the amazed silence, Dad followed her. Both of the parents went upstairs and stayed there while the abandoned guests drank and smoked and finished the sandwiches and eventually drifted out without proper goodbyes from anyone.
Dad came down eventually, but Mum didn’t. She didn’t come down to dinner, nor to breakfast the next morning, and when two ladies visited that afternoon, Mum didn’t come downstairs to greet them. She’ll see me, said Mrs. Duncan in a confident voice, and Daeng shook her head, standing on the bottom step. The two women lingered there for a few baffled minutes, then finally left and didn’t return.
The calendar was blown apart. Without the clockwork of the parties and the lessons, time blurred, grew indistinct; the days ground forward indistinguishable from one another. Dad didn’t go to work. He brooded in the party room all day, smoking and pacing, alone. The parents’ bedroom door stayed closed, with Mum behind it. The whole house seemed quenched, Daeng and Noi and Choy going through the daily chores in silence, Noi taking trays up to Mum and bringing them back down with the food barely touched. At meals, the girls ate alone at the table, the orange place mat at Philip’s place terribly empty.
It rained a lot, but even between rainstorms they didn’t go outside to play. Laura didn’t skip rope; neither of the girls swam. They stayed in their bedroom together, went down to meals together, never far apart, as though a new gravitational force had sprung up between them. Jane came over once, neighbor Jane who still had a brother—that thought provoked a thorny blankness in Bea’s mind—and who hissed in a fascinated, eager whisper Do you think he’s dead? and tried to make Laura leave the room so grownups can talk. After that visit Jane was not invited back.
Bea was beginning to be impatient: Why hadn’t they just found Philip and brought him home? Where was he hiding, and why? He would be in a lot of trouble when they finally found him. Somewhere inside herself there was a hard, dull kernel of understanding—that he was not hiding or being naughty—but she pushed it down in her consciousness. She wasn’t sure what Laura comprehended. Laura asked no questions and seemed tranquil, even pleased by her older sister’s new willingness to tolerate her company. She had always been the baby of the family, difficult matters ever out of her purview. Bea had no words to explain what was happening; she was glad Laura didn’t ask.
Bea kept herself busy by reading. She did it methodically and without enjoyment, working her way through all of the books on all of the bookshelves in the house, even the grown-up ones, no one to stop or redirect her. If she didn’t understand something, she dutifully passed her eyes over the words and turned the pages just as if she did, every page until the last one. She took comfort in the way the pages followed each other, the earnestness of the printed words, as if they were the most important thing in the world. As if there were an orderly, ordinary world outside of this one, where everything was in chaos.
During the daytime, the house wasn’t frightening to Bea, surrounded as it was by bright sunshine, warm rain, or both, and filled with the servants busy at their tasks and the benign companionship of her little sister and the books. But at night, with darkness at the windows and the servants in the Quarters, the parents in their bedroom all the way down the hall, Bea lay awake, rigid with terror and planning, straining to hear through the hum of air-conditioning. The girls’ bedroom door always stayed closed to keep in the cool, but it didn’t have a lock and she watched the handle, expecting at any moment to see it turning.
She built spindly Tinkertoy creations, tall enough to make a clatter if they fell over onto the wooden floor. After her sister was asleep Bea stood two on the windowsills, leaned two more against the inside of the unlocked door. In the morning she arose before Laura, to remove them. Seeing the wooden sentries in the early light, Bea always felt foolish; but each night it was impossible to sleep until they were all balanced in their places.
On the fifth day without Philip, Bea was positioning one of the statues on the windowsill when she saw something in the garden below. There was no moon, so it was not a thing exactly but an absence of thing, a shape of darkness, larger than a person or an animal. Its smooth motion was familiar somehow, and after a few seconds she recognized it: the Mercedes, with headlamps off, was gliding slowly across the grass.
A wide panel of light fell onto the garden—the ground-floor wall below had been flung open. As if in reply, the car’s headlights went on. Through the glass of the closed bedroom window, Bea could hear shouting; then Dad was there running along beside the car. It kept rolling, pushing tunnels of light along the g
rass while Dad pulled at the driver’s door handle and banged a hand against the window. Just at the edge of the swimming pool the car stopped. The driver’s door opened, and Dad lunged at the figure who got out. A new tall shadow fell across the grass then, its base at the house and its head nearly reaching the conflict: Mum was on the terrace. The shadow began jerking and shortening, Mum running to join the men. From the dark garden beyond the car, faces appeared: the servants, almost unrecognizable to Beatrice in their sleeping garb. Mum opened the back door of the car, crawled halfway in.
There was a loud crack, and the car lurched and settled a little lower on one side, then more cracking and the car lurched again, the luminous channels from the headlamps angling downward into the water. Bea realized what was happening: the tiles around the pool, under the car’s front tires, were bursting from the weight. Dad released his hold on the figure, who by now was recognizable to Bea as Somchit, and pulled Mum out of the car, both of them falling back onto the grass. Somchit threw himself at the Mercedes, grasping the upright of metal behind the open driver’s door and planting his feet. He was dragged along briefly before he stumbled and fell onto his knees. With a long shuddering slide, its undercarriage scraping the pool edge, the Mercedes slipped into the water.
It floated for a few moments before rolling to the left, geysering water upward from the open driver’s door. Debris on the surface whirled in the vortex, making tattered bobbing shadows on the lit blue water as the car rolled lazily back onto its belly and, headlamps still on, sank to the bottom of the pool.
The police came and took Somchit away; the servants filtered back to the Quarters, leaving the silhouette of the parents standing together. Finally they came toward the house, up the steps to the terrace beneath Bea’s window, and disappeared inside; shortly after that the wide light was extinguished as the house wall was drawn closed. The swimming pool glowed in the dark garden for several more minutes before the car’s headlamps went off. Bea watched for a while longer after that, a rectangle-inside-a-rectangle in her vision fading with each blink. Across the room, Laura had never stirred.
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