What Could Be Saved

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  * * *

  When she woke, the sun was up. Her head felt clear, the grief in her chest focused and sharp. She put her lips against the vertex of Robert’s skull; he stirred. They kissed. At the end of the kiss, she drew back. “The girls must never know,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “There’s something else,” he said. “I should have told you a long time ago.”

  “I understand,” she said.

  “There’s more I need to tell you.”

  “I understand, Robert,” she said, and the smooth pebble of his name in her mouth seemed to surprise them both. “There’s nothing more I need to know.”

  * * *

  He fell back to sleep but she did not. She touched her lips very gently to the broken skin over his knuckles, then slid out from under the weight of his arm and made her light-headed way to the bathroom. She opened the bottle of boiled water meant for toothbrushing and rinsed her thick-tongued mouth, then drank the rest greedily. She was repelled by her own smell rising from her crotch and armpits, by the lank greasiness of her hair. She showered, then applied careful makeup.

  The girls appeared on the landing as she descended the staircase, tying a scarf over her still-damp hair.

  “Are you going out, Mummy?” asked Laura.

  “Just for a little while,” said Genevieve. They looked big-eyed, younger than when she had last seen them. She bent and opened her arms. Laura thundered down the steps into her embrace; Bea followed more slowly. Then they were both hugging her, hard. “My goodness,” Genevieve said.

  “Where are you going?” said Laura.

  “She’s going to the salon,” said Bea, scornful. “She has her scarf on.”

  “I’ll be back soon,” said Genevieve, avoiding the lie. There had been lies enough; she was choking with them. She kissed each girl. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back very soon.”

  * * *

  “You’re looking very thin,” Max said. He was just out of the shower, still in his robe, his face ruddy and his hair curling wet over his forehead. “Let me order up a meal.”

  She shook her head, sat on the bed but didn’t take off her headscarf or gloves: a signal.

  “The Thai police will never find him,” she said. “They let the driver go yesterday. Some false alibi; I don’t know why they are pretending to believe it.” She kept her eyes on his. “Can you help?”

  There was a long moment, something passing between them.

  “We’ve done what we can,” he said, finally. “We’ve had men in every back lane of this sewer of a city.” His eyes soft, sorry. “We think he might have been taken out of the country.”

  “But why?” Puzzled. “We’ve had no ransom demand. Why would they keep him?”

  He didn’t respond, and something in her brain went white and empty.

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  He sat on the bed beside her. As he put his arms around her, she felt the gold Buddha that she wore under her clothes roll against her collarbone. The amulet of protection. Why hadn’t she given one to Philip? To all of the children. To protect them against the evils of the world, not least her own poor mothering. She’d thought she’d countered every threat she could think of, down to the two oily drops pipetted daily into each small ear canal to ward off the organisms that swam invisibly with the children in the backyard pool. Yet she herself had been the danger. Even though she loved them. Particularly Philip, who aroused a fierce protectiveness in her that the girls never had, not even Bea, who was her firstborn and who looked just like her. Philip was her son, who had come to her too early, too small, who needed extra care. Beatrice had been bottle fed with formula as was customary then, science deemed superior to nature, but Genevieve had opened her blouse for Philip, scandalizing the maternity nurses. He had lain in the curve of her arm and suckled eagerly, as if he understood how much he needed the sustenance that came from her body. Thank you, she’d felt. Thank you.

  She pulled from Max’s embrace, got up from the bed.

  This was the last time she would ever see this room, she realized. This had been the place where she had been Jenny, thinking only of herself, pretending that she might choose her life. As if a person could direct a life instead of letting it happen. Stupid Jenny.

  Genevieve raised her arms, unclasped the chain around her neck, let it cascade with a chattering rush of links into the hollow of her hand. Held it a moment, regarding the serene Buddha, before opening her fingers and tilting her palm. The necklace fell onto the carpet without a sound.

  “Jenny,” said Max as she went to the door.

  She shook her head but said nothing, turning the knob and stepping through, closing the door of room 510 firmly behind her.

  In the lobby, she stopped at the front desk; the concierge smiled and made a polite wai, Good morning, Madame, with no light of recognition in his eyes. She remembered the last time she’d been here, and what Noi had said again and again in the tuk-tuk, all the way home: Master mai ru.

  “What does mai ru mean?” she asked the concierge. “If someone tells you that someone else mai ru?”

  “Not knowing,” the man said. “If you have secret—someone never know it.”

  “Like a promise,” she said, remembering Noi’s earnest eyes.

  “Khrap khrap khrap,” he said, nodding. “Yes. Someone keep your secret for you.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  PHILIP WOULD have loved the vehicle that came to take the car out of the pool, Laura thought. She watched from the bedroom window as it drove through the front gate, a truck with a crane in the back, hook swinging as the truck took a hard left off the driveway and cut a second set of ugly lines across the grass. A group of men jumped out of the truck’s bed when it stopped; two of them dove into the pool with the hook while the others stood dry, smoking cigarettes and watching. After what seemed an interminable time, the wet men pulled themselves out and the dry men began cranking the winch mounted on the truck, the handle going around and around, the thin black cable slowly losing slack.

  The car broke the surface with its grill and shiny front fender and hung there, the sun dazzling off the Mercedes symbol, the cable taut as the two men strained at the winch. Nothing except the water was moving. Everything stayed like that for what felt like a long time. Then the car seemed to surrender, coming steadily up out of the pool until it hung high from the hook, deadweight and vertical like a fish from a line, great fountains of water coming from the opened windows. All of the men struck up cigarettes as the gushing slowed to dribbles. The car hung there dripping while they smoked.

  At some unclear signal the cigarettes were crushed out and one man hopped into the truck cab. The rest arrayed themselves in two rows on the truck bed as the crane swiveled and the car swung over their heads. They reached up, touched fingertips to the tires’ black rubber, then their fingers and then their palms, guiding the wet beast in its descent. When the car settled onto the flatbed, the men swarmed around it with straps. Laura had a pang of sympathy for the car then, as though it were a captured animal. All of the men braced themselves against the sides of the truck and the vehicle jerked into motion. More deep ruts across the green sweep of grass, a crushed hibiscus plant, a hard right turn onto the driveway. Then it was out of the front gates and gone.

  Laura played the whole episode in her head again and again, so she could describe it perfectly for Philip when he came home. Particularly that time of balance, the blunt emerged snout of the car unmoving, its peace-sign hood ornament sparkling in the sun and the reflection of the sky breaking again and again around it in the water. She memorized it so carefully that she dreamed of it for a long time, but then as the years went on she slowly forgot it all.

  * * *

  Their father drove them now wherever they needed to go, only two of them in the back seat so there was no need to argue: they each got a window. There were no more lessons and no more weekend parties, neither at home nor out. Their mother read them a bedtime story each night. A
t meals, the empty orange place mat stayed for weeks on the table with that chair pushed in, and when one day the girls came down for breakfast and Daeng had set the table with the red and green and blue and yellow place mats only, neither of the girls said anything.

  Chapter Forty

  “WE’VE LOST the war,” said the Boss.

  Robert felt a rush of astonishment, although it shouldn’t be surprising news. American troops had been withdrawing since August. Nonetheless, defeat seemed tall-tale impossible, the stuff of a fable, mighty steel tanks and beef-fed men vanquished by a diminutive, poorly armed peasantry.

  “There will always be another,” said the Boss as Robert seated himself in the chair before the desk. Robert looked at him, at his watery gray eyes and long nose. He had worked for this man for four years and did not know what he really thought of the war, of the work they had been doing. The Boss was compartmentalized, as Robert was, completely neutral. They aimed themselves where they were pointed, without ethical compunction, without underlying ethos or dogmatic zeal. It was part of their unique suitability.

  “Has there been any word?” the Boss asked.

  “They’ve stopped looking,” said Robert. That was enough to say. No point in sharing the sickening possibilities suggested by the policeman. By now, he is most likely out of the country. They often use luggage for transport. Thankfully Genevieve had not heard any of that. Robert would never have expected that even such a terrible loss would have undone Genevieve as completely as it did. That was exactly how he’d describe it—she’d been undone as completely as a knotted rope falling open, the halves slack and separate, retaining the memory of the knot but never able to be twisted together in exactly the same way, with that same fresh perfection, again.

  “Terrible,” said the Boss. A sigh. He offered Robert a cigarette; he declined. “Did you want something?”

  He had, of course. He’d had a purpose when he’d marched down the corridor past Miss Harch to knock on this door.

  “I need to confess something,” said Robert. The Boss, who was lighting his cigarette, raised his eyebrows. “About Bardin. I found him in my office one night looking through my desk and files, and he told me some rubbish story about a photograph of his being mixed into my materials by mistake. He didn’t take anything,” he said. “I’m not sure what he was really doing there.”

  The fan cranked slowly on the ceiling above their heads.

  “When was this?” the Boss asked.

  “Three months ago. I should have said something.”

  The Boss smoked, thinking. “Which photograph?”

  “A boy in a striped shirt. I told Bardin I didn’t use it, but that wasn’t true.”

  “I remember,” said the Boss, nodding. “You made him an informant. That was good work.” He tapped his cigarette ash into the brass ashtray with a ting. “Why didn’t you report this before?”

  “It seemed like a personal matter,” said Robert. “I was wrong not to tell you.”

  “All right,” said the Boss. “Thank you for telling me now.”

  Robert nodded, but didn’t rise. He flexed his nearly healed knuckles where they lay hidden on his thighs, below the desk surface.

  “Is there something else?” asked the Boss.

  “After we go home,” said Robert. “I’d like to do something more—practical.”

  The Boss’s eyes met Robert’s, and for once did not slide away. “Why?”

  “I have talents that are being wasted.” His heart galloping beneath the boastful words. Under the gray gaze, Robert added, “And if this is going to be my work, then I should actually do the work. Not play about.”

  A long pause.

  “I agree,” said the Boss.

  Robert got up from his chair. He was at the door, hand on the doorknob, when the Boss spoke again.

  “All we can do now,” the Boss said, “is hope that when we look back, we’ll see that all of this will have been worth it.”

  His voice held honest emotion. Robert knew that if he turned, he might glimpse the man’s real face. Or maybe not. Perhaps, by this point in the man’s long career, there was nothing to see.

  Robert didn’t look. He didn’t need to see.

  “I can tell you right now,” he said in a rough voice. “It wasn’t.”

  In his office he packed up his briefcase, putting Genevieve’s picture in, leaving the hat rack and the potted plant. He left the building and went straight down the stairs to the car, drove away without looking back. His own life forked ahead of him: one reality in which Philip was found alive, and the other in which he was found dead. He couldn’t bear contemplation of the third possibility: that he would never be found at all.

  Chapter Forty-One

  GENEVIEVE STOOD very still as Robert came up behind her and put his hands on her upper arms.

  “It looks like we’re going home,” he said.

  “We can’t leave,” she said, not turning. “Robert. We can’t.”

  “Sweetheart,” he said. “He’s not here. If he were still here, they’d have found him.”

  That was wrong, she thought. He was so small. He could be hidden anywhere.

  “We can’t stay forever,” said Robert. “You know that.”

  From the floor below, she could hear Noi and Choy working together to clean the dining room, their murmured Thai, the little noises as they lifted each chair and set it down the way she’d taught them, so that the floor didn’t get scraped.

  She walked out of his arms, toward the window. It was bright midafternoon. At the front of the house, one Mercedes sat dusty in the driveway; in the side garden, Kai clipped a flower border with long-bladed shears. The swimming pool had been emptied and cleaned and refilled after the car was taken out of it, and Bea and Laura were in it, leaping like two ivory dolphins. Little wavering lines of heat danced off the vivid tableau of fuchsia flowers, emerald grass, blue water.

  To be seven again, thought Genevieve, watching Laura windmill her arms, sending arcs of water up against the sky. Seven and pure, in that clean baptismal water. To wash it all away, and start again. She wanted to walk into that oblong font, to lie back in it and swallow it and feel it cover every part of her skin. But of course that water would be sullied by her entry. Nothing had the power to absolve her.

  Perhaps Master mai ru, she thought, but I will never allow myself to forget.

  “We’ll take Noi with us,” she said, not turning. “If she wants to come.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  NOI’S FAMILY was uniformly enthusiastic about the proposition of her move to America. They were saving for Nok’s wedding, which had to be grand enough to befit a royal lotus blossom. Choy, however, was skeptical, asking why Noi would travel so far to be a servant when she could be a servant right here. Daeng said nothing then, but that night she came to Noi’s room.

  “Why haven’t you taken the medicine yet?” she demanded. “You can’t wait much longer. Especially if you’re going to America. Farang don’t like babies made without husbands.” Without waiting for Noi to reply, she added, “And you shouldn’t go to America. You’ll be trapped there, a slave.”

  “Madame said I could go to school,” said Noi.

  Daeng made a scornful noise. “Even without a baby, there wouldn’t be school,” she said.

  “How is Somchit?” Noi ventured.

  “That dog,” said Daeng. “He must have another girlfriend already; he went to her after getting out of jail. Hiding from his responsibilities. Don’t worry about him. Worry about my daughter, trying to feed her children.” She gave a short laugh. “Worry about yourself.”

  After Daeng left, Noi’s mind rattled with all that she’d said. Would going to America be stepping into a trap? That the Prestons wanted to take her reassured Noi that the police hadn’t revealed what she’d told them. She’d had to repeat the two-hour lie over and over while they interrupted her and tried to confuse her. How do you know what time it was? they’d demanded. I could hear the radio pl
aying next door, she’d said. The five pips went just before Somchit came. Finally, they’d written it all down on a paper and made her put her name at the bottom. It hadn’t helped anything that she’d done it—Somchit had been freed from jail, yes, but according to Daeng, he’d now abandoned his family. It hadn’t hurt anything either, though. It had been an unimportant lie after all.

  Daeng had said: Worry about yourself. But Noi was making choices not only for herself now. Maybe the medicine was the right choice for the longan. Which would be more terrible: to be born only to suffer and starve, or to be given a chance to go back, and be born into a different life?

  She thought of the basket, the fat kicking legs.

  I can’t do this, she thought. She was a weed trying to hold back a boulder of destiny. She sent a silent cry into the universe: P’Sao, I need you. She didn’t expect an answer. For the first time Noi thought that perhaps she had invented all those visits from her sister; maybe they had been nothing but homesick dreams.

  You should go back, she told the baby in her mind, just before falling asleep. You deserve a better mother than me.

  * * *

  When the rush of blood came in the middle of the night, Noi knew that the baby had heard her.

  Choy pushed open Noi’s door in the morning, took in the situation at a glance, went away and came back with a sheaf of broad leaves from the banana tree and a bottle of juice. She made Noi roll onto her side and smoothed a leaf onto the mat beneath her. She put the bottle to Noi’s lips, held it there for a long swallow.

  “Stay in bed and drink the rest of that,” Choy said. “If anyone notices you are missing, I will tell them it is your pracham duan.”

  Noi’s body took two days to expel the longan; she lay sweating on her sleeping mat with her pha tung over her and a banana leaf beneath her to collect the blood. She dozed when the turmoil in her belly would let her, and woke sticky every few hours in the small room that increasingly smelled like damp metal. She moved only to drink the juice that Choy brought, or to add a banana leaf when necessary, putting a clean one on top of the bloody one and lying down again. Choy came in the evening with more leaves, took the others away.