“He would be almost thirteen now,” Robert said.
She nodded, the window glass rolling under her temple. They said nothing else, all the way home.
* * *
The Foundation progressed from simple feeding stations to a school with an attached dormitory and a wiry nun, Sister James, who lived in. That first school enrolled just twenty children, most of them orphaned or abandoned, but not all—permission was obtained from any existing family. In time, they added some older children to the little ones; a disastrous move, reported Sister James. Older children were disruptive and greedy; they bullied the younger ones, came for the meals and slept through the lessons, stole whatever they could from the classroom. Many of them were addicts.
“They’ve been too long on the street,” said Sister James. “After a certain point, a person might not be rescuable.”
“Surely we are all rescuable,” said Genevieve. Shocked: she’d expected more mercy from a nun.
“Idealism has no role here,” said Sister James, a Scot who had spent her life in Asia. She might have been forty or seventy, her skin roughened by sun. “We can help the young ones, give them a good start in life. The older ones are sinking the ship.” Genevieve gave in. She let Sister James set the age cutoff at twelve years old.
* * *
After Robert died, Genevieve had the odd thought Laura’s alone now. Odd but not inexplicable: purely on the basis of resemblance, the family could be sliced down the middle, Genevieve and Bea on one side, Robert and Laura on the other. Without Robert, the family was asymmetrical. Genevieve was dozing on a plane when that thought wandered through. Followed by another: Too bad we don’t still have Philip. At that, she came fully awake. Too bad. As if the central tragedy of her life, that dark omphalos into which everything was always slowly migrating as if drawn by some terrible gravity, were a mild misfortune. Something to tut-tut about, like rain at a garden party. The airplane was flying through a storm; she turned her face to the window, where raindrops wriggled like short translucent worms. She and Robert had not been companions for a long time, but they had been connected in a way that could not happen again. She felt a loneliness to her core.
* * *
In the nineties, when the Foundation was considering expansion into Cambodia, Genevieve made an exploratory visit. She spent a morning talking to survivors of the genocide, whose lack of self-pity was humbling, and in the afternoon she visited Angkor Wat. Her guide was disappointed that Genevieve would not be able to return for the sunrise the next day, and took it upon himself to show her a spectacular sunset, urging her past the Apsaras in bas-relief, past the benevolent Buddhas smiling down from the stone of the Bayon, to the foot of a near-vertical stone stairway at whose top, he promised, was the best sunset place.
She climbed to the flat stone terrace, stood looking out at the enormous temple complex. According to the guide’s crisp history, it had been built originally to the glory of the Hindu god Vishnu, was reconsecrated to Buddhism two hundred years later, and eventually was abandoned to be eaten by the jungle. The ruins were a testament to thousands of lives spent and lost, over centuries come and gone.
What Genevieve was building was so tiny. The Foundation elementary school enrolled four hundred children at that point, with uniforms and dormitories and a battalion of teachers. By many measures a success, but Genevieve had her doubts. The week before, she’d seen Bangkok bar girls protesting government attempts to regulate the sex industry, marching with signs that said BETTER AIDS THAN STARVATION. She had been bemused, wondering what their pimps had offered or threatened to make the girls demonstrate against their own interests, when she recognized one of the marchers. And then another, and another. They were former Foundation girls, each of them fed and housed and educated through their early years. Their rescue had been temporary after all.
She knew that when Foundation children were released at age twelve, some went on to middle schools run by cooperating charities, and some back to their families, but most were returned to the streets. She knew that; but the chart illustrating eventual outcomes was one figure on one page in a thick annual report, easily flicked past, and Genevieve had allowed herself to be dazzled by the positives: the improved vaccination numbers, the falling mortality rates. She had believed in Sister James’s good start.
Genevieve saw now that they had both been naive, thinking they could ignore the sex industry, that dark space that had been dilated in the Bangkok economy in the sixties and seventies from the influx of farang, that did not collapse when the war came to an end. Through the succeeding decades it had expanded into a voracious maw, into which the Foundation delivered the children just as they grew out of simple needs, for food and medicine and the alphabet. A good start was not enough to protect them.
Standing on the terrace of Phnom Bakheng, Genevieve thought of the girls marching for the right to prostitute themselves, to risk AIDS and death. It had seemed wrongheaded, insane. But if one took the sex out of it, weren’t the marchers simply saying what they needed? Employment, a means of support. More than charity running across their palms like water. What if the girls had something to sell other than their bodies?
A chorus of ohhs broke out from the group of tourists standing on the terrace with her: the sun was beginning to set. Genevieve barely noticed.
It wasn’t that older children and adults weren’t rescuable, she thought; it was that the Foundation didn’t know how to rescue them. It was that Genevieve hadn’t known how. The Foundation’s mission could adjust; it could teach skills. They could take the older ones after all, they could take everyone.
She stood under the bowl of violent orange and pink sky working out the details, the vision of her life’s work spreading out before her like bright veins on a leaf, the good futures possible for other people’s lost children.
As the colors dimmed to gray and flashlights began flicking to life around her, the guide touched her arm, Was beautiful, yes? and she realized that the guides were herding the tourists toward the set of stairs equipped with the farang handrail, to make their way back down to the ground. Genevieve descended apart from them, down the middle of a stairway cut so steeply that each next step was invisible. Stepping again and again into nothing, all the way down.
* * *
She saw Maxwell Dawson again at a Foundation event at the turn of the century. He must have been in the crowd when she was onstage narrating her slideshow. She no longer needed to use a picture of Philip, nor any euphemisms. The world was hardier now, ready to understand that sex trafficking made the unappetizing mortar between the tiles of a vigorous tourist trade all over the world. Still, Genevieve’s presentation was curated carefully: enough truth to inspire outrage, not so much as to provoke hopelessness.
She recognized Max immediately when he came up to her afterward.
“At this point, you’ve spent more time in Southeast Asia than I have,” he said. He had aged well; his hair had stayed full and his body trim.
“Needs must,” she said. She might have expected to feel guilt at seeing him, but instead felt a wave of nostalgia. For herself as she’d been before, for the passion they had shared. “I even speak a little Thai,” she said. “Very badly indeed—but I do understand kha kha kha.” He smiled: so he remembered that conversation.
“Do tell,” he said.
“Hard kha kha kha”—a light staccato—“means yes. Soft kha kha kha”—a zephyr—“means no.”
A pause, both of them smiling. Then his expression became grave. “I was sorry to hear about Robert,” he said. She inclined her head to acknowledge the statement. “I’m alone now too.”
His eyes held the same adoring spark she remembered; that spark in men’s eyes had lighted her path through the world. She had not had much formal education, no marketable skills, but no one wanted those from her anyway. They had wanted her attention. The attention of a beautiful woman, without even a hope of sex, was enough for so many men. Genevieve hadn’t seen that light in a ma
n’s eye for a while; what men—and women—wanted from her now was absolution, to accept their check and tell them that they had done their part.
“You know, in certain circles, you’re thought of as a saint,” said Max.
“You know I’m not,” she said. Lightly accenting the you, letting the word stand for all that had been between them. She dropped her voice and confessed, “I loathe these functions.”
It was true; she heartily disliked playing Lady Bountiful, being called good or generous. Her actions weren’t pure, didn’t originate in goodness. She had brought Noi to America, for example, neither from a burst of generosity nor because she thought of her as family. It had been a barter. Noi kept certain facts sharp and present. Like a hair shirt, over time the torment familiar, a kind of comfort. Genevieve could offer her America, in return for that.
“One would never guess,” Maxwell whispered back to her. “You’re the model of graciousness.”
Had it really been thirty years? His warm brown eyes were exactly the same.
“They never found your boy,” he said. He spoke it as a declaration rather than a question, the habit of a man long in authority.
“No,” she said.
His face took on a repentant, furtive look; he leaned closer, to say something for her ears alone. But before he could say that next thing, what she knew would be some version of I felt responsible for what happened, she drew back and turned away, to greet a group that was hovering to her right. The pleasant nostalgia she’d been feeling was gone.
The years had swiveled the telescope of Genevieve’s self-absorption around, shown her to herself as tiny and unimportant; she understood now that events didn’t happen because she was a bad mother or a selfish person. Although those things might be true, events occurred for other reasons, confluences of forces both obvious and invisible. Yet, understanding that her guilt was meaningless, she hadn’t relinquished it—and it was not divisible. Now that Robert was gone, there was no one to carry it with her. Anyone else who tried to heft the burden, even for a moment, was a charlatan.
She felt Dawson lingering beside her for a while as she chatted with one group and then another; when she eventually turned back, he had gone.
* * *
Genevieve always spent a few hours canvassing on foot during each trip, showing the same old photograph as well as the most recent age-progressed image. Maybe someone would remember having seen him, having known or heard of him. She always included the area around Thammasat University, although she never saw that boy again. She chased down every lead as she had always done, the surge of hope each time a little less.
She stopped at a stall selling honey in beautiful jars with glass elephants standing on their tops, and spoke to the farang vendor. Are you in trouble, Genevieve asked her, do you need help? Force of habit. The woman smiled and shook her head. I’m happy, she said, with such sincerity that Genevieve feels tears come into her eyes.
“Keep right beside me,” she warns Bea and Philip as they step into the house. Carrying a fretful Laura, she follows the agent through the foyer and into a big empty room with no windows, puts her hand out to a switch on the wall. It clacks upward but brings no light.
The rental agent has scurried ahead into the darkness, is doing something there. A metallic chunk and a brilliant line of sunshine falls into the room. It widens as the agent pulls: the wall, it appears, is not solid, but a long series of joined panels that fold clack-clack-clack into a box at the far end. Genevieve stands in front of the enlarging oblong of light as Bea and Philip, who have not stayed right beside her, shriek from various rooms Mum, there’s animals on the walls and Mum, the water comes out brown.
“Don’t drink the water,” she calls to them. “Don’t touch anything. Come back here.”
They crowd next to her, subdued, as the agent leads them around the ground floor. Most of its square footage is dedicated to one very large space behind a door. “For parties,” says the agent, demonstrating open, close, with a radiant smile. Genevieve is baffled: What kind of parties is she thinking of, that will benefit from a closed door?
“There must be some mistake,” Genevieve says in the kitchen, staring at a monstrous black stove that squats on the tile like a relic from a previous century.
“Don’t worry, Madame,” sings the rental agent. “Number One will cooking for you. Never come in kitchen again.”
She herds them upstairs in a cowed parade through the bedrooms, downstairs again to the side terrace, where she waves an arm, beaming. When they fail to react, she takes Genevieve by the wrist and leads her to the edge of the terrace. “Swimming pool,” the agent says, and turns Genevieve to look toward the back garden wall. She points, enunciating carefully, “Soo-wing.” Just visible above the jungle of vegetation is the top crosspiece of a swing set, the rest of the structure swallowed by vines.
“We can’t possibly live here,” says Genevieve, the first words she has spoken in ten minutes.
“This your house, Madame,” says the agent, her hand still around Genevieve’s wrist, the M’dumm a reproachful coo. “Your husband choose it.”
Robert had probably selected from a list: three bedrooms, a big garden, and a swimming pool. It must have sounded splendid.
“We’ll have to choose again,” says Genevieve, pulling her wrist from the woman’s grasp under the pretext of resettling Laura in her arms. “Where’s the list?”
“No list, Madame,” says the agent. She holds out a small cluster of keys. Still smiling, but there is a firmness detectable now beneath the sweet, like the stone of a peach or the dark spindle of pip in the translucent fruit they had had at breakfast.
Genevieve realizes suddenly that she doesn’t even know where they are in the city. She has no map; in the car she’d been playing pat-a-cake with a fractious Laura, paying no attention to the roads. She has no Thai money yet: Change money is on her list of first-day errands. She doesn’t even know Robert’s office telephone number, nor the telephone number of the hotel. Even if she knew those numbers, she doesn’t have any coins to put into a phone box. Are there phone boxes? She doesn’t recall seeing any.
This is the moment when she begins to understand the enormity of what she has allowed.
“Are you all right?” The honey-selling woman had stood up behind her stall and was leaning forward, her face sharpened with worry. “Ma’am?”
Behind her, a skyline busy with tower cranes. Genevieve felt herself rolling back to the present. Bangkok hadn’t been a cozy village for some time. Philip would be thirty-five—no, almost fifty—now, the thread connecting them gone slack somewhere in these streets.
“Yes,” said Genevieve. “Thank you.”
She bought a jar of the honey and also a cake of the beeswax that bore the same elephant in relief. She would have some of the honey with her breakfast toast in the morning before her flight; she’d give the wax to Noi for her sewing needles. Laura would like the jar for her doll clothes; those little Barbie shoes were always going missing.
* * *
She’s almost given up wishing that things had gone differently, but she can’t help yearning after a few more shining days. That’s how that time before appears in her memory: the sun always shining, even through the rain, and all of them together, her husband loving her in that pure, uncomplicated way. Both of them deserving that love, that grace. She looks down into the water, at her children’s wet heads slick and dark like bobbing seals. Come swim, they say. Mama, come swim.
Now she is in the water with them, her body buoyed and light. She bounces on her toes, small bounds up and down, the heavenly coolness swallowing and releasing her, now at her waist, now lapping at her throat. She lifts her face, eyes closed against the sun, and falls softly to earth over and over, with the children invisible but all around her, laughing and near.
The way it might have happened but didn’t, but is happening now.
* * *
She looks up to see a middle-aged woman with sandy-blond h
air, dressed like a teenager in a paint-spattered T-shirt and blue jeans. From behind her, terrifyingly, Genevieve herself steps out. A visual hallucination, it must be. Unless the time slips have somehow become real and she’s meeting herself in the past.
“I need to get home,” Genevieve tells the nearer woman. Careful not to look at the hallucination beyond. “I’ve lost something.” She doesn’t know what it is, but it’s something no one should lose.
The woman crouches in front of her. “André says you seem a bit confused.”
Genevieve looks down at the carpet. She knows this industrial blue, she’s been here many times. She looks up, sees a metal shark fin through a large distant window. So, airport. But which one? She doesn’t recognize the logo on the tail—it’s not the temple-roof scroll of Thai Airways, nor the Pan Am globe, nor the red phoenix of JAL.
“Mum,” says the hallucination. “Do you know where you are?”
Genevieve flicks a brief suspicious glance at her, then looks away. Is this a Jesus-in-the-desert moment, is she being tested? It feels more like a power struggle: This town isn’t big enough for both of us. Perhaps she should yield, let the younger version of herself go forward in her place. In some ways it would be lovely to succumb.
“Airport,” she says.
“That’s right,” says the crouching woman. “We’re at Dulles.” She looks up to Genevieve’s left and says, “Thank you again.” Genevieve looks up too. A worried-looking young man stands there, in a V-neck sweater; his hairline is an upright swatch, like Tintin’s.
“Don’t worry,” Genevieve tells him. “He’ll turn up.” He always does, that mischievous Snowy.
“Let’s go home, okay?” says the crouching woman.
She puts out her hand; Genevieve takes it.
She accepts the keys, smiles at the rental agent. She understands how it is. She and her children are marooned, at the mercy of this tiny person and a country of people like her, surrounded by streets so foreign that not even the alphabet is intelligible. Genevieve will rise to the challenge. Thank goodness it’s only for a year.
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