What Could Be Saved

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “Your help,” said Laura after the silence had stretched out. “What did you do?” Recalling Mrs. Schultz’s voice, It might be better to let things lie.

  “I helped him,” said Dawson. Darting his eyes at Laura, “Are you sure you want to know this?” Prickles had started along Laura’s arms, but she nodded. “We went together and found the driver,” he said. “We took him to a place I knew about, and got the truth out of him.” He cleared his throat. “I was willing to do it, but your father wanted to,” he said. “He was like a man possessed. I’ll never forget it. Blow after blow after blow, regularly spaced, like a metronome.” With grudging admiration, “He kept going even after his hands broke open and he was bleeding as much as the driver.”

  Her father had had bandages once in Bangkok, Laura remembered, wound all around his hands like a mummy. They hadn’t been remarked upon or explained. She could recall him at the breakfast table, spooning papaya with his mummy hands.

  “The driver first tried to change the story back, to the original timeline,” said Dawson. He shook his head. “I don’t know why he thought that would help.” He wasn’t looking at Laura anymore; his eyes were on his own hands, where they lay together on his lap. “When he finally confessed, he could barely speak. His tongue was like a wet lump of meat in his mouth, and we were stepping on his teeth, rolling all over the floor.” He sounded almost nostalgic.

  “The driver confessed?” said Laura. “To what?”

  Dawson looked up, as if surprised to see her there. “To taking the boy, of course,” he said. “He sold him to a middleman, who sold him to a farang pimp. He wasn’t sure where the pimp took him. He couldn’t give us names.” His lips a bitter line. “When it was clear that he could tell us no more, your father finished it. Even though he’d promised him mercy.” A skittering wheeze that was possibly a laugh. “That was a promise no one should have believed. Not from a man who’d just heard that story about his son.” He ran his tongue around his dry lips, looked at the glass of water sitting on the rolling tray.

  “What do you mean—finished it?” said Laura.

  “Your father crushed the driver’s windpipe,” Dawson said. “It took a very long time.” He succumbed to another bout of coughing.

  Laura felt hot all over.

  “But the driver was innocent,” Laura said. Her voice sounded far away in her own head. “He didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  Dawson, still coughing, waved his hand toward the water glass. Laura took it up and held it for him, positioning the straw. He leaned forward and took a long pull, then released the straw, panting. He looked up at Laura. “You’re the younger sister?” he said. She nodded. “The driver planned to take you, originally.”

  “What?” Laura couldn’t process what he was saying.

  “He confessed to that part right away.” He waved again for the water; she brought the straw to his lips and he suckled and released, then sat back. “He said he drove the two sisters to dance classes every week, and he had a plan. He was waiting for one of you to be sick one day and stay home. He said the older one was prettier, but she was mouthy, and would have put up a fight. So he was waiting to get you alone. He knew it would happen eventually: farang were always getting sick. He said he was waiting for his luck.” He cleared his throat. “But it never happened: you were always together.”

  Laura felt a coldness wash over her. Was it true? She remembered bouncing in the back seat in her leotard, putting her legs out straight to admire her pink tights and pink shoes, beside an irritated Beatrice. Beatrice always there, protecting her little sister without even knowing it.

  Laura put the glass back on the tray. “Mr. Dawson,” she said. Very slowly, looking into his face. “Philip has come home. He told us what did happen to him. The driver had nothing to do with it.”

  Dawson’s eyebrows rose, lifting the hooding flesh away from his eyes.

  “He’s come home?” he said. “Impossible.”

  “He’s home,” she said. “And the driver didn’t take him, or sell him to anyone. None of that happened.”

  For a moment, she could see doubt in his eyes, before his expression hardened into truculence. “Someone has sold you a bill of goods,” he said. He stabbed a shaking index finger into his palm for each of the next three words. “I was there.” His lips a bluish stubborn line. “We did what had to be done.”

  She realized that nothing she could say would undermine the story he’d told himself for nearly half a century, about honor and vigilante justice. Philip could stand in front of Dawson like the resurrected Jesus and tell him the truth, and Dawson would turn his face away.

  “Ask your mother about it,” said Dawson.

  “What?” said Laura.

  “She knew what happened. She knew all of it. Your father told her.” With contempt. “He burdened her with that knowledge. And still she chose him. That’s the only part I do regret. How I gave him to her like a present.” His sigh caught, turned into a cough. He ripped another tissue from the box at his elbow; Laura looked away while he coughed and spat. The knickknacks on the bookshelf were obviously mementos: a small framed pen-and-ink drawing, a glossy conch shell, a light-green ceramic pitcher. The last, she saw, had been broken at some point, and mended with bright gold. It made a beautiful design, actually, forking around the side of the object like lightning.

  “Your father never gave up looking,” said Dawson when he was done coughing. He folded and smoothed the tissue in his hand. “He believed that your brother had never left Bangkok. When satellite surveillance was in its testing stage, I sent over duplicates of every image. He had the clearance to see them, of course, but it was—outside protocol.” He was looking out the window at the green of lawn cut by white paths, the empty blue sky overhead. “We weren’t friends,” he said. “It wasn’t friendship that bound us.”

  He didn’t speak for a long time, and it seemed to Laura that he had fallen asleep. But as she got up to leave, he turned his ruined-panther face to her.

  “Does your mother ever speak of me?” he asked. Sounding almost shy.

  “No,” said Laura. “She never has.” Feeling the cruelty of the next words as she delivered them. “I don’t think she remembers you now.”

  * * *

  After all this time, here it was: a piece of the deepest truth. Their father was a murderer, their mother a conspirator. The terrible thing he’d done, the thing she’d driven him to do. Had they believed that justice had been meted out? However they had seen it, the act had taken them over a line. They’d never forgiven themselves, or each other. Maxwell Dawson had told at least one person, Mrs. Schultz (had he actually bragged about it to her, Laura wondered?), but Robert and Genevieve had never tried to relieve themselves of the burden of the secret. The girls must never know. The parents had carried it, together—and apart.

  There was traffic on the return drive; when the car dropped Laura in front of the Tudor, she was late for family dinner. Night was draping indigo shadows beneath the high gutters of the house; crosshatched light came through the diamond-mullioned panel above the front door. That same front door she’d opened and shut a thousand times as a teenager and young adult, coming and going alone from an empty house. It had seemed like a lifeless shell then, around a broken family. She had never stood outside in the gloaming like this, seen it inhabited and alive.

  Movement against the gauzy glow of the curtained living room bay window. They would all be in there, scattered between the sitting room and the living room and the kitchen, the twins and Clem and Bea and Genevieve, Noi and maybe one or more of her daughters. The boys had been trying to learn Thai, using apps on their phones, Noi laughingly correcting them. Bea and Philip would most likely be bent over the new garden plan, scrolled out on the coffee table in front of Genevieve. The three of them had been fussing at it for months, tweaking and retweaking the layout in preparation for the beehives that had been ordered. Philip was threatening to do some of the planting himself when the spring
came. He had recovered as well as his doctors had predicted; Laura had taken charge of his meds and getting him to his follow-up appointments. To her surprise, Bea hadn’t seemed to mind sharing the bossy-sister role. Beatrice had a new fragility about her, still healing from the betrayal of Todd Bardin. Whom she no longer called Uncle, whom she never mentioned at all.

  Edward’s sedan was at the curb, in front of the crossover. He and Laura had talked more, agreed to kick the marriage question down the road while Laura worked on her new series, slated to show in Sullivan’s New York space in the spring. After that, if they both decided to marry, Edward would put his house on the market and move into Laura’s. It had been his suggestion. He did have some conditions—a real TV, some comfortable furniture—to which she’d agreed.

  Up until that minute, Laura would have argued that secrets always needed to be told, that they brought enlightenment or granted redemption or delivered justice. Keeping secrets had driven her family apart. But the secret Laura carried now was of a different kind. Robert was a murderer, Genevieve guilty of conspiracy and, if Laura had read Maxwell Dawson’s intimations correctly, also adultery. Laura remembered what Mrs. Schultz had said. Your father was a good man. Was it possible for a person to be truly good, who had done a horrible thing? A question that might be debated forever. There was no possibility of justice for the driver now; Robert was dead already, and Dawson would be dead soon. The knowledge about what they’d done would bring nothing but harm. It was a secret capable only of destruction, one that needed to be kept, to be folded into one generation of a family and not passed down. Standing there on the pavement, Laura decided: she would say nothing about it to anyone.

  She walked up the path toward her family. Imperfect and damaged and hopeful. A work in progress, like everything.

  * * *

  That night when Laura meditated, for the first time she succeeded in drawing both lines and saw, at the point of their crossing, a hovering wintry-white globe. She watched as the fog within it settled, revealing a figure: her brother Philip as he was on a long-ago, lost day.

  Towheaded and squinting, he stands on the brink of his complicated future, poised just at the open mouth of the vortex. But not tumbling. Not about to fall inside and take them all with him. Instead, there he is, perfectly in balance, eternally safe.

  Acknowledgments

  EVERY BOOK is a conspiracy; consequently, there are many people to thank (or blame!) for perpetrating this one. First, the wonderful Peter Borland, for loving this story as much as you do, and for your steady kindness and care in helping to bring it forth. Thanks also to publisher Libby McGuire and associate publisher Suzanne Donahue for enthusiastic support, and to Dana Trocker, Kristin Fassler, Gena Lanzi, Maudee Genao, Paige Lytle, Sean Delone, and the rest of the Atria team. I am grateful to Wendy Sheanin at Simon & Schuster for going above and beyond, and I offer profuse, humiliated thanks to my copy editor, Laura Cherkas, and production editor, Liz Byer, for perceptive and meticulous work.

  I owe everything to my literary agent, Laura Gross, who is simply the best person on the earth. Thanks for your patience with me while I went off to be a doctor, and thanks for welcoming me back. I am so lucky that our paths crossed thirty-cough-cough years ago.

  Huge appreciation to early readers Danielle Teller and Emily Scott, who saw the book in its struggling phases and were helpful in deep and multiple ways. Thanks also to Carla Buckley, who did double duty for this book: as an author providing wise and generous counsel on the art of writing, and as a sister understanding how a story can carry a flavor of truth about a family, while not resorting to actual fact.

  Thanks to the Murrays, Narisara and Sarawan and Charles, for your gracious and brilliant guidance, and to Rasee Govindani and Sarah Rooney for assistance with translation and transliteration. Also to Suchart Milsted and Jerry Milsted, and Gerald Fauss and Marghi Fauss, and the myriad others who will know what I got wrong, may detect what geographical bits I scrambled slightly in service of story, and who will—I hope!—forgive me. I am also indebted to many, many primary sources, strangers to me, who shared online: their oral histories and memories and video footage refreshed and bolstered my childhood memories of old Bangkok.

  I am so grateful to the book community, the independent bookstores and all the delightful, generous people who dedicate themselves to reviewing and promoting books. Your work means more than you know. Shout-outs in particular to Kristy Barrett and Tonni Callan of A Novel Bee on Facebook, and also to book bloggers Fictionophile and The Librarian in Me; your kind words about my previous book buoyed me up while I wrote this one.

  For their relentless encouragement I thank Annalee Harkins, Elizabeth Branch, Pamela Friedman, Mary Huey, Natalie Wolcott Williams, Bilyana Petrova, Kaoru Murata, Spike Lampros, Alyson Denny, Eric Friedland, Ilse Jenouri, Gus Kletzien, Stanley Chin, Sue Cash, Anna Murray, Kate Matthews, Phyllis Sidorsky, Catherine O’Neill Grace, George Chen, Marcy Day, Rick Matthews, Cheryl Graves, Len Seamon, Jocelyn Buckley, Jillian Buckley, Tim Buckley, Jonathon Buckley, Becky Hutchinson, Denise Gerade Schwarz, Richard Bausch, and Bobby Rogers. I also want to thank you who are reading this, for the precious gift of your attention. I do hope you enjoyed the book.

  I must note here that my family loved our time in Bangkok; I hope that this work of fiction doesn’t suggest otherwise. Any perceived insult to Thailand, the Thai Royal Family, or the people of Thailand would be wholly unintended and a product of my own clumsiness. I offer apologies for any blunders, and deep gratitude for your indulgence.

  I am enormously thankful to my sister, Carla, and brother, Harley—for this is a sibling story, no matter how fictional, and I hope they will see what is true here and what is not, and remember with me.

  What Could Be Saved

  Liese O’Halloran Schwarz

  This reading group guide for What Could Be Saved includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Liese O’Halloran Schwarz. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

  Introduction

  Fifty-two-year-old reclusive artist Laura Preston is at a crossroads personally and professionally—her painting career has stalled, her boyfriend has asked her to marry him—when she is contacted by a stranger who claims to be her brother. Decades earlier, eight-year-old Philip disappeared while the Preston family lived in Bangkok. Older sister Beatrice dismisses it as a scam, but Laura ignores her warnings and flies to Thailand to find out if it could be true. But meeting the man who claims to be Philip in person leads to more questions than answers.

  Topics & Questions for Discussion

  Sisters Beatrice and Laura react very differently to the news that their long-lost brother may have been found. Why do you think that is? What are the roots of the strain between the sisters? Do you relate more to Beatrice or to Laura?

  In the beginning of the book, Laura has been experiencing an artistic block, unable to move on from a series of paintings called the “Ghost Pictures.” Who or what do you think the ghosts might represent?

  Genevieve undergoes a striking transformation over the course of the book. As a young wife and mother in Bangkok, what were her primary motivations and concerns? In the second half of her life, how did those change? Do you think she became a fundamentally different person, or did she merely channel her energy into different causes? Did you find it strange that she devoted so much time to rescuing other people’s children while paying so little attention to her own?

  Water is a recurring theme in the book—the khlongs, the swimming pool in the Prestons’ garden, the river that runs past Noi’s house. Do you think water represents the same thing each time it appears?

  In chapter eight, Bardin tells Robert a story about an elderly woman who mysteriously dies in the middle of the night. Why do you think Bardin tells him this pu
zzling story? And why does it come back into Robert’s mind just as he’s facing his own mortality?

  The Preston family’s house servant Noi notes on page 370 that “although [she] was not much older than the Preston daughters, she had always felt the gap keenly.” What made Noi grow up faster than Beatrice and Laura did? What role did Noi play in the lives of the Preston family? Did her role change over time?

  Genevieve tells Beatrice on page 382, “You don’t have to do the same things I do,” and Beatrice says, “I know.” How do you think Beatrice’s choices, as she grows up, are different from her mother’s? How are they similar?

  “We’re all still children. . . . That never stops” is said by a character in the book (p. 235). Do you agree with that statement?

  On page 399, Bea says to Laura, “you were what could be saved of our family.” Bea could be speaking literally—their conversation is about measures Bea took to save her sister from a potential kidnapper. What else could Beatrice have meant by that statement?

  At the annual luncheon to welcome “New Ladies” to the expatriate community, Genevieve is astonished that one of the newcomers is a man. What does this suggest about the ways American society is changing while she is in Bangkok? What else does she notice about the “New Ladies” that disturbs her?

  When the Preston family returned to the U.S., they brought one of their servants, Noi. In the book we read about Noi’s dreams, her love for her sister, her skills as a seamstress, her desire for a daughter. In bringing her back to America, did the Prestons help Noi fulfill an “American Dream”? Why or why not?

  Philip is given a nickname by his martial-arts classmates: Nitnoy. At first he rejects it, but later on he embraces it. Why do you think he does that?

  Compare Robert’s final moments of consciousness (p. 363) to Genevieve’s experience of dementia. Do they share certain qualities? How does Genevieve’s dementia allow her a freedom she never had in her former life? What has her illness taken away from her, and what has it given to her?