He touches the back of Anna’s hand and forces yet another smile, in a day of forced smiles. “If you’re not going to eat, I need you to do something. I want you to leave by yourself. Go left on the sidewalk and don’t look around. Go two blocks down to the little soi that’s got all the pharmacies on it.”
She nods.
“Take the soi all the way to the boulevard and then flag a cab. Go to the house, go anywhere you want. I’ll see you tonight at home.”
Her eyelids drop for a second, and when they come back up, her eyes are an open door, completely unguarded. She says, out loud, “Home.”
The word on her lips blindsides him, and he hears what he just said. Part of him wants to push his chair back and run from the restaurant, leave her there with her life and her ruined career and the son she never gets to see, and part of him wants to put his arms around her and tell her everything will be fine, although “fine” feels miles and miles away.
He can’t hold the smile, so he brings up his hand and brushes the backs of his fingers over her cheeks, then he nods, a tiny nod, less than an inch, that means something enormous. She puts her hand on his and presses it to her cheek. For a moment, that’s all there is.
After she’s left, Arthit follows his watch’s second-hand around the slow circle of a minute and then tracks it another thirty seconds for safety’s sake. Then he gets up, his back still stiff, and picks up the white plastic bags of food.
He sees no one obvious on the sidewalk, so he picks up his pace, a man in a hurry, and when he gets to the little soi with the pharmacies on it, he drops a bag of noodles.
Crouching on the pavement to pick up the food as people sidestep him, he sees Anna, almost all the way to the next block, and ten meters behind her, measuring his stride to hers, her follower.
Thanom, he thinks. Children, he thinks.
13
Door Number Two
RAFFERTY SAYS, IN Thai, “I don’t know what to say to her.”
“Then don’t say anything,” Rose says, in English. Two hours have passed since she returned from her mysterious errand. They’re on the living room couch, a litter of takeout boxes and paper plates on the table. It’s been dark for almost an hour, and Bangkok glitters like costume jewelry through the glass door. Rafferty loves to sit with Rose and watch the night slide in.
Music, muted and tinny, floats in from Miaow’s room, the door to which is closed and guarded, in Rafferty’s imagination, by a pair of fire-breathing dragons.
“Mrs. Shin said they were almost two hours late for school.”
“I’ll ask her about it,” Rose says, from the center of a cloud of remote serenity that puzzles and irritates him at the same time. She smells like limes, the result of having scrubbed the backs of her hands with them. She thinks it lightens her skin. Since they sat down, she’s been gazing through the glass door at the city as though this evening it’s assembling itself differently than usual.
“Andrew, Andrew, Andrew,” Rafferty says, the words pushed out of him by a surge of irritation.
“They got to school, didn’t they?” Rose says. “That should make you happy. When she starts not going to school at all, that’s the time to worry.”
“I don’t know,” Rafferty says. A wave of moroseness makes him slump until he’s sitting on his spine. “What do I know about girls?”
“Everything that matters,” she says, patting his hand comfortingly.
“I knew this had to happen eventually. I mean, in theory.”
“Nothing is happening,” Rose says, sounding a little too patient for his taste. “She has a friend. The friend is a boy. They were late to school one day, that’s all. Her body is changing, and she’s hiding it, and she doesn’t—”
“Her body is changing?”
“It’s confusing for a girl when—”
“Her body is changing? Where have I been?” Outside that burning house, he answers himself silently.
“Why do you think she wears your shirts all the time? Look at you, you’re like a guard dog, with your ears pointed up. You should be chained to the wall.”
“I’m not ready for this. I mean, I knew it would come sooner or later, but I voted for later.” He sits there without doing anything for a minute and then says, “Poor kid.”
“She’ll live through it.”
“Do you think she’s hungry?
Rose says, “She said no twice.”
“Maybe I should ask again. If she’s growing and all—”
“The hall is only seven meters long,” Rose points out. “She’s capable of walking that far, even if she’s weak from hunger.”
Poke subsides for a few heartbeats and says, “She’s twelve,” as though the number were a crushing argument.
“Maybe thirteen,” Rose says. “Considering all this, probably thirteen.” She’s wearing cut-offs and one of Poke’s white shirts, and she smoothes her thighs with her palms as though she enjoys the feel of her own skin. Rafferty watches enviously.
“Are you calmer now?” Rose says.
“I’ve been calm the whole time,” Rafferty says, trying to sound calm. “Just because I’m concerned, that doesn’t mean I’m not—”
He breaks off as Miaow trudges by, looking persecuted, to disappear into the kitchen. By the time Rafferty has thought of something to say so she won’t think she interrupted something he didn’t want her to hear, she’s come back out with a can of Diet Coke and a plastic bag filled with slices of sour green mango with chili and salt that Rose bought from a street vendor. She holds it up, more as a point of information than a question, and disappears again. Sure enough, she’s wearing one of the loose, shapeless shirts she borrows from Rafferty after school.
“It’s a good thing I’ve got a lot of shirts,” Rafferty calls after her, getting three or four muttered syllables in response. “I probably shouldn’t talk about that,” he says to Rose. “Or should I? What’s the protocol?”
“Mmmm-hmmm.” At long last, Rose looks at him, but she’s giving him the glassy eyes that mean she’s thinking and he knows she’s not listening to him. Then she focuses on his face and says, “I want a TV.”
Rafferty says, “Excuse me?”
“A television,” Rose says. “I want a television.”
“Me, too,” Miaow says from the hallway.
“Are you listening?”
“No.”
“Good, because I’m not buying a—”
“Everybody has a TV,” Miaow says, coming into the room with the plastic bag looped over her index finger and a piece of reddipped mango in her other hand. Rafferty’s shirt hangs loosely enough that, he thinks, Andrew could fit inside it, too.
“Obviously, everyone doesn’t have a TV,” Rafferty says. “You don’t.”
Miaow gives him what the Thais call small eyes. “That’s not an answer.”
“Television is evil.” Rafferty is thrilled they’re having a conversation. “Tiny spores fly through the screen like gnats and go right through the bones in your skull and sit around laughing as they eat your IQ. Next thing you know, you like Simon Cowell.”
Miaow’s brow wrinkles. “Who?”
“The things I’ve spared her,” Poke says to the air.
“How am I supposed to be an actress if I can’t watch acting?”
Poke says, “I thought the play this year was stupid.”
Miaow opens her mouth and closes it again, apparently surprised to be reminded that she’s actually discussed something with them. “It is.”
“What is it?”
“Something old,” she says witheringly. “Small Town.”
“Really?” He sits back in surprise. “When I was in high school, I was in Small Town.”
“That’s what I mean. It’s old.” She licks some of the chili-salt mix from the mango slice. “Who were you?”
“Ned.”
“Gooey gooey. Mushy. Ned and, uh—”
The way she’s looking at him, he knows she knows the name, but he says “Julie.”
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“Julie,” she says. Then she looks at the floor.
“You’d be a great Julie.”
“I’m too short for it.”
“Well, then.” Rafferty starts to say something more but realizes the Miaow is still talking. She says, “But Andrew—” She breaks the sentence so abruptly she might as well have snapped it over her knee.
“Andrew?” Rafferty says innocently.
“He has an idea,” Miaow says.
“To make the play less stupid?”
Miaow shrugs, and suddenly she seems farther away.
“To make you taller?”
Rose says, “Poke.”
Miaow says, “To make Mrs. Shin do two shows. One tall and one short.”
“But,” Poke says, and stops. Whatever he thinks of Andrew, the kid’s not dumb.
“It’s discrimination,” Miaow says. She pulls Andrew’s chart from her pocket and unfolds it. “Most of the Asian kids are short and the Anglo and farang kids are tall. So he’s going to say—”
She stops because Rafferty is laughing. “That’s great,” he says. He snaps the picture with his index finger, making a satisfying thwack. “Of course, it’s discrimination.” And then he’s laughing again.
Miaow almost smiles, but instead, she says, “So I need a TV.”
“Pretty good,” he says. “But not good enough for a TV.”
“Okay,” Miaow says, going for Door Number Two. “Then how about a piercing?”
Two minutes later Miaow is back in her room, listening to Tegan and Sara, played at the limit of the speakers on her laptop. Rafferty says, “It isn’t fair. This is like a miracle, right? I mean, my little girl is, you know, she’s, um, she’s—”
“Becoming a woman?” Rose supplies, and then bursts into laughter. “The things you don’t know,” she says.
“She won’t even talk to me.”
“She talks to you when she wants a TV. And, in case you’ve forgotten, I want one, too.”
The doorbell rings.
Poke waits until it rings again and it becomes apparent that no one else in the apartment has any intention of getting up. “Don’t bother,” he says loudly enough to be heard in Miaow’s room. “I’ll get it.”
He opens it to see Andrew in his after-school clothes: knee-length black T-shirt celebrating a local thrash band called Drool, a pair of jeans that were undoubtedly distressed by puzzled Chinese who’d been proud of the way they looked the first time, and black-rimmed spectacles, more conspicuous than the rimless ones he wears to school. He looks stricken, like someone who’s just barely escaped a fight with a bunch of bullies who are waiting outside. He’s clutching a tightly folded newspaper under his arm as though he’s afraid it will escape.
“Hello, Mr. Rafferty,” he says without visible enthusiasm. He peers around Poke and his face lights up. “Oh hi, Mrs. Rafferty. Is Miaow home?”
Rafferty says, “What’s it worth to you?”
From Miaow’s room, the volume of the music drops and she calls, “Is that Andrew?”
“Seems to be.”
“Poke,” Rose says between her teeth, “let him in.”
Rafferty opens the door the rest of the way, and Andrew sidesteps him as though he might bite. Rose gets up from the couch, says hello to Andrew, and goes to the counter between the living room and the kitchen to get her purse.
“Come on back to my room,” Miaow calls.
“No problem,” Rose says, raising her voice for Miaow. “You can come out here. We’re going out.”
Rafferty says, “We are?”
“We are,” Rose says. She glances at the door to the bedroom. “Bring your wallet.”
Rafferty says, “How are you going to get home, Andrew?”
Miaow says, from the hallway, “Dad. He just got here.”
“My father’s driver,” Andrew says. “He’s waiting.”
In the elevator, going down, Rafferty says, “I forgot. His father’s driver.”
“He’s a nice boy,” Rose says from inside her infuriating bubble of peace.
Rafferty says, “Andrew.” He scuffs the heel of his shoe over the linoleum floor and says, “I’ll bet he wants to play Ned.” He has memories, vivid even now, of hours spent alone with the girl who spelled her name Suzi and played Julie opposite him in high school. “This is all happening too fast.”
MIAOW OPENS THE refrigerator and withdraws another Diet Coke, then turns to see Andrew shifting from foot to foot as though he hasn’t gone to the bathroom for a week. She stands there, the chill of the refrigerator flowing down her left side. Andrew blinks heavily a couple of times and says, “You have to look at this. You, uh, you have to.” He puts the newspaper on the counter, opens it, flattens it with both hands, and then steps away from it as though it were a snake.
The unopened can of Coke icy in her hand, Miaow comes around the counter and looks down. Her spine snaps straight, as though it had been yanked from both ends, and her jaw drops open.
A dark-haired man glares at the camera, dead-center on the front page, his hair oiled and combed back. The same man whose face she saw for the first time eight hours ago on Andrew’s new phone.
The word beneath the photo is MURDERED.
Beneath that, in smaller type, it says: DISGRACED POLICE COLONEL SHOT TO DEATH.
14
Fifty Inches Is a Swimming Pool
“FORTY-EIGHT THOUSAND BAHT?” Rafferty regards his wife as though she’s just told him he’s about to be struck by a meteorite. “That’s fifteen hundred dollars.”
Rose shrugs as if to say small money. “We’re rich. It’s a good one. Look at it, very pretty.” The other customers in the store haven’t had time to get used to her yet. She’s still drawing stares, as befits the owner of the longest legs in Southeast Asia.
Rafferty says, “She just wants to watch acting, right?” he says. “She can do that on a little one. Hell, for fifteen hundred dollars, I can have actors come up to the apartment.”
In Thai, Rose says, “There’s me, too.”
“Sorry?”
“I’ve been very good about this, even though—are you still going to love me if I tell you this?”
“No promises,” Rafferty says, “But try me.”
“I like television. I like turning it on and watching people move around. When I was living in the village, there was only one TV, and since I was so tall, they made me sit at the back of the room, and I couldn’t really see anything because I’m near-sighted—”
“I’ve actually heard all this, and it’s heartbreaking all over again. There should be music, or maybe boxes of Kleenex everywhere so we could—”
She’s already talking again. “But I even liked it then. And I’ve lived with you for years now, and never asked for one.” She adds, in English, “I am soooo nice. TeeWee help me with my Englit.” She’s leaning on the accent pretty hard.
“Great. You can learn to sound like you grew up in an American trailer park. In New Jersey.”
“You’re a snob,” Rose says in Thai, but using the English word. To the salesman, who has been orbiting her in disbelief for four or five minutes, actually sniffing the air, and who looks to Rafferty like he might be in the opening months of his fourteenth year, she says, “What really worries him is that he won’t be able to figure out how to make it work.”
“My father’s the same way,” the salesboy says, looking helplessly at her knees. “Older people just can’t—”
“There’s no point in you two talking to each other,” Rafferty says. “I have the wallet.”
“That’s a fifty-inch screen,” the saleschild informs Rose for the second time, shifting to his left to talk past Rafferty. He wears black slacks and a blousy white shirt, and he’s as narrow as his necktie. “Good size for an apartment. Ten-eighty resolution, backlit, 240-hertz engine, smart screen, built-in wi-fi, six HDMI inputs, and we’ll throw in a set of gold cables.” He stops and fidgets, obviously wishing he had more to say.
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�All of that?” Rose says, giving him a smile that adds an inch to his height. “What’s the best discount?”
Poke says, “Fifty inches is a swimming pool—”
The saleschild throws him a tolerant nod of the head that says, isn’t he cute? and says to Rose, “For you, I can take off ten percent. Cash or charge?”
“Cash,” Rose says. “My father is rich. For cash, twelve percent.”
“Twelve,” the boy says. “So, forty-two thousand, two-forty.”
Rafferty says, “We’re letting a scourge into our lives.”
Rose puts a hand on his arm. “Don’t you think Miaow has talent?”
“Don’t I think—of course, I think she has talent. But she’ll be watching Korean music videos.”
Rose says, “And I’ll be watching it a lot, since I’m going to be home more.” She says to the saleschild, “It’s difficult for him to let go of money. He was very poor as a boy.”
Rafferty fishes a wad of thousand-baht notes from his pocket and counts out forty-three of them for the boy, who wheels away as though he’s afraid Rafferty will snatch it back. “You’re going to be home more?” he asks, watching his money walk away. “Why? Is business slow? Are you and Peachy having trouble finding jobs for your clients?” The clients of the domestics agency Rose runs with her partner, Peachy, are mostly former sex workers trying to get out of the game by cleaning house.
“Not exactly,” Rose says. Her tone brings him around to face her. She seems to sharpen her focus, and Rafferty has the feeling she’s looking right through his face, to something he didn’t know she could see, something that might even be behind him. She regards him that way for a long moment and then says, “Business is fine.”
“Then why—”
There’s a tug at the tiny muscles around her eyes; it’s almost a wince. Her eyes skitter past him and then come back, and she says, “I’m,” and stops. She takes a breath and says, “I’m pregnant.”
For Rafferty, time goes all bent somehow, as though it’s curved itself to stretch around something massive. The room brightens and a tone in his ears slides up the scale until it’s a high hum, and the store wavers once or twice like something seen through ripples of heat, and he blinks it away and all he can see is Rose.
For the Dead Page 9