She says, “Aiya,” drops the spoon to the floor, and grabs the bottom of the shirt, Poke’s shirt, Poke’s favorite shirt. “No, no, no,” she says. There’s a smear of brown on the tail of the shirt.
She runs hot water over her fingers, touches the tip of the dish detergent bottle to her index finger, and rubs at the smear, making it bigger. She takes the dishtowel, a fresh clean one Poke put out to replace the mottled, malodorous rag that had been on duty for a couple of weeks, drips water on it, and scrubs at the smear. The dishtowel gets browner but the shirt doesn’t get whiter.
It’s coffee, she thinks despairingly. The only way to get rid of a coffee stain is with a pair of scissors.
She knows it’s not really a problem, knows he’s aware she wears the shirt, even knows that it’s not actually his favorite shirt. All this is just a game they play, one of a thousand games they play, about tiny things at the edges of their lives, things that don’t matter. They build the games because they can make the tiny things matter. It’s a way of reminding themselves how blessed they are.
So he won’t actually be mad. But it will spoil the game. One of the secrets she pretends to keep from him will be gone.
She wipes at the shirt again and then takes it off and puts the stain under the faucet, working detergent through it with her fingers. Keeping the non-secret a secret is suddenly important to her. And she knows it’s because of the real secret, the secret Poke doesn’t even suspect.
The baby she lost.
Someone’s baby, she has no idea whose. Some drunk’s baby. There were always customers who refused at the last moment to use condoms, who didn’t have one and wouldn’t take the one she tried to force on them, who made it clear that they weren’t going to let her leave the hotel room until they were done with her. There was the occasional broken condom. In the month before she was late for the first time in her life, there were four or five times like that.
Four or five long-forgotten possible fathers. A whore for a mother. Why would that baby want to be born?
And it hadn’t been.
She drops the shirt into the sink, the gleaming clean sink, sucks in all the air her lungs will hold, and spreads both hands on her bare belly, barely touching her skin. This baby. This baby will be strong. This baby has a father who will love her. This baby isn’t coming into the world of a bar girl, a girl who won’t be able to take care of it, who’ll just park it up north in a leaking hut with her mother and her drunken father. Go see it on Buddha’s birthday, when the bars are closed. Bring it bright toys so it won’t cry when it sees the strange woman leaning over it.
That was her dead baby, not this one. She’s been living part of her life for her dead baby ever since … ever since. Now she won’t have to. This baby will have a good father, a happy mother, a smart sister. This baby will have no reason to decide not to come into the world. Ignoring the coffee cooling on the counter, the water running over Poke’s shirt, she closes her eyes and sends a prayer to her dead baby, and is startled to hear herself say, in her mind, You can come back now. Her eyes pop open, and she stands there, looking at nothing. She says, “You can come back now. You can come back now.”
A bolt of energy runs down her arms all the way to her fingertips. Moving briskly, she takes the rough side of the sponge and scrubs the stain on the shirt into another world. She hangs the shirt to dry on the handle of the refrigerator door, squares her shoulders, and goes into the bedroom. When she comes back, she has the package of cigarettes in her hand. The water is still running, and she holds the package under the faucet and then tosses the sodden mass into the trash.
She says fiercely, “You can come back now.”
18
The Fence
THE THING IS, they’re going to have to climb a fence and cross a sidewalk.
The golden man had barked into his phone, ordering the car to be brought around, probably by the other dark man. She thinks, he’ll bring the car to the street at the front of the hotel. There’s a chain-link fence there, with a gate in it. In the old days, sometimes the gate was open. The last time Miaow was here someone had removed the metal U that snapped down over the upright pole to lock the gate in place.
If the gate is open, she thinks, she and Andrew haven’t got a chance. But that was a long time ago. For all she knows, the whole thing has been stolen by now, and they might be able to walk straight through and they’ll really be screwed. If not, she’ll have the fence.
Her karma will give her the fence.
If she were alone, the fence would be all she needed to get away. She can scale it and jump down from it much faster than they can. She could be a block away by the time their feet touched the sidewalk.
But there’s Andrew, who’s still wheezing and coughing.
The golden man and the short one with the red shirt have hauled them into the destroyed lobby. The golden man has the neck of Miaow’s T-shirt twisted in his fist, and the man with the red shirt leans against a peeling wall with one foot braced against it and his arm around Andrew’s throat, its elbow pointed at Miaow. It looks like a wrestling hold. He’s smoking a cigarette. Andrew is dead white, white as paper, his face dripping sweat. His eyes are unfocused and there’s something empty about his body, as though its spirit has fled it.
The golden man says to Miaow, “Is he all right?”
“I don’t know,” she says. She remembers the little zipped bag hanging from her shoulder. “He has diabetes,” she says, holding the bag up as evidence.
“Boy,” the golden man says. “Boy, are you sick?”
Andrew makes an o with his lips, then licks them, and his eyes come to Miaow’s and she sees the terror in them. “No,” Andrew says, and then he coughs. His voice seems to come from far away.
“Loosen your arm,” the golden man says to the short man. “Boy, did you take your medicine before you left your house?’
Andrew shakes his head no, and then nods yes. Nods again.
“You’ll be all right,” the golden man says. “We just need the phone, and then you can go.”
Miaow says, “Give it to him, Andrew.”
Andrew says, “I don’t have it.”
The golden man says, “Careful, boy.”
“It’s at home,” Andrew says. His voice is all tremor; if she couldn’t see him, Miaow wouldn’t recognize it as his.
The short man gives Andrew a shake. “Why would you leave it home?”
“It doesn’t—doesn’t have my SIM card. If my parents call and I don’t answer, I can say I forgot the phone.”
“Check his pockets,” the golden man says, and the short man clamps his arm more tightly around Andrew’s neck and pats the boy down, then shakes his head.
“Sorry, girl,” the golden man says, and quickly slaps her pockets. He feels her phone in her jeans and says, “Take it out.”
She holds it up for him. It’s an iPhone 4, black like Andrew’s, and his eyes widen and then slide away, rejecting it. He nods at the bag hanging from her shoulder. She puts the phone back and unzips Andrew’s case to show nothing but his diabetes kit.
The golden man draws a long breath, and Miaow can feel heat coming off him. He says to Andrew, “Who is at your house?”
Andrew’s blinking fast. “My—my father. It’s Saturday. And my mother, she’s sick, so she’s always home.”
“I’m sorry,” the golden man says, and Miaow feels a cold needle of fear pierce her stomach. She knows instinctively why he’s sorry, and it isn’t because Andrew’s mother is sick. She knows, as sure as she’s standing there, that they’re all as good as dead.
“It’s not your fault,” Andrew says, and Miaow wants to hug him just once, hug him as hard as she can, hug him until he squeals. She should have hugged him months ago.
The golden man’s phone rings, and he listens and says, “Good.” He hauls Miaow across the lobby. “Take her, too. I’ll go ahead. I’ll be on the other side of the fence. You stay back until I wave you to come.” To Miaow, he says, �
�This man will kill you if you fight him.”
The short man knots her T-shirt in his fist.
“Look for me,” the golden man says. “I’ll wave you out. If they have to go over the fence, they’ll come one at a time.” He looks from Andrew to Miaow. “Him first. If I’ve got him, she won’t go anywhere. Three minutes.” He gives Miaow a last look, his eyes lingering on her for a second, but then he shakes his head and turns and lopes out of the lobby, toward the fence. He runs, Miaow thinks, as naturally as most people breathe. If they have to outrun him, they have no chance.
But, of course, no matter how fast he is he can only chase one of them. If Andrew gets his courage back, he can outrun the short man. So the thing is, if it comes down to being chased, she has to make the golden man chase her. Even though he’s faster than she is.
She tries to catch Andrew’s eye, but he’s staring at the wall. He seems even less substantial than he had before; it’s as though tiny bits of him are flaking off and rising into the air, as though he’s dissolving in front of her and in a minute she’ll be able to see through him. She scuffs her foot loudly on the floor, and the man holding her shirt shakes her like a puppy. Miaow coughs, and Andrew’s eyes come to her. She holds them, willing him to understand that he’s to follow her lead.
He glances away, and she thinks, Look where following me got him. But she can’t allow that, she can’t allow anything that might make her hesitate. She knows what will happen at Andrew’s apartment.
The fence and the sidewalk. It has to be the fence and the sidewalk.
The feeling comes upon her the same way it used to, when she was on the street. Time almost stops, except for the rhythm of her breath. Her vision sharpens and there’s a sparking in her core, the surge of extra life that always came to her rescue in the old, chaotic days. She’d thought then that it made her—for as long as it lasted—more alive, faster, smarter, than the people who were after her. They didn’t stand a chance.
She hasn’t felt this in a long time.
Andrew is looking at her again, and he seems puzzled. It’s showing, she thinks, and she pushes it down, coiling it inside her so it can explode when she needs it. She looks at his eyes, then drops her own eyes to her feet, then repeats the pattern, hoping it means to him what it means to her: follow me. But his eyes drift up, probably to the face of the man who is holding her, and then down to the floor again.
Miaow’s silent count has reached 200 by the time the man in the red shirt says, “Now” and tugs on her shirt. She needs Andrew to be ahead, so she stumbles and falls to her knees, and then lags back, limping, as they enter the weeds that surround the hotel, waist-high on her, thigh-high on the man.
Everything looks so normal: the sun is high, and dust from the weeds billows into the air and glints yellow in the light. The shade beneath the trees has bright spots in it where there are holes in the canopy. She can hear traffic noise from two directions: from her left and from the boulevard in front of them, six lanes wide, on the other side of the chain-link fence.
That either will or won’t have a gate.
Miaow prays for the gate to be there.
And sees it. Closed. She can’t tell whether it’s locked, but her pulse accelerates slightly.
A woman walks by on the other side of the fence with a bulging white plastic bag dangling from each hand. Free to keep going, to go home and be with her children, released from school on this sunny Saturday, free to nap or cook or do nothing at all. Free without giving it a thought.
Seeing that she’s looking at the woman, the man hauling them twists the neck of her T-shirt, as though he’s afraid she’ll cry out, then raises the near leg and brings his foot down on her instep.
She yelps and then goes still. No point in fighting him. She could get free, but there’s Andrew to think about.
Cars go by on the other side of the chain-link.
They’re about five meters from the fence now, standing in the weeds with the ruined hotel behind them. Miaow squints at the gate. The stolen U-joint has been replaced with a new one, and a padlock holds it in place.
At the moment she accepts the lock as a joyous certainty, the golden man comes into sight from the left, probably from the spot where the car is waiting at the curb. He gives them a fingers-curled come-ahead sign and then stands there, looking left and right as a couple of teenagers go by on bicycles. The moment their backs are to him, he holds up a single finger and points at Andrew.
The man holding them begins to move, hauling Miaow along, and Miaow pushes the dangling bag behind her so she can get to it without it being visible to the golden man on the other side of the fence. She drags her feet as the three of them wade through the weeds.
The golden man looks left again and gestures for them to stop. One more glance in each direction and he waves them forward. A moment later, they’re at the fence. The man shoves Andrew toward the chain-link, holding him by the hair, and the golden man gestures for Andrew to climb.
But he doesn’t. He shrinks back and then he’s clawing at the man’s hand and screaming for help. The man yanks Andrew back, against his own body, and knees him hard, in the middle of the back, and Andrew sags. The man knees him again, and Miaow slips her hand behind her onto Andrew’s little leather case. Deliberately, giving it one hundred percent of her attention, she unzips it and withdraws the hypodermic, bringing it up to her face and using her teeth to pull the sheath off the needle. As the man wraps the neck of Andrew’s shirt in his hand and lifts him from the ground, Miaow drives the needle deep into the knuckle at the base of the man’s index finger, where it’s knotted around her T-shirt.
The hand snaps open and the man screams hoarsely as Miaow yanks the needle free, and as he bends down, still roaring, to grab her, she aims for his eye but misses, the needle going instead into his cheek and hitting the cheekbone. He screams again and backs away, letting go of both of them and grabbing with both hands at the injury, and as Andrew leaps back, looking stunned and disbelieving, Miaow reaches the man in one leap and buries the needle in the side of the man’s neck.
She grabs Andrew’s hand, and the two of them are running, running the length of the fence to their right, away from the injured man on their side of the fence and the golden man on the far side—but now, six or seven long steps behind them, the golden man is starting to run, too, and Miaow knows he’s faster than they are and she calls to Andrew, “At the fence pole, go over,” and she takes her own leap at the fence.
Scaling it faster than she’s ever climbed anything in her life, she feels a quick grasp and jerks her foot away from the man below. He’s left holding her flipflop. She’s free but the golden man is coming, and she feels the fence vibrate as Andrew hits it and she scurries the rest of the way over and jumps, jarring onto the pavement only a few steps in front of the golden man, and as Andrew tops the fence a couple of meters farther down, she pulls out her iPhone, her fingers covering its distinctive screen, and waves it in the air as she runs, and the golden man instinctively starts after her. Instead of running away from him, she reverses and runs toward him, her one bare foot hot on the pavement, sees him stop, off balance and confused, and then, hearing Andrew’s shoes slapping the pavement behind her, going in the other direction, she feints left, as though she’s going to try to get between the golden man and the fence but goes right instead, bolting between two parked cars and into the first traffic lane, just avoiding, by a few inches, being run over by a motorcycle policeman.
19
An Empty Envelope
DR. RATT SAYS, “She’s hopeless.”
He and Rafferty are standing on the sidewalk in front of the apartment house that shelters, temporarily, Rafferty’s latest good deed gone awry. With them is Hwa, the maid who’s been caretaking the addict upstairs.
“She want to go home,” Hwa says.
Hwa is Vietnamese, slender and small-boned, Chinese-featured, with hard, tired eyes, her gray-streaked hair pulled tightly into a no-nonsense pony tail, nothin
g cute, just an announcement that she declines to put up with any interference from her hair. If there’s a soft side to her, Rafferty hasn’t seen it, and she certainly takes a hard line about her charge, the woman named Neeni for whom he rented and furnished the apartment upstairs.
Neeni is, Rafferty thinks, what’s left when someone who had nothing but beauty is no longer beautiful. She’s a faded photograph, an empty envelope, something that could be blown sideways by a window fan. Dr. Ratt has just come from his third monthly visit to evaluate Neeni’s withdrawal from the mixture of whiskey and codeine-laced cough syrup that she’d lived on for several years before Poke pulled her and Hwa out of a burning house and drove them through a flooded Bangkok toward a different life.
A life Neeni is apparently declining.
“Has she been good?” Dr. Ratt asks Hwa.
“Can’t be bad,” Hwa says. “Nothing here for her to take, and can’t go out. I don’t let. Tranquilizer finish three week ago.”
“She looked quite tranquil,” Dr. Ratt says.
“She lively today,” Hwa says. “Eye open, everything. All she want is go back to village in Laos and start again.” Hwa knows Neeni better than any of them. For years, in Haskell Murphy’s dreadful household, Hwa had made sure Neeni had her medicine at hand, didn’t set fire to things, and kept out of her dangerous husband’s way. For the past seven weeks, on Rafferty’s orders and in exchange for the promise of some of the money Rafferty took from Murphy, she’s been playing nursemaid again.
Dr. Ratt says, “Neural damage. You can only make them misfire for so long before the paths get worn away. A lot of the connections you and I take for granted aren’t there any more. Her brain is an erased blackboard. Some of the paths are still there faintly, some are just gone. If she’s sober for years some of them might come back, but she’ll never be who she was.”
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