Where the Sea Takes Me

by Heidi R. Kling

  Not wanting to point, I flicked my head to the right. I filled him in on my boat observations and what Amelie said. “We should follow them.”

  “Okay,” Deni said without argument, without question, without insisting everything had to be his idea 100 percent of the time.

  God, I missed Deni.

  Taking my hand, we ducked against the pounding rain and wind and followed the suspicious group, carefully lagging at least twenty feet behind them. Down the road, they ducked into a small hotel. We hung back, waiting.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “Do you want to follow?”

  “What about the man? He looks dangerous. If he’s the same guy Amelie told us about, he’s no slack.”

  Dangerous didn’t seem to faze Deni. “I will wait until they are alone.”

  “Okay. Let’s go inside the lobby after I try to call Tom again.” That didn’t work, but when I tried Amelie, she answered.

  “I don’t know if he’s the same man who has my sister, but the description seems to match up. How do the girls seem?”

  “Scared. Small.”

  “What are they wearing?”

  “Raggedy-looking clothes.”

  “That’s good. It means they’re fresh from the village. If you can help them, try, and if you can, ask them if they know my sister. Her name is Pearl.”

  Pearl.

  Now we had a plan. The village we were in looked dodgy. It wasn’t a place I would want to spend the night, so we had to move on soon.

  We sat on a small, wooden bench in the lobby and watched the man talk to the clerk, the two girls standing back meekly.

  Deni flashed me a look before approaching them. I picked up my phone and pretended to be listening to someone on it.

  Deni quietly spoke to the girls, concealing his face, while the man chatted up the lobby employee. The girls looked spooked but nodded at something Deni asked.

  The man turned, catching Deni. “The girls aren’t ready yet. Besides, you look like you have your hands full already.” Chewing on a peppermint stick, he glanced over Deni’s head, looking at me like I was a menu option at a perverted restaurant.

  Pig.

  I vowed then and there to do whatever it took to rescue those girls from his meaty paws.

  A flash of defensive anger crossed over Deni’s face, but he was smart enough not to let the man see it. He looked to me, and I shook my head gently—Don’t worry about it, my look said. This is good. Pretend you are looking for a girl.

  Even though it grossed me out, Deni nodded politely before saying something else to the creep.

  “Did you hear that?” he asked in a low, disgusted voice after he wandered back to me.

  “Yes.”

  “You were right. He plans to sell those girls.”

  My eyes stayed on the girls.

  “Did she tell you anything else?”

  “No. I think she was afraid of me.”

  “If we move on to find Tom, if we leave alone them alone with this terrible man, they’ll turn into Bubbles and Daevy and Arunny and will wind up silent by the side of our pool hoping to be healed. That is, if they’re two of the lucky ones who manage to escape.”

  My fingers clenched into fists.

  “We will not let that happen.” Deni’s face remained neutral—he’d seen a lot of bad stuff in his life. “What now?”

  “Now we look for the tuk-tuk and go find Tom. Fill him in. Ask him what to do.”

  The rain above us pattered on the tin rooftop, sounding like the happy feet of children playing.

  I turned to Deni. “What did you ask her exactly?”

  “I asked, ‘Who is that man?’ and she shook her head, scared. She wanted me to go away. She was afraid to tell me. I said, ‘Can we help?’ and she shook her head.”

  “What did he say? Did he recognize you from the boat?”

  “He said, ‘Where are you from? I saw you on the boat with the girl.’ And I said ‘The Philippines.’”

  “Why?”

  “To protect my identity.”

  “Okay. You’re good at this. So you have his phone number?”

  “Yes. He said they are traveling to Phnom Penh, and I can meet them there when the girls are ‘ready.’”

  I shuddered, but had to ask. “What will he do to get them ‘ready’?”

  Deni looked at me with an expression that meant, you can probably guess, but I’m not going to say it.

  I wish I hadn’t asked.

  In one of the documentaries I watched to prepare for this trip, they interviewed a Vietnamese man who “trained” girls in sexual favors, in pleasuring sex tourists…himself. What a noble soul, making this sacrifice. I could barely watch it I was so disgusted. Especially when I found out he was still walking around free.

  The “training” usually involved a series of rapes by a pimp, and then by others. It ensured that the girl could never be “pure” again, and couldn’t return to a normal village life. Like Dr. Chhim said at the clinic, the girls were usually forced to do drugs and became addicted, making them rely on the pimp as supplier, or go through withdrawal. Since drugs and prostitution are illegal, the girls also cannot go to the police for help, as they are considered criminals for their sex work and drug use.

  Essentially, they were trapped.

  “We have to save them before the ‘training.’ That’s what Amelie meant by ‘good, they are still in their villagers’ clothes.’ This is so gross.”

  “Are you okay? You look like you might fall over.”

  “I’m disgusted.”

  “Yes,” Deni said, looking pensive. “It is very bad.”

  I had a thought. A dark thought that sent shadows to my stomach.

  “Wait. If they just came from Phnom Penh on our boat, why would they not be ‘ready’ until they got back?”

  Deni and I looked at each other when it dawned on us both.

  “He’s here to collect more girls.”

  Under the rooftop rain, I clutched Deni’s arm. “The floating villages! That’s where Amelie says he takes them.” I thought about the chipped-away paint of faded colors; we passed so many. “The question is…which one?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Deni effortlessly chatted with the street vendor, his knack for picking up new languages uncanny. On the boat, he told me he learned Taiwanese and Mandarin at his university, and a little French and German. No wonder he spoke so easily with Meat Hands McGee.

  We watched the vendor shake up the passion fruit juice and then add the fresh lemon. Deni paid with Khmer money and then asked the guy about where to buy snake. “Ah,” the kid said in English. “If you want to eat snake on the street, you have to go to night market, or you can have it on a stick. Eight p.m. is the night market.”

  Deni looked to me. “Eight p.m. That should work. We wait, and watch and see where he goes. We follow him. Or I follow him and you can go see the girls. In the meantime, we will study the language book and practice.”

  We had left Phnom Penh at 7:00 a.m. and traveled via boat for six hours. It was already about 2:00 p.m. “Six hours we wait? Here? What about Tom?”

  “If we want to save the girls, we may need to forget about where Tom is.”

  I blinked. “I’ll call the hotel and leave a message for him.”

  “Use my phone. It seems to be working fine, as everything I touch is magic.”

  “Of course it is,” I said, flushing. Deni waggled his eyebrows before taking a long sip of his juice.

  He never took his eyes off me.

  As predicted, Deni’s reception was perfect. I left a vague message for Tom at the resort. Tom told me the name—Angkor Resort. The woman I talked to spoke a little English, and I told her I was Tom’s traveling companion and we were lost in the storm. That we would take a tuk-tuk tonight after the night market, and I was with Deni. I hoped she wrote it down correctly, or, at the very least, told him I called.

  The rain continued throughout the afternoon as we holed up
in the market at a little booth keeping an eye on the hotel.

  Finally, around 7:00 p.m., Meat Hands McGee stomped through the front door, slamming it behind him.

  “Deni, it’s him,” I said in a low voice.

  Deni sat up straighter, holding his paperback in front of his face.

  I slouched down in my seat. “You follow him; I’ll go talk to the girls.”

  I practiced the Khmer I learned:

  “Khnhom chea choncheate amerikeang. Khnhom ach chuoy anak ban.”

  I am American. I can help you.

  We made a plan to meet in one hour back where we got off the boat. It was far enough out of the way. Since my stupid phone didn’t work, Deni couldn’t text me or anything, so we pinky swore about the meet-up spot. Since I was untrusting and paranoid in general, I suggested a Plan B to our meet-up: the hotel near Angkor Watt.

  Hugging me, he kissed the top of my head. We were about to be separated for the first time since we reunited, and it felt terribly familiar in a way that tugged on my heart.

  “Aku akan berada di perahu, gadis berambut merah muda.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked softly.

  “I’ll be at the boat, girl with the pink hair.”

  I leaned into his chest, and he hugged me close to him. “I’m scared,” I confided to his beating heart.

  “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?” he asked me.

  “This,” I said. “Trying to save those girls.”

  Before I could chicken out, I climbed onto my tiptoes. “And this.”

  I kissed him, once, quickly, on the mouth. His lips were warm and soft and exactly as I remembered. When we pulled away from each other, his eyes were open in happy surprise.

  “I will see you soon,” he said. Squeezing his hands back, I prayed it was true.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Heart rate quickening from kiss and adventure, I struggled to embrace the moment. Alone again. I didn’t love it.

  Everything about this plan was outside my comfort zone. The hot wet air, though it was not Indonesia, brought me right back to being alone on that beach. Strange that something as simple as weather could affect everything so much, adding a dangerous backdrop, a sultriness even, that cool and easy San Miguel couldn’t ever compete with.

  Slipping easily into the hotel, I found a staircase off to the side. The girl at the front desk didn’t ask me any questions, and I didn’t linger there. Deni had given me the room number. Not a lot of time to get my message to the girls.

  Their room was on the second floor, at the end of the hallway.

  The walls were painted green, not mint, not quite forest, somewhere in between.

  I knocked on the door softly. Waited. When no one answered, I knocked again, and said the words Deni and I looked up as the key part of our plan:

  “Khnhom chea choncheate amerikeang. Khnhom ach chuoy anak ban.”

  I’d written it down and read it, repeating it again, louder.

  After about thirty seconds, the door creaked open and a girl’s face stared back at me with curious but suspicious eyes. She looked behind me.

  “I’m alone,” I said. I repeated the words I knew. “Khnhom chea choncheate amerikeang. Khnhom ach chuoy anak ban.”

  The girl looked behind me before turning around and saying something to the other girl—Her sister? Her friend?—in Khmer. The friend sat on the bed closest to the window with sheets pulled up to her chest. Her eyes were wild with terror, whereas the girl I spoke to appeared fairly calm.

  The wild-eyed girl said something to the calm girl before me, who I immediately sensed was the leader of the duo. “You have to decide. Just leave your things and come.” I implored her with my eyes, with hand gestures. “Where you’re heading is not good for either of you.”

  The calm girl eyed me carefully as if making a decision based on whatever it was the wild girl said.

  Stepping back, I assumed she’d join me in the hallway. How could she not?

  Why was she still standing there?

  Why wasn’t she running after me?

  Scanning the hallway one more time to make sure we were alone, I reached out a hand. “Come on,” I urged. “Hurry.” Channeling some of that earlier bravery, I clenched my fists, silently wishing for her to do what I wanted. To do what made sense.

  To run.

  When she opened her mouth and said, “I cannot,” I blinked.

  “What…why would…” I turned around to see if the man was coming. That must’ve been it; it was the only thing that made sense.

  But no.

  An empty hallway.

  Quickly, I scratched the name of the clinic in Phnom Penh on a card I got at a bar. “Go here if you can. They will help you.”

  She slammed the door in my face. I quickly tucked the card under the door and slipped down the exit stairwell, praying she’d keep it, or at least look at the clinic’s name before she ripped it up for her own safety.

  “It didn’t work,” I confessed painfully to Deni. He was waiting right where he said he’d be. “Maybe I didn’t get the message through?” I continued. “I mean, how could I? My accent is terrible, and maybe she heard me wrong? We have to go back. You need to talk to her. You can make her understand.” The air was now thick with heat. The rain dusted instead of pounding, smelling like Cherry 7-Up.

  “Do you remember any words she said?” Deni asked, patiently as I tried to calm down.

  “She said, ‘I cannot.’ Which is weird right? What does that mean: I cannot?”

  “She spoke English?” He looked surprised.

  “A little, yeah.”

  “Okay. What about the other girl?”

  “The other girl was even less eager to talk to me. She was hiding in the bed, looking scared out of her mind.”

  “Okay.” Deni glanced off, thinking.

  “What do you mean ‘okay?’” I pressed.

  He shrugged. “I mean okay. What happened.”

  How can people just sit around while this terrible stuff is happening right under their noses? Girls getting kidnapped and sold from poor villages? Then again, that’s why a lot of the tourists come. To cash in on exactly that.

  Frustrated, I asked, “Did you have any luck? Where did the perv go?”

  Meaty fingers had a new nickname.

  “He went to another bar. A rich bar filled with rich people in fancy clothes. He sat there chatting with mostly non-Cambodians.”

  “Land Rover drivers?”

  “Yes. I could not get close enough to hear much, and I did not want him to see me of course…”

  “Did you see any girls?”

  “Dancing. Walking around with trays of drinks and food. Talking to the men.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “You know…they were working. They were there for the men. It’s a loud place. Music on the stage. The girls spoke with the men and danced before them…and…”

  “A strip bar?”

  “What is strip?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Did you talk to anyone?” I asked.

  “No. These girls are already busy working for someone else. I am surprised he is doing business in public like this, but this is where it happens.”

  “Nothing about that creep would surprise me. Well, I guess we’re right back where we started. Do you know what time it is?”

  What we were doing, what we were looking for, and what we were trying to save these girls from was entering a new and scary territory that made it awkward to discuss with Deni. Sex. Sexuality. Paying for sex. I was about to change the subject when he did.

  “It is almost time for the market.”

  I’d been so preoccupied that I hadn’t noticed the sky darkening. Bright colorful lanterns popped up around town, turning the hot, damp night into magic.

  “I smell snake,” I said.

  He grinned and everything else lightened, too.

  The rain continued to calm as new lights sprung up around u
s, pop, pop, pop brightening up the night like a fairy tale. Street vendors rolled individual carts through the road offering up grilled everything on sticks, next to pots of steaming rice, vegetables, and, yes, I imagine, snake.

  “We go?” Deni asked, reaching for me.

  “We go,” I said. I accepted his hand, and our eyes met. His eyes lingered on my lips for a moment, a sly smile spreading across his mouth, probably remembering our earlier surprise kiss. Any second we could be ripped away from each other and spinning alone again under separate starry skies.

  He put both hands on my face.

  “Next time they will say yes,” he said.

  A warm wind picked up, and Deni looked to the sky. Greasy meat on sticks suddenly smelled alluring in a different way, almost like a spell, a temptation—a poison. The ominous air on my face felt wicked as Deni’s eyes darkened with a new understanding of this situation. “Be careful, rambut pinang, these are devil men.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  We found Tom at the hotel and crashed in our separate rooms, exhausted.

  The next morning, my heart was heavy with thoughts of the girls and how we’d find them again. Our plan was to visit two other temples before seeing the grand tourist highlight Angkor Watt, then stop by a hospital on our way where Tom knew a “Master’s” person. It was Angkor Children’s Hospital.

  Since we didn’t have time to fill him in the night before, we told Tom about the man and the girls along the way and tried to brainstorm a plan. A next move, anyway. I hated the fact that we weren’t diving straight into action, but they pushed me away. What could I do? If I forced my way in, I might be the one arrested. Or Deni.

  At the hospital, the stench was terrible. It reminded me of the nursing home I sometimes volunteered at back home, but much worse. Children on stretchers and gurneys lined the hallways, alternately wailing or staring out with blank eyes, similar to the girls in the hotel room. One thin boy was attached to an IV with what looked to be third-degree burns on his arm. I had to cover my nose when we walked past him.

  Tom pointed at a physician board. “Look.”

  BED 1: DEAD