One of the buildings housing the restrooms is in sight now, but she has to get across a wide, grassy, relatively open space to reach it. Just as she sets off onto the lawn, one hand to her brow to mask her face, one of the restroom doors begins to open, and Luntanh accelerates and veers to the right so she can stand beside the building, behind the opening door. When the door is fully open, she grabs its edge and darts through it, pulling it closed and locking it.
She’s alone behind a locked door, surrounded by concrete walls. There’s a toilet to sit on. She collapses onto it, noting the dried blood that’s stiffened the front of her shorts, and the sight triggers an overwhelming reaction, as though everything she’s been keeping down, everything she’s been pushing aside so she can see her way to the next moment, has been compressed into a single gigantic ball that’s rolled down a steep slope just to knock her flat. All her plans, all the momentum that has brought her this far, is knocked out of her, as her breath was when one of the village boys sucker-punched her. The whole world is reduced to the ugly, dim little bathroom and the echoes of the sobs she didn’t know she was making. And at this moment, something in her recognizes, she’s safe enough to give herself entirely to crying, so she does. And when she feels as though she might be dramatizing it just a little, she stops.
A small mirror, but it’s big enough to give her the bad news. She looks as if someone hit her in the face several times with a brick. It’s not going to be just a matter of getting the blood off. Her nose is so swollen that its narrow, expensively constructed bridge is thicker than her thumb, and the skin around one of her eyes—the left, the side where he hit her—is turning an ugly purplish brown. There’s even bright red blood in the eyewhite. Her lower lip, which she doesn’t even remember him hitting, is twice as fat as usual, and Ying’s claw marks make it look like someone attacked her with a rake.
So she does what she can. She pulls off her T-shirt and gently bathes her face with cold water, then takes a paper towel, wets it to make it softer, and begins very lightly to move it in small circles across her cheeks and down to her mouth and chin. It takes several passes, and it hurts whenever she gets close to her nose, but eventually most of the blood is gone, or so she thinks until she lifts her chin and sees the blood-tinged water making rusty trails down her throat. When that’s clean, she cups water in her hands and dips her nose into it, breathing out through her nostrils until all the water has leaked between her palms. Then she does it again and again, until she can use a sopping towel to scour the blood, very, very gently, from the bridge of her nose and from her nostrils.
By the time she’s using hand soap to scrub the front of her T-shirt, several people have knocked on the door, so the park is filling up as the morning wears on. She gives herself one last unhappy look, wets her fingers, and uses them to pull her hair lower on her forehead and forward on the left and right, closer to her nose and mouth. Then she studies the effect, wishes for the big movie-star dark glasses that had been in her backpack, and pulls the T-shirt back on. The area that begins beneath her chin and stretches down to the center of her chest is wet and still slightly brick-colored with dried blood, so she turns it around and wears it backward.
Nothing she can do about the angry-looking skinned areas of her knee and elbow, but in a town where people regularly go down on motorbikes, they won’t attract attention.
Someone knocks again, impatiently this time.
“One minute!” she calls out. She grabs the wet paper towels that she’s dropped everywhere, wads them up, throws them into the basket, and pushes them down so they’re not too conspicuous. Then she debates for a moment whom to call: Betty and her friends from the bar will be asleep until noon, and Miaow is in school. And so what? she thinks. I’ll leave a message. As she steps out through the door, her head down over the phone and her hair hanging forward to conceal her face, she sidesteps the waiting woman and powers up the phone. Her eyebrows rise; it’s later than she’d thought, almost noon, which means the school lunch break is coming up soon. She dials Miaow’s number.
Once she’s left a message, she pauses and looks at the bright, hot day and tries to think of a single place she’d be welcome. For the first time since she set out on her journey, she misses her village.
18
Behind Every Drop of Sour Lemon Juice
He’s left Clemente in Chu’s, where she was waiting for the waiters to clear everything off the table so she could start digging through the boxes, logging numbers and looking for photos of the victims, which Rafferty thinks someone might recognize in the bars they frequented. It seems to him that overlapping patterns are the only likely pointers they’re going to find, given how far apart in time some of the murders are.
“We definitely need more pictures,” she’d said, flipping through the nearest box as he got up to go. “Too bad we can’t get the stuff the relatives trashed or took home.”
“I don’t suppose the morgue photographs—”
“No. They were floating facedown, in some cases for more than forty-eight hours.” She fans a hand in front of her upper lip, as though clearing fumes. “The ones I saw were barely recognizable as faces, much less individuals.”
“I’ll see what else I can do.”
He walks a few distracted blocks, thinking about Rose. It’s just late enough that the shadow of the Skytrain, rising above the center of Sukhumvit, shades the curb edge of the sidewalk, and he aims for that to get out of the sun. People walking in the opposite direction have had the same idea, so there’s some broken-field weaving, and in the end he just gives them the shade and settles for a clear, if hot, path.
He gets Rose’s voice mail, which reminds him that she’s out with Fon and who knows who else. He hopes she’s having a good time. Her spirits have been so heavy lately that there’ve been times he barely recognized the woman he married. Clemente’s question echoes in his head, and suddenly he knows with certainty that Rose’s moods haven’t just been hormonal, despite the male consensus that pregnant women are sometimes impossible. He’s done a little reading of his own, reading she doesn’t know about, and in an instant it’s clear to him: She’s worried.
He calls her again, if only to be doing something, and listens a second time to her message as though it might be coded, as though it might conceal something that would either confirm or soothe his anxiety. But all it sounds like is Rose, the old Rose, before her voice tightened and irritation seemed always to be just over the horizon.
He’s an idiot.
But, he thinks, not much I can do from here if she’s not answering, and even if she were, nothing I try seems to work. Someone bumps into him from behind, apologizes, and hurries past him, but Rafferty doesn’t even look up.
He angles to his left, avoiding more collisions, until he’s in front of a tailor shop. Shaking his head in the negative when the Indian man who patrols the sidewalk to buttonhole customers says, “Shirt, sir? Slacks?” he pushes speed dial for Arthit.
Arthit says, “Did you see Clemente?”
“Just left her. She’s laid claim to the restaurant, and she’s sitting there, working away.” He explains about the spreadsheet.
“I have an eye for talent.”
“Is there some way to get pictures of all these guys? I mean, weren’t they photographed when they went through immigration?”
The Indian man says, “Nice suit, fits good,” and Rafferty puts a finger in his free ear.
“The later ones were,” Arthit says. “Some of them probably entered the country before the government finally decided which cameras to buy, which is to say the ones with the highest graft markup.”
“Can you get the ones who were photographed?”
“Not very quickly. I haven’t got much weight behind me these days.”
“Well, hell.”
The Indian man is tapping his ring on his plate-glass window and gesturing at the somewhat dusty su
it jackets hanging there. Rafferty moves three or four feet down the sidewalk but stops again, struck by a thought. “Most of these guys probably stayed here long enough to make visa runs, right? And probably most of them went to Phnom Penh. You’re supposed to put a picture on your Cambodian entry form.”
“Good thinking,” Arthit says. “And those cops don’t earn anything. Tell you what, I’ll find out who to call and—can your client go five hundred US?”
“Sure. I mean, I haven’t asked, but I can’t see why not. Edward’s father has money, and Fran certainly does.”
“Fran?”
“The wife of the one who lived.”
“Sir,” the Indian man says.
“Fran? You’ve been busy.”
“I have an active metabolism.” There’s a tug on his shirtsleeve. “What about the Americans? They should have pictures—”
“Forget it. Nobody gets anything out of the Americans. You need a security clearance to learn what the date is.”
“Excuse me,” Rafferty says. To the Indian man, he says, “I don’t want a fucking suit. Leave me alone.” The man backs up but then holds his ground, obviously evaluating the threat.
“Aaahhhh,” Arthit says, “you’re on those blocks. You really could use a suit. Maybe you could get one with little feet in it.”
“Can you do it?”
“You mean get the pictures from the Cambodians? Sure, probably. Give me a couple of hours to work it out. Five hundred US is more than those guys make in a month.”
He’s got about two hours before he’s supposed to meet Clemente at Edward’s place, so he goes back home to change his shirt. He’s saturated the one he’s wearing with so much sweat that it smells like something that might be used to lure large carnivores into camera range.
When he pushes open the door to the apartment, he pauses for a moment, half in, half out—a habit he’s developed, in part because there’ve been times when he wasn’t sure who might be inside and also because it drives Miaow crazy. The place seems almost supernaturally silent, as it always does when he’s the only one in it. The three of them, he thinks, make a lot of noise, and then he amends “noise” to “music.” He belongs to an intergenerational, intercultural trio, and they’ve been improvising their music, sometimes a bit stormy, sometimes romantic beyond the point of good taste, for . . . good Lord, how long now? He’s been in this apartment nine years, Rose, the cello, a little more than eight, and the first violin, Miaow, about seven. He thinks of himself as the banjo.
Not since he left his parents’ home in Lancaster, California, some twenty years ago has he lived anywhere this long; not staying in one place had been the most fundamental building block in what he then thought of as his life plan. And now, after nine years here, immobile as a tree, he can’t imagine going anywhere.
He pulls off the offending shirt, tosses it onto the bed, and goes into the bathroom to grab a washcloth and do the minimum Bangkok hygiene routine, face, neck, chest, underarms. He turns to take the wet cloth out of the bathroom and through the kitchen to the hamper containing the things Rose said she was going to wash today, but he gets sidetracked by the lingering fragrance, maybe tea tree oil, of her shampoo. It’s coming from one of the heavy bath towels she used last night, now abandoned forlornly on the edge of the tub, and he remembers suddenly that he promised to help her dry her hair but had fallen asleep with his jeans and shirt still on. Even so, when he woke in the middle of the night, the air conditioner—which Rose used to hate—had been making its low, metallic burr, the room was cold, and he had been covered with a spare blanket.
Small kindnesses, he thinks. There’s nothing much more important than small kindnesses.
Washcloth and damp towel in hand, he goes back into the bedroom to retrieve the sweaty shirt. On his way to the little storage area in the kitchen where Rose keeps the laundry hampers, he makes a detour into Miaow’s room, following one of the ley lines the three of them have put down, the straight paths they’ve taken thousands of times from room to room, from family member to family member. On her bed he sees a shuffle of loose pages, one of them half crumpled, undoubtedly the product of the little inkjet on his desk. Figuring, If she didn’t want us to see it, she’d have put it away, he goes over to take a look. The type is very heavily marked up, mostly with multiple question marks, exclamation points, and what look like angry scribbles, and he uses the washcloth to smooth the crumpled page—at least he can say he never touched it—until he can read what’s written there. He sees:
THE MOTHER: How do you know that my son’s name is Freddy, pray?
THE FLOWER GIRL: Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y’ de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel’s flahrzn than ran awy athaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f’them?
He can’t help it, he begins to laugh. He should have warned her. It’s the first scene of Pygmalion, and Shaw, who was nothing if not meticulous, begins the text with an attempt to present phonetically the cockney accent his flower girl, whose name is Eliza Doolittle, will gradually lose over the course of the play. Even as he’s laughing, he feels a sympathetic pang for his daughter. She’s a sponge for language; with a few notable exceptions she has hacked her way through the thorniest thickets of pronunciation and the contradictory rules of grammar and spelling that mark English as a hybrid, assembled from a dozen other languages, ancient and modern. He’s heard her at night reading out loud in her room, and he’s sat with her the following morning as she repeated the passages to him so he could offer corrections. He worked with her endlessly on Shakespeare when she played Ariel in The Tempest. And then, with some well-hidden trepidation, she opens Pymalion and first thing out of the box she gets this . . . this cipher. It must have looked hopeless, and Miaow—who has tried desperately to leave behind the dirty street child she once was—has never wanted a role as much as she wants this one. It’s her story.
It’s going to be a bear for her, he thinks, and the phrase “life lesson” pops into his head.
A favorite topic of conversation for his father, whom Rafferty does not think of with much affection, could be indexed as Life lessons, comma, benefits of. Frank Rafferty was fond of using his son’s (and his wife’s) occasional failures as an opportunity to urge them to learn from reversals, although he wasn’t quite so benign when it was his own problem. Behind every drop of lemon juice, he once said to Poke, whose girlfriend had just dumped him, is a lemon blossom. Poke had replied, And a whole fucking lemon, too, but Rafferty’s mother, who was fast on her feet, had gotten between them in time to prevent an escalation that could have made the little house seem very much smaller for weeks to come.
Life lessons. Who’s had more life lessons, and handled them with more grace, than Miaow? He immediately adds, And Rose. Not many lemon blossoms back there either. His own life, by comparison, feels like he was sentenced at birth to Beverly Hills. And now here he is, in love with two people who have become themselves in the hardest possible ways.
He makes himself two silent promises. First, he’ll find a way to be helpful to Rose without getting underfoot all the time, and second, he’ll help Miaow with this accent, no matter how many thrown objects, how much Sturm und Drang it takes. The accent is the only stumbling block. Other than the accent, she was almost literally born to play Eliza.
He tosses the dirty stuff into the hamper, briefly thinks about putting it all into the washing machine, and then abandons that plan because it could be construed as passive-aggressive criticism. Instead he goes into the living room and powers up his printer.
His nice clean T-shirt is soaked by the time he’s walked the six blocks to Leon and Toot’s. He’s perspiring so heavily, and the air is so humid, that he feels the way he felt when he’d just arrived in Thailand, when he was always the wettest guy on the block. Thais seem somehow to perspire in secret, and he grew used to slogging along slowly to conserve his strength, spritzing like
a fountain, with water dripping from the tip of his nose, as the Thais glided by looking as cool as ice-skaters.
“Hot, yes?” is the first thing Toots says as he’s wilting his way toward a barstool.
“You noticed,” he says. The newly printed pages of Shaw’s play rolled up in his right hand are limp and damp. “Can I get a soda water, heavy on the ice?”
“You look hot,” Campeau says, unashamed, as always, to state, or even restate, the obvious. He sits on his stool as though he made it himself. He seems to have been there ever since Rafferty’s first day in Bangkok.
“Just out of curiosity, Bob,” Rafferty says, looking at his watch, “what time do you usually get here?”
“Right after opening,” Campeau says. “Miss the heat that way.”
“Nobody else is here?”
“What’s-his-name is in the john,” Campeau says, miming wavy hair just above his head.
“Glad it’s not—sorry—glad it wasn’t just Leon and me.”
Campeau sights him suspiciously over the top of his glass. “Leon and you what?”
“Who couldn’t remember the name of—Hey, there,” Rafferty says as the guy with the hair comes into the room, wiping his hands on his pants.
“Poke,” the guy with the hair says, investing it, as always, with a kind of radio-announcer solemnity that makes the name sound ridiculous in Rafferty’s ears, but this is the way he says everything: like an actor who has entered, a bit late, a mystifying scene to which he and only he can reveal the key, except that he might have forgotten his lines. He sounds exactly the same when he asks for a refill.
“Hold on,” Rafferty says. “Me first.” He downs the icy club soda and extends his glass for another. When Toots has taken charge of it, he says, “The guy who got beaten up so bad and went to Phnom Penh. You remember, some bird name.”
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