Edward comes bustling out of the kitchen and makes a sharp right to go upstairs. “Her contacts, the blue ones—”
“Violet,” Miaow says automatically.
“Fine, violet. Well, they’re still in, and her eyelids are so swollen I’m afraid they’ll scratch the surface of her eyes. My dad wears contacts, so he’s got all that stuff. We need to get her lenses out.”
“Edward,” Clemente says.
He’s halfway up the stairs, but he stops and turns, gazing down at her, and Rafferty is struck again by the boy’s good looks.
“You did well today. You helped us quite a lot.”
Edward blinks a couple of times and then ducks his head in acknowledgment. “Thanks,” he says. “Just find him, okay?”
Clemente has trudged off to her car, toting the box, and Miaow and Rafferty are on the front porch, watching her go. The door behind them is ajar. Miaow sighs.
“Are you sure about this?” Rafferty says.
“Look at her,” Miaow says. “She slept under a bench in Lumphini last night. Some meth mutt tried to paw her while she was asleep. She can’t go home, because the guy who beat her up is probably going to complain to the cops, and the people in her bar will tell them where she lives and who her friends are and where they live. She can’t come to our—”
“No,” Rafferty says, “she can’t.”
“And here’s Edward,” she says, “all alone in this big house, with food and water and bedrooms that no one has ever slept in.” She opens her mouth to say something else but falls silent.
When the silence is getting awkward, Rafferty says, “You are aware that she likes him.”
“Everybody likes him,” she says, sounding slightly bitter. She shoves her mouth to the right and chews on her lower lip. “But you know,” she says, “they’re my friends. Both of them.”
Rafferty wants to hug her, but he’s learned not to, not unless she invites it. So instead he makes a high musical humming sound with his lips tightly closed, moves his head right and left as she watches him uncertainly, and then he darts in and kisses her, very quickly, on top of her head.
She scratches her head. “What was that?”
“That?” he says. “Oh, that. You’ve just been bitten by a kissquito. They’re rare, but once one bites you, you stay bitten.”
“Yeah? If they’re so rare, how come one just bit me?”
“They follow me around,” he says. “I have no idea why.”
She glances at the front door. “So what happens if one bites you?”
“First you smile, and then you give yourself the pleasure of admitting what a terrific person you are when you’ve done something selfless.”
“That’s silly,” she says, but she’s grinning at him. “Kissquito.”
“I know. I stopped trying to be cool around you when you were eight.”
“Seven,” she says. “Should I go inside?”
“Do you think you can help? Can you make her more comfortable?”
A shrug. “I don’t know.”
“Would it be rude to leave without saying goodbye?”
She nods. “It would, wouldn’t it?”
“Should I go in with you?”
She says, “Call the kissquito again.”
“They don’t just come when you call.”
“No,” she says, “but if you do . . .”
He makes the humming noise as she watches, and then he darts in and kisses her in the same spot. “Salty hair,” he says.
“That’s what I’ve always wanted to hear,” she says. She pulls the door open and leans on its edge, scuffing the sole of her shoe on the porch and making a gritty noise. “But thanks. Okay, then, bye.”
“I’ve got some ideas about Pygmalion,” he says. “We’ll talk about it tonight.”
Going inside, she says, without turning back, “Promise?”
“What time will you be home?”
“Early,” she says. She glances at a bright yellow watch he realizes he’s never seen before. “Before dinner probably.” She grabs an audible breath and closes the door behind her.
22
Adjusting the Balance
Rose’s phone rings again.
Fon doesn’t even take it out of her purse. It’ll be Poke again, or maybe Miaow. They’re both probably getting worried. But then Fon’s a little worried, too. Across the room the foreign woman—Joyce, she thinks—glances over at her. “You’re not going to look?”
“It’s her husband again.”
Willis takes his eyes from the screen of his phone long enough to say, “Poor guy.”
“She has reasons for not telling,” Fon says. “Or thinks she does.”
They’ve been in the hospital for almost an hour. The doctor to whose office the doula took them had done a brief examination and then come out, saying he believed it was best that she have a procedure immediately and he couldn’t do it there. Should he call an ambulance, and could she pay for it if he did? Joyce had looked worried, as though she were debating whether to volunteer the money, and Fon had said, “I have it. I have money, credit card, everything.”
So Fon and Joyce and Willis had ridden to the hospital in a cab and Rose had gone in the ambulance, the doula riding with her. They’d found their way through the white corridors to the correct waiting area and then settled in for what proved to be a very, very long hour, broken only by occasional beeps and cackles from Willis’s phone games until his mother had snapped at him to kill the noise. After a while the doula had come out and shrugged at them; she’d been barred from the room.
And now it was more than an hour; it was almost an hour and a half, and then it was two hours, and the chairs got harder, and there were no windows so they had no sense of the day, and the doula excused herself to go see another patient somewhere else in the city, and Willis said he was hungry, and Joyce said he was always hungry, and Willis went back to his game, his stomach growling at them reproachfully, and Fon said to Joyce, “You don’t have to wait. I can take care of her,” and Joyce said everything would be fine if they could just feed the beast, and Willis had said, “Jeez,” and Fon smiled sympathetically at Joyce and got a surprisingly warm smile in return, considering how bony her face was. All female farang except the very young seemed to Fon to have bony faces, but Joyce’s seemed to be all bone, except for the part that was nose. Still, when she smiled, she was very pretty.
Fon said to her, “You very pretty,” and Willis looked up, startled, as Joyce shook her head and said, “Old lady,” but she was still smiling.
Willis said again, “I’m hungry,” and then he said, “Do you think it should take this long?”
In the silence that followed, a nurse opened the door and looked in, saw no one she was searching for, and started to back out, but Fon stopped her and asked where the boy could get something to eat.
“You like Thai food?” the nurse asked dubiously.
“I love it,” Willis said.
“You come with me,” the nurse said. “First I looking for somebody. I find, I take you to cafeteria. Have hamburger, too,” she added. “Thai food hot.”
“Thai is fine,” Willis said, and the two of them went out. The door closed, leaving just the two women and the silence in the room.
After a minute or two had passed—time seemed to Fon to be lurching by in fits and starts, and she couldn’t really gauge it until she checked her phone—she said to Joyce, “You know about this. Is taking too long?”
Joyce had opened her mouth, closed it again, and looked away. Then she said, “It might be.”
After a long, hot slog looking for a cab and wishing he’d hitched a ride with Clemente, Rafferty settles himself in the backseat, sniffs at his shirt, and gives the driver the address of the Landmark. He needs to check in, talk to the desk and the people on the switchboard, make
sure everyone understands about the name, Mr. Whatever It Had Been. Mr. Milton, Mr. Somebody Milton.
Richard. Richard—
He waves both the name and the errand aside and leans forward to give the driver a new address, the one for Aspirin, the auntie nobody likes. She sounds suitably difficult to handle, and that’s what he wants now, something difficult, something that will involve him completely. He can handle the hotel on the phone, give them a credit card, do everything except show them his passport, which he probably doesn’t have to do anyway, because Arthit was the one who made the reservation. What he has to do at the Landmark isn’t urgent enough, compelling enough. Distracting enough.
Auntie Aspirin might be.
He has to face it. He’s not just worried. He’s frightened.
It’s not only that no one has heard from Rose today, although that’s what’s brought it to a boil. His reply to Clemente, when she asked about the pregnancy, had been completely disingenuous. She’d invited him to talk about it before he was prepared to. Saying something out loud, he feels instinctively, magically makes it real. So he hasn’t discussed it with anyone, not even Arthit, but that doesn’t mean he’s not worrying about Rose all the time; he knows she’s having a difficult pregnancy, and he knows she’s afraid she’ll lose the child. At night, when she’s asleep, he’s gotten out of bed to open the books he bought, to search out her symptoms online, and he knows that what they’re most likely to indicate is a miscarriage. And he knows that her fear of that is the reason she’s locked him out of what she’s going through—why she’s seemed, for the past month or so, to be in a different room, behind a closed door, even when she’s sitting beside him. He supposes it’s because she’s afraid he’ll hold the baby’s loss against her, although he can’t think what he’s done or said that would make her believe that.
Because losing the baby, much as he dreads the possibility, isn’t what he’s most afraid of. He’s most afraid that something will go wildly wrong and he’ll lose her. He knows that it can happen, and it’s no comfort that the odds against it are high.
Why hadn’t he dried her hair? What kind of an asshole is he anyway? You can’t just roll over and fall asleep when there’s an . . . an opportunity like that. There’s no way to know, he thinks, because life isn’t kind enough, or cruel enough, to tell you when it’s the last time you’ll dry your wife’s hair, when it’s the last time you’ll say good morning to her, argue mildly about her refusal to give up Nescafé in favor of the beans he buys and grinds daily, talk about Miaow with her. When it’s the last time you’ll look at her across a room when she’s not aware of your gaze, hear her laugh when she’s on the phone with a friend. Listen to her breathe when she’s asleep.
The apartment that feels so small for the three of them would be immense without her in it. He and Miaow would rattle around in it like Edward, all alone in that big empty dump his father bought. His life is unimaginable without her. She’s as fundamental to him as gravity.
There’s a blur at the side of his field of vision. A moto taxi zips by, going too fast, and so close that the driver’s shoulder bumps the rearview mirror on the driver’s side of Poke’s cab. The young woman passenger laughs, although it might be the surprised laughter of someone who is momentarily amazed at being alive. He watches them zip off, weaving through traffic. The driver was young, the woman, in the glimpse he got of her, was pretty, so the driver was showing off. He supposes people risk their lives for less every day.
Rose is not—is not—risking her life to have this child. This isn’t the nineteenth century.
And yet it happens. All his reading has made him an expert on the ways pregnancy can go awry. There can be infection, then sepsis, the infection finding its way into the bloodstream, invading other organs and systems of organs . . .
“How much farther?” he asks the driver. He has to say something, do something.
“Not much,” the driver says. Bangkok is as flat as the floodplain on which it was built, but it slopes very gently downhill when you’re approaching the river, and Rafferty can feel that now.
“Do you have children?”
The driver catches his eyes in the mirror. “Five.”
“Wow.” He realizes he’s leaning forward so far he probably looks like he’s about to climb into the front seat, and he forces himself to sit back. “They’re all healthy, your kids?”
“Sure,” the driver says. “And they eat all the time.”
“And your wife, did she . . . I mean, were the pregnancies easy for her?” He realizes what an odd question it is and says. “My wife is pregnant. First time.”
The driver smiles in a way that looks more like sympathy than celebration. “Not easy,” he says, “Second time, third time, easy. Fourth time, fifth time, nothing. First time, the world stops.”
“Yeah,” Rafferty says. “It does.”
“You worried?”
“Am I worried?” Rafferty is stunned to feel tears come to his eyes. “I’m terrified.”
“Your mama alive?” the driver says.
“Yes.” He blots his eyes with his shirt.
“Your wife mama alive?”
“Yes.”
“You alive?”
“Of course.”
He shrugs. “Well, then.”
“It’s not going right,” Rafferty says aloud for the first time.
“What can I say?” the driver says. “It’s between her and the baby. Tell her you love her. It won’t help, but it can’t hurt.”
The voice on the other side of the door is unexpectedly sweet. He was expecting something like a nail on slate. “Who is it?”
He says, in Thai, “I’m here to talk to you about Herbert Dell.” The corridor is lit by about half the number of fluorescents it requires, and an actual path has been created in the center of the dirt-brown linoleum, wearing away the surface to reveal the paler material beneath. It looks like a ghosts’ highway.
The closed door says, in English, “Who?”
“Umm. Buddy. Buddy Dell.”
“Oh, Buddy.” There’s a silence. “Has he come back?”
“No. We’re looking for him.”
“Well,” she says, an undercurrent of stubbornness coming into her lower tones, “I don’t know where he is. Who are you?” Her English is almost unaccented.
“Just a friend. I . . . um, I’m good at finding people. Listen, can you please open the door? Just give me five, ten minutes.”
“Stand in front of the door. In front of the middle of the door.”
He does as she says, and he hears something heavy sliding over the floor inside the apartment. A second later a little bright hole about the size of an American quarter appears in the center of the door. The place is nowhere near fancy enough for a peephole with a lens. An eye is put to the hole. It looks him up and down.
“Name.”
“Philip Rafferty. Look, you can call Edward at Buddy’s place and ask him about me. He’ll tell you I’m okay.”
“Edward,” she says, the way she might say “mildew.” The little hole in the door goes dark again, and whatever it was slides back over the floor. A moment later the door opens.
Auntie Aspirin is a plump little doll of a woman of the general type often seen in advertising wearing an apron and baking some homey sweet. He was expecting something out of The Addams Family, an angular vamp with, perhaps, black fingernails, so he mentally kicks himself for stereotyping and says, “Thanks for talking to me.”
“No problem.” She steps aside to let him in, kicking a small step unit a foot or so farther from the door. She’s barely five feet tall, and her face is pleasant enough except for her eyes. Rafferty thinks, If I tossed a handful of coins into the air, she’d have them counted before the money hit the floor.
“This way.” She turns and leads him into the living room, which is small, crowd
ed with furniture that’s covered in densely patterned prints, and almost as dim as the corridor. The builders saved a fortune on window glass; the day’s last light leaks into the room only through two panes about a meter high and as narrow as medieval arrow slits. On the outside the glass is the kind of dirty that sometimes inspired Rafferty when he was a kid to write wash me on someone’s car.
“Cozy,” he says. It’s the word Miaow used, sarcastically, to describe Edward’s father’s place.
“Good enough for me.” She stands in front of the overstuffed couch, neither sitting nor inviting him to sit, and gives him a long, assessing look. He feels like he did in church back in Lancaster, the day his Catholic mother introduced him to the priest—that everything he’d ever done wrong in his life had been waiting patiently for that moment and had manifested as facial acne. “You’re married,” she says.
“I am. I’m the most married man I know.”
“Don’t you find marriage complicated?” She sits and waves him toward an uncomfortable-looking chair.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “Not compared to, say, metaphysics.” The chair is much more uncomfortable than it looks.
“I don’t know what that is,” she says. “I don’t think I need to know. So . . . no sign of Buddy?”
“None, but we think he’s been taken, and we think we know by whom, and we don’t believe he’ll be alive much longer if we don’t find him.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Me and some other people.”
The eyes flicker, and he realizes that his evasiveness has angered her. She says, “How much longer?”
“At the outside twenty-four hours.”
She nods. “You’re right,” she says complacently. “That’s not much longer.” She’s wearing a blouse with outsize buttons, surprisingly cartoonish for what seems to be her deeply unwhimsical personality, and she’s toying with one of them. “But if you say you know who has him—”
“In general terms. We’re about ninety percent sure they’ve taken other men in the past, and all those men but one or two are dead. That’s why I want to talk to you.”
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