“It was in the other room, where the doctor was, and my mom and your mom’s friend—”
“Fon, her name is Fon.” She raises her voice. “What kind of pro—”
The boy holds a vertical finger to his lips and says, in a semi-whisper, “They want us to be quiet. Your mom needs to rest. The doctor said so, after we went back to him.”
“All right,” she says, but what she wants to do is to barge through the closed door and demand to know what’s going on. Still, Fon had told her to wait, and so had the boy’s mother, who has an air of command Miaow hasn’t seen since her fifth-grade teacher, who could quell a buzzing roomful of hyperstimulated kids with a single raised eyebrow. And she figures they wouldn’t order her around that way, right in front of Rose, unless there was a reason. And even if Rose did look kind of half there, they wouldn’t dare to keep Miaow on the wrong side of the door unless that was what Rose wanted, too. “Just tell me,” she says, and she’s whispering, “why did you have to go back to the doctor?”
“I shouldn’t. They want to be the ones who—” He breaks off. “I’ll get it wrong. Like I said, they kept kicking me out.”
“Just the most obvious thing that happened. You don’t have to diagnose it or anything.”
“My name is Willis,” he says, and it sounds like a desperate dodge. “I mean, Will. What’s yours?”
“I’m Miaow, I mean, Mia—no, forget it, I’m Miaow.” She has failed to get the kids at school to go with her new name, so she’s abandoning it. “Just the most basic thing.”
Willis turns back to look at the balcony. He says, so softly she can barely hear it, “Bleeding.”
“Bleeding? You mean, from . . . from . . .”
“Her . . . her lady parts,” Willis says, and now he’s red enough to stop traffic.
We’re probably the same age, Miaow thinks, but I’m a thousand years older than he is, and she finds herself on her feet, dumping the rest of Pygmalion on the floor. “I’m going in.”
“You . . . you shouldn’t. My mom, she—”
“Be quiet,” Fon says, coming through the door. “If there’s one thing in the world your mother needs right now, it’s sleep. She’s been poked and stitched, and she’s had some anesthetic—”
“And she’s been terrified for weeks,” Willis’s mother whispers, closing the door behind her. “It’s a miracle she hasn’t had a nervous breakdown.”
“What about . . .” Miaow says, sitting again. She swallows. “The baby?”
“Oh, honey,” Fon says. She rubs her eyes and sighs. “Move over. Joyce and I are tired, too.”
“Sorry, sorry.” Miaow grabs the pages from the floor, lines them up and sharply taps the bottom edge of the stack on the table to straighten them, apologizes for the noise, then scoots to the end of the couch. With another sigh Fon settles beside her, and Joyce, if that’s the name Miaow heard, sits at the end.
Passing the buck, Fon says, “Joyce?”
“It was pretty close,” Joyce says, leaning forward so she can make eye contact with Miaow. “She might have been on the verge of losing it. A friend of Fon’s is a doula. Do you know what a doula—”
“Yes.”
“She took us to a gynecologist, who did an exam and a procedure. I can explain it to you if you want, but the idea is just some stitches to tighten the . . . the passage the baby will come through, give it time to develop in the womb until it’s viable. Do you know what ‘viable’ means?”
Willis says, “It means—”
“I know what it means,” Miaow says. To Willis she says, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound like that.”
“So we had the procedure, and your mother, who was already in shaky shape, was exhausted. We thought we’d bring her back here. But then she began to cramp again. She said she was bleeding. We called the doctor and got his service, but he called us back and we met at his office. He took her into the examination room, and we waited for about an hour, and when he came out, he said he’d looked at her again and given her a mild sedative—”
“Mild,” Fon interjects. “She was in outer space.”
“—and he said she needed to go to bed and stay there. So we got into another cab, but she got carsick—”
“In about half a mile,” Fon says.
“And Fon’s . . . um, apartment was much closer, so we took her there, and she slept there for a few hours.”
Miaow says, “Why didn’t anyone call me?”
“Well, first,” Joyce says, in the exact tone of voice Miaow remembers from fifth grade, “it wasn’t about you. It was—it’s still—about your mother and the baby. And Fon knew you’d call your father, and then we’d have him to deal with, too. Fon says he’s . . . excitable.”
“Where Rose is concerned, yeah,” Miaow says. “Shouldn’t he—”
“Of course he should. But we can’t have that. She can’t have that. For the next eight or ten hours, she needs to sleep and she needs to be in bed. Right now the enemies are gravity, movement, and emotional upset.”
“But my father—”
“Don’t call him. When he comes home, explain what’s happened and ask him to leave her alone until she wakes up on her own. He should sleep out here—this is a perfectly nice couch. Maybe you could put some—”
“Yeah, right,” Miaow says. “But you don’t know what he’s been going through.”
Fon leans forward and, in her sweetest and most cheerful tone, says in Thai, “You’re being unforgivably rude. These wonderful farang, who don’t even know your mother, have given up their afternoon and their evening to help her. They’ve been with her for almost fifteen hours, and Joyce hasn’t even eaten. They may have prevented something terrible.”
Miaow closes her eyes for a moment. When she opens them, she lowers her head and makes a wai, her fingertips almost touching her forehead, and says to Joyce, and then to Willis, “Forgive me. My Auntie Fon has just reminded me that you were my mother’s angels today. I was rude and . . . and—”
“And frightened,” Joyce says. “We would have been frightened, too. We have been frightened. But please, listen to us and don’t call your father. There’s no reason to upset him now. He can’t change anything, whether he’s here or not, and the best thing you can both do for your mother is to leave her alone until she’s awake again. Let her decide how and when to talk to him. If she were in here with us, she’d ask the same thing. Will you promise me not to call him?”
“Wait,” Fon says. “Miaow. Your mother told you about this, didn’t she? About the first pregnancies—”
“She said one,” Miaow says.
“Well, there were two. But she told you she’d miscarried before, didn’t she?”
Miaow is studying her the way she might look at a chess opponent. “Yes.”
“Have you told your father?”
Miaow looks from her to Joyce, then to Willis. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because she made me promise not to.”
“Because,” Joyce says, “she’s the one who has to tell him. And you know what? He’ll be home soon, anyway. It’s probably just a matter of an hour or two. Isn’t that right?”
“I suppose,” Miaow says.
“Oh, and when she is awake,” Joyce says, “take her whatever she wants. What’s she eating a lot of lately?”
“Tangerine slices and yogurt.” Willis makes a face. “And . . . ummmm, maraschino cherries?” The empty jar is right in front of her on the table, silently reproaching her. What kind of daughter is she anyway?
“That’s ghastly,” Joyce says. “But if that’s what . . . Do you have those things here?”
“The tangerines and the yogurt.” At least she, Poke, and Edward had gotten those.
“Two out of three,” Joyce says. “But I’ll tell you, that’s no diet for a healthy pregnancy. Are your
English reading skills at the same level as your conversation?”
“I read better than I talk,” she says.
Joyce, glancing down at the pages on the table, says, “George Bernard Shaw? My, my. I’ll send over some pamphlets tomorrow, dietary stuff and—”
“I’ll bring them,” Willis says.
“Yes, Willis, of course you’ll bring them.” Joyce is clearly amused, and Willis sees it and stares a hole in the floor.
“Thank you, Willis—Will,” Miaow says. “I’d like that.” Willis glances at her and then turns again to the balcony, which he seems to find fascinating. “So,” Miaow says. “Just so I’m sure I understand, Rose is okay? The baby is okay? For now, I mean?”
“Absolutely,” Joyce says in English as Fon says approximately the same thing in Thai, and Willis says “Yes” to the balcony. Joyce adds, “But it’s a fragile situation, especially emotionally. You don’t want to do anything to upset the applecart.”
“The apple—”
“It’s a saying. Just, you know, don’t disrupt the order of things. If you keep reading Shaw, you’ll find he wrote a play with that title.”
Miaow says, “Oh.”
Joyce looks at her watch, and a vertical line appears between her eyebrows. “Where is your father anyway? Look at the time.”
“Where he is . . . it’s hard to explain. But he’s not doing anything . . . you know.”
“I should hope not,” Joyce says. “That young woman in there doesn’t need drama. She needs love, she needs quiet, she needs to be waited on, and she’s going to have to spend a lot of time in bed for the next six or eight weeks, at the very least. Is your father up for that?”
“He’s up for anything,” Miaow says. She taps the phone in her pocket without even knowing she’s doing it. “It’s my mother who’s going to be the problem.”
Fifty minutes after they’ve left, she overrules all of them and pulls out her phone. She dials Rafferty’s number and listens to it ring. When it kicks over to voice mail, she hangs up, feeling a little ripple of uneasiness radiate out from the center of her chest.
35
You Could Fold Him Up and Mail Him
“Got everything?” Kang asks.
“Of course I do. It’s in the Jeep, most of it.” She’s jumpy. He’s never seen her jumpy before. “What about you? Did you get the machines?”
“I’ll do that last. That’ll tip him off. A change like that—”
“If you dosed him, he’s out cold,” she says. “You could fold him up and mail him, and he wouldn’t know.”
“Right,” he says, feeling the quarter dose of dope flowing smoothly through his own system. It would have put a smaller man under, but at his weight it just softens the edges. Maybe he should go up and give the guy the last three-quarters of the syringe. Make him easier to handle. “I’ll . . . uhh, I’ll go up and check on him.”
“Just get the fucking machines. They’ll slow us down.”
“Okay,” he says, but he stays where he is. He wants either to give the shot to the patient or use it on himself. At this point he’s pissed off and apprehensive enough that it sounds like a good idea to take a little more edge off.
She shifts from foot to foot. In anyone else it would look uneasy, but she doesn’t get uneasy. “If the cops are really getting involved—”
“You think I’d make that up?”
“—and we’re not coming back here,” she says, “I want my money.”
Here it comes. “I’ve only got part of it.”
She goes as still as a photograph, her eyes fixed on his, and he remembers with some force just how dangerous she is. “Why do you only have part of it? How much of it do you have? Where’s the rest?”
“Someplace safe.”
“You asshole,” she says in English. “You’ve spent some.”
“No, no, I—”
“Or you’re going to cheat me. Is that it, you big freak? After what I went through to get the money, to be with those men, to go to the banks? Are you seriously thinking about cheating me?” And she reaches down to the table beside her and grabs the handle of a teapot and swings it upward, inscribing a fan of pale brown liquid that seems to hang glittering in the air as she brings her arm back and heaves the pot at his head. Cold tea slaps his left cheek and gets into the empty eye socket, and the pot hits the wall beside him in an explosion of pottery shards and tea. “I’ll kill you,” she says, leaning toward him, her hands rigid at her sides and her fists clenched. “Do you think I won’t?” She picks up the Louis Vuitton purse, and her hand comes back up with a little black automatic in it.
“Right,” he says. “Good idea. Shoot me. Then you get rid of him, you carry out the machines and the other stuff, you finish wiping the place down. Oh, yeah, and you figure out where the rest of the money is.”
“Why isn’t it here?”
“Because,” he says, his voice grating even more than usual, “you never, ever put all the money in any single place. Suppose we couldn’t come back here? Suppose somebody found it? Suppose the building burned down? Suppose, suppose.”
“How much is here?”
“About a hundred fifty thousand US.”
“That’s nothing,” she says. The gun is pointed at his very considerable center mass. “We’ve taken almost nine hundred—”
“You take it all,” he says. “There have been some ex—”
“Of course I’ll take it all, and then another . . .” She closes her eyes for a moment, and he tenses for a jump, but they open again. “Another four hundred. That’ll leave you three-fifty.”
This is not the time to raise the issue of sharing expenses. “You’ll get it.”
“You bet your life I’ll get it. Now, bring the heavy stuff down to the front hall so we can drag it out.”
It might have been an hour since the sound of the Jeep had cut through the fog of the drugs and grabbed Buddy’s attention; the engine was loud and the valves tapped, and he’d heard it before, but only once or twice. He thinks the two of them keep it garaged somewhere and come and go mainly in taxis. Even then, they get out of the cab at the building at the intersection and then walk the rest of the way in. He never hears an engine, never knows one of them has arrived until he hears the front door close. So the Jeep: it’s another change, and certainly another piece of bad news.
The way he figured it when he heard those valves clacking away, he had two choices: He could let it discourage him or he could let it terrify him. He chose terror—not that it was entirely in his power to do otherwise—because he thought the fear might spur him into an even tighter focus, even more productive activity. And it has; he’s been furiously busy since then, with a couple of drifty, nauseating intermissions for the dope to have its way with him, but when he’s back, he works feverishly. Stretched thin by his new level of urgency, he jumps halfway out of his skin when he hears something bang into a wall downstairs. There have been arguments before, shouting at times, but he’s rarely heard anything that suggests personal violence. Maybe, he hopes, one of them has killed the other.
As frightened as he is of the monster, he hopes she’s not the one who’s still alive.
The bobby pin is in his mouth, the cast is sawed down to a few inches below his knee, probably enough, probably time to quit, after he breaks off this last piece. The bed is full of plaster dust and linen threads, and he’s taken all the skin off the bleeding knuckle of his right index finger, scraping it over and over again across the broken edge of the cast to get the longest possible draw on the saw. In between the interludes of focus, he’s still occasionally caught off guard by an opioid wave or two, but they don’t disorient him as much as they used to. Plus, he’s heaved out everything that was in his system, so vomiting is no longer a problem.
But the bang on the wall demands attention. One or both of them might . . .
There isn’t time to do everything, so he chooses the big ones: lay the Levi’s flat beside him, pull up the blankets. No time for the cuffs. They’re gaping open and empty, so he slides his hands back beneath them, scraping the index finger yet again, slipping a finger into the curve of each cuff to tug it, he hopes, out of sight, with the backs of his hands resting on the rail four inches below the one from which the cuffs hang. If the big man doesn’t turn on the light, if this is just a quick bed check from the door, he might get away with it. Otherwise it’s over. Assuming it’s not over already and that’s why the big man is coming. He closes his eyes, wills his body to stop shaking, and waits.
The creak of a hinge announces the door’s opening, but then there’s nothing. Maybe he’s in luck and it’s just a final look in preparation for . . . well, for whatever they plan to do.
But then the giant begins to walk toward him, his weight prompting complaints from the cheap floorboards. Normally he goes to Buddy’s right, where the IV setup is, but this time he goes to the left, the side where the chair that once held Buddy’s Levi’s is—now, in Buddy’s imagination, the size of an aircraft carrier and empty, empty, empty. Surely this time the man will notice.
He keeps coming, though, until Buddy can feel the sheer bulk, the gravity of the man standing beside him, only a couple of feet from the head of the bed, not moving. Then there’s the almost inaudible susurrus of skin moving over cloth, and the man grunts slightly. Buddy knows the giant is bending down, because he can smell the beer on the man’s breath. Something touches the outside of his arm, just an inch or two up from the lower end of his biceps, pressing, feeling for, for . . . what? The whatever it is apparently isn’t there, because the fingertip—and that’s what it is, a fingertip—is lifted, and then it touches him again, an inch or so farther up the muscle, and he hears a satisfied grunt and then feels a prick and a burning sensation. Inadvertently, he moans.
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