She knew the answer already. There was no stopping.
She got right to the point. “And this process will heal my son?”
“It might help him, yes. It often has a beneficial effect upon the child.”
“And if I don’t do this?”
He shrugged. His voice was restrained, but there was tension in it. “Then that’s your choice. And the case is closed.”
“And Noah will forget all about this?”
“It isn’t uncommon for a child to forget by five or six.”
“Noah is only four.”
His eyes glinted. “Yes.”
“I don’t know if I can make it a year or two.”
He faced her stoically across the kitchen table. She’d met him twice now, had shared intense hours in the same room with him, and she still didn’t trust him. She couldn’t figure out if the light in his eyes was that of a genius or a crackpot. There was something stilted and hesitant about the way he talked to her, something that remained hidden, though it might simply have been the reticent nature of a scientist.… Still, he was good with Noah, gentle and patient, as if he cared about him, and he was a psychiatrist, and had handled many similar cases. Could she rely on that?
She felt again the current of fear that had been flowing inside of her for months now, like a river beneath a thin layer of ice. She heard it rushing through her dreams. When she woke up, she remembered nothing but the sickness of the feeling; she lay in bed and felt the power of it pulling at her and thought: my son is unhappy, and I can’t help him.
“You still plan to write about this?”
He sat back in his chair and regarded her. He spoke so slowly it was maddening. She wanted to shake him. “I am interested in documenting the case. Yes.”
“The case, the case. The case is a child, Jerry. Noah is a child.”
He stood up, a flash of aggravation crossing his face. “I know that. You think I don’t know that? I’m a psychiatrist—”
“But not a parent.”
The anger dropped from his face as quickly as it had arisen. He was impassive again. Resigned. He picked up his battered briefcase and glanced at her briefly, his eyes glittering with restraint. “Let me know what you decide.”
She sat for a long time in her kitchen, looking over the documents he had assembled. Her questions were too numerous to count. What would Noah want with this other family? What could they do for him? Was it crazy to do this? Perhaps she was the sick one. Perhaps there was a rare syndrome that caused mothers to hurl their offspring into vortices of new age pseudoscience.
But no; she wasn’t being neurotic. She was doing this for Noah. Not because he was wildly disrupting their lives and bankrupting them (though he was) but because the look on his face when she put him to bed, this night and every night (“I want to go home. Can I go home soon?”), was breaking her heart.
Fifteen
On the drive from his home in Connecticut to Ashview, Virginia, Anderson got two speeding tickets. He drove in a state of high excitement, barely catching his breath; he couldn’t keep track of the speedometer, could hardly focus on the GPS. He looked out the windshield, thinking of his new American case, and felt like he was starting out all over again.
He remembered his first case as clearly as if it had happened the day before.
Thailand. 1977. The river.
It was early morning, and the day already warm. He was eating breakfast with his old friend Bobby Angsley on the veranda of his hotel. Up the river, toward the city, buttery sunlight bounced off the Temple of the Dawn, scattering color into the air like a jewel. In front of them, a dog struggled to cross the river, its matted head thrusting above the waves.
Anderson was jet-lagged and three days sober. His sunglasses gave everything a sickly yellow tint. He focused on his friend, who was flirting with the waitress as she arranged a saucer of clotted cream on the white muslin next to a plate of scones. Her face was perfectly symmetrical, like a face in a dream.
“Kap khun kap,” Angsley said, placing his hands together in a parody of a polite Thai, or perhaps he had become one, Anderson didn’t know. He’d seen him only twice since they’d graduated college ten years before, and each time had been a disappointment to both of them. They were on different paths: Anderson rising quickly within the university, en route to becoming chairman of the Psychiatric Department within a few years, and Angsley going in another direction, or rather (as far as Anderson could see) in no direction at all. Anderson had been surprised to find his friend settled anywhere; since college he had seemed perpetually on the move, briefly inhabiting the fine hotels and women of major cities from Nairobi to Istanbul, trying and failing to exhaust all that money born of generations of tobacco.
They watched the waitress go back through the open doors into the lobby bearing her silver tray. Nearby a string quartet was playing “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”
“Look what I’ve brought.” Angsley wagged his ginger eyebrows, reached into a paper bag at his feet, and pulled something out with a flourish, plopping it on the table. The thing slumped against the silver teapot, its legs splayed across the white linen: bright red yarn hair, striped legs, red circles for cheeks.
“You brought me a Raggedy Ann doll?” Anderson stared at it dumbfounded; gradually, it dawned on him. “It’s for today. To give the girl.”
“I was hoping for some kind of porcelain number but this is what they had. The stores here…” He shook his head.
“Are you out of your mind? You can’t give a doll to the subject of an experiment.” (Was that what this was? An experiment?)
“For god’s sake, man, loosen up. Have a scone.” Angsley took a bite out of a scone as large as a hand, sprinkling crumbs across the white cloth. His reddish hair was prematurely thinning across the expansive dome of his head, and his features had gone pink and blurry from too much sun and Thai whiskey, giving him a soft, pumpkinish look. Perhaps his brain had gone soft as well.
“It’s bribery.” Anderson frowned. “The girl will say whatever you want her to say.”
“Consider it a gesture of good faith. She’s not going to change her story for a Raggedy Ann doll, believe me. At least, I don’t think so.” Angsley peered at him. “You’re hating me under those shades, aren’t you?”
Anderson removed the sunglasses and blinked bare-eyed at his own white fingers. “It’s just that I thought you wanted a scientific appraisal. I thought that was the point of bringing me here?”
“Well, we’re kind of making it up as we go along, aren’t we?” His friend smiled a broad, slightly manic smile with his crooked teeth, as deranged in its way as that of the doll.
A mistake, Anderson thought. This was all a mistake. A few days before he had been in Connecticut, trudging through the snow to his lab. He’d been studying the long- and short-term effects of electrical traumatic stimulus on a rat’s central nervous system. He’d left the experiment at a crucial juncture.
“I thought this was a serious endeavor,” he said slowly. The note of complaint rang in the air like a child’s.
Angsley sounded hurt. “You didn’t put up much of a fight, if I remember correctly, when I asked you to come.”
Anderson looked away from him. The dog was still trying to cross the river. Would it make it to shore or drown? Two children exhorted it from the other bank, hopping in the mud. The rank river smell mingled in his nostrils with the floral scent of the tea.
What Angsley said was true. He had been eager to come. It had been a feeling, more than anything else, that had led him here, a wave of nostalgia that had overtaken him the moment he had heard his friend’s excited voice in the midst of those bleak months after the baby had died and everything had fallen apart.
He and Sheila were in separate hells and hardly spoke to each other. He made it through his days, studied his rats, took down the results as he ought to, drank more than he ought to; yet felt much of himself, most days, to be no better than the vermin he studied. Actual
ly, the rats had more spark.
Angsley’s boyish enthusiasm had traveled the long distance between them like a memory of the interest he had once had in life and might find again, if he took the chance; and in any case it would be an escape, a respite, the thing he was looking for every night at the bottom of the glass.
“I’ve heard about the most extraordinary thing. It’s Shanti Devi all over again,” Angsley had said on the phone, and Anderson had laughed for the first time in months to hear the name. “I’ll pay your way, of course, in the interests of science.”
“Go,” Sheila had said. Her eyes were red-rimmed, accusing.
So he had taken it, this chance, this respite. He was taking it. He’d been relieved to leave Connecticut, with its oncoming Christmas and its angry, devastated wife. He had told Angsley nothing of his circumstances, preferring not to discuss it.
“Shanti Devi,” Anderson said now, aloud. It was probably nothing, he knew that. Still, the name was a tonic on his tongue, bringing him back a decade, to the taste of beer and youth. “It’s pretty hard to believe.”
Angsley brightened. “That’s why we’re going. So you don’t have to.”
Anderson glanced away from his eager face.
The mangy dog had made it across; he was scrambling up the muddy banks of the other side. He shook his fur, and the children screamed and scattered, avoiding the droplets of foul water that spun and sparkled in the light.
“No dolls,” Anderson said.
Angsley patted Anderson on the hand. “Just meet the girl.”
* * *
The girl lived a few hours north of Bangkok in a village in Uthai Thani province. The boat sputtered through the slums on the outskirts of the city, then moved past larger, more rural dwellings, wooden houses with piers at the ends adorned with tiny wooden temples, spirit houses for the dead. The harvested rice fields were golden brown on either side of them, dotted here and there with an ambling water buffalo or a small shack. Anderson felt the images taking the place of thoughts in his mind, soothing him, until he was nothing but a white hand skimming the surface of the water. The jet lag was catching up to him at last and he dozed sitting up, lulled by the hoarse, steady roar of the motor.
When he awoke a couple hours later the air had grown hot and thick in his lungs, and he was blanketed with sunlight. He realized he had dreamed of the baby. In the dream Owen was whole, a beautiful child with blue eyes like Sheila’s that regarded him pensively. The baby sat up and reached out to him like the boy he might have been.
* * *
They approached a small wooden house on stilts surrounded by lush foliage. How Angsley identified this particular house from the identical ones that lined the road near the pier was a mystery that Anderson didn’t bother solving. An older woman swept the dirt floor in the shadows underneath the house, chickens muttering around her ankles. Angsley wai’d to her, his head bowing over his hands, revealing the naked spot of pink scalp at the center of his skull. The two of them had a discussion.
“The father is working out in the fields,” Angsley said. “He won’t talk to us.”
“Your Thai is pretty good, right?” Anderson asked. It occurred to him they ought to have hired an interpreter.
“It’s good enough.”
It would have to be.
They climbed the stairs. A simple room, well swept, slatted wooden windows looking out onto cropped fields and blue sky. A woman was placing an array of food on a table in battered tin bowls. She was wearing the same kind of brightly patterned cloth the old lady wore, knotted right above her breasts. She was lovely, Anderson thought, or had been, not so long before; anxiety seemed to have caught her beauty in its net. When she smiled at them, worried lines rippled from her dark eyes, and her crimson lips parted to reveal bright red teeth.
“Betel nut,” Angsley murmured. “They chew it here. Some kind of stimulant.” He bowed his head respectfully, hands together: “Sowatdii-Kap.”
“Sowatdii.” Her eyes darted from one of them to the other.
Anderson looked for the child and discovered her crouched in the corner, watching the yellow lizards frisking in the ceiling dust. He was dismayed to see that she was wearing nothing. She was frail, almost emaciated, her face and concave belly painted with a white powder he surmised was used to keep away the heat: two round circles on her cheeks, a line down her nose.
The woman had laid out a villager’s feast for them: white rice and fish curry, though it was only ten in the morning, and tin cups of water that Anderson was sure, as he sipped, would make him ill. He couldn’t risk offending her, so he filled his roiling stomach, the taste of metal coating his mouth. Outside the window, a man shepherded a water buffalo across a field of golden stubble. The sun barreled through the slats in the windows.
Angsley walked over to the child. “Got something for you.” He pulled the doll from his bag and she took it soberly. She held it in her outstretched hands for a moment, then cradled it in her arms.
Angsley lifted his brows meaningfully at Anderson across the room, as if to say, “See? She loves it.”
They set up at the wooden table, now cleared of breakfast. Two white men, a nervous woman, and a little naked girl who couldn’t have been more than three holding a grotesque red-haired rag doll. She sat quietly next to her mother. She had an uneven birthmark to the left of her navel, like a splash of red wine. She clutched the doll tightly in her hands, watching her mother shave papaya into long, even strips with quick fingers.
They talked to the mother. Angsley spoke in Thai first, and then in English, for Anderson’s benefit.
“Tell us about Gai.”
She nodded. Her hands didn’t stop moving. The strips fell away from the papaya into a tin bowl. Every time a sliver dropped from the knife, the little girl shuddered.
The mother spoke in such a low voice that Anderson was amazed Angsley could even hear her to translate.
“Gai’s always been different.” His voice, translating, was almost robotic. “She won’t eat rice. We try to make her, sometimes, but she cries and spits it out.” The mother made a face. “It’s a problem.” There was her tense, thin voice, and then Angsley’s low flat one. The emotion, then the meaning. “I’m afraid she’ll starve.” As if reminded of this, she picked up a piece of the papaya from the battered tin bowl and handed it to her daughter. The girl clutched the doll in her left hand and reached for it, gripping it as if with pincers; Anderson saw that three of her fingers on this hand were deformed. It was as if these fingers had been drawn sloppily, in a hurry, without the refinements of nails and knuckles. The girl caught him looking at her fingers and she curled them into a fist. Anderson looked away, ashamed of himself for staring.
The mother stopped peeling papaya and let loose a stream of words. Angsley could barely keep up with her. “My daughter says that last time she lived in a bigger house in Phichit. The roof was made of metal. She says our house is no good. It’s too little. It’s true. We are poor.”
She grimaced, lifting a hand to indicate the simple room. The girl stared at them, chewing papaya, and clutched the doll’s floppy body more tightly in her hands.
“Also, she cries all the time. She says she misses her baby.”
“Her baby?”
The girl was watching her mother talk. She was like a rabbit in a field, listening.
“Her little boy. She cries and cries. ‘I want my baby,’ she says.”
Anderson felt his heart begin to beat a little faster. His mind, though, remained apart. “How long has she been saying this?”
“One year, maybe. We tell her to forget about it. My husband says it’s bad luck to think of another life. But still, she talks.” She smiled sadly, put down the knife, and stood up, as if wiping her hands of the matter.
The men stood, too. “Just a few more questions—”
But she was shaking her head, still smiling, retreating through a door in the rear of the room.
They watched her shadowy figure stir
ring something on a low charcoal stove.
The child sat at the table, stroking the doll’s absurd hair, humming tunelessly. Anderson leaned across the table. “Gai. Your mother said you used to live in Phichit. Can you tell me about this?”
Angsley translated. Anderson held his breath. They waited. The girl ignored them, playing with her doll; its blank button eyes seemed to be mocking them.
Anderson walked over to Gai, squatting down next to her chair. She had her mother’s high cheekbones under the circles of white powder and her mother’s anxious eyes. He eased himself onto the floor and pulled his long legs into a cross-legged position. For a long time, fifteen minutes, he simply sat with her. Gai showed him the doll, and he smiled. They began to play silently. She fed the doll and gave it to him to feed.
“Nice baby,” he said after a while. She tweaked the doll’s painted nose affectionately.
“A really pretty baby.” Anderson’s voice was gentle, admiring. He followed Angsley’s Thai tones floating up and down like paper airplanes borne haltingly up and then falling, missing their mark. Who knew if he was saying it correctly?
She giggled. “It’s a boy.”
“Does he have a name?”
“Nueng.”
“Nice name.” He paused. “What are you feeding him?”
“Milk.”
“Doesn’t he like rice?”
She shook her head. She was only a few inches away from him. He could smell the papaya on her breath and a chalky smell, possibly from the face paint.
“Why not?”
She grimaced. “Rice is bad.”
“It doesn’t taste good?”
“No, no, no, not good.”
He waited a moment.
“Did something happen while you were eating rice?”
“A bad thing happened.”
“Oh.” He was aware of all the sounds in the room: Angsley’s voice, the scratching of the lizards as they raced madly across the ceiling, the quick clicks of his heartbeat. “What happened?”
“Not now.”
“I see. It happened in another time.”
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