“This is Derek. My little brother. He’s spending a few months up here to help. And he swears he knows how to install cheap solar panels and build a generator out of some chicken wire and a car battery to keep those computers going. If he doesn’t I’m shipping him back to Oz.”
Derek’s bright blue eyes twinkled with a youthful eagerness. His floppy brown hair fell into them. He pushed it away with his right hand, which bore two copper rings, one on his ring finger and the other on the index finger. Around his neck he wore a necklace made of delicate white shells. I remembered something Nina told me a long time ago when we lived together: “Men who wear a lot of jewelry love to go down on you. It’s just a fact.”
Derek and Mia had the same high cheekbones and thick eyelashes. He wore cargo shorts, the kind with lots of pockets that no one ever puts things in, and a white tank top that read: EAT, SLEEP, RAVE, REPEAT.
I will never understand tank tops on guys. They’re high on the list of reasons I’m glad I’m not in my twenties now, along with Tinder and vaping.
He was a pleasant cliché of a twentysomething backpacker. I caught his gaze traveling from my bare legs to my chest. I saw myself through his eyes—a pasty middle-aged woman wearing a poorly tied sarong and a floppy hat to keep the sun off her face. I felt ancient.
“Just you wait, sis. I’ve got skills.” He did a little jig when he said it then stretched out his hand to shake mine, and when our hands touched he raised mine to his lips.
“Charmed,” he said with a grin. Twenty years ago this gesture would have been enough to tempt me into bed with him. Now I just rolled my eyes in amusement.
Mia swept her hand around the room to indicate the boxes. “As you can see, we haven’t done much with these yet. Learning computer skills could give the refugees a real chance at getting a job. But, the learning curve is steep. We’re also hoping to help some of the newer arrivals set up social media profiles and e-mail accounts so they can get updates from back home and communicate with their families. We have a lot of women here who lost contact with their husbands and have no way of getting in touch with them. Some of them don’t know if their men are dead or alive.”
The last part of that sentence lingered in the air. My skin burned at the thought of not knowing Karl’s whereabouts and I felt a stab of guilt that I had caused him a similar pain over the past couple of months.
Derek rubbed his hands together. “Let’s get them out and plug them in.”
“You do that, baby bro.” Mia ruffled his hair. She looked at me. “Want to help him?”
I nodded and tried to hide my disappointment. I’d hoped to spend the day meeting some of the refugees, but I couldn’t refuse. This was real work that needed to get done. I wasn’t here as a tourist.
With my orders in place, Buppha set off on her own, a new package of Red Vines magically appearing from within the folds of her robe.
Derek and I fell easily into the conversational beats of getting to know one another. There was something about being in a foreign country, surrounded by complete strangers, that made it easier to condense your life story into talking points, even the parts you rarely discussed.
Derek told me how, before he came here, he’d been in the middle of getting a PhD in astrophysics.
“Really?” I felt like a judgmental bitch before the word finished coming out of my mouth. Why was I so surprised? Because he was fit, handsome, and covered in elaborate tattoos? I reminded myself that Neil deGrasse Tyson was probably something of a babe when he was in grad school.
My surprise didn’t seem to ruffle him. “I’ve always liked the stars,” he explained. “And I’m weird good at math. It’s a little useless, now that the space program’s going to shit, but I figure maybe I can work for Ricky Branson one day and get a bunch of richies to the moon for holiday.”
“So you’re on break from school?” I asked.
“I took the year off,” he said, and proceeded to explain how he came here to take a break before going back to his family’s cattle ranch in Australia.
“My mom died last year and Dad’s selling the place now. It’s been hard. With her gone I felt this duty to go home and help my dad. Even if it meant putting my life at university on hold,” he said.
“I hear you,” I said. “I’ll bet it isn’t easy. Your dad must be glad for the help.”
Karl had stepped up in a similar way when his father died. Before Karl Carmichael Sr. had his first heart attack, my husband had promised me he was going to take a break, to take six months away from New York to spend just with me and the new baby. We researched apartments in Nairobi, not far from where Karen Blixen wrote Out of Africa. I’d slowed the pace of my own writing then, but I hadn’t stopped yet. I told myself I’d keep writing after the baby was born. I’d write when she napped. Back then I thought babies napped all the time, not just for erratic thirty-minute intervals during which you could only accomplish one thing and that one thing was usually brushing your teeth or going to the bathroom.
But when Karl’s dad had his second heart attack, and then the stroke, Karl took the big job he’d told me he never wanted. He became the publisher. Soon after that we made the move to the Upper East Side. We never talked about that apartment in Nairobi again. In the years after that it seemed to me like we’d never even dreamed it was possible. Ten years later, Karl and I were essentially living his parents’ life. We lived in their house. He ran his father’s company. I even sat on some of the same boards as Alyse. In fact it stunned me how like Alyse I’d become without ever thinking about it. Actually, when I really thought about it, it horrified me. Our current life was the opposite of the one Karl and I plotted as newlyweds living in our first apartment in the West Village. But it had happened so gradually, like a frog in slow-boiling water who doesn’t realize he’s dying. The shape of our lives felt entirely out of my control.
Derek was eager to help his father keep their ranch alive, but lately it had become too much of a struggle. Competing with the large commercial farms was impossible.
“I just came here to clear my mind before going back. Get some perspective, you know?”
I did know.
He paused then. “There’s also this girl back home . . .”
I laughed at that. Wasn’t there always a girl?
He looked at me over the monitor between us, the final of the fifteen we’d set up over the last couple hours. “Looks like we’re about done here, so that’ll be a story for another time, eh. Let’s call off and get a beer.” He licked his lips as he grinned. His bottom two teeth were crooked in a way that made his face even more interesting.
“There’s a bar here?”
He laughed at me. “It was a joke. I think I could round us up some piss-warm bottled water, though.”
My throat was dry. “Anything to drink would be a dream.”
“Wait here and I’ll see what I can find.” Derek had a slight hop in his step that would be exhausting if he weren’t so adorable.
I walked out of the computer room and back into the blazing sun.
The shriek of a small child pierced me through my heart. It sounded exactly like Tilly had only a couple years earlier. Karl called the noises she made during her tantrums the “dolphin shrieks.” Across the road a young woman stood with her legs splayed over a screaming toddler. The little girl lay facedown in the dirt, pounding the road with her tiny fists, her head bucking up and down into the air. The mother clutched the hand of a slightly older child. The child’s other hand gripped one of Buppha’s waxy Red Vines.
The woman met my eyes with embarrassment. “I said she must share the candy.” She spoke slowly and deliberately like someone who had only recently learned English. I understood. All mothers feel the need to excuse their children’s behavior, as if it’s an immediate reflection of who we are and every choice we’ve ever made as mothers. How many times had I done it on the playground in the midst of one of Tilly’s tantrums? Her terrible twos were also her terrible threes and into t
he beginning of her fours. She’d wail herself hoarse over losing a toy, not getting a turn on the swings, and once when a squirrel in Central Park ran away from her. I always apologized and made excuses no matter who was in earshot, most often a crew of Haitian nannies who had seen and heard the worst of all the children in Manhattan. Those excuses were more for me than anyone else.
I walked over to her. “There’s nothing you can do. You have to wait it out. She’ll get tired.”
The woman had a round face and almond slivers of eyes. Her light brown skin was smooth. She was young, a couple of years past twenty. She wore faded sweatpants with a hole in one knee and a green T-shirt. When I stood closer to her I noticed a long pink scar down her cheek. Purple circles stained the skin beneath her eyes. “I’m Kate.” I pointed my index finger toward my chest.
“Htet.” She said her name shortly and quickly, tet, like it was punctuation rather than a word. Her eyes were flat as she watched the child continue to scream and I recognized in her the same exhaustion I’d felt in the first few years with my own girls.
“My youngest is four. It gets better,” I promised. I remembered strangers telling me this when Tilly threw a fit at the park, in the grocery store, in the middle of Madison Avenue. I didn’t believe them then. I wanted to tell them to fuck off. I knew the truth. It was never going to get better.
But just as I thought I had reached the end of my sanity, it did get better. “My daughter did this for three years and now she’s wonderful.” I sat down in the dirt and rubbed circles on the little girl’s back out of habit. I looked up to see gratitude pass across the mom’s eyes. The child twisted her head and pressed her cheek into the dirt to look at me. She’d expected her mom. Her mouth was set in a steely frown.
“What’s her name?” I asked. The back rub worked its magic. Most kids behave better when they have an audience besides their mom. It happened each and every time Karl came home after I’d spent a day with two angry children. For him, they were angels.
“Cho,” Htet said, and raised two fingers to indicate the girl’s age. She nudged the other little girl forward and raised a third finger to show she was three. Cho’s sister continued to watch the little girl on the ground with bored disinterest. “This is Chit. Means ‘love.’ Cho means ‘sweet.’ Not sweet now.”
“Cho is a beautiful name,” I said.
Derek appeared carrying two bottles of water and two amber bottles of beer. He approached the four of us and easily introduced himself to Htet. I pulled both bottles of water from his hands and handed them to the young woman. “You’re welcome to the beers too,” I said. I was pleased that Derek gave a small nod in agreement. His unhesitating generosity made me like him even more.
“Just water. They’re thirsty. We waited six hours for medicine shots. Thank you.”
Mothering was the hardest thing I’d ever done, probably the hardest thing I’d ever do. I’d done it under the best of circumstances, with nearly every resource at my disposal, and it still nearly destroyed me. I couldn’t imagine doing it here in this camp, with no resources and the constant reminder that you had no real home.
Htet kneeled down and scooped her small daughter into her arms. Cho’s eyes were drooping, the candy long forgotten. She’d probably fall asleep in her mother’s arms as they walked down the road.
“You’re welcome.” I paused then. I don’t know why I had the urge to follow her, to help her, besides the fact that she was another mother and she looked like she could use a friend.
Instead I turned in the opposite direction. Derek and I walked side by side back to Mia’s office, where I was hoping to find Buppha.
“It’s the kids that get me,” Derek said. “They break my heart. I can’t imagine growing up here. But it’s worse for them where they come from. The stories my sister tells me . . .” He tapered off and kicked a jagged rock down the dirt path with the side edge of his filthy flip-flop.
“You have kids?” he asked.
“Two. Both girls. Isabel and Matilda.”
“Are they in Thailand too?”
“New York. They’re back in New York with their dad.”
“You still married to him?”
I was taken aback by the question. “Yeah, very much so.” A note of defensiveness crept into my voice.
“But you’re here all alone? Buppha said you’ve been here for a few months.” He sounded surprised.
“A couple of months.” It sounded surreal when I said it out loud. Have I really been here that long?
He paused and took a swig of beer, then grinned. “Hmmm, a marriage vacation. I like it.”
I forced a laugh that sounded more like a grunt. “I don’t know if I would call it that.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you or anything. I just mean that’s cool that you two can deal with the separation.” He paused for a breath. “That scenario didn’t work out so well for Mia.”
“Mia, your sister?”
“Yeah, her and her husband both joined up with Doctors Without Borders, but they got assigned to different places. She ended up in Laos and he was in Somalia. They figured it was just a year. Right? What the hell. You can do anything for a year.”
“So what happened?” I reached over to pull the other beer out of Derek’s front pocket. The cap wasn’t a twist-off so I walked over to one of the buildings and whacked the top off on the side of a piece of wood, the way I’d been taught when fetching beers for my dad and his friends as a little girl.
I was pleased that Derek’s eyebrows rose, impressed with my skills. I took a long sip of the warm liquid. It tasted like a rusty penny.
“Her man fell in love with another doctor, broke her heart, and she never saw him again.”
I stopped dead in the center of the road. “That’s terrible.”
Infidelity was something I never worried about with Karl. He was loyal to everyone in his life, almost to a fault. Still, Derek’s story needled its way into my brain, and I couldn’t shake the possibility that any man left alone for long enough would start to look at other women.
“What did Mia do?”
“She was devastated. But, she’s in love with her work. She’s been in different parts of Asia ever since. Laos, Vietnam. She’s been here the longest, though, running this camp. My dad and I have been up here a few times visiting her. We joke with her that she’s married to all these people now and she has hundreds of babies to take care of, but I know that it isn’t the same thing. I think she’s happy with her life and sad at the same time, you know?”
I did know. I knew all too well. I nodded, but before I could say anything else I heard a woman shouting in a distinctly American accent.
“Your Web page says we can visit between the hours of noon and five and we are only a few minutes late. I want to volunteer. I am offering up my services to you.” The voice belonged to a tall brunette wearing expensive leather boots over skinny jeans and sweating through a silk pussy bow blouse. Her skin was pulled so tight across her face it looked like her cheekbones were wearing spandex. She definitely had a rich husband. Sure enough, that man stood in the mud behind her. He was a short and stout fellow who resembled a warthog with the confidence of a lion. He whipped off a pair of gold Cartier aviators and squinted at Mia, who was trying to shoo his wife back into the Land Rover with their small Thai guide. The American man pulled out his wallet to offer Mia a wad of baht. “Can my wife just walk around and take some damn pictures with your fucking refugees?”
Mia shook her head. “Sorry, sir. We’ve got strict rules to follow. I’m not supposed to let visitors in here after five. It’s a liability issue. We’ll lose our funding if we break the rules.”
Just then the man caught sight of Derek and me. “There’s some other Americans. If they’re allowed in here why can’t my wife take a few goddamn pictures. She’s on the board of Feed the Children and she just wants to show the board members some goddamn pictures of some hungry goddamn children.”
Mia motioned to us. “
They’re full-time employees. Maybe you can come back tomorrow. I can let you in at seven. You can spend the entire day here. I can put both of you to work. I could use the help.”
“Tomorrow we’re wheels up to Siem Reap.” His face smoldered with the expression of a man willing to destroy someone when he didn’t get exactly what he wanted.
The man’s wife was now tottering after the little girls playing hopscotch, trying to corral them around her for a selfie. I attempted to cover the disgust on my lips with my beer bottle. I wasn’t on a marriage vacation. This was what I had needed a vacation from. I needed a break from these kinds of people, the ones who thought a wad of cash could get them anything their heart desired, including selfies with the poorest people in the world.
The wife succeeded in taking a few photographs of the girls. They crowded around her, hoping to receive candy in return for posing. They knew this was a quid pro quo. Disappointment crumpled the children’s faces when the woman strutted away, already scrolling through her photos to determine the best one for Instagram. Not that she noticed their hurt expressions. Her eyes lit up as she saw the line of women holding babies at the doctor’s office, still snaking around the building. “They’re perfect. I need pictures with them.”
Now Mia physically stepped in front of her and pushed her back to her vehicle. “You have to leave. I’m sorry.”
Seeing Mia’s beleaguered expression, I decided to speak up. I knew how to deal with men like this.
“There are security cameras all over here. The last thing you want is for this video to go on YouTube, a video of you bullying poor aid workers so your wife can take a few pictures,” I said in a strong voice that surprised me. I could tell I had unnerved him by conjuring one of the few threats he would take seriously: social embarrassment.
A group of four of the khaki-clad men with guns approached our group. I thought for a moment that the fat American man wouldn’t know better than to back off. Thankfully, he had a modicum of sense and ushered his wife back to their massive vehicle.
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