For the Dead (10 page)

It seems to take Chalee a moment to hear the question, but she looks from the picture to the sleeping girl and says, “What things?”

“Here.” Dok touches his finger to the bridge of his nose several times, as though he’s making little dots. “These things.”

Chalee sits way forward in her chair and crinkles her eyes, staring at the girl on the bed, and Dok wonders whether she needs glasses. She says, “I don’t see—”

“Sure,” Dok says, and then they’re both up, Chalee heading to the left of the bed and Dok going right. Dok says, touching his nose again, “Some
farang
have them. You know, priggles or something.” He puts a knee on the bed, below the rail with the girl’s hand cuffed to it, trying to get closer.

“Freckles,” Chalee says in English, bending down, and as Dok’s weight pushes into the bed, the girl’s eyelids flutter and then open, and she looks straight at Dok’s rat-teeth, only a foot or two from her face, and screams a shredded sound that seems to bring part of her throat with it, and then she’s yanking frantically at the cuffs and banging her head up and down on the hard pillows and flailing her legs to kick the blankets off, and she turns her head and sees Chalee and the dangling tube at the same time. Chalee leaps back as the girl’s head lunges toward her, mouth wide open and all teeth, but what she does is clamp them on the tube and jerk it out of her arm with a spray of droplets, and then Dok’s running for the door as though the world’s biggest, angriest rat is snapping at his heels.

B
Y THE TIME
the girl who has some training as a nurse arrives with a replacement IV kit, Chalee is sitting halfway down the bed, lightly caressing the back of the girl’s hand where the cuff scraped it, and Dok is patting the other hand, although from quite a bit farther away. The girl is making short, broken sounds, not quite sobs, that seem to come all the way from her stomach, and there are shiny tracks down the sides of her face. She’s staring a hole in the farthest wall.

“Did she say anything?” the almost-nurse says, coming in, and the eyes of the girl on the bed widen at the sight of the IV bag.

“Maybe in Lao,” Dok says.

“Do you speak Lao?”

“Not enough.”

“It wasn’t Thai,” Chalee says. “She was crying and yelling, so it was hard to understand her, but I don’t think it was Thai.”

“It was Lao,” Dok says, surer of himself.

As the almost-nurse approaches, the girl on the bed begins to scrabble with her legs and pull against the cuffs again, but Chalee puts her palm on the girl’s forehead, barely touching her. The scrabbling stops, although the girl’s eyes stay on the IV in the almost-nurse’s hand.

“It’s okay,” Dok says, using the English word. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” He thinks for a moment and then gets down off the bed and holds out his arm. To the almost-nurse, he says, “Stick it in me.”

“I can’t do that,” the almost-nurse says. She’s only about nineteen, and she looks very uncertain. “The needle has to be sterile.”

“Look at her,” Dok says, tugging the sleeve of his T-shirt all the way to his shoulder. “She’s so frightened. You won’t even get the needle into her arm.”

“But I can’t—”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Dok says very fast. He licks his lips and glances at the girl on the bed for a second. “Then do this. Take the
needle out and aim it at my mouth and squirt some into my mouth.” To the girl he says, in one of the English phrases all Thais know, “No problem, look, look.”

“I don’t know,” the almost-nurse says.

“Well, I do,” Dok says. He opens his mouth wide, the two big teeth in front gleaming, and closes his eyes.

“Look at her,” Chalee says, and the almost-nurse takes a quick, timid look at the girl on the bed, who is watching the almost-nurse’s hands very closely. “She wants to see.”

“You don’t tell anybody,” the almost-nurse says. She slips the needle out of its sheath, positions it about six inches from Dok’s mouth, and squeezes the bag. A thin stream of clear fluid snakes into Dok’s mouth, and his eyes pop open, very wide, and a look of dismay seizes possession of his face for a second, but he banishes it and makes a great show of swallowing, and then, with another quick look at the girl on the bed, he opens his mouth again. This time, he lets the stream flow for a few seconds and then raises a hand. When the almost-nurse pulls the needle back, he turns to the girl on the bed, swallows hugely, makes a painful smile, and nods. The moment he looks at her, her eyes dart away.

“Good,” he says, and then he shudders.

Chalee says to the almost-nurse, “Does it have that sleeping stuff in it?”

“I don’t know,” the almost-nurse says, sounding surprised. “The doctor left three of them last night. All I do is put them in.”

Dok displays his arm to the girl on the bed, tapping his finger on the inside of his own elbow and then pointing at hers. “Okay?”

The girl closes her eyes and moans, but she lets her right hand fall open. She bares her gray teeth when the almost-nurse pulls off the bandage, and she turns her head to the left, toward Dok, when the needle goes in. But she doesn’t resist.

“Thanks,” the almost-nurse says to Dok, once the bag is dangling from its spindly metal stand. “I don’t know how I would have done it. Boo should know how much you helped.”

“She’s just frightened,” Chalee says. Dok pats the bottom of the bed, and when the girl’s eyebrows contract he points at his chest and then the bed. She doesn’t respond, so he slowly climbs back up onto the bed and begins to smooth her left hand again. Chalee pulls her chair up to the right side of the bed and when the girl turns to regard her, Chalee holds up her sketch and widens her eyes in a silent question.

But the girl doesn’t look at the drawing. Instead, she studies Chalee’s eyes for a moment and turns slowly back to Dok, up on one elbow on the bed beside her, his hand on hers. Chalee watches the two of them for a few minutes, and then Dok’s eyes grow heavy and close, and he puts his head down on the bed. The girl looks down at him, so emptily he might be a mile away, and then she begins to blink slowly, and her eyelids come up a little less with each blink and then close again.

Except for one short, rubbery snore from Dok, the room is completely silent. Chalee gives them a few minutes to slide more deeply into sleep, then gets up and tows her chair to the other side of the bed, where she can see both of them. With their eyes closed and their lips parted they look like they’ve gone somewhere together. She begins to draw.

T
HE MONEY IS
driving him crazy.

Rafferty has never thought much about money, aside from wishing for more of it. Now that he has more than he knows what to do with, he thinks about it all the time.

When he’s not thinking about that girl running into the burning house, that is. Or when he’s not thinking about Miaow.

He doesn’t know which event comes as more of a surprise: that he’s suddenly swimming in money—money that he can’t, in good conscience, spend—or that Miaow has become so paralyzingly difficult.

He’s long been aware, as a matter of information, that children go insane when they become teenagers. But it’s one thing to know that and to sympathize politely with people whose kids have suddenly ceased to be conventional, predictable beings and turned into human fractals. It’s another to deal with it day by day in your own home, when the child who’s bewildering you is the one you love. And Rafferty loves Miaow with a love that seems to flow through him rather than from him, because, he thinks, he couldn’t possibly hold so much. He’d have run dry years ago.

His laptop screen goes dark, a reproach for how long it’s been since he touched the keys. Not that he has anything to write, anyway. He’s making a second try at fiction, and the people he makes up seem much less interesting than the people he knows.
The coffee in the kitchen, his nose tells him, is burned. When Rose drifted in there half an hour ago, on her way out of the apartment, he’d asked her to turn off the pot and she’d said she would, but what he’s smelling right now is fried coffee. He gets up from the white hassock, now stuffed, like practically everything else in the apartment, with Haskell Murphy’s money, and goes into the kitchen. The little red light glows reproachfully on the coffeemaker and the stink is so thick the air should be brown. He snaps the hotplate off and totes the carafe to the sink, where he runs cold water into it. The pot makes a loud high clicking sound like teeth slamming together, but when he pours out the water, it’s intact.

“If I were broke,” he says to it, “you’d have split in two.”

After Miaow left, towing most of Rafferty’s heart behind her, Rose telephoned half a dozen of her confidantes from the bedroom, showered and dressed, and then gave him a distracted kiss on the head, forgot to turn off the coffeemaker, and left to meet one of the crew—probably Fon, her first friend in Bangkok, back when she was new to the bars.

Rafferty is halfway through filling the grinder with beans before he realizes he’s making coffee in a sort of automatic chain of actions that began when he rinsed the carafe. He glances at his watch: 2:30
P.M.
, and decides to finish the job. He’ll have time to stop jittering before Miaow comes home.

She’s wrapped herself in some invisible parent repellant. For the first four years they lived together, she told them everything, even if she told most of it to Rose, but now she gets upset whenever she hears a question mark. She lives with them like a spy in deep cover: she spends hours online but doesn’t talk about it. She goes to school but doesn’t talk about it. With a little cramp of anxiety, he acknowledges that he knows why: she’s told too many lies there, beginning with her first name. In the biography of Mia Rafferty she’s created, she was never a street child; Rose comes from a rich family somewhere up north; he, Poke, is a famous writer. Mia is practically an aristocrat.

And then, of course, there’s Andrew. Miaow talks to him and texts him endlessly and spends three or four afternoons at his parents’ apartment, but never talks about it. Asked what they do, she says, “Stuff.”

Rafferty supposes he should take
some
comfort from the fact that Andrew is so unthreatening, that he’s—well, a geek, a father-dominated Vietnamese geek with a big head on a narrow neck and no social skills at all. But Andrew will never be permitted to enter Poke’s Circle of Trust for the unarguable reason that he’s a boy, and Rafferty remembers, with eye-stinging clarity, what
he
had been like as a boy. At Andrew’s age, which is to say thirteen, Poke was already pushing his way into the deeper sexual thickets, with no regard at all for the girls who kindly showed him the way.

If Andrew ever treated Miaow the way he, Rafferty, had treated Sophie and Kim and Lita and—what was her name?—Trinity, and what
had
her parents been thinking?—if Andrew treated Miaow that way, Rafferty and Rose would be picking up pieces of her for years.

He pours water into the coffeemaker, thinking that he could tell her
so much
about what she should avoid, beginning with boys like the one he used to be. But it’s out of the question. She’s got an alert system like those outdoor lights that go on whenever anyone moves, and before he could mouth the first syllable he’d be blinking helplessly against the glare and the whoop of sirens, and she’d be half a mile away and running full out.

And he knows what Rose will advise. She’ll say,
Leave her alone
. And she’ll say it with such serene superiority that he’ll have to bite his tongue to keep from saying something
really
stupid.

He yanks the pot from beneath the steaming stream of coffee and slips his cup in. Somewhere in this irritable near-teen with her hacked, badly-colored hair is the little girl he met and befriended when she was selling gum all night in the entertainment district and whom he and Rose ultimately decided to adopt—the little girl who had never been in control of anything in her life. To whom
every kindness they showed her was a gift. When Rafferty looks back, it’s easy for him to identify the time when she began this appalling metamorphosis: it was the day she stopped parting her hair. And now, here she is: impossible. It’s as though a butterfly had spun a cocoon and come out as a carnivorous caterpillar.

Three or four mouthfuls have dripped into the cup so he reverses the swap, slipping the pot back into position and wandering into the living room. The apartment’s space seems to him to be surprisingly elastic—small, even crowded when they’re all there, but large enough to echo when he’s alone in it. They’ve been amazingly happy here, he thinks, despite all the drama the rooms have hosted. One woman dead, another attacked with a knife, a destructive explosion of fury from a street child named Boo—the child who’d rescued Miaow when she was first abandoned on the sidewalk and given her a home and a band of friends, of sorts, before burning himself almost into invisibility in the fire of amphetamines.

And what
is
Boo up to now? he wonders. The kid’s been off drugs for a few years. Last time Rafferty saw him, he was working, a bit uneasily, with a pair of crooked cops in a scam to rip off tourists who tried to pick up children. Rafferty thinks the kid could probably succeed at anything he wants to do that doesn’t require formal education, but doubts he would stop working with homeless kids. Especially not now, with thousands of them flooding into Bangkok as Thailand’s rural farming communities break down.