For the Dead (15 page)

If the doctor had asked Rose, she would have answered that her day so far was making her feel very good indeed.

Rose says, “Wery good,” and then overcorrects to, “Vvvvery good,” pushing her front teeth deeply enough into her lower lip to make a dent.

The woman who was asked how she felt is wiping her cheeks with a ragged tissue. She’s in a big room full of extremely orderly women sitting in rows of chairs. They peer at the weeping woman as though she might disappear at any moment, like a ghost.

There’s something extremely comfortable, Rose thinks, about sitting on your own couch with a plate of leftover green mango slices, watching someone else cry. Wearing one of your husband’s best shirts, one he pretends he doesn’t know you wear when he
leaves. With the apartment empty and all yours as the day outside passes noon. With America on your big television.

With a baby growing inside you.

She puts a flat hand on her flat stomach, trying to find a little spot of extra warmth. She knows she won’t find it and she doesn’t, but the act of looking for it makes the day even better. It makes her want some Nescafé.

She gets up and says in English, “Excuse me, I come back” to the crying woman on the television, laughs a little at her village-girl joke, and pads barefoot to the kitchen. She pauses before she steps into the gleaming kitchen, just to take in again—perhaps for the fourth time today—how clean Poke left it. He’d gotten up long before she did, and when she went in for the day’s first cup of coffee, she’d smelled chlorine and had spent an anxious moment looking for the source until she discovered that he’d scoured the sink, getting rid of the map of ancient coffee stains and the pale brown spots where wet tea bags had sat for hours. The stove had been scrubbed and the refrigerator door had been sponged, Miaow’s handprints wiped away. He’d also rearranged the refrigerator’s contents into tidy, logic-free rows. It had taken her several minutes to find things she could usually touch blindfolded.

The
floor
was clean.

He’d even filled her teapot with bottled water, ready to be heated. When she’d picked it up, the unexpected weight almost made her drop it on her foot.

She turns the knob on the stove, waits for the reassuring blue poof of flame that tells her they’re not all going to die of asphyxiation or in a terrible explosion, and pulls the jar of Nescafé crystals from the cabinet above the rice cooker. Poke had placed it right on the edge of the shelf, within easy reach, as though going up on tiptoes might damage the baby.

How long will this last?
she asks herself. Nothing good lasts long.

And how will it change when Miaow learns what’s happening? Miaow had fled through the front door a little after ten in the
morning, not even waiting for the television man to finish setting up the big screen and turn it on. Maybe Poke is right. Maybe the attachment between Miaow and Andrew is deeper than they had thought.

A little blister of anxiety forms in the region of her heart. It makes her want a cigarette.

The pack of Marlboro Golds is right where she left it, next to the bed. The lighter is still on top of it. It’s been there all day, sending out the occasional siren call, and every now and then she’s had to fight the impulse to grab it and light up.

She hasn’t gone back into the bedroom since she got dressed.

Thinking about the cigarettes, she slides her hand over her stomach again, but this time she doesn’t know she’s doing it.

Miaow
, she thinks. The throw-away child, tossed onto a sidewalk. As tough as she tries to seem, Miaow worries about everything. She double-checks everything. If she were hanging over a cliff, held only by a knotted rope, she would try to improve the knot. She has no idea how remarkable she is, how smart, how decent, how much she’s loved. Somewhere in the center of her being, Miaow is still the short, dirty, dark-skinned, frizzy-haired, unloved reject who tried to sell chewing gum to Rafferty on his second night in Bangkok.

The baby—Poke and Rose’s
own
baby—is going to shake Miaow to her core. She’s going to feel like unwanted furniture. They’re going to have to be very careful about how they tell her. They’re going to have to love her extra-hard.

Rose jumps as the teapot shrills. She turns off the gas and realizes she hasn’t even opened the jar of coffee.

“How did that make you feel?” she asks herself, trying to sound American. Then she says, “Make me feel stupid,” and unscrews the jar. The teaspoon that she thought she’d already taken out is still in the drawer. “One, two, three,” she says, focusing on opening the drawer, pulling out the spoon, and ladling a little mountain of Nescafé into the cup. A couple of brisk, businesslike stirs, and the
spoon, with its clot of undissolved coffee, clatters into the bottom of the sink.

She takes a gasping-hot mouthful and forces it down. To the baby, she says, “Get used to it,” and the people in the living room laugh appreciatively. Maybe that woman has stopped crying. For some reason, the laughter makes Rose feel guilty about staining the sink. She puts the cup back on the counter and runs water over the spoon, rinses the bottom of the sink, and dries the spoon on her shirt.

She says, “
Aiya
,” drops the spoon to the floor, and grabs the bottom of the shirt, Poke’s shirt, Poke’s
favorite
shirt. “No, no, no,” she says. There’s a smear of brown on the tail of the shirt.

She runs hot water over her fingers, touches the tip of the dish detergent bottle to her index finger, and rubs at the smear, making it bigger. She takes the dishtowel, a fresh clean one Poke put out to replace the mottled, malodorous rag that had been on duty for a couple of weeks, drips water on it, and scrubs at the smear. The dishtowel gets browner but the shirt doesn’t get whiter.

It’s
coffee
, she thinks despairingly. The only way to get rid of a coffee stain is with a pair of scissors.

She knows it’s not really a problem, knows he’s aware she wears the shirt, even knows that it’s not actually his favorite shirt. All this is just a game they play, one of a thousand games they play, about tiny things at the edges of their lives, things that don’t matter. They build the games because they can
make
the tiny things matter. It’s a way of reminding themselves how blessed they are.

So he won’t actually be mad. But it will spoil the game. One of the secrets she pretends to keep from him will be gone.

She wipes at the shirt again and then takes it off and puts the stain under the faucet, working detergent through it with her fingers. Keeping the non-secret a secret is suddenly important to her. And she knows it’s because of the
real
secret, the secret Poke doesn’t even suspect.

The baby she lost.

Someone’s baby, she has no idea whose. Some drunk’s baby. There were always customers who refused at the last moment to use condoms, who didn’t have one and wouldn’t take the one she tried to force on them, who made it clear that they weren’t going to let her leave the hotel room until they were done with her. There was the occasional broken condom. In the month before she was late for the first time in her life, there were four or five times like that.

Four or five long-forgotten possible fathers. A whore for a mother. Why would that baby want to be born?

And it hadn’t been.

She drops the shirt into the sink, the gleaming clean sink, sucks in all the air her lungs will hold, and spreads both hands on her bare belly, barely touching her skin.
This
baby. This baby will be strong.
This
baby has a father who will love her. This baby isn’t coming into the world of a bar girl, a girl who won’t be able to take care of it, who’ll just park it up north in a leaking hut with her mother and her drunken father. Go see it on Buddha’s birthday, when the bars are closed. Bring it bright toys so it won’t cry when it sees the strange woman leaning over it.

That was her dead baby, not this one. She’s been living part of her life for her dead baby ever since … ever since. Now she won’t have to. This baby will have a good father, a happy mother, a smart sister. This baby will have no reason to decide not to come into the world. Ignoring the coffee cooling on the counter, the water running over Poke’s shirt, she closes her eyes and sends a prayer to her dead baby, and is startled to hear herself say, in her mind,
You can come back now
. Her eyes pop open, and she stands there, looking at nothing. She says, “You can come back now. You can come back now.”

A bolt of energy runs down her arms all the way to her fingertips. Moving briskly, she takes the rough side of the sponge and scrubs the stain on the shirt into another world. She hangs the shirt to dry on the handle of the refrigerator door, squares her
shoulders, and goes into the bedroom. When she comes back, she has the package of cigarettes in her hand. The water is still running, and she holds the package under the faucet and then tosses the sodden mass into the trash.

She says fiercely, “You can come back now.”

T
HE THING IS
, they’re going to have to climb a fence and cross a sidewalk.

The golden man had barked into his phone, ordering the car to be brought around, probably by the other dark man. She thinks,
he’ll bring the car to the street at the front of the hotel
. There’s a chain-link fence there, with a gate in it. In the old days, sometimes the gate was open. The last time Miaow was here someone had removed the metal U that snapped down over the upright pole to lock the gate in place.

If the gate is open, she thinks, she and Andrew haven’t got a chance. But that was a long time ago. For all she knows, the whole thing has been stolen by now, and they might be able to walk straight through and they’ll
really
be screwed. If not, she’ll have the fence.

Her karma will give her the fence.

If she were alone, the fence would be all she needed to get away. She can scale it and jump down from it much faster than they can. She could be a block away by the time their feet touched the sidewalk.

But there’s Andrew, who’s still wheezing and coughing.

The golden man and the short one with the red shirt have hauled them into the destroyed lobby. The golden man has the neck of Miaow’s T-shirt twisted in his fist, and the man with the red shirt
leans against a peeling wall with one foot braced against it and his arm around Andrew’s throat, its elbow pointed at Miaow. It looks like a wrestling hold. He’s smoking a cigarette. Andrew is dead white, white as paper, his face dripping sweat. His eyes are unfocused and there’s something empty about his body, as though its spirit has fled it.

The golden man says to Miaow, “Is he all right?”

“I don’t know,” she says. She remembers the little zipped bag hanging from her shoulder. “He has diabetes,” she says, holding the bag up as evidence.

“Boy,” the golden man says. “Boy, are you sick?”

Andrew makes an
o
with his lips, then licks them, and his eyes come to Miaow’s and she sees the terror in them. “No,” Andrew says, and then he coughs. His voice seems to come from far away.

“Loosen your arm,” the golden man says to the short man. “Boy, did you take your medicine before you left your house?’

Andrew shakes his head
no
, and then nods
yes
. Nods again.

“You’ll be all right,” the golden man says. “We just need the phone, and then you can go.”

Miaow says, “Give it to him, Andrew.”

Andrew says, “I don’t have it.”

The golden man says, “Careful, boy.”

“It’s at home,” Andrew says. His voice is all tremor; if she couldn’t see him, Miaow wouldn’t recognize it as his.

The short man gives Andrew a shake. “Why would you leave it home?”

“It doesn’t—doesn’t have my SIM card. If my parents call and I don’t answer, I can say I forgot the phone.”

“Check his pockets,” the golden man says, and the short man clamps his arm more tightly around Andrew’s neck and pats the boy down, then shakes his head.

“Sorry, girl,” the golden man says, and quickly slaps her pockets. He feels her phone in her jeans and says, “Take it out.”

She holds it up for him. It’s an iPhone 4, black like Andrew’s,
and his eyes widen and then slide away, rejecting it. He nods at the bag hanging from her shoulder. She puts the phone back and unzips Andrew’s case to show nothing but his diabetes kit.

The golden man draws a long breath, and Miaow can feel heat coming off him. He says to Andrew, “Who is at your house?”

Andrew’s blinking fast. “My—my father. It’s Saturday. And my mother, she’s sick, so she’s always home.”

“I’m sorry,” the golden man says, and Miaow feels a cold needle of fear pierce her stomach. She knows instinctively why he’s sorry, and it isn’t because Andrew’s mother is sick. She knows, as sure as she’s standing there, that they’re all as good as dead.

“It’s not your fault,” Andrew says, and Miaow wants to hug him just once, hug him as hard as she can, hug him until he squeals. She should have hugged him months ago.

The golden man’s phone rings, and he listens and says, “Good.” He hauls Miaow across the lobby. “Take her, too. I’ll go ahead. I’ll be on the other side of the fence. You stay back until I wave you to come.” To Miaow, he says, “This man will kill you if you fight him.”

The short man knots her T-shirt in his fist.

“Look for me,” the golden man says. “I’ll wave you out. If they have to go over the fence, they’ll come one at a time.” He looks from Andrew to Miaow. “Him first. If I’ve got him, she won’t go anywhere. Three minutes.” He gives Miaow a last look, his eyes lingering on her for a second, but then he shakes his head and turns and lopes out of the lobby, toward the fence. He runs, Miaow thinks, as naturally as most people breathe. If they have to outrun him, they have no chance.

But, of course, no matter how fast he is he can only chase one of them. If Andrew gets his courage back, he can outrun the short man. So the thing is, if it comes down to being chased, she has to make the golden man chase her. Even though he’s faster than she is.