For the Dead (24 page)

“She’s—Neeni. You know how she was, and she’s still like that. Let me unlock the other one, you’ve hurt your hand.” Holding his breath, he moves to the side of the bed and very slowly bends over her arm. Not touching her skin, he angles the cuff upward until he can work the key into it and turns the key until he hears the double click and it springs open. “There,” he says.

She works her wrist back and forth, wincing slightly, and then holds up the arm with the IV in it, extended and palm up, the pale elbow open to him “This,” she says.

“I can’t take that out,” he says. “I’ll—I’ll faint. Needles make me—” He makes a little cyclone spiral with his hand.

“That’s silly,” she says, and she begins to peel off the bandage.

“No, no, wait. Wait, wait, wait.” He turns to the doorway. “She’s going to pull out the
drip
,” he says, hearing the panic in his voice, and then he hears something that sounds like a hiccup, and then another hiccup, and he turns back to the bed.

She’s laughing. She’s laughing at him. She’s beautiful.

T
EN MINUTES LATER
, the drip has been pulled while Rafferty has his back turned. Dok has claimed his place on the bed, sliding the empty handcuff up and down the left-hand rail, making a
skin-tightening sound until Chalee, sitting on one of the metal chairs at the bedside, slaps his hand.

The sound of the slap brings Treasure’s head around, fast, but when she sees Dok shaking his hand in the air, her face relaxes. She looks down at Dok as though he’s something new and unexpected, something that sprouted up through the blankets and into the light.

Chalee says to Poke, “She’s so pretty.”

“Her mother was beautiful,” Rafferty says as Treasure’s eyes come to him. He’s on the metal chair Dok vacated when he climbed onto the bed. Treasure didn’t seem to be paying any attention to him; her hand was only an inch or two from the edge of the bed, and when he sat down she hadn’t pulled it away. He feels its presence as though it’s throwing off heat, knowing it’s costing her something to leave it there. Slowly, he puts his hand beside hers, and she doesn’t move away. “She’s still beautiful,” he says.

Treasure lets the remark float past her as though it were in a language she doesn’t understand but then, very slightly, her chin dimples. She puts a hand to her face as if she could still it that way.

Boo and Arthit had seemed to make Treasure nervous, so Rafferty and Dok are the only males in the room. Chalee is drawing again, a picture of a young girl sitting in a dim room, the light coming from a window to the girl’s left. She works with little attention to the task, as though the lines are already faintly sketched on the paper. Leaning against the wall at the end of the bed, her arms crossed across her chest, Anna regards the group at the bed with, it seems to Rafferty, the kind of dampened regret she might feel toward a picture that’s emerged inaccurately from memory. The peculiar focus Rafferty felt from her when he described his first encounter with Treasure has lessened but not disappeared, and Rafferty knows she’s watching the lips of everyone who is facing her.

“Who is that, Chalee?” he asks.

She keeps drawing for a long moment, and when she looks up, it’s not at Rafferty but at Treasure. “My sister,” she says. “Sumalee.”

“How old is she?”

Breaking her gaze on Treasure, Chalee begins erasing fiercely. “She’s dead.”

Treasure’s eyes remain on her, and Chalee raises her head again. To Treasure, she says, “She killed herself.”

Treasure says, “Your—your father?”

“No. Well, yes, but no.” Chalee glances at Rafferty, just an instant, as though she would rather he weren’t in the room. In a mixture of Thai and Lao, she says to Treasure, “We were—rice farmers, in Isaan. We didn’t have money. He, my father, borrowed a little every year from a bank—no, no, not a bank,” she says, squinting toward the memory, “a
trust
. Farmer’s Trust, something like that. And he trusted them, like their name said, but then they took the farm and the house. My father was going to sell Sumalee to get the money, but she ran to our old house and threw a rope over the beam in front of the window.” She and Treasure look at each other as though no one else is there. “She told me she was going to leave a present for the Trust,” Chalee says. “I didn’t know what she meant.”

Treasure pulls her feet up and pats the covers on the bed, and Chalee puts down the stack of paper and crawls up as Dok slides over to make room. There’s a moment of silence, and then Chalee starts to cry. A second later, Dok sniffles.

Anna stands suddenly and waves Poke out of the room. As he goes through the door, his phone rings: Rose.

“Now I
am
worried,” she says. “I called Nguyen, and Andrew is there, but they haven’t seen her. I searched her room, hoping she’d left her phone, but it’s not there. Poke, I’m getting frightened.”

He tries to think of something worth saying and can’t. “She’ll be fine. I’m sure she will.”

“But why hasn’t she called? Why hasn’t she answered?”

“She’s hurt. She thinks we lied to her.”

Rose says, “That’s probably it.” There’s a moment’s silence, and she disconnects.

“Sure,” Rafferty says to the dead phone. He turns, not certain whether to leave or go back into Treasure’s room, but Anna makes a noise like steam, Sssss-sssss-sssss, a demand for his attention.

She’s writing on one of her blue cards. Impatiently, she pulls it free and hands it to him and begins to write on the next one.

The fluorescents in the hallway are dim and far apart. Angling the card to catch as much light as possible, he reads,

If you tell that child everything will be all right

Anna is writing even more quickly than usual, and by the time he looks back at her, she’s already pulling out the second card and extending it. He can read it while it is still in her hand. It says:
you had better be sure you’re telling her the truth
.

H
E
’
S SO WEARY
that he feels scooped out. He should go home, but what can he do there? Fuss at Rose? He knows from long experience that when she’s frightened she moves inward, becomes remote and distant, as though she’s wrapped in a brittle, transparent shell.

It seems better to stay here. And maybe
here
, at least, something can to be settled.

“I don’t think it’ll work,” he says. Last time he looked into Treasure’s room, Dok and Chalee were asleep, Dok beside Treasure, and Chalee curled up across the foot of the bed, the drawing of Sumalee crumpled in her hand. Treasure’s eyes were open, fixed on Chalee, and she had the abstracted air of someone who has just been deafened by an enormous noise.

He and Boo have been joined by a young African-American woman named Katherine who’s representing Father Bill and First Home. Boo is silent, letting Rafferty deal with Katherine. “I probably agree with you,” Katherine says, “but why do you say it?”

“She doesn’t have the social skills.” He’s once again sitting on the corner of Boo’s desk, with Boo in the chair behind it and Katherine on one of the chairs the children dragged in. “You weren’t there, in her house, I mean. She was brutalized on every level. He slapped her, he punched her, he turned her into a ventriloquist’s dummy. Literally: he’d force her to sit on his knee with his hand
on the back of her neck and press hard enough to cause pain, and when she opened her mouth he’d supply the words. Just completely overrode her will.”

“Why? Why would anyone—”

“Because he was a sick, evil fuck, and he
could
. She lived in that big, awful house with him and two Vietnamese servants, and her mother, who was in a haze all the time, just knocking over furniture, so that left Daddy. I think it’s amazing that she lets Dok and Chalee anywhere near her—”

Katherine says, “She touched your hand.”

“Almost. You saw that?”

“I was in the hall, looking in through the door.”

“I had no idea what to do.” Rafferty rubs his face with both hands. “And I’m not at my best. My daughter is missing.”

Boo says, “It’s only been a few hours.”

“I know, I know. She’ll be fine, she knows the city, blah blah. Still, it’s one thing to know all that and another to have her back home.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Katherine says, “but you’re an adult male, and she—reached out to you.”

“I don’t understand it any better than you do.”

Katherine shifts in her chair. “I hate to compartmentalize like this, but we need to figure out what to—”

“I know. Okay, let me talk. I don’t think Treasure can get along in a bunch of kids, much less sleep in a room full of them. Dok and Chalee are exceptional. But, you know, in a group, there are—conflicts. It could be dangerous for her, it could be dangerous for them. She’s never been around people her own age. When her father wasn’t slapping her silly, he was showing her how to plan terrorist attacks. I worry about what kind of behavior someone in a group, someone who’s not as sympathetic as Chalee and Dok, might accidentally trigger. This is a girl who lit fire to her own house.”

“We have to do
something
with her,” Katherine says.

Boo says, in English, “He’s thinking about it.”

“I have a lot of money that, I suppose, belongs to her,” Rafferty says. “I’ve been using it to try to get her mother sort of straightened up, but—” He puts his hands flat on the tops of his thighs and blows out a lungful of air. “But that’s not going to work. She’s past straightening up.”

Katherine says, “You have her money? You’ve been
taking care
—”

He raises a hand. “I had it all worked out, I thought. Put Mama in an apartment, pay someone to keep her straight. Mama would be fine, Treasure would show up, everything would work out. It’s so
American
. They’d all be sending out Christmas cards in a year or two.” He yawns. “I feel like I should work for Hallmark.”

“Then stop thinking about you,” Boo says, still in English.

Rafferty sighs and rocks back and forth in his chair, which squeaks. Closes his eyes and sees floating red spots. “I’ve got to go home. Okay, here’s where I am right now. Leave her where she is tonight. Tomorrow, if we haven’t thought of anything better, let her sleep in here.”

Boo looks around the room. “In my
office
?”

“Are you in here at night?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Then stop thinking about you. Put three cots in here and let Dok and Chalee stay with her. Find a way to close that door. Just temporarily.”

Boo says, “We need to talk to Dok and Chalee first.”

Katherine says, “They’ll agree. Kids love to feel necessary.”

“I know they’ll
agree
,” Boo says, in Thai this time. “I want them to suggest it to her. Tell her that they’ll all have their own beds or something, that it’ll be—I don’t know—fun.”

“Tomorrow,” Rafferty says. “Leave them where they are tonight.” He gets up and shoves a hand into the pocket of his jeans and works out a wad of money. “Here’s twelve thousand baht. Get some new pads for those cots, new sheets. Pillows. She used to live
in a nice house. Put something colorful on the walls. Magazine pictures of girls with friends. She had them all over her hiding place. I’ll send you more money tomorrow morning. Buy Dok and Chalee whatever they want.”

“She needs more help than two little kids can give her,” Katherine says.

“Obviously, but she’s
letting
them help. That counts for a lot. For now, anyway.”

Katherine says, “She needs a long-term solution.”

“Tomorrow,” Rafferty says.

“It’ll have to be—” Katherine says, looking past Rafferty, and then breaking off. “Who’s this?”

Rafferty turns to the doorway to see Miaow, looking at him with no pleasure at all.

Miaow says, “What are
you
doing here?”

“A
KNIFE
,”
HE
says to Rose. “The son of a bitch had a knife.”

Rose is occupying virtually all of the couch, sitting dead-center, her knees folded to the left, her long arms extending along the sofa’s back. It’s a position he’s learned to avoid from across a room.

Miaow, who has paused behind him, apparently to judge Rose’s reaction, pushes past him toward her room.

“If you go back there,” Rose says, “you can stay there until your next happy birthday for all I care.”

Miaow says, “He chased me with a knife, or didn’t you hear that part?”

“I heard it. I would have chased you with a knife myself if I’d been the one who spotted you.”

“Nice to be home,” Miaow says, heading for her room again.

Rose brings her head forward a lethal inch or two. “I wasn’t joking, Miaow. Go back there and close that door, and we’ll have a real problem.”

Rafferty says, “Rose—”

Over him, Miaow says, “What’s a
real
problem? If he’d caught me, if he’d stabbed me out on Soi Whatever it was, would that have been a real problem?”

“
Here’s
a real problem,” Rose says. “The whole world is about you. The whole world and everything in it exists just so Miaow can tell us all whether it’s good or bad. We all just wait, hanging
uselessly from strings, for her to give us the word. She goes to a school most kids would give their teeth to be in, a school full of kids from all over the world, and it’s all about Miaow. Andrew has a father who’s got a head made out of rock, and that’s all about Miaow. Poke and I are going to have a baby, and that’s all about Miaow. My own
baby
is about Miaow.”

“That’s not fair. You didn’t even—”

“I’ll give you this, you had more class than Andrew’s father. You were winning there for a minute while he was here, even though you’ve been a complete hairball for the past couple of months. But then what happened? You learned something that you knew made Poke and me happy—or leave me out of it, if you want, something that made
Poke
happy, Poke, who’s turned himself inside-out for you—and what do you do? You make it all about Miaow and you storm out of this apartment. And I’ll tell you, since I’m angry enough not to keep it from you—you humiliated us in front of that Vietnamese toy soldier who acted like he’d honor our home by shitting in the middle of the floor. You acted like the girl he thought you were. Just tell me, eye to eye, since I have to ask a question I never thought I’d have to ask, are you even the
tiniest
bit happy for us?”