The Map of Lost Memories (21 page)

She moved the flame in a circle beneath the map, and the paper grew translucent. Then she held the match still, until a brown stain flowered beneath Siem Reap. The dusty, chicory odor of the paper seeped into the air. Her hand trembled, and the map tilted precariously close to the fire. The paper split apart along the road that led to Angkor Wat. She shook the match out and dropped it to the floor.

As Marc sat beside her, his fingers grazed the bare skin between her neck and shoulder where the collar of her robe had slipped down. He asked, “What are you doing?”

“This is my past,” she said, whisking the flame of a new match against the edge of the map. An ember spread, and a hood of fire rose above the page. “I’ve drawn it so tightly around myself that I can’t see where I’m going. I can’t see that there might be a different path to take, other than the one I started out on.” She watched as an orange river flowed toward Stung Treng, and Cambodia’s shadowed gray countryside shimmered beneath the fire. “At least I thought this was my past. Now it seems I was part of a past I didn’t even know about.” She carried the blazing paper to the washbowl beside the bed and dropped it into the water. It hissed, leaving a scroll of black ash.

“Do you wish I hadn’t told you?”

“I wish he’d told me years ago. All that time I could have known about you, the way you’ve known about me.” Feeling the loss of this chance she’d never had, she took the next map and continued to light the limitations of her history on fire. She burned another, and another, until all of her maps except one were gone, and the room reeked of scorched paper.

——

As morning broke over Saigon, Irene began to pack. She unstrapped her map case from its hiding place in the bureau and tossed it on the bed. The buckle wasn’t secured, and the flap fell open, displaying Reverend Garland’s diary, her mother’s watercolor tablet, and Anne’s gun. Its coral handle shrank in Marc’s grip. “I didn’t take you for the type to carry a weapon.”

They had spoken only a few words to one another since she had destroyed her maps, and she felt dazed as she told him, “I don’t even know how to shoot the thing. Anne gave it to me after Simone and I killed Roger.”

“I suspected that it was the two of you.”

“He was going to shoot me, and she stabbed him, and then I hit him with a car.” The room smelled of smoke, and Irene opened the window. Rain slunk through, relieving the sticky, closed heat. “We didn’t mean to do any of it,” she said, savoring the dampness on her skin. “Or maybe we did.” After last night, the murder and its motives seemed more distant than ever.

“Why is this expedition so important to you, Irene? You say it’s about your reputation, but I’ve checked around. You may have been cut out at the Brooke Museum, but you’re well-regarded. You already have what you need to claim a new place for yourself—a good place—in the art world. You don’t need the scrolls.”

She turned to him. “What are you talking about?”

“Tell me the real reason, for both of you, you and Simone.”

“The reason we share?” She gathered up the costume she had bought to impress Louis. “It’s where we’re from,” she said, running her fingers over the blue buttons. “It’s what shaped us. Finding the history of the Khmer is like finding a missing part of our own histories. It’s a way of making ourselves complete.”

“And this is why you don’t leave her behind?”

“I wish I could, I do, even though it would be against Mr. Simms’s wishes. She’s made such a mess of everything.” Irene could not help but
laugh at how absurd the situation had become. “But that’s not it. No, I was foolish enough to show her the map. She knows where the scrolls are. There’s no way I can outrun her, not with Louis on her side. They could easily beat me to the temple. Or they could send off a telegram. That’s all it would take to have every official in the country after me.”

As Marc reflected on this, he searched for his shirt among the sheets. His tattoo was dark and unforgiving on his shoulder. “It seems to me you need someone on your side.”

“Are you … do you want to come to Cambodia with me?”

“Do you want me to?” he asked.

She was listening for a trace of the desire they had shared, but she sensed, instead, caution. As he dressed, she watched him. Tall and fair, Marc was the closest Irene would have to family once Mr. Simms died. The closest she would have to being known without having to explain where she’d come from, who she was. She trailed her fingers through the slush of ash in the washbowl. She could see the remains of her blackened country, the daub of a charred village bereft of its surrounding landscape. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

I do not know if many men have from childhood, as I have had, a presentiment of their whole life. Nothing has happened to me that I have not dimly foreseen from my earliest years.

PIERRE LOTI
,
A Pilgrimage to Angkor

Beside Marc, in the front of the Pierce-Arrow sedan he had borrowed from his aunt, Irene tucked her feet up onto the seat, her bare toes resting against his leg. She gazed out at the sunrise brushing the morning chill from the leaves of rubber trees, planted in even rows along the newly paved highway heading west toward Cambodia. Light welled on the horizon, and the radiant green of an occasional rice paddy emerged from beneath shawls of white mist. Rolling down her window, she let the wind cool her face, still warm from Marc’s lingering touch in her hotel room hours before.

Simone sat in the backseat with Louis. They had taken her from the hospital against her doctor’s orders, and although she was drowsy and silent,
Irene was aware of her attention as Marc lowered his hand from the steering wheel and traced his finger over her ankle. Always such a private person, Irene scarcely recognized herself as she laid her hand over his, not caring that she was being observed, while the landscape around them brightened and opened wide, the coconut and rubber plantations giving way to the flat, exposed countryside monotonous with rice fields. She didn’t care about anything right now except the memory of the previous night and the reddened highway leading her toward the home of the ancient Khmer.

Sitting next to Marc, Irene noticed the way he listened to every word spoken to him with undivided attention, and how he was not self-conscious when she caught him watching her, and her attraction for him flared like the incandescent blue kingfishers startled to flight with the passing of the car. She thought about her feelings for the Khmer and how she had nurtured them so diligently over the years. She had not known that passion could take root without being sown, and the discovery was intoxicating. She laid her head back on the seat and gazed out at a flock of egrets, their silky wings dragging feathered shadows over the surface of the fields. The sun burned her wrist, exposed over the edge of the door. She knew she should pull her hand inside, but she was engrossed by the deepening color, as if she were being shaped at that very moment, like an unformed piece of clay.

“I should be drinking Pernod over ice on the terrace at the Manolis by now,” Simone declared, waving her Gitane with one hand and a rice-paper fan with the other, to whisk the smoke from the car.

Ice. Irene’s mouth watered for it as she sat in the front seat watching Marc, who was drinking coffee in one of the
nipa
stalls, beneath strings of drying cuttlefish. They had been stopped for almost an hour along the low shore of a delta tributary, waiting for the ferry. It was nearly noon, and the sun was a flat white haze, as if it had smoldered into the molten pallor of the sky. Irene knew it was dangerous, the compulsion to give parts of herself to Simone, but she could not resist the urge to talk about her feelings for Marc. And Simone of all people would not judge her for
what she was going to say. “I don’t know why, but I always chose men I could live without. Men I wouldn’t miss when they were gone.” She confessed, “I was engaged once, and when he wrote from the Somme to tell me that he had fallen in love with a Parisian girl, I was overwhelmed by how relieved I felt—that I wouldn’t have to be the one to call off our marriage.”

Having yet to ask why Marc was with them, Simone nodded and said, “It can ruin you, wanting someone too much.”

The car’s doors were open in the vain hope of a breeze stirring through, but the air was too heavy to move. The muddy brown river was as motionless as the landscape. Irene thought about how tenderly Louis had helped Simone from the hospital to the car, and how she had slept for a while with her head on his shoulder. But there was also a coolness between them. If they had reconciled, they had not done a tidy job of it, and the effect this problem could have on the expedition concerned Irene. “Is that how you feel about Louis?” she asked.

Simone gazed up the road, where he stood in front of a stall displaying bottles of sun-warmed cola. “That was how I felt about Roger.”

“You loved him more than you loved Louis?”

“It was different. Roger came along when I needed him to. He rescued me from the heartache of my parents’ death. He gave shape to my longing. He taught me how to understand my country in an entirely new way.”

“He beat you.”

“Yes, he did that too. But he had strength. He had conviction. He never would have let me go. But Louis did. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive him for that.”

Seeing no advantage in arguing against Simone’s logic, Irene watched Marc. He was close enough for her to see the dusting of crumbs that had fallen onto his shirt from the baguette he was eating with his coffee, but still, in the newness of her craving for him, he was too far away. She asked, “Was there ever a time with Roger when you didn’t feel fragile?”

“Not a moment. And I’ll be honest with you, Irene, I never felt more alive.” Squinting, Simone cast her gaze out across the river. “
Merde
, if that ferry doesn’t arrive soon, I’m going to crawl out of my skin.”

——

Out in the open of the ferry landing, Irene could not touch Marc the way she wanted to. She could not even look at him the way she wanted to, and she certainly could not ask the things she wanted to ask with Simone and Louis around. The restraint was making her edgy. “It’s hot as hell out here. I have to do something besides smoke. Teach me how to shoot the gun.”

“At anyone in particular?” he asked, tossing a piastre coin beside his empty coffee cup. He surveyed their surroundings, beyond planks of fly-infested boar fat, past a group of women, half-asleep, having abandoned their bamboo poles festooned with trussed, listless chickens. He led her around these obstacles toward the ridgeline of dried mud that ran along the bluff above the sluggish river. His loose shirt and trousers could have been bought in the Chinese quarter in Shanghai. They were so unlike the tailored suits favored by Mr. Simms, and she wondered if this was deliberate, or if he was simply that unlike his father.
His father
. Strange, how easy this was to accept.

As the food shacks fell into the distance, their soft drinks and baskets of shriveled vegetables growing indistinguishable on their counters, Marc put his back to the river and scrutinized a dehydrated sea of low, wiry trees and tufts of woolen scrub. His eyes settled on a lone banana palm a few dozen yards away. “That will be your target. Give me your gun. Do you see the blossom?” he asked, using the pistol to point it out, as if shooting was the only reason they had walked so far from the others.

Irene had not expected him to take her in his arms, but she had hoped, once they were beyond being overheard, that he would say something about last night. Just a word, to bind it securely to this morning. As she spotted the blossom, hanging like a purple pendant from its corrugated vine, she felt herself withdrawing from his nonchalance, and she fought the impulse. She did not want to retreat, not from this man. The day was hot, they were both tired, and they had already declared much to one another, simply by leaving Saigon together. She took the gun back and raised it, surprised by how shaky her grip was.

“You can use both hands,” Marc said.

She laced her fingers tightly and peered over the apex of her clenched fists. The blossom seemed to perch on the tip of the barrel. She asked, “Why don’t you have the same last name?”

Marc wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “You can’t wait until we’re at least beneath a fan?”

“I can’t help myself. You say you know so much about me. I’d like to know about you.”

The caution she had heard in her hotel room crept back into his voice. “You mean about Henry and me?”

“Yes, that’s part of it.”

He tilted Irene’s hands, straightening her aim. “I didn’t even meet Henry until I was six years old.”

The banana blossom quivered over the tip of the pistol. “Why not?”

“Up until then I hadn’t known about my mother’s affair with him. I thought a man named William Rafferty was my father. Then he died, and it turned out he’d gambled everything away. The debt was too much for her. She had no choice, she had to tell Henry about me.”

Irene lowered the gun. “What if she needed Mr. Simms to believe—”