The Map of Lost Memories (40 page)

Midnight
.

Thunder surged down from the eaves. “Go,” Xa insisted, grabbing her wrist and dragging her aside as the storm of bats rushed from the entrance and into the night, shattering like black raindrops in the shadows above the trees.

As Irene lay in the dark, waiting for midnight, the first of the rain dropped like pebbles onto the bowed canvas roof. The storm that followed shook the tent as if it were a raft in a typhoon on an open sea. She prayed that it would not pass too quickly. If she could hear nothing beneath its thunder, not even Louis’s snoring, then maybe they would not hear her leave the tent. The blackness was impenetrable, and each time she looked at the watch that Mr. Simms had given to her in Stung Treng, she was cautious, fixing a shelter under layers of clothing and a blanket before holding her flashlight to the jeweled face. Finally, it was 11:55. For what felt like the hundredth time, she checked that the two keys were around her neck and that the carnelian bracelet circled her wrist.

She felt as large and loud as an elephant as she inched her way blindly around the others, along the edge of the tent. She squeezed through the door flap quickly, before a gust of wet air could wake anyone. She was thankful for the sheer exhaustion they all shared, the debilitating alloy of emotional and physical fatigue. Simone had finished one gin-tonic before passing out on her cot, and Louis and Marc had soon followed. Adrenaline was the only thing keeping Irene awake. She felt punch-drunk as she stood outside, hurriedly dragging on her flannel coat and oilcloth poncho.

As she brushed against the tent, a runnel of water poured over the awning. Instantly, her boots were soaked through. Too late, she remembered her hat. Rain streamed down her face as she shielded her eyes with the flat of her hand, peering into the waterlogged darkness until she was able to see a blurry flickering. Anchored in the tide of rainfall, a small figure held a torch, its flame outlining the shell of an umbrella. Irene stepped into the seabed of the storm, and with the ground sucking at her boots, she plodded toward the light. When she reached it, she found Kiri waiting for her.

Five years old and sent out alone into the night. His bare, scrawny arms were goose-bumped with cold, but he was grinning, the impish, ecstatic grin of a boy who has at last been invited to play with the older children. His torch was crafted from burning pitch stuck to the end of a stalk of bamboo. He handed Irene an umbrella of her own. It was slick with a thick coat of oil to keep water from leaking through. The sound of raindrops bounding off it made her feel as if she were inside a tom-tom. She offered the boy her flashlight, and he snatched it from her. Flinging his torch into the mud, he started toward the ravine.

The center of the bridge was indiscernible in the torrent. For a moment she thought he might try to cross it. Horrified, she grabbed his arm to jerk him back, but he was only squinting around. Squirming free, he squatted on his haunches beneath the canopy of a tree. He patted the ground. She joined him to wait out the deafening rain. She had been grateful for it in the tent, but she now cursed it for causing yet another delay.

Beneath her poncho, she twisted out of her coat, which she discovered was not hers but Louis’s. After emptying its pockets of bent cigarettes and
a sterling hip flask, she gave it to Kiri. He put it on eagerly, although she had a feeling it was more for novelty than for warmth. He looked tinier than ever, sunk within the collar, his arms lost in the sleeves.

As Irene sat with Kiri, she wondered if the child had been sent by his father, to prove that he could be useful to her. She wondered what Kiri knew about his mission, what Xa had told him and what Xa knew, and if either could even comprehend the whole fantastic story if she were able to articulate it to them. There was a man, very old and sick, who’d sent her halfway around the world in order to give her this night. A night that had somehow become entrusted to a five-year-old. She let Kiri hold the pocket watch, and his eyes widened at the fierceness of the tiger and the terror of the horse. Marc had taught him to whistle lively military tunes, and as they waited out the storm, he accompanied it with a reedy version of Sousa’s
Gladiator
march.

Gradually, the rain eased. When it was penetrable, Irene stood. The flashlight’s battery was winding down, its shine little more than a flush of light, but the landscape was growing visible as the clouds drifted downwind. A clear, pale nocturnal light laid a course over the slats of the bridge. Kiri giggled as he slipped and slid across. With the shimmering treetops below her, Irene walked on the edge of the night.

Beneath the star-filled sky, the temple was no longer a ruin. It was not destroyed by nature or trampled down by time. Dusted in a fine talc of moonlight, the guardian
nagas
arched proudly toward the sky. There was a sugared luster to the rain-soaked surface of the walls and the molten roots of the strangler figs. But as she stopped at the end of the causeway, it was the flames that entranced her, torches blazing around the open platform of the dance pavilion. The
apsaras
seemed to have come to life, their arms swaying with the motion of some long-ago song. The smell of burning eucalyptus filled the air, mingling with the grassy aftermath of the rain. At the bottom of the pavilion’s stairs, Kiri stared up at Clothilde waiting on a stone bench, wrapped in a thick blanket.

Irene approached and sat down beside her. She asked, “Are you going to take me to the scrolls?”

“I presume so, but I don’t know for sure. This is for you.” Clothilde held out a cloth bag. “He must love you very much to go to all this effort.”

How loyal Clothilde had been. Irene said, “He must love you very much to trust you with this.”

“I happened to be a woman for sale at the right time at the right price.” This was said without bitterness. “I still have more left to do tonight. I will see you soon.” Before Irene could ask any more questions, Clothilde walked away, farther into the temple’s tree-shrouded shadows, beyond the torches’ tenuous reach.

Kiri’s eyes moved back and forth between the women. Should he follow Clothilde, or should he stay with Irene and see what was in the bag made of green Chinese brocade? Irene unhooked the buffalo bone toggle, and as she reached in, the boy’s curiosity trapped him. He came to her side and watched eagerly as she took out a metal box. It was too small to contain the scrolls, but it made her smile. “I remember this,” she said, running her fingers over the pair of overlapping brass locks. “He showed it to me when I was a girl.”

Indifferent to the language barrier, Kiri nodded intently.

“This is called a puzzle lock.” From around her neck she removed the chain that contained the two keys. “Here, hold this for me.” She gave the box to the boy, who took it solemnly, as if he understood how important this moment was. “These are pin tumbler locks, but they’re special. The keys won’t work unless you know the code. What a risk! What faith! He told it to me almost twenty years ago. What if I’d forgotten? But I haven’t forgotten. He knew I wouldn’t.”

Her chest tightened with happiness. She rolled the dials into position. 1. 8. 5. 7. The year of Mr. Simms’s birth. She fitted the first key into its keyhole, and the second into the other. With Kiri gripping the box to hold it steady, she rotated both keys at the same time. The lock clicked. The shackle snapped free.

Unable to resist, Kiri tore back the lid. His eyes moved quizzically from the book inside to Irene. It was no bigger than her hand. It had a cover of watered silk, and in the center “Diary” had been painted in elegant script. A page was marked with a stiff square of paper, and as she opened the book, she realized it was a photograph. She saw the back of it first. Penned in Mr. Simms’s hand, the same hand that had written “Midnight” on the note from Xa, were the words “Sarah and Irene, 1901.”

Turning it over, she whispered to Kiri, “I was the same age in this picture as you are now.”

But when he found that the box contained no genie or king’s crown, or any of the other magical things he might have hoped were inside, Kiri’s quicksilver attention strayed, back to the pocket watch, which he began to dismantle into a pile of springs and metal bits.

Irene had not seen her mother’s face in such a long time, and she was stunned by how fresh the shock of death could feel, decades after the fact of it. Sarah had been nearing thirty when Irene was born, and so in this photograph she was only a few years older than Irene was now. The girl—
me
, Irene thought, disoriented by this new and unexpected vision of her past self—clung to her mother’s skirt as if she would never let go.

Sadness rose within Irene, filling her, and she knew that to read the diary would be to drown in heartache. She also knew that she had no choice. She wanted no other choice. Steeling herself, she looked at the page marked by the photograph. At the top left was half a paragraph continued from the previous page.

It was not “our scroll” that caught Irene off guard. After everything she had been through on her journey, after everything she had discovered, this—her mother’s involvement with the history of the Khmer—felt fated. It was her mother’s voice that unnerved her, the voice that had always sounded hoarse,
from talking so much
, Irene’s father used to tease. As her eyes moved over the sentences, Irene was not reading her mother’s tale but rather listening to it, the words so distinct it seemed inconceivable that Kiri did not hear them too.

Irene was startled by Kiri impatiently tapping on her boot. He was grinning at a precarious tower he had built out of the watch pieces, eager for her approval. She smiled back at him and then looked out at the temple yard, half-expecting to see her mother walking across the grass. But the spell of her mother’s story had been broken, and only the shadows of old stones inhabited the grounds. Irene was confused, but scanning back through the words she had just read did not help clarify the mystery her mother’s story presented. She had written about a library filled with palm-leaf books, not a sanctuary containing ten copper scrolls. Irene did not understand and anxiously resumed reading.

Irene glanced from the diary to the strand of carnelian beads around her own wrist and then quickly read on.