War Baby (26 page)

‘I can’t find anything physically wrong with her,’ Dr. Clooney said. ‘It’s probably psychosomatic.’

The blinds in Clooney’s surgery in the Whaler’s Reach Medical Centre were drawn against a grey afternoon shower. A fluorescent tube buzzed overhead. Clooney leaned back in his chair, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, and tapped the end of his fountain pen on his desk.

He consulted the file in front of him. ‘When you first brought her to see me she was undernourished and well below average height for her age. We treated her for lice, intestinal worms and a tropical ulcer. Now she’s five foot four inches tall and almost ninety-five pounds. She’ll never play women’s basketball and I doubt if she’ll ever need the Scarsdale Diet, but overall she’s in pretty good physical shape. I’d say you’ve done a good job.’

‘I thought that, too, until about a month ago.’

‘Like I said, I can’t find anything really wrong with her.’

‘She wouldn’t get out of bed all last week. She said she was too sick to go to school. This week I made her go. But I don’t know if all this tough love is doing any good. As soon as she gets home she throws herself in front of the television and doesn’t move.’

‘Sounds like my daughter.’

‘I’m not the only one who’s noticed a change. Her teacher rang me last week to ask me if there was something wrong. On her final assignment last term she got an A in English, her first ever. The last assignment she handed in she got C minus. I tried to talk to her about it. She screamed at me, told me I was pushing her too hard, that I was ashamed of her because she was Asian. She’s turned into a complete stranger.’

Clooney took off his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘I don’t know what to say to you. You’ve crossed a mountain range with this kid, and now you’re panicking because you’ve taken a couple of steps back. When you got Jenny, you had no idea what her life experience had been before she came to you.’

‘I think I had a better idea than most.’

Clooney shrugged his shoulders. ‘Within reason.’

‘I don’t understand this. Everything’s been going so well. I thought she was doing okay.’

‘I can give you a referral if you want.’

‘A referral?’

‘A therapist.’

‘I was hoping you’d find something physical - make it easy for me.’

‘We can wait for the results of the blood tests, there might be something. But I think you’ve already made up your mind what the problem is. Haven’t you?’

Clooney was right. She had settled into her new home and her new school so fast he thought it was all going to be so easy. But he had known in his heart that it would take more than a few good meals and a private tutor. Logic dictated that. Here was a child accustomed to stealing food and sleeping in the street; after a month at Lincoln Cove she was washing down her vitamins with a glass of water every morning, then running for the school bus in her new Reebok joggers; a girl who had survived alone for months on a deserted island reef was suddenly unable to run an errand to the shops without her Walkman.

She had adapted too far, too fast. ‘I’ll take the referral and talk to Jenny about it.’

‘Sure,’ Clooney said. ‘Good luck.’

* * *

Odile was drowning.

Jenny was in the aluminum runabout that Webb used to go fishing. She sat at the stern, one hand on the throttle of the outboard. She saw her mother over the troughs in the waves, one hand reaching skywards. She was calling out to her, but the words were carried away on the wind. She twisted the throttle as far as she could but the little boat could not go any faster and she knew she would not reach her in time. She disappeared under the cold, grey waters of the cove.

She woke as the rain hurled another flurry of rain at the window. ‘Mother,’ she whispered.

* * *

Webb stood in the doorway. ‘Time to go to school.’

‘I’m sick.’

‘Dr Clooney says there’s nothing wrong with you. Come on, get up.’

Jenny pulled the covers over her head and turned her face to the wall. ‘Leave me alone.’

‘What is it? If there’s something wrong you can talk to me about it.’

‘I’m sick. My head hurts.’

Webb looked around the bedroom. Over the last few weeks the posters of Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen had come down, had been replaced with pictures of Vietnam painstakingly cut from magazines, scenes of a pastoral Asia she could not possibly remember, an idealized version of her heritage; peasants in straw
non las
laboring in rice fields; water buffalo hauling wooden ploughs; incense burning at a Buddhist altar; pavement hawkers at a market; bright oranges, rambutan, a wok sizzling with noodles and shrimp.

‘You have to go to school today.’

‘What’s the point? So I can grow up to be a blonde homecoming queen?’

‘Homecoming queens? Is that what this is about?’

No answer.

He grabbed the covers and pulled them off the bed. Jenny lay in a foetal position in her T-shirt. ‘You want me to get real sick and die? Okay, I’ll lie here till I freeze to death!’

‘You’re not going to freeze to death because it’s summer. And you’re not going to lie there because you’re going to school.’

‘Screw you,’ she said.

Webb bit back his anger. ‘Am I supposed to be impressed by your new command of the language?’

‘Screw you double.’

He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her off the bed. She rolled on to the floor, screaming, covering her head with her hands. ‘That’s it, go on, beat me. You’re just like the communists! Go on, make me do what you want!’

‘You can’t lie here in bed all day!’

‘Why not?’

‘You didn’t get through everything you’ve been through just to lie here and turn into a vegetable! Is that what your mother wanted for you? Is it?’

‘Don’t talk about my mother, okay? You didn’t know my mother! Don’t you talk about her!’

Maybe I did know her.
He nearly said the words aloud but stopped himself.

He bent down, his face inches from hers. ‘Okay, you want it to be like Vietnam, we’ll make it like Vietnam. You want to eat, you work for it. You go to school, I feed you. You stay at home, you starve. No food, no water, nothing.’ There were some jays and gulls squabbling where the ragged lawn met the rocks. ‘If you get really desperate you can go back to eating birds. Is that what you want?’

‘I don’t care!’

He was getting nowhere with her. He went out, slamming the door behind him. He leaned against the wall, closed his eyes, let the anger drain out of him. Oh, that was a great way to handle things. What was needed was calm, assertive, rational; instead he had turned it into a shouting match, then a wrestling match, and had finally delivered an ultimatum that would be impossible to enforce. Brilliant parenting.

He sat at the breakfast bar staring gloomily into his coffee. The New York Times lay on the counter top: it seemed the Russians had found their own Vietnam; and the generals in the Pentagon had evidently enjoyed their Saigon adventures so much they were looking to repeat the experience in Central America. He thought of the old Chinese curse:
May you live through interesting times.

He heard a noise in the hall and looked up. Jenny had on her windcheater, jeans and Reeboks, and her schoolbag was slung over her right shoulder.

‘Want some breakfast?’ he said.

She shook her head.

‘You only have to starve if you don’t go to school.’

‘I’ll have a seagull at recess.’

He took the car keys from the hook beside the refrigerator. As an afterthought he went to the pantry, found a green chili, bit into it. He held out the other half for her.

She shook her head. ‘You win,’ she said.

She trailed out of the door to the jeep. He heard the passenger door slam. Yeah, he thought.
You win.

Webb sat in front of his PC, his desk cluttered with the research materials for his latest book; his old notebooks, the pages stained with dust and sweat; some dog-eared transcripts of interviews; piles of black and white glossies; half a dozen soft and hardcover books, sections marked with tom strips of paper; the detritus of the three months he had spent in El Salvador. There was a pair of half-moon spectacles perched on the end of his nose, another tactical retreat in the face of middle age.

The phone/fax rang. He snatched up the receiver and cradled it on his shoulder, his attention still focused on the computer screen. ‘Webb.’

‘Hugh, this is Joe Norrish.’

‘Everything okay, Joe?’ Norrish was the local police sergeant; he had met him a few times at summer barbecues. He was a mountain of a man who said very little, but by all accounts was a steady cop.

‘Hugh, we got ourselves a problem here. I’m down at the McVeigh’s 7-11 on Main Street. Can you come down?’

‘What’s this about, Joe?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it on the phone, but it’s your kid. Old Man McVeigh caught her shoplifting.’

* * *

McVeigh’s office was at the back of the shop. The desk was cluttered with all the usual small business junk - an adding machine, account books, receipts on a bill spike, hard-backed ledgers, invoice books. There were phone numbers scrawled on a whiteboard on the wall. A calendar, emblazoned with the name of the local Shell gas station, was tacked under an ancient aerial photograph of Lincoln Cove.

Jenny sat in a wooden chair behind the desk, her hands between her knees, staring at the floor. Joe and Old Man McVeigh stood in the doorway, talking in whispers.

As Webb walked in, Norrish nodded and shut the door.

‘What happened?’

McVeigh looked uncomfortable. Webb did not know the McVeighs; he did most of his grocery shopping at the supermarket in the Whaler’s Reach shopping mall.

‘I was watching her from behind the counter, in the mirrors,’ McVeigh said. ‘I saw her putting some candy in her pocket.’ He didn’t look at Webb, kept his eyes on Norrish. ‘I was suspicious from the moment she walked in, her being ... you know, Asian and everything. No disrespect, but you know what I mean.’

Jenny pooped a wad of gum but did not look up.

‘She tried to walk out without paying so I shouted at her to stop. Just then Mr. Ross from out Bayview walked in and he heard me shouting and he just kind of grabbed her. When I asked to look in her jacket I found three packets of M&Ms, a can of Coke and five goddamn packets of Marlboro.’

He glared at Webb.

‘I’m very sorry, Mr McVeigh. This kind of thing has never happened before.’ He looked at Norrish. ‘Is she going to be charged?’

Norrish scratched his head. ‘Hell, Hugh, we don’t want to do that. I’ve spoken with Joe here and I don’t think we need to go no further with this.’ Webb glanced at McVeigh and realized this was more Norrish’s good sense than the old man’s. ‘Mr. McVeigh here got his goods back. I’d like to get this sorted out between ourselves if we can.’

‘I appreciate that,’ Webb said.

‘I’d better get back and help Cloris in the shop,’ McVeigh said, and he went out.

Jenny had still not said a word.

Webb crouched down so that he was on her level. ‘Jenny. What’s going on?’

‘I don’t know. I never got caught in Saigon. Guess I must be out of practice.’

He looked up at Norrish, who raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.

‘Why aren’t you at school?’

‘I told you I didn’t want to go but you said you would starve me out if I stayed home. So I didn’t have a choice, right?’

He ran a hand over his face. Great, just great.

Norrish opened the door. ‘Maybe you two ought to sort this thing out at home. Now, I’ve made it clear to the young lady that something like this can’t happen again. I’m sure you understand, Hugh. Once, well, it’s kind of a trivial thing and I’d just as soon forget all about it. But a second time, and we have to start due process.’

‘I understand that, and I appreciate everything you’ve done.’ He took Jenny’s arm. ‘Let’s go. Thanks again, Joe.’

He led her through the shop to the jeep parked at the kerb outside. She got in the passenger seat, put her hands in her jeans and stared straight ahead. A refugee with attitude, Webb thought.

They did not speak in the car. When they got home she tried to go to her room but Webb grabbed her arm and led her out to the deck. It was a beautiful morning, bright and blue. ‘You want to tell me what all that was about?’

She shrugged, her face a sullen mask. He wondered what had happened to the funny teenager who had shown him how to make spring rolls in the kitchen a few weeks before. ‘Please, Jenny, I’m just trying to understand.’

‘Nothing to understand, okay?’

‘How many times have you jumped school like this?’

‘Who’s counting?’

‘Humour me. A rough guess.’

She pretended to think. ‘Three. Four.’

‘And what do you do? You spend your whole time shoplifting? If I go in your room right now and check the shelves, is there a stack of VCRs and stolen TVs going to fall on my head?’

‘No, I put them under the bed where they can’t hurt nobody.’

Christ, he thought. She hates you, and you don’t even know why. ‘What the hell’s wrong with you? I got you out of that camp, I fed you, I clothed you, I gave you a place to belong, I gave you an education. Is this how you repay me?’

‘I got to be grateful to you forever? Well, fuck you!’

He had never heard her swear before. It took his breath away. ‘No, you haven’t got to be grateful to me forever,’ he said, as calmly as he could. ‘Just once would be fine.’

‘Oh, you’re a really big guy, all right, you saved the poor little gook girl, the freak who ate seagulls! That’s what you want to hear, right?’

‘You’d rather I left you on U-5?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Easy to say now, isn’t it?’

‘Just leave me alone, okay. I don’t need any of this shit anymore.’

Webb stood up, picked up his canvas director’s chair and threw it over the rail onto the lawn. Afterwards he felt stupid. It was something a child would do. But he felt better.

‘God, you really are a piece of work,’ he said. He took deep breaths, trying to calm down. No one had made him this angry, ever. ‘Your mother would be real proud of you, wouldn’t she?’

‘Don’t talk about my mother! You didn’t know her! Don’t tell me what she is thinking!’

This was not going to get either of them anywhere. ‘I’ve tried really hard to love you,’ he said, as gently as he could. ‘And you know something? I succeeded. You’re not a stranger to me anymore, you’re not some freaky survivor. You’re my daughter. That’s the only way I think of you. So you go right ahead, you sleep all day for the rest of your life if you want, hold up 7-11’s from here to San Francisco with sub-machine guns, I don’t care. Hey, you’re a refugee, right, the world owes you? But I’ll tell you something else. It doesn’t matter what you do, I’m still going to love you. Whatever happens. I just wish you would cut me the same deal.’

Having said his piece, he left her sitting on the deck.

Stealing M&Ms. Jesus.

She didn’t even like M&Ms.

* * *

Yeah, you should be grateful, she thought.

Everyone at school, everyone in the whole town, treats me like I should be grateful, like I should spend my whole life thanking them because they were lucky enough to be born here. They think they’re so special being nice to a little gook orphan.

Uncle was right. When she had first seen him at Puerto Princesa, she had prayed that he would bring her to America with him, the golden place where her mother had told her she would find freedom. She could not count the days she had spent dreaming of escaping Saigon, getting away from the soldiers, the police, the communists. For the first time in her life she had a roof over her head, she had enough to eat, she was safe.

She was alive and Mother was dead. How was she supposed to forgive herself for that?