A Nail Through the Heart (29 page)

Rose and Miaow are standing there, pale as ghosts in the fluorescent light of the hallway.

“We couldn’t sleep,” Miaow says.

And Rose says, “Neither of us.” She clears her throat. “Could sleep,” she says. Then she adds, “With you here alone.” She has a plastic bag in her hand.

Rafferty wants to say something, but he finds that he can’t. He steps back, inviting them in.

Miaow steps forward, her eyes wide at the ruin of the apartment,
but Rose hesitates, looking down at something beside the door. “Do you have a guest?”

“Where’s Superman?” Miaow asks. She points her chin toward her room. “Is he—”

“We have to talk about Boo,” Rafferty says. He steps forward and rests a hand on her shoulder, and her warmth travels up his arm and straight to his heart. “About all of it. Tomorrow.” Rose has stooped down to pick something up, and when she rises, she has in her hand a pair of shoes—battered, worn out, scuffed, and beaten. The soles flap loose like a clown’s. Shoes, Rafferty thinks, as some of his new happiness drains away, that were probably retrieved from a trash bin and then carefully placed at his door.

“What are these?” Rose asks. “They’re not yours.”

“No,” Rafferty says, the word finding its way around the sudden weight in his chest. “They’re not.” Miaow’s head comes up sharply, and her eyes pierce him.

“Then why are they here?”

“Aaaahhh,” Rafferty says. He drops to his knees and hugs Miaow, and although she stiffens for a moment, she exhales and settles against him and lets her head fall onto his shoulder. He kisses the knife-straight part in her hair and looks back up at Rose. “I guess someone’s decided to go barefoot.”

“Well,” Rose says, bewildered, the shoes dangling from her fingertips. “In that case—” She starts toward the kitchen, toward the trash.

“Wait.” Miaow pushes herself away from Rafferty and goes to Rose, her back straight and her shoulders high. The long braid perfectly bisects her back, as though she has willed it into order. She extends a hand, and after a moment Rose gives her the shoes. Miaow goes to the open door and puts the shoes just outside, touching the edge of the mat. She turns to Rafferty, her face soft and unguarded.

“In case he changes his mind,” she says. She closes the door.

T
his will do until we go to the temple tomorrow,” Rose says, on her knees on the carpet. One by one the items come out of the bag. Sixteen small candles, just clear glass cups about two inches high, into which white paraffin has been poured. Six sticks of incense and six burners. Rose lights four of the sticks, rises, and places them in the corners of the room. Then she places two more, one on either side of the door.

A clear plastic bag full of water, secured by a rubber band. A new bowl, shallow and white except for a lotus painted in very pale green on the bottom. A small ceramic figure of the seated Buddha.

Miaow is asleep, or at least in her room. Rafferty doubts she will sleep well tonight. Wondering about the boy.

“What
will we do until tomorrow, Rose?”

“Ssssssshhhhhhh.” Seated again, she dips a hand into her bag and comes up with a lighter, which she uses to light two of the candles. The light they emit is different from the electric light in the room, calmer and warmer.

“Open the door,” Rose says.

Rafferty says, “The door.”

“There has to be a place,” Rose says, “for her to go.”

“Right,” Rafferty says. “A place for her to go.” He gets up and opens the door to the relative dimness of the hallway.

“You don’t want her here,” Rose says, lighting two more candles. “Believe me.”

“Not to look a gift horse in the mouth or anything, but is this why you came back tonight?”

“Of course it is.” She lights two more candles. “Well, it’s one reason. Turn off the lights. No, wait.” She gets up, bowl in hand, studying the carpet, then stoops to pull aside the throw rug from the kitchen. “Here,” she says. Even from the door, Rafferty can see the scrubbed spot where he tried to wash the last of Madame Wing from his life.

Rose kneels slowly and places the bowl in the center of the spot. “Now,” she says. “The lights.”

Rafferty hits the switch. The candles make pools of light on the carpet and glow softly on Rose’s skin.

“Take two of the candles and put them by the door,” Rose says. “One on each side.” She lights two more and puts them on either side of the scrubbed spot on the carpet, about eighteen inches apart. Rafferty does what he is told, and Rose places two more lighted candles about a foot closer to the door, slightly farther apart than the ones that define the spot.

“In my village,” she says, placing two more candles another foot closer to the door, “every New Year we cleaned the houses.” She lights two more candles and puts them still nearer the door, a bit farther apart. “We shook out the carpets and washed the walls and swept the street.”

“Starting the New Year clean,” Rafferty says.

She places two more candles, then makes a small adjustment in the two she had put down last. Rafferty can’t see any difference, but she cocks her head to one side and studies it, then leaves it alone. “At the end of the day, we lit candles in paper bags and put them along the street and then off across the fields to the forest.”

“And the point was…?”

“It was a path,” she says. All the candles are in place now, illuminating a strip of carpet that begins at the wet spot and gradually widens to the door. “Come here,” she says. She sits on one side of the wet spot and slips a fingernail beneath the rubber band that seals the bag of water. Intent on the task, which she is doing slowly and very deliberately, she lifts her head a fraction of an inch to indicate the place on the opposite side of the spot. “Sit.”

He sits. He can feel the flesh on his legs shrink away from the dampness beneath his knees.

She has worked the rubber band free of the bag now, holding it carefully by the open end so not a drop of water spills out. She lifts her face to his. He can see the tears standing in her eyes.

“We couldn’t leave you alone with her,” she says. “Miaow and I. We both love you. And we know you. We know you’ll just go on stepping over this spot. Waiting for it to dry. And it will never dry. And you won’t know she’s here.”

He wants to say that she’s not here, but all he can really hear is,
We both love you.
He nods his head, uncertain of his voice.

“Tell her you’re sorry,” Rose says.

For a long moment, a moment subdivided by the flickering of the candles, Rafferty isn’t sure he can say it. Then he whispers, “I’m sorry.”

Rose’s eyes never leave his. “Tell her you don’t blame her for the karma that trapped her, that made her do such terrible things. Tell her you know she had light inside her. Tell her you wish her spirit well.”

Rafferty gets through it somehow. When he says he knows she had light inside her, he realizes he is crying.

“Put out your hands,” Rose says. “Over the bowl.”

He does as he’s told, palms up, and she slowly pours the water over them. She puts down the empty bag, picks up the small Buddha, and holds it over her heart. She closes her eyes. “Now tell her she’s free.”

IN THE HALLWAY
outside, Mrs. Pongsiri steps from the elevator and pauses at the open doors. She sees the shoes beside the door, the path
of light, the two people kneeling at the end of it, the water being poured. Then the man, her neighbor Mr. Rafferty, says something, and at the same time the candles flicker as though a window has been opened, and something cold blows against—no, through—Mrs. Pongsiri. She takes a step back, feeling the skin pucker on her arms.

At the end of the path of light, the man and the woman bend toward each other until their foreheads touch. Their eyes are closed.

M
iaow looks up from her plate. “Hell is empty,” she says in English, “and all the devils are here.”

“Hello to you, too,” Rafferty says. He looks at the half-eaten dinner spread across the table. “Thanks for waiting.”

“We were going to,” Rose says in Thai. She puts down her ever-present cup of Nescafé and adds in careful English, “But we are hungry.” She’s been studying English six hours a week, trying to leave bar-girl Thaiglish behind, but the past tense is a problem, since the Thai language lacks it. Then she says to Miaow, in Thai, “What was that you said?”

“It’s from the play,” Miaow says. “The first act. I get to say it.”

Rose says, “What are ‘devils’?”

Over the noise of the restaurant, Miaow launches into an energetic explanation in Thai that involves one of the more baroque Buddhist visions of hell, and Rafferty squeezes past his adopted daughter’s chair to get into the banquette so he can reach under the table and put a proprietary hand on Rose’s leg. She pats his hand and then laces her fingers through his, listening to Miaow, who finally has to pause for breath.

“Not a nice thing to say about Poke,” Rose says.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Rafferty says. “Compared to some of the things Arthit just said about me, it’s a birthday card.”

“He didn’t come back with you?” Rose asks. She glances around the restaurant, an American steakhouse on Silom, as though she’s worried she might have missed him. The mention of Arthit puts her into anxiety mode, as it has for the past eight months, since his wife, Noi, died.

“He wanted to go home,” Rafferty says. “I tried to talk him into joining us, but . . . well, you know. He’s going to get through this alone. If it kills him.”

Miaow says,
“Guys
,” in a world-weary tone that almost makes Rafferty sit up straighter.

Rose apparently doesn’t see anything precocious in the remark. “I wish I knew someone I could introduce him to,” she says. “My girls wouldn’t work.” Rose’s “girls” are former dancers from the Patpong bars who have left the life to work with the agency Rose co-owns, which finds them jobs as housekeepers. And Rose is right, Rafferty thinks; they’d be disastrous matches for Arthit.

“Speaking of your girls,” he says, “you can tell your friend Fon that Toy is probably still running. Arthit scared her silly.”

“Serves her right.” Rose pushes a full water glass toward Miaow and makes a “drink up” gesture. Miaow rolls her eyes but picks up the glass. In keeping with some health advisory she read somewhere, Rose has the two of them drinking more water than they want, although she herself continues to subsist on the instant coffee Rafferty loathes with such intensity. “The little idiot,” she continues. “I’ve never seen Fon so angry. Here she is, slaving in other people’s houses all day,
not
working the bars but still sending money home every month, and her stupid little sister decides to come to the big city and give it a try. Probably thought it was all cell phones and fancy clothes, gold jewelry, going out to dinner with foreign gentlemen. When what it really is, is dancing around dressed in almost nothing and letting fat men grunt on top of you a couple of times every night.”

Miaow darts a look at Rose and then looks away.

“Toy didn’t seem happy,” Rafferty says.

“I’m sure she didn’t,” Rose says. “And to make things worse, she decided to work in an upstairs bar.”

“Why does that matter?” Miaow asks. “What happens in upstairs bars?”

Rafferty says, “Nothing that you need to—”

Rose says, “Upstairs the girls dance naked.”

Miaow says, “Oh.” For at least the third time since Rafferty sat down, she runs her hand through her hair, which is now chopped to within four inches of her scalp and bleached a sort of margarine yellow with a slight orange cast at the roots, the stubborn remnant of the midnight black that’s her natural color. The haircut cost all of Miaow’s allowance for five weeks and looks like it was done with a broken glass. She came home with it ten days ago and announced that it was for the play, her school’s production of Shakespeare’s
The Tempest,
in which she’s been cast as the spirit Ariel. Ever since the time, four years earlier, that Rafferty had first seen her selling chewing gum on a Patpong sidewalk, she’d worn her hair severely parted in the center and pasted down, a hairstyle he’d come to think of as unchangeable, quintessentially Miaow. And now she looks, he privately thinks, like a very short Sid Vicious. He’s still startled every time he sees her. She gives her new hair a tug and says to Rose, “Why would they want to dance naked?”

Rose says, “Money. They get paid a little more.”

Miaow absorbs it for a moment. “You never did that.” It’s not a question, but it is.

“I didn’t have to,” Rose says. “I was beautiful.”

“You still are,” Rafferty says.

Rose leans in his direction and says, “What did you say?”

“I said—”

“Oh, I heard you.” She shakes her head. “I’m ashamed for wanting to hear it again. Poor, dumb little Toy.”

“She believed every word Arthit said. She’ll probably run all the way to the train station.”

“Just like my sister, Lek, when you and Arthit chased her away,” Rose says.

Rafferty says, “We’re thinking of opening a business.”

“I was that innocent,” Rose says. Her eyes roam the restaurant, as though she’s surprised to find herself there. “When I first came down to Bangkok, I believed everything. I had no idea how things worked. If it hadn’t been for Fon, I don’t know what would have happened to me. I was frightened, I was sad, I was stupid. I did everything anyone told me to do. A girl would take me over to a customer—a customer who’d
asked
for me—and then she’d tell me I owed her ten percent for introducing me. Girls borrowed money they never paid back. One of them stole my shoes, and I had to go out barefoot and buy some flip-flops on the sidewalk. I stepped on a burning cigarette butt.”

Miaow says, “I did that, too, once.”

“And you were just a kid,” Rafferty says. “Both of you.”

“I was seventeen,” Rose says. “And that’s
village
seventeen, about as sophisticated as a Bangkok ten-year-old. I remember the first time I went shopping with my own money. I’d never owned anything except T-shirts and shorts, and those were secondhand. And here I was, in Bangkok, on my own, with money in my pockets, more money than I’d ever had in my life. And there were stores
everywhere.
I bought toys, stuffed animals, little plastic pins that lit up. A Santa hat, a ring with a big red plastic jewel in it that I thought looked like a ruby, and a bracelet made of little plastic fruit. The most terrible things—blouses with big buttons and hearts all over them, teddy-bear hair ornaments, brand-new, stiff, dark blue jeans that were loose and too short to be stylish. I was so proud of them. I got all dressed up to go to the bar that night, and the girls just laughed. Everybody except Fon. Well, she laughed a little, but not the same way. She’s the one who taught me that you were supposed to spend ten times as much money for a pair of jeans that look like a whole village wore them for a year and that are so long you’re walking on the cuffs. That you have to wear real rubies if you’re a Bangkok girl. I was a hick. I didn’t fit in at all. And some of the girls just hated me because I stood out.”

“You certainly stood out when I came in,” Rafferty says. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Miaow fidget. For the past eight or nine months, Rose’s past, which she’d previously taken for granted as part of the family landscape, has become an object of both interest and a certain amount of embarrassment. In the relatively exclusive private international school Miaow now attends, a former street child whose adopted mother was a prostitute is conspicuous in all the wrong ways. Eight months ago she’d had Rose lighten her hair to a dark red, and she’d bought skin-lightening cream. Next was her name. She’s already told them that the play’s program will inform the audience that Ariel is played by Mia Rafferty.

Rafferty has to face the fact that his daughter is turning into a petit bourgeois. Surrounded every day at school by kids from middle-class and upper-middle-class families from all over the world, Miaow has been looking for the magic that would transform her into one of them. And she seems to hope that the play will help her make the transition.

“Sir?”

Rafferty looks up to see a waiter, maybe eighteen years old, with a carefully trained flop of reddish hair over his forehead, fine high cheekbones, and a waist narrower than Scarlett O’Hara’s. His eyes go to Miaow’s hair, widen for a split second, and then bounce back to Rafferty.

“Do you need a menu?”

“No,” Rafferty says. “Miaow, what did you have?” Miaow is more a red-meat expert than Rose, who thinks all beef should be cooked gray the whole way through, and then cooked again. And served to someone else.

“The rib eye,” Miaow says, pushing the remains toward him for inspection, although there’s not much left. “It was good.”

“The same,” Rafferty says to the waiter. “Medium rare. With some french fries. Cook the french fries until they scream.”

The waiter says, “Sorry?”

“I want them very crisp. Burned, even. And a Singha.”

“Rib eye medium rare and a Singha, and french fries that scream,” the waiter says. His English is much better than Rafferty expected it to be, yet another sign of the ways in which Bangkok is changing. When he first got here, most people’s English was rudimentary at best. “Do you want them to scream in French?”

“If you can arrange it, I’d like them to scream
‘Sacre bleu.
’ ”

“Of course, sir. Singha, coming up.” He leaves.

Watching him go, Miaow says, “He’s cute.”

“He’s an old man,” Rafferty says.

“He liked your hair,” Rose says. For the first couple of days, she’d looked at Miaow’s blond chop with horror, but lately her gaze has grown speculative.

Rafferty says, “Don’t even think about it.”

Rose puts both hands at the nape of her neck and lifts the long, heavy fall of hair, then lets it drop again. “Do you have any idea how long all this takes to dry?”

“To the second. I’ve spent some of my happiest hours waiting for it to dry.”

“Look at Miaow,” Rose says. “She washes it, dries it with a towel, and then messes it up with her fingers. How long, Miaow?”

“Three or four minutes,” Miaow says. “But then I have to keep messing it up all day.”

“Of course,” Rose says, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“It has to be messed up
right,
” Miaow says.

Rafferty says, with some nostalgia, “It’s amazing how your part’s disappeared.”

“It hasn’t,” Miaow says. “That’s why I have to keep messing it up. Andy says it’s—”

Whatever Andy said it was, Miaow decides not to share it. She clamps her mouth closed and starts pushing around the remnant of her steak.

“Who’s Andy?” Rafferty says, exchanging a glance with Rose.

“This guy,” Miaow says. Nobody says anything, so she adds, “He’s in the play.”

“When the play’s over—” Rafferty begins.

“No.” Miaow ruffles her hair. “I won’t keep it blond, but I’m not going to start parting it again. I looked like a baby.” As long as she’s ruffling it, she grabs a tuft and tugs, as though she’s hoping to get another half inch of growth. “What do you think about it for the play?”

“I think it’s great,” Rafferty says truthfully. “For the play.”

“Since Ariel’s sort of a he,” Miaow says.

“I guess so,” Rafferty says. As the only professional writer among the school’s parent population, he’d been asked by Mrs. Shin, the Korean drama teacher who’s directing the play, to cut it down to seventy minutes or so, mainly to get the roles to a length the kids could memorize. As a result he’s spent several months immersed in
The Tempest.
“But Ariel’s a spirit, not a person,” he says, “so I think it’s right for the character to be, you know, not really a girl or a boy. The costume and the hair—I think they’re going to be great.”

“Caliban, though,” Miaow says, “Caliban has to be a boy, right? Even though he’s kind of magic, too. Because he tried to mess around with Miranda, and Prospero is pissed—I mean, angry—at him.”

“Miaow,”
Rose snaps.

“Sorry,” Miaow says. “The kids all talk English, and they say that all the time.”

“Well,
you
don’t.”

Miaow changes the subject, asking Rafferty, “What’s an anagram?”

“It’s a word that has the same letters as another word but in a different order. Like ‘eat’ and ‘ate.�� Or ‘life’ and ‘file.’ ” Rafferty watches Miaow visualize the words in her head and move the letters around. “Or ‘vile’ and ‘live’ and ‘evil.’ Is this about Caliban?”

“Yes. Mrs. Shin says it’s an anagram for . . . for—”

“ ‘Cannibal,’ ” Rafferty says. “It isn’t exactly, not the way we spell it now. But the Elizabethans were kind of adventurous about spelling.”

“But if he meant ‘cannibal,’ it means he didn’t like Caliban, right?” Miaow says.

“When Shakespeare wrote the play, new kinds of people were being discovered all the time,” Rafferty says. “There were all sorts of ideas about them. Some Europeans didn’t think the savages, as they called them, were human. The English were snobs, and as you know, a snob is someone who dislikes anyone who’s not like him.” He’s trying clumsily to make a point about Miaow’s school, but it sails past her. “Mrs. Shin is interpreting the play so it’s about colonialism. Remember, we talked about interpretation, how people at different times find different meanings in Shakespeare’s work. From a modern point of view—one point of view anyway—Caliban is the original inhabitant of the island, and whether he’s evil or not—”

Rose drops her fork with a clatter on top of her cup, which tips over and spreads coffee across the tablecloth.

A man’s deep voice says, “Well, well.
Rosie.
”

Rafferty looks up to see a tall, very solid-looking white man looming over their table. He’s at least six-two, mannequin handsome, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, with a jawline so square it looks like a caricature. His pale hair is perhaps half an inch long and has been allowed to grow in front of his ears in squared-off sideburns. It looks like a helmet.