For the Dead (16 page)

She tries to catch Andrew’s eye, but he’s staring at the wall. He seems even less substantial than he had before; it’s as though tiny
bits of him are flaking off and rising into the air, as though he’s dissolving in front of her and in a minute she’ll be able to see through him. She scuffs her foot loudly on the floor, and the man holding her shirt shakes her like a puppy. Miaow coughs, and Andrew’s eyes come to her. She holds them, willing him to understand that he’s to follow her lead.

He glances away, and she thinks,
Look where following me got him
. But she can’t allow that, she can’t allow anything that might make her hesitate. She knows what will happen at Andrew’s apartment.

The fence and the sidewalk. It has to be the fence and the sidewalk.

The feeling comes upon her the same way it used to, when she was on the street. Time almost stops, except for the rhythm of her breath. Her vision sharpens and there’s a sparking in her core, the surge of extra life that always came to her rescue in the old, chaotic days. She’d thought then that it made her—for as long as it lasted—more alive, faster, smarter, than the people who were after her. They didn’t stand a chance.

She hasn’t felt this in a long time.

Andrew is looking at her again, and he seems puzzled.
It’s showing
, she thinks, and she pushes it down, coiling it inside her so it can explode when she needs it. She looks at his eyes, then drops her own eyes to her feet, then repeats the pattern, hoping it means to him what it means to her:
follow me
. But his eyes drift up, probably to the face of the man who is holding her, and then down to the floor again.

Miaow’s silent count has reached 200 by the time the man in the red shirt says, “Now” and tugs on her shirt. She needs Andrew to be ahead, so she stumbles and falls to her knees, and then lags back, limping, as they enter the weeds that surround the hotel, waist-high on her, thigh-high on the man.

Everything looks so
normal
: the sun is high, and dust from the weeds billows into the air and glints yellow in the light. The shade
beneath the trees has bright spots in it where there are holes in the canopy. She can hear traffic noise from two directions: from her left and from the boulevard in front of them, six lanes wide, on the other side of the chain-link fence.

That either will or won’t have a gate.

Miaow prays for the gate to be there.

And sees it. Closed. She can’t tell whether it’s locked, but her pulse accelerates slightly.

A woman walks by on the other side of the fence with a bulging white plastic bag dangling from each hand. Free to keep going, to go home and be with her children, released from school on this sunny Saturday, free to nap or cook or do nothing at all. Free without giving it a thought.

Seeing that she’s looking at the woman, the man hauling them twists the neck of her T-shirt, as though he’s afraid she’ll cry out, then raises the near leg and brings his foot down on her instep.

She yelps and then goes still. No point in fighting him. She could get free, but there’s Andrew to think about.

Cars go by on the other side of the chain-link.

They’re about five meters from the fence now, standing in the weeds with the ruined hotel behind them. Miaow squints at the gate. The stolen U-joint has been replaced with a new one, and a padlock holds it in place.

At the moment she accepts the lock as a joyous certainty, the golden man comes into sight from the left, probably from the spot where the car is waiting at the curb. He gives them a fingers-curled come-ahead sign and then stands there, looking left and right as a couple of teenagers go by on bicycles. The moment their backs are to him, he holds up a single finger and points at Andrew.

The man holding them begins to move, hauling Miaow along, and Miaow pushes the dangling bag behind her so she can get to it without it being visible to the golden man on the other side of the fence. She drags her feet as the three of them wade through the weeds.

The golden man looks left again and gestures for them to stop. One more glance in each direction and he waves them forward. A moment later, they’re at the fence. The man shoves Andrew toward the chain-link, holding him by the hair, and the golden man gestures for Andrew to climb.

But he doesn’t. He shrinks back and then he’s clawing at the man’s hand and screaming for help. The man yanks Andrew back, against his own body, and knees him hard, in the middle of the back, and Andrew sags. The man knees him again, and Miaow slips her hand behind her onto Andrew’s little leather case. Deliberately, giving it one hundred percent of her attention, she unzips it and withdraws the hypodermic, bringing it up to her face and using her teeth to pull the sheath off the needle. As the man wraps the neck of Andrew’s shirt in his hand and lifts him from the ground, Miaow drives the needle deep into the knuckle at the base of the man’s index finger, where it’s knotted around her T-shirt.

The hand snaps open and the man screams hoarsely as Miaow yanks the needle free, and as he bends down, still roaring, to grab her, she aims for his eye but misses, the needle going instead into his cheek and hitting the cheekbone. He screams again and backs away, letting go of both of them and grabbing with both hands at the injury, and as Andrew leaps back, looking stunned and disbelieving, Miaow reaches the man in one leap and buries the needle in the side of the man’s neck.

She grabs Andrew’s hand, and the two of them are running, running the length of the fence to their right, away from the injured man on their side of the fence and the golden man on the far side—but now, six or seven long steps behind them, the golden man is starting to run, too, and Miaow knows he’s faster than they are and she calls to Andrew, “At the fence pole,
go over
,” and she takes her own leap at the fence.

Scaling it faster than she’s ever climbed anything in her life, she feels a quick grasp and jerks her foot away from the man below. He’s left holding her flipflop. She’s free but the golden man is
coming, and she feels the fence vibrate as Andrew hits it and she scurries the rest of the way over and jumps, jarring onto the pavement only a few steps in front of the golden man, and as Andrew tops the fence a couple of meters farther down, she pulls out her iPhone, her fingers covering its distinctive screen, and waves it in the air as she runs, and the golden man instinctively starts after her. Instead of running away from him, she reverses and runs
toward
him, her one bare foot hot on the pavement, sees him stop, off balance and confused, and then, hearing Andrew’s shoes slapping the pavement behind her, going in the other direction, she feints left, as though she’s going to try to get between the golden man and the fence but goes right instead, bolting between two parked cars and into the first traffic lane, just avoiding, by a few inches, being run over by a motorcycle policeman.

D
R.
R
ATT SAYS
, “She’s hopeless.”

He and Rafferty are standing on the sidewalk in front of the apartment house that shelters, temporarily, Rafferty’s latest good deed gone awry. With them is Hwa, the maid who’s been caretaking the addict upstairs.

“She want to go home,” Hwa says.

Hwa is Vietnamese, slender and small-boned, Chinese-featured, with hard, tired eyes, her gray-streaked hair pulled tightly into a no-nonsense pony tail, nothing cute, just an announcement that she declines to put up with any interference from her hair. If there’s a soft side to her, Rafferty hasn’t seen it, and she certainly takes a hard line about her charge, the woman named Neeni for whom he rented and furnished the apartment upstairs.

Neeni is, Rafferty thinks, what’s left when someone who had nothing but beauty is no longer beautiful. She’s a faded photograph, an empty envelope, something that could be blown sideways by a window fan. Dr. Ratt has just come from his third monthly visit to evaluate Neeni’s withdrawal from the mixture of whiskey and codeine-laced cough syrup that she’d lived on for several years before Poke pulled her and Hwa out of a burning house and drove them through a flooded Bangkok toward a different life.

A life Neeni is apparently declining.

“Has she been good?” Dr. Ratt asks Hwa.

“Can’t be bad,” Hwa says. “Nothing here for her to take, and can’t go out. I don’t let. Tranquilizer finish three week ago.”

“She looked quite tranquil,” Dr. Ratt says.

“She lively today,” Hwa says. “Eye open, everything. All she want is go back to village in Laos and start again.” Hwa knows Neeni better than any of them. For years, in Haskell Murphy’s dreadful household, Hwa had made sure Neeni had her medicine at hand, didn’t set fire to things, and kept out of her dangerous husband’s way. For the past seven weeks, on Rafferty’s orders and in exchange for the promise of some of the money Rafferty took from Murphy, she’s been playing nursemaid again.

Dr. Ratt says, “Neural damage. You can only make them misfire for so long before the paths get worn away. A lot of the connections you and I take for granted aren’t there any more. Her brain is an erased blackboard. Some of the paths are still there faintly, some are just gone. If she’s sober for years some of them might come back, but she’ll never be who she was.”

Hwa says, “Wasting time, you wasting time here.”

“Yeah.” Rafferty wipes both hands over his face like someone who’s just waking up. Neeni sucks the energy right out of him; ten minutes with her, and he’s exhausted. “But look,” he says. “Neeni’s probably still got a daughter. Treasure is somewhere in Bangkok. What happens if—”

“What
happen
.” It’s a scoff: Hwa’s lips are curled, the corners pulled down. “Maybe Treasure burn too bad, maybe die somewhere else.”

“I don’t think she was burned,” Rafferty says. “I think Treasure ran straight through that house and into the yard and that room she made in the hedge. At least, I hope so. The hedge wasn’t burned.”

“House—
boom
,” Hwa says.

“Treasure’s little room was fine.” Rafferty glances to Dr. Ratt, looking for support. “You saw it.”

“I did. Of course, the fact that the room was intact doesn’t mean she was in there.”

Head cocked on one side, Hwa says, “You see room?”

“He took me,” Dr. Ratt says.

“Soft heart,” Hwa says to Rafferty, and it doesn’t sound much like a compliment. “But, you know—this girl crazy.”

“A gift from her father. But yeah,” Rafferty says, feeling like he’s admitting something he hasn’t wanted to acknowledge, “it’s hard to imagine her making friends.”

Hwa puts her hands near her ears and makes scrabbling motions with her fingers. “Crazy. If she not dead, maybe live near river. In hole, like animal. Before, at house, she catch things every night. She
baba-bobo
”—Vietnamese slang for “crazy.”

“The issue,” Rafferty says, hearing the total hopelessness of it in his ears, “if she’s alive, I mean, is what happens if we find her. Whether she can be helped. I’m keeping money for her to get help—the money I took from Murphy’s. But the question is, does she still have a mother?”

“
That
woman?” Hwa says, lifting her chin toward the apartment several stories above them. “You see. What you think?”

“But if she goes home, to the village. Maybe you could go—”

“No.” Hwa’s face softens. “Cannot, you know. Cannot help everybody. Neeni will drink. Treasure crazy. Sometime—” She makes a gesture, a fluttering, falling leaf, with one delicate hand. “Must to let go.”

Dr. Ratt says, “She’s right.”

“
I
know she’s right,” Rafferty says. “Fucking hell, I know she’s right. I just hoped
—keep
Neeni here, let Hwa help her, maybe she’ll—”

Hwa says, “No.”

“Right.” Rafferty scuffs his shoe over the pavement. “Can you take her home?”

“Can,” Hwa says. “Then I go my house.”

Rafferty says again, “Right. What about the money?”

“You give me.”

“I mean, for her. I’ve got, I don’t know, a lot that really belongs to her.”

“A little at a time,” Dr. Ratt says. “Give her too much, she’ll be dead in days.”

“I’ll work it out. A hundred a week or something.”

“Give the rest of it away,” Dr. Ratt says. “Give it to Father Bill.” Father Bill Chandler runs a school and shelter for Bangkok’s street children.

“Maybe,” Rafferty says. “But I should keep it for Treasure.” He rattles the five-baht coins in his pockets without even hearing them. “Treasure,” he says. “Who the hell knows.”

“I’
LL SET UP
the money,” Rafferty says after Hwa has gone back upstairs to see whether Neeni is trying to smoke the sofa. “Hwa can make the travel arrangements.”

“Hwa can do just about anything,” Dr. Ratt says. “They should make her prime minister.”

“I had really hoped …” Rafferty’s voice trails off.

“Life goes on,” Dr. Ratt says. “Even when it doesn’t.”

“Speaking of that,” Rafferty says, feeling the lift in his heart, “speaking of life going on, Rose is pregnant.”

“No. What can I say?” Dr. Ratt is not normally a demonstrative man, but he spreads his arms. “Come here.” He hugs Rafferty, American-style, and then lets him go. “Is this her first?”

“Jesus,” Rafferty says. “If it’s not, I don’t know it.”

“I’ll have Nui call her. She’s had three in her spare time. Nui can be her guide. Where’s Rose’s mom?”

“Isaan. They’ve been on the phone all day.”

“Well, until her mom arrives, she can talk to Nui. Nui will love it. I’m so happy for both of you. Does Miaow know?”

“That’s sort of the problem,” Rafferty says.

Dr. Ratt sorts through the ring of keys in his hand. “I’ve been through it. Our first one was six when Nui got pregnant with her
little sister. She went completely nuts, breaking things, threatening to run away.” He chooses a key and pushes a button, and something chirps behind Rafferty.

“What did you do?”

“We made her part of it. Nui didn’t want stretch marks, so Lala got to put lotion on her mother’s stomach. We put her in charge of Nui’s naps. She drew signs to keep me quiet.” He turns to go. “But the most important thing we did was to let Lala name her. That made the baby Lala’s, too.”