Nowhere Girl

For my mother

For the first time in days, I hear voices. I'm curled over on myself, pressed into my cramped hiding spot, clinging to the dark like it's a life jacket.

The voices move closer.

They'll pass by, like they have before. They'll go somewhere else. They have to.

But they don't.

Laughter roars just above me, and through a chink in the tarp I see dirty gray running shoes move closer. I push myself tighter into a ball. They don't know I'm here; maybe they won't see me. Then the cover is ripped away and everything moves very fast: a roar of frigid air, a blinding wash of light, men's voices raised in shock and alarm.

I've been discovered.

Just as quickly, the tarp falls back on top of me. I am alone with my terror. The voices mutter to each other, growing louder and harder and fiercer.

They were caught off guard, but they'll soon decide what to do. They'll rip away the cover for good this time—and then what?

My heart is pounding pounding pounding in my chest, so loud I can hardly hear the splash of waves outside. Everything around me blurs. I need something familiar, something I know. The bars! Where are they? The bars will protect me. If only I could find them …

But of course I can't. My prison bars are gone, far away with Mama and all the rest of my past.

It's no fairy tale, this life of mine. It's no dream. I'm just an ordinary girl born into a web of secrets, trying to unravel it strand by strand. Trying, somehow, to find my way out.

It's been a long road to bring me here, to this pallet, seconds away from discovery and capture. And has it been worth it?

I close my eyes and I am there, living those memories like it's the first time.

P
ART  
I

Departure

1

There's a tree that grows just outside the prison compound—a twisted old thing, curled into itself, bark into leaf into hard-packed ground. A tree like that's got character, I think to myself, looking out at it through my bars. On nights like this I can see it clearly, all craggy and hunched over, backlit by the fat moon. That tree probably started out smooth and straight and proud, one day so long ago. But then something went wrong, something inside the tree or maybe outside got it growing the wrong way. And the tree started to bend and twist, to turn over into itself. Maybe becoming an inside-out stump was the only way it could survive.

Surviving. Is that what I'm doing?

I look around the tiny cell where I've lived my whole life. In her bunk, Bibi lies flat on her back, snoring loudly. Jeanne has her hands bunched in tight fists, wary even in sleep. My cot is on the floor, next to Mama's bunk. Her bunk that is still empty, almost three months later.

Why am I still here? Every day Chief Warden Kanya says, “Tomorrow, I am calling the American embassy. Shameful, a young girl wasting away in a place like this!” And every day I beg her to wait just one more. Give me a little more time, I tell her. I need to prepare myself to face the world. Figure out what I'm going to do once I get out there.

And what I don't say is that truthfully, I do not want her to call the embassy at all. If Mama taught me nothing else, she taught me this: Keep your head low. Stay out of sight. Do not get involved with the outside world. Of course, I can't say any of this to Chief Warden Kanya. There is so much that she does not know. There is so much that
I
do not know.

But the days pass, and I know I will need to act soon.

My eyes flick back to the window. The tree looks like a lumpy, black paper cutout against the hot white moon. And for some reason I keep wondering: if someone had been there with water and care, if someone had come to fight off the pests, would that tree have grown up clean and straight?

And if so, would it have been better off? Or do all those gnarls show the tree's strength? Are they evidence of a life wasted or a life lived full?

I decide that I love that tree more than anything else in the world.

And with that I make up my mind: I've had enough of waiting. Chief Warden has bent the rules for me as long as she can. If I don't act soon, she will call the embassy despite my protests. Mama's gone, but she's left me instructions. Now I need to start growing on my own.

It's time for me to leave Khon Mueang Women's Prison.

2

Here's what I know about myself. My name is Luchi Ann, and that's all the name I need for everyday. I didn't know any more of my name until three years ago, when I was ten, and Mama made me promise never to tell it to a soul.

It's not the only thing she made me promise.

Here's what I know about my mama. Her name was Helena and once upon a time she was tall and blond and beautiful. I know this because of the wooden tea box that holds all my most important things. Chief Warden Kanya gave me the box after Mama's passing. It stays in the office for safekeeping, and every few days I like to go in there and pull everything out, look over each item carefully. In that box is the photograph—the one showing Mama before. There's also a Thai paper that tells how I was born, right here in the back exercise yard of Khon Mueang Women's Prison, up north of Chiang Mai. And there's Mama's passport and a bunch of dollars, real American dollars that I never get tired of touching. The paper feels soft but strong, like a whispered promise you know will be kept.

A promise is something I understand. It's the glue that holds together my world. My mama always said her secrets were her backbone, what made her strong.

“We are behind bars, but we are alive,” I remember her telling me, back when I was too young to wonder what her words really meant. “Here we are safe, Luchi, remember that. No one knows who we are, so we can't be hurt. Promise me you'll never do anything to change that.”

I linked my pinkie finger with hers and gave my solemn promise; then I leaned into her arms and we held each other until the bell clanged for lights out. We made a strong rope, Mama and me and our secrets.

But then everything changed.

I don't like to think back to her last few weeks, when the fever came. Mama had been the whirlwind in our cell, the joker, always making us laugh. How many hours we spent with Bibi, our cellmate, rolling across the floor laughing at her crazy stories! She could even get a chuckle out of our other cellmate, Jeanne, on some days. I think we all knew Mama laughed so much to stop us from seeing the tears she kept hidden inside, but we played along. Mama was like that. People would fall all over themselves to do what she wanted.

This fever was different than anything we'd seen before, though. With the heat came pain, then blood, and one day when I looked close, my mother was a black-and-white sketch of herself. The tears were gone, but so was the smile, and so was the spark, and so was everything that made up the real
her
. That last day, she reached one twig arm toward me as I sat cross-legged on her bed, where I had been since the start of her sickness. She grabbed my finger with her whole hand, tried to hold on and couldn't, so I held on to her instead.

“Luchi,” she rasped, and it was all I could do to hear, so I leaned in closer. “I'm not long for this world. You'll have to make your way out of here. Have to be strong, do what I could never do. You'll have to go … home.”

“Home?” I looked around the prison cell that was my whole world and wondered what she could possibly mean.

“I didn't tell you enough about my past. I thought there would be time. I thought—” She coughed, a spasm wrinkling up and down her body. “I thought we would leave here together … someday. When it was safe.”

“We will, Mama,” I said, squeezing her hand tighter. “Tomorrow you'll feel better. Sleep now.” But tomorrow would be no better. Even I could see that.

“All those promises, all those things I told you.” Mama's eyes were bright now, her cheeks scarlet. “Remember them … don't … do them … you've got to remember that, will you? All those promises, all those secrets … all right? Will you? Won't you?”

I looked up at Bibi, confused. What was Mama trying to tell me?

Bibi just shook her head. “
Lap dee dee na ja
,” she whispered, stroking Mama's short hair. “Sleep is the best thing for her now.”

I nodded. Bibi was right. Mama's eyes drifted shut, and I loosened her hand from mine and set it down carefully at her side.

Eight hours later she was gone, without ever waking up. Without ever explaining to me what she had been trying so hard to say.

Chief Warden came to me the next day, asking about relatives and officials and moving on, but I just cried and begged for more time. How could I leave? Sure, I had been out in the world before—to the courtyard nearly every day, and into Chiang Mai with the guards on certain occasions. Once I spent five days with my favorite guard, Isra, at her family home. They treated me like a princess, and even now, that memory is rich and sweet. But that world was never my own. Now, the only person I belonged to was gone. Was I also supposed to leave the only place I had ever lived?

And what about the unnamed danger that lurked in the outside world? I'd never gotten Mama to tell me
what
it was we were afraid of. How could I hide properly if I didn't know what I needed to stay hidden from?

Go home
, Mama told me, but she left me nothing of that place. To me, at least, it did not exist.

3

And now I sit on a straight-backed wooden chair in Chief Warden Kanya's office, watching her watch me. Her eyes are like cups of tea, big and dark and wet.

“What people do you have on the outside?” she asks, pulling up the question like a familiar tune. “Tell me about your mam's family.”

We have had this conversation almost every day for the last three months. And now that I have told her I'm leaving, she thinks I will finally be glad to accept her help. But I only shake my head and lower my gaze to the desk. I must leave this place and face whatever dangers I might find on the outside. I know this. But I will not abandon my promises so easily.

“You must have relatives, yes? I can call them and make arrangements. They could come and meet you.”

I cannot tell her these things she wants to know. What Chief Warden doesn't understand is that I am not just being stubborn. How can I tell her what I don't even know myself? My silence was Mama's last wish, but my ignorance was carefully formed over my whole lifetime. And this is the full truth I cannot reveal: I know nothing of my past, nothing beyond my own name, and that I am sworn never to tell another soul.

Yet I know Chief Warden will not give up. She runs a prison; she has enough patience for many lifetimes.

Sure enough, she pulls out her favorite line. The one that always gets me talking. “I still do not know why I haven't called the embassy. Such negligence I could be charged with! A minor, an American child at that … I should call them right now.” Her hand hovers in the direction of the phone, then slumps back to the desk.

She won't call them. Every day that she has waited; it would look worse for her to finally do so. I think by now it is too late. Three months later? What would she even tell them? But underneath her prickly surface, I know the chief warden is worried for me. She will not let me leave her care without knowing that I will be safe. And so I rip a tiny hole in my silence and pass out some of the truth she so desperately wants to hear.

I have had time to prepare for my departure, and I now have a starting point: an old sheet of paper found in Mama's things, a paper listing names and addresses and telephone numbers of people in Bangkok. It isn't much, and all the folds and wrinkles show my treasure's age. How reliable can this information be, after all this time? Yet I have nothing else. This is my only link to my past.

It is a start, and that is enough for me.

All of this is more than Chief Warden needs to know. She does not need to see the very thin bridge I am stepping out upon. I only need to reassure her, and then be on my way.

“Here,” I tell her, waving the paper just out of reach. “Mama has many friends in Bangkok. She has written them all down. Once I get there, these people will know what to do. They will help me.”

Chief Warden knows how Mama was, how close she kept her past, so she cannot have expected me to hand her a phone number now, an easy call to make everything okay. But she sighs. Maybe she hoped I would be different.

“Very well,” she says now, and I hear resignation in her tone. “I have called my nephew, Kiet. He is driving to Bangkok today and can take you with him. Once you are there, you can find these friends?”

I nod, not for the friends but for the nephew, a minor celebrity in our world and a long-ago friend of my childhood. He comes to visit on holidays, and he usually brings a crate of papayas or rambutan for his aunt and the other guards. A few choice pieces of fruit always end up on my cot. I do not know him well anymore, but I know I will be safe driving to Bangkok with him. I look up at Chief Warden and give her a small smile.

Her eyes droop and I know she wishes there was more she could do. But how can she? Mama was strong in life, and she is strong in death. She has set out the path that I must follow.

Chief Warden starts to talk. “I still remember the day your mam came through those doors. We don't get many foreign transfers—our facility is usually considered too small and too far north to bother with. But crowding was extra bad that year and we had the space, so Bangkok sent us a shipment. Six or eight prisoners, and all of them terrified of what this relocation would mean for their futures.” She sighs. “But your mam was different. It was almost like she wanted to be here, in this up-country prison on the far side of nowhere. You would have thought her greatest wish was simply to be forgotten.”

I swallow, because those words have the taste of the familiar.

“She looked at this prison like she was stepping into a dream, and when I asked her about the American embassy, about calling family, about sending out letters, it was always the same.”

I say the words in my mind along with Chief Warden. Lord knows I've heard them enough times over the years: “ ‘No, thank you. There is no one out there for me. I will remain where I am until my time has been served.' ”

She shakes her head. “Then after a few months we found out that you were on the way, and of course we all thought that would change her. That perhaps a man—your father—might come for you, might bring your mam to her senses. But no.” Chief Warden studies me, like she's trying to read in my face the answers she's looking for. She sighs. “What am I saying? Of course you know your own mother's story! You must have heard this many times before.”

I fix my eyes on the ground. I have to keep them there because looking down helps me set my mouth in a straight line. If not, I might open my mouth and say what I'm really thinking, which is: No! I don't know anything about my mother's past. She hid from me, hid from all of us. I don't know her stories and I don't know her life.

My
father
? I choke down a bitter laugh. Mama's only responses to my questions on that subject were downward spirals of depression that lasted longer and longer, until I finally gave up asking. And now she has taken her fear—and her secrets—to the grave.

Or has she? With a quickening heartbeat I look down at the sheet of paper clenched in my hands. Maybe these scribbled notes are a map Mama has left me to figure out my future. Maybe, from these words, I can begin to understand what she used her last breath to try to say.

Chief Warden struggles heavily to her feet. “You should go back to the cell now and prepare your things. Kiet will be here by noon.”

I stand and lift my eyes to meet hers. There's a strange lightness in my chest. Chief Warden's story of my mother's arrival is not much on its own, but now I wonder: what other secrets might be out there, waiting to be discovered? For the first time since making my decision, I look toward the door and consider whether the outside might not only be a place to fear—but maybe, also, a place to search for answers.

Somewhere out there is my mother's story, the whole story. And I must find it.

The chief warden has no more things to tell me. She lowers her head and whispers, “
Luuk
.” Daughter. She has called me this only once before, and it surprised me back then, too.

I was a skinny little runt, and I used to think the bars of our cell were some sort of pen to slide out of, a joke between friends. I could turn sideways and slip through them like a pit from a mangosteen, and when I did I was proud enough to dance, shrieking, up and down the corridor.

The guards mostly just laughed, letting me rattle around and make play-corners for myself. Isra would hold me on her lap sometimes and let me listen to her radio while I made chains out of the paper clips on her desk. In those times the world was one giant game, created for my enjoyment.

But the chief warden was made of sterner stuff. A job was a job and a jail was a jail—so she said, and often. Isra and the others could hear her footsteps coming down the hall and would trundle me back into the cell before she got there. One time, Isra was in such a hurry she forgot to take back the pocket radio she'd been letting me use. I listened for hours before she returned to get it.

After a few more years, I started learning about cells. Not about prison, exactly—that came later. But I learned the bars weren't there for my fun after all. They were like teeth, long and thin and sharp, that stayed there all day and night, grim and menacing. I wasn't sure they meant me harm, but I began to keep my distance.

And then one night my worst fears came true.

It was late, and I hadn't been able to sleep. Some months had passed since I'd last climbed through the bars. But Isra had left her radio out and I could see it on the guards' desk, calling to me. Mama and the others were sound asleep and the cell was dark. Maybe the teeth were sleeping, too, and then how could they bite me?

I pushed through. My leg slipped smooth and then my shoulder and half my body. My head came next and I had to turn it to the side—how did those bars get so close together? I pushed hard, and then I knew I'd done wrong. I thought the teeth were sleeping but they weren't, they were awake, just lying quiet in the dark and now they had me tight and they wouldn't let me go.

I was stuck. No amount of moving could get me in or out.

I didn't dare make any noise, not even a whimper. I wasn't eaten yet, but the second I made a sound I knew it would all be over. I thought of Mama, just out of my reach. If only I could stretch a little farther, quietly shake her awake—

But no. Mama, too, was afraid of the bars. I'd seen her stare at them, seen the fear in her eyes when she thought I wasn't looking. She couldn't save me from the jaws of this cage. And so I brought my hands up to the bars in front of me and held still, so very still.

Time passed like this; I stayed frozen while the moon moved from one side of the cell window to the other.

And then feet clattered in the hall: Chief Warden Kanya was making her rounds. She marched through and her flashlight glanced over me, trapped as I was. She startled, nearly dropping the light, but then she squatted down and shone her beam full on me and I'd never before seen her look so soft.

She called me
luuk
, little daughter, and she pushed and poked and got me back through the way I'd come. She kept those teeth away. And then she looked at me and she put one hand on the side of my face, where the skin felt hot and mushy, like bruised fruit.

I didn't understand her look then. But I think I do now. I think she was just a warden doing her rounds and checking up on things and then she comes upon this child stuck in the bars. Stuck between inside and outside, not able to move, not really a part of either. Trapped in between two worlds.

I think maybe that night she saw me real for the first time.

The next day she tried to talk Mama into letting me leave. “Surely you have family in your country who can take her. She is a growing girl, and she needs to live in the real world. Not in this—this place!” Chief Warden was fierce as a tiger, glowering right into Mama's face.

But Mama never flinched. She got that look she had sometimes, that empty look like a mask with no eyes behind it. “We have no one,” she said. “No one who can help.”

And I knew Mama would fight for me, take on the world to protect me from the danger that lived on the outside.

The chief warden never brought it up to her again. And when Mama died and I said I wanted to stay on just a little longer, she pressed her lips together and wrote out a schedule of duties I could perform around the prison in exchange for my room and board. For these last months I've slept nights in my cell with Bibi and Jeanne, while the chief warden has looked the other way and left me alone with my grief.

“
Luuk
,” Chief Warden Kanya says again. She pulls me out of my remembering and I am back in her office. Back in this world where I am grown, where I am alone, where everything is different. Why can't I be different, too? I could be a strong, confident girl. I could have no dark shadows in my life, no unknown secrets forcing me to stay hidden. What would I do, if I were that other me?

It's no use.

Inside, I'm still that scared little girl, trapped between my fear and my promises and just wishing my mama would wake up and save me, help me, tell me what to do.

For a second a wave of grief crests inside me, and I know if I let myself sink into it I will drown, truly drown in my sorrow. I will slip under the surface and be swallowed whole. And then I will never leave this place.

But there is a part of me that has to leave.

And so I push down inside me and squeeze with all my might. Mama's gone. I am alone. But I am still alive.

Holding my tea box in trembling hands, I turn away from Chief Warden Kanya, who is now crying real tears that are making my eyes more blurry than they should be. The plastic watch on my wrist tells me there are just a few hours to go, and a whole world to learn to live without. I move away quickly and hurry out of her office.

My old life is gone forever.