The Hot Countries (24 page)

“I probably would have done the same thing, in her shoes.”

“Then I won't say anything about how much it bothers me that she took that knife out of our kitchen. Just relax. Sit back and enjoy your truffles. I'll call you when I hear from Mr. Bixby.”

“I'm going to the state capital,” Edward says.

Rafferty, sitting next to Mrs. Shin in the fourth row of the dim auditorium, mouths the words silently. In unison, he and Edward continue: “To go to college. There's no reason for me to stay here.”

Rafferty knows the scene line for line—it's Ned's best moment in the play—but the way Edward (who is, of course, playing Ned) chews and swallows the last few words, they sound something like
nreezin frrme tstayheer,
causing Mrs. Shin to sigh discreetly and shake her head. While Rafferty, all those years ago, had belted his lines to the last row, Edward seems to have been told frequently that it's bad breeding to raise one's voice.

“Give us a little more volume, Ned,” Mrs. Shin calls out. “Projection, remember?” When she's directing, she calls all the actors by their character names. Just imagine, she tells Edward, that Miaow—Julie—is thirty feet away instead of sitting directly across the small table that's doubling for the town's ice-cream shop. “One more time from the top,” Mrs. Shin says, “and
audibly
this time. We've still got to do the technical run-through.”

Throughout this exchange Miaow has sat motionless, as though she's in a bell jar that seals out everything that's not in the world of the play. She's hunched over the table, shoulders curved like a bow, neck stretched forward, awkwardness in every angle of her body, using her spoon to make tiny back-and-forth scribbles in the glass cup that's supposed to contain her ice cream. Rafferty recognizes it as something she does at dinner when the conversation wanders into an area that doesn't engage her. The moment Mrs. Shin says, “From the top,” Miaow straightens, places the spoon precisely beside the cup, and gets up, clasping her elbows with her arms folded over her stomach and exits into the stage-left wings. Edward ambles behind her with his hands in his pockets.

Mrs. Shin has directed the scene to give Miaow the stage alone for a few seconds, a small present to her actress, which she has justified by telling Miaow that Julie always arrives early when she knows Ned will be somewhere. Mrs. Shin calls, “Let's go,” and after a beat Miaow comes onstage down left like someone whose sentence is about to be pronounced. Her face is defenseless, her mouth slightly open, the image of someone who's moments away from having a nail driven into her one and only hope. She pulls out the chair and sits without seeming conscious of her actions, focused on something invisible just a few feet in front of her eyes. Rafferty realizes he's leaning forward in his seat.

When Edward enters, Miaow looks up at him and involuntarily starts to smile, then lowers her gaze to the tabletop, leans back in her chair, and puts her hands in her lap. Not until Edward is seated does she meet his eyes, and then only for a second. When the scene reaches Ned's announcement that he's leaving town, she slides down in her chair and her shoulders curve anxiously as she picks up her spoon and begins the scribbling motion in her cup. Edward seems to pick up her energy, and for a few moments they're just two shy, hapless adolescents from seventy years ago, adrift leagues apart on an ocean of feeling and unable to summon the words or the courage that would lead them to each other.

Rafferty thinks idly that he was probably a little better—or at least louder—as Ned than Edward is and that Miaow cuts to ribbons the high-school senior, three years older and a more experienced actress than Miaow, who had played Julie in his production. Movement at the edge of his vision attracts his attention, and he sees several cast members drift down the aisles to watch more closely. The one most intent on the action is Siri Lindstrom, the school beauty whom everyone thought would play Julie. She's got eyebrow-pencil lines drawn on her forehead and at the corners of her eyes to age her into Julie's mother, her glorious wheat-colored hair has been gathered up and stuffed almost maliciously into a gingham bonnet, and the expression in her eyes is one of the purest loss: someone who's always thought she had everything, seeing the one thing she'll never have.

Rafferty has never been particularly conscious of his age, but looking at all of them, both the kids onstage acting the play he once acted and the ones in auditorium watching, he's aware that he's seeing his own past, just as when he regards the men in the Expat Bar, he's looking at one of his possible futures. For a moment he feels adrift in time—much the way, he thinks, Wallace must often feel—and then the scene is over and the applause of the people in the aisles brings him back, and the lovelorn teenager on the stage is once again his daughter.

Mrs. Shin claps her hands twice, not applause but a demand for attention. “Clear the stage, everybody.” She looks at her watch. “Lights ready?”

“Ready,” someone calls from behind them.

“Sound?”

“Ready.”

“Places, everybody. We're going double-time until there's a technical cue, and then we'll let the tech crew take it at their own speed.” She glances over at Rafferty and then calls out, “One exception. Luther? Luther?”

A slender Chinese boy comes on from stage left. “Luther is our Narrator,” Mrs. Shin tells Rafferty. “You'll remember him as Prospero in
The Tempest
.”

“I certainly do,” Rafferty says, trying to make it sound positive. Luther, a born actor and not a good one, is cured ham to the bone. He had impersonated age as Prospero by walking as though he'd been tied in a square knot for days and untied moments before taking the stage.

Mrs. Shin, who is holding back a smile, says, “We'll take your opening speech at the usual speed, Luther.”

Luther says, “Thank you,” in his prematurely deep and plummy voice, as though he's just been given a long-overdue Nobel Prize, and retreats back into the wings.

“Watch this,” Mrs. Shin says. She actually elbows Rafferty in her excitement. Then she cups her hands to her mouth and says, “Let's go, let's go.
Lights.
”

The stage brightens selectively, spots picking out the odds and ends that have been silhouetted there: furniture, a few partial walls with windows, a doorway or two, a couple of ladders—all of it strewn almost randomly across the space. Luther ambles in downstage, yawning and punching at the buttons on his phone, paying no attention to the audience, looking like a kid who's got a few spare minutes and nothing to do with them. He yawns and ambles upstage—his back to the audience—to a table, which he dusts with a couple of swipes of his palm. Turning to sit on the table's downstage corner, he freezes as he sees the audience. Instead of sitting, he comes a few steps downstage and cups his hands around his eyes to shield them from the lights, scans the auditorium, and says,
“Oh.”
Immediately he shoves the phone into his pocket, tugs his shirt down, straightens, and begins to walk with a pronounced, stagy limp, working his elbows a little whenever he's on the bad leg. He stops, faces out, and says, apparently searching for his lines, “So
 . . .
” He licks his lips and says, “Ummmm,” and then looks at his palm as though something is written there, squints at it, and says, “Hilldale,
yes
, Hilldale. It isn't a very big town. 'Bout two hundred souls,” and then he's limping again and talking at the same time, gathering momentum with the play's opening speech, and Rafferty is surprised to find that he's interested.

“Your daughter,” Mrs. Shin whispers. She looks like she's being tickled. “We all know that Luther, despite that extra helping of voice, isn't the most convincing actor in Bangkok, so Miaow worked this out with him, didn't even tell me about it. Luther is playing a young actor who's not very good, and it's changed the whole production. Some of the actors are in the audience when we start, and they just get up and go onstage when it's time. Your daughter came up with the whole thing. ”

Rafferty says,
“Miaow?”

“You don't know what you've got there,” Mrs. Shin says as Luther gathers steam onstage. “Everybody in the cast has picked it up. We've got a play about a play, and it's working. Oh, I almost forgot. Tell Miaow to keep her eyes on the newspapers for the next day or two. I think she's going to get a surprise.” Then she raises her voice. “That was great, Luther, now double-time. Everyone
remain in place.
Lights, get on the ball. We've got to do this monster
twice
.”

“Where do you get it?” he asks.

Miaow, leaning against the window on her side of the cab, says, “I don't know.” She looks tired after the two run-throughs; she'd worked the part, even at double-time. But she also seems lighter inside, like she could almost float off the seat.

“You must have some idea. It's too
 . . .
too strong for you not to have been aware of
 . . .
” He tapers off. “Of
something
.”

“Not really. I never thought about acting until Mrs. Shin made me try out for Ariel. Now it's practically all I think about.”

This is a tone, direct and completely serious, he almost never hears her use. She'd grown so accustomed to disappointment before she joined them that she automatically distances herself from the things she feels most deeply about.

“But when you started to become Ariel,” he says, “there must have been something in your past that you were leaning on. To imagine her the way you did and then, you know, to put it out there like that.”

“All I can think of is when I was on the street,” she says. She turns away as though to look out the window. “I saw so many people who weren't like me.” For a moment he thinks she won't go on, but she says, “You know. People who had
everything
, I thought, and I didn't have anything. Mostly I watched kids. I tried to imagine what it must be like to be them, to have stuff, not to want all the time, to have a place to live and somebody who got upset if they
 . . .
if they skinned their knee. I mean, I stepped on a
nail
—it went all the way through my foot and poked up on top, and no one even said, ‘Poor little girl.' And I wanted all that, and I couldn't have it, but I wanted to know what it felt like. So I watched them and found little pieces of how they felt. I mean, I could see what the way
 . . .
the way they walked or laughed or went into a store—what it said about how they felt, and I could practice moving like that when I was alone and sort of
build
that feeling a piece at a time, do you know what I mean?”

“Probably.”

“I found out how it felt to move like I owned the whole sidewalk. Like what you were talking about, like Delsarte. What it felt like to look at things in stores and know I could have them. Like I'd earned it somehow. And how they felt when they looked at me, too. That was like eating matches,” she says, “knowing the way they felt about me. It made me hate myself. So I pretended. I moved like I owned everything around me, only it was a secret and they weren't allowed to know it. I was like the king in disguise in all those stories you read to me when I was little. And that was true in a way, because I knew so much more than they did about what was actually happening all around them. How thin the walls around them really were. Does this make any sense?”

“Yes.”

“It was a kind of acting, I guess. And that's what I've been doing ever since you put me in my school. I've been acting.”

“It's not
all
acting, Miaow,” he says. “The kids who like you aren't just falling for an act. Give them some credit. You think
Edward
is falling for an act?”

“Edward doesn't know me. No one at school knows me. I'm
good
at this,” she says in a tone that closes the conversation.

“You've got a lot of talent.”

She says, “It's what I want to do.”

“We'll do what we can,” Rafferty says, “to see that you do. And now I want you to do me a favor.”

“Sure,” Miaow says. “What?”

“I want you to tell me what someone is feeling.” He leans forward and says to the driver, “Klong Toey. Near the river. I'll direct you.”

26

You Have to Say Yes

Anna looks blurred
with exhaustion, but the sight of Miaow brings her to her feet in the empty classroom, fumbling with her hands and then her thick, chopped hair as though she's been caught in the middle of doing the dishes. “What a surprise,” she says, working too hard at the delight. She hasn't met Miaow more than a few times, Rafferty realizes.

Miaow's smile doesn't have much behind it; to her, Anna is the woman who tried to betray Poke to the police, back when Treasure's father was alive. Stepping in front of her, Rafferty says, “How is she?”

“The same.” She finds her chair with the back of her leg, starts to sit, and then thinks better of it. “She won't talk or eat. She won't look at people. I don't think she's even turned over except the one time she had to get up to use the bathroom.”

“Dok? Chalee?”

“They
 . . .
they don't know how they feel about her. After what she did, even though she may have protected them from that man. Chalee says Treasure went crazy, kicking the man over and over when he was already hurt and then spitting on him.” Her eyes go to Miaow, who doesn't look particularly surprised. “But Chalee's in there anyway.”

“Good,” Rafferty says. “Can you take us to her?”

“It's not locked,” Anna says. “She's not going anywhere. Oh, I'm sorry, you don't know. She's
here
. We moved the hospital bed here from the compound. Easier for everybody. And after what happened, no one wants to go into her room.”

Anna leads them up the uneven stairs to the girls' floor, warmer than the ground floor even in this damp weather, and makes a left at the top of the stairs, away from the rows of cots, spottily populated by watching girls. Anna says, “Chalee still in there?” and gets a few affirmative mumbles. They go down a short corridor to a closed door. “Used to be for storage,” she says, stepping aside.

When Rafferty opens the door, he finds himself looking at Chalee, who's facing him from across the bed. She's sitting in between the bed and the wall on a folding metal chair that's identical to the ones she and Dok sat on twenty-four hours at a time for days on end, after they found Treasure in the alleyway. The room, the hospital bed with the motionless girl on it, the chair, Chalee—Rafferty feels like he's back at the beginning of a story with a bad ending.

He lifts his eyebrows in a question for Chalee, and Chalee shrugs and gets up. He and Miaow go into the room as Chalee heads around the foot of the bed, toward the door. She and Miaow exchange curious glances, both of them turning back once they've passed each other. Chalee breaks the gaze and goes out, but Miaow watches her go, and Rafferty can see her mold
her posture—stiffened spine, head held high—into an approximation of Chalee's. Miaow doesn't turn back to him until the door closes behind Chalee. As Anna said, Treasure is lying on her side, curled into a ball with her knees drawn tightly up, almost to her chest, and one arm folded under her head, as though she's trying to present as small a target as possible. Her back is to them. Two pillows have fallen or been pushed to the floor, where they lean crookedly against the legs of the bed. Miaow goes around the bed, with Rafferty following, and sits in the chair Chalee just vacated.

Treasure's face is waxy and damp-looking and her eyes are closed, although the faint fluttering of her lashes says she's awake and aware of them. She sniffs the air a couple of times.

Miaow pulls the chair forward until she's no more than an arm's length from Treasure's face and stares at her. A handful of minutes—from Rafferty's perspective it could be anywhere from three to five—gets dealt from the deck, but Treasure gives no further indication that she's aware of them or interested in them.

Miaow leans in closer and blows on Treasure's face.

Treasure's eyes squeeze more tightly closed, but she doesn't open them or move her body. Miaow takes a deep breath and begins to blow softly, obviously intending to empty her lungs if need be. Rafferty puts a cautioning hand on her shoulder, but Miaow slaps it away, and the sharp sound of the slap brings Treasure's eyes wide, wide open.

Rafferty has backed quickly away from Miaow, hoping Treasure won't think that one of them struck the other.

“My name is Miaow.” Miaow works the chair a little closer so she won't have to lean. “We met each other once before, over in that other building. Do you remember?”

Treasure closes her eyes again, and Miaow leans forward and blows again, harder this time, and Treasure opens her lids and stares at her.

“I'm not that easy,” Miaow says. “Now, Poke, Poke is that easy. He'd fly halfway around the world if someone told him you were crying, but me, I'd probably make fun of you. Poke is much nicer than I am.

“I'm the girl Poke and Rose adopted,” she says, settling into the chair. “
Don't close your eyes.
So why am I here? I'm here because Poke thinks I can see how people feel inside, and he wants to know how you feel. Because he's
worried
about you. Do you want to tell him how you feel?”

A slight movement to his right catches Rafferty's attention, and he sees that the door has opened about an inch and that Anna's face is pressed to the crack. Below her he sees, right against the opening, one of Chalee's eyes.

“I didn't think so,” Miaow says. “If I felt like you, I wouldn't want anyone to know either. Think how embarrassing it would be, after you live through this, to have them know you felt this way. They'd
pity
you, and nothing is worse than that.” She sits back in the chair, crosses her arms, and takes a deep breath.

“When I was three or four years old,” she says, “my mother and father threw me away. Here's how they did it. They bought me a piece of candy, one of those big round, hard lemon balls that you don't chew, you suck on it, and then they tied a piece of brown string around my wrist, too tight to pull off, and tied the other end around part of a bus-stop bench—you know, the upright thing that separates the seat from the back. Then they went away.” She stops and licks her lips, quickly, and says, “I thought they'd come back. I was
sure
they'd come back. I'm not certain about this, but I think I invented a game. They'd be back when the lemon was gone. I know even now that the lemon lasted a long time, because I kept tasting it and tasting it and moving it from one cheek to another. I sucked it really hard, rolling it around in my mouth, waiting for it to get smaller and go away so they'd come back. And it got dark, and some buses stopped, and a lot of people came and went, and my parents weren't with them, and then the candy was gone and the street was almost empty.”

She puts one hand, with its chipped black fingernails, on the edge of the bed. “And I was crying, I guess, and leaning against the edge of the seat, because I wasn't big enough to climb up on it. I couldn't go anywhere, because, I mean, where would I have gone, and anyway I didn't know how to untie a knot. So I couldn't get up on the seat and I couldn't run away, and a big
soi
dog, bigger than I was, came up to me and stopped and looked at me. Its tongue was hanging out, and it had all these teeth. Then it went down on its front legs with its butt in the air and jumped at me. I screamed and waved the hand I could wave, the one that wasn't tied to the bench, but the dog went down again with its front legs spread out, and it jumped at me again. Now I know that's how a dog plays. The dog probably had a kid at home, and that was how they played, but I thought it wanted to kill me. Eat me, I don't know.” Miaow begins absently to scrape at the nail polish on her thumb. “So it kept trying to play, and I yelled at it and kicked it, and after a while it turned around and left. And I stood there, leaning against the bench and wishing it would come back.
”

There's a rustle of bedclothes, and Treasure props herself up on one elbow.

“So I wanted the dog to come back, I wanted the lemon candy to come back, and I wanted my parents to come back. It's stupid that I wanted my parents to come back. My father slapped me a lot, one time so hard that my neck was sore for days. For years I only remembered two things about him, his loud voice and the way he slapped me that time. That was my father, that was everything I knew about my father. Two things. And then, when I was five or six and living on the street, I remembered one more thing about him. A man tried to catch me near Little India to
 . . .
you know, do things to me, and he had been drinking whiskey. When I smelled that whiskey, I ran faster than I'd ever run in my life, because that smell was my father, and that's who I was running away from. And I got away from the man, but I've never smelled whiskey since without my neck hurting. That's how hard my father hit me. So that's the third thing I know about my father, that he drank whiskey. Do you want to hear more?”

It takes a full minute, maybe more, but Treasure says, “Yes.”

“So I was
 . . .
I was
 . . .
” She scratches her head. “
Right
, I was tied to that bench, and the dog was gone. I don't know how long I was there, since little kids don't know how long things take, but it felt like a long, long time. I'd gotten cold. I was hungry. I'd wet myself—which made me even colder—I had snot all over my face, and a few people had walked by and looked down at me. I was ashamed to be tied to the bench, so I stood in front of the string, with my wrist behind me. So they wouldn't know that I was so bad that my parents had thrown me away. I'd figured out by then that they weren't coming back.”

The door opens another half inch, as though someone has leaned against it, and then closes most of the way again. Anna and Chalee are still peeking around it. Neither Miaow nor Treasure seems to have registered it. “I was really tired of standing there, and I needed to try to sleep, but the string was too short for me to sit down on the sidewalk. If I sat, I had to hold my wrist in the air, which hurt after a while, and anyway it looked stupid. So I decided that everything would be all right if I could climb up onto the bench. Climbing on the bench would solve all my problems. If I could get up there, things would be fine. This must have been really late at night, because I don't think the buses were still running. So I got up on tiptoe and got part of my tummy on the edge of the bench and just tried to
 . . .
you know, jump a little and flop onto it like a fish, but—” Miaow suddenly smiles, and Rafferty—who feels like he's hanging in space, listening to the story Miaow has never told him—realizes that she's returning a smile from Treasure. “But every time I tried to push off with my feet,
something
, my clothes or my tummy or something, would snag, and I'd fall hard, onto my knees. Really
hurts,
your knees hitting
concrete. After three or four times, I gave up and sat on the sidewalk crying, holding my stupid arm in the air until my hand got numb, and I began banging it against the concrete bench and feeling how it didn't hurt, and then a boy came along, a few years older than I was, and he had a knife, and he cut the string and he took me away. That was Boo, by the way, the guy who runs this place now, that's how we know him. Boo came and found me, and after that I lived with the kids he bossed around. I did anything he said until he got into
yaa baa
and went crazy. We stole things, we beat up rich kids, we took food from drunk bums. We cut some purses. When I was five or six, I got a knife of my own. I cut people with it a few times. I cut one man pretty bad, and if I had to, I'd do it again right now.”

There's a long silence in the room. Treasure has extended her neck toward Miaow so far that Rafferty can see her fine-boned profile through the frizz of hair that still has blood matted into it. He's certain she no longer even knows he's in the room.

“So here's what I'm saying,” Miaow says. “You've got friends here, and they're really nice kids, my father worries about you all the time, and that deaf lady out there, the teacher, Anna? She's crazy in love with you, and she's with my father's best friend, who's a good man, and
you can have a life
.
I
have a life,” she says, wiping one cheek with her palm, “and if I can have a life, anybody can. You know, people don't just throw love at you all the time. That's not how it works.” She brushes her fingertips over her right eye, shaking her head. “They don't come back over and over again, and there aren't other people lined up behind them to throw more love at you. You have to say yes. You have to let them love you. Okay,” she says, getting up and sniffling. “That's what I came to say. And oh, yeah, I hope we can be friends. That would make Poke happy.”

She squares her shoulders and heads past Rafferty for the door, wiping her face in the crook of her arm, almost angrily. When she pulls the door open, Anna and Chalee back up fast, but then Anna stops and waits for Miaow to go through. Then she and Chalee come into the room. Rafferty catches the door as it closes and goes into the hall.

Poke hears Miaow at the bottom of the stairs, moving quickly, but he stays where he is, a foot propping the door open, looking into the room. For what seems to him like quite a long time, Anna stands by the chair looking down at Treasure, and then she sits. After a few more minutes, Anna's eyes slowly droop closed and her head falls onto her chest. Chalee, leaning back with one foot up against the wall, stares at Treasure, looking like someone trying to solve a puzzle. Then she sighs and goes to sit beside her on the bed.