Tiger Girl (18 page)

Entire villages were evacuating from the border. Sometimes they ran into groups of Khmer Rouge, but the soldiers were afraid to waste their bullets. The soldiers stole the lizard my brother was saving to eat later, the dead bat he'd found, the leaves Arun had picked. Finally they took the sandals off their feet, and then the soldiers went on. Sometimes Arun and my brother ran into families or just bands of lost children, wide-eyed and terrified, trying to find their way back to their parents' villages. If the children carried food, Arun and my brother asked for some. Once they simply took it from the children and ran.

Everyone was so hungry. It didn't seem like stealing. It didn't seem like a bad thing to do. It was food. But then, afterward, their stomachs hurt, they had cramping diarrhea. It seemed a funny time for Heaven to be showing any opinion about the business of man, but they didn't steal from children again after that.

Together they returned to the jungle, hiding during the day, and walking only at night, when it would be harder for people to see them. My brother no longer trusted people, no matter if they were soldiers or villagers; humans were dangerous, he decided. He'd take his chances with the animals and the minefields. They followed along the edges of a Khmer Rouge-built road, stepping on bodies when they saw them because they knew then that the mines would have already gone off. They
hid in the brush, they hid under the bodies, they hid whenever they thought they heard people. Eventually they came upon a large group of men who were wearing civilian clothes but who still moved like soldiers, walking toward the Thai border. My brother didn't trust them, but he followed them at a distance, tracking them like animals. In this manner he was able to make it to a refugee camp in Thailand with Arun.

We're safe, my brother thought. We've made it.

But in the camp, he quickly learned they'd landed in a new kind of trouble. They were two boys without family, without protectors. The Red Cross doctors were able to save Arun from the infections that ravaged his body, but they could not heal the wounds he'd already suffered, the ones that no one could see. For several months Arun lost his sight, although the doctors said there was nothing wrong with his eyes. He felt mysterious pains and heard the voices of the dead in the wind. When his sight returned, the doctors accused him of having lied. Other survivors thought he was possessed by demons.

The camp directors tried to find a family that would take them in, but nobody wanted a sick boy. It was bad enough to have to take in a stranger's son, and they had enough burdens with their own children. If they took in a teenager, they wanted one who could work for them.

My brother sized up the families very quickly. Ones with many small children were the most vulnerable. He learned to ingratiate himself with the mothers, he learned to make himself useful. He protected them from the gangs of thieves that roved through the camp, from the crazies who had lost their minds in the war and now fought against phantoms with improvised weapons, from the bullies with small privileges doling out soup in the kitchens or helping the doctors in the makeshift hospitals. But still no family would take them in.

Then finally he figured out how to bargain with the fathers.
My father was a rich man
, he said.
He'll give you a big reward if you help me. My father was a member of Sihanouk's government, he had many foreign ties, he left the country before the Khmer Rouge took over and doesn't know what happened to me. When I find him again, he'll reward anyone who's helped me
.

To prove he wasn't lying, he told them stories about his life in the capital as a boy. He described the meals he ate, the servants he ordered about, the movies he'd seen, the toys he'd played with.

At last a family was willing to take them in.

After they were sponsored to come to America, my brother had to change his name, of course, so that all the papers matched. He and Arun became this family's paper sons, and my brother's real identity was lost. It was just another story he remembered, and no longer a person that Uncle could track through the Red Cross.

After he arrived in America, the family moved in with cousins in L.A., but they grew angry when my brother couldn't find his rich father. They made him work instead of going to school. Then he joined a gang to make some money, promised Arun he'd be back, but then he got caught and spent some time in juvenile detention, where he got his GED. When he got out again, he went to look for Arun. The family told him Arun had moved away.

My brother tried living on his own, here and there, trying to find work. But it wasn't easy. He had a record, he didn't have an education, he had gang tats. These were hard years. He started selling drugs again, then he saw the article in the paper. My brother glanced at the picture, then he stared. He almost couldn't believe it, just when he'd completely given up, there was his long-lost father, smiling in black and white from the front page.

His rich father, alive and well in America, in a town just down the 10.

It was a dream come true. Better than winning the lottery. It was like the happy ending of the sentimental movies Arun used to watch in Phnom Penh.

That very day, he packed up his belongings in his car and drove on the 10, leaving the city behind, and traveled all the way to Santa Bonita, a podunk little town he'd never heard of in the Inland Empire, to find the father he'd last seen when we was nine years old.

There was something missing from Paul's story. I couldn't put my finger on it, I couldn't say what exactly was wrong. But he was lying about something, hiding something important and big, so glaring I could feel it like a bruise pulsing just beneath my skin. But all I said was, “That's some story.”

And Paul nodded, agreeing with me.

I had just managed to doze off when the phone rang, waking me from a half-dream in which I was driving on the highway, the taillights of the cars ahead of me streaming red light like water until I was floating down the 10 on a glowing crimson river. Giant fish—catfish, carp, a ribbony eel with a mouth full of teeth—and a white crocodile bobbed in the air beside me as I tried to steer around them. I found that I had an oar in my hands, and that I was paddling through a red-tinged fog. Someone honked at me, and I peered through the haze, desperately trying to see past the floating schools of fierce-looking fish, but the honking continued, and I woke up on the sofa, my neck cricked against its arm.

The phone rang again, and I leapt up, tripping over my feet as I ran to the kitchen. Maybe something had happened to Uncle, I thought, and I was suddenly chilled, my skin turning to gooseflesh in the gray light of early morning. “Hello?”

“Who is this?” A husky voice at the other end sounded angry.

“Are you calling for my uncle?” I asked.

“Your what?” There was a pause, and then the person hung up.

“Give me that!” Paul emerged from the bedroom and grabbed the receiver. “Hello? . . . Hello?” Disappointed, he slammed the receiver back on its cradle. “Who was that?”

“I don't know. The person hung up.” I padded back to the sofa. “Don't wake up Sitan.”

Sitan shifted on the floor, his sheets a knot around his legs. It was bad enough that Uncle allowed both Sitan and Paul to share his apartment, two men who were all but strangers to me, but now he didn't even bother to return, leaving us alone with each other. I curled up on the sofa, pulling my coat over my knees.

“Was it a woman? What exactly did she say?” Paul was wearing jeans, no socks, no shirt. His long torso was tattooed up and down. The light was too dim to see much of the design. A long eel or perhaps a dragon, something with scales and bulging eyes peered from between his washboard abs.

“It was a guy, I think,” I whispered. “Maybe it was a woman. I don't know.” I tried to find my comfortable spot again as I sank into the cushions.

“What did she say?” Paul was standing over me now. He grabbed hold of my shoulder and shook me.

“Hey! Hands off!” I shoved his hand away and jumped over the back of the sofa so the furniture was between us.

“Huh? What?” Sitan sat upright, his eyes still closed. He rubbed at his head with one hand.

“What did she say to you?” Paul spoke slowly, as though he thought I might be lying, as though there were a right and a wrong answer and he was threatening me to get it right.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I gauged the distance around him to the door in case I had to run. He seemed unhinged, desperate. I climbed over the back of the couch, darted over to the kitchen phone, and dialed *27. The phone at the other end rang, and I held it out to Paul. “Ask her yourself.”

Paul grabbed the phone. “Hello? . . . It's me! . . . Hello? Hello?”

“Call the operator. Trace the number, see who we just called.”

Paul bounded into the bedroom and came back out, pulling on his T-shirt, then his leather jacket. He stuffed his bare feet into the sneakers by the door.

“Where you going?” I asked.

But he ran out without answering, slamming the door behind him.

By the time Uncle returned from supervising the baking, Sitan had taken off as well. Only I remained, seated in the kitchenette, eating half of the grapefruit.

Uncle smiled. “Put some sugar on,” he urged me.

“I like it sour.”

“Is he still sleeping?” He gestured toward the bedroom door. “I have a surprise when he wakes up. I spoke to Father Juan, and he is going to announce this miracle during Christmas Mass. I told him I would bring my family. All of us together. To thank God for this blessing. I almost lost faith that this day would ever come, but now I am so thankful.” Uncle smiled.

I nodded, fairly certain that Paul would be less than thrilled with this surprise. “Paul went out a few hours ago.”

“Where? Why?”

“I don't know. Someone, some woman I think, called and then hung up on him, and he got angry and left.”

Uncle looked somber. He took off his jacket carefully and hung it on the back of his chair, his movements small and precise, as though too much motion might unsettle the balance of the universe.

“We can hit redial on the phone and see if he's there.”

Uncle didn't answer. “He'll be back.” He seemed to be trying to reassure himself. He put a paper bag on the table in front of me. “The Kasim sisters made
tarte aux fraises
.”

“Thank you,” I said. He nodded and headed to the bathroom.

I picked up the phone and hit redial, but the other end only rang and rang and rang. Whoever lived there didn't have an answering machine. Then I called the operator and asked if she could give me the last number I'd called. I thanked her and wrote it down on the side of the brown bag of pastry.

“Was it busy again this morning?” I called to Uncle through the bathroom door, but he didn't answer. I could hear the water running in the shower.

I really hoped Paul wasn't going to just disappear now that he'd turned up. Was he disappointed because Uncle wasn't rich anymore? Then a thought caused a chill to run up and down my spine. Maybe he really was just casing out the donut store. Maybe he hadn't left the gang. Now I wished I'd taken a better look at his tats. Maybe someone could identify what they meant, which gang he was affiliated with. The more I thought about it, the more naive I realized we'd been. We had no proof that this “Paul” was really my long-lost brother. Didn't he himself admit his records all had made-up names? The Red Cross wouldn't be able to say who he really was. And the story of his escape in Cambodia. How did I know it was true?

We didn't even have his DNA for a test, although I had no idea where anyone actually tested DNA except for crime labs on TV cop shows.

I looked in the sink, but there wasn't so much as an unwashed cup.

Nothing to prove Paul was who he said he was.

And nothing to find him with again if he didn't come back.

At work, I hinted to Anita that Paul was an imposter. “Did you ever see a picture of my family? There was one taken in Phnom Penh,” I said. “I saw it once, when Uncle lived with us in Nebraska.”

“I don't think I have, honey. But I sure would like to if you find it.”

“So you don't actually know what Paul is supposed to look like? Because he doesn't look like Uncle, does he? He's strong-looking. He's got broad shoulders and all those muscles. He's not very tall. Uncle used to look, not exactly handsome, but like a wealthy man. He had that kind of never-had-to-work-in-his-life look.”

“That must have been some photograph,” Anita said.

“What if there's some kind of mistake?”

“Your uncle is so happy, honey,” Anita said. “Finding his son alive is the answer to his prayers.”

“But what if Paul isn't really who he says he is? What if he's lying?”

“Now why would I think a thing like that?” Anita shook her head. “Sometimes we just have to have faith.”

The next day came and went. Uncle stayed open on Christmas Eve, just in case Paul should try to find him there at the donut shop.

“I'm sure he's busy,” Uncle said. “Something came up. He has his own life. I should have told him my plans. I forgot that he is a grown man. He has this girlfriend who called him. Maybe he has his own family. I didn't ask. I didn't think to ask. Maybe he thinks I don't care. Maybe he's disappointed in me. I didn't think.”

“I'm sure he'll come back,” I said, Uncle's state of agitation alarming me. I'd never seen him this nervous. Ma's mood swings I was used to, but I hadn't known Uncle to question his blind faith in the future before, and it worried me.

“You think he'll come back?” Uncle asked, as though he genuinely cared about my answer.

“Yes,” I said.

“He said he's coming back?”