Across the Deep

by Lisa McGuinness

  Copyright © 2020 by Lisa McGuinness.

  Published by Bonhomie Press, an imprint of Mango Publishing Group,

  a division of Mango Media Inc.

  Cover design: Hugh D’Andrade

  Cover illustration: Hugh D’Andrade

  Layout & design: Tracy Sunrize Johnson

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  Across the Deep: A Novel

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2020940939

  ISBN: (print) 978-1-64250-391-3, (ebook) 978-1-64250-392-0

  BISAC category code FIC044000, FICTION / Women

  Printed in the United States of America

  For my husband, Matt McGuinness.

  Thank you for traveling through life with me;

  for being fun, smart, kind, incredibly supportive, witty,

  and the best person I know.

  Also for Kate Canova and Jeff Reed:

  the most inspirational and encouraging writers’ group

  anyone could ask for.

  Suda

  At first her ears and eyes were acutely attuned, hoping that if she focused intently enough, she would be able to make out something—anything—in the pitch-blackness. Suda’s ears took over the work of discovery when her eyes could only fail at their task. She tried to determine the significance of each creak and rumble as the ship’s huge engine roiled to life. The vibration it caused matched the accelerated beat of her heart. Her hands traced the perimeter of the four-foot by eight-foot steel box that surrounded her. Trembling palms touched cans she assumed contained food, and her fingers scrambled birdlike through the box until they alighted on a can opener. In one corner sat a case of water bottles, and in another, a bucket. She dropped to her hands and knees and found the tattered mattress she had seen before the door had slammed shut. It took up most of the floor space, which was good. It would keep her from banging onto the ridged steel during the unexpected but inevitable motion of the ship.

  As days passed, she stopped treating the darkness as an adversary and accepted it as her companion. She was relieved it protected her from knowing the extent of her filth. The fetid bucket had slopped over when a great wave rocked the ship. The smell at first intolerable was now a simple fact.

  She had never before known the fear that came with complete isolation. Her childhood family had been small but close. She and her brother, Asnee, had been free to roam the village, exploring in the safety of a tightly knit community. And later, at least she had been with other girls. But now, in the dark, cold, uncomfortable container, the shock of being completely solitary was almost as difficult to bear as the fear of her unknown future.

  Outside, the deep blue water pitched and churned—as if expressing distress while simultaneously protecting the ship’s hidden cargo. Desolate and lonely, only the sounds of seabirds and crashing waves kept Suda company—and even those were muted by the steel cage of her shipping container tucked among many on the outer deck. The wind, which began as a warm breeze against the ship at the port of departure gradually turned cold and howled as the days passed, allowing both the metal and the ragged girl to become chilled. It finally stilled just before the ship reached its destination. Weak with hunger and deeply fearful of what was to come next, Suda’s journey across the deep ocean from Thailand to the docks of San Francisco was complete.

  In the dark and lonely hours, Suda’s mind drifted back to her untroubled days, when she was a little girl, before her life had taken its dark turn. When she closed her eyes, she could see the details of that time—sun shining on the verdant hillsides of her village after the rain, her brother laughing, her parents sharing a look over their children’s heads. She suddenly could taste the mangosteen fruit eaten on special days and the sweet sticky rice with mango her mother made when the crop had been good.

  Suda simply meant “daughter” in Thai. But her mother, smoothing back her little girl’s silky black hair and braiding it into an intricate design in the back, insisted her name was special because she had always wanted a daughter and finally had one. She kissed Suda’s soft tawny cheek and pulled the worn, faded orange tee shirt down over the girl’s head.

  “There you go, little princess. You’re ready for the day.” She smiled at her daughter whom she could already tell was quick witted and sharp.

  Suda didn’t know her hillside village was poor. To her, the dirt floor of her small house was normal, and rolling out blankets to sleep each night was how it was done by most of the families who inhabited the hills. The soft, brightly colored blankets were beautiful and meant rest. Her family tended coffee trees, an endeavor much less lucrative than the poppies many others in the nearby villages grew to supply the heroin trade. But her parents wanted no part of drugs, even though it meant remaining poor.

  Now, as Suda’s legs cramped in the cold-dark prison of the shipping container, as she lay hour after hour on the hard mattress, she allowed her mind to visualize her life back then. Her earliest memory was of running; she saw her little, skinny legs confidently hurrying along the thin, rutted dirt paths in her village. The view of lush green hills, covered in rows of trees, peeked through the leafy plants along the path and between the small houses that made up her rural community. Her feet, heavily callused from never wearing shoes, knew each narrow track in the hillside, though the paths twisted out from her home like the roots of an old teakwood tree. Her mother sent her out many times each day to transport one thing or another.

  “Bring lunch to your brother,” her mother pressed a circular bamboo container of rice fried with eggs into the little girl’s hands, knowing she would carefully deliver it to her brother, Asnee. Upon her return, her mother thanked her and called her “precious jewel” or sometimes “her joy,” and Suda drank in the praise, not understanding it was rare and would be fleeting.

  By the time she was six and ready to go to school with her brother, her hillside village was as intimately known to her as her own body.

  “Are you excited, Suda?” her father asked her that first school-day morning.

  Suda nodded in response as her mother finished brushing and braiding her hair.

  “Stay with your brother and be respectful to your teacher,” he reminded her.

  “I will,” she nodded, an earnest expression on her young face. Her mother smiled at her daughter’s seriousness.

  “I’ll miss you and Ploy,” Suda looked at her baby sister asleep in the scarf her mother had tied around her middle.

  “You’ll hardly miss a thing,” her mom patted Suda’s cheek.

  “Tell me if she does anything new,” Suda visualized Ploy sitting up for the first time or developing some other new skill while she was away.

  “Off you go,” her father said, ste
ering his children toward the door.

  Asnee obediently took Suda’s hand as they left but dropped it and ran ahead to catch his friends as soon as they were out of their father’s sight.

  “Hey!” Suda yelled after him, but he didn’t turn back. She looked around, momentarily fearful and alone, but the excitement of being included with the other children walking to the nearby school overrode her apprehension. Her slightly-too-large uniform had been handed down from an older girl in their village. The short-sleeved, pale blue top wasn’t crisp and spotless like those of some of the other students, but it was hers. And she had her very own navy blue skirt in place of the pants she usually wore.

  Suda loved school, but her favorite time of the day was when she returned home, burst through the front door, and found her mother and Ploy there. She went straight to her baby sister, picked her up, and held her while her mother quizzed her about what she had learned that day.

  Once Ploy learned to walk, she and their mother sometimes strolled a little way toward the school so Suda and her brother could join them along the way home. Suda could hardly wait for the day Ploy would be old enough to go to school with them.

  “A few more years,” she told her. “Then you will get to go to school, too.”

  “You mean have to go to school,” Asnee corrected. He, at twelve, was just counting the days until he could stop going to class and start working the land with their father full time.

  The monsoon season that year hit early, hard, and fast. That day, clouds and humidity had been building throughout the morning, and then torrential rain was unleashed midday while the students were at lunch. Immediately soaked, they scrambled back inside the classrooms and then sat, doing the rest of the day’s lessons in damp clothing that clung to clammy skin. Once released, Suda and Asnee ran home through the rain as quickly as they could, occasionally slipping on the muddy paths along the way but laughing as they splashed through the streams of water. They knew Ploy and their mother wouldn’t meet them in the wet weather, but they didn’t expect their little house to be empty when they arrived home. Suda made them a snack, and they did their homework while they waited, but even as the dark evening fell, their parents and Ploy weren’t back.

  Finally Suda started the rice they always ate for their evening meal while Asnee went out to ask after their parents and Ploy. The rarity of being alone in their home felt strange to Suda—especially with the pouring rain slamming against the metal roof. Her stomach clenched with anxiety. They should be here. Why weren’t they?

  The water boiled, and she added the white kernels to the pot. Soon the scent of jasmine rice wafted into the room. It momentarily comforted her, but when her brother hadn’t returned by the time all the water had absorbed, she knew there was something seriously wrong.

  Time passed, and then more time slipped by before the front door swung open. But it wasn’t her parents, Ploy, or Asnee who stood on the threshold, but her Auntie Pakpeo. Suda looked at her warily. She had never liked her auntie. Her mother said Auntie Pakpeo had been nice at one time, but when her husband died, she turned bitter and mean.

  “Come with me,” Auntie Pakpeo gestured toward her.

  “Did you see Asnee?” Suda asked about her brother. “He’s out looking for our parents and Ploy. Do you know where they are?”

  “I saw him. He came to my house, and I told him to wait there. Now you come, too.”

  “But, what about …?”

  Her aunt seemed annoyed at being questioned.

  “Put the rice in a bowl and bring it.” She gestured toward the pot Suda had been stirring when her aunt entered. “No reason to let good food go to waste.”

  Suda obediently began scooping the contents into a bowl, hungry and desperate to slip a spoonful into her mouth but not willing to incur Auntie Pakpeo’s anger.

  “Have you seen my parents and Ploy?”

  Her aunt made no attempt to soften what came next.

  “They were on the hill when the rains came,” Pakpeo told her matter-of-factly. “The water was rushing. Ploy slipped. Your parents went after her to try to stop her from being swept away …”

  “Ploy?” Suda’s voice quivered.

  “They’re all gone, Suda.” Her aunt put out her hand, gesturing Suda to come with her, but Suda was frozen. She couldn’t understand what she was saying.

  “All gone?” she stammered. A terrible vision of her parents and Ploy being swept away in a flash flood raced across her mind. “But …”

  “Come,” Auntie Pakpeo said gruffly and put out her callused hand toward Suda, who placed her own small hand inside.

  Their deaths had been years ago. The loneliness that had never left her after that day had become something Suda had gradually come to accept. Yet, being trapped in the container had brought back memories of the freedom she had felt as a young girl. She longed for humid fresh hillside breezes and imagined inhaling the moist warm clean air into her lungs, now clogged with fetid smells and air that had been entombed with her on her ocean journey. She rested on the bare mattress, arm across her face as she visualized her past. How different her circumstances had become.

  By the time the ship’s huge engines slowed, Suda already suspected they were close to land. The water sounds had changed. The waves felt less ferocious, and the rocking had stilled. Deep, low blasts of noise seeped through the metal that separated her from the outside world. She later learned they were foghorns, but from inside the inky blackness, they sounded as if the earth was weeping. When the ship thumped against what she imagined must be a dock, Suda—half delirious—knew it soon would be time to enact the plan she had devised. Muffled shouts reached her ears, but it sounded like gibberish, and then a certain stillness came stealthily with deep night and the wee hours. She slept on and off, her tongue dry and her stomach gnawing painfully—having consumed her last can of food at least two days before. Her foggy brain dozed until abruptly awakening to the rumbling of heavy machinery and a shocking, loud clang of metal reverberating against her container. The box that had become her prison rose into the air and assumed a swinging weightlessness as it was transported through the air before it thumped onto land. Although she had tried to brace herself, the motion threw her against the side—the impact adding another deep bruise to her already-battered body.

  Again quiet; eyes once more staring into darkness, ears keen; waiting … waiting until finally muffled footsteps approached.

  As the door slowly opened, a sliver of light hit her eyes like a blow across the face. Her eyes, as dark as bitter chocolate, closed against the pain, but she forced them open so her target would be visible as her shaking arms threw the bucket’s contents toward the silhouetted figure at the open door. Her plan was simple: hurl her own waste at whoever opened the door and then run.

  Her weakened arms visibly trembled, but she cocked the bucket back and heaved its contents with what little strength she could muster.

  “Ahhh!” a man’s voice yelled. In her weakened state, most of it had slopped on the floor, but Suda thought at least some had met its mark. It was her chance to escape, and her wobbling legs slid past him toward the door. She was almost through when his strong fingers wrapped around her bony arm. She tried to wriggle free, but her strength was too depleted. She dropped her head in abject defeat: just like that, she had so easily been caught.

  She reversed directions and scrambled back into the container, trying to get away from him, even if for a moment, but her body was wheeled around in the man’s firm grip, and his voice whispered urgently in accented Thai. He held his face close to hers, intently talking, talking faintly and somewhat unintelligibly. He put his finger to his lips, but she wouldn’t have been able to speak even if he hadn’t told her to be quiet. Her mouth was achingly dry. She was trapped, and they both knew it.

  He smiled at her and waved his hand toward the door, trying to coax her to go with him, but she clenched
her jaw and went limp, refusing to help, so he was forced to hold her upright and pull her, feet dragging, through the door. Her cracked lips puckered to spit at him, but there was no moisture in her mouth, so she simply stared at him defiantly. Was he Thai? She couldn’t entirely tell. His face held a hint of hill tribe, but his eyes were too round. Had she journeyed for days and days only to end up back in Thailand? It didn’t make sense.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she tried to say, but no sound came out.

  She breathed deeply, experiencing this fleeting moment in the cool morning sunlight, proud to have survived the journey. The hope of fresh air and sunlight had sustained her for weeks, and her lungs inhaled the scent of the brackish water. Her face tilted to the sun as she tried to hold onto it, to savor it, but instead she felt her consciousness slipping away and embraced the darkness.

  Suda heard the honk of a horn and the distant sound of a siren. Her frail weight was stretched across a battered leather seat and covered by a blanket that smelled faintly of grease. Her bruised limbs were tender, but she came to understand that she was, in fact, still alive and now in the back seat of a car. The man who had taken her from the container was in the front seat, hands gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles looked white against his skin. He looked over his shoulder, changed lanes, and then glanced back at her before turning his head to face front again. His window was open wide, but the blanket was tucked around her, keeping the chill at bay.

  She wanted nothing more than to simply stay in that cushioned space, warm and comfortable at last. Heavy eyelids closed again, but they snapped back open moments later when the tires tapped a curb and the door was flung open.

  “You’re going to be all right. I’ve got you,” the man said in English. Then catching himself, he repeated it in Thai, even as her sunken eyes told him she wasn’t really listening.