Across the Deep

by Lisa McGuinness

  “I don’t know,” Claire said snidely, realizing she sounded like a petulant elementary school child, but unable to stop herself. “Did you?”

  Claire wanted Hailey to know she saw her get the drugs from the skanky hipster but couldn’t bring herself to just come out with it. It wasn’t just that, Claire realized. Now that she knew, she realized she had seen the same vacant look in Hailey’s eyes that her mother had sometimes had.

  “How could I have not noticed?” she mumbled out loud. She stood still, facing the counter, saying nothing else for a moment as she allowed that realization to sink in.

  Hailey looked at her, confused.

  “And don’t give me the big innocent eyes, either.” Claire turned her back to her and then practically threw a gallon of milk into the under-the-counter refrigerator and slammed the cooler door.

  Hailey looked around wondering what had gotten Claire so riled up. It didn’t occur to her for a moment that she would have noticed the exchange when her connection dropped off the pills, and Claire’s hostility just made her that much more eager to get alone and take one.

  And now, Claire, still lurking as close to the front and trying to catch every word spoken, heard Grace talking about Hailey being ready to leave? Claire closed her eyes remembering the day she saw Hailey buying pills. Since then, she had observed Hailey’s pupils being a little bit too large and her demeanor being a little too calm. She shook her head, lips pursed, furious that Hailey was blowing it but not willing to be a snitch.

  She walked back to the counter where she had been working before she began eavesdropping, grabbed the bread dough, and pounded it against the kneading board. She reminded herself that this scenario was exactly why she shouldn’t get involved in other people’s lives. Don’t care about them, and it all works out. She sighed, her mind switching to Suda.

  “Ugh!” escaped her mouth involuntarily as the fact that she was ignoring her own advice occurred to her. She couldn’t help herself; she liked that waif. Suda was kind and smart. Claire could tell she was by the look in her eyes when Claire talked to her. And she was pretty sure Suda was starting to understand. She could tell. Against her better judgment, she was not just letting her in but seeking her out. “What’s wrong with me?” she murmured under her breath. “I never learn.”

  Claire began rolling out the baguettes, knowing she’d beaten the dough so much they’d be ruined. But, hey, that was how life was; right?

  She heard Grace and Simone change the subject and tried to get on with her work. She could understand why Simone would miss what was going on with Hailey because she’d never lived the life, but Grace? Come on.

  Simone was about to close for the day when the door chimed and a slight young Asian man tentatively stepped in.

  Simone turned to him with a smile. “Hi,” she said. “What can I get for you?”

  He didn’t say anything, but his eyes darted around, and something about him made her uneasy.

  “Coffee?” she asked cautiously, but he shook his head.

  “We have a few croissants left, but I’m afraid it’s slim pickings at this hour because we are about to close.”

  His confused look bespoke the fact that he wasn’t a native English speaker. That itself wasn’t terribly uncommon in San Francisco, given the number of tourists who passed through the city, but because of his features, she couldn’t help wondering if he was Thai. The thought made her overly cautious, given the circumstances, and she touched her phone, which was tucked in her pocket, to make sure it was available in case she needed to call 911, Chai, or both.

  The young man seemed slightly agitated, and she noticed a sheen of sweat on his forehead although the day was cool and mild. He looked around the space again and caught sight of the door to the kitchen.

  His eyes turned back to her, and she met and held them. Something about him was off, and she wanted him to know that she wouldn’t be easy to get past. She was someone to contend with.

  “Tea?” she asked, keeping her voice purposefully calm, and he nodded.

  “Yes,” he hesitated, adding “please,” and fumbled in his pocket. For a split second, she thought—terrifyingly—that he was going to pull out a gun. Instead he took out some money and furrowed his brows at it; the uniformity of the size and color of the bills made it difficult to immediately determine the value of each.

  She wondered if she was being unduly worried. Perhaps he was simply feeling out of his element in a strange country or sweaty because he had a fever.

  He nodded his thanks when she handed him the tea and gave the place one last look before walking back out to the street. Was he the guy Chai had warned them about? Had he found them? If so, how?

  She shook her head, not sure whether she was seeing something that wasn’t there. He was probably just a guy who stopped in for tea. Still, trusting instincts that hadn’t led her wrong in the past, she decided to heed this frisson of concern. She made a note of what he looked like and planned to tell Chai about him the next time he was in.

  Suda

  The smell of yeasty bread and warm butter; the back drop hum of American voices; the constant hiss of the coffee steamer; another bouquet of flowers brought in from the farmers market.

  Suda had learned many English words in the weeks since she had been at Hope House, but the two words Suda heard often were love and healing, frequently in the same sentence. Breathe was another of her favorites. Simone rubbed circles onto her back and reminded her to inhale and exhale. Suda liked the sound of the word. The gentle ee sound matched the calm breaths she was supposed to take in and let out.

  The women at Hope House seemed to form a family of sorts—Simone being mother to all—even though the others were not much younger than she was. She had a certain strength and joyfulness in her being that Suda found mesmerizing. Like bubbly water, she thought, enjoying the image.

  Once she had stopped being terrified every waking moment, Suda had noticed that when you can’t speak the language others are speaking, it’s easier to observe people’s body language, emotions, and hidden intentions. Even those aspects that they don’t realize they’re expressing.

  For example, Suda noticed that Chai seemed to be in love with Simone. Suda saw it even though Simone herself didn’t seem to realize. Maybe Chai didn’t know it yet either. She observed him finding excuses to be around even when it was unnecessary. And she witnessed the fact that Chai liked to touch Simone casually on the arm or gently on her back when he scooted around her, as if it was coincidental. He was definitely more American than Thai in his mannerisms, she thought, because a Thai man would never so be so bold. And Suda could see that it was purposeful from the subtle yearning on his face. He also brought baskets of produce and bunches of flowers from the farmers market, ostensibly for everyone, but Suda noticed he always looked at Simone’s face to see her reaction and whether she was pleased with them.

  Suda sometimes smiled at how obvious it seemed to her, although he believed he was giving nothing away. She liked him, though, and, more importantly, she trusted him. She hoped he succeeded with Simone, who seemed unaware as far as Suda could tell. When Chai looked at Simone, he reminded Suda of the way her father looked at her mother before they died and she was forced to go with her aunt, who sold her to the karaoke as soon as she could. Suda shoved that memory to the back of her mind and turned to observe the others in the group.

  Hailey was more difficult to read. She kept to herself mostly. She was polite when she was in the group but rarely joined in the conversation. Instead she observed shyly from the outside. Suda wondered what had happened to Hailey to bring her to the safe house, but she had no way of knowing.

  Suda had made several observations about Claire, though, who seemed to want people to believe she didn’t care about anything or anyone. Her tone was dismissive when she spoke to people, but she saw that Claire hung around Grace and Simone at every opportunity.
She brought Suda coffee each morning but pretended it happened accidentally, as if she had suddenly found herself with an extra cup of coffee in hand—elaborate foam art included—that she needed to offload on someone. Suda tried not to show that she saw Claire’s kindness because she observed that Claire didn’t like to be noticed. She also saw that Claire followed them all with her eyes, as if she were afraid of having people out of her sight and therefore out of her life. She wondered whom Claire had unexpectedly lost. Suda sometimes found herself wanting to hold Claire’s hand but had noticed that whenever Simone or Grace touched her, she shied away, awkwardly.

  Another observation Suda had made about Claire was that she often wrote on scraps of paper. She couldn’t make out what it was, but she sometimes later found the papers, forgotten, with a line or two of words scrawled on it. She was curious about it, but something told her not to ask, that Claire wouldn’t want her to have noticed her habit of staring into space, often with her fingers tapping her lips, and then searching for a pen or pencil and scratching words out on whatever paper she could find close to her. Sometimes it was even the baking paper Simone had them place scones on before putting them in the oven. Suda wondered what it meant. She had never seen anyone write anything before. Why just a few words? And then why did she leave them behind? When she came across a scrap that had been abandoned, Suda would take it and slip it into her pocket. She tucked them away for someday when she could read.

  Mostly, though, while everyone else communicated over dinner in a language she couldn’t understand, Suda passed the time thinking about her own future. Even before Chai had given her the warning about Aanwat, she had felt deep in her core that he and Gan were still searching for her as much as she wished they had simply given up.

  “I think there was some sort of mix-up,” she had confided to Nittha one afternoon when she was visiting.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I heard them say there were supposed to be more girls,” Suda had closed her eyes, seeing inside of the container for that fleeting moment before she was closed into darkness. “I’m grateful for it, though.”

  “Why?”

  “I arrived half-starved. If there had been others, some of us would have died before we got here, I think.”

  Suda ran her hands over her stomach and across her hips. She was definitely fleshing out, and she liked it. She had been so skinny and weak before, and now she felt stronger. She thought back to her emaciated arms trying to throw a bucket of her own waste on Chai. She actually felt herself smile at the memory. It was a good thing she had been weak, otherwise he would have been covered, and she would have run to who knows where. She might have died from starvation by now. Or worse, she might have been caught.

  Instead she was in this house in San Francisco, surrounded by kind people. It still amazed her.

  Claire looked over at her, wondering about Suda’s small, amused smile. “Hey,” she nudged Chai, who had joined them for dinner. “Ask Suda what’s so funny.”

  When Suda told him what she had been thinking about, he burst out laughing and recounted his first encounter with Suda, skinny arms wielding the bucket. He was a good storyteller and made the entire situation seem humorous instead of tragic, which kept the mood light. The vision of the slight-framed Suda taking on Chai had them all laughing.

  “It sounds as if you did a ‘shitty’ job of protecting yourself,” Claire said, using air quotes in hopes of not getting busted by Simone for language. It worked; they all rolled their eyes while Chai translated Claire’s joke.

  Suda drank in the feeling of close-knit comaraderie—the kind of family she’d wished for since being torn from hers so long ago. Even though she couldn’t understand what they were saying, she could clearly see that they were laughing with her and not at her. She felt their pride in her for trying to save herself and could tell that Chai was probably embellishing the story for laughs, which she appreciated.

  At that moment, her decision crystallized. Suda was determined to stay, not just in San Francisco, but at Hope House, working in the bakery. She felt content—which was a new emotion for her.

  Grace had found a therapist for Suda who spoke both Thai and English and smuggled her—hat on head, large, dark sunglasses on her face—twice a week to an office on the other side of San Francisco. It was part of the program, she had Nittha explain. All the young women at Hope House did therapy. Nittha had started by explaining what a therapist was, but Suda still found the concept odd. She was supposed to tell someone she didn’t know about her feelings of humiliation and describe the pain she had gone through. Why would she do that?

  Her therapist told her that she would need to deal with the losses she’d encountered in life in order to heal, but for now, Suda preferred to simply live in the present. She did like the car ride both ways, though. It was interesting to see a little bit of the city where she had landed. The buildings were so tall, and people of all different colors walked the sidewalks. She could see businesses and trees. The buildings looked different from the buildings in Chiang Rai. They were taller, bigger, imposing.

  Suda’s therapist told her that a transition from fear, real fear as she had experienced, took a long time. The woman added that it made sense that it would take time for Suda to trust her, so, for now, they would just spend time together. That seemed odd to Suda. Drive to see a stranger and spend time together to build trust so that someday, if she wanted to, she could talk to her? Americans were confusing sometimes, but she did like them.

  Instead of talking about her trauma, Suda asked her how to say different words in English. At least that was helping her, she thought, even if it wasn’t in the way Grace and Simone expected it to. Learning English was difficult, and it was slow going, but she was determined. The linguistic sounds were very different from what she was used to, but she was curious about the name for things and that was a starting point.

  She had a vision of a possible future, and she wanted to do it right. She would study English. She would become a baker so she could serve others the warm bread and muffins she had come to love. She would stay right where she was.

  She was excited to learn to read. Suda noticed Claire always had a book in her hands. When Claire read, her face softened and relaxed. It made her look different, even prettier than she already was. Claire often absentmindedly twirled a strand of hair around her finger when she was lost in a book. She looked as if she didn’t have a care in the world. It seemed very American to her: baking bread and reading books—perhaps because at Hope House they didn’t watch television, so she had nothing to compare her sense of American culture to. But for whatever the reason, instead of longing for an expensive car or trendy clothing, Suda longed for the ability to immerse herself in a book.

  Grace, Suda noticed as she continued looking around at the others seated at the table, seemed like an open book herself. She knew a bit about her story because Nittha had told her, and Grace herself had told Nittha so she could translate for her. Grace was the exact opposite of Suda, who would prefer to keep everything that had happened to her hidden. But Grace said sharing what had happened to her with others who had similar trauma was her calling. Suda had no idea what that meant, but the fact that Grace told her she’d been forced to become a prostitute did make Suda feel less alone. Less ashamed. Because Suda could see that Grace had come through it. In fact, she seemed to gain power when she talked about it, not from having been a prostitute but from the fact that she’d overcome her past. Her face became more animated, more intense, when she spoke about her time on the streets. Grace stood tall and was confident and comfortable with herself in a way Suda had never encountered.

  At first Suda had difficulty getting a handle on Grace. Her messy blue hair, brash tone, and expansive hand gestures when she spoke reminded Suda of the Thai street hawkers who tried to lure her to buy their wares on market day. She even saw her throw back her head and laugh without cov
ering her mouth once when Claire said something to her, which Suda found intriguing and strange. It was not only that she would be so exuberant but that she seemed actually happy. Joyful. But how could that have happened? It made Suda a little bit uncomfortable.

  Yet in spite of that, Grace’s unwavering kindness had shown Suda that she had good intentions. She wanted Suda to be safe and to heal. Suda felt her protectiveness and appreciated the way she somehow included her even with no shared language.

  Suda had been shyly hiding in Simone’s apartment for the better part of a week when Grace first lured her out to the shared part of the house.

  “Come,” Grace had said, waving her hand in a gesture Suda understood to mean that she should follow her. She led her to the kitchen, pulled out a chair, and brought Suda a cup of tea. She made Suda feel a part of the house, invited into the rhythms of the day.

  Grace even laughed at herself easily if things went awry when she tried to do something new and joked with all of them about the horrors of the experiences they’d had in a way that made them seem less like victimized girls and more like humans who had gone through something difficult and survived. Grace often threw her fist into the air to show her power. Suda had tried it when she was alone but felt foolish. She was determined to keep trying though, so she could someday show her power, too.

  Aanwat

  A reel of Suda hopping into that car replayed in Aanwat’s mind as he walked back to his hotel. Had she been staying at a bakery the whole time he’d been looking for her? How did she get there, and why was she there? He wondered if she had been moved from one place to another for some reason, or whether she’d been there since she’d arrived in San Francisco. He couldn’t imagine how it had happened. It was all too strange. And who was the woman she was with? Was she in the business? Was the bakery really a brothel? Maybe it was a front.