Across the Deep

by Lisa McGuinness

  Thinking back, she should have known he was up to something. He had been in such a good mood. They’d even laughed together at some joke or another.

  She started crying in earnest. She reached her arm out and slid a towel off the rack and wrapped herself in it. It was white and starchy and smelled like hotel.

  She was frozen in place and shivering behind the door, but she couldn’t bring herself to move. She didn’t know how long she’d been crying in the hotel’s bathroom before Nick arrived.

  “Sweetheart, sweetheart,” he’d soothingly intoned through the door. “There’s no reason to be scared. You were having fun; remember?”

  “What are you talking about? Where am I? Where’s Mom?” Claire threw open the door and stood there in a towel, tear streaked and smelling of vomit.

  “Your mom? What do you mean? She’s not here. She’s dead; remember?”

  “I saw her dress. She’s here. I know she is.”

  “That’s not her dress anymore. It’s yours. You put it on last night. It looks great on you by the way. Even better than it did on her.”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t know what’s happening. I woke up here. Where are my clothes? What happened?”

  “How could you not remember? We had a party. You, me, and my boy Ian over there. He nodded to the man sprawled on the bed snoring obliviously.

  “I’m calling the police!” she moved toward the phone.

  Nick grabbed her arm. “No, you’re not,” he said. His mouth was smiling, but his eyes were hard. “Because nothing happened here that you didn’t want. Remember? We started with tacos, moved on to margaritas, and then finally you begged me for a roofie. Just a little fun, beautiful girl. You said you wanted to forget.”

  “No, that’s not what happened. I wouldn’t drink and do drugs. I would never do that.”

  “Never say never, because clearly you did, and no one would believe otherwise.”

  “Of course people would believe me. Why wouldn’t they?”

  “Oh, you’re wrong there, sweetheart. A picture’s worth a thousand words. I will humiliate you. I will tell all the little girls you hang out with at that precious school of yours. You think you’re their friend? How quickly do you think they’ll drop you once they know what you’ve been up to?”

  Claire suddenly had a vision of herself dancing around their living room laughing and Nick holding her up when she stumbled. But when was that? Had he drugged her first? Had he put something in the tacos or in the diet Coke he brought her? That’s the only explanation she could think of.

  “Did you drug me?” she asked, her voice small, stunned, and hurt. The betrayal pierced deeply.

  Her mind flashed on the way he’d been looking at her recently.

  “You disgusting creep!” Claire hissed.

  Nick laughed. “That’s all you’ve got? Wow, Claire, I’m scared.”

  The violation of her very core made her feel like screaming, but something in his eyes stopped her.

  “Did you drug me?” Nick repeated her question in a falsetto singsong voice, imitating her. He looked her square in the face. “I gave you what you wanted. And believe me, you wanted it.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “Clearly you did, or we wouldn’t be here right now.”

  “Did you put something in my food?” Her tone slipped from confused to accusatory.

  “Claire. Sweetheart. Stop saying I drugged you. I didn’t. We had tacos. I was drinking a margarita, and you asked for a sip. You loved it. You wanted your own, remember?”

  A flash of asking for a drink raced through her mind. Had that happened? Was he right?

  “I want to go home.” She started crying in earnest. “I … what time is it? I have school today. I have a biology test.”

  “Always studious,” Nick laughed. “Fine. I’ll get you home, but it’s already almost 11:00, so you’ve probably missed it.”

  “You said you’d take care of me. Not … not …”

  She looked around the room. It smelled, and there was a disgusting passed out naked man in the bed. Nick looked wrecked and her body was sore in all the wrong places. The situation really sunk in and another sob escaped.

  “Nothing happened to you that you didn’t want. Come on, Claire. Don’t be a child. You knew what was going on. And I have taken care of you, just like I always said I would. And you helped. You charmed a client, just like I knew you would.”

  Claire shakily put her mother’s dress back on. It hung loosely on her thin frame. She had no idea where her underwear was. She just wanted out. She wanted to be home. Immediately. Now.

  Nick grabbed his phone and called for a Lyft. He smiled at her as if there was no problem in the world they couldn’t handle together.

  Claire wrapped her arms protectively around herself. She walked out of the hotel room, and into the elevator without looking back. When they reached the outside, the cold fog whipped through the thin dress, and the fact that she had no coat made her teeth immediately begin to chatter.

  “Hey, there. Are you okay?” the doorman asked her.

  “She’s fine.” Nick answered for her as he followed her out into the morning. Then he opened the door to the waiting car, and she slid inside averting her eyes.

  They rode home in silence. All Claire wanted was a shower, and the second she walked into the apartment, she went straight into the bathroom, locked the door, and started running hot water. The sound drowned out the crying that she didn’t even attempt to contain.

  She made it to the sanctuary of school just as the bell rang to signal the end of lunch, and students began filing back into the halls for afternoon classes. She walked into the attendance office, wan looking, wet hair thrown into a bun on top of her head.

  “Overslept,” was all she managed to say to the secretary, not able to meet her eye.

  She smiled and winked at Claire. “Any other student, and I’d be sure it was a cut, but for you, one of our star pupils, I’ll just give you a hall pass, no questions asked.”

  Claire wanted to scream. “Do ask. Please ask.” But what came out was a mumbled, “Thanks.”

  All she could see was herself, naked in a hotel room, and that man. She shook her head in attempt to clear the vision, but it wouldn’t leave.

  “Hey!” Kate spied Claire getting her books out of her locker. “Where have you been? You look like a drowned rat!”

  “Overslept,” Claire said and then turned to her friend and hugged her tightly, trying to control her emotions.

  “Um,” Kate pulled back. “You all right?” She furrowed her brow taking in her friend.

  “I’m fine,” Claire said, realizing she would never be able to bring herself to tell Kate what had happened. She would sooner jump off a cliff than speak the words aloud. She slammed her locker and turned away.

  “Wait!” Kate called after her, grabbing her books and trying to catch up, but Claire rounded the corner and practically sprinted all the way to biology, leaving Kate standing confused in the school’s hallway.

  The door to Hope Bakery chimed, and a customer interrupted Claire’s memory.

  “Hi.” She forced her face into a smile. “Can I get you a coffee?”

  Suda

  Grace pulled her battered old blue Honda Accord up to the side street by Hope Bakery’s back door, and Suda—San Francisco Giants baseball cap pulled low on her forehead—dashed for the passenger door, although she was convinced she’d never be recognized. Not with the bleached hair and glasses. Still, the thought of being caught sent shivers through her body. She would try to kill herself, she had decided, if they ever got to her, because she didn’t want to live through being trafficked again. She had been made to do things she hated to even think about and had been beaten so many times she shuddered at the memory.

  Grace told her to crouch low in the seat, bu
t Suda was already slumped so low only her eyes and baseball cap were visible through the window. Still, she was able to watch the city go by as they made their way to her therapist’s office.

  She wished she could tell Grace how much she liked looking at the buildings. It was incredibly different from the Thailand she knew, having never been to a big city. She liked the brightly painted homes with all their fancy shingles and intricate colors. And the hills were so steep. Her village had steep hills. She tried to visualize them covered in buildings like these and couldn’t manage it.

  She sometimes held her breath as the car zoomed up the hills and crested the tops. There was that brief moment where the street below was no longer visible, and it always turned her stomach for a second or two. The buses were loud and huge! It was difficult to understand how they were able to move on the electricity that ran through the wires rather than on regular engines.

  It seemed to her that they could use some songthaews and tuk tuks here to get around more easily, though. And more scooters. Here it was cars, cars, cars.

  She wondered if she could become a new person here. If maybe someday she could forget her past. Forget the pain, forget the humiliation, forget the sadness and longing. She sighed visualizing her mother and baby sister’s faces. She wondered if forgetting her past even with its pain would be worth losing the rest. She would never know, she reminded herself, because she could never forget anyway.

  And where were the brothels in this city? She didn’t see signs of any, but there were always brothels.

  Once they arrived, Grace pulled out her phone to check texts and pass time in the waiting room while Suda ventured into her therapist’s office and sat on the smooth brown leather couch. The couch was deep, so she had to scoot back and tuck up her legs beneath her, otherwise her feet wouldn’t touch the floor, which made her feel like a small child. The walls were painted a creamy white and were decorated with photographs of Thailand’s lush mountains, which helped put Suda at ease. She breathed in the sight, feeling homesick for her childhood village and aching to be there, and at the same time relieved and deeply grateful to be safely away from so much hurt.

  Suda guessed that her therapist was in her thirties, but her age didn’t matter. It was the fact that she had been born and raised in Thailand and then came to the United States for college and never went back that Suda found interesting. Although the therapist was from Bangkok rather than the hill country, Suda liked the fact that she understood Thai culture and spoke her language. She understood, on a different level than Simone and Grace could, all the cultural subtleties Suda didn’t even think about that defined her worldview. At the same time, her therapist created a bridge to her life here in San Francisco, where so much was different and strange.

  During Suda’s visits, the therapist was gradually trying to draw Suda out of her shell. She asked her to describe her childhood in Thailand. Immediately visions of it swam before Suda’s closed eyes. For her, there were two distinct parts of her life: before and after.

  Before was when her parents were alive and she was allowed to roam free as long as she remained in her village. The hills were covered with abundant green vegetation and dirt the color of redwood. She could almost feel the hot, humid air filling her lungs and the moist ground under her feet as her mind wandered back.

  When she was small, they often still wore traditional dress. She loved the brightly colored clothing. Even the headdress that sometimes felt scratchy in the heat gave her a feeling of belonging. She was part of her people. Her parents loved each other, which at the time seemed normal, but as she grew, she learned that they had been an exception rather than the rule.

  It was true that her brother was favored, but to her that was of no consequence because he was good to her. He usually looked out for her. Once they were old enough, they helped harvest the coffee beans together.

  There had always been enough rice and eggs to fill her tummy. The corrugated steel roof seemed sturdy enough and kept them dry. When the rain fell, it made melodious pitter-

  patterings against the steel like a song. She loved to listen to it as she drifted off to sleep on rainy nights with her mother’s arm tucked tightly around her. Eyes closed, she breathed in deeply, remembering. She couldn’t imagine ever feeling that kind of safety and contentment again.

  She shivered, connecting the memory of rain to her lowest moment in the shipping container during a storm at sea: she had wept bitterly as the rain fell because the sound of the drops against her steel prison was almost the same as the rain sound of her childhood that was so completely lost. The storm had been a beautiful reminder, a haunting memory, and the sound of loss.

  But that was not what she contemplated as she recounted her early life.

  When she and her brother, Asnee, had reached school age, there was little money for shoes and a uniform, so they went barefoot, which was fine with her until she reached the school room and discovered the other students wore shoes. It was up to each family to equip the student with school supplies, but coming up with paper and a pencil had been difficult. What they had on hand became a point of competition between Suda and her brother, with her brother more often than not winning out. She used the cast-off pencil nubs when she could and begged or borrowed them when there were none to be found because being caught without a pencil at school meant a smack on the forearm or the backs of the legs from a ruler at the teacher’s hand. She loved learning, though, and an occasional welt was worth it to her to be there with the other kids.

  Suda paused in recounting her tale, and the therapist gently nudged her forward with a simple, “And then what?”

  “When I was about to start school, my mother became pregnant. She was surprised and seemed happy. There was a beautiful lightness about her that I will always remember.” Suda’s face held a melancholy softness as she thought about her mother then. Her lovely wide cheekbones and smiling eyes.

  “They drowned when I was about ten years old,” she said softly. “My parents. As well as my little sister, Ploy.”

  “What happened? Can you tell me?”

  “There’s water at the bottom of our village. It looks like a small lake, winding between jutting mountains. It’s beautiful. We loved to play in it during the dry season when it’s safe.”

  Suda looked out the window, as if she could see the water just beyond.

  “We had to be careful because the rains sometimes come on suddenly.”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “They were in the valley, at a low point, harvesting coffee berries. It started pouring rain. The storm caught us all off guard. It came earlier than expected that year.” Suda’s voice was expressionless in the quiet.

  “The water made a muddy river. The hill washed out, and they tried to climb up a steep slope to get back up, but my sister slipped and started to be washed away in the torrent. My parents both jumped down after her—they tried to save her—but none of them came home. That’s all I know. They drowned on a regular, nothing-special Thursday while my brother and I were at school.”

  Suda looked back at her therapist and then went on.

  “My aunt took us in, but it was difficult. She already had three small boys and our uncle, my mother’s brother, had died a couple of years earlier. She did her best for a few years. We helped in the fields, but once I got older, she realized that she could make some money from me.” She shrugged. “Sometimes we had to skip a day of eating when there was nothing. So, feeding two more … after a while that was just too much for her, I think.”

  “Mmmm,” the therapist nodded and made a noise that could be either soothing or prompting.

  “I don’t really blame my aunt. It’s hard to be hungry. To watch your children getting skinnier and then try to stretch the meager amount you have across two more people. So, instead of a burden, I became an asset.”

  “You speak about it in such a detached way. What she d
id to you was not okay. What happened to you is wrong. You are a worthy person with a right to safety and to have your basic human needs met.” Her therapist looked into her eyes with a tender expression.

  “I appreciate you saying that. But, my life made it so that my brother didn’t starve. My aunt and cousins didn’t go hungry. Now I have no idea what’s happening to them. Aren’t they worthy, too?” An image of her brother’s face with his lopsided grin and chipped front tooth appeared unbidden in her mind. She wondered what he looked like now.

  “Of course. Everybody is, but not at the expense of another. Do you understand?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure. Family is important. They got money for me.”

  “Yes, but you are not an asset. People are not things, Suda; you were treated like one, but you are not one.”

  It’s nice to think so, Suda sighed, but she was undecided about what was true. Her body had come to feel like just a thing while she was in the karaoke. She had detached it from her mind as much as possible. After a while, she hadn’t felt like a full human anymore anyway. She had hated her life, but at least she knew she was keeping her brother alive. Now she wasn’t sure what would happen to him.

  Chai

  chai felt sure that little shit Aanwat was up to something. He had been acting extra nervous and evasive lately. The guy had been looking for Suda since his arrival, but Chai had noticed a change in his demeanor over the last few days, which worried him more than a little bit. What was he up to?

  Chai knew Aanwat had checked all the massage parlors and nail salons posing as a concerned relative looking for Suda. Seeing him strike out day after day while Chai knew Suda’s exact location was gratifying.