Laura stood a bit longer at the window after he had gone. She found that she had risen to her toes in sympathetic stealth. Had it been Somchit? The whole episode, just moments past, seemed dreamlike. She turned to look at Beatrice, who lay soundlessly in her bed across the room. Laura crept back to her own bed, slipping in and forcing her toes right down to find the cool patch between the sheets.
It had been Somchit. The domed forehead, the cheekbones, the nose, the ink-black hair gleaming at the part—she’d seen them all clearly when the moonlit bicycle-beast had looked back toward the house, just before slipping through the gate.
She wondered if she should tell.
PART 2
2019
Chapter Ten
SUVARNABHUMI AIRPORT was clean and modern, not much different from the ultra-high-tech and sparkling Narita, where Laura had spent a short layover. She followed the signs to the taxi stand with a blank feeling: nothing she saw, or smelled, or heard, sparked any recollection. She went through the glass exit doors into daylight and a heat sudden and stifling and close all around, as though she’d stepped into a giant mouth. The taxi driver read the address on the paper she gave him, then handed the paper back, turned on the meter, and pulled away from the curb.
They were soon on a highway, the traffic thick but moving well, the driver barely slowing at toll points as he rolled the window down to chuck the coins. It was a large roadway, four lanes in each direction; only the Thai characters on the green signs hanging over the road distinguished it from the Beltway that circled Washington.
She glanced down at the paper in her hand and realized it bore the address of Claudette’s house. Laura had meant to give the taxi driver the other paper, the one with the hotel address. She considered telling him to change the destination, but decided against it. Apparently fate had intervened to send her directly to Philip.
From the map she’d studied on the plane, she knew this highway traveled north of the city and ran east-west, so Bangkok itself would be to the left of them. Laura kept her face turned to that window but she saw no skyline, nothing but scrubby industry, palm trees, houses. So much concrete. So many billboards. Where were the temples she remembered? Where was all the green? They took a hard left and traffic slowed to a crawl, the road narrowing to two lanes between a double array of diverse buildings: storefronts, two-story houses, apartment complexes with exterior staircases switchbacking up their sides, the open mouth of a car wash.
“You come to Bangkok before?” inquired the taxi driver.
“Not for a long time,” said Laura.
“Oh, many change,” said the man, nodding. He probably hadn’t even been born when she’d lived there.
A break in the billboards revealed a stretch of horizon, a serration of tall buildings against a violet smudge of pollution, before the road crested up into the sky and plateaued at the new height. They were traveling in choked but steady traffic along the rooflines of buildings that crowded up on both sides of the concrete barriers when Laura saw, jammed between a billboard and a mirror-glassed office building, a red-tiled temple roof. Its ornate peaks and scrollwork passed mere yards from the taxi window, close enough almost to touch, then were gone.
They crossed over an expanse of brown water and the taxi peeled away down an exit, diving into the overpass shadow and emerging into a broad passageway without lane markers, traffic plaiting and unplaiting at high speed. After a few hair-raising minutes of that they were delivered into a narrow street with a topiaried median to the right, and on the left a line of open umbrellas like dirty canvas flowers. Abruptly there was a wall of cement outside Laura’s window, and the road became shuddering dirt.
“Construction,” said the driver, smiling into the rearview mirror, before turning into an alley. Sheet metal panels rose well above eye level on either side, making a channel barely wide enough for one car. There were no other cars and no pedestrians in sight.
Laura was suddenly aware that not a soul on earth had any idea where she was. She had no idea where she was, and she was a day’s travel by air from anyone she knew. There was no protection against what might happen now, deep in this anonymous alley in this foreign place. She fumbled her phone from her pocket, turned it on.
It vibrated with text after text, alert boxes floating up on the screen in quick succession. Many of them from Edward. It was surprising that he had sent so many. He was used to her going incommunicado periodically while working; normally he’d send one or two texts and stop to wait for a reply. She flicked the alerts away and tapped in a text to Sullivan. I’m in Bangkok. Looking at the paper, she carefully copied the address of the house into a text and added, If I don’t text you again in an hour, call the Bangkok police and give them this address.
No reply dots—of course not. It was barely six a.m. where he was.
The taxi stopped beside a high wall. The driver shut off the meter and turned on the dome light, announced the fare with a smile. She could still turn back, she thought numbly as she paid with her card. The driver popped the trunk and got out, returned with her bag in his hand. He stood beside her window, looking quizzically in at her. Now or never, she thought. She gathered herself, reached for the door handle.
And stepped out into the hot breath of her childhood. Potent and unmistakable, that tapestry of scent: flowers and sewage and cooking odors and things Laura couldn’t name. She stood wavering, taking it in.
“You okay?” asked the taxi driver, setting her bag beside her.
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”
He made a wai and got back into the car. She went forward, carrying the bag toward a tall wooden gate. It bore shiny numerals that matched the house number on the paper, but she could see no button or call box. Puzzled, she looked to the right and left of the gate—nothing but smooth, featureless wall.
“Puuun.” The syllable came from behind her.
She turned: the taxi driver was grinning from his window, making a pulling motion like a train conductor sounding his horn. She turned back and saw a hanging string, like the chain for a WC. She grasped it and pulled down, was rewarded by a tinkling sound from an invisible brace of bells.
“Right house?” called the taxi driver.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Okay,” he said, but he didn’t start up the engine. They waited together. She was considering pulling the chain again when the gate cracked open and a Thai face peeked out.
“Hello, er, sawadee-kha,” Laura said. “I’m looking for Claudette?”
The opening in the gate widened; a short elderly man stood in the gap. He made a wai and stood back for her to go through.
“I wait for you five minute,” the taxi driver called as the gate shut behind her.
Even in the gathering darkness, Laura could see that the property was magnificent, lawn sweeping around, long banks of shrubbery. A low stone wall surrounded a fishpond—she blinked and saw Choy sitting there, reaching out to the water with a hand loosely cupped around a ball of rice, two fingers extended to pluck the surface and summon the fish. Choy wasn’t there, of course; there was no one sitting on the wall.
The man was climbing a set of steps that rose to a large framed wooden house; she followed, placing her feet carefully, some deep warning bell in her mind tolling snake. There were no lights on anywhere. The man paused outside the front door of the house to slip off his shoes and Laura did the same, leaving them in a line with the others there—just four pairs, she noticed—and then he led her inside. They went down a corridor that was lit only by the waning daylight coming through glass panes high in the walls, past a number of closed doors, before they arrived at a wide doorless opening. A far light glowed within, at the end of a very large room. From a distance it seemed to be a surreally suspended disk, like a hovering ball of lightning, but as Laura approached she could see that it was a 1970s-style floor lamp, a globe at the end of a curved silver arc, like an eyeball on a giant stalk. In the pool of incandescence it shed were four
bentwood chairs, and in one of those sat a small woman, posture erect, holding a cellular phone at eye level.
“Miss Preston,” she said, putting the phone down, standing up and coming forward, hand extended. “How was your flight?”
In person, Claudette’s face was slightly too broad, the eyes too far apart, to be strictly pretty. She had a vivacity, though, that made her visually arresting, and she was pristinely groomed. She was tiny. Towering over her, Laura felt grubby and gross.
“Fine,” said Laura, setting her bag down and enduring the brisk handshake. “Long.”
“I’m sorry it’s so dark in here,” said Claudette. “No electricity in the house. We have had to improvise.” She sat again, waved Laura to the chair opposite, spoke to the old man. “Kiet. Bring two bottled waters, please.”
The room, scattered with shapes of furniture—carved low tables, a hinged screen—had the haphazard, unintentional look of a space that was just being moved into or out of. Laura supposed the improvisation was the long extension cord she could see snaking away from the base of the floor lamp and out of the pool of light. Toward a window, perhaps, and outside, to an electrical pole that Kiet or someone else had climbed in order to splice into the box there.
As if suspicious of Laura’s interest in the room’s furnishings, Claudette spoke sharply.
“My father didn’t leave a will,” she said. “The house and everything in it now belong to me.”
“Of course,” said Laura. “Where is Philip?”
“Meditating,” said Claudette, the word delivered with a strong flavor of restraint, as if she were suppressing an eye roll. “He meditates twice a day. They all did.” Her air of vague disdain was familiar, from the Skype sessions. “The house was wired for electricity, but they did not use it. Over the years, the wires rotted or were eaten by mice.” She shook her head. “Imagine, no air-conditioning in Bangkok.” Reading something in Laura’s expression, she added, “It wasn’t a cult, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I wasn’t,” lied Laura. But that had been the charitable option.
“It was more like a business cooperative,” said Claudette. “They made things. Cloth, pottery, honey.” She opened her purse and extracted a cigarette case. She allowed herself the eye roll this time, accompanied by a tiny headshake. “I had to relocate half a million bees.” Tamping a cigarette against her thumbnail. “So. We must wait for the meditation to finish.” She put the cigarette into her mouth and lit it.
“How long has my brother been living here?” said Laura. My brother. It felt so strange to say that.
“Decades,” Claudette said. She pronounced it dee-cades. “According to him, he came here around 1980. Not long after my father left my mother and moved here.” Her voice held a shadow of teenage pain. “When was the last time you spoke with him?”
No one that Laura knew smoked anymore. The burning tip, the smoke spiraling up, the acrid smell were mesmerizing.
“Philip has been missing since he was eight,” she said.
Claudette stared at her. “Eight,” she repeated, hissing smoke with the word. “Eight years old?”
“Yes,” said Laura. “He disappeared in 1972.”
In the stunned silence that followed, the servant appeared with the bottled waters. Thank you, murmured Laura in Thai as she took one, surprising herself. Khob khun kha. Where had those words come from?
“Well, my father had nothing to do with that,” declared Claudette, twisting the cap off her bottle. “In 1972, my father was still living in Lausanne, with me and my mother.” She put the bottle to her lips, took a swallow. “He was a professor of philosophy.”
“Perhaps they met before they came to live in this house,” said Laura. She strove to make her voice neutral, as if she were not accusing the dead father of kidnapping or pedophilia. Even if Claudette’s father hadn’t been the one who originally took him, Philip would still have been a minor, at least according to U.S. law, until December 1981.
“Not possible,” said Claudette. “My father lived with us until February of 1980.” Her jaw was square, defensive. It was clear that February 1980 was her life’s landmark, when Papa left, the way that August 1972 was the Preston family watershed. “He had never lived in Asia before. My mother thought it was temporary insanity, but it seems not.” She took another drag on her cigarette. “Not temporary,” she clarified.
In February 1980, Philip had been just sixteen. If he had come here to this house then, that still left eight blank years after his disappearance.
“What is your plan?” Claudette said. “Where will you take him?”
“Home,” said Laura. “To the U.S.”
“That will probably be difficult,” said Claudette, in a not-my-problem tone. “He doesn’t have a passport. No identification papers of any kind.”
“I was thinking we could get a DNA test.”
“Hm.” A noncommittal sound. Claudette leaned forward to tap her ash into an ashtray on the low table between them. “We’ve had a doctor to visit,” she said, non sequitur. “He said there is something chronic, possibly with the liver, and his heart is not strong. He prescribed some pills.”
She leaned back again, and Laura saw her fatigue. In the midst of grief for her father, probably also coping with a lifetime’s unresolved feelings of abandonment, Claudette had had to contend with all the mess left behind, a crowd of strangers (freeloaders, or cult members, or prisoners, whatever they had been), the half a million bees. Something perhaps like rehoming a litter of mongrel puppies one by one. Philip was the last.
They sat without speaking for a few minutes, Claudette apparently unbothered by the silence, smoking while Laura sipped from the tepid bottle of water.
“Here he is now,” Claudette said.
Laura turned her head, and felt her heart seize at the sight of her dead father in the doorway.
“You two look very much alike,” commented Claudette.
“It’s the hair,” he said. His smile acknowledged the weakness of the joke.
Laura stood up, went to him. His wai complicated her embrace at first, before he put his arms down. She looked up into his face, saw again her father adumbrated there, in the shape of the eye sockets, the long chin.
He seated himself on one of the chairs, and Laura sat opposite him.
“So,” he said. “You turned out to be pretty.” Dryly added, “Against all odds.” Then he smiled, and the skin dented under his left eye, like a high, horizontal dimple. Their father had had that dimple. Laura had it too.
She tried to match his teasing tone. “You turned out to be tall. That’s the real headline.” Skirting around the gigantic question—where had he been, and in what circumstances, when that growth spurt had taken place?
She’d expected, without really planning it, to get the whole story immediately. What happened that day you disappeared and Where have you been for forty-seven years? But now that the moment was here, she found herself thwarted. Not just by the presence of onlookers—the servant in the corner, grim Claudette sipping from her bottle of water—but by a muffling shyness. As though Philip were a stranger.
“You’re living in the States now?” he said.
Again, she noticed that he didn’t sound completely American. Laura had worked hard to eradicate her own accent after they’d come back, mimicking her classmates, rounding her vowels and dulling her Ts. Was Philip’s voice the sound of her own youth, preserved as if in amber?
“Yes,” she said. “We went back after—we moved back there.”
He nodded. “And how are the rest of the Prestons?”
The rest of the Prestons, what an odd way to put it. Unnerved, aware of Claudette’s gimlet eye, Laura became chatty.
“Well, Bea is exactly as you’d expect. As bossy as ever, running the world from her house in Northern Virginia. She has twin boys, you can’t believe how handsome and smart they are. Her husband does something we’re not allowed to ask about.” She almost added like Daddy, but stop
ped herself. Partly from long habit—non–family members in earshot—and also because maybe Philip hadn’t ever known. What had they understood about their father’s work back in 1972? “Mum is doing well, very healthy.” Too difficult to explain about the dementia now. “Noi helps with her, remember Noi?”
He nodded. “And Dad?” he said.
“He died.” Her eyes instantly moist, thirty-nine years a mere fingersnap to grief. “In 1980.” Philip may have already been living here then, free to come and go. Or had he been free? And where had he been before that? Again, the question Laura’s thoughts kept crashing against like a tide against a seawall: Why hadn’t he contacted them sooner?
“I’m sorry to hear that.” His tone kind but somewhat removed, as if he was sorry for the rest of the Prestons, for Laura and Beatrice and for their mother, for the untimely ending of a human life, but not as if he felt the loss personally.
“Philip,” she said, leaning forward. What happened to you? on her lips.
He shot his eyes sideways, toward Claudette. It was the first rapid movement he’d made, and the implication was clear: he didn’t want to discuss anything in front of her.
So instead of speaking the question, Laura said, “We have to get you home, all right?” A thought struck her. “You do want to go back to America?”
“Well, he can’t stay here,” interjected Claudette. She’d lit another cigarette, and shot out a long skein of smoke between pursed lips. She turned her head, told Kiet, “Bring the little blue bag.”
“I thought we’d sort this out over a day or two,” said Laura, taken aback.
What Could Be Saved Page 13
