What Could Be Saved

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “You can sort it out at a hotel, yes?” said Claudette.

  At that moment it all came together, muzzily overwhelming: the lack of sleep, the heat, the utter strangeness of the scene with the bald brother-stranger and the irritated Swiss woman, the orphaned furniture and the pool of light in which they all sat, the powerful but fragmentary nostalgia.

  “May I use the bathroom?” she asked Claudette in a faint voice. Asking her permission instead of Philip’s, although this had been Philip’s home—his prison?—for dee-cades.

  “Of course,” said Claudette with a surprised tone, as though she hadn’t just made it clear that she intended to expel both of them from the property posthaste. She motioned to Kiet to show Laura the way. “Take a torch,” she said, indicating a cluster of flashlights that stood on the table, flared heads down.

  Laura slid the bathroom’s pocket door closed—no lock, she noticed again—and balanced the flashlight on the sink, the basin muffling its glow, while she got out her phone. Six thirty p.m. was seven thirty a.m. there. Sunday, so Edward would be at home, having breakfast. She felt an abrupt longing to be there with him, fluffy scrambled eggs and buttered pumpernickel toast and hot milky coffee, the newspaper crossword cued up on the iPad. She would love to hear his voice—but she didn’t want to hear his remonstrations. The person she most wanted to talk to, she realized, was Beatrice. Although what would she say to her? Bea, I’ve come to Bangkok to get Philip and it’s super weird and I wish you were here. And more, her imagined monologue running down a surprising channel, Why can’t we ever be united on anything, we’re sisters and Daddy’s dead and who knows what Mum remembers, our childhood is gone apart from our memories of it and why are we always on opposite sides of some invisible line? Even if she were disinhibited enough to say all that, she wouldn’t get the first sentence out—by Bangkok, Bea’s outraged questions would interrupt. And even if Bea listened, even if she were able to put aside her anger, what could she do to help, in this moment, from across the world? She recalled Bea leaning against the counter in her kitchen, her impassioned, defeated I can’t.

  Laura put away the phone. She had begun this on her own; she’d have to finish it.

  * * *

  Claudette called a car, and Laura and her long-lost brother left the compound together. Although the house had reportedly been his home for most of his life, Philip left it without looking back, slipping his feet into the largest of the paired sandals beside the front door and walking out. Kiet presented a small blue duffel—all of Philip’s worldly possessions, apparently—and Laura slung its strap over her shoulder beside the strap of her own bag and followed Philip’s limping form down the front steps and then the long path, toward the gate. Absurdly, she was still gripping the half-full water bottle, sloshing water against the cap with every step.

  They rode into the heart of a positively futuristic-looking downtown, lighted skyscrapers rising all around them and an elevated rail running high alongside. Laura gave up looking for landmarks. She remembered grass, wooden buildings, temples. Of course things must have changed a lot in so many years, but how could all of it be gone?

  From the U.S., she’d booked into a hotel whose name she was sure she had recognized; when the taxi drew up before a modern tower she knew it couldn’t be the same building. They got out of the car and a bellman took their bags; Laura and Philip followed him into an extravagantly planted portico three stories tall, its ceiling a glassed dome of hovering twilight.

  The doorman deposited the bags at the front desk and made a quick wai before heading back toward the hotel entrance. Laura gave her name and asked the clerk for a second room, if possible one adjacent to the one she’d reserved. The clerk shook his head—there were no other rooms available on the same floor.

  “On a different floor, then,” she said.

  “I will look, madame.” The word conjured up Genevieve so powerfully that Laura had the impulse to look around for her. But of course madame was nonspecific; her mother had been just one among many, and now Laura was one herself. The clerk finished clicking computer keys and said with infinite apology, “I am so sorry, madame. We have no other rooms available.”

  “In the whole hotel?”

  “Yes,” said the clerk, smiling as though he were not delivering bad news.

  Laura had been looking forward to some privacy, to regroup, to decide what to do, perhaps to telephone Edward. Would she have to sleep in the same bed with Philip?

  “Well, that will have to do,” said Laura, with a gaiety she did not feel, her mother’s voice in her head singing In for a penny, in for a pound. “We can share the room. Is that all right with you?” she asked Philip, who nodded.

  A bellman appeared, pushing a brass luggage carrier; he plucked the two bags from the carpet, nestled them onto the velvet planchet as lovingly as though they were Vuitton, and led the way to the lift.

  When the bellman switched the overhead light on in their room, Laura saw with relief: two beds. She had no baht, but the man accepted a ten-dollar bill. He made a wai—this time Laura had the presence of mind to return it—and then was gone, and she and Philip were alone. Philip sat on one of the beds and she sat on the other. Between them, a nightstand with a telephone, and a chrysanthemum floating in a glass bowl. Across the room there was a desk bearing a figured brass bowl of fruit, and on the wall above that the dull black of a flat-screen television.

  “It’s a nice room,” Laura said. Philip nodded. “Well. I’d love to take a bath. Then dinner? Unless you’re starving now.”

  “Not starving,” he said.

  “Unless you need the bathroom first,” she said.

  “No, you go ahead,” he said.

  The ninnying politeness of their exchange echoed in her mind as she went into the bathroom. It was like any five-star hotel bathroom anywhere, slick and white and clean. She tipped a cascade of bath beads under the faucet blast, and while the tub filled with fragrant foam, got out her phone. The notifications she’d flicked away before obligingly rose to the screen in a stacked array, the most recent one showing on the top: Now I’m worried.

  She read them in order.

  Edward: Wheels up at six thirty. Look out, I am accessorized!

  Here.

  Here.

  Helloooo.

  Oh no, she realized. She’d missed the partner dinner. She’d been in transit while Edward was sending these jaunty messages.

  Do I need to park and come in? There’s nothing on the street.

  All right, I’m going around to the back.

  Are you in there? Calling.

  Laura, are you okay?

  Did you forget?

  Please let me know you’re OK.

  Now I’m worried.

  She texted I’m okay - I’m sorry - Can’t talk now - I’ll explain soon.

  Then she stripped and got into the bath, huddled in steamy clouds of lather while her phone buzzed and buzzed from the pile of clothing beside the tub.

  I can’t, she thought. He knows I’m okay. He can wait. She lay back, lifted a leg from the suds and put it against the wall, looked down the column of her leg to her toes splayed on the tile, and closed her eyes.

  She saw her own canvas-shod foot kicking at a slanted oblong of sunlight—the window in an open car door—and the scowling face of Philip, his fluffy hair making a cockscomb against the light behind him. He grabbed her kicking foot and pushed, doubling up that leg and crossly crowding against her, the back of her other leg painfully unsticking from the leather, while he grunted Don’t be a brat.

  She opened her eyes. It had been memory, not dream. She and Philip had been quarreling over the window seat. The scene had floated up in her mind without effort, as though it had been lying undisturbed and whole just below the surface of her consciousness since the day it happened. She’d never specifically recalled that episode before, although she also knew she’d always remembered it. Why had that moment been selected from all the other possible moments, to be harbo
red in such perfection and completeness? On the other side of that bathroom door, unless she was very much mistaken, was the same little boy from that memory. It seemed preposterous, miraculous.

  * * *

  Her phone buzzed again. She must have fallen asleep; the bath was cooling. She reached over the side of the tub, crushing one breast against the porcelain, and teased the phone from the pocket of her jeans, where they lay abandoned on the tile.

  Sullivan, not Edward.

  Am I calling the Bangkok police? said the text. The phone buzzed again: Are you really in Bangkok?

  Yes Bangkok, she typed. No police.

  The phone rang. She turned on the hot water, to refresh the bath and cover the sound of her voice, and answered.

  “Don’t ask me to explain,” she said.

  “Okay,” said Sullivan.

  “I came here to get my brother,” she explained anyway. “Or the man who says he’s my brother. I haven’t seen him since I was seven and he was eight.”

  “Okay,” said Sullivan.

  “He was living in some kind of commune. Shaved heads and pajamas and no electricity, and lots of meditating.” It sounded more and more like a cult as she heard herself describe it. “Maybe his head isn’t shaved, actually,” she said. “Maybe he’s gone bald. He’s fifty-five,” she said, and she was laughing and crying a little at the same time. “Fifty-five.”

  “Are you sure it’s your brother?”

  “Ninety-nine percent,” said Laura, and then recalled the rest of the Prestons. “Ninety-five.”

  “Ninety-five is still very good,” said Sullivan. “What’s he like?”

  “Calm. Otherworldly calm. A real Zen motherfucker.” The bath was dangerously full; she turned off the faucet and cracked the plug. Water drained with a throaty gurgle. “I’ve been acting like some kind of batty hostess.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In a hotel. Both of us. That woman just threw him out of the house.”

  “All right,” Sullivan said. He didn’t ask who that woman was. “Has he—or anyone—asked you for money? Or banking information? Has anyone handled your wallet or credit card?”

  “No.” Too loud: the syllable echoed. “I haven’t asked him one thing,” she whispered.

  “One step at a time,” Sullivan said. “What’s your plan?”

  “The consulate tomorrow, to get him a passport.”

  “Is that the best idea? If you’re not sure it’s him?”

  “It’s him,” she said. She remembered that first sight, her father’s ghost standing in the doorway. “I really think so.”

  “If you believe it’s him, well, then, good,” he said. “Give yourself a night. Give both of you a night. Have some food, have a good sleep. It’s sleep time there, right?” Listening, Laura took one of the white robes from the back of the door, plunged the hand with the phone through the sleeve, shrugged the whole robe on, then put the phone back to her ear. “—have a lot of ground to cover,” Sullivan was saying. “He knows you want to know. Don’t push.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Anytime,” said Sullivan, adding before the call ended, “Be careful.”

  She tied the bathrobe belt more tightly, scooped up her clothing from the floor, took a deep breath, and opened the bathroom door.

  Philip was sitting on the bed where she’d left him. Just sitting. Not watching TV, not looking out the window. Doing nothing, eyes closed. Was he meditating? She walked quietly through the room, dumped the clothing onto her bag in the corner, and took the room service menu from the desk.

  “How was the bath?” he said.

  “Good.” Looking down at the open menu, she heard herself say, as if someone else were speaking, “Were you living with Claudette’s father voluntarily?” Over her racing heart, she added, “I mean. Was he holding you prisoner?”

  A moment of silence, of held breath. Staring at the menu, shredded green papaya and tomato with spicy garlic-lime dressing.

  “No,” he said. “He was my—” He considered, choosing the word. “Teacher.”

  Cult, thought Laura, cult cult cult, it was a cult after all. Pounding in her ears. “So you could have come home?” Her voice quavering a bit.

  “I was home,” he said, the correction gentle.

  She looked up from the menu, directly at him. She heard Sullivan’s admonition, Don’t push, but the words came out anyway. “You know what I mean,” she said. “You could have contacted us. You could have found us. If no one was stopping you.”

  He looked back at her; she couldn’t read his expression. After a long pause, he said, “I didn’t feel that I could.” And then, with no change in his voice to indicate the shift in topic, he said, “I think I need medication.”

  “Are you all right?” she asked, alarmed.

  “The doctor Claudette called prescribed some pills. I think they’re in the blue bag.” For some reason, Laura noticed the article—the bag, not my bag—as she brought it to him with a glass of water. He unzipped the bag, tumbled some pharmacy boxes onto his lap, and scrutinized them before punching first one pill and then another from blister packs and swallowing them down.

  “There wasn’t a funeral,” he said.

  How do you know that? she almost asked, but realized in time he must be talking not about himself but about Claudette’s father.

  “Claudette had his body shipped to Switzerland for burial,” said Philip. “He would have wanted to be cremated.”

  “I’m sorry.” With a hint of a question mark—was he sorry? Did he feel sympathy for the wishes of his teacher—or cult leader, or kidnapper, whatever the truth was?

  “She has her own healing to do,” he said.

  Laura watched him tuck the boxes back into the bag and zip it up. What must it be like, to be able to fit everything you owned in the world into an overnight duffel? How self-centered she was. She hadn’t even considered that Philip must be in mourning too, or at the very least in shock from the abrupt change in his circumstances. Sullivan was right: no more questions for now. She took up the room service menu from where she’d dropped it on her bed and thrust it toward him.

  “You choose,” she said. And added, as he opened the menu and bent his head over it, “Mai phet maak.” His face creased with amusement. She’d meant to say not too spicy, the way the Prestons had always said it at home, but probably the family patois had the tones all wrong, and they’d all been saying something like “light my cow on fire” to one another through the years.

  He chose from the Western side of the menu, hamburgers and french fries. Extra pickles, he said into the phone, smiling at her as he did, and she felt a wave of shame for her scrutiny and doubt. She had loved pickles as a child, had always wanted extra. He’d remembered.

  They sat on the beds across from each other, the air-conditioning rushing from the wall.

  “You told me about everyone else,” he said. “Are you married, do you have children?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m a painter.” It sounded comical, as if the one explained the other. “I never considered doing anything else, didn’t even choose a sensible minor in college.” College. The word hung awkwardly in the air. Something the Preston girls had done as a matter of course, something their brother didn’t get to do, as far as Laura knew. Had he had any formal schooling since he was eight? He’d said Claudette’s father was his teacher. What did that mean? “I didn’t graduate.” She heard the air of strained apology and forced herself to stop there. “I was thinking we could go to the consulate tomorrow morning and get you a passport. Or—do you even want to go home?”

  The word slipped out before she recalled what he’d said already: I was home. Perhaps America was not home to him anymore.

  He nodded. “I think it’s time,” he said.

  * * *

  She awoke in the night, and at first did not know where she was. It was a disorientation deeper than geography. She could be a little girl again, or herself at sixteen or thirty-five
, or someone else entirely. Who is that breathing? She turned her head as slowly and quietly as possible, and her heart jumped to see a shape of darkness looming against the backdrop of the city lights in the window.

  It was Philip, of course, sleeping sitting up in the other bed. He’d piled the pillows behind him to watch the movie they’d chosen, then stayed like that when eventually she’d turned off the light. Three feet away from her, her brother. Or a stranger. All day he had flipped back and forth in her mind, brother-stranger-brother-stranger. Despite the pickles, despite the flashes of physical similarity to her father, despite everything.

  As she fell off to sleep again, another memory came into her mind: just a sound, the trickling noise of a coin falling into a vending machine. Bits of narrative crowded up to bolster the fragment: it was Philip’s coin, he’d found it in a hotel where the Prestons were staying; he had made the selection and let Laura pull the lever; they’d sat in an empty corridor to consume the candy, their backs against opposite walls and legs stretched out toward each other. Even as more details came to her—shushing each other as they crept from the room where their older sister was sleeping, the scratchiness of the carpet under Laura’s thighs—she suspected that much of it was a clinging cloud of memory pollution, a mixture of invention and extrapolation, the way a constellation is confabulated from three stars. The only absolutely true parts were the sound of the coin falling and the glow of a shared secret.

  I’ve missed you so much, she thought. Speaking into the universe, not necessarily to the man a few feet away. My big brother.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE CONSULATE was located in the embassy, on the other side of the park. Laura and Philip took a tuk-tuk; as they idled at a stoplight on Ploenchit Road, she had a thought. She leaned forward and shouted to the driver over the noise of the motor, putting her phone over his shoulder to show him the map on the screen. She wasn’t sure he’d understood, but a minute later, instead of turning right on Wireless Road, he stayed straight. The Skytrain ran along in midair high above them; below it a scribbly scrim of electrical and telephone wires coursed from pole to pole. They rode past Burger King, past endless hotels, past a McDonald’s with a life-size statue outside of Ronald McDonald making a benevolent wai. And then they were turning onto a small lane, slowing and then stopping.