Return to Tomorrow

by Marisa Carroll

  “She speaks Thai. And better yet, she speaks Hlông.” Father Dolph looked down from his eight-inch advantage in height and smiled crookedly, almost like a boy. “The problem…”

  “I knew there would be one,” Rachel grinned, overcoming her momentary loss of optimism. Father Dolph was notorious for trying to find comfortable niches for square pegs. The miracle was, with the ten thousand souls under his care, he managed to make so many of the square pegs fit.

  “She doesn’t speak English.”

  “Oh, dear.” Rachel knew her Thai was adequate but not fluent by any stretch of the imagination. The Hlông dialect, like those of other hill tribes, was simply not structured for dealing with technology…or bureaucracy.

  “Ahnle is a lovely child.”

  “She is Hlông?” Rachel asked.

  Father Dolph nodded, pausing in his long strides to sign a requisition form shoved under his nose by one of the staff members who had hailed him as they passed the camp offices. “She’s a niece to the village headman. Her brother is a trader. He taught her Thai.”

  So the girl came from one of the less isolated villages. That was good. She would be less apt to jump at every shadow, be mistrustful of every instrument and procedure she didn’t understand.

  “Here we are,” Father Dolph announced unnecessarily as they turned a corner and mounted the three rickety wooden steps to the sheet-metal building that housed the administrative offices of the camp. “I told Ahnle to wait. I thought I might be able to talk you into coming with me.”

  A straggling hibiscus tree stood sentinel in the dusty, fenced-off courtyard. Aside from a few stunted willows bordering the stream that ran along the compound’s northern perimeter, the hibiscus was the only tree in camp. The rest had long ago been cut down to provide wood for cook fires and to warm the chilly winter nights.

  A young girl, dressed in a white blouse and black sarong-style skirt, was seated in a straight-backed chair in front of Father Dolph’s desk. Her hands were folded in her lap, her head bowed in a polite attempt not to stare openly at a stranger. She stood and made the traditional wai, a gesture of greeting, fingers steepled in front of her as she bent her head. Father Dolph and Rachel returned the greeting.

  “Ahnle,” Father Dolph said in his Dutch-accented Thai. “This is Rachel. You will help her with her work.”

  Ahnle nodded and bowed more deeply still.

  “May you always dwell within the spirit gate,” Rachel said in Hlông. It was a formal greeting. Living within the protection of the wooden archway that guarded each Hlông village was of great importance to the tribal people.

  “May your grandchildren walk beneath it as your ancestors did,” Ahnle replied, equally formal.

  “Welcome.” Rachel decided she might as well start Ahnle’s English lessons, then and there. She smiled and the girl smiled also.

  “I’ve already had Ahnle put her things in the spare room in your hut. I hope that’s okay with you.” Father Dolph spoke in English, also. Ahnle waited politely, her dark, almond-shaped eyes downcast.

  “Yes, of course. I feel guilty with a cottage all to myself when everyone else is so crowded.” Rachel smiled and accepted the slim folder of papers Father Dolph handed her from the top of a pile on his desk.

  “Here are Ahnle’s papers. She’s been in the camp about a year so she knows her way around.”

  “Do you have family in the camp, Ahnle?” Rachel asked in Thai so that Father Dolph could understand.

  “No.” The answer was soft-spoken, polite, but wary. Ahnle looked at Father Dolph from the corner of her eye, then back down at the wooden floor.

  “She is estranged from her relatives. Her brother has gone back into the mountains,” he said.

  “Into Laos?” Rachel felt a small ripple of fear crawl across her skin. Less than two years ago she had made that journey with her brother, Micah, in reverse, a nightmare trek of pain and illness that had ended in her recapture by the Vietnamese.

  “He wanted to return to their village before the rainy season begins.”

  “Or more likely, to bring out the opium harvest.”

  “We don’t know that.” Father Dolph’s voice was stern.

  The Hlông village where Rachel had spent so many years had had its poppy fields, also, but the soil was too poor, the village too isolated to make the opium salable on the open market. It was the only medication the villagers had. It had made Father Pieter’s last pain-filled weeks more comfortable. She had thanked God and the phi spirits for its availability. Yet, in the wrong hands, it became a weapon of great evil and destruction. A fleeting image of Lonnie Smalley’s drug-ravaged face crossed her mind’s eye.

  “It’s the most likely explanation.” Rachel switched back to Thai. “Ahnle, why did your brother leave you behind?” It was unusual for a Hlông maiden to be left without benefit of a male family member to protect her. Ahnle looked to be about sixteen or seventeen, of marriageable age, which made it odder, still, that she should be unchaperoned.

  Ahnle did not answer. She bowed her head but not before Rachel saw the gleam of tears in her dark eyes. She felt a jolt of sudden sympathy and the beginnings of understanding. She looked at Father Dolph with a question in her eyes.

  He nodded, spoke softly in English. “Ahnle has a child.”

  “Is the baby ill, deformed?” The Hlông loved children but their life was harsh and demanding. Frail, sickly babies did not long survive the rigors of that life, as she knew only too well, and to her everlasting sorrow.

  Father Dolph shook his head. “The father is unacceptable. His family has been at odds with Ahnle’s for generations. They would never have met if they hadn’t come to the camp. He has since left for Germany. He did not claim the child.”

  Rachel’s heart went out to the young girl, still only a child herself. Ahnle remained standing quietly but she’d raised her head to stare at a point just past Rachel’s left shoulder. Her hair was a glorious shade of ebony, so black it seemed to take light into itself and hold it in its depths. Her eyes were almost as dark as her hair. She was small and slim, just an inch or so shorter than Rachel, about five feet, tall for a Hlông woman.

  “So she is unprotected and her child has no ancestors to revere.” A dire fate for one of her people. Rachel squared her shoulders. Ahnle wouldn’t suffer any more fear and disappointment if she could help her. “I imagine we can work her schedule around the baby.” She spoke in Thai again so that Ahnle could understand. She smiled and held out her hand, half expecting the girl to do the same. Ahnle didn’t smile. She bit her lip and shook her head, blinking back tears once again.

  “No baby,” she said holding out her empty hands before curling her fingers into her palms.

  “The child was a boy,” Father Dolph said quietly.

  “A boy child.” Rachel let the words sift from between stiff lips. Boy babies were very precious in Hlông society. Any irregularity in his birth would be overlooked in Ahnle’s village if he grew tall and strong. She longed to take Ahnle into her arms and comfort her, but resisted. One did not touch a stranger in Ahnle’s world.

  “Ahnle’s brother has no male children. He has taken the baby back to the village, and will raise him as his own.”

  “He will have ancestors,” Ahnle said miserably. “I cannot care for him here. It is best.” She started to cry.

  “Don’t cry, Ahnle.” Rachel touched the rough cotton sleeve of her blouse. “The pain will pass.”

  “No. I will always grieve.”

  Rachel shook her head, denying Ahnle’s words but understanding only too well the agony behind them. “Someday you will not grieve.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I lost a son,” Rachel said, leading the girl out of the cool, dark room. Then she spoke a deliberate, comforting lie. “You will not forget but someday you will remember without pain.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “ISTAR BOONY?” AHNLE SAID, repeating Rachel’s words as best she could.

 
Rachel laughed at the fractured pronunciation. “No, Ahnle. It’s Ea-ster Bun-ny,” she repeated, enunciating each syllable with exaggerated care.

  “Eei-star Bun-y.” Ahnle made a second attempt.

  “Close enough.” Rachel went back to her task of stirring hard-boiled eggs in the cups of food coloring dyes that she’d received in a package of Easter goodies from her mother. She’d been hoarding her ration of hen’s eggs, one per day, for a week. She’d also traded some of the gaily wrapped Easter candies in the package to a woman from Ahnle’s village who kept chickens in bamboo cages outside her hut for five more. Now she had an even dozen, two for each color of dye, the smallest amount you could decently color—at least according to Rachel’s mother.

  “Do bun-nies lay eggs in America?” Ahnle asked in her careful English. Her tone said she wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they did.

  “No.” Rachel racked her brain for a simple explanation for the tradition of coloring chicken eggs and having them delivered by way of basket-carrying rabbits. “It’s a custom of the ancestors to please the small ones.” It was the best she could do.

  Ahnle nodded, accepting the words, pondering their meaning. She learned so quickly. Rachel couldn’t believe how much progress she had made in the past six weeks.

  “It is good to make children happy.” The familiar look of loss and longing came into her eyes as she thought of her son. Rachel bit her lip. Nothing she could say would help ease the pain. Only time would heal that wound.

  “There.” Rachel lifted the last egg out of the dye. She kept her tone brisk, deliberately light. “Now we’ll put them in the baskets.” She suited action to words, lining up four small woven baskets she’d traded more candies for along the street of makeshift huts where much of the camp’s trading went on. She lined them with the improbably colored styrene Easter grass her mother had used as packing.

  “This is very strange,” Ahnle observed, poking some of the grass, a particularly lurid shade of lavender, with the tip of her finger. “Is it from a bun-ny nest?”

  “If Easter Bunnies made nests, it would probably be with this,” Rachel admitted. She had not attempted to explain the religious significance of the holiday to Ahnle. That was Father Dolph’s department.

  “America is strange.”

  “In many ways.” Rachel smiled. “But it is also beautiful and full of wonderful things.”

  “I will see it someday. Maybe.” Ahnle watched as Rachel piled three colored eggs in each basket, then sprinkled them with brightly colored, foil-wrapped chocolates in animal shapes.

  “Perhaps.” What if she took Ahnle back to the States with her? She had promised Father Dolph eighteen months of her life. But after that…

  She didn’t like to think too far into the future. For so many years she’d had to survive day by day, sometimes hour by hour. She couldn’t look that far ahead without being afraid of what might come. She liked Ahnle. They worked well together. They were growing closer each day, despite the difference in their ages. She was old enough to be the girl’s mother, it was true. In Ahnle’s world she was old enough to be her grandmother. But here, in the hand-to-mouth existence of a camp almost within shelling distance of a hostile border, none of those distinctions mattered. They were two women bound together by the loss of a child. It was a bond they would always share.

  “It is time for Mass,” Ahnle said, hearing the recording of a church bell playing from the loudspeaker above the chapel. “Will you go? I will take the baskets.”

  “Yes, I’ll go.” Rachel picked up two of the small baskets. “This one is for Father Dolph. This one for Brother Gabriel—” the Belgian monk who was Father Dolph’s assistant “—and this one for Dr. Reynard.”

  “That is three,” Ahnle said counting. “Who belongs to the four?”

  “You do,” Rachel said, ignoring the fractured grammar in the last sentence. “Happy Easter, Ahnle.”

  “Thank you, Rachel.” Ahnle smiled and bowed ceremoniously, then reached out and touched Rachel’s hand, lightly, fleetingly. Among Ahnle’s people touching was reserved for family members only. “Happy Eea-star.”

  “I’d better hurry or I’ll be late for mass.” Rachel turned away to hide the rush of feeling that surged into her heart.

  “I will walk with you.” Ahnle picked up the basket destined for Dr. Reynard. “I will give this to the doctor so you will not anger Father Dolph’s God by being late.”

  AN HOUR LATER, RACHEL walked along the dusty main street of the camp, her heart and soul comforted by the timeless peace of the Mass. The heat of the day was beginning to fade. Storm clouds massed on the horizon, reminding her that the rainy season was almost on them. She shuddered to think of what the unpaved streets and pathways of the camp would be like after three or four months of steady, heavy rain.

  Ahead of her, near the main gates, a UN Border Relief Organization truck was off-loading sacks of rice to be distributed among the camp residents the next day. They also supplied sugar and salt, canned meat and fish. The food was nourishing but dull. Drinking water, too, had to be trucked in. Water for washing and laundry was supplied from cisterns located in various places around the camp, or from the stream running along the north border of the compound.

  Everything the camp used, everything they needed to exist here, had to be trucked in. It was an ongoing process that never stopped, regardless of the weather or occasional random shelling from Vietnamese-backed Laotian insurgents who occasionally infiltrated the next valley. If she walked this way again tomorrow, the trucks would still be there, or others just like them. Perhaps tomorrow the medical supply truck with the antibiotics and surgical supplies that Dr. Reynard had ordered two weeks earlier would arrive.

  As she watched, another vehicle drove through the camp gates. It was a jeep, a U.S. army jeep, old, battered and disturbingly familiar. Rachel stopped in her tracks, watched as it drew to a halt before the camp guards’ security hut. Two men got out, both tall and lean, hard-muscled, one black, one white.

  “Rachel.” Ahnle’s touch on her sleeve was feather light, her voice soft, but Rachel jumped as if she’d been poked with a stick.

  “Ahnle! You scared me out of a year’s growth.”

  The girl looked puzzled and disturbed. “I did not mean to,” she said contritely.

  Rachel laughed. “It’s just a saying. It means you startled me because my attention was on something else.”

  “What?” Ahnle asked with all the curiosity of a child.

  “Nothing. Let’s go back to the cottage. It is time to eat.”

  “I am hungry, too.”

  Rachel stood a moment longer at the edge of the wide, dusty main street that began at the camp gates and ended at the front steps of the administration building where Father Dolph had his office. The two men were still inside the guards’ office. What would Brett Jackson and Billy Todd be doing here? The sun was going down, hiding its light behind the sharp edges of the western ridge of the valley. The shadows were long, making bright, confusing patterns as they played hide and seek with the setting sun. The two men’s actions were no concern of hers anyway. She turned away.

  “Mrs. Phillips.”

  Rachel stopped, turned slowly to face the man whose voice she couldn’t forget. “Brett.” His name slipped out before she could stop herself from saying it. “Hello, Rachel.”

  “Hello.”

  He didn’t return her smile. He stood before her, tall, stern, as unyielding as the mountains at his back.

  “Afternoon, ma’am.” Billy Todd touched his fingertip to his temple in a casual half salute.

  “Hello, Billy.” Rachel let her smile grow brighter, more assured. “I never expected to see you here.”

  “We stop to check up on Father Dolph every now an’ again, when we’re in the neighborhood.”

  Rachel looked away, into the hills, remembering. “I suppose we aren’t very far…from the place we first met. As the crow flies.”

  “No, ma’am,” Billy answered
with a laugh.

  “You didn’t tell anyone here about the temple, did you?” Brett asked, his deep voice grating on every word.

  “Of course not.” Rachel’s eyes flashed. Billy grinned harder at her spirited response. “I saw no reason to discuss our meeting with anyone here.”

  “Who’s this?” Billy asked. Rachel tore her eyes away from Brett’s hard blue gaze. Billy was looking at Ahnle.

  “This is my helper, Ahnle.” Rachel made the introduction in English. Her smile returned, soft and loving. “She is also my new friend.”

  Ahnle looked up, smiled shyly, wonderingly, at Billy but remained silent. Rachel realized it was probably the first time the girl had ever seen a black man, but she didn’t seem afraid. She had come a long way from the timid, childish creature Rachel had met in Father Dolph’s office that day. She was proud of Ahnle’s newfound poise and air of composure.

  “Father Dolph is hearing confession,” she told the men when the silence threatened to grow too long. “He’ll probably be busy for quite a while. It’s Holy Week,” she added, in case they didn’t know. A fair number of the camp’s residents were Khmer, relocated from the huge camps along the Thai-Kampuchean border. Many of them were devout Catholics.

  “I imagine Brother Gabriel can find some use for this, if the padre’s tied up.” Billy pulled a wad of bills from the back pocket of his faded jeans. Rachel glimpsed American dollars, Thai baht, Indian rupees. It was a considerable sum in any currency.

  Where had all that money come from? she found herself wondering. The sale of teak logs? It didn’t seem likely. Simon’s warnings about Tiger Jackson’s line of work came back to her in a cold rush of disappointment and renewed suspicion. Her lips thinned into a straight line. She looked up to find Brett Jackson watching her with a scowl on his bronzed face. She looked away, confused and upset.

  “I know where Brother Gabriel is,” Ahnle said softly.

  Rachel glanced at the girl in surprise. She had never spoken out that way in front of a man, any man, before. “I show you.” She gestured toward the administration building.