Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  Miaow said, “Mommy,” again.

  To her surprise, Daw stretched an arm toward her. She pulled back the hand that was nearer to him, and he leaned forward and took the other one. She started to withdraw it, but he covered it with both of his, gently, and she stopped resisting. For the first time in months, they looked into each other’s eyes.

  Finally, he said, “I’m sorry.” His glance skittered down to the floor and came back up again. “I’m worried and, I don’t know, frightened.” He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he said, “Maybe it’s the pills.”

  Something inside her clenched itself tight, but she pushed it away. She looked at him, registering the changes in his face: heavier, more blunt, less finely formed. Older. She sat back down. “Do you think so?”

  He said, “Are you happy?”

  “No,” she said, biting back what she wanted to say about his absence, the perfume, the other women. He had come to her, and the least she could do was listen.

  “Let’s try it,” he said. “Let’s throw them away, all of them.”

  Miaow called out again, and this time, Hom said, “Just a minute, sweetheart. I’ll be right there.”

  Daw said, “Can we do this?”

  “Why would I—” she said, and then she abandoned the sentence and sat completely still. She was looking at her lap but she could feel his eyes on her. “I mean, it’s not . . .”

  Miaow called her again, obviously on the verge of tears.

  “It’s up to you,” he said. “But I’m going to do it. Try to do it.”

  Hom felt a feathery little ball of panic in her chest. She had to breathe around it. She said, “I don’t know, I mean, I’m not—” There was something rising in her throat, and she swallowed it once and then again, and when she could speak, she said, “When? Where?”

  “Now. In the sink. We’ll throw them in and run water over them.” He got up and went to his drawer and pulled out a cloth bag with a knot at the top. He held it up to her, eyebrows raised. “Yes or no?”

  In the moment it took her to find an answer, she had the sensation of something heavy rising up from inside her and escaping into the room; the light seemed just a tiny bit sharper, and she had a sense that it was a long time since she’d taken a really deep breath, the kind that relaxed her all the way to her toes. She shook her head to clear all that away, and said, “Yes.” Then she was up and hurrying into her room. Miaow was sitting with her back against the wall, one rag doll clenched tightly in each hand, looking up at her. “Just a minute, sweetheart,” she said. “Everything’s fine,” and then she went into the little bathroom, feeling like she was walking up a steep hill, lifted the lid of the toilet’s water tank, and peeled away the Ziplock bag she had taped to its underside. Trying not to look at it, trying not to register the familiar shapes and colors. She turned to see Daw looking at her, and, a good two meters behind him and peering around his legs, Miaow.

  “Honey,” she said to her daughter, “go over to your dollies for a few minutes. Your daddy and I have something to do.” She stepped to the sink and started the water flowing.

  “Plug it up,” Daw said.

  She put the plug in the drain and said, “You’re sure about this?”

  “I’ll show you,” he said, and he loosened the drawstring on his bag and turned it upside down over the sink.

  Hom watched the pills spill into the water. There were a lot of them, and several were new to her, and she felt a quick current of resentment: he’d been keeping them from her. But she swallowed the emotion—something she’d grown used to doing—and exhaled heavily, stepping back a little to avoid getting splashed as he shook the bag empty and dropped it to the floor, and then put his hand in the water and began to stir it. While his attention was on the sink, she worried open the Ziploc and fished out a couple of clean-looking white uppers. She’d eased two of them out and into her palm as he turned to her, and she felt the instant blush of someone caught in something furtive, so she handed them over and went to work on the others, feeling the familiar shapes and weight as she worked them free and passed them on. When the bag was empty, nothing in it but the dust the pills had left behind, she held it upside down in front of him, and he nodded.

  She had thought the pills would dissolve quickly, the way she envisioned them doing in her stomach, but they stubbornly retained their shapes as Daw stirred the water with his hands. The colored ones were tinting the water around them, but none of them seemed to be shrinking.

  “Wish we had hot water,” Daw said. “That would speed it up.”

  “Maybe we should just leave them,” she said. “Let them fall apart on their own.”

  He startled her by laughing, although there was no amusement in it. “Might not be a good idea. I might be in here in two minutes with a couple of straws.”

  To her surprise, she laughed too. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d laughed together.

  He had big, flat hands, like paddles, and he was stirring hard enough and fast enough that water occasionally slopped over the edge of the basin. He leaned down, a little closer to the water’s surface. “Here they go,” he said, and, sure enough, some of them were disintegrating, leaving smoky little trails behind. She stepped closer without being aware that she had done it, and they stood, shoulders touching, watching the whirlpool until he pulled the plug and let the water, not so clear now, drain away into the dark pipes, unrecoverable. When it was gone he took his cloth bag, ran water over it, and mopped the basin several times, rinsing the bag and wringing it out each time until he apparently felt the basin was clean. He licked an index finger, passed it over the porcelain, and licked it again. Then he nodded. “Done.”

  He turned and opened his arms to her, and without a moment’s thought she stepped into them and felt them close around her. “Miaow?” she said. “Can you come here for a hug?”

  They all went out to dinner for the first time in months, and then went for ice cream. Daw told Miaow she could have anything she wanted, and she said she wanted three flavors: banana, banana, and banana.

  27

  A Sparkling Little Bouquet

  It lasted almost two weeks, two endless, itchy, irritable, bite-the-tongue-and-breathe-deeply weeks during which she found herself sidestepping sudden flares of anger as she would puddles on the sidewalk. On the thirteenth day—at a time when, before the supervisor let her go, she would have been at the sorting table, thinking about lunch—she was instead (she told herself) straightening Daw’s room, and, naturally, that meant that she had to hang up his trousers. He had four pairs, all jeans, and the three he wasn’t wearing were—in the order in which she spotted them—crumpled on the floor, wadded up on top of his drawer unit, and dangling from a coat hanger he’d slipped through a belt loop. That was the one, she decided, he’d thought she’d be least likely to handle.

  That was the one with the pills in the pocket.

  A sparkling little bouquet. Five, in all. Two of the tidy, immaculate white speedies that had gotten her started in the first place, one sleeper, one she couldn’t identify, and an orange tablet she recognized as yaa baa, which she hadn’t yet tried. The guy who worked in the kitchen and sold her most of her pills had told her not to mess with it until she knew she could either be alone for a few hours or in the company of people she trusted who had taken it before. “It’s a big one,” he’d said. “You want to be a little careful at first.”

  For a moment Hom was startled by how deeply the discovery of Daw’s deception upset her, how sad it made her feel. Then she felt a surge of anger that he was keeping the pills from her, followed by a sudden impulse to get revenge by swallowing all five at once and seeing where they would take her. But no, he’d be furious; he might even hit her, and, anyway, she had to go pick up Miaow pretty soon. At the notion of going out, a little insect hidden somewhere in her mind rubbed its long legs together in anticipation.
Once she was out, she could get her own. The energy churned inside her. She put the pills back, took a quick look through the window, saw that it was drizzling and that it might be a prelude to something more dramatic, and grabbed an umbrella. At the last moment, she remembered to get a little rain cape for Miaow.

  First, a stop at the restaurant for a quick buy from the guy in the kitchen (and a nod and smile for Chai) and then, with the pills secure in the pocket of her jeans, a quick swing by Sonya’s for the child. She could wait to take the uppers until tomorrow morning, she thought, but she’d sleep like the dead that night.

  And she did, that night and the nights that followed. With the weeks blurring into months, with no one tracking the time, she and Daw became silent partners, never acknowledging in so many words they were both complicit, that they had chosen their path together. There was a new feeling of freedom about it, a sort of mutual abandon, something like a shared commitment. They no longer hid their pills from each other. They sat together through long nights, bristling with words and ideas, laughing and talking over one another, launching themselves into new experiences as they never had before, comparing notes on the pills, developing a connoisseur’s vocabulary. When things went bad, they eased each other through it. They were, Hom discovered, closer than they’d even been. He became the scout, discovering and bringing home new adventures, especially new painkillers, and she chipped in, sometimes with money scooped from the register at the restaurant because they were spending almost as much as they were earning.

  They could no longer afford to keep Miaow at Sonya’s, so she was home all day and all night, “underfoot,” as Daw sometimes complained. Sensing that she was excluded from something she didn’t understand, Miaow located and claimed the empty corners of the apartment’s two rooms, the spaces her parents never used.

  As her mother and father formed a new, overenergetic team, Miaow withdrew even more deeply into herself, more silent with every passing month and season. Largely unobserved, she grew taller and more slender, her plump baby features giving way to a distinct, and even striking, face, although it was usually tilted downward, toward the floor. She became comfortable, or so it seemed, with her invisibility. Being alone, occupying her solitary corners became her obvious preference. She backed away from hugs, avoided eye contact, and often answered questions in a whisper, as though making more noise than that would draw attention to her or, perhaps, prolong the interaction. Or, as Hom sometimes realized with a squeeze of pain around her heart, make her or Daw angry.

  For company, Miaow clung to the tatters that were all that remained of her two rag dolls, and she spent much of her time in the back room with them, engaged in a murmured three-way dialogue, improvising plays in which she assigned all of them, including herself, names and clearly defined roles. The plays were usually about things she had seen and done, and sometimes the dolls had the names of people she had met: Sonya and her helper or kids who had been staying at Sonya’s when Miaow did. Miaow used a different voice or whisper for each person, and the characters weren’t limited to the dolls; she would invent spirited exchanges between windows and doors or among dinner utensils. Whatever the play of the moment, it ceased the instant the door was opened and the spell shattered. She usually hid the remnants of the dolls behind her, as though she thought they might be taken away.

  Slowly, she grew an invisible shell. She obviously dreaded Hom’s occasional seizures of guilt, almost operatic in their intensity; she often talked softly to herself as Hom promised her that everything would change. She usually had to be asked a question twice before she would answer, and when she did, it was often a monosyllable, barely audible.

  As Miaow sealed herself off and floated into her whisper world, Hom fretted. With no day job except for her full-day waitress shift on Saturday, and the ever-increasing cost of the pills, she found herself missing the hours at the sorting table, not solely because of the money, but also because she felt trapped in the apartment day after day with no one who understood her state of mind. She chafed at her solitude even when she was caught up in the wind-tunnel energy of an amphetamine project or luxuriating in the trapped-in-amber languor of the pain pills. In between those high points, she was bored and resentful or jittery and short-tempered, staring out the window and at the ugly soi, wishing she were down there or, really, anywhere. But, she told herself, there was nothing she could do; she was stuck there, with a child who barely acknowledged her, who rejected her, until Daw got back, which he usually did just before she had to leave for the restaurant. It became more and more important for her to get to work on time; she wasn’t as polite and patient with customers as she had been, and she knew she was no longer the management’s pet waitress.

  Even Chai was gone. He’d found a better job, cooking at a nicer restaurant. He had come by to see her three times, the two of them sitting in their old booth, but it was clear that the attraction between them had evaporated, at least on his part. Several times, halfway through a long and—she thought—interesting answer to one of his questions, she saw his brow furrow, and she realized that he had lost her thread. And, at least once, so had she; when this happened he looked at her as if he wasn’t quite sure who she was. So he stopped coming. The girls from her old job had stopped coming, too, for some reason and so, other than the money, she no longer had any cause to look forward to the restaurant. In fact, the only thing it had to recommend it was that it wasn’t the apartment, where time often felt as thick and slow as sludge.

  When Daw was late coming home, which wasn’t as frequent as it had once been, she towed Miaow down the hall to a single room occupied by a thin, tired-looking woman with two small children of her own. Each time, Hom gave her a few baht and a promise that Daw would be home in an hour or two, which he generally was. Occasionally, though, he came in later, or he neglected to retrieve Miaow, and that always cost Hom a little extra and sometimes led to a sharp exchange with the woman, whose children kept baby hours, up with the sun.

  As the days folded into each other, sometimes quickly, sometimes agonizingly slowly, Hom’s world often seemed to be encased in thin glass that shone with a hard, sugary glitter, accompanied by the sense—especially when she was on the pills’ downslope—that everything around her was breakable. She sometimes envisioned herself rapping her knuckles on the air in front of her and watching the cracks spread in all directions. Often she would suddenly come to herself, not quite sure what she’d been doing, as though she’d been sleepwalking. When that happened there was usually a bolt of panic as she tried to put together the pieces of the time she’d lost, tried to find the thread of whatever activity had taken her to where she was standing or sitting. In these moments she felt entirely adrift. There seemed to be nothing to connect her either to the girl she had been in the village or to the child sitting silently in the corner.

  Increasingly often, she woke in the middle of the night, when the speed that had pushed her through the day had faded away and been replaced by the soft cushion of the sleeping pills or the pain medication. At those moments, undistracted by the scattering of her energy, she would realize, as though it were a new discovery, how little attention she had been paying to Miaow. I could have taken her out today, she would think. She won’t be this age forever. She won’t always want to be with me. By the time I was seven or eight, I didn’t want to be with my mother. Anybody was more interesting than my mother. And the next day, she might or might not remember her resolution, but if she did and if the weather was dry and if nothing more pressing claimed her attention, she would take her daughter out. But Miaow dragged her feet, looking at the ground and lagging behind much of the time, as though she wanted to turn around and go home, so Hom would abandon the plan.

  In fact, she felt as though Miaow had shut her out. When all three of them were together, Miaow stayed in the other room, and when she was with them—at mealtimes, mostly—she usually seemed to be pretending to be alone. When they caught her gazing at on
e or both of them, she looked away, as though she’d been doing something she shouldn’t. She kept her eyes on the floor or, if they hadn’t taken them away from her so she could eat, on the dirty remnants of her rag dolls. Often, Hom had to address her two or three times to get a response. When Miaow did engage with them she was demanding and querulous, resistant to requests or orders, and often burst into tears over nothing, or so it seemed to Hom. Once, when Miaow was being fractious and Hom was trying to quiet her to prevent Daw from losing his temper, she remembered the silent baby she had carried through the forest, and when that image came to mind she sat beside Miaow and wept. Her tears frightened Miaow, who backed away, crablike.

  It wasn’t as though she didn’t realize, at unpredictable, scattered times, that she needed to change the way she was living. Sometimes when she woke in the morning—in the bright, quiet interlude before the day picked her up and had its way with her—she found herself remembering her sisters: how close they had been and how their mother was always there, almost, at times, a fourth sister. She was there even (and, often, especially) when they wanted her to leave them alone, leave them to make their own mistakes: to stay out long after dark and get devoured by mosquitoes; to jump into the paddy at night and catch cold; to break an arm, as Hom had done when she was twelve; and, in one instance, to be chased right up to the front door by an unknown man who might have been crazy. Her childhood had been loud, it had often been disorderly, but it had never been lonely. The village had laughed about Hom’s mother’s attempts to manage her rambunctious gaggle of girls, jokingly predicting dire futures for them and calling the sisters the terrorists; but there had been a kind of glue there, holding them together when they were fighting with each other.