She had expected to feel that glue between her and Miaow. Even when Hom’s own mother was at her angriest or most distracted, it was impossible not to feel the warmth of her love for her daughters. As much as Hom wanted to believe that the distance between her and Miaow was at least partly Miaow’s fault—that Hom had simply given birth to an unemotional child—she could only believe it when the pills were at work. In the moments when they had no claim on her, she was defenseless against the icy waves of guilt she felt. Very occasionally she would surface from sleep in the middle of the night to hear Miaow’s slow, even breathing two or three feet away, and she would roll over and light the candle to look down at her sleeping child. It was always the same reaction, a kind of amazement at the perfection of the thick lashes, the fine, fragile sculpture of her nostrils, the flawlessness of her skin; and then, as she watched, the image of Hom’s mother or of her oldest sister, who most resembled their mother, would float up through the landscape of Miaow’s face and establish itself there. When that happened, a kind of heaviness would declare itself in Hom’s chest and spread rapidly outward, as sudden and unexpected as a flock of birds erupting from a thicket, and sometimes Hom would begin to weep. And when she did, Miaow would open her eyes slowly and, without rolling over or looking away, scoot farther from her mother, until she was at the edge of the candlelight. As long as Hom remained awake, Miaow’s eyes would be open.
Each time, the sleeping pill would eventually pull Hom down again, but the memory was always vivid when she woke the next day. Those were the mornings on which she was most likely to promise herself that she would change the way she was living.
And she meant it, every time. But always, by midday, when the morning cocktail of pills was doing its work, she would find herself mentally counting the ones that remained and, eventually, checking the bag to make sure.
As money got tighter, Hom tried to impose a kind of discipline on how much went to her habit and Daw’s, jamming a small fistful of baht into the hip pocket of her jeans after she was paid at the restaurant and limiting herself, in her dealings with her suppliers—she had several by then—to the money she carried up front. Three or four times, always promising silently to make it up next time, she augmented her salary by palming some of the tips she was supposed to share with the staff, and twice, when a customer was too drunk, she thought, to count his change, she short-changed them. One of them privately shamed her the next evening by pushing over to her, just before he left, the precise amount she had stolen. She stood beside the table as the door closed behind him, her face burning. The fear she felt about the thefts was unpleasant, but it was nothing compared to the tamped-down, pressurized panic that filled her when the plastic bags were almost empty.
Even with the occasional theft and her attempts to limit her spending, she and Daw had less money every week. Daw’s pay from the moving company was shrinking, and he was complaining about the way he was being treated. This meant that additional weight fell on her to come home with the essentials, the mixed bag of speed, painkillers, and sleepers that got them from one day to the next. Painkillers had become her favorite of them all. They wrapped her in cotton, dulled the edges of her fears and her worries, lessened the shock she felt when she looked at the gaunt, sharp-featured woman in the mirror, and silenced the nagging voice inside her that told her it wasn’t enough to stop sometime in the future; she had to stop now. They had to stop now.
One night she came home, tired out and shaky, to find, yet again, that Daw hadn’t returned and that Miaow was still with the woman up the hall. She felt a hot bloom of fury; she had only a few baht left. When the woman opened the door, Hom saw Miaow on the floor across the room and was astonished to realize—as though it had all taken place while she wasn’t looking—how much her daughter had grown. Miaow was laughing as she played with the babies, one of whom was a toddler, while the other had obviously just mastered crawling. When the woman shook her head, as though in rejection of whatever excuse Hom was going to make, Hom gave her a look that drove her back a step, blinking like someone who had been slapped. At that moment the spell was broken; whether it was the woman’s sudden movement or a delayed recognition that the door had opened, Miaow glanced up at them, and as Hom watched, the happiness drained from her child’s face and was replaced by the closed, inward-looking expression Hom had grown used to. The woman reached over and curled Hom’s fingers back over the money and said, “I just wanted to say that you don’t have to pay me. Miaow is such a delight, and my kids love her so much. I feel like I should be paying you.” Miaow’s eyes had gone to the woman as she spoke, but the moment she felt Hom’s gaze she looked back down at the floor. Then, so slowly she might have weighed a hundred kilos, Miaow got up.
Hom followed her down the hall until they reached their door. As Hom unlocked it, she put her hand on Miaow’s shoulder, but Miaow shrugged it off, went into the back room, and closed the door behind her. Hom didn’t even know she was weeping until she saw the room swimming in front of her. She stood there, hand over her mouth, looking at the closed door and trying to decide what she should say, how to begin. If she could only find the first five or six words, the exactly right words, she was certain, all the rest would come to her. In the end, she dried her face, filched a Korean imitation of Oxycontin from her husband’s stash, and sat on the couch to wait for him to come home. By the time he did, she didn’t feel quite so bad.
Two weeks later, Daw was fired from his job.
28
Shiny New Brass Locks
He jolted her awake by banging open the door to the back room, raging, about two hours after he’d left for work. He had four days’ pay in his pocket, and he’d had to threaten his boss with physical harm to get that. They claimed he’d stolen something, which, he said, he hadn’t. Hom was startled by the fear behind his rage; he’d never seemed frightened of anything before.
It took an hour or two of listening, encouraging, even cajoling, to get him to the point where he could stay on topic long enough to tell her all the bad news: they’d fired him the moment he came through the door, and the head of the company, whom he’d never even seen before, had been there in a fancy silk shirt to promise him that they would tell competing companies that he was a thief if any of them asked for a reference. Moving was the only job he’d ever had in Bangkok, and it was closed to him now.
The two of them were so wrapped up in their problem that neither of them had given Miaow a second thought. Only after Hom managed to sit Daw down so she could fix him something to eat did she realize Miaow was no longer in the back room. Hom checked the barely functional bathroom, and then, feeling stupid, she looked again at the corners her daughter had claimed as hers. Not until then did she feel the stab of panic, a tangle of snakes low down in her stomach.
Back in the living room, she had to draw a couple of deep breaths before she said, “She’s gone.”
“Don’t be silly,” Daw said. “Where could she go?”
Before he’d finished the question, Hom knew where she had gone. Halfway to the front door, she heard the knocking. She opened it to see the thin woman from down the hall. The woman, whose name Hom couldn’t remember, had Miaow’s hand in hers, but her arm was stretched nearly straight by the weight of Miaow’s reluctance; she was hanging back, dawdling, as Hom’s mother would have said, as though pulled by the gravitational force of the woman’s apartment. Her eyes were on the floor, her face rigid with resistance.
“I’m so sorry,” Hom said, but the woman wasn’t looking at her. She was staring past her at the front room, and Hom realized that for weeks, perhaps months, things had been left wherever they fell or were dropped; clothes were everywhere, plastic plates and paper napkins littered the floor, and the small wooden chair that she used to sit in when she was sewing lay on its side as it had ever since Daw walked into it in the dark. “We were, ummm, we were searching for something,” she said, feeling shame heat her face and just barely not stammering.
“Thank you for, for bringing her back.”
With no conviction in her voice, the woman said, “I knew you’d be worried.” To Miaow, she said, “Here you are, sweetie. Maybe your mom will bring you back down again.” She released Miaow’s hand and gently pushed her to the doorway. Miaow went through it, sidestepping her mother, avoiding her father’s eyes, and closed the door to the back room behind her.
“It’s a difficult age,” Hom said.
The woman said, “I’m sure,” peered at Daw with evident curiosity, said, “I’ve got to get back to my kids,” and went back down the hall. Hom closed her door more forcefully than was necessary. Behind her, she heard Daw start for the back room, and she said sharply, without even turning to him, “Leave her alone.”
The next day, having forgotten that he’d denied stealing anything, Daw showed Hom a pair of cuff links, circles of polished black stone, each with a tiny diamond at its center. That afternoon he sold them for more money than he’d made in a month at any time since they’d come to Bangkok, but in what seemed like no time—certainly no more than a week or two—the money was gone. Hom’s mother had always said that bad fortune never came in small doses, and at the end of the same week Hom erupted in anger at a customer in the restaurant and was sent home for good with her week’s pay and her tips, which she declined to share with her coworkers.
And there they were: they had no income and they had spent what money they had.
A few days later—neither of them could have said how many—the man who came in the morning to collect the rent learned they didn’t have it, looked at the rooms, and gave them four days to get out. If they weren’t gone by then, he would have them carried down to the street; and, he added, noticing the open window, their belongings would be thrown down after them.
That night she and Daw, fueled by the little white ones, made feverish plans for putting things together again. At eleven or thereabouts he went out and came back with two cheap bottles of wine, and when Hom woke up late the next morning, her head hammering, she lay motionless on the bare floor of the front room, where she had never slept before, trying to remember if they had really discussed what she thought they had discussed, and what had happened afterward. And then, when she rolled over, the grit of dried mud on her arms and legs brought it back, like something enormous surfacing out of dark water, and she let out a scream that woke Daw.
He had begun by talking about money. Neither of them had a job or any prospect of getting one. They had eaten virtually all their food and had only a few days left in the not-hotel. As much as she had hated the little shack down near the harbor, she’d immediately raised the notion that they could return to it; after all, if they’d fought their way out of it once, they could do it again. But no, Daw had said, it was impossible; he’d checked it after he was fired, and it was taken. He’d also, he said, gone to talk to the man in the Isaan restaurant, but the man had nothing to suggest; there had been a flood of villagers into the city as the price of rice dropped. He had, Daw said, been rude to him. There seemed to be no way around it: until they had put things back together, they were going to be sleeping in the street.
She had sat back, absorbing that, but he wasn’t finished. It would be dangerous, he said. Some of the people on the sidewalks were desperate, some of them crazy, all of them impoverished, and most of them eager to steal whatever they could get away with, even if people got hurt. Homeless people were murdered from time to time.
As dangerous as it would be for them, he said, it would be much more so for Miaow. Children were assaulted on the street, and whatever they had, no matter how little, was taken from them. Sometimes a child was simply stolen; a car would stop and men would jump out and carry the child away to be sold into slavery or into child brothels. Some of the brothels were in foreign countries, Arab countries, where, people said, the captives could simply be disposed of when it was no longer profitable to feed them.
He said, “I think you need to go north and take her with you.”
At this point, Hom had jumped to her feet and run from the room into the corridor, hands over her ears, forgetting that it was raining. She’d stumbled down the stairway and out into the empty soi, not even feeling the drizzle needling her face. With no destination, just abandoning herself to the need to run away from everything, she splashed down the soi toward nothing, not realizing she’d clapped her hands over her ears again until her feet went out from under her in a mud slick and she couldn’t get her arms down quickly enough to break her fall. She’d sat there, cold, filthy, and wet, listening to her teeth chatter as she shivered, shocked into sobriety, and then she had wailed. Suddenly the awful little rooms she had either disliked or taken for granted seemed almost palatial: they had walls and a roof and a window they could open, they had a door they could lock behind them. They had kept all of them—they had kept Miaow—safe. And the truth was inescapable: they only had a few more days there, and nowhere to go.
She couldn’t go home. Home was no longer there. Her father had died a year and a half ago, and two weeks later there had been a knock at the door and her mother had learned that the house and the paddies, like so many that had belonged to the nation’s rice growers—the real producers of much of the country’s wealth—had been mortgaged to one of the big millers, who kept the price of unmilled rice low and advanced the farmers loans in full knowledge that it was the cheapest way to steal the land.
And her parents had made a grave mistake in not continuing to have children until they produced a boy. To a poor family, boys were security. Boys were the future. When a couple was too old to work, it was their sons’ duty as good Buddhists to care for them. The obligation of a girl, though, was to care for her husband’s parents. Her sisters all lived with their husbands or their husbands’ parents now, and her mother was shuttled among them, an inconvenient guest. Her sisters’ husbands were from poor families, just like hers; two of them didn’t even own the land on which they lived. There was no room for her and Miaow there. The only thing she could think of, and it filled her with despair, not just for herself but also for Miaow, was returning to her mother-in-law’s house, the place she had sworn Miaow would never go back to. And now it would be even worse: she had defied the old woman and they would be returning as supplicants.
When she came back—hours later, it seemed to her, although it couldn’t have been—dripping water everywhere and tracking mud into the front room, Daw was sitting right where she had left him. He would not return to his mother’s house, he said. They weren’t wanted there. And they couldn’t take Miaow into the street, they couldn’t put her through it. What they needed to do was give her a better chance with someone else, maybe only temporarily. It was the only thing that was fair to her. It was for the child’s sake.
He’d obviously been thinking about it. She could do it, he said. She could be completely in charge. They would take Miaow someplace where there were a lot of people and leave her there, but actually keep watch. Hom could pretend to go away and then come back and hide herself to see who tried to take the child, if anyone did. If it looked wrong to her, if the people looked dangerous, she could run out and claim her and then try again the next day. If the people seemed all right, she could follow them to see where they lived. In a few weeks or a month, when they were on their feet again, she could go and reclaim their daughter. He promised, they’d get her back.
It was unthinkable. But.
There was nowhere for them to go. No place with her family up north, no place in Bangkok. And suddenly she realized that there were—there might be—two places where Miaow could be safe for a short time, as long as it would take to get a job, any kind of job. And if it wasn’t enough to support the three of them, well, then it would still support her and Miaow.
Daw had been staring at the floor since he’d proposed his solution, and he didn’t look up as she rose and went through the door to the back room and into the bathroom, avoiding look
ing at the place where Miaow slept. She scrubbed the mud from her hands and washed her face, groping with her eyes closed for the old T-shirt that served as a towel. When she opened her eyes, she was facing the mirror, and the woman she saw there looked abraded, chipped away, like she had stood for a long time facing down a sandstorm. Some of the prettiness she had taken for granted was still there, but the bones of her face were too evident and her skin, once so smooth, was mottled here and there with blemishes, a kind of acne that she knew was a gift of the meth. Makeup, she thought, I can cover it with makeup. Pull the dry hair back in a ponytail, use a little water to create spiky bangs to cover some of the bumps on my forehead. Lipstick, a little rouge. She could look like someone who some kind of business might want to hire. Whatever the job was, she would snap at it. It was the key to keeping her child, or—if need be—to getting her back.
She mopped her face again, pulled off her wet clothes, and went into the small bedroom, where she lay down and put an arm around Miaow. She wasn’t aware that she was sobbing until Miaow, slowly and carefully, extricated herself, went into the corner where the remnants of the rag dolls were, and lay down with her back to her mother.
All that night and the next day, Hom ransacked her mind for ways around the future Daw had presented to her. In the end it came down to two concrete issues: a safe, temporary home for Miaow, and some source of income. It seemed to her, as she paced the rooms through the day and into the evening, that Daw was responsible for everything that had gone wrong. He’d lied to her about how life would be in Bangkok, he’d been the one who brought the drugs into their lives, and he’d been the one who stole the cuff links and had been spotted. And there had been the perfumes and the fabrications about the evenings with “the guys.” The only thing that mattered to her at this point was Miaow; her first responsibility had to be her daughter. She got up and took a sleeper, and by the time she drifted off, she had a simple plan for the new day.
Street Music Page 25
