And she’s between them: two years old or so, and already well on her way to being Miaow, except that her shoulders are hunched as though she’s afraid she might be taking up too much space on the bench, and Rafferty feels an immediate spurt of hatred for the man on the right, who barely seems to know the child is there. Miaow’s expression, even at that age, reflects at least two emotions; she’s looking at the camera as though she’s terrified that it might eat her, and she’s also half hoping that it will. Her mother’s gaze seems to say, Look. Isn’t my baby beautiful?
“Yes,” he says, and then he surprises himself by swallowing. “Yes, here she is.” He looks over at the boy, who’s rippling like someone at the bottom of a pool, and he realizes his eyes are wet. He wipes them as the boy studies him curiously. “You’re, umm, you’re giving this to me?”
A shrug. “It’s not mine.”
Sniffling loudly, Rafferty reaches into his pockets and pulls out the remaining hundred-baht bills and passes them to Lamon, who folds and pockets them without a glance. Carefully putting the picture back into its plastic envelope and then slipping it into the pocket on his T-shirt, Rafferty says, “Why do you—” He breaks off, and re-frames the question. “You’re young, you’re smart, you’re energetic. Why do you stay here?”
The boy says, “Because it’s better than there.”
As the park recedes behind him, he can feel it all churning in his gut, a seething, unstable mixture of rage and pity and regret that seems to roll around, as fluid and as heavy as mercury. When he crosses a street and trips as he steps up onto the curb he realizes that he’s exhausted, and he ducks into a restaurant, one of the Western chains that have broken out like blisters all over the city. He wants the energy and the clarity he usually finds in a cup of coffee. He sits alone at a plastic table, still damp and smelling of sponge from its most recent wipe-down, and by the time the cup is empty he’s dialing his phone.
“I’m eating dinner,” Arthit says.
“At this hour?”
“This is the post-crisis hour, as you, the parent of a teenager, should know.”
“This won’t take long. I know who killed Hom. I have an eyewitness who described it in details that perfectly match your reconstruction of what happened. Good work, by the way. The witness is the one who put the mysterious white bag there. She sometimes gave them to him, full of food, and he meticulously returned them to her, empty but finely folded.”
“I need to talk to him.”
“You won’t. He won’t have anything to do with the police. Incidentally, he’s got an ear that was mauled exactly the way Hom’s was. That was done with a fingernail, and the guy it belongs to is named Yai. He operates or used to operate some dodge with kids in Patpong or someplace nearby.”
“Yai?”
“Yai.”
“Underage kids?”
“If the witness was one of them, and I think he was, they were, definitely underage.”
“Just so I’m clear on all this, give me the three-minute version.”
Rafferty has to take a couple of deep breaths to steady himself, to put some distance between him and the story, before he can boil it down. When he’s finished, his armpits are wet and it takes him a moment to bring himself present. “That’s it,” he says, “as far as I understand it.”
“Why all the stuff about making her follow you?” Arthit says. “He knew where you lived. Why didn’t he just take her there?”
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. He told Hom that she’d get a share of the money, but I think he planned from the beginning to kill her and take it all. Murder was a serious enough charge, I think, that he wasn’t taking any chances on anyone seeing him with her anywhere near my house. She was, umm, conspicuous. He probably worried that people would remember. Just keeping his ass safe, I think.” He sucks in a deep breath and blows it out. “She was always going to be killed.”
There’s a silence on the line, and Arthit says, “Call you back.”
Rafferty’s heart is going double-time. He gets another cup of coffee and stares at it until it’s room temperature. Then he sips it, makes a face, and gets another one. As he sits down again, the phone rings.
“He’s a bad boy,” Arthit says. “Pimp, dealer, bully, enforcer, extortionist. With a record like his, if by some happenstance he was arrested by a couple of honest cops who found a huge amount of dope on him, he could be put away until the next Great Flood. Would that make you happy?”
“He’s not going to carry that much dope around.”
There is a silence on the line.
“Oh,” Rafferty says.
Arthit says, “Are you okay?”
“I feel like I’ve spent the last week as a crash test dummy, but other than that—”
“But I’ve just given you good news, right?
“Right.”
“Then suck it up. Go home and do your real job. Be a father. Don’t worry about Yai.”
Rafferty leaves the new cup of coffee steaming on the table.
34
She Has Two Parents
When he closes the apartment door behind him, feeling a thousand years old and a thousand pounds heavier, he’s startled to see Rose coming out of the kitchen with a cup of something in her hand. He had thought it was much later; his sense of time has abandoned him, but a glance at his watch tells him it’s a little after ten.
She stops, her upraised eyebrows asking the question, and he says, “It went fine, I guess. I learned a lot.” He turns toward the hall, heading for Miaow’s room.
“You know,” she says behind him, “you have two children.”
“Yes, but only one of them is in trouble right now.”
“How would you know?”
He turns back to see her sipping from the cup, and the smell of peppermint, which he loathes, finds its way to him.
“He’s got you,” Rafferty says. “He’s got more aunts than I have fingers. He eats on schedule. What could be wrong?”
“He needs you, too. He’s a boy. Even at this age, he needs to have men around him. And you’ve got to grow up and stop seeing him as competition.”
The little envelope with the photograph in it feels warm in his pocket. He says, “Give me ten minutes.”
Rose says, “No.” She sips again and holds out the cup. “Would you like some?”
“Peppermint tea? I’d rather have a glass sandwich.”
Rose says, “We’re all out of glass. You know, you have two children and Miaow has two parents.”
“What does that—”
“It means that you’ve barely included me in any of this. It’s about a mother and a daughter, you know, and you’ve left out the only person in this house who’s been both.”
“You’re . . .” He stops, mentally bumping into what she’s just said.
“You were going to say that I’m busy with the baby, and yes, I am. But I’m her mother, too. Her door is locked, by the way. Edward came over without warning and she sent him home, and then she slammed her door so hard the picture in the hallway fell off the wall. It’s still locked, you don’t know where the key is, she won’t open it, and you’re not going to knock it down, so just come into our room with me—it still is our room, you know—and say hello to your son, and then tell me what happened. We’ll talk about it. Together. Remember together?”
Rafferty says, “Beer,” and heads for the kitchen. Rose stays where she is, and he says, “You don’t actually have to wait for me. I’m not going to dash for the front door, escape into the night. I just . . . I can’t actually think of a time when I needed a beer more than I do right now.”
“And I can’t think of a time when you and I went in to see Frank together. This will be the first.”
He stands in the light of the refrigerator and tries to remember why he opened it. “That’s hard to b
elieve.”
“Only for you. Go ahead, get your beer. My tea is getting cold.”
“Okay, okay, getting the beer.” He pulls out a small one to show her how seriously he’s taking the discussion, even though he knows she won’t appreciate, or even notice, it. The things men do for women, he thinks, going back into the living room and finding her exactly where he left her. He stops and just looks at her. “You are beautiful.”
“I know. Worse men than you have told me that. Come on, put your free arm around my shoulder, and I’ll put mine around your waist, and we’ll go in together. He needs to see things like this so he begins to realize that people can come in pairs. Right now, you’re just the only farang in the crowd.”
“The door isn’t wide enough.”
“I can solve that,” she says, and she does, pivoting them about forty degrees without breaking the embrace as they pass through it, and, joined at the hip, they detour around the bed, drinks in hand, and move in tandem to the crib. “He’s asleep,” she whispers. “He sleeps there for hours now. Pretty soon, it’ll be all night and we can be roommates again.” She leans against him and rests her head on his shoulder, and he inhales the scent of her shampoo in what seems like the deepest breath he’s drawn in days. It feels like coming home.
“Look at him,” she says, her lips to Rafferty’s ear. “My little farang.”
In spite of a sudden, unexpected glow of pride, Rafferty says, “He doesn’t look like me.”
“Look at that nose. Not a Thai nose. Not as big as yours, which is good because we’d have to get a bigger apartment . . .”
“Hey,” he whispers.
“. . . but not as small as a Thai nose. And look.” She puts her hand beside the sleeping baby’s face. “Not dark.”
The baby opens his eyes and looks at both of them as though from a great distance, and then closes them again. His thumb goes into his mouth, and Rose waits, one hand up to caution Rafferty not to speak, and after a count of ten or twelve, she hands him her tea and very gently works the thumb free. Then she licks her own fingertips and whispers, “Our son tastes good.”
Rafferty says, “I’ll take your word.”
“You would make a terrible woman.”
He says, “If I’d known you wanted a woman . . .”
“They were standing in line,” she says, “if I had wanted one. Give me my tea and come on,” she says quietly, “let’s catch up.”
He sits beside her on the bed and takes a first hit off his beer. Instantly, muscles he hadn’t even known were tight relax, and he lets out a sigh.
Rose says, “That’s a nice sound. So here’s what’s happened here. Frank ate everything I gave him for dinner and he hasn’t spit any of it up yet.”
“That’s nice.”
“Adjust your scale,” she says. “These things are important to me and to Frank. We both need them to be important to you, too. We’re not a TV show and you can’t change the station when the pace slows down. If you’re not interested, tell me now and I’ll stop trying. It’s too much work to have to deal with two babies. If you can’t find a way into this . . . this relationship, you and I are going to have problems.”
“I don’t want us to have problems.”
“Then get to know your son. You’ve been acting like he bites.”
“I’m just . . . I don’t know how to do this.”
She reaches over and takes the beer out of his hand. “You love me, right?”
“Of course.”
“Well, he’s half me.” She takes a long swallow of beer. “So you’ve got a head start. Love that half of him and after a while, maybe you’ll learn to love the half that’s you, too. I’m going to need help, Poke. The girls won’t be here forever, you know.”
“Fon will.”
She laughs and hands him the beer. “Yes, Fon will be around for a while. And he loves her. He’s going to love you too, if you’ll give him a chance. Can you promise me that you will?”
“Do I have to change him?”
“Once in a while.”
“How can something so small poop so much without turning inside out?”
“He’s just trying to impress you.” And then she’s laughing. “And I already know you can be a parent, because I’ve seen how you do it with Miaow.”
He says, “Thanks.”
“You’ve been more of a parent to her than I have.”
“She needed a father.”
“So does he.”
“And speaking of Miaow,” he says.
She says, “Give me the bottle again.” She drinks about a third of it and says, “How bad is it?”
“Well, it’s awful in some ways, but in others it’s not actually as bad as we always thought it was, either.” He tells her the story Hom told him, and when he’s done, she sits there, holding the bottle as though she’s forgotten it’s in her hand.
At last, she says, “That’s her side of the story.”
Rafferty said, “She carried everything she owned around with her except for one thing, which she buried in the ground where she slept. Buried it for safety. According to someone in the park who knew her, she dug it up and looked at it all the time.”
He works the picture, still in its plastic envelope, from his pocket and hands it to her.
She puts her teacup in her lap and looks at the photograph for five or ten seconds and then squeezes her eyes closed and scrubs at her forehead with her fingertips, hard, almost violently, as though she’s trying to push something right through the skin. When she looks up, her forehead is bright red and her eyes are wet. “I’d know her anywhere,” she says. “Even at that age, she’s Miaow. Poor her. Poor both of them.”
“So,” Rafferty says, “I was going to go in and—” But he stops because Rose has gotten up and is holding out the bottle of beer, now almost empty. “I’ll do this,” she says. “It’s a mother thing.”
He takes the beer and watches her detour to the closet, where she slides one of the doors aside and goes up on tiptoe to get something off the top shelf. It’s a key, and Rafferty recognizes it.
“You kept losing it,” she says. “If I’d told you it was there you’d have lost it again. You—you go talk to Frank or something.” And then she’s gone, closing the door behind her.
He has no intention of eavesdropping, but having two closed doors between him and them seems excessive, so he waits until he hears Miaow’s voice and the sound of her door closing before he very quietly opens the one to the room he’s in.
As long as he’s up, he tiptoes into the kitchen and gets another beer, then tiptoes back to the bedroom and hovers, suspended, just inside the door, feeling so little contact with the floor he could be a puppet whose strings are too short. He hears Rose’s voice, low and soothing, and Miaow’s higher and thinner, and then Rose talks for a long time and he can’t understand a word and he’s ashamed of himself for trying, so he drifts across the room toward the crib.
The kid is lighter-skinned than Rose, although Rose isn’t very dark. Rafferty can’t spot the incipient Western beak yet, but he’ll take Rose’s word: She’s been studying this face nonstop for, what is it, fourteen days now, fifteen? He hears a raised voice in Miaow’s room—Miaow’s—and then Rose’s voice, lower in both pitch and tone, and he’s trying to catch a word or two when he sees, out of the corner of his eye, a change in the baby’s face.
He looks down into the bluest eyes he’s ever seen. They seem to be looking at Rafferty’s forehead, and without knowing he’s doing it he goes up on tiptoe to intercept the baby’s gaze. Now Frank is waving his fists around, and Miaow lets out something that could best be described as a yelp. Listening for all he’s worth, Rafferty puts his hand into the crib and touches the back of the baby’s hand, and Frank wraps his infinitesimal fingers around Rafferty’s index finger, and the world falls away until there’s n
othing but the blue of the baby’s eyes, the warmth of his son’s fingers around his, and the sound of his daughter’s voice and then his wife’s, the two of them talking a mile a minute at the same time, and Rafferty leans down into the crib and says to the baby, “Get used to it, kid. It’s music.”
35
Coda
When the phone rings early the next morning, he rolls over blindly to grab it from the glass-topped table beside the couch, and falls out of his and Rose’s bed, hitting the edge of the night table with his hand and bringing it down on top of him. The phone slides off and lands on his right cheek, and he grabs it even before he does a damage assessment and croaks, “Hello?”
“Wow,” a woman says in English. “Guess I woke you up.”
“Guess you did.” Frank is crying, probably frightened by all the noise, and Miaow is suddenly in the doorway, her eyes so puffy they might have been stung by bees, saying, “You guys fighting already?”
“Who are you fighting with?” says the woman on the phone. “Oh yes, sorry, this is Jillian Trelawney, lives next door to Mr. Campeau? There’s someone in the apartment.”
Rafferty is feeling a bit blurry from lack of sleep, and his head hurts. “In your apartment?”
“No, silly, in his. Would I call to tell you there’s someone in my apartment? I’d be celebrating it privately. But next door, in his, I can hear them moving around.”
Rose is up now, bent over the baby, and Miaow goes over, a bit gingerly, and stands beside her.
“Oh, Lordy, you’ve got a baby,” Jillian Trelawney says. “Bad on me. But, still . . .”
“I’ll come over in a bit,” Rafferty says. “Push your bed against the door.”
“Oh, no, really?”
“No,” he says, “not really,” and he hangs up.
Street Music Page 33
