The yellow scarf comes into his mind’s eye, her preoccupation with the drape of the scarf. The way her face had softened when she mentioned her daughter.
He fights down the anger and the guilt and makes notes, just to process the information with both his mind and his hand, to see what links might open up. Doesn’t see a meaning behind the patterns, although there’s an elusive little flicker there somewhere.
His mind keeps wandering into scenarios, based on assumptions about what it is that Ton and his accomplices might really want. He follows one line of plausibility to its end-a bad end-and backs up and starts over. This time, with slightly different variables, the process takes him to a different end, different but still bad. Start again, factor in a new initiative on his part, and this time the ending is, to view it charitably, ambiguous. Maybe ambiguous is the best he can hope for. Maybe ambiguous should sound good to him.
The tuna salad in front of him has warmed to room temperature as the restaurant has filled and then emptied around him. Now the waitresses straighten the room, squaring the chairs and dusting the seats, laying down new linen, folding napkins and wiping their fingerprints off clean glasses, joking and talking quietly, and glancing over at him from time to time. They notice that he seems to be completely unaware of them, just staring through the window and sometimes making a note in the little notebook in front of him.
And he’s cute, one of them says. Is he part Thai?
“Have problem?” she says.
Rafferty almost jumps out of his seat. He had no idea anyone was near, much less standing at his elbow. He looks up to see a girl of seventeen or eighteen, cute in a baby-puffy way, wearing the kind of accessories that girls her age in the United States would either scorn as cluelessly uncool or embrace as post-retro irony: Hello Kitty earrings, little butterfly hair clips, a long curved comb at the back of her head, decorated with a row of hearts, to pull the long black hair out of the way.
“Just thinking,” Rafferty says, ripping himself, with a certain amount of relief, out of the latest lethal scenario. “Sometimes thinking is the only thing I know how to do.”
“Food not okay?”
He’s forgotten about the food. He has to look down at it. “It’s fine.”
“How you know?”
“Excuse me?”
“You no eat.” Just a ghost of a smile to acknowledge that she won the exchange, and then it evaporates.
“I thought I was hungry, but I wasn’t.”
She opens a graceful hand, palm up, slightly curled fingertips a few inches from the plate. “You want I take?”
“Sure. Thanks. Sorry to waste it.”
“Not waste,” she says. “Can give to kid. You know? Some kid not have eat.” She raises the fingertips to her mouth, looking uncertain. “Boss not know.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t tell him.” This girl, and others like her, had helped Miaow survive, sometimes with their boss’s knowledge and sometimes without, when she was on the street.
When she was being protected by-
The vision of the boy who pushed past him on the sidewalk is suddenly in his mind again. And it brings with it a jumbled confusion of impressions and emotions: kindness and violence, hope and disappointment, failure. Mostly, and most deeply, failure. A failure he has hoped a thousand times to be able to rectify. He has prayed for a chance to rectify it.
But he looks at everything he’s facing at the moment, at the danger and the isolation, and his only thought is, Please, not now.
The boy doesn’t come.
Da sits there, the inverted red bowl as conspicuous to her as a fire on the sidewalk, terrified that Kep will suddenly materialize, swearing at her, threatening her. Maybe snatching Peep away from her.
She constantly scans the crowd for the blue shirt. Twice she glimpses blue and grabs the bowl and holds it upright, but it’s someone else both times. Someone who doesn’t look anything like Kep.
She thinks, I could get up and walk away myself.
And go where? says a voice in her head. And do what? You couldn’t take care of yourself before, when you were alone. And now look at you, you’re stuck with a baby. And you’re waiting for this boy? You don’t even know anything about him.
“I do too,” Da says aloud, without realizing it. “I saw him disappear.” One minute he had been there, and an instant later he wasn’t. She had recognized it then. This place was his forest, just as the land around her village had been her forest. She’d grown up there, gotten into danger there, escaped it there. She’d known where to go, how to live there, what was safe and what wasn’t. If someone had been lost there, Da would have been the person to trust.
Trust, the voice says. Why do you think you can trust him?
Da thinks, Because his face was clean. Because his clothes were dirty but his face was scrubbed. There was something about him that said he was more than he seemed to be. And because she believes that she can sometimes see things in people that are invisible to others.
Blue down the sidewalk. She grabs her bowl and turns it upright. As she watches Kep stride down the sidewalk, she pulls the coins from her pocket and drops them inside. Looking away, as though she doesn’t know he’s coming to get her, she raises the bowl.
RAFFERTY CLAPS HIS hands twice. With the floor covered by the cheap, worn rug, taken from a dusty room full of stuff that tenants have abandoned over the years, and with blankets tacked to two walls to create a soft corner, the sound of the clap dies immediately. The sheets hung over the windows soak up the echoes, too. When he’d started putting the pieces together, two hours ago, the sound had reverberated with a
Pinch or not, this is better. This will work.
His watch says 4:50. Miaow had been sulky when she peeked into the fourth-floor apartment on her way up, practically rolling her eyes at Rafferty’s efforts. For all Rafferty knows, she and Rose are planning her new life, her life as Mia, right now. Father of the year, he thinks, not even realizing that his newly introverted daughter is going through a crisis. When he finds his way out of this mess, he’s going to rethink this whole fatherhood thing. He’s obviously not doing it right. He knows nothing about little girls. And his own father, who abandoned the family when Rafferty was seventeen, didn’t provide much in the way of a paternal role model. But he’ll do better.
It’s comforting to look forward to a time when he can focus on being a better father. When Miaow’s problems will be as important to him as they are to her.
“Looks great,” someone says. “You’ve got a real eye for decoration.”
Rafferty turns to see Lieutenant Kosit leaning against the edge of the doorway. He is in street clothes, and looped over his thick fingers is the handle of a fancy plastic shopping bag from an electronics shop on Silom.
“I think the blankets provide a kind of unexpected elan,” Rafferty says. “Who would ever have believed those colors would go together?”
Kosit says, “No one.” He holds out the bag. “You owe me seven thousand baht.”
“Jesus. I’m not using it for opera.”
“You needed some way to jack it into your speakers, right? Well, that’s where they get you. Connectors. That’s where they got you, anyway.” He fishes out a receipt and flaps it in Rafferty’s direction. “See? Connectors, twenty-three hundred baht.”
