sharply to me. Not a frown in the hallway. You, on the other hand, will terrify everyone who sees you, and you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to keep your teeth wet.”
He brings the box cutter closer. “Trying to pronounce the letters
He stops. He’s still looking at Daeng, but his face has gone slack, and it feels to Daeng as though Murphy is seeing straight through him. Then the gray-blue eyes lift to a point just above Daeng’s head and wander slowly to the right. Murphy stands up straight and backs up until he bumps the table, and then he sits, the box cutter dangling from his hand. “Or
Both guards say, “Yes, sir,” and pull even harder on Daeng’s lips.
Murphy gets up and comes back over. He leans down so he’s only inches from Daeng’s face and says, “I want you to say something for me. Okay?”
Daeng tries to answer, but all that comes out is a vowel.
“Exactly,” Murphy says. “Now, here’s what I want you to say. I want you to say ‘Helen.’ ”
Daeng says, quite clearly, “Helena.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Murphy says. He bows his head and closes his eyes. Without looking up he says, “Now say ‘Cheyenne.’ ”
Daeng begins to speak, but Murphy says, over him, “ ‘Eckersley,’ say ‘Eckersley.’ ”
It’s a difficult word because it’s nothing Daeng has heard before, but he says, “Eckersley.”
Murphy whirls and flips the table so it lands legs-up, the sound ear-popping in the small room, “Mother
Daeng begins the word, but Murphy’s not listening. He tosses the box cutter onto the floor, pulls out the cell phone in his pocket, and speed-dials a U.S. number. He glances over at Daeng and the guards and carries the phone into a corner, with his back to them. Daeng hears him release a quiet laugh, just a single, unamused syllable, and say, “Paul.”
Murphy listens for a second and then says, “Have you been in her house since you had your visit with her?” He turns, so Daeng is looking at his profile. Murphy’s eyes are closed. “Well,
“What should we do with him?” asks the man with the swelling hand.
Murphy puts a hand on the doorknob and turns back to face them. “Daeng,” he says. “Means ‘red,’ right? Same nickname I had, back when I was a kid. Red.” He looks down at the floor. As the guard is about to speak again, he says, “Bury him in solitary. As deep as you can. The most solitary solitary you’ve got. A week at least, until I say he can go. He talks to nobody.”
He puts the phone into his pocket. “You’re lucky, Red,” he says. “You’ll get to kiss your wife again.”
22
The room is a faded green not found in nature, pale and spectral in the overhead fluorescents. All the way around the room, about three feet from the floor, are tiny, grimy handprints, hundreds of them, as though left by an army of invisible children. They seem to jump and twitch in the lights’ flicker.
Sitting on a pillow, Rafferty can’t keep his eyes off the handprints. He keeps asking himself where the children are.
The sobs have subsided to irregular gasps and sniffles. The two women lean against each other, a limp pantomime of grief. The older one has collapsed against the younger, her arm thrown heavily over the other woman’s shoulders. And yet it seems to Rafferty that the older, with her terrible, devastated eyes, is the one who is recovering more quickly. In the last half minute or so, her hand has grasped the loose fabric of her pajama-style trousers and formed a fist around the cloth. Ming Li sits on the floor in front of them, face submissively down, her little MacBook Air closed to hide the screen shot of the newspaper from Cheyenne. She keeps her eyes on the floor, giving the women the invisibility they need to recover themselves.
The older woman coughs, so suddenly and loudly that the younger one flinches. She says, without lifting her head toward Rafferty, “How you find us?”
“My sister,” Rafferty says with a nod at Ming Li. “She followed you when you left the shop.”
Ming Li says to the older woman, very formally, “I am sorry.”
“No matter,” the woman says. “Name you, child?”
“Ming Li. This is my older brother, Poke.”
“We’re both sorry,” Poke says. “Sorry to bring you terrible news.”
“Twice,” says the older woman. She sniffles percussively. “My name is Thuy. This girl is my daughter, Jiang.”
Jiang, who is in her forties, shakes her head in the negative, although it’s hard to tell what she’s objecting to.
Rafferty says, “What was Helen’s name?”
“Bey,” Thuy says. “Means ‘baby.’ ” She coughs again and says, “Baby sister for me.”
“The man who was killed,” Rafferty says, “gave me-”
“Billie Joe,” Thuy says. “Billie Joe Sellers.”
“Well … um, Billie ran into me-”
“Billie
“The last thing Billie Joe did was stick that ticket in my pocket.” Rafferty tugs at the edge of his pocket. “It was very, very hard for him to do that. He didn’t have any strength left. But he did it because he wanted me to have that ticket.”
“Stop,” says the younger one, Jiang. She releases a sharp barrage of Vietnamese, and when she stops, Rafferty tells the rest of the story.
When he’s finished, Thuy puts her hand across her mouth, as though trying to hold something in. Her shoulders shake several times, and she sniffs twice.
“That night cops came to my apartment and dragged me down to an interrogation room. I saw a man there, an American.”
Thuy could be made from stone, but Jiang’s eyes widen. She glances away quickly and translates.
“I’m going to tell you what he looked like,” Rafferty says. “He was short and-”
Thuy says, in English, “Red.”
The rain hid them when they came.
The monsoon had hit with fury that year, rain so thick, so dense that people disappeared into the gray, two or three meters away. The rains dragged an unusual cold front behind them, and for people whose skin was always wet, the cold seemed to reach straight through and scrape at the center of their bones.
All the huts leaked. It was a season of dripping water. The rice was rotting, and green mold grew on clothes that were folded and stacked. The paddies had overflowed the dikes so that water ran ankle-deep through the mud street of the village.
They sat in the huts day and night and shouted at each other over the rain. The hut that Thuy and Jiang
