can’t just sit here and do nothing. I hope you understand.”
Tooney gave him a humorless smile. “Of course, I understand. But, please, can’t you just trust me?”
“It’s not a matter of trust. I believe you think you’re doing the right thing, but when it’s someone close to you who’s in danger, people often don’t think straight. If your granddaughter’s in trouble, we need to get help.”
“If we do that, she is as good as dead.”
“Yeah. Dad said the same thing, but you can’t know that for sure.”
Tooney’s shoulders moved up and down as he took in a deep breath. “I can.”
“How?”
Tooney gave Logan’s dad a pained look as if he were hoping there was some way he could be spared from having to say anything more.
“Tell him,” Harp said. “That can’t hurt her.”
Tooney carefully touched his hand to his bruised face. “But what if even after I do he does call the police?”
“He won’t. I promise.”
“But what if he does?”
Harp looked at his son. “Then he’s not the man I thought he was.”
Logan let that one pass. He knew his dad was trying to guilt him into cooperating, but there was potential guilt on the other side, too, the guilt of inaction if it turned out a phone call could have saved the girl.
Tooney didn’t move for several seconds. Finally, he lifted his head, and looked Logan in the eye. “I was one of the lucky ones.”
14
“You know that I am from Burma, yes?” Tooney said.
Logan nodded.
Tooney’s gaze grew distant, lost in a memory. Finally, he looked back at Logan. “When I escaped, I was able to bring most of my family with me. Many were not so blessed. My younger sister, my brother, my wife, my two daughters, we were all together. The only ones who could not come were my father and my older sister. He too old to travel, so she stay to take care of him.” He paused again, but only briefly. “It was not easy to leave without them, but we had no choice. My wife had been…
“Friends hid us in cars and drove us into the jungle in the hills to the east. From there we walk for five days, hiding when we hear patrols, until we cross into Thailand. This was 1984. Already there were refugee camps along the border with thousands of other Burmese. We were just six more.
“Then, for a second time, we were lucky. We stayed in camp for only one year. A church in San Luis Obispo sponsored our whole family. That’s how we got out of Thailand. That’s how we come to California.”
He took another pause. This was a lot more about Tooney than Logan had ever been aware of, but by the knowing nods from his father, the story wasn’t new to him.
“My oldest daughter, Sein, did you know her? She several years older than you, but we not move to Cambria from San Luis Obispo until after she graduate high school, so maybe not.”
Logan shrugged. “I saw her around a few times. But I don’t think I ever spoke to her. I knew Anka a little, though. She was two years behind me, I think.”
Tooney gave him a half-smile. “Anka, my American child. She born in Burma but it like she never lived there. She teach high school English now, and she married to white boy like you. He’s a good man, though.”
“As opposed to me?”
Tooney shook his head. “You not bad. But you lonely man. You need someone to warm your heart.”
Logan let the instant psychology session, as unexpectedly accurate as it was, pass without comment.
“Sein, she meet Burmese boy at camp in Thailand,” Tooney went on. “His name Khin. She tell me all the time she love him. Khin’s family sponsored, too, but by group in North Carolina. So he far away. Did not stop them, though. As soon as he out of high school, he come to California for her, and marry her. He good man, too. Very much love her. They have first baby 1988. My first granddaughter, Yon. Then one more in 1991, Elyse.” He drifted again. “My wife never see Elyse.”
“She was born after your wife died?” Logan asked. He only had vague memories of Tooney’s wife. As far as he could recall, he never saw her after his first or second year in high school. He’d heard later that she’d passed away, but he didn’t know the family very well at the time so the details didn’t stick with him.
“No,” Tooney said, an undercurrent of anger in his voice. “Thiri, my wife, she died in 1994. In Burma.”
“Burma? But I thought you said she came here with you.”
“She did,” he said. “Do you know Burma history?”
“A bit.”
“Aung San Suu Kyi?”
Logan nodded. She was the daughter of Aung San, the popular Burmese general who was assassinated when she was still a young child. Later she became a symbol of freedom in a country that had come to be run by a
