way up, and suddenly he's laughing. The laughter reaches down and brings more laughter with it, and he's standing there, still bent over, injured elbow tight against his side, squeezing his sliced thumb, simultaneously laughing like a fool and blinking away tears as Rose, her foot still in her hand, glares down at the hazardous litter on the carpet in front of her, clenches her teeth, bends the knee of the leg she's standing on, and jumps over the spill of glass. She lands on one leg, windmills her free arm to stay up, and manages to remain standing, and then she's laughing, too, and Rafferty moves crablike, still bent forward, across the room to her, and he puts his unbandaged arm around her, pointing the bleeding thumb away to keep the blood off her clothes, and the two of them lean against each other and laugh until Rose starts to cry.
Very slowly, very carefully, Rafferty maneuvers her to the couch, Rose taking small, backward, one-legged hops, and gets her seated. He kneels in front of her and cups her face in his hands, painting a bright brushstroke of blood across her cheek, as she closes her eyes and weeps, bringing her own hands up to hold his wrists. He leans toward her until their foreheads are touching, his hands still cradling her face. She makes an enormous snuffling sound, and he laughs again, although his own cheeks are cool and wet. Rose's sobbing turns into a laugh and then a hiccup, and Rafferty says, 'Look at us.'
Rose pulls back enough to pass her arm over her cheeks and sees the blood she's smeared on her arm. 'We're both bleeding.'
Rafferty says, 'Are we ever.'
He feels a presence and turns to his left to see Miaow and Pim standing there, staring at them, eyes wide and faces wide open.
Rose snuffles again and then wipes her nose on the back of her hand. 'Okay,' she says. 'It's time.'
Pim backs away from the crying, laughing people on the couch. She puts a hand behind her for the doorknob and says, 'Thank you for a nice afternoon.'
'You might as well stay,' Rose says. 'You need to hear this as much as they do.'
'But I have to-'
Rose sails over her with a single breath. 'No you don't. You need to know about this. You must be hungry, right? Well, Poke's going to bandage his thumb and bring me a bandage for my foot, and then he's going down to get us all some takeout from the street vendors. You and Miaow can go down with him to help him carry it all. Get a lot, because this is going to take a long time.'
Miaow looks suspicious. 'What're you going to do?'
Rose reaches over and brushes Rafferty's hair off his forehead, then raises her hand as though she's going to swat him. 'Be Poke's wife,' she says. 'Wipe blood off walls. Sweep glass.'
PART II
Chapter 8
Afternoon sunlight sparkles off the stones on her fingers and at her wrists.
Kwan watches as the young woman leads a small parade of children, the bolder ones pushing forward for a closer look as though she's fallen to the dust from outer space, as though some of them hadn't known her when she was as brown and filthy as they are. The children wear patched shorts and dirt-brown T-shirts, liberally ventilated with holes. Their feet are bare or slap along on rubber flip-flops. Scabs define their knees, and their legs are lumped and mottled from insect bites. One of them, not one of the bolder ones, is Kwan's next-youngest sister, Mai. At thirteen, Mai is one of the tallest children in the queue, but that's because she's older than most of them. She hasn't yet had the growth spurt her mother dreads, the spurt that says that Mai may yet become as freakishly tall as Kwan.
As tall as the Stork.
The boy bringing up the end of the line proudly tows a small bright pink suitcase. It has wheels, and they get snagged in the holes that pit the road every few feet, so the boy doing the honors has to yank the wheels free every time and then catch up with the parade. In the background, at the village's edge, the dented orange taxi that first drew the children's attention finishes a jerky turnaround-back and forth, back and forth, trying not to bump two rickety houses it could bulldoze flat without denting its fenders-and bounces over the rutted track leading back toward the railroad station, kicking up a plume of reddish dust that drifts across the village in a dry parody of fog.
The woman the children follow shimmers like an exotic tropical bird that's landed among the rice sparrows. She wears a loose blouse the color of sunset-silk, from the way the air drapes and redrapes it-and a short, tight, glittery black skirt. Shiny high heels in a leopard-skin pattern puncture the dust of the road between the houses. The woman's skin, paler than Kwan remembers it, looks polished, as though it's been slowly rubbed smooth. The highlights in her shaped and tapered hair, bright enough to have been shellacked, are almost blinding in the slanting sun. She pays no attention to the kids, but as she passes Kwan's house, she looks up and smiles.
Kwan feels like she's been caught spying. She pulls back, ducking behind the damp clothes that hang on the line strung above the deck around her sagging wooden house. The deck and the house are raised about a meter above the dirt to keep the floors dry in the rainy season. Kwan reads the name of the rice company printed on the inside of one of her mother's dresses before she realizes how rude she's being, and she pushes aside the stiffening and now-dusty clothes and does her best to return Moo's smile.
'We should talk while I'm here,' Moo says, looking up at Kwan Then, as though she's remembering something, she says, more politely, 'Are you well? Have you had rice yet?'
'I'm fine, thank you,' Kwan says. She knows she's blushing. Moo has never once spoken to her in the four summers since she went down to Bangkok, never even seemed to notice her. Now that they're speaking, Kwan has no idea what to say.
'Straighten up,' Moo says severely. 'You're tall. You can't fool anybody by bending over like that. You just look crippled. Stand up and be proud of it. Some men will like it.'
Now Kwan's face is aflame. This is her least favorite topic. 'Nobody likes it,' she says. 'I look like a giraffe.'
Moo nods, but she's not listening. The nod is polite dismissal. 'Maybe tonight,' she says. 'We'll talk.' She starts to move away but stops, and some of the kids who were already in motion behind her bump into each other. She reaches up to her left ear and fiddles with something for a moment. Then she mimes a little underhand throwing motion, and Kwan brings her hands up, and on the second pass Moo actually does throw something, something that flashes blue in the air as it flies and then lands, small, hard, and sharp, between Kwan's panicky, hurriedly clasped hands. An earring.
A sapphire earring.
The stone is the size of a small raisin, dark blue as the new-moon sky, mounted on a straight gold post. A little tangle of gold wire that looks like one of the symbols in written music that Kwan has seen in school-a clef, the bass clef, for low music, Teacher Suttikul calls it-is stuck on the post, where it secures the earring to the lobe and holds it in place. The earring probably cost more money than her father earns in two years.
Kwan says, 'Oh, Moo. I can't-'
'Not Moo,' the woman says, and her smile goes muscular, just something her face is doing, with nothing behind it. 'Not Moo anymore. My name is Nana.'
'Nana,' Kwan corrects herself. She knows that. Moo has called herself Nana for years now, ever since the first time she came back. Kwan wants to kick herself. She never gets anything right. Tall, awkward, tall, stupid, tall.
'Put it on,' Nana says. 'After we talk, I'll give you the other one.'
