much. Kwan is-' She looks at her daughter. 'Kwan is my first baby. Even though she's bigger than I am, she's my first baby.'
Everyone laughs except Kwan and her father.
Teacher Suttikul holds out an arm, and Kwan gets up and goes to her. It seems to take five minutes for her to cross the room, and she can feel her father's eyes on her every step of the way. When she's finally side by side with Teacher Suttikul, the teacher barely comes up to Kwan's shoulder, and Kwan is amazed all over again that such a small, unassuming person has such strength. The teacher puts an arm around Kwan's waist and gives her a squeeze.
'That's finished, then,' she says.
Kwan can't say anything. She feels as though her throat has been tied in a knot.
Her teacher pulls a little flashlight from her purse. 'Come on,' she says. 'You can walk us past the dogs.'
The children scatter in front of them as they come through the door. Only one of them, Mai, is slow to move, and that's because she's staring up at the teacher. Teacher Suttikul slows and touches Mai's shoulder. 'Your name?'
Mai glances at Kwan for reassurance. 'Mai.'
'Good, good. How old?'
'Thirteen.'
Teacher Suttikul beams at her. 'Then I'll see you next year.' She turns back to the room and calls out, 'I'll look forward to seeing Mai next year.'
Mai bobs her head and backs away. With Mr. Pattison in the lead, Kwan and her teacher go down the four steps and turn right, around the house, to get to the dirt street. Once they're out there, the stars running like a spangled river between the dark trees, Kwan whispers, 'Please turn off the light.'
Teacher Suttikul snaps off the flashlight, and Kwan throws her arms around the woman. Hugging her teacher with all her strength, and with her own heart pounding in her ears, Kwan still hears Mr. Pattison stop to wait for them, standing alone in the dark.
Chapter 9
She can't even smell the exhaust of Mr. Pattison's motorbike anymore. She's been sniffing for it, but it's gone.
The last she saw of them was the wide cone of light from the bike's headlamp, bumping away from her, leaving her by herself, dead center in the red dirt of the road, staring after them. Staring at the black and white stripes of Teacher Suttikul's terrible blouse as it recedes into the darkness and the fuzziness of the nearsighted. Gone now, leaving Kwan more alone than she's ever felt in her seventeen years.
They're far enough away now to take with them even the sound of the bike, and here she is, ducking into the undergrowth to the side of the road just beyond the village, out of sight of anyone who might come looking for her, anyone who might say any word at all to her, have any kind of plan for her. She's thinking about ghosts and wishing she could have gotten on the bike. Just climbed up, wrapped her arms around her teacher's thick, solid waist, and zoomed through the night. Away from the broad black door that's just swung open in front of her.
Sold. Ruined.
Her father's eyes when her teacher talked about prostitution, about families who-
She's the center of a vortex of mosquitoes. Something moves, back in the bush. Everyone knows there are ghosts outside the village.
A breeze rattles the dry leaves on the bushes near her. If whatever made that noise is still moving, she won't be able to hear it. She can smell herself, the salty smell of shock and fear.
She can't stay here all night.
She feels like she's turned to stone. Her feet are too heavy to lift. And even if she could lift them, where would she go? She can't force herself to go home. She can't be in the same room-she can't even share the same light-with her father.
What she wants to do is drop to her knees and cry as she cried when she was a child, her throat wide open, her eyes running, and her nose streaming, letting out some of the grief that's built up inside her, like smoke with no outlet. She wants to slice open the skin on her cheeks and forehead with her fingernails and then scrub dirt into the cuts, dirt that could never be washed out, that would scar her, and then nobody would ever want to… buy…
She realizes she has her palm pressed hard over her lips and that a moan is building behind them. She straightens. Pulls her hand away. She will not moan.
And as she feels her will strengthen, a new thought, even colder than the others, breaks over her. What had her mother known? How long had she known? Her mother.
An hour ago, Kwan thinks, I was worried about staying in school.
She's aware again of the door, broad and even blacker than the night that surrounds her. She imagines something on the other side, holding out a hand to her. Or maybe it's not a hand.
The image makes her back prickle, and she turns slowly, seeing the dark, foamy shapes of bushes and, behind them, something bent and spavined, and she inhales quickly, the hand that had been over her mouth now pressed to the center of her chest, fingers splayed.
From the direction of the village, off to her left, a motorbike coughs a couple of times and roars into life. Kwan looks again at the twisted shape, sees that it's not moving, and backs deeper into the brush, farther away from the road. She keeps her eyes on the road, trying not to imagine the twisted thing opening long-fingered hands behind her. As much as she needs to know what's coming down the road, she looks over her shoulder at the dark shape. At first she can't give a form to anything, but then the bike's headlamp is turned on and the darkness thins, and she can see the bushes behind her, with nothing behind them but a spindly, dejected tree, and the roar increases in volume and whips past, dwindling into the distance. Two boys from the village, a little older than she, boys who are always in trouble for drinking and fighting. Boys without money. No one knows where they got the bike.
There is something in her left hand, the clenched hand. She lifts it to see what it is but then remembers. It's Nana's earring. Brought all the way here from Bangkok.
She sees her village with sudden clarity: Two rows of slanting, leaking houses, stinking latrines, badly chewed dogs. Dust and heat. People who are sometimes kind and sometimes cruel. Old people, young people. Working and living and dying. At the mercy of the weather, at the mercy of the rich. At the mercy of alcohol. Trapped in circles of karma that none of them can perceive, sentenced to a life of numbed endurance, voluble about nothing they care about, but slinging words bright and sharp as razors when tempers flare or the whiskey speaks. Mute as fish about the things that matter, the things they think about all the time. Hunger, work, injustice, endurance, the empty bellies of those they love.
The problem of their daughters. The opportunity presented by their daughters.
She could, Kwan imagines, just turn and walk down the road with the village behind her and never look back. Walk through the night until she sees a lighted window with someone behind it who needs her, someone who will take her in and let her help, let her wash and scrub and lift and carry. And never speak to her, never ask her anything. A smile in the morning, work through the day, a clean floor to sleep on at night. No one coming to the door. No one knowing her name.
Right, she thinks. Life is a movie.
She takes three deep, silent breaths. She'll be able to go to school. Teacher Suttikul won. She's got what she wanted. School, learning, working to make herself better. The story she's been trying so hard to write, the story of a village girl who is led to a treasure by the ghost of her dead grandmother. How happy the treasure makes the girl's poor family. The story Teacher Suttikul likes. The word Teacher Suttikul said: 'college.'
Her father's eyes. The way he watched her when she crossed the room to get to Teacher Suttikul. Their cold weight on her back as she and her teacher paused in the doorway to talk to Mai.
And she knows, deep in the pit of her stomach, that the wide dark door is still open and that school is not on
