Nowhere Girl (16 page)

45

It's all happening too quickly. What can we do? There's no escape. We are imprisoned here as surely as I ever was on the inside.

The pounding at the door comes again, and I can hear the guard's voice: “It's quite late, sir. Ms. Finn might well be sleeping.”

The return voice is low with a cold fury. “She will not be sleeping for long. And if you wish to retain your employment, I suggest you restrict your opinion to matters which concern you.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Payne,” comes the reply, and feet shuffle away from the door as the pounding starts up again.

So this is it. I am to meet for myself the source of that haze of fear in my mother's eyes, that terror she danced with by day and cowered from by night. Rupert Payne Sr. is standing like the devil on my doorstep. “Stay back,” Nana whispers, starting to get up. “I'll go deal with him.”

But I get to my feet first, put a hand on her arm. “No,” I say. “I have to do this. For Mama. I need to do this.”

She looks deep into my eyes, then nods. “He can't hurt you,” she says. “He won't hurt you. I'm here. The guards are here. We'll all stand up to him together.”

I smile and squeeze her hand, but as I move toward the door that is now rattling on its hinges with the force of the blows, I've never been less sure of anything in my life. Breathing slowly and deliberately, trying not to sink into the fear my mind is screaming out, I unlatch the door. And swing it open.

Rupert Payne Sr. leaps into the room like he has a rocket strapped to his back. He grabs my arms with both hands, then looks me up and down. His face goes a darker shade of red. He shoves me to the side with a curse. “Out of the way, child. Where is she? Where is that … Helena Finn!” he bellows. “Where are you? Didn't I warn you? Didn't I tell you what would happen?”

The storm of fury has clearly been building for a long time, because he doesn't seem to take in his surroundings. He seems lost in the moment as he rants and raves out his hatred for my mother, calls her every name he can think of.

And I smile.

It's a slow smile, but it starts right in my core and grows out with a spreading warmth. Because he didn't win. He didn't. My mother—my weak, terrified, fear-driven mother—spent her life battling this monster. And she won.

A dubious victory, perhaps. But she was never beaten. He never got her.

And he won't get me, either. I push off from the wall where I've been huddled and move into his line of vision. “Stop!” I yell, and to my surprise, he does.

He blinks and looks at me. “Who are you?” he asks.

“I'm Luchi Finn, Helena's daughter.”

At her name, he starts up again. “Where is she? I told her—”

But I cut him off. “She's dead.” And I watch with satisfaction as the blow lands.

“What? But the border official said—” He glowers at me. “You're lying. I had a flag on her name—they called me because she had returned.”

“Then your spies don't have their facts right,” says Nana, speaking up for the first time and coming to put her arm around my shoulder. “If you're looking for my Helena, here she is.” She's holding the urn in her arms, and for a second I'm afraid she'll shove it at him, but instead she holds it tight to her chest.

Payne looks at Nana, then at me, then down at the urn. Then—he crumples. He drops like a broken branch that's been holding up a mountain and has finally collapsed under the strain. He folds in on himself and falls to the ground in front of us, gasping like a fish.

What's he doing? I look over at Nana. She grabs my arm with her free hand, and that's when I know it for sure—though I still can't believe it.

Rupert Payne Sr. is lying at our feet, crying his eyes out.

We stand and watch him, and it's nothing like it was with Nana earlier, because I'm still angry with him, so angry, and I don't want to let him get to that comfort stage. So I squat down next to him and lean in to his face. “What are you doing?” I ask. “It's not enough that you killed her, now that she's dead you can't take it?”

He shakes his head, his eyes wild, his wrinkled jowls swaying. “It's not like that,” he rasps. “You don't understand how it's been. This rage …” He takes a long breath. “This rage is all I have lived for, all that has kept me going for the last fifteen years. It's my backbone. It's been my life! And now—by God, now I hardly know why it started.” He looks up, searching Nana's face. “Why did I drive him away? Why did I hate her so much? I think … I think maybe I thought that if I could get her back, if I hated her enough, I could somehow turn back time, bring
him
back. If I could get revenge on her, I could make up for his loss.”

I look at him. He's so small, and the hate rises in me like a living thing.

“Well, I'm here now,” I spit out. “I'm her daughter. You can take your revenge on me in her place.”

Nana sucks in her breath and squeezes my arm in an iron grip, but he just shakes his head and rises to his feet. “Will you get me some water?”

It's delivered more as a statement than as a question and, shaking her head, Nana trundles off to the bathroom. Payne stands there rocking slightly, looking at me and shaking his head. And that's when I know that it's over—this reign of terror, this giant of a man. He tried to break my mother, but somehow, with her silence and her disappearance and her unwillingness to give in, she broke him. He'll never be what he was.

And, quite likely, the world will be a better place.

46

There is a lot of telling after this, so many questions and answers and tears and heartbreak. So many bridges to mend. So many webs to untangle.

Old Payne—I still won't call him my grandfather—in his new broken state, having released his long-held rage, surprises us by becoming a rational, tolerable person.

“I'm not going anywhere,” he tells us. “You're family now, the only family I have left. I'm sitting right here until we figure out what's going to happen next.” And so we talk. He and Nana grudgingly find they have more in common than they'd expected, especially when food is called for and their tastes agree.

And over plates of fruit and saltines and caviar and pâté, we talk. The story builds slowly, like the old television on the guards' table outside my cell, where you have to tune it so carefully, a nudge of the dial here, a bump of the knob there, twisting and turning and all the while the image is getting clearer and sharper until all of a sudden you have it: a whole image, a picture, a tale that unfolds as real as real life. This is the story that my mother's mother and my father's father weave their separate facts together to reveal.

The story of a rich, entitled young man who had everything but wanted only to be seen for who he really was. The story of a young girl who met a stranger at a bar and found her soul mate. These two shared a passion so deep that nothing, no impossibility seemed too great. They only wanted each other. And when society didn't agree, they left—flew around the world in search of that peace they were denied at home.

The peace they would never find.

For there was a fatal flaw in their perfect world, a deadly white powder that ultimately would bring about their destruction. It is unclear how far back the drug use had started, but young Rupert had a weakness that could not be controlled. He had tried to break the habit so many times, had promised his young bride he would never go near the stuff again.

“Helena was straight-edge as they come,” Nana whispers. “She didn't even drink alcohol—tried it once at seventeen and swore never to touch it again. Her father—my husband—he was an alcoholic. We divorced when she was seven, but Helena had seen enough. She never would have used any kind of drugs. And she wouldn't have stood by while Rupert did, either. She must not have known until it was too late.”

But when Helena found his body on that fateful night, she must have known right away that he had been using again, that he had sniffed himself high and then fallen into the pool to his death.

We don't dwell on the source of my mother's terror, on all that must have gone through her thoughts as she considered what to do next, but the struggle is vivid in my mind as I know it must be in theirs. The authorities would surely have exonerated her of any guilt. But what about her father-in-law, what of his many threats, now that Rupert was no longer there to protect her? What could she do, young, alone, newly married and away from everything she knew, with such a threat bearing down on her?

And so, most likely spurred by blind panic, Helena ran, stopping only to grab her backpack and throw in some essentials.

Which was her own undoing.

“I flew to Kuala Lumpur to collect her things,” Nana says. “They'd bought matching backpacks for the trip. She told me about them in her letter before she left. His was never found. But hers was still lying there in the hotel room.”

His backpack on her back. His pack with the secret compartment stuffed with his newly acquired bags of white powder, feeding a habit that had claimed one life and was about to swallow up another. The drugs were found by the Thai border patrol, and Helena Finn was quickly locked away—so quickly, in fact, that the alert had not yet gone out placing her as a person of interest in the case of her dead husband. By the time the call did go out, Helena had slid into the depths of the Thai prison system, from which she would not come out alive.

“She could have done something to help herself,” I say, mostly for my own ears. “Anytime she wanted, she could have. At least she could have tried. But she was too afraid. She chose to bury herself in her secrets. It was the only way she knew to fight back.”

I close my eyes while the buzz of conversation continues around me. In my mind I see Mama as she was, filling our cell like a sunburst—so desperate for life that she chose fear, yet too bound by her fear to really live. Did she never wonder if things had to be that way, if there might have been another path? What if she
had
gone back, had faced old Payne down? Which one of them would have broken first?

And then I remember Mama's final moments, her last words to me. With a rush of realization, the blinds fall away from my mind. All that talk of secrets and promises … and how little I'd understood! In those last, dying moments, I now realize, Mama finally saw the truth. In the end, she saw her secrets for what they really were: not cloaks but chains.

Don't
, she tried to tell me.
Don't do what I did. Don't be held in by secrets. Break free.

And I did, Mama, I tell her. Even without understanding what you were saying, I did. Your message came through in the end.

You didn't know it, but you were winning the battle all along.

And now, so have I.

47

Almost a full day has passed since Payne burst in on us, and I am growing more accustomed to his blustery, egocentric ways. He's a bit like a spoiled child who expects everyone to do everything he says, but deep down is afraid that nobody loves who he truly is.

With good reason.

Still, in spite of all I know about him, in spite of all he has done, I am finding it harder and harder to dislike him. It's obvious now that his breakdown in my room was less the thing of a moment and more the accumulated weight of years of shame and guilt. He now seems curiously eager to start over, to be a different sort of tyrant than the one he's been. He'll always rule, of course. That's the way he is. Nana and I scurry around, bringing him Scotch and water, fetching the newspaper, and rolling our eyes at each other behind his back. But for all his gruff manner, he is family. And I have little enough of that left.

Both he and Nana rented rooms for the night, and it's now evening, my fourth day in America, and we are walking along the coast and looking out over the bay. It's a special day, Nana has told me, a day when the whole country celebrates a long-ago victory of independence. I decide that this day should hold my own celebration, too. There's something I've wanted to do for a long time.

While Payne sits on a nearby bench, watching with hawk's eyes, I move along the shore, looking for just the right things. Loy Krathong, the Festival of Light, is not until November, but I can't wait that long. There's a full moon rising out over the water, and everything about the night, the air, the soft summer breeze, feels right.

I find just what I'm looking for: a wide, round piece of bark that is firm and curves up a bit at the edges. It's about the size of a saucer—a little small, but it will do. Nana stands next to me, watching as I assemble my
krathong
. Then she takes a few steps back, joining Payne in observing me from a distance. Perhaps she can tell how much I need to be alone right now. On my own, to do this one last thing.

My raft will be simple, compared to the ones I've seen back home. Isra loved to take me out for this festival—the lights floating down the river, mixed with the glowing lanterns drifting up into the night sky, are some of my favorite memories. It's so far away, that old life, yet it's also a part of me that will never fully disappear. And that's what has brought me out tonight, to honor my past and show gratitude for my journey.

Working carefully, I cover the base of my
krathong
in soft green leaves. To this I add some flowers I've been able to find—wiry yellow ones and small soft blue ones, and a few that are a bold pink. I arrange them in a pattern, with the pink ones clustered together in the middle. Once it looks beautiful, I add my mementos: the last of the
baht
that Isra gave me and the scrap of paper with Mama's listing of names and addresses in Bangkok. On top of this I place my square of embroidered cloth, the piece I began with Yai but never finished. I touch it carefully, stroking the clumsy green and brown stitches. There's still no image there that I can see. But it feels right to let it go like this.

That's what Loy Krathong is about, after all—letting go. It's a time to loosen hold of the past and to look toward the future. It's a time to begin life afresh, to look at the world through brand-new eyes. And it's a time to remember the dead, to honor those who have gone before.

“This is for you, Mama,” I whisper.

I don't know where the road ahead will take me, this new life I am just beginning to taste. Behind me, Payne is bickering with Nana about where I will live. They are so different, these two, yet curiously alike. For a second I picture myself following Payne into his fancy limousine with the dark tinted windows, pulling up to his palatial mansion, and flying in his private helicopter wherever the fancy strikes me. Then I picture myself holding Nana's hand as I cross the same threshold my mother passed over so many times, as I make her house my home, as I learn about her from the beginning forward. Those are just two of the forks my road has ahead; I know there will be many more to come.

And then I know that it doesn't matter what road I take. My life's no fairy tale, and it's taken long enough to get me this far, but somehow I know that whatever's up ahead, I've found my happily ever after.

I'm wearing it on the inside, and nothing can ever change that.

I reach into my pocket and pull out the matchbook I brought from the hotel. I should have candles to do this properly, but it doesn't matter. Moving quickly, I strike match after match, crisscrossing them into a burning heap in the center of my raft. The little boat bobs in the shallows and once it starts to blaze I give it a gentle push and it floats out toward the bay.

In the sky overhead, fireworks explode—my new country celebrating this day of my rebirth. I look down at the flaming embroidery at the top of my pile as it moves away from me—and suddenly I see it. There
is
a picture there. The green and brown thread is starting to sizzle and crackle but for a second I see it clear as day: a tree.

But not a bare, dark, stunted tree like the one I drew strength from when I was on the inside.

This tree is heavy with leaves and bursting with life. It is tall and straight and proud. A tree like that, I think, could take the storms and still stand. It could hold its ground no matter what the world threw at it.

I have crossed the world for this moment, for this feeling of looking out at the world, knowing it is there for my taking. I have slipped through the bars and they didn't bite. They couldn't hold me. The wind calls my name.

My raft sails farther out toward the sea, now a sputtering ball of flames. It doesn't matter. The image of that tree will be with me always. It's inside me now.

This tree will live forever.