The Hot Countries (8 page)

“So,” Arthit says, and pauses. “Well, sooner or later I have to say it out loud: we're thinking of asking her to come live with us.”

Rafferty says, “Permanently?”

“If she wants to,” Arthit says quickly. He looks past Poke, at him, and away again. “We're considering adopting her. If she did decide to
 . . .
to live with us for a while, sort of a trial period on both sides
 . . .
well, it would give her everything at once. She'd have a nice place to live—here, I mean—and every day she could go back to the shelter with Anna and see her friends.”

“She'd have a mother and father,” Rafferty says. He experiences a twinge of uneasiness at the idea of Treasure being able to relate to a father figure, even one as benign as Arthit, but a smile is called for, and he produces one. “It's a wonderful idea.”

Arthit returns the smile, although it mirrors some of the anxiety Poke thought he'd concealed. “And later we could see to college and all that. Just, you know, a real life for her.” He reaches out and covers Rafferty's hand with his. “I'm glad you think it's all right. We were a little worried about you.”

“Why?”

“No, no, I said that wrong. I mean we were worried about
both
of you, Treasure and you. You were the first adult male she ever trusted. You were the first one who ever treated her like a child—like a human, for that matter—and you were the one who ended her relationship with her father—”

“By killing him,” Rafferty says.

Arthit makes a loose fist and raps the back of Rafferty's hand, a call for attention. “He needed killing, and she knew it. And then, when she finally said something at the shelter after all those days, the first word she spoke was your name. You were the only person in Bangkok she asked for.”

Poke says, “And?”

“And I think she's had it somewhere in the back of her mind that she might eventually be able to live with you and Rose and Miaow.”

“Not possible,” Rafferty says. What Arthit said is no surprise. “I've got Rose and Miaow and the baby or babies to think about, and I can't bring Treasure into all that. She's still too unstable.”

“Babies?”

“You don't even want to know.”

Arthit tilts his head toward the door. “Listen to that come down.”

“Flooding up in Rose's village,” Poke says.

They sit there, smelling the freshness of the rain. Poke says, “Arthit, I
know
how Treasure feels about me. It's been bothering me, too, but I don't know what to do about it.”

Arthit says, “It's a tough one. So does this
 . . .
interfere with anything you had in mind?”

“Only in the sense that I might be able to stop worrying about her.”

“Then you think it might work? Treasure and Anna and me?”

“I think if anybody can make it work, you can.” He sips some cold coffee. “But she's a complicated kid.”

“Anna loves her.”

“Well, then, that's about half of it, isn't it?”

Arthit says, “She'll do everything she can to make Treasure happy. And I'll be wise and fatherly, if I can figure out how.” They sit there in the warm, shining room, two friends who have come through a rough period and found each other again.

And then
Rafferty says, “Holy shit.”

“What?”

“Varney.”

Arthit says, “Why would Varney—” He breaks off, and the rain outside crescendos. “We're idiots. We haven't given it a—”

Rafferty is shaking his head. “He has no way of knowing she's alive. Even if he thinks she might be, there's
 . . .
there's no possibility he knows where she is. But if he wants the money, he might also want—”

“Major Shen?” Arthit says. “Let's say Varney was connected to Major Shen through Murphy—” He says, “No, no,” and shakes his head. “Even if Varney is in contact with Shen, Shen doesn't know that Treasure turned up alive.” He's looking at the back door again but not focused on it, nipping at the tip of his tongue. “Her mother?”

“I suppose he might find her village,” Rafferty says. “If he knew Murphy well enough, he might know where in Laos she came from. But I never told Neeni that Treasure surfaced. It was so obvious that all she wanted to do in the world was drink herself to death. And Hwa—the Vietnamese maid who took care of Neeni when I was trying to get her off the dope—Hwa had no idea where Treasure was. And Varney would have to find Hwa even to learn that.”

Arthit gets up. “Well, I'll tell you what. This is the prod I need. Even if we're certain that no one knows where she is, in light of all this
 . . .
this
bother
, it seems like a good time to move her. And to check out Mr. Varney.” He picks up the cups and totes them to the sink and runs water into them.

“Listen, Arthit.”

“What?”

“This isn't
 . . .
I mean, this thing with Treasure, with adopting Treasure. It isn't going to be easy.”

Arthit turns off the water. He says, “Easy is the last thing I think it's going to be.”

8

Talks, Talks, Talks

“No,” Anna says,
packing a lot of opposition into the syllable.

Arthit looks at Poke, who shrugs and looks at Boo. Rafferty has good reason to trust Boo's judgment: Years ago, when Miaow was abandoned on the pavement by her parents, Boo—then using the street name “Superman”—had taken her into his gang of runaways and protected her. Just a few months ago, he acceded to Rafferty's request that Treasure be allowed to stay in the shelter, even though Boo felt she might be a danger to the other kids. He seems to feel Rafferty's eyes, and he glances over at him before he says, in Thai, “I think she can handle it.”

“You don't know who this man is,” Anna says to him. “You don't know what their relationship was, if they had one. Even Poke doesn't know. What if he's like her father? What if she goes back
 . . .
” She swallows, leaving unspoken the words they all hear:
to the way she was
.

When, after a lifetime of deafness, Anna worked up the courage to abandon the sheaf of blue cards she had always written on and chose instead to speak aloud in front of strangers, her voice had seemed to Rafferty to be flat and mechanically unpleasant. She had never heard the way people emphasize some words and drop others, and she had to take many pronunciations on faith. Even now her sentences have a kind of chewed-and-swallowed sound to
them, the stresses coming seemingly at random. But at the moment he doesn't really register any of that. He just hears the love she so clearly feels for the child.

It's the tone Rose uses when she talks about the baby.

He says, “I think he might be a danger to her.” Anna, watching his lips, starts to speak, but he holds up a hand. “We don't even know if Varney is his real name. We don't know much of anything. The less we know about him, the harder it's going to be to protect her. Maybe she can give us the information we need.”

Boo, sitting behind his rickety old desk in his little office at the shelter, a space that's walled off by movable hospital-room dividers, says, “Up to you if you want to ask her about this man, but I don't think you should say anything about adopting her until I talk to Father Bill and get him to say yes.”

Arthit says to Boo, “What do you mean, ‘get' Father Bill to say yes?”

“He'll start the process if she wants to do it,” Boo says. “But it's complicated, and it takes a lot of his time. I don't want to surprise him with it. He's not good with surprises.”

“I'm a
policeman
,” Arthit says, sounding stung. “Anna's a teacher. We'd be great parents.”

“I'm sure you would,” Boo says. “I'm just telling you how it is.” They're all speaking Thai, Rafferty following along a couple of syllables behind and Anna turning to watch people's lips. Now she reaches over and puts a hand on her husband's shoulder, gives him a single calming pat that tells Rafferty quite a bit about how the intimacy between them has grown.

“Sorry,” Arthit says. “I'm nervous.”

“He is,” Anna says. She smiles at Arthit as though he were a child who just needs a little understanding from the grown-ups.

Boo raises his voice and calls, “Chalee? Chalee, are you out there?”

A thin girl with a strikingly angular fox face and quick, bright eyes pokes her head into the opening between the movable room dividers. “Now in here,” she says in English.

“Can you get Treasure for us?”

Chalee says, “Can,” and starts to retreat.

“Wait,” Rafferty says, and Chalee freezes on the spot, her eyebrows raised inquisitively. “You know her better than anyone,” he says.

Chalee looks down at the floor, considering the sentence. “I guess.”

“Have you been listening?”

“Sure.” Chalee is giving her English some exercise.

“Well, what do you think? Is she
 . . .
I mean, has she gotten stronger?”

Chalee says, “Yes.”

“What if this is someone who frightens her? Do you think she can handle that?”

Chalee looks at Boo and says, in English, “Boo say okay.”

Boo says to Chalee, “You know her better than I do.”

“You can't ask a child to make this decision,” Anna says tartly. “You're the expert.”

“You're the
teacher
,” Boo says. Chalee's eyes go from one of them to the other.

Arthit says, “Poke is the only one who knew her before.”

Poke says, “Anyone else want to pass the buck?”

Chalee says, “What's a buck?”

Rafferty says, “It's a
 . . .
it's a something people
 . . .
uh, pass to one another when
 . . .
when—”

“When they don't want to make a decision,” Arthit says. “Like now.”

“Well,” Chalee says, looking at Poke, “up to you.”

“If it's up to me,” Rafferty says, and takes a deep breath, “bring her in.”

Chalee looks at Boo and then at Anna, sees no disagreement, and disappears between the partitions.

After a moment's silence, Arthit says to Boo, “If she says she wants to go, Father Bill will let us have her?”

“It's not that easy,” Boo says. “There's legal stuff, and he'll want to talk to both of you, too.”

“About what?”

“I don't know. Whether you know what you might be getting into. Kids are a full-time job.”

“
I
know that,” Anna says. “I understand children.”

“I know, I know,” Boo says, “although Father Bill would say there's no such thing as
children
, there's just one kid at a time. Look, there's nothing we can do about it now. We should all just relax.”

“Right, right,” Arthit says, sitting back in the chair, his spine rigid. He notices his bouncing leg and quiets it, but he's still radiating tension as Chalee comes in, followed by Treasure.

At first sight it's difficult for Rafferty to see in this girl the furious, terrified child in the filthy nightgown he'd met that night in Murphy's house. She'd carried her shoulders in a tight, permanent flinch, arms pressed to her sides as though to make her smaller. Her thick, dark, reddish hair had been a concealment, a tangled thicket that she pulled forward to surround and hide her face like a snarl of thorns. She had moved with the tamped-down, ever-present wariness of someone who expects a slap to be waiting around every corner. At the height of the violence that had erupted that night, she'd run from the room and methodically soaked the house with gasoline. Then she'd set it ablaze. Her movements now are fluid, not precisely confident, but without her former hesitation. The stiffness in her neck and back is mostly gone, just a hint of rigidity in the set of her shoulders. She's gained weight, and her hair has been tamed, pulled back from her face and pinned in place by two red plastic heart-shaped clips, something he never would have associated with her, even more surprising than the used, street-child shorts or the bright T-shirt featuring four guitar-carrying anime Japanese teenage girls. Looking at her now, Rafferty realizes that he might not have recognized her in the street.

She surveys the room quickly and—out of habit, Rafferty thinks—holds no one's gaze. She nods respectfully at Anna, who has become her teacher. Her eyes slow when they reach Rafferty, and she gives him a small, almost unintentional smile, ducking her head a bit awkwardly, and then she stops, just a few steps inside the room, waiting.

Rafferty says, “Hello, Treasure.”

She looks at him again for a split second and then away, and Boo breaks into the moment, saying, “Sit down, Treasure. We want to talk to you for a minute. Thank you, Chalee.” Chalee, looking disappointed, goes out of the room, although probably not out of earshot. Boo parts his long hair with his hands, snags it behind his ears, and waits, looking at each of them.

Rafferty says to Treasure, “How are you?”

In spite of Boo's invitation, Treasure hasn't taken a chair. Instead she stands beside one, keeping it between her and the others, her hands grasping its back with one raised knee resting on the seat. Although Rafferty asked the question, she looks first at Boo and then at Anna, who smiles encouragement at her, and she says, very softly, “I'm fine.” She seems to search for words for a second, rocking the chair a little on its back legs, and then surprises Poke by saying, “How are
you
?” She's speaking English, her father's native language. She glances at Anna again and gets a nod of approval.

“I'm fine, too,” he says, unprepared for the question. He clears his throat. “We want
 . . .
I mean, we need to talk to you about something.”

Her voice taut, Anna says, “I still don't know about this.”

The moment Anna says it, Rafferty realizes that he agrees with her. He says, “Maybe we don't need to talk about it yet.”

Treasure says, “Did I do something wrong?” She turns to Boo so quickly that the chair squeals on the floor. “Do I
 . . .
do I have to leave? Can't I stay here?”

“No,” Boo says, both hands upraised. “Nothing like that. Nobody wants you to leave.”

“Then what?” Treasure says. She swallows loudly enough for Rafferty to hear her across the room. “What did I do?”

“Okay,” Rafferty says. “Listen, the first thing you need to know is that you haven't done anything wrong and that we all love you and we're all going to stay with you and
 . . .
and take care of you.”

She says, “Then what is it?”

With absolute certainty that he's handling this badly, Rafferty says, “Did you ever meet a man named Arthur Varney?”

Treasure's gaze drops to the floor, and she's still for the space of several breaths, seeming to work the question through. Then, without looking up, she says, “You mean, with my, my—” She shakes her head as though clearing it. “My father?”

“Yes.”

“Arthur Varney,” she says experimentally. She looks at each of them and says, “No.”

“He's shorter than I am,” Rafferty says. “Kind of
 . . .
not fat, but
 . . .
” He spreads his hands. “Wide. Like he's got muscles, like one of those guys who's into showing off his muscles. Forty years old, maybe a little more.”

Treasure relaxes a bit, leans away from the chair, her hands grasping the back. “American?”

“Yes. He
sounds
American anyway.”

“My, my, my father, he didn't have friends. Only people he yelled at. I don't know who you mean.”

“He's American, a little older than I am but younger than your father, black hair. He's got a big mustache—”

He breaks off because Treasure's head has snapped up. Now she's looking past him, as though at a light over his shoulder, a long distance away. Her mouth is slightly open. After a moment she rubs her right index finger over the skin of her left forearm, just above the wrist. She says, “Snake?”

He nods.

With no warning at all, she plants both feet on the floor and drags the chair a few steps back, keeping it in front of her, tilted so that its rear legs point at them like gun barrels. The self-possessed girl who came into the room is gone. Her shoulders are raised and rigid, almost as high as her ears. The knuckles on the fingers curled over the chair back are paper white. She tilts her face downward as though she still expects the tangled curtain of hair to drop forward and hide it, glancing at them, one at a time, out of the corners of her eyes.

Everyone in the room can hear her breathing.

Rafferty says, “Treasure,” and she hauls the chair another quick step back, its legs making a ragged noise against the floor. Anna is up and moving toward her, but Treasure stops her with a glance. So deliberately that it looks mechanical, she turns her face toward Rafferty again, showing him the expressionless mask of muscle she had worn in the presence of her father. She lifts her right hand and uses the side of her index finger to blot her upper lip. Her hand is shaking. “Talks, talks, talks?”

“That's him.”

“Not Arthur,” she says. The only thing moving in her face is her lower lip, which is trembling. “Name is
 . . .
is
 . . .
is P-P-Paul. Paul something.” She turns to look through the doorway Chalee just left through. “He's
 . . .
he's
here
?”

“No, he's nowhere near us. Please. Sit down.”

“He can't come here,” she says.

Rafferty says, “He won't.”