World and Town (34 page)

“Like it?” asks Chhung, his eyes going.

“Yes,” says Hattie. “I like it very much.”

Over Hattie’s objections, Mum slices open a green mango, too, offering this to Hattie along with an orange-colored salt; Hattie dips.

“Delicious,” she says. Chhung beams. “Cambodian like fruit.”

“Of course they do.” Hattie eats. “Chinese people, too.”

Chhung’s eyes crinkle with pleasure.

“The kids bring the fruit back?”

Chhung nods.

Is that legal? Never mind. “So at least you know what he’s doing and where he’s going,” she says.

Mum nods, too, then, real relief on her face. Chhung, though, suddenly laughs, his shirt pocket heavy and swinging; he puts a hand up to steady it.

C
arter and Sophy are laughing, too, as Hattie walks by with Reveille. She tries to hum. The last time she went Cato-hunting, he was stuck in a closed-up basement; she found him with a dead bat in his mouth and perfectly fine. This time, though—well, how much more likely that he’s collapsed of old age or been nabbed by a fisher. Those fisher being fast and vicious, after all; they can flip a porcupine and gash its stomach in a wink. A thirteen-year-old dog with arthritis wouldn’t stand a chance against one. And if Cato has indeed been nabbed, well, he wouldn’t be the first of her dogs to go over the years. Hattie’s prepared.

Still, she’s finding this a grim walk from which she’d love distraction. The fields are certainly a help, with their great weaves of white and purple asters—the wild apple trees, too, with their rings of fruit at their bases, like Christmas tree skirts. Hattie breathes deep as she passes them. The air smells like cider. And the mountainsides! Those leaves could break a stone with their brilliance. All those red maples.

But to drop in on the musicians—impossible.

And yet there goes Reveille, anyway, bounding down the driveway to Sophy, who laughs and lets him put his muddy paws on her lap; he dots her sweatshirt with paw prints. Hattie follows hesitantly. But then—lo!—just like that they are pitched into the kind of accidental peace that makes you realize how easily people could stop being themselves if they could.

“I want you to listen,” says Carter. “Come on, now, Sophy, let’s hear it nice and loud. The way you just played it.”

“Okay. This is ‘Turn, Turn, Turn,’ ” she says. “The words are from Ecclesiastes, I think.”

Is it a coincidence that she’s singing a song based on the Bible? Hattie looks at Carter, but his focus is on Sophy.

“You think?” reproves Carter. “You
know.
”

Sophy laughs, her cheeks dimpling. “I guess.” She looks at Hattie, who smiles to hear how much louder she’s singing now, her voice so rich and strong—molten—that even Reveille’s ears prick up. Who would have imagined Sophy would have that voice in her? A contralto. And as the last note sounds, Sophy freezes her strumming hand in a surprising new fashion, too—midair—bowing her head dramatically. Her hair falls forward, curtaining all but her shiny nose.

“Bravo! Bravo!”

Reveille’s ears swing outward like automatic doors; Carter and Hattie stand side by side, clapping.

“Play another one,” says Carter. “Play ‘The Sounds of Silence.’ ”

Sophy makes a face.

“None of that,” he says. “Come on.”

“Come on,” Hattie echoes.

And again Sophy plays, and again they clap, solid with joy. Hattie and Carter are both in jeans and fleece; Hattie can feel her skin flush. Probably she glows, like Carter. His eyes laugh.
If we make our own realities
, Lee used to say,
why don’t we make ones we’d choose?
But somehow they cannot ask Sophy to play a third song. Some moment has passed; it’s time for Carter and Sophy to settle back down to their lesson.

“Back to the search,” says Hattie. She zips up her vest as if she’s cold, though she’s not.

“Good luck.” Carter gives a kindly grin. “Cato’s a special dog to you, isn’t he? Kind of your main man.”

She laughs. “I guess. Four legs and he sheds, but at least you can count on him to wag his tail like he knows you.”

It’s just a joke. Still, Carter bristles.

“Well, and who might that be directed at,” he says—neutrally enough, but he’s digging his hands in his pockets and looking down.

As if she is El Hatchet now!

“I hope you find him,” says Sophy. “I do. I really do.”

“Thanks,” says Hattie, calling Reveille. Who is more than ready to leave now, as is she.

And yet when, exhausted and dispirited, she finally finds Cato back at the house, how she’d love to run down through the ferns to tell Sophy and Carter! For, behold—it is, it really is Cato. Bloody and bedraggled, as if he’s been in a tangle—at his age! He should know better. It doesn’t seem possible that he would survive any sort of contest, but somehow he has. Imagine. There’s blood all through his gray muzzle, though; he struggles to his feet even more slowly than usual when he sees her—one leg at a time, whimpering. And even on all fours, his back legs remain half bent under his body—his back will not straighten. Poor Cato!
Come, my friend
. Of course, even curled into his backside, his tail goes full speed; his heart works just fine. Though is that a chunk taken out of his back leg? Oh, Cato, Hattie says. Thanks to yoga she can still make it down to hug and pet him; he smells dank, as if he’s been through some standing water. Who knows where he’s been? Anyhow, he licks and licks her—her
main man
, indeed—warm and alive, thankfully, whole and home. Her Cato, come back! She sees to his wound.

E
verett’s new home is nothing like a pole barn. It is more like a fire warden’s tower, with a cockamamie truss system leading up to a platform, on which sits a hut. The hut can’t be too comfortable but appears to serve its purpose: What with its main window facing Ginny’s bedroom, the thing is driving her nuts. She pulls down the shades, but even so can feel him watching her, she says. She can’t sleep. She can’t eat. She can’t pray. As for whether he really is watching, Judy Tell-All says, Of course he is. He’s like the terrorists, she says. Watching us and watching us all these years. Watching us, still.

Thinking things
, Sophy would say.

Everett nose full of beeswax!

But others say, Where would he get the time? Now that Value-Mart’s up and left, and the inn’s been sold again, there’s a mini-mall going up on the site; and guess who’s the general contractor on it. Everett’s a busy man. Plus you’d have to be pretty crazy to sit watching a pulled-down shade, they say. And sure, Everett’s mad, but crazy is something else.

“Sounds like someone has a guilty conscience to me,” says Carter in yoga class. “Sounds like someone’s projecting.”

And after that people talk differently. “She’s projecting,” they say. “She is. She’s projecting.”

The sort of people who,
when they see a wall falling, come to help push
, Hattie’s father would say.

Jill Jenkins, though, is an exception.

“It’s not her fault the cell tower passed,” she says, loudly. “It’s our own fault for not going to every darn meeting. For relaxing our vigilance. We’re just like the government sitting on all that intelligence and doing nothing. Did we not know this was coming? We did. We knew.”

Carter shoots Hattie a questioning look; and indeed, Jill’s comment seems both wholly accurate and oddly heated to Hattie, too. Why should she help him out, though? Confirming and conjecturing, playing big sister the way she once did.
Dá guān
—she focuses out the window instead. The yoga class has an edgewise view of Everett’s tower; what an experience it’s going to be to watch its nightmare double, the cell tower, growing, too, across the lake.

And didn’t you always help when you could
.

Twins.

S
arun used to slink around his father; now he saunters around him, brazen. Mum watches him with dismay, but still he goes on looking his father in the eye instead of training his gaze on the ground. And when Chhung speaks, Sarun sometimes listens, but sometimes doesn’t. He’s wearing an MP3 player in a red armband; the black wires loop up his back to his ears. His head bops. Which might be why Chhung is now throwing things—a little like Sophy playing with Annie, or like Gift. One morning there’s a lamp out front. Another, a basketball jersey. Yet another, Sarun’s armband. And in the evenings, Hattie hears yelling—mostly in Khmer, although Sarun sometimes yells back in English.

Drinking. Drinking is at least part of the problem.

One night Hattie sees Sarun being beaten. Or thinks she does—where are her distance glasses? They should be on her head; why are they not on her head? She is about to get out her binoculars when suddenly her glasses appear on the kitchen table; and so it is that she sees that Sarun is tied up, or at least that his hands appear fastened behind his back. How did Chhung manage that? And though it’s a little hard to make out exactly what’s happening, she does see violent up-and-down movements: Chhung’s arm, Chhung’s torso. Chhung’s arm. Is that a belt in his hand?

She calls Greta. No answer. What with Cato still weak, Reveille stands beside Hattie, his ears and tail up—taking Cato’s place, it seems. She pets him reassuringly—he’s bigger than Cato, and easier to reach, anyway—as she tries Grace next. By which time—thank heaven—the beating has stopped. Sophy is bringing her father a drink; she offers it to him with two hands. May it be something nonalcoholic. Chhung drinks, taking a break. It’s hard to see where Sarun is.

Still no answer.

“It’s okay,” Hattie tells Reveille. “It’s okay.”

Reveille’s ears relax; his head drops; his tail wags. He’s ready to play.

“Go find Annie,” she says.

She is about to make herself some
mántóu
—a lot of work but worth it—when she sees that the beating has resumed, only with—what is that? Hattie pulls down her distance glasses.

The kitchen knife.

She calls 911, gives the address, then hurries next door. The dogs know it’s something serious. Too serious for Reveille; it’s Cato who, rising to the occasion, follows her. One of her walking shoes comes untied; she doesn’t want to stop to tie it, but finally does—a moment Cato takes to pee against a tree. He can only raise his leg to half-mast, but does so with surprising ease, or so it seems by moonlight. It’s windy out; the cedars are whipping and rocking—rioting. And the ferns—by day all yellow and brown, headed toward dormancy—are glinting a bright steel gray now, rippling, an eerily live sea. She hurries on.

Yelling, crying, banging. Smashing. Hattie knocks and knocks—pounds—until finally Sophy cracks open the door.

“Is everything all right?”

Cato, front paws up on the crate beside Hattie, wags his tail as if echoing her concern, but Sophy stands stone-faced. The door is barely open; she’s backlit by the TV; it’s hard to see the expression on her face. The whites of her eyes catch a bit of the moonlight, though, and gleam, unlike her pupils, which keep their flat black.

Her choroid coat, absorbing the stray light.

“I was just wondering,” says Hattie.

“You are a nosy old busybody!”

“Because I saw …”

“What can you even see? At your age?”

“I …”

“You’re imagining things! There’s nothing to see!”

Sophy slams the door so hard, Cato barks.

“The police are on their way,” Hattie calls. She thinks the Chhungs would want to know; she’d love to explain. But the door stays shut. It’s everything she can do to step down from the crate without reinjuring her ankle; and back at her house, she does not watch the police arrive—she’s too tired. Was she seeing things? Anyway, she’s stiff and heavy, leaden; her limbs have
a lifelessness of their own
. It’s the way they felt for a good year after Joe and Lee died—so heavy, she didn’t think that they would ever really lighten again—or, if they did, that they would lighten for good. And sure enough, she sleeps now like a dead person.

I
t is two days before she can think about dropping back in on the Chhungs. Finally, though, she wakes in a courageous frame of mind.

Come, my friend, ’tis not too hard to go and knock next door
.

Robe. Bathroom. Breakfast. For the dogs, for herself. Coffee.

Annie catches a mouse but lets it escape; Hattie sighs.

Then finally she is knocking, a bag of cookies in hand. Chhung appears with a closed face; it’s day one all over again. His eyes go and go. The sun behind him is bright; the cartilage of his ears glows pink.

“English lesson?” she says.

No answer.

“Conversation class?”

He steps back—fades back, it seems, leaving the door ajar. Hattie climbs into the trailer after him, though he’s disappeared—into his room, maybe? She waits in the living room for a minute; the TV’s on mute. She goes to knock on Mum’s door. No Mum, but Sophy is sitting on the mattress, her back propped against the wall. Her Bible lies facedown on the bed, which is a jumble of bedding and pillows; the room is otherwise spic ’n’ span. Mum’s folded clothes are in one pile, Sophy’s in another, Gift’s in a third, and in the far corner, there is a small altar with a statue of the Buddha, some plastic flowers, and an incense holder. Sophy’s face is in her hands, her fingers tucked as if for safety under a blue stretch hair band.

“Sophy,” says Hattie, quietly. “Are you okay?”

Sophy’s fingers venture out. Though the air is cool, she’s wearing shorts. Her elbows rest on bare knees; her silver flip-flops sit to the sides of bare feet.

“Listen. If ever you want to talk, I’m here.”

The curtain wafts.

“A busybody neighbor is sometimes a helpful thing.”

Sophy wraps her arms back around her knees, burying her head. Only a sliver of forehead shows; her hair fans wide. She says nothing. Still, Hattie can hear her voice:
So why didn’t you say so? If you’re going to think things?

“I’m worried about you,” Hattie offers. “About your family.”

“Well, don’t be.” Sophy’s voice, coming from behind her arms and knees, is muffled. “It’s God’s plan.”