Fools' River Read online

  “You look terrible,” Fon says in Thai. Then she says it in English for the benefit of Willis and Joyce.

  “No, she—” Willis begins, but his mother silences him with a glance. To Fon, Joyce says, “I don’t think she’s eaten anything.”

  “Sure she has,” Fon says in English. “She’s had her awful yogurt, haven’t you?” Fon was never a conventional beauty, but there’s a kind of relaxed harmony in her face that makes her prettier than most of the baby dolls strenuously mimicking the Japanese and Korean starlets who have become the templates for female beauty in so much of Asia. Fon’s face announces that she’s someone who can be depended upon.

  “I ate,” Rose says. “Really, I’m feeling much better now.”

  Joyce is studying her. “Stay there for a minute more,” she says.

  Fon moves aside, and the woman behind her steps forward and, without a word, extends both hands. The gesture is a command of some kind, and Rose automatically reaches up. The woman grasps her wrists and turns her hands over to study the backs and then rotates them again as though she’s about to read Rose’s palms. She says, “Mmmm-hmmm.”

  “I told you,” Fon says to the older woman.

  “Told her what?” Joyce says.

  “She’s pregnant,” Fon says, “and it’s a problem.” There’s a spattering of syllables all at the same time and from all directions, and Rose can’t tell from whom.

  Joyce says, in a more businesslike tone of voice, “Do you hurt anywhere?”

  Rose says, “No,” and then, “Yes,” and then she says again, “Yes,” and begins to weep.

  The group goes silent, and the three women who gave up their chairs take an instinctive step back to preserve Rose’s privacy, but Joyce says, “Have you had problem pregnancies before?”

  Rose nods, and Fon says, “Two.”

  Ponytail must have moved close again, because she puts a hand on Rose’s shoulder, and Rose says, “I’m going to lose this baby, too,” and then she’s crying loudly, not caring who hears it, not caring about the people at the adjoining tables, feeling the cold truth of what she’s just admitted open up beneath her, eager to drag her down. There are more hands on her, on her back, on her shoulders, and someone, maybe Twelve-Year-Old, rubs the center of her spine in light circles, but there’s no controlling the sobs, not just for this child, not just for her and Poke and Miaow, but for the other two as well, the two children she left in the dark without ever bringing them into the light of day. The unborn ghosts of her failed womanhood.

  There are arms around her from all directions, and Joyce says, “Go get . . . um, Kwan some water, Willis,” and Willis says, “She’s already got water. That lady just—” and Joyce says, “Water, Willis, now,” and Willis says, “Sheesh,” and gets up, and a couple of wadded-up napkins are forced into Rose’s hand, and then it’s just crying until, finally, it stops.

  Rose focuses on breathing as the others wait to see whether they’ll be needed to comfort her again, and the older woman—Rose recognizes her now, doesn’t know her name, but she’s a doula who assisted a number of bar workers through childbirth—says, in English, “She needs a doctor. Now.”

  “Are you . . . I’m sorry,” Joyce says. “Are you a medical professional?”

  “She’s a doula,” Fon says briskly. “Are you a doctor?”

  “She’s a nurse,” Willis says from outside the circle.

  “Get something to eat, Willis,” Joyce says. “And don’t tell me you’re not hungry.” When he’s gone, she says, “How far into your term did you lose them?”

  “About now.”

  “How far is that?”

  “A little more than four—”

  “A doctor,” Joyce says in English and the doula says in Thai.

  “You don’t understand,” Fon says. “She doesn’t want anything to be wrong.”

  “It’s not about you,” Joyce says sternly to Rose as Twelve-Year-Old takes the soaked napkins and gives her two dry ones.

  “Her husband doesn’t know she’s—having problems,” Fon says.

  “It’s not about him either,” Joyce says. “It’s about your baby.”

  “You have to try to keep the baby,” Ponytail says. And Twelve-Year-Old says, “Yes, you can’t—”

  “But I don’t . . . I don’t think there’s any way—”

  “Listen.” It’s Joyce, and there’s no arguing with her tone. “There’s a—”

  “Can save, maybe,” the doula says, glancing at Joyce, and Joyce opens her mouth and closes it again. “You talking stitches, yes?” the doula asks.

  “Yes,” Joyce says. “It’s an outpatient—”

  “New,” the doula says.

  Joyce closes her mouth and looks deferentially at the doula, and even in her emotional state, Rose can see that it’s not an easy thing for the American woman to do. On the other hand, there’s a brightness in her eyes that indicates a willingness to shove herself back into the discussion anytime it goes awry.

  The doula says to Joyce, “Please. You tell.”

  “If you are going to lose the baby,” Joyce says, “and there’s no guarantee you will, it’ll be because your cervix—do you know the word ‘cervix’?”

  “Yes,” Rose says.

  The doula nods briskly, and Joyce says, “It’s usually because the cervix is dilating early, like it’s made a mistake and it . . . it thinks the time has come for the baby to be delivered.”

  “Have good doctor here,” the doula says, with the kind of certainty Rose has always envied and never possessed. “Not far.”

  Joyce gives the doula a doubtful glance and gets a stony gaze. “So,” she says, “they can look, do a pelvic, maybe an ultrasound. Sometimes, depending on . . . on what they see, it’s enough for you just to go to bed and stay there, and sometimes they do a procedure, they take a little stitch, just to narrow the opening, do you understand?”

  Rose realizes how intense her own expression is and that Joyce has mistaken it for incomprehension. She breaks her gaze, looks around, and realizes that the women in the circle all seem like people she’s known for years. “I understand. A . . . a stitch—”

  “Or maybe two, little ones, just to make the opening narrower. Then you can take it easy, not too much walking or jumping around, stay in bed a lot, and when the baby is due—”

  “Cut thread,” the doula says, miming a pair of scissors.

  “Wow,” someone says, and Rose looks up to see Willis over Ponytail’s shoulder, staring wide-eyed at the doula. Rose can’t help it; she starts to laugh, then stops as she cramps again, putting a hand where it hurts.

  “Where is the doctor?” Joyce asks.

  “Two, three kilometer,” the doula says.

  “You stay here,” Willis says. “I’ll get you a cab,” and he wheels and takes off at a run, and in his voice, even through her cramping and her fear, Rose hears the satisfaction of a male who’s been proved indispensable after all.

  She says to Joyce, “You have a fine son.”

  “And so will you, dear,” Joyce says, patting Rose’s shoulder. “You’ll have a strong, healthy child.”

  17

  The Next-to-Last Cough of Someone with Tuberculosis

  Everything hurts.

  Her nose is a numb spot, dead center in an island of ache, and she knows it’s broken. Again. The skin in the hot, reddish-feeling circle that includes her nose and mouth and chin has dried blood on it. When she grimaces, it cracks as though her face is tearing. Her neck is stiff from the way the Meat Man’s slap snapped her head around. The big scabs on her knee and elbow have hardened. Her back and hips ache from the hard, cold pavement she slept on.

  And her eyes feel like there’s a whole handful of sand in each of them. She starts to rub them with the heels of her hands and then thinks, in panic, My new lenses. She was told to take t
hem out for the first few nights, until she was used to them. Has she rubbed one or both of them out of her eyes? From her shelter beneath the park bench, she focuses on the morning distance, and there it is again, the world in all its new and bewildering, hard-edged detail, maybe a bit foggy. The lenses are still in place, even if they’re cloudy because the pretty little case and the liquid in which they should have been soaked overnight are in the backpack in the . . . the Meat Man’s room.

  Once out of the hotel, she sprinted, in as straight a line as possible, the long kilometer and a quarter to Lumphini Park, looking behind her for him repeatedly even though she knew he couldn’t possibly be chasing her. Craning back for the eighth or ninth time, she slammed into a light pole, took two staggering steps backward, and went down on her butt, and then, half a block later, tripped on an uneven sidewalk paver and pitched forward to take all the skin off her left elbow and her right knee, bare beneath her shorts. She didn’t even glance down to check the damage before she was in flight again, zigzagging between the people strolling on the sidewalk and charging full out whenever she hit an empty stretch, dodging traffic across the streets, the pounding of her heart pushing her along like a marching drum. She’d been beaten up and humiliated before, when she was a boy, but this was something new: not stupidity, not insensitivity or the bullying malice of boredom, but hate, and all she knew was that she needed to be somewhere with hiding places, lots of hiding places, somewhere relatively dark where no one would see her bloodied face and remember it, where she could be an animal in a safe hole. Sooner or later that . . . that man would come after her. Or call the police. She knew that people would remember her, bloody, disheveled, and practically flying, but in her mind she erased the path behind her, speeding as she passed people to give them the shortest possible look at her, doubling back briefly two times so there would be confusion about her direction if—when—questions were asked.

  She felt as though she were breathing fire by the time she reached the edge of the park and angled left to avoid the lights of the night market that would remain open until about 1 a.m. The sight of a darker entrance, wide and inviting, slowed her, and she plunged in. The paved, curving path took her toward the park’s center, away from the headlights and the noise of the street. The relative darkness stilled some of the urgency in the middle of her chest. She slowed to a walk, knowing that her injuries were harder to see here, but it wasn’t until she was absolutely certain she was unobserved that she peeled off the path, heading at a blind run again for the areas around the man-made lake where the trees were thickest.

  The water’s edge stopped her, pulled her up short. She stood there, slack and vacant as an empty bag, watching the city’s lights gleam, sinuous and upside down, on the water’s surface. She was still breathing heavily, and her pulse banged in her ears. She thought it might give her some relief to cry, but the remaining bits of Keo, the boy she had been, wouldn’t permit it.

  After a few numb moments, every bit of her attention focused on the lights reflected on the dark water, she sat slowly down at the lake’s shoreline. Not until her muscles had relaxed, not until she was no longer on the verge of flight, did she give way and begin to sob.

  She had no way of knowing how long she sat there crying, but by the time she carefully wiped away the tears, avoiding her nose, and pushed herself to her feet, her joints were stiffening, especially the knee she’d cracked on the sidewalk. Without making a conscious decision, she moved toward the darkest area in sight, a copse of trees on the lake’s long curve, and then through that into another grove of bigger, older trees, so thick with foliage that it blocked completely the lacework of moonlight that had dappled the ground as she walked. At the edge of the little wood, she claimed an empty bench, far enough from the nearest source of light that neither she nor it threw a shadow, and she climbed onto it in a gingerly fashion, new centers of pain flaring into existence with every cautious move. She sniffled a couple of times, almost experimentally, the air feeling oddly icy in her damaged nose, and then decided she was cried out. So, for the first time, she began to think about her situation.

  The nose could be fixed. The bruises and scrapes would heal, even Ying’s claw marks. What wouldn’t change was that the Meat Man was a farang tourist, probably American, and as such a protected species, while she was a katoey, a prostitute, and an illegal immigrant with a forged identity card, about as low in the Thai pecking order as it was possible to go. Not much question about whose side the police would find more profitable.

  She yielded to a small wave of self-pity, let it wash around inside her for a moment, and then banished it so she could keep her head clear as she considered her position. She didn’t see anything that raised her hopes. He would call the police and say she attacked him and probably that she stole money from him. He would undoubtedly send the cops to This or That Bar, where several girls would gleefully tell them where she lived, and then the cops would go to her room, which she couldn’t get into anyway without paying the landlady. One of her enemies in the bar, probably Ying, would give the cops the name of Lutanh’s closest friend, Betty, who worked at another Patpong club, which meant that she couldn’t, in good conscience, even ask Betty to take her in. She could see no clear path to refuge in any direction.

  For a moment she thought what her life would be like in prison, winced at the images that came to mind, and decided she would kill herself before she’d let them send her there.

  The only wisp of hope she could find was that he might be so embarrassed by the whole thing that he wouldn’t want it on any official record. He might not want the attention. He might be one of those odd men for whom katoey were a dark secret. She pulled that hope over her like a thin blanket and drifted into sleep.

  In what felt like just minutes, she snapped awake to the sense of something crawling on her. Bent over her, prodding the area where her breasts would be if the hormones had kicked in, was a filthy, vile-smelling man of indeterminate age with meth blossoms all over his face and wearing layers of old clothes despite the heat. His breath was feverish and foul, his nose only inches from hers. She struck twice, without thinking: a knuckle-popping blow to his throat and then a full-out kick, all the strength she could put into straightening the leg with the bad knee, directly into his gut. He’d stumbled back with a shuddering grunt, looking startled and almost comically offended, clearly too drunk to remain upright. She’d leaped from the bench as his feet tangled beneath him, and then she’d taken off at top speed, heading even farther into the park, the man’s aggrieved complaints following her until they faded into silence and she realized he wasn’t going to come after her.

  The night was still surprisingly hot, the air close and damp, almost as motionless as it was in her room. How she’d hated that room, and how badly she missed it now, how much she wanted to go back, to lock the door behind her and crawl onto the hard, narrow, lumpy bed and curl herself into a ball and cry until she used up all her sorrow. Only yesterday morning, she thought, as the dawn’s first light began to sift like fog through the trees, she’d had money in her pocket, a place to stay, a job—even if she hated some things about it—and more money coming at the end of the day, and she’d been good as Peetapan, and, and there had been something else, something wonderful. What had it—

  She’d met Edwudd. She’d looked her absolute best with her new violet dress—lost now, abandoned in her backpack—and her new violet eyes. She’d been the prettiest she’d ever been. He’d glanced at her twice when Miaow wasn’t looking at him. He was so beautiful.

  And look at me now, she thought, lightly passing her hands over her face, the losing fighter in a Muay Thai match, someone who had blocked her opponent’s best kick with her nose. Hurting, frightened, soaked in sweat, she halfheartedly searched out another bench, started to lie down on it, and then decided instead to crawl beneath it. Just a few hours’ sleep. Things, she told herself, would be different with a few hours’ sleep.

&nb
sp; When she finally opens her eyes, things are different. For one thing, the sun is well above the horizon. For another, she can hear music from the front of the park, where hundreds of people gather for aerobics. Must be past nine, maybe even ten or ten-thirty.

  And one more thing that’s different: She’s being stung by ants.

  She slaps at the side of her neck and brushes at her bare legs, accidentally scalping the newly formed scab on her knee. As she rolls out from under the bench, her right hip, which already hurts, gives out an especially sharp pang, and she puts her hand there and feels the outline of her phone through the pocket of her shorts.

  The morning seems to brighten in every direction. Her phone wasn’t in the backpack she’d left when she escaped from the Meat Man after all. And then she has a sudden memory of reaching into the pack to retrieve her forged identity card in anticipation of showing it to the security guard, and she slaps at her right front pocket and finds it there in its little plastic supposed-to-be-leather folder. He doesn’t have my picture, she thinks, and it seems as though her heart expands a bit in the center of her chest, easing a kind of cramp she hadn’t even been aware she’d been feeling. Drawing a deep breath, she pulls the phone out and powers it up, and her spirits sink: 14% power, it says, and she knows from experience that fourteen percent is like the next-to-last cough of someone with tuberculosis. She might manage two short calls, but to whom? With only two calls left and nowhere to plug in, she needs to think. She powers off again, slips the phone back into her pocket, and thinks, First, stop looking like a nightmare.

  Around the lake, to her left if she’s in the right place, there are some bathrooms. The question is how to get to them without attracting attention. Moving in a way that she hopes looks idle and uninteresting, her bloody face downward, she chooses the largest tree near her, pauses as she picks out the next one, and walks on. Aside from the throng doing aerobics far behind her, the park is still mostly empty, and only once does she have to go slowly enough to keep one big tree between her and a woman who is walking in the opposite direction on the path that’s thirty or forty meters away. Joggers work the perimeter, but they’re not looking at anything except their next twenty meters.