A Nail Through the Heart

11

I was really little," Miaow says without preamble. She is speaking Thai. "Maybe five or four." Miaow has no idea how old she actually is, so they took a vote and decided she's eight, although she could be a big seven or a small nine. "I slept under bridges. There were rats there that bit my fingers. When it rained, I slept in the doors of stores that were closed. Men came around all the time to chase us away. At night I went behind restaurants and waited for them to close. They throw away a lot of food, did you know that?"

"I wouldn't be surprised," Rafferty says. On his lap is a plastic bag containing a bright pink T-shirt, which Miaow bought for him on the sidewalk. He is perspiring against the plastic, but he doesn't want to move the bag.

"Well, I didn't know it until some other kid told me. We had to keep changing restaurants. If a place threw away really good food, the big kids would learn about it and take it all." She looks at a large spot on the carpet for a moment-a spot Rafferty and Rose have been battling for weeks-and then out at the balcony. "Kids can be mean, you know. Some adults think all kids are cute, but we're not. Some kids are as mean as adults."

"I'm sorry, Miaow." She rarely speaks of her life before he met her. Much of what he knows about it he has learned from the pictures she draws, Crayola nightmares of children huddling together on sidewalks surrounded by adult knees. Once in a while, there's an adult face with big, sharp, white teeth.

"No problem," she says. "It's the way it was." She brushes a stray hair from her face and runs her palms over her head to make sure her part is straight. It's an aspect of the world she can control. "I wasn't big enough to sell gum. So I just asked people for money. But most days nobody gave me any. I was really, really hungry. It was all I could think about."

"Poor baby," he says without thinking. She usually meets pity with scorn, but today she lets it pass.

"It's hard to sleep when you're hungry. You know you're going to wake up hungry. You know you'll be hungry all day. Sometimes I got so hungry I fell down."

"That should never have happened."

"It happens to lots of kids. It's happening right now. Out there." She lifts her chin to the glass doors and the city beyond.

Rafferty pats her hand, feeling the insipidity of the gesture all the way to his bones.

"It's hard to make friends, because kids come and go. They get taken by the police or something. So you stop trying. You think it's better alone. But then there's nobody to tell you things, like new places to sleep or which men are bad. I didn't know who I should run away from."

He has never asked her about this. They have never discussed whether she was abused sexually, in part because he doesn't know how to ask and in part because he isn't sure he could handle his rage if she was. He knows that an act of sudden physical intimacy-an unexpected hug, for instance-makes her go rigid, and sometimes she strikes out reflexively with fists and fingernails.

"I was frightened all the time," she says. "I hurt. I remember when I lost one shoe in the summer and my bare foot got so burned on the pavement I couldn't walk. There were holes in my skin. I found a piece of wood in the street and put it under my foot and tied it with a plastic bag. It made me limp because it didn't bend, and people thought I was crippled. I got more money then, so I put a cloth around it, like a bandage." She breaks off, listening to herself. "It was a pink shoe," she says regretfully. "I looked everywhere for it."

She rests her hand on his forearm and keeps it there, fingers open and palm up. She rarely touches him. Her voice changes and softens. Up until now she has been talking to the room; now her words are aimed directly at him. "What I wanted then was to sleep at night and have food and a place to get clean. I was dirty all the time. Just like Superman. I never thought I would live this high above the sidewalk. In the air. I never thought I would go to school."

Rafferty does not trust himself to speak. Finally he says, "You deserve everything, Miaow. You give me more than I give you."

"Nuh-uh," she says, and adds in English, "I make problems for you."

"I love you," he says. "You make me happy."

For a moment she leans her head against his arm, and Rafferty feels as though his heart will dissolve. It lasts only a second or two, and then she is sitting upright again, and he can hear her swallow.

"One day this boy came up to me with a handful of flowers, and he said, 'Come with me.'"

"Superman," Rafferty says.

She gives him a long look. "His name then was Boo."

"Okay, Boo."

"He took me to a room," she says, "on a little soi. There was a big woman there, a really fat woman. She had gold bracelets. And a whole bunch of little kids on the floor, making garlands out of the flowers." She pauses, working out the order of the story she wants to tell.

"So you sold the flowers," Rafferty prompts. Bangkok's garland sellers, children of five and six, work the city's busiest intersections, approaching drivers at stoplights to sell the fragrant loops of flowers offered at shrines. It is filthy, dangerous work. The children breathe carbon monoxide all day. Occasionally they are hit by cars. "For how long?"

"A long time," Miaow says.

"And were things better then?"

"I had some money. I could eat every day, and I had a place to sleep. But then-" She withdraws her hand. "Then everything was bad again."

"What happened?"

She takes the bag from his lap and pulls the T-shirt out. She looks at him and then at it. Very carefully, she folds it into the smallest possible square. Then she unfolds it slowly, as though she hopes to find some answer written on it. "What happened," she says, "is that Boo went crazy."