Livia Lone

16-THEN

Livia scrambled to her feet, confused and frightened. Outside the box she heard shouting, explosions like the fireworks they used in village celebrations. Her first thought was, Nason?

But Nason wasn’t there. For a moment, without Nason to protect, Livia was paralyzed. There was another series of loud bangs. Something-a rock? A metal stick?-hit the outside of the box and made it ring like a huge bell. Livia backed up against the far wall. If something came through the door, she wanted to be as far from it as possible.

There was more shouting, more loud fireworks. Several moments of ominous silence. And then there was a huge bang just outside the door, and the door was yanked back and the box filled with brilliant sunlight, and then the sunlight was gone, replaced by fog, but the fog stung Livia’s eyes and her throat and made her cough and drool and gag. She stumbled for the door, choking and blinded. People smacked into her from both sides, but she kept moving, desperate to get away from the choking, stinging fog.

She tripped on something and fell to her hands and knees, retching. She scrubbed her eyes with the back of a hand, and for a moment her vision cleared. She was amazed to see that she’d made it out of the box. It was sunny, the fog was gone, and the boat wasn’t moving-it was stopped, on the side of the river, next to a platform with machines and buildings on it. There were men swarming everywhere, wearing plastic masks and black uniforms. They all had guns-long guns, machine guns or rifles like the ones she had seen on the fuzzy village television. Were they trying to take her?

Even choking and half-blinded, she realized she would never have a better chance to escape. She started crawling in the direction of the platform. Maybe if she stayed low, no one would see her.

But something slammed into her back and drove her to the ground, knocking the breath out of her. She craned her neck and saw one of the men in black clothes, a big man, standing over her with his foot on her back. She struggled and squirmed, but she couldn’t move. The man turned his masked face this way and that, occasionally glancing at her as his head swept left and right, the long gun he was carrying pointing wherever he looked.

There was noise everywhere-shooting and shouting and a weird, rippling wailing sound, like an animal shrieking but louder and unnatural.

Finally, the noise stopped. The big man removed his mask, then knelt behind her and pulled her wrists behind her back. She struggled, terrified, but couldn’t stop him. Something encircled her wrists-something flexible but also strong-and then tightened.

She tried to squirm free, but it was useless. All of it was useless. Why couldn’t she have eaten the bad food? Or just stopped eating, and drinking, too? She would never be able to help Nason, she would never even know what had happened to her. And now these men were going to hurt her, make her do more disgusting things, and how could she stop them? Her parents had sold her, and Nason was gone, and she had no one in the world. Her face twisted in torment and she sucked in a long, sobbing breath, and then another, and then the helplessness and emptiness and despair consumed her and she tilted back her head and wailed.

The man reached down and pulled her up by the shoulders. She didn’t even think about running. How could she run, with her wrists tied behind her? Where would she go?

The big man said something to her, but she just kept crying. She was so tired of gibberish, of people talking to her with words she couldn’t understand. All she wanted was to know where Nason was. And if Nason was dead, then she wanted to die, too. She didn’t care about anything else.

The big man gripped the underside of one of her arms and pulled her along to the dock. Through a blur of tears, she saw more people, and realized from their blue uniforms, like the ones on the Thai officers who had sometimes come to the village because of some problem, that they were police. The realization wasn’t heartening. She didn’t know these people and didn’t trust them. That they wore uniforms could be good or it could be bad. And what difference did it make, anyway?

Some other people from the box were already on the dock. They were sitting cross-legged, and, like her, their wrists were tied behind their backs. Other police were leading more of them to the dock, all with their wrists tied. Livia turned and saw two of the men who had been feeding them on the boat facedown on the ground, not moving, blood pooling around them. The police must have shot them. It didn’t make her happy, or sad, or anything at all. When they were alive, she’d needed them for food and water. Now she didn’t. So it didn’t matter whether they were alive or dead.

The big policeman said something to her again, but the gibberish only made her cry harder. He put a hand on her shoulder and pushed down, and she realized he wanted her to sit. But she didn’t want to sit. And she didn’t want to listen. So she resisted his pushing, crying uncontrollably. The man pushed more. Livia’s legs wobbled, but she wouldn’t let him push her down.

And then a blue-uniformed woman with deep brown skin came and shoved the big man back. Livia couldn’t understand the woman’s words, but she was clearly angry and admonishing the big man. They argued for a moment, and then the woman pointed off to the side. The man glared for a moment, then stalked off in the direction the woman had indicated.

The woman leaned forward so her head was on the same level as Livia’s, and looked in Livia’s eyes. She said something. Livia had no idea what, but her tone was soft and her eyes were filled with kindness. Livia looked at her skin, fascinated. She was the color of chocolate, darker even than the darkest people among the hill tribes, but her eyes were lighter, her lips and cheeks fuller. Livia had seen such people on the village television, and she realized distantly that she had always assumed television was the only place they existed. She blinked her stinging eyes, trying to adjust. What was real? What was television? Was the village a dream? Where was Nason?

The chocolate woman kept talking-softly, gently, reassuringly. Livia recognized the tone as the way she herself would talk to a sow feeding a litter and nervous about Livia’s approach. It made Livia feel better. And then, still talking in her soothing tone, the woman stepped behind Livia, and all at once Livia’s hands were free. She pulled her arms around and massaged her wrists. The woman tossed something onto the ground, and Livia saw it was some kind of plastic, and that the woman had cut it with a knife she was holding. The woman folded the knife closed and returned it to a belt filled with tools, including a gun in a special holder.

Another big uniformed man rushed over and started arguing with the chocolate woman, gesturing to Livia and then to the cut plastic binding on the ground. He was obviously unhappy that Livia was untied. But the chocolate woman wouldn’t back down. She raised her voice and stood close to the man’s face until finally, like the first man, he walked off, snarling some words as he did so like a dog slinking away from a fight.

Livia sat in the hot sun for hours and watched, trying to understand. Dozens of people in different uniforms rushed back and forth, taking notes and photographs; picking up things too small for Livia to see and putting them in plastic bags; talking to each other and into little boxes Livia thought were radios. The chocolate woman stayed close the whole time. She gave Livia a bag of something salty and crunchy to eat and a can with a sweet drink inside it, and she wouldn’t let anyone bind Livia’s wrists the way they had done to all the other people. Livia wondered whether it was because she was a child. She didn’t know, but at least she wasn’t tied. Being tied was horrible.

A car pulled up and more people got out-people with Asian faces, not chocolate or pasty white. They squatted and talked to the people from the box, and after a while the police began to remove the wrist bindings. The Asian people tried to talk to Livia, but she couldn’t understand any of them. In Thai and Lahu, she said, “Nason, my sister, do you know what happened to my sister?” over and over, but none of them understood her any better than she understood them.

The police took them all to a big, modern building-a hospital, Livia realized from the people in white coats, although she had never been to anything more than the hill tribe clinic near her village. Livia sat in a small room on a table covered in soft white paper, the chocolate woman leaning against the wall opposite. A pasty man in a white coat came in. Livia knew he was a doctor-he had an air of authority about him, and the instrument for listening to hearts was hanging around his neck. He said some words, then tried to touch Livia with the instrument. But the thought of this strange man-any man-touching her was horrifying. She jerked away and bared her teeth. He took a step back, then frowned and came forward again. Livia put her hands on the table, ready to spring past him and run. But the chocolate woman talked to him the way she’d talked to the other men, and after a moment, he walked out.

The chocolate woman gestured to herself and said, “Tanya.” Then she gestured to Livia and raised her eyebrows.

Livia understood. The chocolate woman was saying she was called Tanya. And asking what Livia was called.

“Labee,” Livia said.

Smiling, Tanya held out her hand and said, “Hi, Labee.”

Livia looked at Tanya’s hand. Was she supposed to hold out her hand, too? She did, the same way Tanya had.

Tanya laughed. She took Livia’s hand in her own and gently moved it up and down. Livia understood-they didn’t use the wai in the West, the slight bow with the palms pressed together and the fingers up. They shook hands. Tanya was introducing herself. She was being nice. She’d been nice since the moment she had chased away the big policeman and cut the ties off Livia’s wrists.

It was good that someone was being nice to her. But while Livia was grateful, she didn’t trust it, either. Niceness could disappear at any moment. Maybe Tanya would get bored. Maybe something would make her angry. Or maybe she would sell Livia, the way Livia’s parents had.

So no. Livia wouldn’t trust Tanya, even though the woman was being nice. She wouldn’t trust anyone.

They waited. A woman in a white uniform brought food on a tray. Though Livia was painfully hungry, she wasn’t sure she should eat, because eating would keep her alive. But then she thought of Nason. So she devoured everything on the tray-chicken and rice, a sweet drink, and a weird, jiggly, translucent red cube that tasted like berries. Tanya stepped out when Livia was done, and came back a moment later with another tray just like it. Livia finished everything on that one, too.

They waited more. There was a telephone in the room. Like so many other things she was seeing here, Livia knew what a telephone was, but had never used one. From time to time, the phone would ring, and Tanya would pick it up and talk into it, then put it back the way it was. On one of these calls, though, she didn’t put it back-she nodded vigorously, and spoke excitedly, then handed the phone to Livia. Livia stared at the phone, uncertain, and Tanya gestured to it, as though expecting Livia to do something. Livia raised the phone to her face and looked at it. She could hear a tiny, tinny voice coming out. A woman’s voice, and she was speaking in Thai: “Hello? Hello, are you there?”

The feeling of someone she could understand, who would be able to understand her, was so overwhelming that Livia’s throat closed up and tears spilled from her eyes. Tanya stroked her arm, and strangely it looked as though she might cry, too.

Livia raised the phone to her ear the way Tanya had. “Yes,” she managed to croak in Thai. “Yes, I here. Please, please, do you know Nason? My sister. Where she is?”

“Hello? Your sister?”

“Yes, yes, my sister, Nason. Where she is? Please.”

“I… I don’t know that, but we’re going to try to help you. Are you Thai? The translators thought you might be.”

“Yes, I am Lahu.”

“You came from Thailand?”

“Yes, yes.”

The woman said words Livia couldn’t follow.

“Please, please, slower,” Livia said. “My Thai no good.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I work for the Thai government. In America. In Washington. The capital of America.”

Livia was confused. “America… what? Why?”

“You’re in America. In Llewellyn, Idaho.”

America? No. That couldn’t be right. But they’d been on the boat for a long time… had they crossed the ocean? Livia had never felt so disoriented, so cut off from everything she knew. She might as well have been told she was on the moon.

She desperately wanted to understand the woman’s other words. “Lew-el-in?” she said carefully. “I-da-ho?”

“A town in America. And I am with the Thai Embassy in Washington.”

It was so frustrating not to know the words. “Em-ba-see?”

There was a pause. “Okay, the first thing is to find a Lahu speaker to talk to you.”

“Yes, please that! Please Lahu.”

“All right. The police will take care of you there. Until we find a Lahu speaker.”

“Wait, wait, my sister, Nason. Where she is?”

“The police can help with that.”

“But-”

“The police will help. We’ll find you a Lahu speaker. You’re going to be okay.”

“But-”

Livia heard a click. After a moment, there was a buzzing in the phone. She looked at it, not understanding, put it to her ear once more, then realized the Thai woman was gone. She handed the phone back to Tanya and started to cry again.

Tanya stroked Livia’s shoulder and spoke in her soothing voice. She handed Livia a square of delicate white paper, like paper for the toilet. Livia looked at the paper, not understanding. Tanya smiled, took the paper back, then gently touched it to Livia’s cheeks. Livia was confused-they used this kind of paper for drying tears, not just for the toilet? It was a small thing, but everything was so overwhelmingly alien here that this drying paper upset her and made her cry harder. But she raised the paper to her cheeks and dabbed at them, because it seemed to be what Tanya wanted.

After that, they just waited. More doctors came and went. Tanya spoke to them. They didn’t bother Livia.

Periodically, voices came out of Tanya’s radio. The radio was attached by a spiral cord to a little black box clipped to the shoulder of Tanya’s uniform. A microphone, Livia understood, like the one on the karaoke box in the village. Tanya would pick up the microphone when the voices came out of the radio and talk into it. One of these conversations lasted longer than the others. Tanya glanced at Livia while she spoke, and it sounded like she was arguing. When the conversation was over, she squatted so she was looking up at Livia, who was still sitting on the table. She spoke some words-a question, from the tone-and Livia could tell she was sad, or uneasy, which made Livia uneasy, too. A moment later, another blue-uniformed woman came in, this one pasty white. Tanya gestured to the pasty woman and said to Livia, “Camille.”

Tanya was introducing this new police person. Which meant she was leaving. Livia had been right. She knew not to trust Tanya. Not to trust anyone.

Livia turned her face away and said nothing. She heard the women talking, and then the sound of the door as it opened and closed. When she looked again, Tanya was gone, replaced by Camille.

Someone brought more hot food on a tray-some kind of meat, and vegetables Livia didn’t recognize. She devoured it all anyway. Then they brought her a blanket and a pillow. She slept curled up on the table, waking up frightened and disoriented several times during the night, and dreaming she was back in the forest with Nason.

In the morning, Tanya returned with several new people: three pasty men in suits and neckties, and a woman in western clothes but with a Lahu face. The woman looked at Livia and said in Lahu, “Hello, I’m Nanu, though here I’m called Nancy. Are you the one called Labee?”

Even more than when she had spoken on the phone the day before to the Thai woman, Livia was overwhelmed at being able to understand someone, and this time someone who spoke her own language. “Yes!” she said, nodding vigorously and wiping the tears that had sprung to her eyes. “Yes, I’m Labee. Please, do you know where my sister Nason is?”

“We don’t know, Labee, but I want you to tell me everything you can so we can help. Was your sister with you on the boat?”

“Not on this boat. On a different boat. A bigger one. The one that took us from Thailand.”

“All right, wait just a moment, I’m going to translate what you said for these people. They’re going to try to help. All right?”

Livia nodded vigorously, her jaw clenched shut. Now that she could be understood, it was almost impossible not to talk.

Nanu translated, talking more to the men in suits than to Tanya or the other policewoman. Then she turned back to Livia. “Labee, the small boat you were on, the one that brought you here, came from Portland.”

“Portland?”

“Yes, a city on the West Coast of America. Was Nason with you when you were put on the small boat from Portland?”

An image of Nason, mute and vacant and bleeding, flashed across Livia’s mind, and she pushed it away. These people were trying to help. To help, they needed information. And the more they learned from Livia, the more she might learn from them.

“I… I think so. The men who took us made me go to sleep. When I woke up, I was on the small boat. And”-her voice caught for a moment, and she forced herself to continue-“Nason was gone.”

“Do you know how long you were on the big boat?”

“I’m not sure. We were in a box. But I think… maybe a week. Is this really America?”

“Yes, it is. A week would have been long enough to reach Portland. Were there other people with you on the big boat?”

America. Livia still couldn’t believe it. It was so dizzying, disorienting. She pushed the feeling away and forced herself to focus. “Yes, eleven other children, plus Nason and me. Hmong, Yao… all from the hill tribes.”

Nanu translated for the men in suits and talked back and forth with them. Then she said to Livia, “Some of these men are with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. That means they’re experts on human smuggling.”

“Human smuggling?”

“What happened to you and your sister. And the other children. Smugglers take people from poorer countries to richer ones.”

“You mean, they steal people?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what it means. And sometimes they even steal children.”

One of the men said something to Nanu. Nanu nodded and said to Livia, “There’s a lot of human smuggling from and through Thailand, and these men are trying to stop it. They want you to tell us about the men who took you so they can find and arrest them.”

Livia told them everything she could about Skull Face and Dirty Beard and Square Head. The men asked lots of questions, and Nanu translated back and forth.

At one point, Nanu asked, “Did the men… hurt you or your sister, Labee?”

The way she said it, Livia understood how she meant hurt. Without thinking, she said, “No. They just kept us in a box, like the one on the small boat. And they whipped a Hmong boy named Kai, when he tried to escape.”

Nanu looked at her, and Livia sensed she understood Livia was lying about the men not hurting her and Nason. But Nanu didn’t press. Not that it would have mattered. Livia was too ashamed of what the men had done to her, and too guilty about what they had done to Nason. She would never speak of it to anyone. Never.

Tanya said something to Nanu, who translated, “Where can we find your parents, Labee?”

Livia was immediately suspicious. “Why?”

Nanu nodded as though she already understood. “Labee, did your parents, did they…”

“My parents are dead.”

Nanu translated, and several minutes of animated talking followed. One of the pasty men in particular seemed to dominate the conversation. He was taller and more heavyset than the others, with a stripe of charcoal-colored stubble around his head but otherwise completely bald. His eyes were widely spaced behind wire glasses, and his ears were soft and meaty, the lobes as thick as little thumbs. As Livia looked from him to the other two men and back again, she realized his clothes seemed finer-blue with vertical white stripes, while the other men’s suits were solid gray. If the other two were from this Immigration and Naturalization Service, this man was from something different. Did America have a royal family, like Thailand? But no, though the other two seemed to defer to the man, they weren’t deferring the way Thais deferred to the king. What, then? Was he just rich?

Gesturing to the bald man, Nanu said, “Labee, this gentleman is Mr. Frederick Lone. He’s very concerned about your welfare.”

Livia narrowed her eyes, suspicious. “Why?”

“The men from Immigration and Naturalization… they think they should send you back to Thailand.”

Livia felt a bolt of fear and nausea. “What about Nason?”

“I understand. But these men don’t know what else to do with you.”

“I won’t go back. Not without Nason.”

“What I’m trying to tell you is, Mr. Lone shares your concerns. You were the only child on the boat. There were two others, but they died en route, apparently from food poisoning. Mr. Lone understands your predicament and wants to help.”

“Help how?”

“Mr. Lone is an important man in this town. He owns several businesses-an ammunition factory, a pulp mill-that employ a lot of people. His brother is a US senator-a powerful man in the American government. Mr. Lone’s children are grown, but he and his wife will take you into their home until something more permanent and satisfactory can be arranged.”

Livia looked at Mr. Lone, not trusting him, not liking him. But she felt the same way about all these people. Even Tanya.

“Can Mr. Lone find Nason?”

Nanu spoke with Mr. Lone, then said to Livia, “Mr. Lone is very well connected, through his business interests and through his brother. And he promises to try.”

If America was like what the hill tribe people said about Thailand, Livia knew a rich man could be more useful than the police. Not that she could trust his words. But what choice did she have? She couldn’t go back to her parents. She wouldn’t. And if Nason was in America, Livia needed to be in America, too. She would find Nason somehow, help her somehow.

“All right,” Livia said. “If he can find Nason.”

Nanu spoke again with Mr. Lone, who looked at Livia and nodded as though eager for her to understand.

“Yes,” Nanu said. “He says he knows how important Nason is to you.”

It was only much later that Livia realized how ominous those words really were.