The Fourth Watcher

15

Miaow’s ice cream is melting. For the past minute or two, she’s been remorselessly stirring it into a soup, following the movement of the spoon with her eyes as though she

expects some spectacular chemical reaction. The silence between her and Rose stretches uncomfortably, measured by the circular movement of the spoon.

The brown of the chocolate and the chemical pink of the strawberry make a particularly unpleasant-looking swirl. Rose raises her eyes from the bowl, telling herself she’s not really rolling them, and waits.

“Why him not talk me?” Miaow says at last, in the defensive pidgin she has been using since the conversation began.

Privately Rose thinks this is an excellent question. As happy as she has been with Rafferty since his proposal the previous evening, if he were here right now, she’d haul off and kick him in the shins. “He should have talked to you,” she says in Thai. “He made a mistake. Maybe he was nervous or something.”

Tired of making circles, Miaow scrabbles the spoon back and forth through the thinning slop in a hard, straight zigzag. Rose finds herself counting silently to ten.

The Haagen-Dazs on Silom, where they went to dodge the rain, is empty. The downpour had stopped practically the moment the door closed behind them, but Rose knew there was no escape, so she bought both of them a post-happybirthday ice cream. They had settled at a table, and the moment Rose picked up her spoon, Miaow had seen the ring.

For the past twenty minutes, Rose has been trying to explain to a girl of eight-no, make that nine-that the upcoming marriage is nothing for her to worry about.

“Everything will be the same, but better,” she says for the third time.

Miaow continues to slash through the spirals, giving Rose a first-class view of the knife-straight part she imposes on her hair.

Rose fights an impulse to grab the spoon. “It’s like when Poke told you he wanted to adopt you. You didn’t want that at first either.”

“Did too,” Miaow says in English.

Rose briefly toys with saying, Did not, but rejects it. There are conversations Miaow literally cannot lose, and that’s the opening gambit to one of them. “Miaow,” she says. “Poke and I love each other. We’re grown-ups. We should be married.”

“Not married before,” Miaow says. She is sticking with English because she knows it gives her an edge.

Rose sticks with Thai for the same reason. “Poke adopted you because he wanted you to really be his daughter. He’s marrying me so I can really be your mama.”

Miaow’s spoon stops. She regards the mess in her bowl as though she hopes an answer will float to the top. When she speaks, directly to her ice cream, Rose has to lean forward to hear her. What she says is, “You already my mama.”

In the eighteen months Rose has known her, Miaow has never said this before. Even as a mist springs directly from Rose’s heart to her eyes, her mind recognizes a master manipulator at work. Rose honed serious manipulative skills working in the bar, and she automatically awards Miaow a B-plus, even as she blinks away a tear. “But not really,” she says. “Not one hundred percent.”

The words fail to make a dent. Rose reaches over and takes the spoon from Miaow’s hand. The child’s eyes follow the spoon, and Rose realizes she might just have committed a tactical error, so she licks the spoon and hands it back, trying not to make a face at the mixture of flavors. She dips her own spoon into her scoop of coconut sherbet and holds it out. Miaow examines it as though it might contain tiny frogs, then opens her mouth. Rose feeds her, and as she tilts the spoon up, the thought breaks over her: My baby. “Miaow,” she says without thinking. “Do you know how much I love you?”

Miaow looks up at her, her mouth a perfect O. She has chocolate on her upper lip. “You. .” she says. Then she looks away, staring at the Silom sidewalk through the window. A very fat woman, weighed down further with half a dozen plastic shopping bags, hauls herself past the window, and Miaow’s eyes follow her as though someone has told her she is seeing her own future. Then, without turning back to Rose, she says, “I know.”

Having finally managed to insert the thin edge of the wedge, Rose leans down on it. “And Poke. You know that Poke loves you more than anyone in the world.”

“Love you number one,” Miaow says, still in English. “But that’s okay.”

“Look at this,” Rose says, holding up the hand with the ring on it. “This is Poke,” she says, touching the ruby. Her fingernail moves to the tiny sapphire. “This is me.” She taps the surface of the topaz. “This one, in the middle. Who do you think this is? Who do you think this is, right next to Poke?”

Miaow says, “Oh.” Her chin develops a sudden pattern of tiny dimples, but she masters it. She puts down the spoon. When she looks from the ring to Rose again, she is back in control. “Why am I yellow?”

“Tomorrow you’ll be a sapphire, same as me, because we have the same happybirthday. But you’ll still be in the middle.”

Miaow processes this for a long moment. Then she asks, “Why?”

“Because you’re the center of our lives.” Rose passes her finger along the three stones. “This is us, Miaow. Do you know how old jewels are? Jewels last forever. This is Poke’s way of saying he wants us to be together forever.”

Miaow stares at the ring. Rose sees her mouth silently form the words: One, two, three. Then Miaow says, “Okay.” She picks up the bowl, lifts it to her lips, and drains it. The moment she puts the bowl down, she says, “Can I have a cell phone?”

Ninety minutes and three cell-phone shops later, Rose has heard approximately ten thousand words from Miaow on cell phones in general, how they can play music, how great the games are, how much safer she’ll be with one, and-above all-an encyclopedic disquisition on text messages: They’re cool, they’re cheap, and all her friends send them all the time. Rose’s comment that she thought Miaow’s friends spent at least some of their time at school didn’t create a pause long enough to slip a comma into. Now, as Miaow works her thumbs on the touch pad of her new phone, so fast that Rose can’t see them move, Rose fishes through her bag and realizes she left her own phone at home. She borrows Miaow’s, after waiting until the child finishes keying in the third act of Macbeth or whatever it is, and dials Rafferty’s number. His phone, Rose learns, is not in service, which means he has turned it off. She hands the phone back to Miaow, who immediately polishes it on her T-shirt.

“I’ll send this one to you,” Miaow says, doing the thumbs thing again. “It’ll be on your phone when we get home.”

“Which is where we should go,” Rose says. “Poke will be there soon. When he’s all alone, he breaks things.”

Miaow finishes punching at the keys and then checks the shine on the phone. She uses the front of her T-shirt to rub at a stubborn spot. “Let’s go to Foodland,” she says. “Let’s buy him a steak.” She flips the phone open again. “I can call Foodland and see if they have steak.”

“They have steak,” Rose says. “I was going to make noodles with duck and green onions.”

“Poke’s American,” Miaow says. “He eats anything, but he always wants steak.”

“Poor baby. He tries so hard. Do you remember the night I gave him a thousand-year egg?” Thousand-year eggs, which found their way to Thailand via China, are not really a thousand years old, but they might as well be. They’re black, hard, and as sulfurous as a high-school chemistry experiment. Rose starts to laugh. “Did you see his face?”

Miaow is laughing, too. “And how many times he swallowed?” She mimes someone trying desperately to get something down.

“Like it was trying to climb back up again,” Rose says, and the two of them stand in the middle of the sidewalk laughing, with Miaow hanging on to Rose’s hand as though without it she’d dissolve into a pool on the sidewalk.

“You’re right,” Rose says, wiping her eyes. “If I’m going to be his wife, I should feed him a steak once in a while.”

“He wants to be Thai,” Miaow says, and Rose, startled, meets her eyes. Then the two of them start laughing again.

It is almost seven by the time they step off the elevator, dragging the bags that contain at least one of practically everything Foodland had on discount: shampoo, bleach, detergent, toothpaste, toilet paper, four place mats, two stuffed penguins, five pairs of underpants for Poke (who doesn’t wear underpants), a baby blanket because it was pink, a flower vase, some flowers to put in it, and five porterhouse steaks. As the elevator doors open, Rose says, “We saved a fortune,” and then the two of them stop dead at what looks at first like a pile of wrinkled clothes someone has thrown against the door to the apartment.

But then the pile of clothes stirs, and Peachy looks up at them.

This is a Peachy whom Rose has never seen before. Her lacquered hair is snarled and tangled, her face blotchy where the powder has been wiped away. Two long tracks of mascara trail down her cheeks.

“That man,” she begins, and then starts to sob. “That-that American-”

Rose drops the bags and hurries to her, takes both of her hands, and brings her to her feet. As Peachy straightens, a crinkled brown paper shopping bag, crimped closed at the top, tumbles from her lap to the floor, and Peachy jumps back from it as though it were a cobra.

“It’s okay,” Rose says. “Poke says it’ll be okay.”

“It’s not okay,” Peachy says. “It’s the end of the world.” She points a trembling finger at the paper bag, and Rose squats down and opens it.

And stares down into it, still as stone.

Then she says, in English, “Oh, my God.”