The Fourth Watcher

28

About the same time Rafferty is searching Elson’s suitcase, Arthit’s wife, Noi, is awakened, as she is so often these days, by the pain of her nerves burning away as multiple

sclerosis licks at the sheathing tissue that covers them. She has come to think of the disease as a fire in her body, sometimes banked and sometimes burning out of control, whipped up by something she does not understand. When the disease is raging, especially late at night, it seems there is a third person in the room with her and Arthit, someone who knows how to fan the flames just by staring at her. She feels his emotionless, clinical gaze through the darkness at times when Arthit is sleeping beside her, and on those nights she chews on the corner of her pillowcase to keep from moaning. Noi does not want Arthit to know how fierce the pain has become.

The room is full of light. Of course, it is afternoon. Arthit is off with Poke, making the world-as he likes to say-a more boring place. Her guests will probably be asleep, Rose on the couch and Miaow in the spare bedroom, the one she and Arthit thought would be the nursery until the disease chose their door from all the doors on the block and

knocked.

There is a child in the house, she thinks.

She stretches experimentally, feeling the coals burning in her elbows and fingers-not too bad, a thin layer of ash on them-and explores the weakness in her legs. She has learned in the past few months to test her legs one at a time while she is still in bed, putting one foot atop the other and pushing down, before she tries to stand. On the days when she knows she will be too unsteady to stay upright, she pretends to sleep until Arthit has left the house and then reaches under the mattress on her side of the bed for the aluminum cane he has never seen.

She hopes he has never seen it.

Lately it seems to her that they are playing two different games with similar rules. Noi does not tell Arthit about the progress of the disease because she does not want to burden him. Arthit pretends not to see it because he does not want to injure her pride. So the two of them, each with the other in mind, ignore the thing that has come to occupy the central place in their lives, filling that place with silence.

The place they thought a child would fill.

As she pushes back the covers, she realizes she awoke earlier, dragged up from sleep briefly and then allowed to sink again. It seems to her that the figure who fans the fire was standing at the foot of the bed, looking down at her. The image creates a cold ball of dread in her belly.

Her legs tremble beneath her, but hold, as she bends over the foot of the bed to pick up the robe Arthit bought her for no reason, not even her birthday. She hates the color, a sort of faded, pickled, unripe-banana green, but loves the idea of Arthit shopping for her. She can see those thick fingers picking up one flimsy garment after another as he stands stiff and conspicuously uncomfortable in his uniform in some department store, surrounded by women but unwilling to flee until he finds the one he likes, the one that makes her look as yellow as a wax candle. She slides her arms into the sleeves, pausing as she realizes she is standing exactly where the figure stood the first time she opened her eyes. The dread in her belly solidifies into a gelatinous mass.

Pushing it aside with an enormous effort, Noi limps into the hall. No cane today, not in front of her guests. The thought of the child, Miaow, carries her along.

The door to the spare room is ajar. Noi pushes it open a few inches to find Rose sitting on the bed looking at her, with Miaow asleep at her side, the child’s head pillowed on Rose’s arm. Even in sleep Miaow looks as if she’s in motion; her knees are drawn up like someone doing a cannonball into a swimming pool, and her mouth is half open. Rose smiles and lifts a finger to her lips, then eases her arm out from beneath Miaow. Miaow shifts and emits a syllable of complaint. Rose holds perfectly still until the child seems to be asleep again.

The kitchen is as warm as a hive, rich with the honey-colored afternoon light that slants through the windows and fragrant from the small pots of basil and rosemary Noi grows on the sill. Rose’s hair is a glorious tangle that Noi briefly envies and then forgets, concentrating on moving smoothly. “Coffee or tea?”

Rose gives her a sleepy smile. “Do you have Nescafe?”

“Of course.” Noi slides to the cabinet above the counter, lifting her feet as little as possible-it is the moment when they come back into contact with the floor that gives her the most trouble. She tries to make it look like a preference, perhaps a joke, but she can feel Rose’s eyes on her.

“Poke hates Nescafe,” Rose says. “It’s enough to drive me away.”

“Arthit drinks it by the quart. Hot, cold, lukewarm. He sprinkles it on ice cream.” She unscrews the lid of the jar, smaller and lighter than the ones she used to buy, more expensive but easier to handle. “Arthit’s not happy unless he’s nervous.”

“Poke truly loves Arthit,” Rose says, stretching long arms. “It’s a good thing I’m not jealous. Or very jealous anyway.”

“Life blesses you when you least expect it.” Noi puts the kettle on the burner and listens for the little poof as it ignites; she has a deep-seated dread of the kitchen filling with gas. “Arthit was certain he was through making friends. One thing I don’t understand is why it gets more difficult to make friends as you get older. Remember how many friends you used to have?”

“Thousands,” Rose says. “You said hi to somebody and they were glued to you. And it was impossible to be nosy then. Everybody wanted you to know everything. Nobody had a subconscious. And then one day everybody turned into a box of secrets.”

“It’s not that they got worse,” Noi says. She leans against the stove, feeling the comfortable warmth at her back. “Good people get better, I think, and bad people were already bad. It’s just that people close themselves up. I think of young people as standing like this”-she opens her arms-“and older people like this”-she crosses her arms protectively across her chest.

“Or this,” Rose says, shielding her privates. Noi laughs.

“It’s one reason I’m grateful for this illness,” Noi says. “It brought Poke and Arthit together.” Arthit had originally requested an interview with Rafferty when he learned Poke was writing the book that eventually became Looking for Trouble in Thailand. He went out and bought one of the earlier books in the series, Looking for Trouble in the Philippines, to satisfy himself that the new book wouldn’t fall into the genre of self-improvement for pedophiles, and the two of them had met for the first time over an unreasonable number of Singha beers. During the course of their mutual decline into inebriation, Arthit had told Poke about Noi’s disease, then in its earliest stages, and Rafferty had put him into contact with a doctor in Japan who was working on a promising new treatment. The treatment hadn’t worked, but the friendship had.

“He talked about Arthit for days,” Rose says. He had talked about Noi, too, but Rose does not say this. Poke had pitied Noi then, something that became unthinkable to Rose after the two women met. Noi is too strong to pity.

Noi feels a draft on the back of her neck, something that happens with increasing frequency these days. Some trick of the nerves, yet another way they’ve found to call attention to themselves, the pigs. She turns back to the kettle, but the water is not boiling yet.

“You said one of the things you were grateful for,” Rose says. “What are the others?”

“It gave me notice,” Noi says, facing her again. “If it had been faster, I never would have been able to have told Arthit, to have shown Arthit, the way I feel about him. It would have been terrible to be. . I don’t know, snatched away without the time I’ve been given to make things right.”

“You’re tough,” Rose observes.

“I’ve had practice.” She starts to maneuver herself back around to the stove and stops, staring over at Rose. “What’s that?”

“What?” Rose looks down at herself, and then back up at Noi. “Oh,” she says, putting her hands below the table.

“Ho, ho,” Noi says. “Is this something a friend would tell a friend about?”

Rose brings her hands back up, turning the ring self-consciously. It still feels thick on her finger. “There hasn’t been time. It only happened two nights ago.”

“And you said. .?”

“Oh, well. This time I didn’t have the heart to say no. He was terrified. He’d had it in his pocket for hours, patting it every fifteen seconds like he was hoping it had disappeared. I had to take pity on him. As Miaow says, he tries so hard.”

“They don’t deserve us,” Noi says. “Except when they do.”

“The first time I knew he was going to ask, I did everything I could to chase him away, short of shooting him,” Rose says. “I was awful. I talked for hours. I trotted out my mother and my father, their money problems, my infinite number of younger sisters, my past, other men- anything I could think of to scare him off. It’s no wonder he looked so frightened.”

“Has it changed the way you feel?”

Without thinking about it, Rose runs her fingers over the three stones. “The ring is us,” she says. “It’s a picture of us, Poke’s way of trying to make the three of us permanent. It makes me feel-I guess the word is ‘fierce.’ It makes me believe I’d do anything to protect him and Miaow.” She does not add what she thinks, which is, The way you protect Arthit.

“We all know that children need protection,” Noi says, “but we’re supposed to keep it a secret that men do.” She feels the draft again and rubs her neck. “Well,” she says, “come here.”

Noi opens her arms, and Rose gets up and embraces her. Noi’s nose barely comes to her breastbone, but the heat flows from her in waves, and Rose’s breath catches, and she suddenly realizes she is crying.

“It’s not so terrible,” Noi says, patting her. And then she starts to laugh, and the laugh turns into a sob, and the two women stand there hugging each other and weeping until Noi says, “This is silly,” and dries her eyes on the lapel of the awful green robe. “What a pair,” she says, turning back to the stove. “Do you like it strong?”

“Strong enough to dissolve the cup,” Rose says. “Has Poke said anything to Arthit?”

“If Arthit knows, he hasn’t said a word to me. I’ve barely seen him since this morning,” Noi adds, pouring.

“I thought maybe he just told you.” Rose feels a vague disappointment and realizes she should know better.

“Just told me? When?” Noi stirs the cup, which contains a liquid black enough to be a petroleum derivative.

“Fifteen, twenty minutes ago. When he came home.”

Noi turns to her and hands her the cup, which Rose half drains. “Arthit came home?”

“I didn’t see him, but I heard him as I was waking up. He was walking in the hall.”

Noi feels a prickling low in her back and then, again, the draft on her neck, and she turns to look across the kitchen at the back door. It is ajar.

Suddenly the heat inside her is gone, and she is freezing. She goes to the door and tries to pull it closed.

Instead it is pulled outward.

The man standing there-tall, thin, with an enormous mole on his cheek-gives her a grandfatherly smile and comes in as though he’s been invited.

Miaow has been curled up in bed, listening to the women talking. Their voices give her a warm, comfortable feeling, softer than the quilt Rose threw over her. Then, abruptly, the talk stops. She turns her head to the open door and hears something new: quick movement, a gasp, a man’s voice.

It takes her a moment to get off the bed, slowly enough for it not to creak, and to throw the quilt over it. She slips through the door and tiptoes down the hall. The hallway is dim, but the kitchen is a warm, buttery yellow, and she can see them.

Four men. Two of them holding Noi. And then Rose comes into sight, at a run, and grabs a teapot from the stove and hurls it at the nearest man. Hot water-Miaow can see it steam-arcs from the pot and splashes on the man as the teapot hits him in the chest, and the man cries out. Suddenly there are guns, and Rose is backing away.

Miaow steps back. No one has looked toward her. Moving slowly, afraid to take her eyes off them, she reaches the room where she slept, where she thinks her cell phone might be.

But when she looks, it’s not there.

She hears a burst of protest from Rose, followed by a slap and then silence. Miaow is looking everywhere in the room for something, anything, she can use as a weapon, and then she hears voices again. The men are moving through the house now, talking in low voices. The house is not big; it’s only a matter of moments before they find her. The fear she feels is a familiar companion from her years on the street, the same fear she felt in back alleys when she was hiding from one of the men who liked to hurt children.

The important thing, she knows, is to think clearly.

They are in the living room now. One man is giving orders. He mentions a place that Miaow knows, because Rafferty took her there, and Miaow makes herself memorize the name, afraid the fear will chase it out of her mind. If they are in the living room, how much time does she have? Her mental map of the house is vague. She was very drowsy when they carried her in. She is sure, though, there are only one or two rooms to go. She forces herself to continue to survey the room without rushing, looking for anything that might be useful. On the bookshelf, she sees it. It’s not a weapon, but she can use it.

A children’s book, full of bright animals and easy words in big print, the kind of thing Rafferty used to buy her. She grabs it, snatches a pen from the desk, and creeps into the closet. The closet will give her an extra minute.

She has to leave something for Poke. It can’t be anything the men can read.

If only she had her phone.

The idea sweeps over her. She closes her eyes for a moment, trying to visualize. As she hears them coming nearer, she rips a page out of the book and begins to write, just numbers. She writes them fast, almost without thinking.

By the time they open the closet door and she looks up at them, she has shoved the book and the pen into the far corner of the closet and folded the note into a tight square in her palm. There are two of them.

Miaow keeps her face calm. At least she can deny them the satisfaction of her fear.

The tall man with the mole says something to the fat man behind him, and the fat man bends down and picks her up as though she were a bagful of happybirthday presents, slinging her over his shoulder with her arms trailing down his back.

The man with the mole is walking ahead of them, so he can’t see. Miaow holds her breath and drops the square of paper.