The Fourth Watcher

44

In the middle of the wettest, warmest tangle of arms, legs, and hearts of his entire life, Rafferty is barely aware of the torrent of Thai coming from Miaow, perhaps two hundred

words a minute, far too fast for him to catch more than a phrase or a name or two: Ping, Rose, milk shake, tooth, gun. All he can do is hold on, Rose on his right and Miaow on his left, but now they’re a circle, and so Miaow is, as always, in the middle. Where she needs to be.

The circle opens to absorb Fon and Lek, both of them crying like children, and closes again. With the rain hammering down, the five of them squeeze together even more tightly, the two half-naked women no longer feeling the cold, and then the arms open a second time, and there is someone there who feels new, someone who smells new to Rafferty’s heightened senses, and they wrap themselves around Ming Li. The sky cracks, a fork of lightning fingering its way down, followed by a sound like someone crumpling iron.

With the thunder, Poke feels Rose straighten, remove her arm from his shoulder, and pull away. He looks at her. With her other arm still around Miaow, she is gazing beyond him. Rafferty turns his head to see Frank. His father stands sideways to the group, not even sheltering from the rain. He faces back down the alley between the warehouses, where it all happened.

Something warm fills Rafferty’s chest, and suddenly there are words in his mouth. And then he looks again at his father’s profile, so familiar and so strange, a face he had thought was permanently turned away, and he can’t say them. He swallows, so hard it feels as though he is forcing the words down.

Rose says, “Mr. Rafferty?”

Frank turns, and Rose raises the arm that had been around Rafferty, inviting him in. Frank stands there, not moving, until Rafferty steps aside, closer to Fon, expanding the space between him and Rose. Rafferty lifts his arm exactly as Rose has, the space between them wide and welcoming, and he hears something catch and break in Ming Li’s throat. Slowly, like a man approaching a door he thinks will be locked, Frank joins the circle. It closes around him.

The car is even more crowded on the way out: Fon sits in Lek’s lap and Ming Li in Frank’s. Miaow has spread herself across both Rafferty’s and Rose’s laps, dead weight against them. She fell asleep the moment the car door slammed shut.

Leung is at the wheel. Noi is slumped against the front passenger door, next to Frank. Rafferty can hear her breath whistling in her throat.

With a last look back, Leung puts the car in gear and heads for the gates.

The silence in the car is a kind of warmth, a comforting insulation that makes the events of the last hour seem very distant, perhaps not even real. What’s real now is a car jammed with people, bunched up against each other as though by choice, the steam of breath on window glass, the walls of the warehouses as they slide by in the headlights.

Frank suddenly sits upright and looks back, and Rafferty cranes his neck around, expecting the nightmare to reemerge: men with guns, Chu free somehow, looming out of the darkness with his slicker flapping around him, but he sees nothing. And then Frank begins to laugh.

“What?” Ming Li asks. “What is it?”

“Nothing important,” Frank says, and then he laughs again. “I forgot my rubies.”