The Queen of Patpong

Chapter 20

It's been light for a couple of hours. The apartment is getting hot.

At some point-he has no idea when-Rafferty apparently pushed the glass coffee table away from the couch so he could sit at Rose's feet and lean back against her knees; her words seemed to flow more freely when she couldn't see his face. So he's facing away from her now, in the long moments after she's finished talking, and across the room he sees the morning light picking out glittering splinters of glass in the carpet near the sliding door.

Eight stories above the morning traffic, all he can hear is breathing.

He twists around, getting a message from his lower back to slow down. He ignores it and rises to his knees, then turns to face Rose, accidentally bending the injured elbow and sucking breath through his teeth.

She is sitting limply, sunk into the cushions, with her head tilted back and her eyes closed. He wants to put his arms around her, but it would be awkward with her sitting as she is, and he's also reluctant to break in on her, wherever she may be. Her face looks bleached out and tissue-thin, as though it's been scoured from the inside and one more pass will bare the muscles beneath the skin. Miaow lies on her right side, her knees jackknifed almost to her chest and her head on Rose's lap. Her eyes are wide open, looking directly at him. He reaches over and musses the yellowish chop of hair, and for the first time he can remember since he met her, she doesn't protest.

Leaning against Rose on the other side, her eyes partly closed and her forearm thrown across Rose's lap so she's touching Miaow's shoulder, is Pim. She has the half-drowsy, half-abstracted air of someone reciting silently something she memorized long ago. Her eyes flick to him and then back down, and she rubs her cheek against Rose's shoulder.

His cell phone rings across the room, on the kitchen counter.

"That's twice," Rose says. She opens her eyes but keeps them on the ceiling.

"And it can ring until the sun goes down." Rafferty looks up at his wife, but the moment their eyes meet, she drops her gaze, and the gesture ties a small knot in Rafferty's gut. He thinks, What else?

But what he says is, "Coffee? Nescafe?"

"I think I'll try to sleep for an hour or two," Rose says. "If that's okay with you, I mean."

"If it's okay-" Rafferty begins.

Miaow interrupts him. "That's all you want to say? 'Coffee?'"

Rafferty rises, his back cracking like a bag full of knuckles. "I want to say a lot of things, but some of them are things I only want to say to Rose. And some of them are things I don't know how to say. Coffee will help."

"Well," Rose says, disentangling herself from the two girls and putting her feet under her to get up, "you can say them to me later."

Rafferty says, "I love you."

"That," Rose says, standing and meeting his eyes for the first time, "that you can say now."

Miaow says, "Me, too."

Pim says, "You were so brave."

"I was stupid," Rose says. She stretches, arms up, then presses her fists against her lower back, and bends backward. "But no stupider than you. Find something else to do."

Pim pulls up her knees and rests her forehead on them. Then she wraps her arms around her shins, sealing herself into a ball.

Miaow says, "I want a Coke."

"That's all you have to say?" Rafferty mimics. " 'I want a Coke'?"

"Phoo," Miaow says. She gets up with no effort, as though she'd been on the couch for only a few minutes rather than hours. Rafferty is watching with a certain amount of envy when he feels Rose's eyes on him. When he looks at her, one corner of her mouth is up in an almost-smile.

"Remember?" she says. "Remember when everything worked like that?"

"Everything still works," he says. "It just needs a little coaxing."

"Well, since you're so limber," Rose says, "I'll have some Nescafe."

Rafferty nods. "I'll make it."

"I know," she says. "And, Pim? As long as Poke is up and proving he's flexible, is there anything you'd like?"

Pim just stares up at her, mouth half open, looking as if the world exploded in her face.

"Right." Rose sits back down and wraps her arms around the girl. "Nothing for Pim just now," she says.

From the kitchen, safely out of sight, Miaow asks her question. "So you changed? From when you were in the village. When you were in the village, that's who you really were. The way you were in Bangkok, that wasn't." A pause. "Was it?"

Rose, her arms entwined around Pim, says, "Of course not."

"How? How did you change?"

"Slowly," Rose says. "One bone at a time." She rubs Pim's shoulders with her right hand. "Like that thing you say in the play. About the king under the sea."

" 'Of his bones are coral made-' " Miaow starts, coming into the room.

"In Thai," Rose says.

"Mmmm." Miaow squints up at a corner of the ceiling and changes languages. "His bones are made of coral now, and his eyes have turned to pearls. Everything's changing because of the sea, because he's underwater."

"Like that," Rose says. "One bone at a time. Because I was underwater."

Pim says, "Like I am now," and burrows her forehead into Rose's shoulder.

"And after," Miaow says. "You changed again, into who you are now." It's more a challenge than a question. "Why? How?"

"I met Poke," Rose says. "We found you." She glances at Rafferty and then back to Miaow. "You were the big one."

Miaow returns her stepmother's gaze and then looks over to Rafferty. "Oh," she says, and she goes back into the kitchen. RAFFERTY'S BEEN EXPERIMENTING lately with what he likes to think of as domestic time management, trying to work out the best order for different chores, so one thing can process itself while he does another. It feels good to turn his attention to the coffee-making routine he's worked out: putting Rose's water on to boil while he grinds his coffee and pours it into the filter and adds a shot of cinnamon-a new touch-measuring and then pouring the cold water for his own coffee into the reservoir of the coffeemaker as Rose's water comes to a boil, then spooning out the powdered Nescafe, half a teaspoon extra, and filling Rose's cup with boiling water, stirring the Nescafe into something that resembles coffee's highly challenged third cousin, while the real thing drips from the pot into the carafe behind him.

The whole procedure-the boiling, the grinding and stirring, the smells, the narrowly avoided collisions with Miaow as she barges around the tiny kitchen washing her hands, popping the top on her Coke, going on tiptoe to grab an orange-makes him aware how blessed he was yesterday, when all this was unremarkable, normal, everyday procedure, nothing that needed thought beyond boil the water first or grind the coffee first? Ordinary, he thinks. Ordinary feels very good.

He carries Rose's cup in and puts it on the table. She gives him the sliver of a smile, her arms still around Pim. Miaow pulls a stool up to the counter and starts to peel her orange. Rafferty stops in the middle of the living room, flexes the sore elbow a couple of times, and says, "I just want to go on record. I love all this. I may not say so every day, but I do anyway."

Miaow looks up from her orange. "That's a lot better than 'Coffee?'"

"I even love you," Rafferty says. "It's like loving a cactus, but I do."

Miaow gives the orange all her attention, but he can see the color bloom in her cheeks.

He goes into the kitchen, feeling light-headed, and pours his own coffee into the mug he uses every day of his life. Every wonderful day of his life. Leaning against the cool of the refrigerator door, he inhales the aroma. Out in the living room, Rose murmurs something, probably to Pim, and the couch squeaks as someone gets up, and then the air conditioner cranks into life. Rose says to the world as a whole, "Time for a cigarette," and he hears the rasp of a match.

"Maybe," Miaow says, her mouth full of orange, "maybe you ought to check the voice mail."

"Me, me, me," Rafferty says happily. Despite the chain of horrors in Rose's story, he feels almost exhilarated. He knows what's wrong now; they can begin to fix it. He downs about a third of his coffee, scalding the roof of his mouth, and then tops up the cup from the pot. "Fuel first," he says to Miaow, toasting her with the mug and slopping some on his fingers.

She says, "Bean drink," with the special scorn she reserves for coffee.

"The phone, the phone." Rafferty gulps and burns his mouth again, puts the cup on the counter, wipes his burned fingers on his pants, and speed-dials his voice mail. The first call is a hang-up. Then Arthit's voice comes on the line. He sounds like someone five thousand years old who hasn't slept since the turn of the century.

"Your guy, Horner," he says. "He hasn't left the kingdom. He's in Thailand."