"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.