It seems to be a garage, the floor irregularly spotted with pools of dark oil. The light is cast entirely by the two bulbs overhead, leaving the rest of the space in darkness. Either there are no windows or the sun has gone down. The van lurks in the gloom at the near end, ticking as the engine cools.
The back of his head hurts badly enough to be dented.
“Here’s a chair,” the girl says, pushing one forward. It’s a cheap folding chair, made of battered gray metal. “Get off that cold floor.”
His damp clothes feel heavy as he works himself up-first to his hands and knees and then, grasping the back of the chair, to a posture that makes him feel like Rumpelstiltskin. His head begins to spin a warning, and he eases himself sideways onto the chair without rising further.
“Better?” she asks.
“What about an aspirin?”
“Aspirin’s bad for you.” She gives him the almost-smile he had seen in the street.
“Aspirin is an anti-inflammatory,” Rafferty says. “Getting hit on the head is bad for you.”
“I’m no nurse. My job was to see whether you were still being followed and then to get you here. I’m essentially finished.”
“I thought you wanted to talk.”
“Not me,” she says. “He wants to talk.”
“He.”
“Him.” She steps aside, and Poke sees an old man shuffle around the end of the van, his feet in cheap carpet slippers. The edge of the light hits his knees, and then, as he moves forward, his waist, and then his shoulders, and then his face, and Poke looks at the face twice before he launches himself from the chair, shaking off Leung’s hand, and does his level best to break his father’s nose.
PART II
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.