“There!” She stops and points at a silver Jag, an XK coupe. “I like that one. Can I take a test drive?”
“That’s a sixty-thousand dollar car,” says Cliff. “You want a test drive, I’ll have to clear sixty thousand on your credit card.”
“Do it.”
He goes into the office and runs the card—it’s approved. What, he asks himself, is a sixteen-year-old doing with that much credit? He knocks on Jerry’s door and tells him that he has a teenage girl who wants to test-drive the SK.
“Fuck her,” says Jerry without glancing up. “I’ve got a dealer who’ll take it off our hands.”
“Her card cleared.”
“No shit? A rich little cunt, huh?” Jerry clasps his hands behind his head and rocks back in his swivel chair. “Naw. I don’t want a kid driving that car.”
“It’s the girl from the Celeste.”
“Shalin?” Jerry’s expression goes through some extreme changes—shock, concern, bewilderment—that are then paved over by his customary. “What the hell. He throws a lot of business our way.”
Cliff doubts that a man who rents motel rooms for twenty-nine bucks a night could be boosting Jerry’s profits to any consequential degree, and he wonders what shook him up…if, indeed, he was shaken, if he wasn’t having a flare-up of his heartburn.
Shalin, it turns out, knows her way around a stick shift and drives like a pro, whipping the SK around sharp corners, downshifting smoothly, purring along the little oak-lined back streets west of Ridgewood Avenue, and Cliff’s anxiety ebbs. He points out various features of the car, none of which appear to impress Shalin. It’s clear that she enjoys being behind the wheel and, when she asks if she can check out what the SK is like on the highway, he says, “Yeah, but keep it under sixty-five.”
Soon they’re speeding south on Highway 1 toward New Smyrna, passing through a salt marsh that puts Cliff in mind of an African place—meanders of blue water and wide stretches of grass bronzed by the late sun, broken here and there by mounded islands topped with palms; birds wheeling under a cloudless sky; a few human structures, dilapidated cabins, peeling billboards, but not enough to shatter the illusion that they’re entering a vast preserve.
After a minute or two, Shalin says, “My mother and I…I mean, my aunt. We shared a unique connection. We resembled each other physically. Many people mistook us for mother and daughter. But the resemblance went deeper than that. We had a kind of telepathy. She told me stories about her life, and I saw images relating to the stories. When I described them to her, she’d say things like, ‘Yes, that’s it! That’s it exactly!’ or ‘It sounds like the compound I stayed at on Lake Yogyarta.’ I came to have the feeling that as she died—she was sick the whole time I was with her, in dreadful pain—she was transferring her substance to me. We were becoming the same person. And perhaps we were.” She darts a glance toward Cliff. “Do you believe that’s possible? That someone can possess another body, that they can express their being into another flesh? I do. I can remember being someone else, though I can’t identify who that person was. My head’s too full of my aunt’s memories. It certainly would explain why I’m so mature. Everyone says that about me, that I’m mature for my age. Don’t you agree?”
Scarily mature, Cliff says to himself. He doesn’t like the direction of the conversation and tells her they’d better be heading back to the lot.
“Certainly. As soon as I see a turn-off.”
She gooses the accelerator, and the SK surges forward, pushing Cliff back into the passenger seat. The digital readout on the speedometer hits eighty, eighty-five, then declines to sixty-five. She’s putting on a little show, he thinks; reminding him who’s in control.
“Aunt Isabel spoke frequently about the man who made her ill,” Shalin goes on. “He was handsome and she loved him, of course. Otherwise she wouldn’t have risked getting pregnant. He said he couldn’t feel her as well when he wore a condom, and since this was at a time when protection wasn’t considered important—nobody in Southeast Asia knew about AIDS—she allowed him to have his way.”
A queasy coldness builds in Cliff’s belly. “Isabel. Was she an actress?”
“You remember! That makes it so much easier. Isabel Yahya. You cracked jokes about her last name. You said you were getting your ya-yas out when you were with her. She didn’t understand that, but I do.”
She swings the SK in a sharp left onto a dirt road, a reckless maneuver; then she brakes, throws it into reverse, backs onto the highway, raising dust, and goes fishtailing toward Daytona.
“Take it easy! Okay?” Cliff grips the dashboard. “I didn’t give her anything. She gave it to me. And it obviously wasn’t AIDS, or I’d be dead.”
“No, you’re right. It wasn’t AIDS, but you definitely gave it to her.”
“The hell I did!”
“Before you became involved with Isabel, you slept with other women in Manila, didn’t you?”
“Sure I did, but she’s the one…”
“You were her first lover in more than a year!”
Shalin settles into cruising speed and Cliff, sobered by what she’s told him, says, “Even if that’s true…”
“It’s true.”
“…she could have seen a doctor.”
“She did,” says Shalin. “If you hadn’t gotten her fired, perhaps she could have seen the doctor who attended you.”
“What are you talking about? I didn’t get her fired! She vanished off the set. I didn’t know what had happened to her.”
Shalin makes a dismissive noise. “As it was, Aunt Isabel went to a bomoh. A shaman. I can’t blame you for that. She was a country girl and still put her trust in such men. But when he failed her, she wrote you letters, begging for help, for money to engage a western doctor. You never replied.”
“I never got any letters.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“She didn’t have my address. How could she have written me?”
“She mailed them in care of your agent.”
“That’s like dropping them into a black hole. Mark…my agent. He’s not the most together guy. He probably filed them somewhere and forgot to send them along.”
They flash past a ramshackle fishing camp at the edge of the marsh, wooden cabins and a pier with a couple of small boats moored at its nether end. Their speed is creeping up and Cliff tells her to back it down.
“It’s an astonishing coincidence that we bought the Celeste and you started working for Uncle Jerry,” she says. “It almost seems some karmic agency is playing a part in all this.”
Cliff doesn’t know what troubles him more, the idea that the coincidence is not a coincidence, a thought suggested by her sly tone, or the implication that an intimate relationship exists between Jerry Muntz and the Palaniappans. Now that he thinks about it, he’s seen Jerry, more than once, stop at the motel for a few minutes before heading home. He has no reason to assign the relationship a sinister character, yet Jerry wouldn’t befriend people like the Palaniappans unless he had a compelling reason.
“All of what?” he asks.
“Aunt Isabel was a woman of power,” says Shalin. “By nature, she was trusting and impractical, not at all suited for life in Manila or Jakarta. She ended up in Jakarta, you know. In a section known as East Cipinang, a slum on the edge of a dump. We survived by scavenging. I’d take the things we found and sell them in the streets to tourists. We had enough to eat most days. Tourists bought from me not because they wanted the things we found, but because I was very pretty little girl.” Her lips thin, as if she’s biting back anger. “Isabel could only work a few hours a day, and sometimes not that. Her insides were rotting. She received medicine from a clinic, but the disease had progressed too far for the doctors to do anything other than ease her pain. She’d lost her beauty. In the last years before she died, she looked like an old, shriveled hag.”