26
Day by day, night by night, pill by pill. Not so much difference for the two of them now between day and night. Miaow, though, Miaow still slept all night.
With their increased income, they moved into what had been called a “suite” when the hotel was still a hotel: double the price, two rooms rather than one, with its own functioning toilet, one that could actually be flushed, although the shut-off valve to the shower was, like the one in their old room, welded closed. Still, they could run the water in the little bathroom sink to wash underwear and Miaow’s clothes and even soak cloths and use them to clean themselves in a perfunctory manner, a quick, approximate sponge bath rather than the showers and the lengthy baths she had always loved. But now the wet cloth satisfied her. Despite the fact that they were much closer than before to the floor’s one functional shower, they rarely made use of it.
But the most important thing about the suite was that it gave her a room of her own; she had argued for the necessity of her having the inner room so he could come and go without waking her. No more having to get Miaow back to sleep when he stumbled in at three in the morning and no more (although she didn’t say it) having to smell the perfume of the week. By making her pills last longer for a couple of weeks she had bought a cheap but perfume-free sleeping mat and a separate, smaller one for Miaow, and she’d put them right next to each other. But that hadn’t been such a good idea after all. After a few weeks, when she realized her increasingly eccentric sleep patterns were keeping the child up, she’d created a space between the mats and put a rolled-up blanket between them. Separated even so modestly, Miaow seemed less sensitive to whether her mother was asleep.
As the months sped by, she discovered another benefit to having a space of her own. She didn’t have to share her pills with Daw; they were all hers. She was becoming more accustomed to the various tablets and capsules and more expert in their use, and she found that she was also growing possessive of her experiences with them. She didn’t want Daw in there, staring at her, monitoring her intake, asking what she was feeling, making her talk about it. He could go on forever about what the pills did to him, how they made him feel, making suggestions to her, everything from optimum dosages to mixing cocktails, for what seemed like hours on end. She was doing just fine without all that sharing, and she wanted own her experiences, she wanted to keep them to herself; they were, after all, all hers.
Over the following weeks and months, as the pills carved their way into her rhythms, she began to see the hours of darkness differently. She came to regard as wasted much of the time she had previously abandoned to sleep. By postponing swallowing the sleeper sleep until three or four in the morning, she could set her own rhythms, choose her own projects. For one thing, she could clean; she had taken to wiping down the floor and the walls, at least as high as she could reach, with a damp cloth, turning it until it was gray on all sides and then rinsing it out, repeating until she was done. She could do this almost nightly and still feel like she was falling behind. She could organize her clothes for the week, laying out five sets of T-shirts and jeans, which she would cover partially with the long buttoned jacket she wore at the sorting table and removed to eat in the restaurant. She could mend things, both hers and Miaow’s, spotting an area of wear and reinforcing it before it could give way, re-patching the patches. She bought new buttons for her blouses, snipped off the old ones, and replaced them. She bought a stiff brush so she could clean out the stuff that got wedged into the tread of her shoes. Everywhere she looked, she saw something that needed to be done. One night she came home with a tablet of lined yellow paper and began to write down her thoughts, which evolved into the story of her life, told in no particular order. She illustrated it with line drawings, taking it with her in her purse each day so Daw couldn’t read it if he came home early, which he never did. She bought a second tablet and wrote dozens of letters she never sent, to her parents, her sisters, and her friends from the village. The nighttime hours were, if anything, too short.
One night, when she’d run out of things to do, having been aware for the first hour or two of Miaow’s gaze, she gave up and swallowed a sleeper—actually a sleeper and a half—and drifted most of the way to the cliff she always fell over now when she went to sleep, but instead, abruptly, she sat up. The suite had rats, and she’d suddenly envisioned a new kind of rat trap, one that couldn’t snap shut on her daughter’s fingers. Within minutes she had created it: a bread knife with a dab of Miaow’s peanut butter on its tip, balanced on the edge of the built-in four-drawer storage unit. The knife was positioned over a wastebasket, and several times in the first two or three weeks she’d been awakened by the knife racketing into the basket and the rat running feverish laps at its bottom. Daw had forced open a window in both rooms—nothing as crafty as in their old room—and she just dumped the rat out the window. Eventually, she made a trap for Daw’s room, too.
She was learning that, with the pills, nothing stayed the same for long. As the sleepers lost their potency, she upped the dose and noticed a fundamental change in her usual nightly dance with sleep. Where in the past, before the pills, she had drifted slowly into dreams and then snapped awake in the morning, ready to go, she now fell asleep without any transition, completely and abruptly. And waking, instead of being a gentle swim into the morning light, had become an ordeal. After several days when she slept through the alarm and had to be awakened by Miaow, hungry for breakfast, tugging at her finger, she took to putting one of the white pills on the floor beside her bed and setting the alarm an hour early so she could roll over, take the pill dry-mouthed, and drop off again until she abruptly snapped back to life, often ahead of time, surfacing instantly with her foot tapping and a list of chores and errands assembling itself in her head. Jump up, check the other room to see whether Daw was asleep, had already left, or (possibly) hadn’t come home at all. Make a quick breakfast for either two or three, depending. Wash face, scrub under arms, wash Miaow’s face and hands, get dressed, argue with Miaow about which T-shirt she would wear that day, and bundle her out the door.
Her relationship with Sonya had become businesslike and even chilly. In the morning, Hom darted in and out like a hummingbird, always running late, and Sonya no longer talked with her about teaching Miaow English or, actually, about much of anything. The evening visit was equally truncated. Hom would nip in with minutes to spare, wake the child from her napping place on the floor, take her hand—she had become far too heavy to carry comfortably—and lead her down the stairs, occasionally hurrying her even though she knew Miaow was proud of going down without help and enjoyed prolonging it. Sometimes when Hom appeared at Sonya’s, Miaow would cry as though she were unwilling to go. Once or twice she stretched her arms toward Sonya’s helper, as though she wanted to stay there.
And, in fact, it seemed to Hom that Miaow’s terrible twos hadn’t eased much when she had turned three, or even now, as she approached her fourth birthday. She was querulous, insistent, demanding. She eyed her mother at times as though she were a stranger. Sometimes when they were alone in the room that belonged to just them, Miaow would fold herself into a corner and talk under her breath to the two rag dolls she’d had since she was in her crib. She kept her face toward the floor, moving the dolls from one side to the other as though they were playing with each other, maintaining an inaudible dialogue under her breath. It didn’t take much to start her crying, and she went into a rage if Hom took the dolls away—even if she just wanted the child to eat. And when they were sitting on the floor together, eating, Miaow often whispered to the dolls rather than engaging with her mother.
Miaow’s new distance angered Hom; wasn’t she working herself half to death for the benefit of her child? What was wrong with Miaow? What happened to the cheerful child who smiled at her all the time, the quick learner who sometimes startled both her and Daw with her English words? Where was the little girl who had turned to her for everything, who cried for her the moment someone else, even her father, picked her up? Now she seemed happier with Sonya and Sonya’s not-very-intelligent assistant than she was with her own mother.
And it seemed to her, during the times she was thinking about Miaow, that it was all she did: she felt like she was preoccupied with Miaow night and day. She had invented the rat trap just for her. Wasn’t that love?
There were times when an unwelcome notion peeked through at her: Were the pills to blame? But how could she do without them, how could she power through it all, her fifteen-hour workdays, her loneliness, her unsatisfactory, unfaithful husband, all of it? She decided several times to stop taking the pills, but after a few sleepless nights and a few endless, exhausting days, they always waved at her from her peripheral vision, calling her back to them. Several times, when she found herself taking a little extra—another quarter or half, or perhaps more—for the same effect, Daw came home, bursting with energy, with something new, something that lasted longer and gave him more energy—so, he said, he could take less, work harder, work longer. Once again Hom began cautiously, by halving them, and once again that lasted only for a couple of weeks until she graduated to just popping the whole thing, or, occasionally, two. They were stronger, they seemed to make her faster, clearer, more incisive, better at her job in the restaurant.
They cost more, too.
She had begun to notice that her days, vivid as they were when she was living them, were getting more difficult to remember. Sometime she couldn’t recall what she’d done the previous day, sometimes she remembered an event as having happened on a day when it logically could not have. Once she got dressed and went to work to find the restaurant fully staffed; it was Sunday, the one day she didn’t work. She went back and got Miaow so she wouldn’t have to pay Sonya for a whole day, feeling the curious gaze of Sonya’s newest helper, the one who worked weekends.
And then, on the eighth or ninth morning that she straggled into the sorting room too late, the supervisor took her aside and told her she was concerned about her. Maybe, she said, Hom was trying to do too much, but whether that was the issue or not, it was obvious that something was wrong. She was late as often as she was on time, she seemed jumpy and quarrelsome, and she had recently made several mistakes, sorting errors that would have cost the business a lot of money, or even an account, if a new girl, one of the ones Hom had trained, hadn’t spotted them at the last moment and called them to the supervisor’s attention. “What I want you to do,” the supervisor said, looking at Hom very closely, “is take a few weeks’ vacation. Think about things,” she said. “Get some rest, you look tired. If you still want to be here when things have settled down, you come talk to me, and we’ll work something out.”
Then she had reached into her pocket and pressed into Hom’s hand a small wad of bills, the exact pay for the three days she’d worked that week. Not until Hom was on the sidewalk did she realize that her firing had been planned. The supervisor had precisely the right amount of money in her pocket. The new girl, the one who reported the mistakes, had been sitting at Hom’s table. She never glanced up the whole time Hom was there.
As she stood perfectly still on the sidewalk, the wave of shame almost swept her off her feet.
On the following Saturday, the day that Hom worked a full day-shift at the restaurant, she came home to learn that their rent had been doubled. Daw had been there when the rent collector knocked on the door to get the money and give him the news, and when he protested, the collector gave him two days to move out if he didn’t like it. There were a lot of people who wanted the room, he said. Stay and pay, or go, the management didn’t care which. That night, shortly after Hom got home, Daw came in from wherever he’d been, sober and fragrance-free, to report the conversation.
“And I’m not getting as much work as I was,” he said. “One of the men who ran the company split off and started his own outfit, so now there’s only about half as much work.”
“Really,” she said. “I’d think you’d be home more.”
“I’m out every day, looking for something new,” he said. “Now that you got yourself fired, I need to make more. Great timing, by the way.”
They were in the front room, Daw’s room. She’d only gotten home around six-thirty, half an hour before he came in, and when she heard the front door open she’d left Miaow in the inner room. Now, perhaps hearing the anger in their voices, she began to call for Hom.
“Mommy,” she said. “Mommy?”
“Take care of her,” Daw said. “Then make something to eat.”
“I had no way of knowing you were going to be here,” Hom said. “You’re never here at this hour. I haven’t got anything you’d want.”
“What about you? What about the kid?”
“I ate at the restaurant. I can just heat some soup for her.”
“I don’t want soup.”
Hom got up. “I wasn’t offering you any.”
“Sit down,” Daw said.
Hom said, “Go out and get something that you—”
As she turned away, Daw grabbed her wrist and yanked her back, so hard that she stumbled and went down sideways onto the chair, hard enough for it to start to go over backward, but he slammed his forearm down on her knees and brought the chair’s front legs back to the ground.
From the other room, Miaow called, “Mommy.” She sounded anxious.
“You’ve got money in your pocket,” Daw said. “You got tipped all day long. Go out and get me something right now. Tom yam goong and phad kaprao. And get them back here while they’re still hot.”
Hom said, “Tell one of your girlfriends to—” but he slapped her in mid-word. She sat, stunned and glaring at him, barely hearing Miaow crying from the inner room, and then, slowly, she stood up. “If you ever do that again,” she said, “that will be the end. It will be the last time you ever see me. If you don’t believe it, hit me right now. Come on, do it.”
Miaow said, “Mommy,” again.
To her surprise, Daw stretched an arm toward her. She pulled back the hand that was nearer to him, and he leaned forward and took the other one. She started to withdraw it, but he covered it with both of his, gently, and she stopped resisting. For the first time in months, they looked into each other’s eyes.
Finally, he said, “I’m sorry.” His glance skittered down to the floor and came back up again. “I’m worried and, I don’t know, frightened.” He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he said, “Maybe it’s the pills.”
Something inside her clenched itself tight, but she pushed it away. She looked at him, registering the changes in his face: heavier, more blunt, less finely formed. Older. She sat back down. “Do you think so?”
He said, “Are you happy?”
“No,” she said, biting back what she wanted to say about his absence, the perfume, the other women. He had come to her, and the least she could do was listen.
“Let’s try it,” he said. “Let’s throw them away, all of them.”
Miaow called out again, and this time, Hom said, “Just a minute, sweetheart. I’ll be right there.”
Daw said, “Can we do this?”
“Why would I—” she said, and then she abandoned the sentence and sat completely still. She was looking at her lap but she could feel his eyes on her. “I mean, it’s not . . .”
Miaow called her again, obviously on the verge of tears.
“It’s up to you,” he said. “But I’m going to do it. Try to do it.”
Hom felt a feathery little ball of panic in her chest. She had to breathe around it. She said, “I don’t know, I mean, I’m not—” There was something rising in her throat, and she swallowed it once and then again, and when she could speak, she said, “When? Where?”
“Now. In the sink. We’ll throw them in and run water over them.” He got up and went to his drawer and pulled out a cloth bag with a knot at the top. He held it up to her, eyebrows raised. “Yes or no?”
In the moment it took her to find an answer, she had the sensation of something heavy rising up from inside her and escaping into the room; the light seemed just a tiny bit sharper, and she had a sense that it was a long time since she’d taken a really deep breath, the kind that relaxed her all the way to her toes. She shook her head to clear all that away, and said, “Yes.” Then she was up and hurrying into her room. Miaow was sitting with her back against the wall, one rag doll clenched tightly in each hand, looking up at her. “Just a minute, sweetheart,” she said. “Everything’s fine,” and then she went into the little bathroom, feeling like she was walking up a steep hill, lifted the lid of the toilet’s water tank, and peeled away the Ziplock bag she had taped to its underside. Trying not to look at it, trying not to register the familiar shapes and colors. She turned to see Daw looking at her, and, a good two meters behind him and peering around his legs, Miaow.
“Honey,” she said to her daughter, “go over to your dollies for a few minutes. Your daddy and I have something to do.” She stepped to the sink and started the water flowing.
“Plug it up,” Daw said.
She put the plug in the drain and said, “You’re sure about this?”
“I’ll show you,” he said, and he loosened the drawstring on his bag and turned it upside down over the sink.
Hom watched the pills spill into the water. There were a lot of them, and several were new to her, and she felt a quick current of resentment: he’d been keeping them from her. But she swallowed the emotion—something she’d grown used to doing—and exhaled heavily, stepping back a little to avoid getting splashed as he shook the bag empty and dropped it to the floor, and then put his hand in the water and began to stir it. While his attention was on the sink, she worried open the Ziploc and fished out a couple of clean-looking white uppers. She’d eased two of them out and into her palm as he turned to her, and she felt the instant blush of someone caught in something furtive, so she handed them over and went to work on the others, feeling the familiar shapes and weight as she worked them free and passed them on. When the bag was empty, nothing in it but the dust the pills had left behind, she held it upside down in front of him, and he nodded.
She had thought the pills would dissolve quickly, the way she envisioned them doing in her stomach, but they stubbornly retained their shapes as Daw stirred the water with his hands. The colored ones were tinting the water around them, but none of them seemed to be shrinking.
“Wish we had hot water,” Daw said. “That would speed it up.”
“Maybe we should just leave them,” she said. “Let them fall apart on their own.”
He startled her by laughing, although there was no amusement in it. “Might not be a good idea. I might be in here in two minutes with a couple of straws.”
To her surprise, she laughed too. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d laughed together.
He had big, flat hands, like paddles, and he was stirring hard enough and fast enough that water occasionally slopped over the edge of the basin. He leaned down, a little closer to the water’s surface. “Here they go,” he said, and, sure enough, some of them were disintegrating, leaving smoky little trails behind. She stepped closer without being aware that she had done it, and they stood, shoulders touching, watching the whirlpool until he pulled the plug and let the water, not so clear now, drain away into the dark pipes, unrecoverable. When it was gone he took his cloth bag, ran water over it, and mopped the basin several times, rinsing the bag and wringing it out each time until he apparently felt the basin was clean. He licked an index finger, passed it over the porcelain, and licked it again. Then he nodded. “Done.”
He turned and opened his arms to her, and without a moment’s thought she stepped into them and felt them close around her. “Miaow?” she said. “Can you come here for a hug?”
They all went out to dinner for the first time in months, and then went for ice cream. Daw told Miaow she could have anything she wanted, and she said she wanted three flavors: banana, banana, and banana.