27
It lasted almost two weeks, two endless, itchy, irritable, bite-the-tongue-and-breathe-deeply weeks during which she found herself sidestepping sudden flares of anger as she would puddles on the sidewalk. On the thirteenth day—at a time when, before the supervisor let her go, she would have been at the sorting table, thinking about lunch—she was instead (she told herself) straightening Daw’s room, and, naturally, that meant that she had to hang up his trousers. He had four pairs, all jeans, and the three he wasn’t wearing were—in the order in which she spotted them—crumpled on the floor, wadded up on top of his drawer unit, and dangling from a coat hanger he’d slipped through a belt loop. That was the one, she decided, he’d thought she’d be least likely to handle.
That was the one with the pills in the pocket.
A sparkling little bouquet. Five, in all. Two of the tidy, immaculate white speedies that had gotten her started in the first place, one sleeper, one she couldn’t identify, and an orange tablet she recognized as yaa baa, which she hadn’t yet tried. The guy who worked in the kitchen and sold her most of her pills had told her not to mess with it until she knew she could either be alone for a few hours or in the company of people she trusted who had taken it before. “It’s a big one,” he’d said. “You want to be a little careful at first.”
For a moment Hom was startled by how deeply the discovery of Daw’s deception upset her, how sad it made her feel. Then she felt a surge of anger that he was keeping the pills from her, followed by a sudden impulse to get revenge by swallowing all five at once and seeing where they would take her. But no, he’d be furious; he might even hit her, and, anyway, she had to go pick up Miaow pretty soon. At the notion of going out, a little insect hidden somewhere in her mind rubbed its long legs together in anticipation. Once she was out, she could get her own. The energy churned inside her. She put the pills back, took a quick look through the window, saw that it was drizzling and that it might be a prelude to something more dramatic, and grabbed an umbrella. At the last moment, she remembered to get a little rain cape for Miaow.
First, a stop at the restaurant for a quick buy from the guy in the kitchen (and a nod and smile for Chai) and then, with the pills secure in the pocket of her jeans, a quick swing by Sonya’s for the child. She could wait to take the uppers until tomorrow morning, she thought, but she’d sleep like the dead that night.
And she did, that night and the nights that followed. With the weeks blurring into months, with no one tracking the time, she and Daw became silent partners, never acknowledging in so many words they were both complicit, that they had chosen their path together. There was a new feeling of freedom about it, a sort of mutual abandon, something like a shared commitment. They no longer hid their pills from each other. They sat together through long nights, bristling with words and ideas, laughing and talking over one another, launching themselves into new experiences as they never had before, comparing notes on the pills, developing a connoisseur’s vocabulary. When things went bad, they eased each other through it. They were, Hom discovered, closer than they’d even been. He became the scout, discovering and bringing home new adventures, especially new painkillers, and she chipped in, sometimes with money scooped from the register at the restaurant because they were spending almost as much as they were earning.
They could no longer afford to keep Miaow at Sonya’s, so she was home all day and all night, “underfoot,” as Daw sometimes complained. Sensing that she was excluded from something she didn’t understand, Miaow located and claimed the empty corners of the apartment’s two rooms, the spaces her parents never used.
As her mother and father formed a new, overenergetic team, Miaow withdrew even more deeply into herself, more silent with every passing month and season. Largely unobserved, she grew taller and more slender, her plump baby features giving way to a distinct, and even striking, face, although it was usually tilted downward, toward the floor. She became comfortable, or so it seemed, with her invisibility. Being alone, occupying her solitary corners became her obvious preference. She backed away from hugs, avoided eye contact, and often answered questions in a whisper, as though making more noise than that would draw attention to her or, perhaps, prolong the interaction. Or, as Hom sometimes realized with a squeeze of pain around her heart, make her or Daw angry.
For company, Miaow clung to the tatters that were all that remained of her two rag dolls, and she spent much of her time in the back room with them, engaged in a murmured three-way dialogue, improvising plays in which she assigned all of them, including herself, names and clearly defined roles. The plays were usually about things she had seen and done, and sometimes the dolls had the names of people she had met: Sonya and her helper or kids who had been staying at Sonya’s when Miaow did. Miaow used a different voice or whisper for each person, and the characters weren’t limited to the dolls; she would invent spirited exchanges between windows and doors or among dinner utensils. Whatever the play of the moment, it ceased the instant the door was opened and the spell shattered. She usually hid the remnants of the dolls behind her, as though she thought they might be taken away.
Slowly, she grew an invisible shell. She obviously dreaded Hom’s occasional seizures of guilt, almost operatic in their intensity; she often talked softly to herself as Hom promised her that everything would change. She usually had to be asked a question twice before she would answer, and when she did, it was often a monosyllable, barely audible.
As Miaow sealed herself off and floated into her whisper world, Hom fretted. With no day job except for her full-day waitress shift on Saturday, and the ever-increasing cost of the pills, she found herself missing the hours at the sorting table, not solely because of the money, but also because she felt trapped in the apartment day after day with no one who understood her state of mind. She chafed at her solitude even when she was caught up in the wind-tunnel energy of an amphetamine project or luxuriating in the trapped-in-amber languor of the pain pills. In between those high points, she was bored and resentful or jittery and short-tempered, staring out the window and at the ugly soi, wishing she were down there or, really, anywhere. But, she told herself, there was nothing she could do; she was stuck there, with a child who barely acknowledged her, who rejected her, until Daw got back, which he usually did just before she had to leave for the restaurant. It became more and more important for her to get to work on time; she wasn’t as polite and patient with customers as she had been, and she knew she was no longer the management’s pet waitress.
Even Chai was gone. He’d found a better job, cooking at a nicer restaurant. He had come by to see her three times, the two of them sitting in their old booth, but it was clear that the attraction between them had evaporated, at least on his part. Several times, halfway through a long and—she thought—interesting answer to one of his questions, she saw his brow furrow, and she realized that he had lost her thread. And, at least once, so had she; when this happened he looked at her as if he wasn’t quite sure who she was. So he stopped coming. The girls from her old job had stopped coming, too, for some reason and so, other than the money, she no longer had any cause to look forward to the restaurant. In fact, the only thing it had to recommend it was that it wasn’t the apartment, where time often felt as thick and slow as sludge.
When Daw was late coming home, which wasn’t as frequent as it had once been, she towed Miaow down the hall to a single room occupied by a thin, tired-looking woman with two small children of her own. Each time, Hom gave her a few baht and a promise that Daw would be home in an hour or two, which he generally was. Occasionally, though, he came in later, or he neglected to retrieve Miaow, and that always cost Hom a little extra and sometimes led to a sharp exchange with the woman, whose children kept baby hours, up with the sun.
As the days folded into each other, sometimes quickly, sometimes agonizingly slowly, Hom’s world often seemed to be encased in thin glass that shone with a hard, sugary glitter, accompanied by the sense—especially when she was on the pills’ downslope—that everything around her was breakable. She sometimes envisioned herself rapping her knuckles on the air in front of her and watching the cracks spread in all directions. Often she would suddenly come to herself, not quite sure what she’d been doing, as though she’d been sleepwalking. When that happened there was usually a bolt of panic as she tried to put together the pieces of the time she’d lost, tried to find the thread of whatever activity had taken her to where she was standing or sitting. In these moments she felt entirely adrift. There seemed to be nothing to connect her either to the girl she had been in the village or to the child sitting silently in the corner.
Increasingly often, she woke in the middle of the night, when the speed that had pushed her through the day had faded away and been replaced by the soft cushion of the sleeping pills or the pain medication. At those moments, undistracted by the scattering of her energy, she would realize, as though it were a new discovery, how little attention she had been paying to Miaow. I could have taken her out today, she would think. She won’t be this age forever. She won’t always want to be with me. By the time I was seven or eight, I didn’t want to be with my mother. Anybody was more interesting than my mother. And the next day, she might or might not remember her resolution, but if she did and if the weather was dry and if nothing more pressing claimed her attention, she would take her daughter out. But Miaow dragged her feet, looking at the ground and lagging behind much of the time, as though she wanted to turn around and go home, so Hom would abandon the plan.
In fact, she felt as though Miaow had shut her out. When all three of them were together, Miaow stayed in the other room, and when she was with them—at mealtimes, mostly—she usually seemed to be pretending to be alone. When they caught her gazing at one or both of them, she looked away, as though she’d been doing something she shouldn’t. She kept her eyes on the floor or, if they hadn’t taken them away from her so she could eat, on the dirty remnants of her rag dolls. Often, Hom had to address her two or three times to get a response. When Miaow did engage with them she was demanding and querulous, resistant to requests or orders, and often burst into tears over nothing, or so it seemed to Hom. Once, when Miaow was being fractious and Hom was trying to quiet her to prevent Daw from losing his temper, she remembered the silent baby she had carried through the forest, and when that image came to mind she sat beside Miaow and wept. Her tears frightened Miaow, who backed away, crablike.
It wasn’t as though she didn’t realize, at unpredictable, scattered times, that she needed to change the way she was living. Sometimes when she woke in the morning—in the bright, quiet interlude before the day picked her up and had its way with her—she found herself remembering her sisters: how close they had been and how their mother was always there, almost, at times, a fourth sister. She was there even (and, often, especially) when they wanted her to leave them alone, leave them to make their own mistakes: to stay out long after dark and get devoured by mosquitoes; to jump into the paddy at night and catch cold; to break an arm, as Hom had done when she was twelve; and, in one instance, to be chased right up to the front door by an unknown man who might have been crazy. Her childhood had been loud, it had often been disorderly, but it had never been lonely. The village had laughed about Hom’s mother’s attempts to manage her rambunctious gaggle of girls, jokingly predicting dire futures for them and calling the sisters the terrorists; but there had been a kind of glue there, holding them together when they were fighting with each other.
She had expected to feel that glue between her and Miaow. Even when Hom’s own mother was at her angriest or most distracted, it was impossible not to feel the warmth of her love for her daughters. As much as Hom wanted to believe that the distance between her and Miaow was at least partly Miaow’s fault—that Hom had simply given birth to an unemotional child—she could only believe it when the pills were at work. In the moments when they had no claim on her, she was defenseless against the icy waves of guilt she felt. Very occasionally she would surface from sleep in the middle of the night to hear Miaow’s slow, even breathing two or three feet away, and she would roll over and light the candle to look down at her sleeping child. It was always the same reaction, a kind of amazement at the perfection of the thick lashes, the fine, fragile sculpture of her nostrils, the flawlessness of her skin; and then, as she watched, the image of Hom’s mother or of her oldest sister, who most resembled their mother, would float up through the landscape of Miaow’s face and establish itself there. When that happened, a kind of heaviness would declare itself in Hom’s chest and spread rapidly outward, as sudden and unexpected as a flock of birds erupting from a thicket, and sometimes Hom would begin to weep. And when she did, Miaow would open her eyes slowly and, without rolling over or looking away, scoot farther from her mother, until she was at the edge of the candlelight. As long as Hom remained awake, Miaow’s eyes would be open.
Each time, the sleeping pill would eventually pull Hom down again, but the memory was always vivid when she woke the next day. Those were the mornings on which she was most likely to promise herself that she would change the way she was living.
And she meant it, every time. But always, by midday, when the morning cocktail of pills was doing its work, she would find herself mentally counting the ones that remained and, eventually, checking the bag to make sure.
As money got tighter, Hom tried to impose a kind of discipline on how much went to her habit and Daw’s, jamming a small fistful of baht into the hip pocket of her jeans after she was paid at the restaurant and limiting herself, in her dealings with her suppliers—she had several by then—to the money she carried up front. Three or four times, always promising silently to make it up next time, she augmented her salary by palming some of the tips she was supposed to share with the staff, and twice, when a customer was too drunk, she thought, to count his change, she short-changed them. One of them privately shamed her the next evening by pushing over to her, just before he left, the precise amount she had stolen. She stood beside the table as the door closed behind him, her face burning. The fear she felt about the thefts was unpleasant, but it was nothing compared to the tamped-down, pressurized panic that filled her when the plastic bags were almost empty.
Even with the occasional theft and her attempts to limit her spending, she and Daw had less money every week. Daw’s pay from the moving company was shrinking, and he was complaining about the way he was being treated. This meant that additional weight fell on her to come home with the essentials, the mixed bag of speed, painkillers, and sleepers that got them from one day to the next. Painkillers had become her favorite of them all. They wrapped her in cotton, dulled the edges of her fears and her worries, lessened the shock she felt when she looked at the gaunt, sharp-featured woman in the mirror, and silenced the nagging voice inside her that told her it wasn’t enough to stop sometime in the future; she had to stop now. They had to stop now.
One night she came home, tired out and shaky, to find, yet again, that Daw hadn’t returned and that Miaow was still with the woman up the hall. She felt a hot bloom of fury; she had only a few baht left. When the woman opened the door, Hom saw Miaow on the floor across the room and was astonished to realize—as though it had all taken place while she wasn’t looking—how much her daughter had grown. Miaow was laughing as she played with the babies, one of whom was a toddler, while the other had obviously just mastered crawling. When the woman shook her head, as though in rejection of whatever excuse Hom was going to make, Hom gave her a look that drove her back a step, blinking like someone who had been slapped. At that moment the spell was broken; whether it was the woman’s sudden movement or a delayed recognition that the door had opened, Miaow glanced up at them, and as Hom watched, the happiness drained from her child’s face and was replaced by the closed, inward-looking expression Hom had grown used to. The woman reached over and curled Hom’s fingers back over the money and said, “I just wanted to say that you don’t have to pay me. Miaow is such a delight, and my kids love her so much. I feel like I should be paying you.” Miaow’s eyes had gone to the woman as she spoke, but the moment she felt Hom’s gaze she looked back down at the floor. Then, so slowly she might have weighed a hundred kilos, Miaow got up.
Hom followed her down the hall until they reached their door. As Hom unlocked it, she put her hand on Miaow’s shoulder, but Miaow shrugged it off, went into the back room, and closed the door behind her. Hom didn’t even know she was weeping until she saw the room swimming in front of her. She stood there, hand over her mouth, looking at the closed door and trying to decide what she should say, how to begin. If she could only find the first five or six words, the exactly right words, she was certain, all the rest would come to her. In the end, she dried her face, filched a Korean imitation of Oxycontin from her husband’s stash, and sat on the couch to wait for him to come home. By the time he did, she didn’t feel quite so bad.
Two weeks later, Daw was fired from his job.