35
When the phone rings early the next morning, he rolls over blindly to grab it from the glass-topped table beside the couch, and falls out of his and Rose’s bed, hitting the edge of the night table with his hand and bringing it down on top of him. The phone slides off and lands on his right cheek, and he grabs it even before he does a damage assessment and croaks, “Hello?”
“Wow,” a woman says in English. “Guess I woke you up.”
“Guess you did.” Frank is crying, probably frightened by all the noise, and Miaow is suddenly in the doorway, her eyes so puffy they might have been stung by bees, saying, “You guys fighting already?”
“Who are you fighting with?” says the woman on the phone. “Oh yes, sorry, this is Jillian Trelawney, lives next door to Mr. Campeau? There’s someone in the apartment.”
Rafferty is feeling a bit blurry from lack of sleep, and his head hurts. “In your apartment?”
“No, silly, in his. Would I call to tell you there’s someone in my apartment? I’d be celebrating it privately. But next door, in his, I can hear them moving around.”
Rose is up now, bent over the baby, and Miaow goes over, a bit gingerly, and stands beside her.
“Oh, Lordy, you’ve got a baby,” Jillian Trelawney says. “Bad on me. But, still . . .”
“I’ll come over in a bit,” Rafferty says. “Push your bed against the door.”
“Oh, no, really?”
“No,” he says, “not really,” and he hangs up.
He reaches back and pulls the bedsheet on top of him and then wraps himself in it yet again, feeling like he could probably get rich designing a line of sheets with snaps or Velcro or something for men who are never allowed to wake up naturally. Miaow says, with her back to him, “I’ve been thinking.”
“Really,” Rafferty says. He’s up and working on his hemline.
“That picture,” she says, and she grabs a breath, “you know, that picture?”
“I know the picture,” he says, and Rose shoots him a glance that, while somewhat fond, quite clearly means shut up.
“Well, I was thinking,” Miaow says again. “Ummm, it’s not hard to see that it’s me, right? And that it’s—it’s her, I mean, even though it was so long ago. Right?” She sniffles and swipes furiously at her nose.
“I could see it,” Rose says.
“Well, what I was thinking was—I mean, why don’t we use that to, you know, prove she was my mother and, and that way we could, ummm, we could make sure she gets a funeral, some kind of good funeral, with monks chanting and . . .”
Rose says, “We’ll do it. We’ll all three go down there, and—”
Rafferty says, “I can probably do it through Arthit.”
“Well, then,” Miaow says, and she looks down at her feet.
“If anyone had ever told me,” Rafferty says, “that my daughter was as smart as she is good-hearted and beautiful, I would probably have said it wasn’t possible.”
Miaow, who is thermometer-red, says, “You’re so corny.”
“What?” Campeau growls as he opens the door. Then he’s blinking rapidly at Rafferty. “Oh, it’s you.”
“Getting a lot of Jehovah’s Witnesses?”
Campeau sees what Poke is looking at and yanks his hand, which has been holding the door, out of sight. The thick gauze bandage around his wrist is professional and neatly done, but dirty enough to need changing.
“We were worried about you.”
“Who’s we?”
“Your landlady, Toots, the woman next door. Trix.” He watches Campeau’s eyes widen in something that might be panic, grabs a quick breath, and says, “Me.”
“Woman next door—the Australian?”
“She heard a lot of noise the night you left. It frightened her. She knocked on your door a bunch of times the next morning and then called the landlady. Landlady called me.”
“Had a fight with myself,” Campeau says. “We were evenly matched.”
“I know how that is.”
“Do you,” Campeau says. It’s not a question. “Well, listen, I’ve got to—”
“More or less.” He looks past Campeau at the woman who’s just come into view behind him, probably from the bathroom. She’s slender and white-haired, with symmetrical, delicate features and an unusually full mouth. She’s probably in her early seventies, and he’s seen her eyes before. “Good morning,” he says.
Campeau turns as though he hadn’t been expecting anyone to be there. “Oh,” he says. Then, to Poke, he says, “This is, this is Malee.”
“I thought it might be.” To her, he says, “It’s very nice to meet you.”
“This is Poke,” Campeau says. He looks intensely uncomfortable.
“You are friends,” Malee says, looking slightly surprised. Her English is almost unaccented.
“Like this,” Poke says, holding up his index finger and middle finger, pressed together.
“So, uhhh, listen,” Campeau says, “we should all go out sometime, me and Malee and you and, and, um, Rose.”
“Just the four of us,” Rafferty says, wondering how much it’s going to cost him to sell Rose on it. “That would be great. Just great. Well, hey, I don’t want to butt in. Just needed to make sure you were okay.”
“Yup, sure,” Campeau says, shifting from foot to foot. “You bet. Right as rain.”
“Can’t tell you how happy I am about it.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Campeau says, “get out of here.” But he closes the door gently.
He’s no sooner hit the sidewalk than his phone rings. It’s Fon. She says, “You can buy diaper?”