Thirty

It had been a very long while since Lola had traveled overseas.

She’d nearly forgotten the sense of anticipation that accompanied a trip to a new country, always to the drumbeat of story-story-story. She’d also forgotten the security-line drill. Long gone was her collection of slip-on shoes. She cursed beneath her breath as she bent to untie her hiking boots, tucking the envelope with the SIM card into her bookbag, all too aware of the impatient rustlings of those in the line backing up behind her.

“Got all your liquids out of this?” A TSA operative held up her Dopp kit.

“Um.” Jan had packed her bag for the flight to Salt Lake, but Lola had since mingled her liquids with everything else in the Dopp kit.

“Didn’t you read all the signs? We like people to be prepared. Makes things move faster.”

A man slammed his roller bag onto the belt behind Lola’s duffel and pointedly dropped a baggie full of travel-sized plastic bottles beside it.

“Let me help you with this,” the guard sighed. He pulled lotion and toothpaste and shampoo from Lola’s kit and dropped them into a basket. “What about these?” The baggie with the pills dangled from his hand. “Where’s the bottle they came in? Do you have the prescription for them?”

“Um.” Lola seemed to have misplaced her words along with her travel smarts.

The man behind her coughed. Loud. “I’m going to miss another flight,” said someone else.

The baggie swung. “You need these, or can I toss them?”

“Toss,” Lola managed to say.

“Thank God,” said the man behind her.

As Lola hurried to retrieve her goods, she could have sworn she saw Charlie out of the corner of her eye, smiling in approval.

At least she still had the single pill in her pocket, which—employed for newly benign purposes—responded graciously. The flight attendant had to shake her awake in Seoul, where she spent a layover just long enough to make her think that maybe Jan had had a point about paying attention to one’s wardrobe.

Lola’s years-ago travels had involved frequent layovers in the Dubai airport, where the women travelers, while stylish, had been scarved and robed. But Seoul Incheon was populated by aggressively fashionable women, surefooted in impossible heels, faces masks of impeccable makeup, hair coiffed in swingy styles that somehow looked capable of falling back into place even if tossed about by the gale-force winds of Montana. Lola touched a hand to the tangled mess on her head. She swung on her heel and marched back to a salon she’d seen near a restaurant where she’d eaten lunch.

The stylist spoke little English. Lola mimed what she wanted, making scissors of her fingers, holding them close to her head. When the woman hesitated, Lola took the plastic smock from her hands and fastened it around her own neck. She pointed to the woman’s shears, then back to head, and held her fingers an inch apart.

The stylist shook her head.

Lola took her arm and turned her around, facing the window that looked out onto the concourse. She indicated a passing man, his hair moussed into short spikes.

“Like that.”

The woman’s sigh nearly keened. Her lamentations continued as she sluiced hot water across Lola’s head, rubbed in the shampoo and then the conditioner, and then treated Lola’s scalp to a massage just short of painful. She toweled Lola’s hair and started to work at the curls with a wide-toothed comb. She called to a colleague, a woman with an edgy asymmetric bob, one side barely grazing her ear, the other dipping below her chin.

The stylist touched her hand to her colleague’s hair and smiled hopefully. One last try. “That. We can straighten.” She pointed to a medieval-looking hair press, apparently capable of subduing even Lola’s curls. “Yes?”

“No.” Lola leaned forward, took the shears from the counter, and whacked off a foot-long length of hair.

The women stared, their lipsticked mouths perfect O’s of shock.

Lola handed her stylist the shears. “I’ve started it. You do the rest.”

While Lola had spent years in Afghanistan and elsewhere in Central Asia, along with stints in the Middle East and Africa, Vietnam marked her first foray into Asia proper. A single step outside the airport brought home the difference.

Afghanistan had been hot, summertime temperatures routinely climbing beyond one hundred, with barely enough electricity to power her laptop, let alone a luxury like air conditioning. But at least it was the same sort of oven-dry heat that defined a high plains summer in Montana. Pakistan was more humid, or so she’d thought at the time.

Five minutes in Hanoi, and Lola revised everything she’d ever thought about humidity. She thought of all the clichés—sauna, wet washcloth, dog’s breath—and rejected them as inadequate. She’d had the foresight to switch from a turtleneck to a T-shirt before leaving, but had donned a long-sleeved shirt over it against the plane’s glacial frigidity. By the time she peeled out of it, dark patches of sweat festooned the tee beneath. Her jeans plastered themselves against her legs. Her feet, braising in their boots, wept for mercy. Every pore in her body seemed to have sprung a leak.

She paid for the extravagance of a cab rather than take a bus from the airport to her hotel, craving a bit of near-solitude in which to form initial impressions—and also so that she could quiz the cabdriver, inevitably a font of information, about orphanages. Because she had no idea which orphanage she was looking for.

But she forgot that quest for a moment of unabashed gawking at the city that stretched before her. She’d known better than to expect another Afghanistan, with its villages that seemed frozen in ancient times—their mud homes, their communal wells, their women and children threshing wheat by hand in utter absence of anything signaling modernity. She’d thought Vietnam might be more like Pakistan, rushing toward the future and into the past with equal speed, a schizophrenic mix resulting in a nuclear power that saw more than a thousand honor killings each year.

But, at least at first glimpse, Hanoi was rocketing forward at warp speed, its skyline dominated by construction cranes, with none of the hand labor and rickety tree-trunk scaffolding that characterized building projects in Pakistan. Lola cracked the cab’s window, sniffing for the evocative scent of wood smoke and dung that characterized so many of the places she’d worked. But all she got was a lungful of exhaust and a sharp glance in the rearview mirror from the driver. He cleared his throat. She raised the window.

“Vacation, miss?”

Right. She needed to find that orphanage. I don’t know, Tynslee had said when Lola had asked its name. He always said it in Vietnamese. He said it meant something like nice. Or gentle.

Two words. Along with the photo of Trang, slightly out of register, that she’d clipped from the newspaper and Xeroxed. Now that she was actually in Hanoi, in this taxi islanded by a sea of darting motorbikes, panic gnawed at her. An indistinct photo, a confounding name for the orphanage. She’d just spent more money than she cared to think about on a fool’s errand. And even if she found out what had happened to the sister, how could that possibly help Trang, other than give him peace of mind about her fate, a small bit of comfort during the long years of prison likely facing him?

Pain sliced across her forehead. Goose bumps rose on her arms. Sweat congealed. “Could you please turn down the air conditioning?”

Another look in the rearview mirror. Surely it was the first time a white foreigner had ever made such a request. Lola wrapped her arms around her torso and spoke past chattering teeth. Maybe she’d picked up a bug on the plane. “I’m looking for an orphanage.”

“Orphanage?” the cabdriver said. “You adopt baby, miss? I can take you.” He shot her an assessing glance in the rearview mirror. If he could guide her to the orphanage that provided the baby of her dreams, a large tip likely awaited.

“Trying to find one.” She rubbed her forehead with fingers gone icy. “Not a baby. A boy.”

The driver’s face changed.

“For your husband, maybe? Or, for—” He tapped his heart and whipped the cab to the curb, motorbikes whisking out of its way like a school of fish at the approach of a shark. He turned and spat imprecations in a mix of Vietnamese and English, words indecipherable but their meaning clear. Lola was to immediately remove herself from his cab and catch the first plane back to the United States.

“No, no, no! Wait.” Panic momentarily displaced the headache. She held up one hand and fished through her bookbag with the other, emerging with the sheaf of copies she’d made of the grainy newspaper photo. “This boy. He is fine. He is not sick. He … ”

She couldn’t think of the words, or even the gestures, to convey that she wasn’t after what the man so obviously and needlessly feared—that she was in search of a soft young boy to satisfy her husband’s unnatural urges, or, even worse, a boy with a healthy beating heart or other organs that would replace whatever was failing in her own child. In the research she’d done while waiting for a plane, Lola had read that Vietnam had sharply curtailed adoptions based on false reports that people were acquiring foreign children solely to harvest their organs for transplants into ailing American children.

“He is fine,” she said again. Even though he wasn’t.

He looked at her, and then at the photo. “This boy,” he repeated.

“In America now,” Lola said. “From here. But which orphanage?”

He took a handful of the images. “I find?”

She nodded.

“How much?”

Lola had almost forgotten this part, too. At least she’d had the presence of mind to withdraw nearly all of the cash in her checking account before leaving. She barely stopped herself from pulling out a hundred. The twenty she extended brought an insulted snort and more invective. Negotiations commenced. They settled on a hundred per day, with a bonus if he actually located the right orphanage.

Her chill fled, replaced by heat so intense that for a moment she wondered whether she’d been struck by an early hot flash. Her stomach churned. She’d definitely been bitten by the plane’s microbes. If, indeed, microbes bit. Great. Now she was going woozy.

The cabdriver cleared his throat, awaiting her final answer.

“Three days. No more.” Lola imagined he’d take every last one of those days whether he found anything or not. But at least she could limit the financial damage.