Thirty-Three

Hours later, Lola was glad she’d opted for the bathroom. She’d wished she’d also asked for something to drink, and—her queasiness having abated—a snack. And maybe something to read. She missed her phone, the old one, the distraction of her Scrabble app. She wished she hadn’t been so quick to toss it.

She suppressed an urge to pace, to fidget. Surely she was under observation. She slouched, propped her chin on her fist, and closed her eyes, willing herself to doze. She hoped at least to give the impression of catnapping, of intense boredom, of anything but the anxiety plucking at her nerves like a harpist on crack.

She thought of all the bad movies she’d seen about Americans moldering in foreign prisons. Worse yet, she thought of the reality that too many of her colleagues in the foreign press corps had experienced—whipped, sexually assaulted, imprisoned for months, sometimes years. She wondered how long it would be before Jan panicked and started making inquiries. And then, exactly how concerned the US Embassy might be about a journalist who’d blatantly ignored the regulations of the host country by traveling on the tourist visa. Her thoughts chased themselves around in circles until she finally did drop off, waking with a start when the door swung inward.

The captain—or whatever his rank—entered first, followed a pair of police officers and the cabdriver, his face knotted in fear, with two more officers behind him.

“Oh, no.” Lola leapt to her feet. “This man did nothing but drive me around. He’s done nothing wrong. You must release him.”

“I tell them,” the driver said. “I tell them, ‘No drugs. She only want this boy.’” He clutched a copy of the photo, stained and crumpled, in his shaking hand.

“No, not the boy … ” Lola wished, far too late, she’d found a driver more fluent in English, one who might better have understood what she sought even if she didn’t entirely understand it herself.

“But we find no boy.”

“No,” she tried again. “I wasn’t looking for the boy.” She stopped. She didn’t know what she was looking for. Only that she’d be sure—maybe—when she found it. But now she wasn’t going to find anything.

“No boy,” the driver repeated. “Just—”

He moved aside, revealing the person behind him.

“Just girl.”

She stood, Hanoi-chic in slim black jeans and heels and a white tailored blouse, cheap and a little worn but clean. Lola guessed they were her best clothes. The girl’s gaze flitted among the policemen and lingered on the captain. She raised a shaking hand and patted a strand of wavy hair back into place.

Lola broke the silence. “You’re from the orphanage?” Too young to be the director. Maybe an assistant director, or a secretary. But someone who might be able to explain what was going on, assuming the driver and police had found the right orphanage. Lola wondered if she spoke English.

“Yes.” So soft as to be almost inaudible.

“The orphanage that is called—” Lola prompted.

“The Kind and Caring Home.”

Nice Home. Gentle Home. Tynslee had been close. The young woman seemed near tears. Lola understood how a visit to a police station could be intimidating, even in the United States where at least lip service was paid to protecting people’s rights. She proceeded gently.

“You work there?”

“Y-y-yes.”

“You know about this boy?”

By now, the photo of Trang was so creased and smeared that his features were nearly obscured. But the woman gazed upon it with such intensity that no answer was needed. Lola stepped to her side and put a steadying hand upon her arm.

“What can you tell me about him?”

“He is my brother.”

She burst into tears.

It took some moments, along with the offering of several handkerchiefs (apparently all the cops carried them) and a cup of tea, to calm her to the point where she could speak.

The cup rattled back into its saucer. The girl, seated now, with Lola in a chair opposite her, reached and took Lola’s hands in both her own. Fresh tears carved new tracks in her careful makeup. Her mascara had long gone to hell. “Please,” she said, “tell me when my brother died.”

Lola forgot her dislike of hugging. She came around the table and drew the young woman into her arms. “Oh, you poor child. He’s alive. Your brother, Trang. He’s alive.”

The tears came harder, and lasted longer this time. Fresh handkerchiefs appeared. Lola imagined a file drawer somewhere in the police station filled with neat stacks of folded, starched cotton squares. The woman finally freed herself from Lola’s embrace and gave her a damp smile.

“Alive? Truly? You have seen him?”

“Yes. I’ll tell you all about it. But first, I suppose I had better learn your name.”

The group decamped to the captain’s office. When Mai calmed further, she explained that the appearance of the cabdriver bearing Trang’s photo had led her to only one conclusion—that her brother had died in America before the reunion of which she’d dreamed for so many years.

Lola asked the captain if the geriatric computer at his desk had internet access, and if she could do a quick search. There, with Mai alternately laughing and crying beside her, she clicked fast past all the reproductions of Trang’s booking photo posted on every media outlet in Salt Lake and several beyond, and pulled up images of Trang in his hockey uniform, at the picnic for adoptees, at various school functions.

“So tall! So handsome! But what is this?” She lingered over a Facebook photo of Trang and Tynslee.

“That is the girl he will marry.”

“Marry? This girl? My brother? Are you sure?”

“Yes. They marry young in Utah. A state—um, a place in the western United States.” Lola sought for ways to describe Utah, and gave up. No way to get across in words the vast, empty aridity of the land to someone who’d known nothing but this country where moisture saturated the air, where “alone,” other than maybe a few moments in a bathroom, remained an alien concept.

“Now you see,” she told the captain. “I wasn’t here to sell drugs or to buy them. You know my hotel. You’ve got my phone. Please return it. Take the number so you have another way to find me if you need to talk to me again.”

He scowled, but he copied the number from the burner phone and handed it over.

The charge was nearly gone, low-battery light blinking red, just enough juice for Lola to note the chain of incoming calls, all from the same number.

Jan.

Jan.

Jan.

The phone blinked a final red warning, then went black.