World And Town Part 23

The third lesson, Gift is awake and hurling things. Having just discovered that he can walk and throw things at the same time, he picks up the remote control and throws it. Next, a bottle opener. Next, a bunch of keys. A-meh! he shouts, Ma! A-meh-meh-mam-mam-mam. His chest is streaked with drool, his face bright with naughty delight. Still, Mum calmly opens the kitchen window and sets out a dish of dried mango, leaving it to Chhung to make loud scary noises-hecq! hecq! He leans forward, raising a threatening hand when Gift tries to touch one of the figures on the TV stand. But Gift just laughs and reaches for a porcelain basket instead.

Mum frowns.

"Do you want to meet another time?" Hattie asks.

Chhung shouts. Gift goes running out of the room, his diaper hanging half off. Meh-meh-ma-maa! Chhung glowers. Mum leans forward-to comment on all this, Hattie thinks. But, no.

"Why," she says, instead "Caa."

Hattie thinks. "The white car? Is it back?"

"Frren," Mum says. She closes her eyes, shaking her head.

"You are worried about Sarun. His friends."

"Wor-ree," she says clearly. A word she knows.

"He's upsetting your husband."

Mum nods, pensive. She presses hard between her eyes with her thumbs, her other fingers spread-eagled, then lets her hands fall to the table. "Chiouw?"

"Child? Me? Yes. I have a son."

"He-ahr?"

"Here? No," says Hattie. "He lives far away. Far far away."

"Gone?"

"Gone? Yes. He's gone."

Mum takes this in. Her face is smooth as a girl's, but her glance is a mother's gaze, appraising and thoughtful. She has brilliant dark eyes, with wonderfully clear whites.

"Chiouw gone," she says. "No ..." She hesitates.

"Stay?"

"Staay," says Mum. "No staay."

"Do children stay in Cambodia?"

Mum nods.

"It's hard here, you're right. The children don't stay."

"Mo-der, fa-der ..." Mum stops.

"Yes. Mother, father are alone here. The children don't stay. The children go." Hattie speaks clearly and slowly. "The children go."

"You, sef?"

"Do I live by myself? Yes."

Mum shakes her head. "Hahd."

"Yes, it's hard. Quiet." Hattie continues to speak clearly. Slowly. "You do everything yourself. Decide everything yourself. Eat by yourself." She smiles a little, though she can see it would be all right if she didn't-that it would be all right with Mum. "Some people like it but I find it hard."

"Hahd," Mum says again, sympathetically. "Sarun."

"Sarun."

"Why. Caa."

"Sarun is getting in the white car."

"Sophy."

"Sophy, yes."

"Brew. Caa."

"Sophy is getting in the blue car."

Mum shakes her head.

"It's hard." Hattie doesn't know what else to say. "I'm sorry."

They should really work some more before Gift comes back. And Hattie has a lesson book for Mum in her bag; she should get it out. But instead they just sit a moment, two women at the same table. It's quiet.

Now Mum huddles with Gift. Chhung drinks. The TV is loud.

"Are we having a lesson today?" asks Hattie.

No one answers. The kitchen window is closed; the air is full of smoke.

"Sarun?" asks Hattie.

Mum nods, stroking Gift's hair; he gnaws on her shoulder.

"Do you want to go look for him?"

Sophy bursts into the trailer with her backpack. She glances over at Hattie as she heads to her room-not intending to say h.e.l.lo, apparently-but then stops, realizing that Mum has started to cry. Chhung says something in Khmer; his finger slices the air.

"I don't care what happens to him," Sophy says.

Still, they all pile into Hattie's car-even Sophy, and even Chhung, who seats himself in the front pa.s.senger seat. He rolls his window down, sticks his elbow out, and lights a cigarette. No back brace today; he could reach for his shoulder belt easily enough. Hattie does not dare ask him to buckle up, though. Neither would she say no to Sophy, probably, if Sophy asked for a Christian radio station, but happily she does not ask. Instead, they listen to a talk show: It's the cities everyone's worried about-all those subways that can be bombed, all those communications that can be jammed, all those reservoirs that can be poisoned. Will people be moving out of the cities with time? Will they be moving to towns like Riverlake, seeking haven? Hattie can only hope not as she makes a quick round of the Come 'n' Eat, the skate park, the lot with the hoop back behind Town Hall. The library. The town beach. Millie's. It's a gray fall day, with mist that hangs like something in a Chinese landscape painting-the sort of s.h.i.+fting, breathing layer you get with wet paper and a soft brush. A loose wrist, a little luck.

No luck.

"Maybe we should call the police?" says Hattie.

No answer.

"Maybe we should call the police?" she says again.

Stonewalling.

"You know," says Hattie, "if you people don't want to help yourselves-"

"We can't call anyone because the police in our old town could come after us," says Sophy, finally. "After me, because I ran away and after them because of the 51A." She explains.

"But if they left before it was filed?" asks Hattie.

"In case it got filed, I guess." Sophy shrugs. "It's not, I don't know-"

"Rational?"

Sophy is quiet again but then asks, "Is that like 'sensible'?"

"Sort of. It's more like 'reasonable.' "

Sophy thinks. "It's not, like, rational."

And though Hattie is the enemy, Sophy does meet her eye in the rearview; and in that glance, Hattie at least recognizes, for a moment, the Sophy she knows.

She takes a good look.

They head back home to a terrible wait. Happily, they are in a wet spell-the first one after a dry summer. There is wind and rain to distract them, the pounding relentless at night, and the morning a distraction, too, what with its fast-moving clouds and its sense of letup and change.

Only fools hope things last, Joe used to say.

Hattie hasn't been painting much, but now to kill time she starts working on some bamboo in snow-trying to convey the weight of the snow. Of course, the snow is just the white page, actually-a judicious absence of ink. The weight of it's all suggestion-a matter of bending stalks and burdened leaves, and of using these things to trick the eye into "seeing." It's the sort of trickery they were always interested in at the lab for what it said about how people saw-for what it told them about how the brain put things together. But her interest is different now; she thinks and works, trying to forget about the Chhungs. Why should she care about the Chhungs? When, look! What a good heavy load she's evoked-wet snow, it seems. Spring snow, such as would have represented the spiritual hards.h.i.+ps of the literati, in her father's view. The burdens borne by scholars like himself who "retired" rather than collaborate with a foreign invader-yn sh, who were strangers, in many ways, in their own land.

If only the Chhungs would call the police.

Da gun. She paints.

It is a full week before, finally, on a day of real sun, with bright, leaf-littered roads and dark, newly nude trees-hallelujah!-Sarun reappears.

"Where was he?" asks Hattie, over tea and candy.

"Can-a-da." Mum's face is so girlish with relief, she looks like Sophy.

"Canada? What was he doing in Canada?"

"Eat frut," she says.

"Frroot." Chhung, behind them, enunciates carefully.

"Eat fruit?" guesses Hattie. "Like pears and apples?"

Mum nods, smiling. The window is open; she lifts her face as if smelling a breeze.

"Have a lot fruit up there," explains Chhung. "More fresh."

"The fruit is fresher."

"Cambodian like to go there eat. America fruit no good. No tay."

"No taste."

He gestures at his nose, his eyes jumping excitedly. "No smell." He grins his lopsided grin. "Like baiseball."

Baseball.

Hattie laughs at this rare joke as Mum produces a durian, which to Hattie smells as rotten as the durians in the United States-like something you wouldn't want to step in, much less bring home special. Still, Mum slices it open with pride. Six quick slices, top to bottom, with their big kitchen knife, and there: the fruit opens like a petaled flower. There is a fingered ma.s.s in the middle, which proves delicious; Hattie smiles her approval as Mum shows off a big bowl of other fruit, some of which Hattie recognizes: Tamarind. Pomelo. Dragon fruit, lychees, jackfruit. Things Hattie hasn't seen in decades, and is excited to see again.

"Like it?" asks Chhung, his eyes going.

"Yes," says Hattie. "I like it very much."

Over Hattie's objections, Mum slices open a green mango, too, offering this to Hattie along with an orange-colored salt; Hattie dips.

"Delicious," she says. Chhung beams. "Cambodian like fruit."

"Of course they do." Hattie eats. "Chinese people, too."

Chhung's eyes crinkle with pleasure.

"The kids bring the fruit back?"

Chhung nods.

Is that legal? Never mind. "So at least you know what he's doing and where he's going," she says.

Mum nods, too, then, real relief on her face. Chhung, though, suddenly laughs, his s.h.i.+rt pocket heavy and swinging; he puts a hand up to steady it.

Carter and Sophy are laughing, too, as Hattie walks by with Reveille. She tries to hum. The last time she went Cato-hunting, he was stuck in a closed-up bas.e.m.e.nt; she found him with a dead bat in his mouth and perfectly fine. This time, though-well, how much more likely that he's collapsed of old age or been nabbed by a fisher. Those fisher being fast and vicious, after all; they can flip a porcupine and gash its stomach in a wink. A thirteen-year-old dog with arthritis wouldn't stand a chance against one. And if Cato has indeed been nabbed, well, he wouldn't be the first of her dogs to go over the years. Hattie's prepared.

Still, she's finding this a grim walk from which she'd love distraction. The fields are certainly a help, with their great weaves of white and purple asters-the wild apple trees, too, with their rings of fruit at their bases, like Christmas tree skirts. Hattie breathes deep as she pa.s.ses them. The air smells like cider. And the mountainsides! Those leaves could break a stone with their brilliance. All those red maples.

But to drop in on the musicians-impossible.

And yet there goes Reveille, anyway, bounding down the driveway to Sophy, who laughs and lets him put his muddy paws on her lap; he dots her sweats.h.i.+rt with paw prints. Hattie follows hesitantly. But then-lo!-just like that they are pitched into the kind of accidental peace that makes you realize how easily people could stop being themselves if they could.

"I want you to listen," says Carter. "Come on, now, Sophy, let's hear it nice and loud. The way you just played it."

"Okay. This is 'Turn, Turn, Turn,' " she says. "The words are from Ecclesiastes, I think."