Planet Lolita (17 page)

I asked about the first.

“It hasn’t happened yet,” she replied.

“Okay.”

“Please look at me.”

“I’m supposed to be sleeping. Isn’t it late at night now?”

“Please.”

I turned to her. She’d covered her mouth with her hand. I pulled it away, saying it was all right, and tried hiding my shock at her appearance. Is this what adult unhappiness looked like? Super-bright, super-fit Leah MacInnes, a woman among the men getting the goddamn job done, would turn fifty on January nineteenth. Happy B-Day, Mom! Suddenly I doubted we’d be together on that date as a family, or even as mother-daughter.

But I also saw, mirrored in my mother’s glassy irises, a teenage girl betraying in her expression, the hair fallen over her eyes,
perhaps her own sour breath, her distinct variety of distress. The hair, I decided, had to go.

She touched the cavity between my collarbones where I still hadn’t washed since last night. Instead of repeating that I should scrub off the crusted blood, she said, “Do you remember who gave you the cross?”

“Dad, for my First Communion—I think.”

“That was another one. This was a gift from Mother Ginger, the woman who ran the shelter I took you to when you were twelve.”

“Not Dad?”

“I wanted you to see one of the projects that were keeping me away from Hong Kong for such long periods. Hard, honest work, the kind that never induced a single ethical pause.”

“You were funnier then,” I said, meaning “happier.”

“Getting Mother Ginger certified with the Thai authorities, and the international agencies, to give the younger children a chance to find adoption parents, was a very big deal. I was proud to show it to you, show you what could be done for those girls, especially the older, more at-risk ones.”

Just talking about the job she used to do, the causes she once fought for, lifted her voice. I didn’t mind helping her feel better about herself. “Wasn’t Mother Ginger ancient?” I asked. Though I wanted to picture her in my memory, I kept seeing Mrs. Ma.

“She died not long after. A peculiar Englishman with no last name is in charge now.”

“And she gave me this?” I said, forgetting the cross had been stolen.

“She took a shine to you, the way everybody does. You and your father share that gift, although with very different outcomes. And there was a boy there who liked you even more. We
called him Sam. Not his actual, or possibly full, name. He was Cambodian.”

“Sameth,” I said at once. Another face appeared, this time correct. Sam was a gangly boy with a sweet smile and bright dark eyes, tongue pressed between his teeth while he worked on a drawing. He carried a pad around the compound, and liked to sketch people, along with characters from Thai animation and Japanese manga. I tried to contact him once we returned to Hong Kong, but kids in Thai shelters didn’t have Facebook back then, or much access to computers. I also remembered a conversation between us about shoes. He had owned just one pair. “Why was he there?”

“His mother ran the kitchen. They lived in a room behind it, but Sam wasn’t allowed to attend the local school. His Thai wasn’t good enough, and he didn’t have the correct papers.”

“How did we communicate?”

“In English.”

“He was amazing at drawing faces. And the only shoes he had were on his feet,” I said. Knock-off Nike, I recalled, HK$100 in a local night market. The same price as a beach hat, or a baseball cap ordered online.

After chewing her lip for a few seconds—Rachel and I both inherited the habit—Mom explained why she had woken me up. “The shelter is in a village called On Klang, about forty-five minutes by taxi from Chiang Mai. There are several trains out of Bangkok every day,” she said. “Google it in an Internet café under ‘Safe Shelter, On Klang’—though most people still refer to it as Mother Ginger.”

“Why an Internet café?”

“Don’t hate me, Sarah, if you can find it in your heart. I’ve never messed up so badly in my life. This city defeats me, over and over.

I can’t gain any traction here, or feel anything more than a visitor, a foreign ghost. A
gweilo
, through and through.”

Wow. She needed more boosting, more affirmation, than I’d thought. I searched for the best words.

“But I have to believe I’ll be given another chance to prove myself with you,” she added before I could say anything.

“And with Gloria?”

Her puzzlement was genuine.
Don’t, Leah!
My heart, which had plenty of room for her, slammed its door. It must have shown.

“What can I say?” she said coldly, lawyerly.

“Maybe she’ll forgive you, Mom. Or maybe she won’t.” Sliding off the mattress—she could lie on the bed as long as she wanted—I gathered my pillow, comforter, and dog. “And I’m from here too,” I said. “I’m a ninety-ten local girl.”

“Where are you—?”

“To sleep in Gloria’s room. I’m going to stay with her until the end.”

Head bowed by the burden of her own cross, she barely managed a nod.

Don’t, Xixi
, I told myself at the door.
She heard you the first time.
“She’s my Asian mom,” I said regardless.

Next morning I returned to my bedroom expecting to find the MacBook gone from my desk. It was there, but I couldn’t get onto Facebook.
Access Denied
, the screen said. The same was true of FaceTime,
Account Suspended
, and YouTube. I still had email, and found one from Rachel. She must have guessed the police wouldn’t bother blocking such ancient technology.

Lawyer Leah is a piece of work, she’d written, and I, for one, can’t quite recall the “happier” Mom from Stanley village days, baking
muffins and combing our hair or whatever else she thinks she once did. She’s also mega-guilty about everything, from how she earns her fat paycheque to how she gets men to drool over her Ice Queen routine, to my loud-chick personality and, now, your petit mal. And yes, for all her smarts she can’t figure out why she so resents Gloria, which is smack-me-with-a-fish obvious to the rest of us, or why she has failed to stop Cool Kwok from becoming the a–hole that was his destiny. (Hello, he’s just not that into you anymore!) BUTBUTBUT, Baby Kwok, she aches the way you and I ache, and she bleeds the same as every poor girl, and she has basically no chance to pull it all off—be ruthless Lawyer, Supermom, Wifey-wife, and Still-Sexy Bitch in stilettos. Even Guanyin would have trouble balancing on those six-inch heels. No joking. It’s US vs. THEM and it’s YOU vs. HIM, and Mom is our only sure ally, now and forever. PLEASE quit cutting her with your teen-vicious knife. PLEASE show her the same compassion you’d show Manga the Mutt. I’m not sure she’ll survive otherwise.

For calling Dad an a–hole, and for not including Gloria as one of US who ached, and bled, and had impossible demands clasped around her neck, I went teen-vicious on my sister as well. Don’t make a sex tape with Greg, I wrote back. It’ll show up on the Net, whether you post it or not. And oh yeah—Head Tax was basically noise.

“Bangkok,” Dad said on Saturday afternoon, the second day of my incarceration. “It’s just the town for outlaws like us. No masks, no panic, no gloom. No ‘Eye of the Viral Storm.’ We’ll ride the Chao Phraya at sunset seeking saffron-robbed monks. We’ll see if God is paying full, or half, attention to our troubles. And don’t forget the three-legged dogs, Xixi. We’ll hang out with them.”

“Isn’t Bangkok underwater?” I said.

On the front page of the digital edition of the
South China
Morning Post
, below the local headline “Eye of the Viral Storm,” was an article about the weird weather in Thailand. A few years ago the city had flooded for several months, the muddy Chao Phraya and the murky canals spilling over, rain pockmarking tin roofs and spewing up from drains. Now the rains were back, and though not yet a disaster, officials were concerned the city might drown one more time. Before
Access Denied
I had watched it all on YouTube. My favourite video, fifty-two seconds long and streaky from drops, showed a bronze Buddha inside a temple grounds. The Buddha sat cross-legged, a stream tickling his belly button and birds bathing in his lap, and seemed okay with it, okay with everything. I wouldn’t mind finding that temple and sitting next to the Buddha, my own legs crossed. The birds would use me for their bath too.

“Only parts of the town,” he answered. “We’ll buy boots.”

“What will we do there?”

He poured himself another vodka, forgetting to add ice. Cold pimpled my arms and the fog creeping up the slope hid the tram. Still, we had to sit at the balcony table so Dad could drink and smoke and pretend to be working from home again today, rather than serving as prison guard over me and Gloria. “Like I said before—we’ll hang out. Have fun. Leave all this crap behind. I’ve friends there who know how to have fun, and won’t care that we’re from SARSville. Lily Chan and JR Chu, Mint and Gun and even Aroon, who calls himself Pepsi and can be a pain sometimes. You’ll love them, and they’ll fall for you.”

“Mint?” I said. “Is that a name?”

“Thais have these nicknames.”

“Is her boyfriend called Pepper?”

“Huh?”

“Pepper and mint—peppermint?”

“Right. Good one.”

“And if all three of them go out together they’ll be Pepsi-peppermint.”

“On Christmas Day,” he said, not appreciating my joke, “we’ll order turkey with trimmings plus a tom yum soup and a pad-se-ew on the side. How will that be for an East/West mash-up?”

“Do you think Mom should come with us after all? She’ll have to quit her job, but she said she will if I ask her.”

“If
you
ask her?” He was definitely irritated now.

“Dad?”

“In Bangkok we’re just going to
be
, kiddo. Breathe in, breathe out, like everybody else. Let’s go off-grid for a while. It’ll be such a relief—for both of us, I bet.”

“I’m already off the grid,” I said. “No more Finding Mary.”

“Did they take down your page?” he said, doing a bad job of playing innocent.

“It’s blocked. Gone for good, probably.”

“It is.”

“Wow.”

“The police saw to it. They said it was necessary.”

“Constable Chu is an evil ninja.”

“I liked him better,” he agreed.

“He was a kind-hearted ogre!”

“You can build a new Facebook page later. And get your phone back.”

“But my phone is right there,” I said, indicating it on the table.

“For the moment it is.”

I said nothing.

“Until things are clear. Until they’re safe,” Dad said.

“I don’t even want to talk to Mary any longer. I don’t know who she is.”

He looked at me, not warm, not cold either. Cool, without being Cool Kwok.

“Honestly,” I added. “What I did was pretty weird. I get that.”

He continued looking. “Events are in motion, Xixi. They’ll have to play out now.”

Kill-me-bored, isolated from everyone outside the apartment and even those within it, I’d hatched an alternative plan. “We could all fly to Toronto instead and meet up with Rachel. Mom too. The grandparentals have an empty mansion—we could do Christmas there.”

Dad didn’t like that one bit. “Do you know how much I had to pay for our plane tickets?” he said. “And it’s minus ten today in Toronto. Who’s the girl who’ll never take snow into her heart?”

I shook my head.

“The second-to-last time we were in Canada, visiting my parents at Chinese New Year, you complained pretty much non-stop about the cold and snow. ‘I’ll never take snow into my heart, Dad,’ you said to me in the car. I was impressed.”

“What did I mean?”

Finally, he switched back to Cool Kwok, especially the smile. “That you’re Xixi, not Sarah. That you belong here, not there.”

“I say strange things.”

He glanced over at the sliding doors in case someone was standing in the living room, observing and judging him. But the only other human in the apartment was Gloria, and she hadn’t left her amah cell since we returned from Mong Kok three days ago, except to be interrogated by Senior Inspector Shrek and Constable Evil Ninja, and swallow bites of the too-salty chicken adobo that I cooked for her. She wouldn’t sit to eat, watching the kitchen doorway in case either parent appeared. Tomorrow she would be flying to Ninoy Aquino Airport in Manila, and then taking first
one bus to Calamba, an ugly ride south through slums and poor towns, and then another forty-five-minute trip past gorgeous Mount Makulot into Batangas City. Tomorrow her life in Hong Kong would be ending, and though she didn’t believe me when I said it, my life here would be over as well.

“What else have you been talking about with Gloria? You’ve slept in her room these past nights—without, I hope, trying to squeeze into that narrow bed.”

Was he tricking me into saying more that could be used against her? “I sleep on the floor,” I answered slowly. “We hold hands until one of us dozes off. She doesn’t grind her teeth, which is good.”

“But you’ve been talking …?”

“I wish.” A sob almost escaped my chest.

“This has been pretty rough for her, eh?” Dad said.

The parents had to be told about Miguel. It was their best chance at redemption. Suppose I kept my word to Gloria, and they found out after she was gone and said, “If only we’d known about her troubles, we’d never have fired her and would have let her go home for a month, even after what happened!” Then I’d have committed the biggest mistake, and greatest sin, by far.

“Miguel is in serious trouble,” I said.

“Who’s Miguel?”

“Gloria’s oldest son. He quit school and joined a gang. He’s—”

“There are two boys, right?” Dad said. “The other is pronounced
Hey-zeus?
”

“She has to save him before it’s too late.”

“Is this more ‘Jesus Talks Filipino’ crap? Those people dive way too deep into the evangelical stuff. That baseball cap she wore …,” he added, shaking his head.

To get away from the feelings that were souring my tummy
and watering my eyes, I told him I had to email my sister—unless that account had also been suspended.

There was another message in my box.

Cool Kwok is messed up about the most basic stuff, Rachel wrote. He thinks he’s Soi Cowboy when he’s really Markham Mall. He thinks he’s gangsta-rough but is pretty-boy puffball. Okay, so I’m writing this after two beers and a killer joint, which is what a girl needs to survive an hour of sitar-mandolin drones with a smile stuck to her face. And the most important fact to register? Dad’s a dick. Literally. He has one, ergo, he IS one. It makes them stupid. It keeps them—sorry to keep saying it—a–holes. He’s going to lose it and he won’t even know that’s what he’s doing. Why else do you think he’s so keen to spend the Xmas holidays in Bangkok—X, or XXX, being the key letter? That city is a permanent GREEN LIGHT for guys who want to show their DICKNESS, their A–HOLENESS, in full. Okay, so I’m worried about what you’re going to witness, have to avert your gaze from. Worried how you’re going to be expected to handle it, live with it, forget that you’re seeing it—another thing men expect of women, never mind if they’re still kids.