A Nearly Perfect Copy (12 page)

Then she joined him in a frantic search. They hitched a ride to another hospital and looked there. Moira fell asleep and grew heavy in Colin’s arms. She woke up hungry at a third hospital, and Elm accepted God-knows-what that someone handed her to eat.

Bodies were piled up in a row alongside the elementary school. Elm refused to look. Colin let his eyes glaze over; he looked only at height until he saw someone about Ronan’s size. Then he would look at the hair. Only if it was sandy blond, a little too long in back, would he look at the face. He didn’t find Ronan.

Moira began to throw up and retched constantly all through the night. The next morning she looked pale and shrunken. Her skin was sagging and Elm could see she was dehydrated. Elm and Moira got in line for transport to Bangkok, a snake of dazed, disheveled tourists in bright sarongs. Most were barefoot; some wore a single sandal. All had mud in their hair, beneath their nails, streaked across their backs.

“I swear I will find him,” Colin said. It was the first sentence he’d uttered in three days that didn’t involve a description of Ronan or a directive to a stunned Elm. “I will bring him with me and we will meet you in Bangkok. Check in at the embassy and I’ll find you there.”

Inside the cargo plane, strangers huddled together for warmth. Moira had stopped throwing up, but now fluid was leaking from the other end in a consistency that reminded Elm of the meconium babies emit the first two days of their lives until their intestines are clean.

They were met by embassy officials and Elm slept for the first time in three nights, slumped in a chair with her head on Moira’s hospital bed. She had no word from Colin.

Moira was in the hospital for two days receiving intravenous
fluids and antibiotics. There were many worse off than she was. People were missing limbs; people had lacerations to their torsos and organs; people were in comas after having hit their heads. In the hotel room the embassy arranged for Elm to stay in, she sat in the bathtub and cried, rocking back and forth. It was like an organ had been torn from her body, and she found herself cradling a nonexistent hole in her abdomen. There was no air in her lungs; she couldn’t breathe, and yet her heart kept beating, loudly, as if to mock her with its vitality.

During the day, Elm and Moira camped out in the waiting room at the embassy in Bangkok. There was coffee there, safe water, hard-boiled eggs, and Cheerios. Moira was eating solids again. Her face had regained its color and the pain in her leg was bothering her only intermittently.

One of the embassy officials had brought in his teenage daughter and her friends, who supervised the children, drawing and reading to them. The children, understanding the importance of the moment, were silent and obedient. So Elm was able to leave Moira, though the girl clung to her so desperately she had to pry Moira’s hands from around her thigh when she went to meet the embassy official to start a file.

There was a box of Kleenex on the table between the armchairs that served as a makeshift intake station, but Elm didn’t need it. She was too empty to cry, too anxious and worried. She felt continuously as though she were about to throw up, not nauseated, but as though her insides were going to revolt, to turn themselves inside out.

The man who interviewed her followed slavishly a sheet of questions, even when Elm had already answered them. Their conversation was taped. He was large for a Thai man, his hair cut close to his head, and Elm could see an old scar peeking through it from his scalp. His eyes were wrinkled from squinting into the sun.

He said that the fact that she’d heard nothing was because the Red Cross had only just arrived “on scene” and that “communication lines haven’t been established.” He gave her a list of items they would need in the event that they had to identify a body, and a pamphlet about surviving trauma. He handed her an application for a replacement passport. Then he directed her to the phone room, where she had fifteen minutes to call relatives in the States.

The list: copies of their passports, Social Security cards, dental records, hair for a DNA sample, a current photo, and a description of what the missing person was last seen wearing.

The only phone number she could remember was Ian’s, because it spelled out “I-ROCK-U-4.” She woke him up.

“Elm, thank God. You’ve no idea how worried—”

“He’s missing,” Elm said. Now the tears started to flow.

“Colin?”

“Ronan. He’s gone, and I’m in Bangkok with Moira, and Colin’s still looking …” Her words stuck in her mouth.

He calmed her down and promised to get copies of the passports she’d left in her files. He would scan the photo of the family on her desk and e-mail it. He would go to the apartment and make the super let him in and take Ronan’s brush and toothbrush and DHL them overnight. He said he would call their dentist, and repeated back to her the number the Thai man had said to fax the records to. He would do that first thing in the morning.

Next to her a white guy with dreadlocks and faded hemp clothing cried, “Mommy,” into the phone.

“Elm,” Ian said. “Elm, are you there? You’ll be okay, Elm. He’ll be okay. He’s probably with some Thai family in a village or something. There’s no phone service there, right? He’s probably fine.”

“Probably,” Elm said. She hung up.

In Indira’s 1920s bathroom, Elm turned on the old taps to splash her face. When she emerged from the bathroom Ian had returned with the half-and-half, and the two of them were smoking Kools at the kitchen table.

“My girl will be here soon,” Mrs. Schmidt said. “But if you want to poke around, I spend weekends at my studio on the island.”

She meant Fire Island, Elm knew. There had been a profile in
The New Yorker
that detailed the delightful mess of the old house, down the beach from Frank O’Hara’s, an easy row from Pollock and Krasner’s house. But that had been a different time, and her famous neighbors were dead. Now artists stay-cationed at their studio apartments in the Bronx, unable to afford any sort of weekend getaway.

“You still design?” Elm asked.

“Unbelievable, but true,” Mrs. Schmidt answered. She brought the cigarette to her lips and took a drag as it quivered. “I ask my assistant to draw a shape. He draws it in permanent marker on large paper, and I
can see the outline. I make changes, then he makes a model. I can see it then with my hands. I can feel it. Is it sexy? Is it cool? Cool temperature, not the other.”

Elm thought she understood. From just a piece of Ronan she could conjure up his entire existence, the smallest down on his back, the curve of his heel, the roughness of his elbows in winter. A piece of clothing could do it, a drawing he made, even a sock fallen behind a radiator that was retrieved years later. The part invokes the whole; there was a literary term for that. When she learned the term in college, it struck her that it described a phenomenon that she had experienced but been unable to express. It explained how pictures were fine, but a single Lego discovered in the box of crayons was a placeholder for an entire world. How a small toy could cause a pain so deep it felt like a hand was squeezing her heart, so insistent that it was impossible to imagine that she’d ever recover.

In the car on the way back to the office, Ian stretched his long legs out in front of him. “I think I’m in love,” he said. “Don’t you want to be like that when you get old?”

“Lonely and palsied?”

“No, you pessimist. Direct, no bullshit. ‘I’m trying to get rid of you, young man.’ Classic.”

“I suppose,” Elm said.

“Oh, Elm,” Ian sighed. Elm could hear the slight note of irritation in his voice, even as he pretended he was only kidding. There was a silence. “We really should poke around in there.” Ian affected a Slavic accent and caressed an imaginary crystal ball. “I see many weekend days of sifting through unimportant newspaper clippings in our future.”

“Colin will love that.”

“Tell him you’re having an affair.”

“He wouldn’t believe me.”

“Marriage,” Ian scoffed. But, like the note of annoyance she heard earlier, she could see through to the underside of his statement, which admitted a certain envy.

Elm felt grateful that people envied her marriage. Elm even envied it a little; the marriage people thought she had, or the marriage she used to have. Colin was terrific: funny, fun-loving, loving. But she regretted the
loss of their idealized existence. Ronan’s death had taken a toll on their marriage. It made sense to her that many couples split up after tragedy; it certainly hadn’t brought them closer together. Colin assumed the role of clown, desperately trying to cheer Elm up. She mourned for both of them. And then he would lash out at her when she didn’t expect it, his grief bubbling over like soda in a shaken can. They would stay together, she didn’t have doubts about that. But would they ever be close again? Elm felt like she was moving through a fog, that a vast misty plain separated her from everyone else. Ian’s comments only made her more aware of the emergent distance.

“Listen,” she said, changing the subject. “You would have loved the party we went to last week.” Elm described the apartment, the artwork. “And some dealer named Relay who was sucking up like I was a free milkshake practically forced her card on me.”

“I know her,” Ian said. “Do you know she’s Lacker’s daughter?”

“Wait, Tom Lacker?” Elm asked. Tom Lacker owned an influential gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. The hipper downtown branch was on Twenty-fifth Street, and the superhip cousin was in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He had all his bases covered, in other words. He was not about to miss a chance to represent an artist. Supposedly, young artists complained that showing with Lacker was like selling your soul to the devil. He fronted you money for supplies, rent, etc., but then you owed him everything. For life. It would make sense that the woman she met was his daughter. In fact, now that Elm thought about it, she had the same nervous laugh, waiting until you joined in to really titter, to make sure you agreed that something was funny.

“Mephistopheles himself. She is your friends’ adviser?”

“I wouldn’t say they’re my friends,” Elm said. “They’re acquaintances of Colin’s from the gym. Oh, and here’s the really funny part. In the master bath, right over the Jacuzzi tub—pink marble, by the way—hangs this portrait of their dog, Dishy or something. Full oil, photo-realist. It’s hilarious.”

“
Avec
or
sans
bone?” Ian asked.

“And they’re planning on cloning him,” Elm said. “Some European company that clones people’s pets. Is that not the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard?”

“Right up there with assless chaps, and squeeze-bottle cheese. Can they really clone him?”

Elm shrugged.

“I went to college with Relay. We were good friends then. Do you still have her card?”

“Not sure,” Elm said. It had been her New Year’s resolution several years ago to ask if anyone knew the person before Elm got catty about someone. She never quite mastered it.

The cab stopped suddenly as a pedestrian buried in a guidebook failed to notice the red light. “Fucking tourists,” said the cabbie.

“Sometimes I hate New York,” Ian said, with uncharacteristic vitriol.