Once We Had a Country (28 page)

That evening, George Ray doesn’t appear in the kitchen to dine with her, and she doesn’t go to check on him. There’s a long list of things to do this weekend before Fletcher returns, but she can’t bring herself to start any of them. Instead, she watches TV and takes in the people on the local news crowing over the hockey win. One of them says God must be a Canadian. She shakes her head and watches late into the night, while the clay statue of Saint Clare stares back at her from the top of the set. The next morning, when Maggie passes by the living room, she glances in at the television with contempt, as if the two of them have shared an ill-advised tryst.

Rain falls hard on the jungle, striking the canopy and collecting into giant drops that crash down on Gordon and the baby. Gordon’s clothes are waterlogged, his hair plastered to his head, while Xang’s little hands are shrivelled from the damp and a stream of yellow mucus runs from his nostrils. He breathes in time with Gordon’s footsteps, the jolts producing wet little whispers of air. Below them, the river tumbles down the gorge, appearing and disappearing through the trees. Sometimes Gordon stops to stare in the direction of the water, but there’s no sign of Yia Pao and little evidence of any life, only a pair of rats at the trailside, both of them enormous with matted black fur, indifferent to him as they gnaw at the innards of a rotting monkey.

The trails Gordon follows are no more than the pathways of animals, criss-crossed with fallen trees and clogged by branches that tear at his skin. A few times he has to stop and set Xang down to clear a way forward. Finally he reaches a place where it seems that a while ago someone went through with a machete, and he’s able to walk more freely while resting Xang against his shoulder.

A hundred yards later, the path jogs. As he completes the turn, he stumbles over something, barely keeping his feet. At the same time there’s a lash of movement, quicker than the eye can follow, and a sound like the flight of an arrow. An unseen force propels him backward, pinning him against a tree.

He doesn’t move, only groans in agony. Slowly, his eyes travel down to his midriff. A long piece of bamboo presses against him there, the end of it neatly sawed off. A spike of metal sticking through it has pierced his body to an unknown depth.

“Oh God,” he says. “Oh Jesus.”

Raindrops stipple the surface of a puddle beneath him. When he tries to shift in place, blood spurts from his body and he stiffens. Xang starts crying, but Gordon doesn’t comfort him, can’t speak. For a long time he stands there, one arm around the wailing child while the other hangs at his side. The blood flows from him until it has soaked his shirt and begins to stain the puddle at his feet.

“Hush,” he whispers at last, then he tries to sing. “Hush, little baby …” He repeats the words before falling silent again.

Branches around him droop under the weight of the rain. After a few minutes Xang gives up his crying. A black rat crosses the path and sniffs the air, looks Gordon in the eye, sizes up the baby.

“I promise,” Gordon murmurs. “I promise, Xang, I won’t let go.”

It’s getting darker. Xang whimpers a little, falls into sleep. Eventually the puddle at Gordon’s feet overflows its edges, and a trickle of pinkish water starts making its way toward the river.

Monday morning, Maggie awakens at sunrise and goes straight to the kitchen for coffee. It’s the second day of October, and there are only twelve hours until Fletcher arrives. At nine she’s tempted to call the doctor’s office, but already she has made herself a nuisance there, and they’ve said they’ll contact her when they know. What else to do? In the orchard she finds George Ray mending the wire fence that keeps out deer, and she asks him if he has any jobs for her. He shakes his head but suggests they eat lunch together when it’s time. This is a surprise. They almost never have lunch together, and all week they’ve maintained their distance from each other. Perhaps he’s trying to distract her from the waiting, or maybe he’s realized it will be their last chance to share a meal on their own.

After she hears the mailman’s truck turn in the drive, she walks out to the box. There’s a letter there, the address written in a hand she doesn’t recognize, the stamp from Laos. Opening the envelope, she finds two sheets folded
inside, coffee-stained and rumpled as though stuffed in a pocket for some time before they were mailed. The handwriting on them is cramped so as to get everything in.

After that there’s a postscript, but it’s been scribbled out, hard enough to poke through the paper.

She checks the envelope again. The postmark is too blurred to discern the date. It must have taken the letter at least a couple of weeks to get here, yet in all that time there was no news about her father from anyone. If what Wale says is true, surely someone must have found out something by now. She has to call Gran and let her know what Wale has written.

Once more she reads the thing. He was probably high when he wrote it. Maybe he’s not even in Laos anymore but in Bangkok or Hong Kong—or Buffalo, for all she knows, sitting in a bar and having a good laugh.

As her outrage grows, she realizes she’s angry not just with Wale but with her father. Didn’t she tell him it wasn’t safe? All along she said that, yet he talked like the only protection he needed was her, like if she didn’t go with him, any worrying she did would be her fault. Now look where it has gotten him.

As she walks back up the driveway and steps onto the porch, the phone starts to ring. It’s Wale, she thinks. It’s the doctor’s office. It’s her father calling to say he’s all right. Rushing through the house, she snatches the receiver just at the dying of the bell and finds it isn’t any of them. It’s Fletcher. Maggie looks at the clock and frowns.

“Where are you?” she asks.

“Still in Boston.”

“What happened? You should be through Albany by now—”

“Something’s come up. We’re having problems with the Brookline voters list.”

If he’s joking, she doesn’t see the humour in it. “I thought you were done with the campaign.”

“I want to be, but I was assigned this thing a while back. I feel like I should get it finished.” He speaks as if everything he says is reasonable and has to be accepted.

“Fletcher, that’s crazy. Let someone else do it. I need you up here.” Then she hears a woman’s voice at the other end of the line. “Who’s that talking?”

“Nobody. Just someone at the campaign office.”

“Fletcher, what’s going on? You’re waiting to hear about the baby, aren’t you?”

“No, of course not.” But he goes silent.

“Fletcher, my dad’s been kidnapped. You hear me? Some drug dealer has taken my father.” Saying it aloud sends her into a panic, and she tries to control her breathing as she waits for his reaction. He doesn’t speak, though. There’s just the woman talking again in the background, then Fletcher replying to her, their voices muffled as if he has covered the receiver with his hand. Still, Maggie can hear his tone, supportive and slightly exasperated at once. She recognizes it well enough. All month on the phone he’s used the same one with her. “Sorry,” he says, his voice returning to full clarity. “Things at the campaign office are a bit hectic. I’ll call you back after lunch, okay?”

“Didn’t you hear what I said?” she cries.

“Look, I’ll make it up to you, I promise. I love you, baby,” he says. A moment later there’s the click of him hanging up.

The receiver in her hand feels insubstantial. It doesn’t matter, she tells herself. He was just distracted and didn’t hear her. She doesn’t need him anyhow. Maybe she doesn’t even love him. No, that isn’t right. It’s some kind of trespass to think like that. Love might inflate and shrivel, it may be impatient or unkind, but it keeps on going, doesn’t it?

When she calls Gran, the line’s busy. In a few minutes she’ll call again. To distract herself, she turns on the television and flops across the couch. Onscreen, a man in a suit is saying there are only five weeks until the election.

She doesn’t want to hear about the election. She’s sick of waiting, sick of politics, sick of television telling her that everything important is elsewhere, that her only role is to stay tuned and find out what happens next. From the kitchen, she fetches a pair of scissors.

By the time she returns to the living room, it’s as if the deed is already done, and she’s glad. In her mind the future’s no longer a maze of unexplored passages but a safe, well-lit corridor leading through the years to come: her father’s return, her baby a toddler, then growing into a little girl. But it could be a son. Why does she assume it will be a girl?

Crouching behind the silver orb of the TV set, Maggie unplugs it and with one snip of the blades cuts the power cord in two. Immediately she feels the world dwindling. Not for her the Cold War, the hijackings, and the price of oil. Already her life is growing smooth as a stone in a river. Time flows around her. Nothing sticks.

As she stands again, she brushes against the set and her elbow catches the clay statue of Saint Clare perched on top. Before she can do anything, the figure goes tumbling from its place. It lands face up and stares at her accusingly with its black eyes.

“What are you looking at?” Maggie says. She snatches it up and throws it against the wall. Falling to the floor, it cracks in two, the legs neatly separating from the torso.

For a moment it feels like a triumph. Then she thinks the statue could be the last thing her father ever gave her. No, she can’t think like that. She can’t start feeling sorry for herself or him. Probably he sent the statue less as a gift than a provocation, another way to make her feel guilty.