“You are who they are,” she says. I don’t know what she is talking about.
Mrs. Ha reaches to scratch her back, between her shoulder blades. “There is something there,” she says. “I just can’t reach it.”
I imagine the little green blip on the tracking device, wobbling. “It’s OK. Everything is all right now.”
“You have no idea,” she tells me as she is drifting off. “I am an old woman but I am not stupid.”
And when she is asleep, I go back to bed. I am drenched in sweat. Susan turns toward me. “Everything all right?”
“Mrs. Ha was crying.”
“Don’t call her Mrs. Ha.”
I take off my shirt, thinking I must smell like Mrs. Ha. I smell like Mrs. Ha and sweat and fear. “What would you like me to call her—Ma Ha?”
“She has a name,” Susan says angrily. “Call her Lillian.”
I cannot sleep. I am thinking we have to take Mrs. Ha home. I am imagining a family trip reuniting Mrs. Ha with her country, Susan with her roots, Kate with her ancestry. I am thinking that I need to know more. I once read a story in a travel magazine about a man who went on a bike ride in China. I pictured a long open road, a rural landscape. In the story the man falls off his bike, breaks his hip, and lies on the side of the road until he realizes no help is going to come, and then he fashions his broken bike into a cane, raises himself up, and hobbles back to town.
RAFT IN WATER, FLOATING
She is lying on a raft in water. Floating. Every day when she comes home from school, she puts on her bikini and lies in the pool—it stops her from snacking.
“Appearances are everything,” she tells him when he comes crashing through the foliage, arriving at the edge of the yard in his combat pants, thorns stuck to his shirt.
“Next time they change the code to the service gate, remember to tell me,” he says. “I had to come in through the Eisenstadts’ and under the wire.”
He blots his face with the sleeve of his shirt. “There’s some sort of warning—I can’t remember if it’s heat or air.”
“I might evaporate,” she says, then pauses. “I might spontaneously combust. Do you ever worry about things like that?”
“You can’t explode in water,” he says.
Her raft drifts to the edge.
He sits by the side of the pool, leaning over, his nose pressed into her belly, sniffing. “You smell like swimming. You smell clean, you smell white, like bleach. When I smell you, my nostrils dilate, my eyes open.”
“Take off your shirt,” she says.
“I’m not wearing any sunblock,” he says.
“Take off your shirt.”
He does, pulling it over his head, flashing twin woolly birds’ nests under his arms.
He rocks her raft. His combat pants tent. He puts one hand inside her bathing suit and the other down his pants.
She stares at him.
He closes his eyes, his lashes flicker. When he’s done, he dips his hand in the pool, splashing it back and forth as though checking the water, taking the temperature. He wipes it on his pants.
“Do you like me for who I am?” she asks.
“Do you want something to eat?” he replies.
“Help yourself.”
He gets cookies for himself and a bowl of baby carrots from the fridge for her. The bowl is cold, clear glass, filled with orange stumps. “Butt plugs,” he calls them.
The raft is a silver tray, a reflective surface—it holds the heat.
“Do you have any idea what’s eating me?”
“You’re eating yourself,” he says.
A chunk of a Chips Ahoy! falls into the water. It sinks.
She pulls on her snorkel and mask and stares at the sky. The sound of her breath through the tube is amplified, a raspy, watery gurgle. “Mallory, my malady, you are my Mallomar, my favorite cookie,” he intones. “Chocolate-dipped, squishy…You were made for me.”
She flips off the raft and into the water. She swims.
“I’m going,” she hears him say. “Going, going, gone.”
At twilight an odd electrical surge causes the doorbells all up and down the block to ring. An intercom chorus of faceless voices sings a round of “Hi, hello. Can I help you? Is anybody out there?”
She climbs out of the pool, wet feet padding across the flagstone. Behind her is a Japanese rock garden, a retaining wall holding the earth in place like a restraining order. She sits on the warm stones. Dripping. Watering the rocks. In school, when she was little, she was given a can of water and a paintbrush—she remembers painting the playground fence, watching it turn dark and then light again as the water evaporated.