In the next seats over, a white-haired elderly couple, distracted by Luna’s cuteness, does not see that a monkey has lowered itself from a frangipani tree behind them, one arm grasping a branch, another reaching for their books and spectacles on the low table beneath the tree. Only when Luna lets out a gasp, clapping as if to spur the monkey on, does the couple become alert to the crime in progress. The husband shoos the monkey with his bathrobe, while the wife jumps several steps away, one hand over her mouth, the other on her heart. Judging by their reactions, this must be their first encounter with the furry fellow residents. After a few hissing threats between man and monkey, the apparent peacemaker relents, disappearing once again into the branches, though not without securing a conspiratorial nod from Luna.
The old couple resettles into their chairs, visibly relieved. Emma leans over, as if to reassure them, and though Teera can’t hear from this distance, she imagines her repeating what everyone has come to accept—that, while a nuisance at times, the monkeys add to the old-world charm of the hotel, and guests should expect to have their belongings brazenly snatched at least once during their stay. Keys, sunglasses, and cell phones are among the most coveted novelties. These are after all city monkeys, as an old gardener working at the hotel once told Teera, not too different from us svar pteah—“house apes.”
A stir ripples through the leafy treetops, and the monkey reemerges, leaping onto the balustrade of a balcony two floors up. Teera can see him clearly now. Hanuman, she’s nicknamed him, the palest of the long-tailed macaques that roam the hotel grounds, his fur so supple and silvery that he appears almost white in the sunlight. Something familiar is slung across his tiny shoulders like the end of a kite’s tail. Teera’s gaze darts back to the ground, and after a quick search, she spies Luna’s brown silhouette partly concealed behind the half-raised back of an empty lounge chair. It seems that while Emma was busy chatting with the old couple, Luna took off her bikini top and gave it to her cross-dressing friend. Still deep in conversation, Emma remains oblivious to her daughter’s escapade.
A laugh escapes Teera, and she feels her apprehension begin to subside. You love children, she hears Amara say. You’ll have fun with this little girl. She wishes her aunt were here with her. They should have made this journey together. There are so many things she failed to ask. Why didn’t Amara ever marry, have children of her own? Teera would’ve loved a young cousin. But in truth, she knows, this was not possible. A scene emerges in her mind, and Teera sees herself again as that eleven-or twelve-year-old peering from behind a screen of leaves, discovering something she didn’t quite understand.
*
It was evening and, after a long day of laboring in the mud and sun, everyone had washed and gone home. Only Amara remained with the leader of their kong chalat, a mobile work unit responsible for digging ditches to irrigate the rice fields. The two women stood side by side, with water up to their chests, in a clear pond surrounded by bamboo thickets, the unit leader still fully dressed, it appeared, and Amara wrapped in her sarong, dyed a deep black, as with all revolutionary clothes. The unit leader suddenly turned toward Amara so that their faces almost touched, gathered Amara’s drenched hair to the front over one shoulder, and then pressed her nose into it, into Amara’s chest, her wet skin, before she lowered herself completely into the water.
At first Suteera was confused, unsure what to do, but then understood she ought to remove herself from the vicinity, leave Amara and the unit leader their privacy. Amara must’ve assumed that she had gone home like everyone else, when in fact she had been slow in coming to wash. She’d dawdled in the rice fields, looking for crabs and crickets she could add to their sparse evening meal. Finding none, she meandered lazily along the dirt path, stopping finally at the bamboo grove at the mouth of the pond.
Suteera did not stay to see if the unit leader would resurface. It wasn’t drowning she feared, because both women knew how to swim well. Later—weeks, or maybe months—when the unit leader was taken away, branded an “enemy” of the Organization for reasons unclear to anyone, Suteera thought it was her fault, that because she hadn’t stayed that evening to keep the others away from the pond, the unit leader got caught, her love for Amara discovered somehow. But this reasoning didn’t make sense. Amara too would’ve been eliminated.
It was years before Teera would come to comprehend the intimacy, the love shared. She and her aunt were already in America, well adjusted to their new life, and Teera had wondered why Amara never paid heed to the men interested in her. You ought to marry one of them, she teased. Even our sponsor is hopelessly in love with you. Amara did not respond to her baiting. She stayed quiet for a long moment, and just as Teera started to think that she might’ve offended her aunt, Amara asked, her voice and gaze distant, Do you remember Comrade Sovann? The leader of our irrigation unit? Teera felt suddenly caught off guard, and she was afraid that saying yes would betray what she’d seen at the pond those many years before. So she told Amara she didn’t remember. Again, Amara fell into silence. Then, shaking her head, she finally murmured, When you’ve known love, you can’t settle for its substitute. It was the closest Amara ever came to opening that locked compartment of her heart.
*
Teera’s gaze follows Luna into the pool. Emma is beside her, seeming to have noted and accepted that the little sprite’s bikini top is lost. There’s something easy and natural about their relationship, as if they had always been mother and daughter. If the two were more physically alike, Teera would never have guessed Luna was adopted. It is the kind of bond Teera imagines Amara would’ve had with her own children, deep-rooted and yet undemanding.
She recalls now those weekends when she and Amara would go jogging together, then afterward stop at a park to watch the babies play with their mothers. That one is so fat I want to eat him! With the cancer, they no longer went running but would still go to the park to watch the children or, as Amara put it, to inhale the plumpness of life. During one of the last few visits before Amara became bedridden, she said, I won’t be here to see it, but I know you’ll make a great mother one day . . . Love doesn’t die, Teera. It never leaves our side. From the very beginning, long before we knew who among us would live and who would die, your mother made me promise to love you for both of us. And I have, for her, for our whole family. You were never an orphan. Love was always your guardian. You have its abiding protection. It never abandoned you.