A lump forms in her throat, and Teera realizes what she has been dreading isn’t meeting the child at the temple, the little girl whose mother was slain, but herself, the girl whose mother ended her own life. She is terrified of coming face-to-face again with abandonment.
This admission releases her. She finishes her breakfast and, with her small belongings, walks back into the café to purchase sandwiches, pastries, drinks, desserts—enough food for a picnic party at the wildlife sanctuary. Her cell phone rings inside her handbag, a single cheery tune, and she knows it is Mr. Chum signaling her. He has arrived and is waiting in the parking lot out front. With the food in hand, she retraces her steps through the hallway and, as she passes the display of cocktail glasses once again, she catches a reflection of her mother in herself. She pauses, smiles at the reflection, and then rushes toward the sunlight. The ghosts follow her everywhere, yet for the first time, she does not feel haunted.
The last time the Old Musician saw the White Building was in 1974, the night he returned to the city to fetch his daughter. Three decades seems like a blink, but the transformation is complete, the decay irreversible. A mass tomb that appears neither for the dead nor the living but for those disavowed by both. Grime and mildew lay siege to it so that even its nondescript sobriquet bodes its vanishing. Aside from its sprawling silhouette, he does not recognize the Municipal Apartments, and it is unlikely that his erstwhile home bears any trace of him.
Still, even from a block away, he is shaken by the sight of it and dares not venture any closer. He leans on the high wall gating the villa at the street corner onto which he’s accidentally wandered, one arm pressed to his stomach to stop the quaking. At dawn this morning, he caught a ride on a tuk-tuk with some monks from the temple who often come to the city on the weekends for their alms rounds. He thought the change of scenery would do him good and decided to wander awhile longer on his own. He would be all right, he assured the monks. He knew his way. But now he wonders how he’s gotten here. Has the city changed so much that he no longer knows the streets, which turns to avoid? He’s come to where he should not have. Yet, he can neither backtrack nor move forward. A recurrent pattern in his life.
Breathe. You are here now. He lowers himself onto the sidewalk, sitting on the bare concrete like a beggar, his cotton satchel on his lap. Just look, and you might catch a glimpse of her. A cat rounds the corner and slinks past him, a moped whizzes through the intersection, a dog yawns and rubs itself against a lamppost across the street, and a vendor pushes her cart filled with breakfast buns toward a market area. The morning is still calm, the streets have been freshly swept of detritus, and the city has yet to be overwhelmed by noise and movement. In the clean early light, the Old Musician can almost believe that it’s possible to peel away the decades, the decay, and find her once again standing before him.
*
She stood in the dark living room, framed by the doorway, arms stretched wide. To embrace him or to block him from reentering their home, Tun couldn’t tell. Just seconds earlier, before unlocking the door with the key he’d carried close to his body all these months, he’d paused, reminding himself why he’d come this far, despite the danger ahead. With the fighting encroaching on the capital, Tun couldn’t leave Sita and Om Paan unprotected, at the mercy of either side. Given the government’s violent crackdown on collaborators and even relatives of suspected rebels, shepherding his family into the rebel-controlled zone seemed the safer path.
Tun had chosen this time of the night when most would be lost to dreams, when the need for sleep held sway, stopping all activities, even the battles. But there his daughter stood, wide awake, looking up at him. She’d padded from her room at the precise moment when he pushed the door open. Had she heard the movements of key and lock? Or had she by some mysterious intuition sensed his return, heard his footsteps long before he arrived?
Tun dropped to his knees so that he was at eye level with her, a finger over his lips so she would know to make no noise that might wake the neighbors. “Sita, I’ve come back . . .” he whispered, taking her into his arms, pressing her hard against his chest to stanch the tide of emotions threatening to flood his heart. She was soft, like down or a cloud, and for a moment he forgot himself, forgot the long months they’d been separated. “I see that your moonlets have been spinning away,” he teased, recalling the explanation she’d given long ago for her tenderness, this supple outer shell cushioning her inner self.
She pulled back, bewildered, and then, heaving as if to gather her bearings, murmured, “Oh, Papa, I’m not a baby anymore,” in a voice so composed that for a split second he was unsure whether it was hers or an echo of someone else’s. She stepped away from him, arms crossed in front of her chest now, as if to bar further affection.
Tun reeled at her self-possession, falling back on his haunches. Almost a year had passed since he left home, and he knew he ought to explain his absence, but there was no time. Besides, how could he even begin?
He looked to Om Paan standing behind her, a second silhouette in the night. The three of them, he thought, must look like a prop crew stealing onto a darkened stage, making unseen arrangements to an otherwise witnessed life. “We have to leave,” he stammered, the words tumbling out awkwardly like a command. Om Paan nodded, disappeared into the room she shared with Sita, and a few seconds later reappeared with two bundles. “I knew you’d come back, sir, so I prepared,” she told him with a calm that could only mean that during his absence the two of them had rehearsed this moment countless times, anticipating his return and their hurried departure, preparing the youngster to say good-bye to her home, her life. “We are ready.”
Tun picked up his daughter, sensing her slight resistance at being carried like a small child when it was obvious she no longer regarded herself as such. Om Paan closed the door soundlessly behind them, and though she knew they might never return, she locked it anyway, so as to delay others from discovering their absence.
With shoes off to mute their steps, they stole through the pitch-dark corridor and then, crouching low, weaved down the open stairwell. Outside, with their shoes back on, they dashed toward a pair of cyclos under one of the leafy trees in a row along the road. Roeun, the cyclo driver, was the same young man from Banaam whom Tun had met ten months earlier, in August of ’73. Back then Roeun hadn’t known he was aiding Tun to slip into hiding. This past March, Tun had made the initial inquiry from Oudong, the nearest provincial capital controlled by the insurgent forces, and, once Roeun was located, had reestablished connection.