A mistake, Anderson thought. This was all a mistake. A few days before he had been in Connecticut, trudging through the snow to his lab. He’d been studying the long-and short-term effects of electrical traumatic stimulus on a rat’s central nervous system. He’d left the experiment at a crucial juncture.
“I thought this was a serious endeavor,” he said slowly. The note of complaint rang in the air like a child’s.
Angsley sounded hurt. “You didn’t put up much of a fight, if I remember correctly, when I asked you to come.”
Anderson looked away from him. The dog was still trying to cross the river. Would it make it to shore or drown? Two children exhorted it from the other bank, hopping in the mud. The rank river smell mingled in his nostrils with the floral scent of the tea.
What Angsley said was true. He had been eager to come. It had been a feeling, more than anything else, that had led him here, a wave of nostalgia that had overtaken him the moment he had heard his friend’s excited voice in the midst of those bleak months after the baby had died and everything had fallen apart.
He and Sheila were in separate hells and hardly spoke to each other. He made it through his days, studied his rats, took down the results as he ought to, drank more than he ought to; yet felt much of himself, most days, to be no better than the vermin he studied. Actually, the rats had more spark.
Angsley’s boyish enthusiasm had traveled the long distance between them like a memory of the interest he had once had in life and might find again, if he took the chance; and in any case it would be an escape, a respite, the thing he was looking for every night at the bottom of the glass.
“I’ve heard about the most extraordinary thing. It’s Shanti Devi all over again,” Angsley had said on the phone, and Anderson had laughed for the first time in months to hear the name. “I’ll pay your way, of course, in the interests of science.”
“Go,” Sheila had said. Her eyes were red-rimmed, accusing.
So he had taken it, this chance, this respite. He was taking it. He’d been relieved to leave Connecticut, with its oncoming Christmas and its angry, devastated wife. He had told Angsley nothing of his circumstances, preferring not to discuss it.
“Shanti Devi,” Anderson said now, aloud. It was probably nothing, he knew that. Still, the name was a tonic on his tongue, bringing him back a decade, to the taste of beer and youth. “It’s pretty hard to believe.”
Angsley brightened. “That’s why we’re going. So you don’t have to.”
Anderson glanced away from his eager face.
The mangy dog had made it across; he was scrambling up the muddy banks of the other side. He shook his fur, and the children screamed and scattered, avoiding the droplets of foul water that spun and sparkled in the light.
“No dolls,” Anderson said.
Angsley patted Anderson on the hand. “Just meet the girl.”
*
The girl lived a few hours north of Bangkok in a village in Uthai Thani province. The boat sputtered through the slums on the outskirts of the city, then moved past larger, more rural dwellings, wooden houses with piers at the ends adorned with tiny wooden temples, spirit houses for the dead. The harvested rice fields were golden brown on either side of them, dotted here and there with an ambling water buffalo or a small shack. Anderson felt the images taking the place of thoughts in his mind, soothing him, until he was nothing but a white hand skimming the surface of the water. The jet lag was catching up to him at last and he dozed sitting up, lulled by the hoarse, steady roar of the motor.
When he awoke a couple hours later the air had grown hot and thick in his lungs, and he was blanketed with sunlight. He realized he had dreamed of the baby. In the dream Owen was whole, a beautiful child with blue eyes like Sheila’s that regarded him pensively. The baby sat up and reached out to him like the boy he might have been.
*
They approached a small wooden house on stilts surrounded by lush foliage. How Angsley identified this particular house from the identical ones that lined the road near the pier was a mystery that Anderson didn’t bother solving. An older woman swept the dirt floor in the shadows underneath the house, chickens muttering around her ankles. Angsley wai’d to her, his head bowing over his hands, revealing the naked spot of pink scalp at the center of his skull. The two of them had a discussion.
“The father is working out in the fields,” Angsley said. “He won’t talk to us.”
“Your Thai is pretty good, right?” Anderson asked. It occurred to him they ought to have hired an interpreter.
“It’s good enough.”
It would have to be.