They climbed the stairs. A simple room, well swept, slatted wooden windows looking out onto cropped fields and blue sky. A woman was placing an array of food on a table in battered tin bowls. She was wearing the same kind of brightly patterned cloth the old lady wore, knotted right above her breasts. She was lovely, Anderson thought, or had been, not so long before; anxiety seemed to have caught her beauty in its net. When she smiled at them, worried lines rippled from her dark eyes, and her crimson lips parted to reveal bright red teeth.
“Betel nut,” Angsley murmured. “They chew it here. Some kind of stimulant.” He bowed his head respectfully, hands together: “Sowatdii-Kap.”
“Sowatdii.” Her eyes darted from one of them to the other.
Anderson looked for the child and discovered her crouched in the corner, watching the yellow lizards frisking in the ceiling dust. He was dismayed to see that she was wearing nothing. She was frail, almost emaciated, her face and concave belly painted with a white powder he surmised was used to keep away the heat: two round circles on her cheeks, a line down her nose.
The woman had laid out a villager’s feast for them: white rice and fish curry, though it was only ten in the morning, and tin cups of water that Anderson was sure, as he sipped, would make him ill. He couldn’t risk offending her, so he filled his roiling stomach, the taste of metal coating his mouth. Outside the window, a man shepherded a water buffalo across a field of golden stubble. The sun barreled through the slats in the windows.
Angsley walked over to the child. “Got something for you.” He pulled the doll from his bag and she took it soberly. She held it in her outstretched hands for a moment, then cradled it in her arms.
Angsley lifted his brows meaningfully at Anderson across the room, as if to say, “See? She loves it.”
They set up at the wooden table, now cleared of breakfast. Two white men, a nervous woman, and a little naked girl who couldn’t have been more than three holding a grotesque red-haired rag doll. She sat quietly next to her mother. She had an uneven birthmark to the left of her navel, like a splash of red wine. She clutched the doll tightly in her hands, watching her mother shave papaya into long, even strips with quick fingers.
They talked to the mother. Angsley spoke in Thai first, and then in English, for Anderson’s benefit.
“Tell us about Gai.”
She nodded. Her hands didn’t stop moving. The strips fell away from the papaya into a tin bowl. Every time a sliver dropped from the knife, the little girl shuddered.
The mother spoke in such a low voice that Anderson was amazed Angsley could even hear her to translate.
“Gai’s always been different.” His voice, translating, was almost robotic. “She won’t eat rice. We try to make her, sometimes, but she cries and spits it out.” The mother made a face. “It’s a problem.” There was her tense, thin voice, and then Angsley’s low flat one. The emotion, then the meaning. “I’m afraid she’ll starve.” As if reminded of this, she picked up a piece of the papaya from the battered tin bowl and handed it to her daughter. The girl clutched the doll in her left hand and reached for it, gripping it as if with pincers; Anderson saw that three of her fingers on this hand were deformed. It was as if these fingers had been drawn sloppily, in a hurry, without the refinements of nails and knuckles. The girl caught him looking at her fingers and she curled them into a fist. Anderson looked away, ashamed of himself for staring.
The mother stopped peeling papaya and let loose a stream of words. Angsley could barely keep up with her. “My daughter says that last time she lived in a bigger house in Phichit. The roof was made of metal. She says our house is no good. It’s too little. It’s true. We are poor.”
She grimaced, lifting a hand to indicate the simple room. The girl stared at them, chewing papaya, and clutched the doll’s floppy body more tightly in her hands.
“Also, she cries all the time. She says she misses her baby.”
“Her baby?”
The girl was watching her mother talk. She was like a rabbit in a field, listening.
“Her little boy. She cries and cries. ‘I want my baby,’ she says.”
Anderson felt his heart begin to beat a little faster. His mind, though, remained apart. “How long has she been saying this?”
“One year, maybe. We tell her to forget about it. My husband says it’s bad luck to think of another life. But still, she talks.” She smiled sadly, put down the knife, and stood up, as if wiping her hands of the matter.
The men stood, too. “Just a few more questions—”
But she was shaking her head, still smiling, retreating through a door in the rear of the room.
They watched her shadowy figure stirring something on a low charcoal stove.
The child sat at the table, stroking the doll’s absurd hair, humming tunelessly. Anderson leaned across the table. “Gai. Your mother said you used to live in Phichit. Can you tell me about this?”