“I thought since they were little kids and they never met me before if they could tell I was a boy I must be a boy, but if they thought I was a girl, then maybe…”
Claude trailed off again. Halfway around the world, his father chose his words very carefully. “You know, for you, this has been a big question all your life. Boy or girl. But not just for you—in this country, it’s one of the first things we notice about everybody. When someone has a baby, that’s our first question. When we meet new people, we like to be able to tell right away. Here, even people who’ve never asked the question about themselves still think about gender all the time. There, your little students probably see other things first.”
“What things?”
“Well, it’s probably unusual for them to meet a white person. You might be the first American they’ve ever met. You probably have a lot more money than most of the people they know, a lot of privileges they never dreamed of. They must have so many questions about who you are; boy or girl just isn’t what’s most pressing to them.” Penn imagined Claude’s identities reordering themselves like a split-flap display announcing train departures and arrivals. It made sense that these students saw foreign, white, American, healthy, rich, and whole before they ever saw male or female. Penn watched the flaps spin over and over themselves until they displayed forlorn, lonesome, and lost. “What do you see, sweetheart?” This was one of the things Penn really wanted to know but was worried to ask.
Claude thought about his day of children without futures or at least with futures unforetold. “I see nothing,” he told his father. “I am unforeseeable.”
Bonesetters
Things unforeseen were plaguing Rosie as well. Everyone reported that Claude was great for the school, patient and gentle, an extra set of much-needed hands for the understaffed staff, for the understaffed students who had never imagined anything as exotic and far-flung as her baby. But Rosie was working when Claude was at school, so this poise and grace went unseen. She knew that the clinic’s students must be teaching Claude as much as he was teaching them, for the protected world of even a transgender ten-year-old is awfully small compared to what these kids had seen, foreseen. But Claude was usually asleep by the time she got home from the clinic, so how he was learning or growing or becoming went unwitnessed as well. Instead she got tears over breakfast or, worse, worry that precluded talking about it, that drew his eyebrows together and his mouth toward his shoulders.
She expected heartache and sadness of course. She expected shock: culture shock from being a stranger in a very strange land and gender shock from being a boy again for the first time in five years and general shock from finding oneself, suddenly, a bald English tutor in Thailand. But she had also expected all that would have started to fade, at least a little, now that they’d been here a few weeks. It was so beautiful in Thailand. There was so much wonder. But if Claude was still miserable, maybe it was time to leave already. Maybe bringing him had been a mistake. “Do you hate it here, my love?”
“Here and everywhere,” Claude said without looking up. For some reason, he felt worse with his mom than he did in his classroom. He knew she was just trying to help him, but maybe he had more in common with his little students. He knew she loved him more than anything for seven thousand miles in any direction, but somehow that just made him cry harder.
She softened her tone. “Should we go home?”
He looked up at her at once, the worry turned sharply to panic. “No. Mom, no. We can’t go home.” Like their ancestral land was set upon by marauding hordes. Like their intergalactic space pod had crashed on landing.
This was unforeseen.
But accounting for the unforeseen was one of Rosie’s particular talents. At home this manifested as never having to go to the grocery store. She would look at a pantry that contained only the dregs of boxes of four different kinds of pasta, half a bag of brown rice, four cans of kidney beans, three of tuna fish, and a bag of expired sun-dried tomatoes and concoct dinner. She would be missing two-thirds of the ingredients in a recipe, and by subbing skim milk for cream and olive oil for butter and lentils for beef and frozen broccoli for fresh spinach and red pepper flakes for mushrooms and nothing for fresh sage leaves (because really, what dish actually hinged on fresh sage leaves?), she could achieve lasagna béchamel without leaving the house.
And it turned out it was this skill—not her years of ER experience, not her advanced training, not the decade and a half she’d spent in a teaching hospital—that made her so valuable at the clinic. What the recipe called for, they did not have on hand. What a Google search, not to mention said years of experience and her not-inconsiderable medical intuition, suggested as a viable substitution was not available either. But what Rosie could do was look at a yawning supply closet with its paltry stock, at moldy equipment and unreliable drug supplies, and figure out something that would work.