Timothy Hallinan - The Fourth Watcher

The room is full of light. Of course, it is afternoon. Arthit is off with Poke, making the world-as he likes to say-a more boring place. Her guests will probably be asleep, Rose on the couch and Miaow in the spare bedroom, the one she and Arthit thought would be the nursery until the disease chose their door from all the doors on the block and

knocked.

There is a child in the house, she thinks.

She stretches experimentally, feeling the coals burning in her elbows and fingers-not too bad, a thin layer of ash on them-and explores the weakness in her legs. She has learned in the past few months to test her legs one at a time while she is still in bed, putting one foot atop the other and pushing down, before she tries to stand. On the days when she knows she will be too unsteady to stay upright, she pretends to sleep until Arthit has left the house and then reaches under the mattress on her side of the bed for the aluminum cane he has never seen.

She hopes he has never seen it.

Lately it seems to her that they are playing two different games with similar rules. Noi does not tell Arthit about the progress of the disease because she does not want to burden him. Arthit pretends not to see it because he does not want to injure her pride. So the two of them, each with the other in mind, ignore the thing that has come to occupy the central place in their lives, filling that place with silence.

The place they thought a child would fill.

As she pushes back the covers, she realizes she awoke earlier, dragged up from sleep briefly and then allowed to sink again. It seems to her that the figure who fans the fire was standing at the foot of the bed, looking down at her. The image creates a cold ball of dread in her belly.

Her legs tremble beneath her, but hold, as she bends over the foot of the bed to pick up the robe Arthit bought her for no reason, not even her birthday. She hates the color, a sort of faded, pickled, unripe-banana green, but loves the idea of Arthit shopping for her. She can see those thick fingers picking up one flimsy garment after another as he stands stiff and conspicuously uncomfortable in his uniform in some department store, surrounded by women but unwilling to flee until he finds the one he likes, the one that makes her look as yellow as a wax candle. She slides her arms into the sleeves, pausing as she realizes she is standing exactly where the figure stood the first time she opened her eyes. The dread in her belly solidifies into a gelatinous mass.

Pushing it aside with an enormous effort, Noi limps into the hall. No cane today, not in front of her guests. The thought of the child, Miaow, carries her along.

The door to the spare room is ajar. Noi pushes it open a few inches to find Rose sitting on the bed looking at her, with Miaow asleep at her side, the child’s head pillowed on Rose’s arm. Even in sleep Miaow looks as if she’s in motion; her knees are drawn up like someone doing a cannonball into a swimming pool, and her mouth is half open. Rose smiles and lifts a finger to her lips, then eases her arm out from beneath Miaow. Miaow shifts and emits a syllable of complaint. Rose holds perfectly still until the child seems to be asleep again.

The kitchen is as warm as a hive, rich with the honey-colored afternoon light that slants through the windows and fragrant from the small pots of basil and rosemary Noi grows on the sill. Rose’s hair is a glorious tangle that Noi briefly envies and then forgets, concentrating on moving smoothly. “Coffee or tea?”

Rose gives her a sleepy smile. “Do you have Nescafe?”

“Of course.” Noi slides to the cabinet above the counter, lifting her feet as little as possible-it is the moment when they come back into contact with the floor that gives her the most trouble. She tries to make it look like a preference, perhaps a joke, but she can feel Rose’s eyes on her.

“Poke hates Nescafe,” Rose says. “It’s enough to drive me away.”

“Arthit drinks it by the quart. Hot, cold, lukewarm. He sprinkles it on ice cream.” She unscrews the lid of the jar, smaller and lighter than the ones she used to buy, more expensive but easier to handle. “Arthit’s not happy unless he’s nervous.”

“Poke truly loves Arthit,” Rose says, stretching long arms. “It’s a good thing I’m not jealous. Or very jealous anyway.”

“Life blesses you when you least expect it.” Noi puts the kettle on the burner and listens for the little poof as it ignites; she has a deep-seated dread of the kitchen filling with gas. “Arthit was certain he was through making friends. One thing I don’t understand is why it gets more difficult to make friends as you get older. Remember how many friends you used to have?”

“Thousands,” Rose says. “You said hi to somebody and they were glued to you. And it was impossible to be nosy then. Everybody wanted you to know everything. Nobody had a subconscious. And then one day everybody turned into a box of secrets.”

“It’s not that they got worse,” Noi says. She leans against the stove, feeling the comfortable warmth at her back. “Good people get better, I think, and bad people were already bad. It’s just that people close themselves up. I think of young people as standing like this”-she opens her arms-“and older people like this ”-she crosses her arms protectively across her chest.

“Or this,” Rose says, shielding her privates. Noi laughs.

“It’s one reason I’m grateful for this illness,” Noi says. “It brought Poke and Arthit together.” Arthit had originally requested an interview with Rafferty when he learned Poke was writing the book that eventually became Looking for Trouble in Thailand. He went out and bought one of the earlier books in the series, Looking for Trouble in the Philippines, to satisfy himself that the new book wouldn’t fall into the genre of self-improvement for pedophiles, and the two of them had met for the first time over an unreasonable number of Singha beers. During the course of their mutual decline into inebriation, Arthit had told Poke about Noi’s disease, then in its earliest stages, and Rafferty had put him into contact with a doctor in Japan who was working on a promising new treatment. The treatment hadn’t worked, but the friendship had.

“He talked about Arthit for days,” Rose says. He had talked about Noi, too, but Rose does not say this. Poke had pitied Noi then, something that became unthinkable to Rose after the two women met. Noi is too strong to pity.

Noi feels a draft on the back of her neck, something that happens with increasing frequency these days. Some trick of the nerves, yet another way they’ve found to call attention to themselves, the pigs. She turns back to the kettle, but the water is not boiling yet.

“You said one of the things you were grateful for,” Rose says. “What are the others?”

“It gave me notice,” Noi says, facing her again. “If it had been faster, I never would have been able to have told Arthit, to have shown Arthit, the way I feel about him. It would have been terrible to be. . I don’t know, snatched away without the time I’ve been given to make things right.”

“You’re tough,” Rose observes.

“I’ve had practice.” She starts to maneuver herself back around to the stove and stops, staring over at Rose. “What’s that?”

“What?” Rose looks down at herself, and then back up at Noi. “Oh,” she says, putting her hands below the table.

“Ho, ho, ” Noi says. “Is this something a friend would tell a friend about?”

Rose brings her hands back up, turning the ring self-consciously. It still feels thick on her finger. “There hasn’t been time. It only happened two nights ago.”