until their intestines are clean.
They were met by embassy officials and Elm slept for the first time in three nights, slumped in a chair with her head on Moira’s hospital bed. She had no word from Colin.
Moira was in the hospital for two days receiving intravenous fluids and antibiotics. There were many worse off than she was. People were missing limbs; people had lacerations to their torsos and organs; people were in comas after having hit their heads. In the hotel room the embassy arranged for Elm to stay in, she sat in the bathtub and cried, rocking back and forth. It was like an organ had been torn from her body, and she found herself cradling a nonexistent hole in her abdomen. There was no air in her lungs; she couldn’t breathe, and yet her heart kept beating, loudly, as if to mock her with its vitality.
During the day, Elm and Moira camped out in the waiting room at the embassy in Bangkok. There was coffee there, safe water, hard-boiled eggs, and Cheerios. Moira was eating solids again. Her face had regained its color and the pain in her leg was bothering her only intermittently.
One of the embassy officials had brought in his teenage daughter and her friends, who supervised the children, drawing and reading to them. The children, understanding the importance of the moment, were silent and obedient. So Elm was able to leave Moira, though the girl clung to her so desperately she had to pry Moira’s hands from around her thigh when she went to meet the embassy official to start a file.
There was a box of Kleenex on the table between the armchairs that served as a makeshift intake station, but Elm didn’t need it. She was too empty to cry, too anxious and worried. She felt continuously as though she were about to throw up, not nauseated, but as though her insides were going to revolt, to turn themselves inside out.
The man who interviewed her followed slavishly a sheet of questions, even when Elm had already answered them. Their conversation was taped. He was large for a Thai man, his hair cut close to his head, and Elm could see an old scar peeking through it from his scalp. His eyes were wrinkled from squinting into the sun.
He said that the fact that she’d heard nothing was because the Red Cross had only just arrived “on scene” and that “communication lines haven’t been established.” He gave her a list of items they would need in the event that they had to identify a body, and a pamphlet about surviving trauma. He handed her an application for a replacement passport. Then he directed her to the phone room, where she had fifteen minutes to call relatives in the States.
The list: copies of their passports, Social Security cards, dental records, hair for a DNA sample, a current photo, and a description of what the missing person was last seen wearing.
The only phone number she could remember was Ian’s, because it spelled out “I-ROCK-U-4.” She woke him up.
“Elm, thank God. You’ve no idea how worried—”
“He’s missing,” Elm said. Now the tears started to flow.
“Colin?”
“Ronan. He’s gone, and I’m in Bangkok with Moira, and Colin’s still looking …” Her words stuck in her mouth.
He calmed her down and promised to get copies of the passports she’d left in her files. He would scan the photo of the family on her desk and e-mail it. He would go to the apartment and make the super let him in and take Ronan’s brush and toothbrush and DHL them overnight. He said he would call their dentist, and repeated back to her the number the Thai man had said to fax the records to. He would do that first thing in the morning.
Next to her a white guy with dreadlocks and faded hemp clothing cried, “Mommy,” into the phone.
“Elm,” Ian said. “Elm, are you there? You’ll be okay, Elm. He’ll be okay. He’s probably with some Thai family in a village or something. There’s no phone service there, right? He’s probably fine.”
“Probably,” Elm said. She hung up.
In Indira’s 1920s bathroom, Elm turned on the old taps to splash her face. When she emerged from the bathroom Ian had returned with the half-and-half, and the two of them were smoking Kools at the kitchen table.
“My girl will be here soon,” Mrs. Schmidt said. “But if you want to poke around, I spend weekends at my studio on the island.”
She meant Fire Island,