But she’s drunk all the time. She’s stoned from early in the morning, goes out with friends I don’t like. I stay in my room when they come over. They bring ketamine, Vicodin, and cocaine, other drugs that I don’t hear the names of, that I don’t stick around to see up close. I’ve had eleven different drugs prescribed to me by now and hated all of them. I’ve spent so much of the last ten years feeling out of control. I slip away with the large bag of bing cherries I’ve picked up at the fruit stand that day and curl up on my mattress on the floor and read.
I start running again in Taipei. I’ve run off and on since high school, but always dipping back into stretches of not leaving my apartment, never feeling strong the way it used to make me feel. But here, sometimes, the apartment’s too oppressive and I get lost for hours in the back alleys of the city, not knowing the language, not reading the street signs, but still somehow finding my way back. She writes our address in Mandarin on a business card and I carry it with me each time I go running. It gets sweaty in my shorts pocket and the writing bleeds, but I don’t ask her for a fresh one. I carry keys and cash and go for hours to be free of her talking and the air is hot and thick and the smog is visible in some places, but I do loops around the small park by our house and sprint through markets, people giving foot massages on the sidewalks. Sometimes old women sitting outside their small fruit stands cheer and I smile and take off.
* * *
The night she brings home a one night stand whose last name we’ll never learn, I’m in bed like that with my cherries and my book. Hotel du Lac: Edith banished to a hotel, on probation, after an aborted marriage. I wake up, a cherry pit stuck to my cheek, when they come in. I try not to listen as they stumble to her room. That morning, when I get up to go to work, her door is open and I see them; all day, instructing wealthy six- and seven-year-olds in simple grammar, I have an image of her on top of him, her bare chest and his.
* * *
It’s a weeknight, a little more than a month later, when she comes home with the first pregnancy test. I think at first that she is joking. I think, briefly, of that time she was twenty and I was nineteen. I wait, another bag of cherries on my lap, The West Wing still playing on the TV, still sweaty from my evening run, as she goes into the bathroom the first time. We walk back and forth from our apartment to the fluorescently lit convenience store a block away to buy more tests to double-check. I cut up mango, share my cherries, sit quietly on the couch as she goes back to check again.
* * *
We go to a doctor in Taipei and he asks us (he asks her, because I don’t speak the language) why we’re wasting his time; she will abort the baby, he tells us. Why are we there asking about prenatal vitamins and care? I’m not sure he’s wrong but don’t say this to her. In all the years since then, I’ve still never been sure why she decided to keep her. I can say that both of us had come to feel completely sapped of power. We were bored and anxious. Six years later, in that coffee shop, when I stared at the word “pregnant” and thought about my baby, I thought of her, of that angry, dismissive man. I think maybe she wanted someone to love and to love her. When I first think of her as a mother that night—so much of our friendship up until then had been her instructing, guiding, while I listened—I think, Of course.
We have a trip planned. For months now, we’ve been plotting our departure, two months across the region with all the money that we’ve saved, then heading home. We’ve pored over maps and scheduled planes and trains and buses. Our jobs have ended. She’s shocked but still we empty our apartment, sell most of our things and leave the rest for our landlord. We pack backpacks and take a flight from Taipei to Vietnam. The plane is small and smells of cigarettes and stale, cold air and she vomits off and on the whole time. She vomits on a bus to Sapa, at a night market in Ho Chi Minh City, in alleys, hostel bathrooms, restaurant napkins. She fights with a pedicab driver in Hanoi, who takes us for a two-hour ride outside the city that we haven’t asked for. By the time he lets us out—still far from our hostel, late at night, and lost—she’s screaming at him and he’s refusing to let go of her arm. She’s frantic and she’s angry, but I think then that knowing how to fight might be one of the most important parts of what’s about to happen to her, and I feel briefly less afraid.
That night, I take her luggage and mine and leave her at an internet café. I go into what looks like the fanciest hotel within walking distance and put a night on my (parents’) credit card. I’ve been without my parents’ money a couple of years already, living off my stipends and waiting tables three nights a week in New York, but they sent me a credit card before I left. I’ll cut it up soon after this. But this night, I buy her tonic water (the only thing that she can keep down) and Western potato chips and, once I’ve brought her to the hotel, I run her a warm bath. We watch TV and sit up in the warm, soft bed together and for one of the first times maybe since I met her, we don’t talk at all.
When she decides, a few days later, in a hostel in Cambodia, to go home, she expects me to go with her. We call her sister, who, whatever I think or say about her over all these years, is there for her, both before and after, in ways that I am not. We start to plan. The whole time we talk as if I’ll come with her. Right before we call the airline, though, I realize that I won’t. This is maybe more agency than I’ve ever had in front of her, perhaps the first time I’ve chosen to be separate from her since we met. I can’t fathom right up to the point when I say so that I might choose it. I feel both scared and impossibly relieved once I do.
We’re in a hostel phone booth in Phnom Penh as I tell her I’m not going with her and she sits and I stand and watch her fingers clutch the old, black phone and I watch pedicabs fly past her out the window, hoping maybe I’ll just disappear.
I’m going to stay, I think, I say.
I can see her shoulders still, her flat, scared face. I feel emptied out and free all of a sudden. For weeks I’ve been trying to help her, somehow fix this or make it better. All this time I wanted her to need me, but I can’t give to her whatever she needs now. I sit with her as she calls the airline. She’s spent more money than me. For weeks before we left, I doled out more and more of the cash I kept by my bed, and we kept a tally on the fridge of what she owed. She spent so much more on weed and evenings out, and I paid most of our rent.
I’ll pay you back, she says, as I hand her my parents’ credit card so she can give the number to the airline.
It’s not my money, I say.
I’ll pay them back, she says.
* * *
The day after she leaves I spend walking through an old school close to the killing fields outside Phnom Penh, now turned into a makeshift memorial: classroom after classroom, I stare at rows of murdered faces. Different rooms contain different sexes: board after board of men and boys; row after row of women and girls. Days later, I’m in Siem Reap and wake up before the sunrise. I’ve hired a young guy to drive me around Angkor Wat and we watch the sunrise through the main temple and I forget to take a picture, shocked still, each time I turn, that she’s not there.