“He could have sold to a tourist or possibly suspected you and bolted. We’ll find out which one,” Phong explained.
We waited a few minutes and sure enough he came back out into the street in search of his next sale.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We call a contact of Father’s at the police.”
“I thought the police were bought,” I observed.
“Not all of them,” he said.
A Detective Tran showed up a few minutes later, and he introduced himself to us. He instructed Finley and me to stay hidden where we were while he and Father and the volunteers surrounded the building as he waited for a warrant.
“Do you really need a warrant when the guy showed me the girls?”
Detective Tran sighed. “Yes, unfortunately.”
Finley and I didn’t utter a word while we paced back and forth on the sidewalk down the street, waiting. And waited. And waited. It was taking so long that Phong was told to give us an update.
“What’s going on?” Finley asked him, her nerves frayed.
“The judge is asking for more evidence than an open solicitation.”
“What in the hell? I saw two girls there.”
“Some judges want more concrete evidence of illegal sex trade other than an offer,” he explained.
“What else could they possibly produce?” Finley asked, both her hands on top of her head.
“They want Detective Tran to see the girls. The only problem is that Detective Tran and Father are both known by sight to this world. There’s no way they will open the door for either of them.”
“Then we break down their gosh damn door!” I yelled, frustrated beyond belief.
“We can’t,” Phong explained calmly.
“Wait, so what are you saying?”
“We have to try and come back at a time they’re not expecting us,” he answered.
I couldn’t believe what he was saying. “You’re not serious,” I deadpanned.
“As a heart attack. They’ll be gone soon anyway, so the whole of today was pretty much pointless.”
I looked at Finley. Her face stricken with grief for the little girls trapped inside.
“No, there’s no way I’m leaving without getting those girls out. No way.”
“Ethan,” Phong said sadly. “We’ll try again. We’ll keep trying.”
“Unacceptable,” I told him, my blood raging in my veins. “Unacceptable. There are little girls in there, Phong. Tiny girls,” I explained to him.
“Ethan,” he told me with glassy eyes, “I know.” My heart tore in two for him.
I nodded once at him in recognition of his staggering loss. There was nothing I could possibly say to him to drive that sorrow home any further for him, nothing I could tell him that could appease him even in the slightest bit.
“But I cannot accept this,” I told him.
“We don’t have a choice, Ethan. We’re prisoners to the system here. We’ve tried forcefully taking the girls and it resulted in years of litigation. The police are bought and paid for, even a few judges. You get arrested by a bought officer and you’re done for. Father is in mounds and mounds of legal trouble already. Father, you, me, Finley, what good are we to these children if we’re locked in jail?’
“But,” I began to tell him, but my objection lost its steam. I couldn’t argue. It made perfect sense and yet no sense at all. “What a disgusting world we live in,” I told Finley, reaching for her hand.
She nodded and took my hand in hers, squeezing it. I calmed down as we stood in silence.
“We’re forced to live within the confines of laws inflicted upon us by a society that knows nothing of right and wrong,” Finley spoke to the ground, breaking the sad quiet. “Laws that obligate us to fight our natural instincts. It’s ludicrous.”
Father, Detective Tran, and the fishermen joined us down the street from the alley they’d been guarding.
“’Tis not to be today. Tomorrow,” Father exclaimed with a sigh, leaning against a shop wall, his cane tucked into his side. He shook the hands of each of the volunteers, including Phong and they departed to their homes.
“Detective Tran,” Finley said, offering her hand. “Thank you for coming so quickly. I know it was your day off.”
“Of course,” he told her, shaking her hand. “Father,” he said, nodding at him. “Ethan,” he acknowledged before heading off into the crowd.
All three of us stood quietly for a few moments.
“I feel like I’ve failed,” I told them both.
“Never, ever feel loike that, lad,” Father admonished in kindness. “Yer here, yer workin’ for the good of our Lord. We’ll keep troyin’.”
We picked up our scooters at An’s and made it back to Slánaigh just in time for dinner. We walked through the front door where the girls were lounging about reading and playing. Sister was sewing in her rocking chair. Her eyes lifted when we entered, hopeful in their bright loveliness. Finley shook her head at her and that life died down, making my heart speed up in disappointment.
These people who worked here, these quiet, unassuming human beings with their blazing, vivid souls cared deeply for the hurt and forgotten children of this country. You could see it in their efforts, their dogged attempts at retrieving and healing the broken young of Vietnam. They were rock stars, and no one would ever know who they were. In fact, the world would make it its life’s goal to keep them in the shadows, but the ironic part was that they cared nothing for recognition. Their motivation was to fix wrong, to alleviate the burdened souls who had been wronged.
My heart clenched for Finley. I looked on my beautiful friend. If only I could have known her then when she needed me as those girls that day had needed me. If only I could have fought for her, wrestled her demons, the tangible and intangible. I would have shredded them to pieces, obliterated them.
“Let’s take a walk at the beach,” she told me. “Sister, we’ll be down by the water.”
“But dinner, Finley,” Sister protested.
“Mind waiting?” she asked me.
“Not even in the slightest.”
We obeyed Sister out of respect, but I don’t think either of us had much of an appetite. We both sat at the table, dejected from the day’s activities, shoveling food into our mouths just to avoid questions later. We helped clean up and Finley also assisted the other volunteers in putting the girls to bed, a task I happily was not allowed to participate in. Fifty screaming, giggly girls is right up there on top of my that’s-okay-I’ll-sit-this-one-out list.
It was close to nine o’clock in the evening when Finley finally emerged.
“Tired?” I asked her.
“Not really,” she admitted. “Too jazzed up, I think.”
We left Slánaigh, paced ourselves down the winding staircase but took off when our toes hit sand, Finley’s-flip flops abandoned at the start of the path, sprinting under the grove of trees bending to the wind. We ran hand in hand until our feet met the lip of the water, warm from baking in the day’s sun.
Winded, Finley turned to me. “I wish we could have saved them. It would have been so different if we could have just saved them,” she said, bursting into a sob at the end.
“Fin,” I whispered, grief-stricken for those girls and for her.
She broke down unselfishly for them, and I wished I could have done something for her then. Swiped my hand and made good of all the bad, but that is not real life as I was painfully becoming more and more aware of.
I sat her in the sand and moved beside her. We laid back, hands linked, staring up into a starlit sky.
“It’s not all bad,” I told her, gesturing at the stars.
“What?” she asked, her tears having dried.
“I know earlier I declared the whole of the world disgusting, but I don’t really feel that way, Fin. It’s not all bad. Right now, as we stare up at the starlit heavens, I can see the beauty in it.” When I look at you I see the good in this world. “We
have to see hope here,” I told her, “or I don’t think we’re going to survive it.”
“I can’t see it right now,” she confessed. So I did the only thing I could think to do, I nodded in understanding.
She turned toward me after a few moments of contemplation, her side digging into the powder sand below us, and I followed her lead. Lifting my cell from my pocket, I turned music on and let it lie above our heads.
“What is it about us and water?” I asked her, making her laugh.
“And music,” she countered.
“And music,” I gave in.
“How far we’ve come.”
“How far indeed,” I agreed.
“We’re not kids from Bitterroot anymore, Ethan.”
“I don’t think we were ever really from Bitterroot, Fin. We never really belonged to anyone, ever.”
“Confession?”
“Aye, my choild,” I said, pathetically parroting Father’s accent.
She hit my shoulder but giggled anyway just so I wouldn’t feel bad, I think.
“I want to belong somewhere...to someone.”
My heart leapt into my throat. Was she asking me? Me! I wanted to shout. Me! Belong to me, Fin. Please, I’ll be your home.
But the moment passed in strained silence, fading behind me in a cowardly fear. Fear of rejection, fear that it would change everything, and a fear that if she left me, I wouldn’t recover. In there laid the drama. I was falling in love with Finley Dyer. Three-quarters fallen if I had been really honest with myself, but did I want to make the final leap? Although I had been quite over Cricket for some time, I knew what it felt like to hurt from love, and my word, was the pain acute.
I let her words lay there, though they begged for a response. Instead, I reached across the sand and wrapped a strand of hair around my index finger, twirling it over and over until I couldn’t feel wear my finger started or her hair stopped.
That night I walked Fin back to Slánaigh before retreating to the houseboat, laying on the bed they had given me and wondering how in the hell I was going to change the fate of all those girls, how I could make enough of a difference that my life would eventually feel worthy of existence.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Turns out there was incredible beauty in the world as evidenced by the girls already residing at Slánaigh. They were cheerful and kind, generous and sweet, funny and even a little bit ornery, which, I confess, was my favorite part about them. They were constantly playing tricks on everyone. I say “tricks” but it was all in good fun and never anything mean. It showed me just how much they were embracing their lives, and it gave me such utter hope. For them. For Fin. Even for me.
During the day, Fin and I would help Sister out, occasionally going out with Father as well, but our “hunting trips” mostly consisted at night.
Our fourth week there started out as any other would, we hadn’t heard much by way of our “eyes” or “ears,” but late in the evening, we’d gotten wind of another active cell near the city proper and we aimed to find them out.
Phong was able to come along this trip as well as four other regular volunteers, Finley, me, Father, as well as Detective Tran, whose hand rested on his phone, ready to request warrants. We’d fallen into a comfortable rhythm using me as bait, my hair tucked back in a man bun and a nón lá on my head.
“You look like a really badass dark Raiden,” Finley told me as we readied ourselves at An’s.
This made me ridiculously happier than a little kid so I smiled like a gigantic idiot, which made her laugh.
“What?” I asked, a little offended.
“You’re just so…” she began.
“So?” I prodded.
She considered me for a moment before her face sobered, making my heart race.
“Nothing,” she finally rasped in answer.
I swallowed. “Nothing.”
“Nothing,” she whispered, putting some distance between us, and trust me when I say that I felt the space keenly.
“Oh, okay,” I stammered.
She smiled timidly at me and I returned the favor in kind.
“Are ye ready?” Father asked us.
We set free into the night and lost ourselves in the methodical canvassing of the city as we swept the streets. The only thing we’d improved upon was connecting two cell phones. I kept a Bluetooth headset in my ear, hidden away from prying eyes. I had hours’ worth of one-sided conversations with Finley night after night and, frankly, it did nothing but make me even further enchanted with her.
“Check, check. One, two,” she teased into my ear. I glanced over my shoulder and smiled at her. “I kind of like that you can’t answer me. It makes me feel powerful. A very rare thing when it comes to Ethan Moonsong.” I shook my head as imperceptibly as possible. “Oh, don’t like that, do you?” she flirted. “Hey, remember that time our junior year of high school when I caught you looking down my shirt?” I choked on nothing and fought a smile. I did not do that. At least not where she could have noticed anyway. Did I? “You don’t think I knew you’d done it, but I knew. I could feel the heat of your eyes even then,” she told me, wrecking my concentration. Even then?
She’d flirted with me like that every time we’d gotten on the phones for our scouting, but I couldn’t ever tell if she was serious because it was doused cold with metaphorical ice water the second we’d stand close to one another afterward. She was driving me insane. It was the good kind of insane, though. The kind of insane where you happily welcomed the madness because the torture was too incredibly sweet to forego.
I shook my head to regain my thoughts and a sense of purpose. She stole that so readily from me without even realizing it. She made me suffer in ways she couldn’t possibly comprehend. Make me suffer, Fin. Please make me suffer, I thought, imagining her lips.
“Twelve o’clock,” she told me, shocking me out of my thoughts and alerting me to a group of white men lingering around a man we’d come to recognize as a trafficker.
I nodded that I’d seen them and crept near, shadowing them as silently as possible.
“Only fifty dolla,” I overheard the trafficker say.
“Get outov ’ere,” a drunk American slurred.
“Okay, no fifty dolla. Forty dolla.”
“We don’t negotiate with terrorists, you sick bastard,” an obnoxious boy answered.
Four American men stood in a cluster, trying to read a digital map on their phone. Drunk and lost. Smart, I thought.
“Only forty dolla,” the trafficker repeated.
One of the boys made a move like he was going to hit the guy. Finally, he got the message and made his way down the street approaching other tourists and getting turned away. I made my way closer to him, edging around people until I was in stride with him.
“You like girls?” he asked me with their usual opener. I didn’t answer him, baiting him further. “Only fifty dolla.”
“I only have forty,” I said low, disguising my voice.
“Forty! Yeah, yeah! We do forty! Come,” he said, taking a right at the next intersection. He tried to corral me with one hand while pointing toward our destination with the other.
“How young?” I asked him.
“Young. Very young,” he replied.
I clenched my teeth as he led me down a narrow path between two shop buildings. At the back there was a door. There was always a door at the back.
“In here,” he told me. “Just in here.”
“No, I’m not comfortable going in there,” I told him and turned back around.
“No,” he said, snatching at my sleeve.
“Don’t touch me!” I roared at him, making him shrink into himself.
“Sorry, so sorry. Only forty dolla,” he offered, determined to deal at whatever cost.
“I said no.” I twisted around him and made a move to leave the narrow passageway.
“Thirty dolla,” he counteroffered, disgusting me.
I burst onto the main street.
/> “Are you okay?” Finley asked me when I reached the curb, concern in her voice.
I’d forgotten she was there.
I nodded, searching the street for her face but found nothing. Good, they’re hidden well.
“Detective Tran is getting a warrant now. The men are assembling. Father says to come meet me.”
I looked around me, searching for her soothingly beautiful face.
“I’m here,” she said, “by the only tree on the street.”
I spotted it almost immediately, basically pushing people out of my way to reach her.
“Almost,” she said, but I wasn’t sure if she’d intended to speak aloud.
I spotted Finley, leaning against the trunk, hidden in the night shadows of two buildings and the cover of the tree. She’d found the perfect spot. I yanked back my nón lá and it rested against my back, the strap lying against my throat. She held out her hand to me. Greedily, I grasped at it with both hands. Finally, I breathed, my chest and heart settling in that quietude I was constantly seeking and found so easily in her.
“You did well,” she told me. Her eyes locked with mine and she smiled. “I’m proud of you, Ethan.”
This filled me with an honor I’d honestly not felt in years. Finley lifted up on her toes, bringing her soft lips to my cheek.
Finley
The harshness of his stubble-covered skin against the creaminess of my own sent a thrill down my spine. My stomach dropped to my feet and my mouth went dry. I leaned my lips against his cheek, the corner of my lip meeting the corner of his by accident. I lingered there, tempting a dangerous game, swallowed, and closed my eyes, my lashes brushing against the bone at his temple.
I expected Ethan to back away from me at that intimate distance but he surprised me by standing stock-still, his face against mine. His warm breath fanned across my face, making my eyes burn with a desperation for him. It was a torturous game we played, our back and forth, and we rode the line between friendship and love with precarious steps. I expected, no, wanted so badly for a misstep.
Bend to me, Ethan. Because I will not.