"Good boy," said Anh Phuoc.
Quyen's eyes followed the carton. "Is that all there is?"
Holding the tiller with one hand, he reached down and opened the cupboard beneath it. Three plastic white cartons.
"That's all," he said, "unless it rains."
"How long will it last?"
"Another day. Two at the most."
Her temple still aching, Mai looked out of the pilothouse windows. From up here she could see the full length and breadth of the boat: every inch of it clogged with rags and black-tufted heads and sunburned flesh. Up here would be the best place to count people. She wrenched her eyes away from the water carton and looked out instead at the sky. Not a cloud in sight. But the sky was full of deceit — it looked the same everywhere. She looked at the horizon, long and pale and eye-level all around them. Whatever direction she looked, it fell away into more water.
***
THE TENTH DAY DAWNED. Engines dead, the boat drifted on. Gray shadows strafing the water behind it. The detachable sail hoisted onto a short mast's yard and men taking turns, croaking directions to each other as they tried to steer the boat, as best they could, to the south.
Mai watched Truong with renewed intensity. Since Mai's recovery Quyen had kept to herself, remaining huddled, during the day as well as night, underneath the companionway stairs where they all slept. That morning Mai had found her sitting in the slatted light, staring vacantly into the dark hold. Squeezed between two old women.
"How is Truong?" Quyen asked her quietly.
Mai said, "I keep telling him to come down."
"He doesn't like it down here."
Mai nodded, not knowing what to say.
Quyen dropped her chin and closed her eyes. Mai looked her over. She didn't look sick.
"Is Chi alright?"
Quyen nodded almost impatiently. One of the women beside her spat into her hands. When Quyen looked up her face was distant, drawn in unsparing lines.
"Look after him, nha? Please."
Above deck, each hour stretched out its hot minutes. Mai lay on her back under the derrick-crane, her head against someone's shin, limbs interwoven with her neighbors'. Truong wedged beside her. The crane cast a shadow that inched up their bodies. She threw her sleeve over her face to ward off the sweltering sun. At one point a wind blew in and the boat began to sway, lightly, in the water. She was riding her father's shoulders. Her mother watching them happily. Whenever he was home he brought with him some quality that filled her mother so there was enough left, sometimes, for her to be happy.
Truong started singing. Softly — to himself — so softly she wouldn't have heard him if her ear hadn't been inches from his mouth. She gradually shifted her arm down so she could hear better. He sang the ballad from the third night. She listened, hardly daring to breathe, watching the now-darkening sky knitting together the rigs and cables of the crane above them as though they were the branches of trees.
When he finished, the silence that surged in afterward was unbearable. Mai reached across her body and gently took hold of his arm.
"Who taught Child how to sing like that?"
He didn't answer.
***
THE NEXT MORNING, back below deck, she woke up to find a puddle of vomit next to his curled-up, sleeping body. It gleamed gray in the early light of dawn.
"The child has the sickness," a voice said without a second thought. It was one of the old women who had camped with them beneath the companionway stairs. The hatch was open and light flowed in like a mist, dimly illumining the three other bodies entangled in their nook. The deeper recess of the hold remained black.
"No, he doesn't," said Mai.
"Poor child. He is not the last. Such a pity."
"Be quiet!" Mai covered her mouth, abashed, but no one reproached her. Several bodies stirred on the other side of the stairs.
Barely awake, Quyen rolled over to her son and propped herself up on an elbow. She brushed his cheek with her knuckles. For a second, in the half-light, Mai thought she saw an expression of horror move across her friend's face.
"Child is sorry," Mai murmured to the old woman.
Truong's eyes were glazed when he opened them. He looked like a burnt ghost. He leaned over, away from his mother, and dry-retched. There was nothing left in him to expel. Another of their neighbors, a man who smelled of stale tobacco, averted his legs casually.
"What it can do to you," the old woman said, her gums stained crimson from chewing betel leaves, "the ocean."
"Does Child's stomach hurt?" asked Mai.
"Yes."
"What it can steal from you and never give back. My husband, both my daughters." "It's just a stomach-ache," said Quyen, then looked up as though daring the old woman — or anyone — to disagree. A gang of eyes, unmoving, inexpressive, watched them from the shadows.
That evening, Anh Phuoc ladled out the last rations of water. He shuffled wearily through the boat, repeating the same account to anyone who stopped him, intoning his interlocutors' names as though that were the only consolation left him to offer them. Weak moans and thick silences trailed him.
When Mai poured her ration into Truong's cup, Quyen frowned, and then flinched away. "Thank you," she said at last. For the first time she used the word for "younger sister."
"It's nothing. I already took a sip."
"Poor child," repeated the old woman, shaking her head.
Truong took some water in, then coughed some of it out. People looked over. In the dusk light his face was pallid and shiny.
He opened his mouth. "Ma," he said.
"I'm here," said Quyen.
"Ma."
Quyen bit her lips, wiped the sweat from Truong's brow with a corner of her shirt. Finally his eyes focused and he seemed to look straight at Mai.
"It's so hot," he said.
"Thoi," said Quyen, dabbing above his eyes, around his hairline.
"I want to go up."
"Sleep, my beloved. My little prince. Sleep."
Mai wanted desperately to say something to him-something useful, or comforting-but no words came. She got up to close the hatch door.
The old woman took out a betel leaf and inserted it into the slit of her toothless mouth.
***
HIS SICKNESS FOLLOWED the usual course. Muscle soreness and nausea in the early stages. That evening his blisters began to rise, some of them bleeding pus. He became too weak to swallow water.
In the middle of the night, Mai woke to find Truong half draped over her stomach. His weight on her so light as to be almost imperceptible, as though his body were already nothing more than bones and air. "Everything will be fine," she whispered into the darkness, her thoughts, still interlaced with dream, scattered remotely across space and gray sea. Back home she'd slept on the same mat as Loc. Her mother by the opposite wall. She reached down and touched Truong's brow.
He stirred awake.
"Is Child alright?"
"I want to go up."
The skin on his face was hot and moist. Mai lifted her eyes and noticed Quyen, mashed in the shadow of the companionway steps, staring at both of them.
"Take him," she said dully.
Mai found a spot for them by the pilothouse, surrounded by sleeping families. When dawn came, Truong's head slid with a slight thud onto the planking. Half asleep, Mai sought his shoulder, shook it. His body gave no response. She sat up and shook him again. His clothes stiff with dried sweat. Nothing.
"Truong," whispered Mai, feeling the worry build within her. She poked his cheek. It was still warm — thank heavens! — it was still warm. She checked his forehead: hotter than it had been last night. He was boiling up. His breath shallow and short. With agonizing effort she cradled his slight, inert body and bore him up the stairs into the pilothouse.