Glorious Boy. Aimee Liu

If she handed him his rattle, he’d take it in both hands and examine it end to end, tracking its changing rhythms.

      Her quiet, serious baby. Ty’s hair had grown into a rich curly umber, eyes a dark mossy green. Though he showed no sign yet of talking, he was stubborn and definite in his likes and dislikes. This she’d known ever since they introduced him to the swimming pool, when he was barely three months old. The entire club membership had turned out that evening to celebrate the end of the monsoon season. The baby was a bonus, and the Ross matrons passed him around like a parcel of light. Marian Small pronounced him The Angel of the Andamans. Rita Wilkerson called him The Cherub. The cantonment’s aging wives were as greedy for white babies as they were indifferent to brown ones. Ty’s birth even helped to mitigate their disapproval of Claire’s career ambitions and willful fraternization with the natives.

      Still, five minutes of ogling and lavender-scented goosing was more than enough for their glorious boy. He let out a wail, and Claire and Shep fled with him into the water, where they expected surprise, at best a bit of tentative splashing. Instead, the infant took to the pool like a porpoise. Claire felt the tension leave Ty’s limbs as soon as he was immersed. He kicked and chortled and reached for the coral glints of sunset skittering across the waves.

      “He’s a natural,” Major Baird declared. “You’ve got yourself a real amphibian there.”

      Ever since, they’d taken Ty swimming almost every evening, and no matter how long they stayed, he would fuss when they pulled him out.

      He was like that in the library, too. Focused. Definite. Persistent. These qualities took a new turn, however, one morning soon after his nine-month birthday.

      At first, Claire saw nothing out of the ordinary. She set Ty on the floor beside her so she could study the library copy of Portman’s Andamanese “history.” M. V. Portman was a British officer who’d overseen the “home” for Andamanese captives on Ross in the 1880s. He’d also taken a stab at documenting their languages.

      “Do nga’ araulo,” she read aloud. “I am following you. Do nga’ paiti ke: I am going to shoot you. Do nga’ bilak: I am going to carry you away. Do tra’ mke: I wrap myself in it.”

      A swooshing sound drew her attention to Ty, who’d pulled himself to his knees and was rolling his rattle back and forth. His intensity made her wonder again, why did she wrap herself in this work? Why wasn’t it enough to be Shep’s wife and raise their child? Or, why didn’t she just content herself with studying the social customs and arcane rules of colonial society in Port Blair? She could conduct that field study without leaving Ross Island.

      She had no illusions about her personal affinity with Leyo’s people. After last January’s abortive field visit, they’d doubtless be happy never to lay eyes on her again. And other than Leyo, who’d spent so much time around outsiders that he was hardly representative, the only other Andamanese in Port Blair was that pathetic drunkard in Aberdeen Bazaar—even Leyo disavowed Porubi as “no good.” Whenever Claire caught sight of the man, sprawled in an alleyway or lifting a bottle of toddy to his lips as he leered at her with those bulging eyes, she hurried away in revulsion. Yet it was the very shame and pity that accompanied this revulsion which answered her question now.

      Ruth Benedict had aroused that same shame and pity with her lectures on the decline of the Choctaw, Pima, and Cochiti tribes. The parallels were inescapable. Just as the Spaniards had begun killing natives in America in the name of God, and the railroad industrialists had all but finished them off, so here the same British who built this library had begun the killing in the name of the Crown, and the current crop of prospectors were eradicating the Andamanese tribes to clear the way for timber, rubber, and coconut fortunes. The missionaries had done their job here, too. In the 1800s, following the rout of the natives that the British without irony labeled The Battle of Aberdeen, it was the colonial chaplain who devised a scheme to win over the survivors by “civilizing” them in captivity. Claire pictured the Victorian inhabitants of Ross, as well as their Indian convicts and soldiers, ogling the natives on display, much as she herself as a child had gawked at the dioramas of Northwest Coast Indians in the Museum of Natural History. Except that her gawking hadn’t led to the Coast Indians dying of alcohol poisoning, measles, and syphilis. Not directly, anyway.

      Atonement, then. Was that why she felt this sense of obligation to study and record what was left of the Biya? Atonement for the sins of the white man everywhere, not to mention her father’s forsaken dreams, her brother’s death, her mother’s undying sorrow. Her own unspeakable guilt. Pity, plus shame, equals sin that must be atoned for by sacrifice, study, and work?

      Or, was that all just a noble front for selfishness? Dare to call yourself a scientist, Dr. Benedict had urged, and conduct yourself accordingly. Dare, in other words, to be ambitious, to see your opportunities and seize them. As she had seized Shep and lunged for the Andamans in the first place. Not out of guilt, but for—

      Shifting, she kicked Ty’s rattle, and looked down to find that her son had crawled all the way to the opposite wall, where he sat on his bottom, blue sunsuit straining across his shoulders as he reached for the open door.

      Claire hurried to retrieve him, but she’d only taken a step or two when he sat back and lofted his hands in the air. Facing away from her, his interest had been caught by the light from two stained glass windows across the room. At this hour the tableau of the Peaceable Kingdom streamed in vivid hues onto the door’s smooth white panels.

      “That’s a lion,” Claire heard herself say. “And those are his little lambs.” Her family had never been much for churchgoing, especially after Robin’s death, and she had only a superficial knowledge of Bible stories, but in this case, the moral was clearly a plea for peace.

      Ty reached to pet the lion, but before he touched the door his hand cast a shadow, and the color caught his arm. He spent several seconds examining his golden skin, then his shadow. Then he turned and, oblivious to Claire, raised his face to the stained glass. She could almost see his mind working as he looked from the high window, back to the scene projected onto the door. He studied the slanting bars of color in the air, watched the motes of dust rain through them.

      Again, he raised his hands, now grasping. The particles spun faster.

      “Ty,” she said. “Your hand is red. Now it’s blue.”

      The shadow of his arm found the edge of the open door. His lips pursed in silent concentration as he opened and closed his fingers, testing to see if his shadow alone would move the door. When it didn’t, he scowled and scooted forward.

      Again, Claire thought she should stop him, but the pointedness of his concentration warned her against it. He wasn’t interested in going through the door; he was transfixed by the changing patterns of light and color that resulted as he pulled the door toward him and pushed it back. Stretch the lion like a snake, or bunch it into a sliver.

      “Look what you can do!” The singsong of her voice sounded idiotic as it echoed off the stone walls. When Ty didn’t react, she moved in front of him and knelt down. “Those are shadows, Ty. That’s color.”

      She listened for some response. A coo. A consonant. A murmur at the back of the throat.

      For a moment he paused and gave her a long impassive stare. He pulled on a lock of his hair. Without making a sound, he returned his attention to the door.

      The pang of rejection this triggered in her was ridiculous. Or was it? Babies were supposed to be distractable, weren’t they? And sociable? Instead, Ty went into his own little world and became all but unreachable. Even when he was nursing lately, his interest would wander off through the window or into the mirror, and he’d fail to eat. Shep said it was normal for some babies to wean themselves early. He was proud of their son’s self-sufficiency, and Jina, too, assured them that they were fortunate to have a son who demanded so little, but at moments like this Ty seemed to Claire unnervingly remote. Maybe she should follow Jina and young Naila’s example and simply let the child lead.

      She pulled up a chair and waited while Ty bent his head in and out of the