Glorious Boy. Aimee Liu

      At length he took her hands. “I’ll help you, you know. I mean, as much as I possibly can—what do you think?”

      She held very still. “Are you suggesting we take the next step?”

      A wave of relief—or, no, it was more like elation—charged his grin. “What’s that thing Americans say?”

      “What thing?”

      “Like, you’re on.”

       “You bet?”

      He shook her arms like reins. “You bet.”

      Four weeks later they were married in a small, stifling ceremony at home in Connecticut. Her father wept and her mother sat characteristically stiff and dry-eyed, a Yankee stoic through and through. Shep’s sister, Vivian, sent a whimsical topiary elephant and best wishes from Sydney, where she was based as a foreign correspondent. Shep’s parents, from their retirement village in Wales, sent proxy wishes in the form of a funereal tower of gladioli. After all, the bride and groom were bound for a penal colony.

      Innocents, the two of them. Naifs willfully twisting omens into romantic curiosities.

      Their first night at sea, Shep recited Kipling. They were lying stripped and spent, surprisingly yet deliciously renegade in their abandonment on the SS Ormonde’s upper deck. Lounge chairs like shadow sentinels stood guard against the August torpor, which had followed the ship from shore.

      “‘We’ve painted The Islands vermilion,’” he sang, soft and jubilant as Claire traced the Pleiades to reorient herself.

      “‘We’ve pearled on half-shares in the Bay,

      We’ve shouted on seven-ounce nuggets,

      We’ve starved on a Seedeeboy’s pay.

      We’ve laughed at the world as we found it—

      Its women and cities and men—

      From Sayyid Burgash in a tantrum

      To the smoke-reddened eyes of Loben.’”

      Dawn burnished the eastern horizon. She placed her ear to her new husband’s heart and wondered at the whoosh.

      Shep’s geography was pale and angular next to her own softer honeyed flesh, and his exuberance soon yielded to a more studious intimacy. Back in the pink light of their stateroom he’d trace the curve of her jaw, the hollows behind her knees, the moles arrayed in the shape of a mouse just below her left breast.

      Claire squirmed under this microscopic mapping. One night she caught his hand. “You touch me like I’m much more valuable than I really am.”

      But there was that fraudulent voice again. She felt as if she were trying to walk atop a giant ball. Could she pull it off, should she? Some part of this cavalier act must be true.

      Another part was necessary. She lacked the nerve to make her admission without cover of jest. So, she lay back in the swirl of bedclothes, flung an arm above her head, and waggled her hips like a floozy. “Maybe I should have confessed up front, but then I thought, you’re a worldly man.”

      Shep grinned too needily. He made the sign of a cross over her unclothed body before touching her hipbones, elbows, ribs. “Semilunar fascia, serratus magnus, brachialus anticus, latissimus dorsi.” The beautiful anatomical terms floated like an incantation of forgiveness.

      “You’re not secretly Catholic.”

      “Just a reverent doctor.” He would not be rushed. He kissed the hairline scar across her sternum, the bitten cuticles of her right hand. He grazed the cap of short dark hair, each imperfection with his lips, his teeth.

      “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”

      He sighed and lay back, stared at the ceiling as if at a cinema screen. At length he said, “Back in Shanghai I used to make quite a pest of myself at the apothecary stalls. I’d pretend they were opium dens, and I was king of the devils.”

      “You mean, I’ve married a bad boy?”

      He grinned. “You sound hopeful!”

      “How exactly were you a pest?”

      “I wanted to try everything. Ticked off the merchants to no end. They didn’t dare shoo away little white boys—no telling who my father might be. On the other hand, they were bound to catch bloody hell if I got sick from their herbs and potions.”

      “What was the attraction?”

      “Ah. Those places were everything I was forbidden. Dark and smelly and dank. Native and scary. The ginseng roots looked like shrunken scrotums.”

      “That appealed to you, did it?”

      “When I was nine,” he said as he stroked her thigh, “I didn’t yet appreciate the importance of healthy testicles.”

      She slapped his hand. “Is there a story here?”

      “Well. There were these botanical buttons that looked like stars and tasted like licorice. I pinched one and swallowed it as soon as I got home. Turned out, it cured constipation in thirty-four minutes flat. Vivvy timed it. You should have seen my father’s face when I told him.”

      “Why on earth did you tell him?”

      “More the fool, I thought he’d be interested. He threatened to sack the cook for taking me into the native quarter, and I got the belt, but that only taught me to keep my experiments secret. Lo and behold, other heathen cures worked better than any dose of Father’s Kaputine, Piso’s, or Cheracol.”

      She saw, finally. “You won.”

      He didn’t answer, but then said, “It’s the work I really want to do when we get to the Andamans, Claire. Those forests are like one great undiscovered apothecary shop. They could well contain the next medicinal miracle.”

      “Your very own treasure hunt.” She gave her husband a kiss. “That makes two of us, I guess.”

      He raised himself up to look down at her. “Now you.”

      “Now me what?”

      “Tell me what you should have confessed up front.”

      And though she’d rehearsed this a hundred times, still she fumbled for a way in. She pulled the sheet over her nakedness. “My parents. It’s not what you think.”

      “What I think . . .”

      “I mean, they’re sad to see me leave, and maybe they blame you for taking me away, but it’s not just that. Or, not just you. See, I had a little brother. He died when I was eleven. Drowned in the pond behind our house.”

      She’d never spoken of Robin like this. She’d never needed to. Her brother was no longer mentioned at home, and her other suitors had all been intent on pretending that life was a lark. The Depression did that to some people, but maybe not in China. And Shep wasn’t a suitor anymore.

      So, before he had time to react, Claire pressed ahead. Robin was eight years old. He wanted to play with her and the girl who’d come home with her after school, but Claire was jealous because this friendship was new and her gawky little brother embarrassed her, so she told him to get out of her room. The pond looked frozen but wasn’t. Robin went out and never came back. Her parents insisted it wasn’t her fault, but she knew better. She and the girl who’d been there that day could not so much as look at each other afterwards.

      “For months I couldn’t even face the mirror, much less talk about Robin.” Ten years ago was one hundred twenty-seven months. “I remember he stuck out his tongue as he was leaving. Licorice was his favorite candy. His tongue was black with it.”

      Shep didn’t move. “You loved him,” he said. Not an exoneration, but