Brett Battles - The Pull of Gravity

They found Larry’s body a few blocks away in an empty lot. It was a couple of kids who made the discovery. They were up early looking for anything valuable they might be able to sell for a few pesos.

Larry had been stabbed three times, any one of which would have been fatal.

The police came to my house at ten in the morning and woke me up. With Isabel in the hospital, they needed me to identify the body. How they knew my connection with Larry, I wasn’t sure. It didn’t really matter anyway.

His face seemed paler, and his skin looked almost like plastic, but it was Larry. No question about it. When I asked what had happened, they said it was a robbery gone bad. They then asked me if I wanted to see the wounds. I told them no.

At the time I had no reason to question their conclusion. Larry’s wallet was missing, and if he had anything else of value on him at the time of the incident, it was also gone.

After I had identified Larry and told the cops I would make the arrangements to send him home, I went to the hospital to see Isabel. She was in a large room with five other patients. Her arm was wrapped and immobilized, but not yet in a cast. I couldn’t see her foot, but the doctor told me the ankle was broken.

There were bruises on her face, and I was sure the damage continued underneath the blanket in areas I couldn’t see. She was in a drug-induced sleep. I asked the doctor when I should come back, and he told me he doubted she’d wake up before the next morning.

That evening I decided to give the girls the night off, and closed The Lounge. I knew if we had opened, it would have been a pretty somber place. All the girls liked Isabel, and most knew Larry, too. It was no time for a party.

I don’t know what everyone else did, but I stayed home, wandering the rooms of my home, taking stock of the possessions I had accumulated. Pictures and furniture and satellite TV and even the house itself, with its three bedrooms and its pool out back. They all represented who I had become in some way, an ex-pat who rented girls for the night, and whose closest friends were drunks and lechers. That’s what I was left with once Larry was gone.

I remember staring out my front window at a palm tree that grew in a neighbor’s yard, the lights from their house illuminating it like a piece of art in a museum. It was tall and thin and swayed slightly in the wind. It was so simple, and so beautiful. I remember thinking, wasn’t that what I had wanted in the beginning? Something simple? An early retirement and plenty of time to do nothing.

But I had damned myself the moment I decided to move to the Philippines.

When I finally turned away from the window, I looked at my house with new eyes. I would sell it as is, furnished and decorated. I would take only the things I really needed.

For me, the never-ending party stopped that night. Rowdy could run the bar himself once he got there.

I was done.

When I arrived at the hospital the next morning, the doctor told me Isabel was awake. He also told me something else.

“She’s been asking for the man,” he said. “Larry?”

“She doesn’t know?” I asked.

The doctor paused before answering. “We thought it best if it came from one of her friends.”

Which meant me.

I entered her room, my head swirling with anxiety and sadness and a deep desire to turn around and leave so that someone else could do what I was about to.

She didn’t see me at first. Her eyes were half shut, pain creasing her brow. I noticed her arm was now in a cast, and the bruises on her face had grown.

I stood at the side of her bed. “Isabel?”

She opened her eyes slowly, and they brightened some when she realized who I was. “Hi, Papa,” she said.

“You look like you’re in pain. Do you need something?” I asked.

“The nurse just gave me a pill,” she said. “I’ll feel better in a moment.”

“The doctor tells me that your arm will heal and your ankle, too. It’ll just take a little time.”

She tried to smile, but that only caused more pain.

“Is Larry here?” she asked. “I thought he would come visit me, but I haven’t seen him.”

I didn’t know how to begin, so I took what I hoped was the easy way out. “What’s important right now is you get some rest and get better,” I said.

“Where is he?” she asked, not letting it go. “Is he hurt?” She tried to push herself up, but didn’t get far before pain forced her back down. “I need to see him.”

“Isabel,” I said. “Larry’s not here. And he’s not coming.”

She looked at me, confused. Before she could ask another question, I said, “He died after the accident.”

I watched as panic overtook her, deforming her face and causing the hand of her unbroken arm to shake. She opened her mouth several times to speak, and when she finally did, her words piled on top of each other in a stuttered gasp. “But he was okay. He wasn’t hurt. Not like me.”

I noticed the doctor and one of the nurses hovering nearby. They had obviously anticipated Isabel’s reaction to the news they had fated me to deliver.

“Isabel, there’s nothing you can do. You just need to get better.”

I knew my words were inadequate. What do you tell someone when the man she’d loved for two years was dead? Whatever it was, I didn’t know it.

“I need to see him,” she said, her voice suddenly strong. “I need to see him now.”

Again she pushed herself up, this time succeeding in reaching a sitting position. Apparently that was the cue for the doctor and nurse to move in.

“No!” Isabel screamed as they pushed her back down on the bed.

She tried to pull away, but she was too weak. When the nurse stuck the needle in her arm, she could barely even shrug. Soon Isabel’s eyes closed and she was once again asleep.

She never did see Larry again. His body was flown back to America and buried a week before she got out of the hospital. Her last sight of him had been as someone pulled him out of the sidecar while he protested that his girlfriend needed help.

A few of the early-bird guests had wandered down from their hotel rooms to the poolside restaurant for breakfast. The sky had turned a beautiful azure blue, with the only clouds in sight distant, dotting the horizon.

I asked Isabel if she wanted something to eat, but she said she wasn’t hungry. So we walked to the edge of the hotel property and looked out over the beach at the ocean.

“I don’t get to see this too often,” she said. “Mornings, I mean. Everything seems so much richer, and calmer. Does that make sense?”

“Sure,” I told her, knowing exactly what she meant.

“Larry always wanted me to get up with him in the morning, but I always wanted to sleep.” She let out a short, derisive laugh. “That was time we missed spending with each other, I guess.”

Behind us somewhere came the laughter of children. On the air there was the aroma of eggs and meat. Boracay was slowly waking.

“It was Mariella, wasn’t it?” I asked.

Isabel looked at me, then returned her gaze to the ocean. “I think it was eight or nine months after the accident-you were gone by then. Even though I’d moved back home, I still heard from the girls sometimes, keeping me caught up on life in Angeles.” She paused and closed her eyes, either searching for a memory or trying to forget it. “The police caught a man who’d been robbing houses. When they were questioning him, he mentioned the accident. He claimed he wasn’t involved, but he had heard that a woman paid three men ten thousand pesos to kill an American. He said the woman was a bar girl.

“Two months later, Mariella came back to the province for a visit. I hadn’t seen her since just after the accident. She visited me in the hospital once. It was a quick visit. She’d been cold and uncaring, and I had been tired and depressed. And once I left the hospital, I only stayed in Angeles long enough to gather my things and get Larry’s money from you.