Brett Battles - The Pull of Gravity

I couldn’t help feeling a sense of failure. On the surface, I’d accomplished what I’d come back to the Philippines to do. The sale of my stake in a bar in Angeles City had been finalized three days ago. Sure, the money wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped, but when is it ever? I was just glad to get it over with. With the bar sold, presumably my last tie to the Philippines was gone.

But Nicky Valenti, one of my ex-pat friends who still lived there, said something the night before I was supposed to leave Angeles and the islands forever that changed my plans. “I hear Isabel’s on Boracay,” he told me. That was it. One small nugget dropped into a larger conversation about nothing. I didn’t ask who he heard this from, or even if the information was reliable.

The truth was, in the few days I’d been back in Angeles, I’d found myself glancing into the faces of the girls as they passed me on the street, wondering if I might spot Isabel Reyes. When I didn’t, I felt a sense of relief. Three years earlier, she’d returned to her home province. Maybe, just maybe, she’d stayed. It would have been the best thing for her. But if Nicky was right, she hadn’t stayed. Instead, she’d come back to the life.

It was the money, most likely. Or perhaps life back home had become unbearable. Probably both. Whatever the reason, my heart sank a little knowing she was working again. Yet, selfishly, I couldn’t also help but feel that maybe I’d be able to find the answers to the questions that still plagued me, and that the memories I lived with every day might finally be put to rest.

If Isabel was on Boracay Island, I had to find her.

After I said goodbye to Nicky, I went back to my hotel room and made a call to Bangkok.

“I need to stay a little longer,” I said into my cell phone. “A few days. Maybe a week at most.”

“Of course,” Natt told me. She didn’t sound surprised.

When I was through explaining to her what had transpired while I was in Angeles, she said, “Take as long as you need. It’s okay.”

“You know I have to do this,” I said.

“I know. I want you to. Don’t worry about me.”

“I always worry about you.”

“I know that, too.” I could almost hear her smiling through the phone.

“ Phom rak khun, ” I said.

“I love you, too.”

I left the following morning for Boracay.

For the next three days I looked for Isabel without success. Though the island wasn’t that large, there were plenty of opportunities for us to miss each other. My search could have gone on for weeks, and the results would have been the same, but I just couldn’t bring myself to give up. Not yet.

Two more days, I decided. If I couldn’t find her by then, I’d know it just wasn’t meant to be.

A day and a half later I was tired and depressed and annoyed at my continued failure. Instead of searching the streets again, I decided I needed a break and went for a quick dip in the ocean. The water was warm and inviting, and I felt my stress drop a notch. I swam for twenty minutes, then stretched out on the beach, and absently flipped through the pages of a magazine I’d taken from my hotel. My mind finally began to accept that it was time to stop this fruitless search and go home.

I guess that was why, as I watched the beautiful girl walk down the shore toward me, that I didn’t realize it was Isabel until she walked past.

An avalanche of memories cascaded through my mind. Isabel at the bar. Isabel, Larry and I on a shopping trip to Manila. Larry and I playing pool down at The Eight Ball.

By the time I recovered, she’d picked a spot not twenty feet away and laid out a towel. She wasn’t alone, of course. There was a guy with her, another member of the Fat White Guys Brigade. He put his towel on the beach next to hers. Instead of sitting, he kind of half fell on his ass, grunting loudly as he did. When he talked to her, I couldn’t make out the words but I detected an accent. German, maybe, or Dutch.

After a few minutes, Isabel, lying on her stomach with her chin propped up on her hands, began casually looking around the beach. No doubt she was checking to see if there was anyone around she knew. Her eyes paused on me for a second. I probably looked vaguely familiar, but when she couldn’t place me, she continued on.

It wasn’t surprising. We hadn’t seen each other since she left Angeles. Back then, I was also a member of the brigade. The Jay Bradley that Isabel knew was an obese slob who thought he was “just a little heavy.” His hair was a brown bush that always needed a trim. Sometimes he shaved, sometimes he didn’t. And then there was his uniform: dark blue cargo shorts that reached below his knees, and a T-shirt, either black or maroon. That former Jay had a dozen T-shirts of each color and three pairs of the shorts.

That was Philippine Jay. Three years gone and good riddance.

By the time Isabel glanced at me that afternoon, I’d lost nearly eighty pounds. My hair was shorter, too. Close-cropped and a hell of a lot more gray. Yet even with the gray, I looked younger. I’d been working out, and, for the first time in nearly forty years, I was in shape. As far as wardrobe, Bangkok Jay had no maroon or black T-shirts, and the only shorts he wore were khaki.

But Isabel looked nearly unchanged. A few years older, sure, but when you were talking about going from twenty-three to twenty-six, that really didn’t mean much. Her thick, black hair was about the same length as I remembered, reaching just below her shoulder blades. She was around five foot three and slim as ever. Her skin was a few shades darker than I recalled, but living so close to the beach now undoubtedly accounted for that.

I guess the most shocking thing to me was that she was showing a lot of skin. The Isabel I knew wouldn’t have been caught dead outside in a bikini. But here on the beautiful Boracay beach she was wearing a white two-piece suit that only covered what it was supposed to.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen her in a bikini before. She’d often worn one inside the bar, but that was work. Outside the bar, it had been strictly one-piece suits if she decided to swim in public at all.

Her face was still her best feature. Larry once told me every time he looked at her, time stopped. I told him he was full of shit, but I knew what he meant. She had large, dark eyes, with lids that seemed to open only halfway. And when she smiled, her whole face lit up.

Yet there was something different about her now. Her…softness was gone. Well, maybe not softness, exactly. Her innocence. That was it. Her innocence had been wiped away. She looked harder now, had more of an edge. And my guess was that when she smiled these days, it was most likely calculated and lacked the spontaneity Larry had loved. It wasn’t much of a stretch to guess what had triggered the change.

Seeing her, I knew now more than ever that she and I needed to talk. Because Larry was dead, and the dead lived only through the memories of their friends and family. Larry had no family, and as far as I knew, Isabel and I were his only close friends.

I continued to read my magazine while keeping an eye on Isabel and her European friend. I should have realized before I came back to the Philippines that Boracay would be the obvious location to find her. It had always been her favorite place. The first time she came here was with Larry, of course. I had been on that trip, too, though I wasn’t the important one.

Around four o’clock, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. By this point I’d finished with the magazine and was absently watching a couple of kids playing in the surf. I glanced in Isabel’s direction. She and her foreigner friend were folding up their towels, finished with their afternoon in the sun. After a few moments, they headed back the way they’d come.