Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

Then Annelise said she had to sit down. As I looked for the nearest bench, she held her middle and doubled over in the street. Her eyes grew listless. I could only catch her wrist as she fell.

“Help,” I called. Some passersby rushed over. What happened? they were asking, but I didn’t have an answer. “That’s Annelise, my neighbor,” a voice behind us said. “Her faulty machinery does that to her.” A crowd gathered as Annelise whimpered on the pavement. Help came in the form of the wooden boat that had just carried the Virgin back from the mountains into town. Dr. Delacruz set Annelise down on this makeshift stretcher, and she curled her body to fit inside. The marchers brought her to the town hospital. By the time she reached the emergency room, the skirts of her borrowed dress were soaked in blood.

—

Two days later I was allowed to see her in the recovery ward. I had my radio with me. Annelise sat upright on her bed, sipping from a can of pineapple nectar. A bag dripped fluid through a plastic tube into her arm.

“They made bunot of me,” she said, sweeping a hand over her body.

Bunot was coconut husk stripped of its inner meat, dried out and used to polish floors.

“I had the wrong cells growing in the wrong places. So they took out all my equipment. It would’ve been of no use to me anyway.”

A vision of a ram’s head hovered at the edge of my sight.

“Would you like to see it?” she said. “My crown of thorns?” She folded down the bedsheet and gathered up the hem of her hospital gown, exposing a swatch of gauzed flesh below her navel. Peeled aside, the bandage revealed a length of dark, scab-colored sutures, crisscrossed like barbed wire. The shadow of raised pink skin around them looked to be weeping.

My head did not know what my hand was up to. I watched, separate, as my fingers rose and reached out — for what? To point, or touch her scar, like a doubting Thomas? But Annelise reached out her own hand and caught mine.

“Show me yours,” she said. I’d never heard her whisper until then, or known her voice to tremble. Still, her grip was tight. I knew what she had asked to see, without her having to explain: my wound, my absence, the feature no one but my mother and Dr. Delacruz had seen. I could not show her without undressing. It terrified me, but I placed my other hand on my belt buckle. Annelise stared without blinking as I showed her first my right side, then my left. My head grew light; there was a drained feeling at my chest, as if my heart had stopped beating. I could still see her scar and was imagining the feel of knives and needles on my own flesh, and wondered if this — the cold sweat above my lip, the difficulty breathing — was how Annelise had felt in the street after the parade.

Then, instantly, we seemed to remember who we were, and to be ashamed. Annelise replaced the bandage and the sheet. While I got back into my trousers she switched on the transistor radio, finding Pusong Sinugatan. Ignacio, one of Joe’s unscrupulous rivals for Reyna’s affections, had exposed the priest who had married Joe and Reyna as a fake and was therefore trying once again to win Reyna back from her American love. In the meantime, General MacArthur had begun his humiliating retreat from Corregidor and out of the country. Joe despaired of ever seeing his sweetheart again. Then the station interrupted the episode for a weather advisory. The rainy season would arrive any day now. In other news, the Pope would soon induct Jaime Sin, the Archbishop of Manila, into the College of Cardinals. “Cardinal Sin!” laughed the announcer. Annelise fell asleep, and I was sitting a safe distance away from her at sundown, when Dr. Delacruz came into the room. “It’s late, anak, ” he said to me. “Let’s get you home to your mother.”

—

Dr. Delacruz and I rode in a silence that felt tender and familiar, fetching food from his own kitchen along the way. “Your friend will be much better now, anak, ” he said. “She’s suffered for three years, and now she won’t suffer anymore.” He paused. “Not unless she decides she wants children.” At our gate he unloaded the wheelchair from his trunk. With care and confidence, he lifted me from the passenger seat and set me down in my chair. It took me a moment to unclasp my arms from his neck.

The doctor handed me a plastic bag with a Tupperware container inside, still refrigerator-cold. He carried my books in one arm and pushed my chair with the other, using my keys to unlock the garden gate and front door.

My mother had just come downstairs from a bath, her hair wrapped in a towel. She looked weary, the lines and hollows of her face sharper than usual. I remembered then that she could become grumpy and delicate around holidays and festivals — times of year that even her most devoted guests spent with their wives and children.

She turned and stared at the doctor, without greeting.

“Danny and I just got back from the hospital,” he said. He pointed to the dish in my lap. “We brought you some dinuguan. ”

The dish was a fiesta tradition: a stew of pig innards cooked in pig’s blood that followed the roasting of lechon. “Thank you,” said my mother, “for thinking of the help. They’ll eat this when they’re working late.”

Dr. Delacruz looked down at the floor.

“As for Danny and I,” she continued, as I knew she would, “we’ve got these sensitive American taste buds — no dinuguan for us.”

I felt sure that he knew the truth, but was too gallant to expose my mother. She stepped aside — a cue for me to wheel toward the kitchen and refrigerate our dinner.

After Dr. Delacruz and the last of the servants had gone, I reheated the dinuguan on our stove. I was hungrier than I had realized, and the mud-colored gravy sated me as no meal had for some time. It seemed my mother hadn’t eaten all day, either. In her haste a splash of dinuguan landed on her robe. She barely paused between the mouthfuls to wipe it off, her napkin leaving a dark smear. I saw my mother in a sad new light. She looked as much like a child as she’d sounded, earlier, pretending for Dr. Delacruz’s sake that dinuguan offended our American palates. By this time I was so certain our lives were about to change that the house seemed already occupied with other people, watching as we slurped dark innards from my mother’s fading china and sharing in this ritual that had once been our secret.

—

The rains began gently enough that I could still visit Annelise after school each day. In the hospital, the week she remained under observation, we passed the late afternoons reading or listening to the radio. I finally confessed to her my hopes regarding Dr. Delacruz and my mother, and we laughed, imagining how Ruben Delacruz would suffer, then learn to tolerate me as a brother. We daydreamed about Dr. Delacruz’s big house, which had room enough to board the servants, meaning Annelise could live under the same roof, and move out of the ravine with her mother and her little brother.

Each time Dr. Delacruz spoke to me or brought me home, my sense of imminence grew. I found myself recalling all the moments he had entered our house or tended to me when I was ill, finding signs I might have been too young to recognize before. Had he always said “anak” to me, and always with such tenderness? One evening after I’d visited Annelise, Dr. Delacruz took me home as usual, and we found my mother in a miserable state. She was sitting on the floor in our sala. The gardener and the maid were standing over her, surrounded by some things dragged from her room: a mahogany trunk inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and a mirrored vanity tray cluttered with brushes and bottles. Her shiny robe had loosened, revealing a swath of pale freckled skin at her chest.