Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

“I saw my name on your computer.”

“You had no right to look there,” he said, sounding like those caught husbands again, “but I have nothing to hide. Please, be my guest.” He rolled his chair wheels back. “Show me what you saw.”

“I know it’s not there now.” You went to him, cloth and Windex still in hand. “I was here, doing my job.” You mimed dusting around his files and keyboard. “I moved this thing by accident.”

He didn’t deny it then.

“It’s wrong no matter what, John.”

He’d said your name so often. This, your first time saying his, felt like stepping off a high ledge without looking.

He placed his long fingers on the keyboard. “I know that,” he said. “I agree.”

“It’s wrong no matter what.” Your voice had lowered into someone else’s.

He looked so sad, so tortured by what he knew to be the right thing. Would Doris, Pepe, anyone you knew — even yourself, a day before — have ever guessed you’d be the one to touch him first? You remembered sitting in the church, years before, not knowing what came next but hoping for some kindness. You placed a hand on his shoulder. You felt a shaking from inside him — not a lot, not a “tremor,” but enough to make you think he needed more warmth, another hand, which you then placed on his other shoulder. You waited, then stepped forward. His hands descended on your hips. He dropped his forehead to the highest button on your dress, above your breasts — bone against flat bone. His short breaths blew the fabric back and forth.

And yes, if you’d stopped there, it might have been a hug, no more — an awkward hug, between two people, not quite friends. If either of you had moved any faster, any sooner, you’d have fled the scene, spooked like a horse. But John’s hand went so slowly from your hip, down to your knee, under your skirt. Any rougher and you might believe it all happened against your will. You looked through the window at squares of light in other buildings, tiny other people, tiny desks and chairs. His hand shifted against you, inches up and inches down, till sounds came out of your throat. You leaned back, seeing pores in the foam ceiling tiles before you closed your eyes.

—

Next to the churchyard, where he parks, the driver of the ambulance stops you. “Hey wait.”

You almost run, prepared to force your way into the building before he can ask for your ID. He doesn’t. He just tosses you a hard hat and paper mask before he walks off, putting on his own.

You smell, right then, the burning. Sharper than all other fires you have known. You put the hat and mask on and keep walking. Flames crackle from a broken car window, its alarm whooping. You haven’t seen a car aflame since Manila in the early eighties, the riot town the Guzmans were escaping. Two nurses pass, a coughing man outstretched between them, his big arms hanging on their small shoulders. The cops and firefighters move so fast. You realize you’re searching for a pair of blue eyes, wondering if John’s brothers are here too, working, trying to find him. If this had happened late at night, would John search the faces of these nurses in blue? Their pale uniforms really do match yours. Only the skirt sets you apart. You couldn’t sit down on the curb, as one nurse does now in her blue scrub pants, and weep into your knees.

The worst typhoon your village ever saw began while you were in a tree. The tallest one on the plantation (Mahentoy, you called it, after the giant in a folktale) let you see as far as the bay on one side and the next village on the other. You were looking for your father. You didn’t know that he had hitched his way already to Manila, where the taxis needed drivers and cafés needed busboys regardless of the weather; or that you would not see him again. You thought there was still time to tell him that a Red Cross tent inland had food and water.

“Come down, Esme,” you heard your mother say. Pepe wasn’t with her.

You shimmied down. The water, when you landed, reached your knees.

“Where’s the baby?”

“Darna brought him to the tent this morning.”

But you’d already seen Darna, your neighbor, from high up in the tree, head inland with her children — three of them, all her own, and no more. Your mother trusted people who had never wished her well.

“All right.” You walked her to the flooded main road and put her on a rescue boat. Then you turned, the water thigh-high now, and ran back to the house.

“Esme!” your mother called. “You’ll drown.”

The wind whipped at your face; the water slowed your legs down like a dream of running. The house was far enough away you had a chance to look at it, still standing, and feel proud of your papa, whose own hands built it, while scraps of other houses were sailing through the storm. One tin sheet could have sliced you clear in half, but missed. Falling coconuts hit the water with louder splatters than their sound on soil. You ducked. And underwater, it was dark and quiet. You could move faster. You swam until your fingers touched the door.

You prayed for love, not just acceptance, of God’s will: even if that meant finding Pepe already bloated with floodwater. Farm girls saw their share of death, both animal and human: stillbirths, yellow fever, malnutrition. And who could blame God, anyway? Looking down on perfect Pepe, how could He not want him back in heaven for Himself?

Inside the house, the water nearly reached your ribs. And there you found him, floating in the wooden trough that had become his cradle. He cooed and gurgled, reaching for his toes. Not a scratch on him.

—

John was the closest you had ever come to an addiction. As a young girl, you never even longed for sweets. Each morning you sipped coffee next to Doris, but you never needed it. Smoking and drinking struck you as a man’s vices, and a waste of money besides. Gambling, too. But nights with John — the stars in your brain, the beggar that sex made of your body — gave you a taste of it, that life, those forces that held Pepe at their mercy.

You walked into the walls of houses you’d cleaned for years. You broke a vase that had belonged to Helen Miller’s mother. “Esmeralda! What’s with you?” said Mrs. Miller. She docked you for it, as if money could replace a priceless thing. I’m sorry, ma’am. You went into his office that same night. Watched his reflection grow taller behind you as you wiped the windows. As he trapped you in his arms and closed his mouth over your ear.

If this was anything like what Pepe had felt, you couldn’t blame him. You could understand almost everything your brother had done over the years, the lengths he went to for his appetites.

But Pepe, at this time, was trying to change. He’d checked himself into a rehab center in the north: the Farm, residents called it, which caused confusion for you and your mother on the phone, between discussing home and Pepe’s rehab. The men there lived like soldiers. Their commander was a former shabu addict, who’d found God in jail, was now a priest, and lived by the old proverb about idle hands. His soldiers rose at dawn, cleaned the grounds, made and mended their own clothes, and cooked food that they had grown or raised themselves. Only after chores and Mass and meetings could they spend one hour every evening on the one leisure activity allowed: wood carving. They learned to shape blocks of kamagong wood: first into planks, then into spheres. The men who mastered those would build the planks into a cross, the beads into a rosary. The veterans learned figures — Mary and the saints, and, finally, to put all previous skills together, a crucifix with Christ on it. Pepe sent his handiwork across the ocean to your nightstand drawer. The priest did not like to rank residents, but Pepe thought he noticed his quick mastery of figure after figure, saw him linger on his work for longer than he did on other men’s.