Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

I glanced again over my shoulder before peeling a patch from its backing. I pressed it to my chest as if saluting a flag or anthem. My heart raced under my hand. In the distance, my mother’s laughter rose and fell. But nothing changed as I lay back on the cot. It seemed as if the years of virtue had made a fortress of me, a barricade that human appetites and weakness couldn’t breach.

Then my bones began to melt. Things happened too quickly, at first, to feel good. The rosary, the notebook, and the fan, unfolding pleat by pleat, rose from the chair and hovered over my father’s bed. The doors swayed. I gripped the edges of the cot, feeling control slip from me inch by inch. Only when the melting reached my fingers, loosening their hold, did I begin to enjoy it. Patches flew out of the box and lined up like a filmstrip in the air, each one a panel with a picture in it, and from there every square inside the house became a screen: song lyrics in the baby monitor; my father’s face in the green computer. Even the windows and the wicket came alive with scenes of bida, kontrabida, and the woman they both claimed. My body sailed up and out of the room like a streamer: through the corridor, the kitchen, the sari-sari. Walls and ceilings yielded to me as they would to a ghost. I heard my mother laughing and my father singing “Fly Me to the Moon,” the sounds and words escaping through the roof into the stars.

—

I woke the next morning to find my bedsheets balled on the sickroom floor, the Succorol patch still on my chest. Tearing it off, I wondered if my mother had checked in on me and seen it. In the bathroom I tried to soap off the patch’s square footprint, but the adhesive was stubborn. I needed a washcloth to work at the residue.

Rubbing away the evidence, I looked down. As if I’d never seen my own hand before. I stretched my arm out and stared at the white cloth, wrapped around my fingers like a mitten. A bandage.

I rushed from the sink to the doorway of the sickroom, thinking back to the night he died. Here was where the moonlight had shone over the bed. Here was the step I took before seeing them. Here was where she gasped, stopping me in my tracks, and bent to hide his body. My mind shuffled through the kinds of scenes you saw in those trashy Tagalog melodramas: on-screen villains, polishing their guns and planting their poisons; my mother, not ministering to him as she had when I was four years old, but instead waiting for me to fall asleep, kneeling at my father’s bedside, removing his shirt and applying a patch to his chest. I pictured her adding another patch and then another, a week’s worth, her fingertips blanching his skin briefly at each point of pressure. I could see her laying an ear to his chest. After midnight, when his breath and heartbeat stopped, she must have peeled off the patches, soaked the washcloth, and tackled the sticky residue just as I opened the door for some cold air.

Now I opened the candy box and counted again: five. Only three should have gone to my father on my second, third, and fourth days home; one to me. I’d seen my mother sell one. Of the other twenty that were missing, how many had she sold? Had she sold some in the nights before as well, while I slept? How many would it take to finish off a dying man?

I must have known a drug so powerful could end his life. So what? Didn’t I want him gone, hadn’t I always? My mother was better off.

But at what cost? I had to ask myself. If she had killed him, I had handed her the weapon. If I’d kept track, a closer eye on the supply, I might have caught it all sooner. What kind of pharmacist lets days go by without taking inventory? Someone incompetent as well as criminal. Like him, in other words.

—

In spite of what I’d told the staff, my father did not have a vast global fan club traveling to see him. No need to drag the wake on for days, as other Filipino families might for more beloved men: we would bury him later that second day. At the cemetery, a block of earth had been hollowed out for the grave. My aunts cooled themselves with lace fans, or brochures they’d lifted from the funeral parlor and folded into pleats. A priest read from his small black Bible. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. In this kind of heat the valley of the shadow of death sounded inviting.

My cousins’ children broke flowers from the bouquet set on the coffin. Before the lid was closed and locked for good, I looked for the last time at my father’s face, under its sheet of viewing glass. The mortician had not only restored the color but buoyed up the flesh itself, faking fullness in the hollows and droop. I could almost imagine that face moving again, the mouth stretching backward to spit. Nearby a headstone waited, even simpler than the banner on his flowers: ESTEBAN SANDOVAL, SR. 1935−1998. SON · BROTHER · HUSBAND · FATHER. My head ached, and my mouth felt dry; there was a grit behind my eyelids I couldn’t blink away.

Now, at his grave, my mother wept into her white handkerchief. She still looked frail, the woman who cleared platters and pulled out chairs, who knelt at my father’s feet and mopped up after him. Her tears affected me the way they always had. I swore to stop them; I’d do anything. I reached for her, then froze — afraid, for the first time in all my years consoling her, that I might cry myself. For years there’d been no question of how much she leaned on me, like any mother on her overseas son. It never dawned on me how much I’d leaned on her: to play her part, stick to the script. Her saintliness was an idea I loved more than I had ever hated him. I put my arms around her, making vow after silent vow. I’d never cut corners again, no matter what the value, who the victim; I would never violate any code, professional or otherwise. I would take her with me to New York. I would never leave her again. I’d bury the patches somewhere no one would find them, so long as she could always remain the mother I knew, not some stranger laughing in the dark.

My uncles turned a crank to lower their brother into the ground. They picked up shovels and began to bury him scoop by scoop. My mother passed her fan to me, then her handkerchief. It felt damp in my palm, the cloth worn thin and soft from all its time in the wash. She stepped forward to join her in-laws, struggling with the shovel’s weight.

A smell of grass and earth took me back to the yard that once existed in Mabini Heights, and I half-expected an acacia tree to appear beside me, or my mother’s voice to call me to dinner through the kitchen screen. I remembered how I used to climb that tree and sling a branch onto my shoulder, aiming sniper-style at the place in the house where my father might be standing. Another time I stabbed a fallen twig into the grass and twisted it, imagining his blood. But I’d fought tooth and nail to rise above that yard. Even in return for all the harm he’d done my mother, to harm him, to be capable of harm to him, was to honor what was in my blood. His blood. I trained myself into his opposite: competent, restrained. The hero in an old Tagalog movie did not win by stooping to revenge; there was a pristine, fundamental goodness in his soul that radiated out to crush the villain. Character and destiny — I believed in all of that, I guess.

My mother raised her foot and staked the spade into the ground. She heaved the dirt into the plot and made a noise, almost a grunt. You don’t know my strength! Through all the melodramas that my family and I had seen over the years, in which the bida and the kontrabida crossed their swords over a woman, I never guessed that she might be the one to watch.

When Mrs. Mansour first came to the house, I thought she was alone. Naturally I could see only her face; the rest of her had been draped in the traditional black. But there was something modern about her right away, even ignoring the fact that she had arrived without a husband. She wore sunglasses — Chanel, I saw, as she approached — and deep red lipstick.