Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

“We talked for a while,” said Jim. “I convinced him not to burn this house down.” Instead, Billy applied for conscientious objector status. Writing the press, the palace, anyone who’d listen. Our vain mission in Vietnam. A puppet President who’ll keep sending our boys there just to stay in Washington’s good graces.

For all the times he’d wished Billy and he could agree on something, Jim was worried about this Billy. This angry, haunted Billy. And for good reason, it turned out. Within two weeks of Billy’s call from 26 Avalon Row, he disappeared. Then, just before she found Jim in Pedia-Onco, watching Porky Pig, police found Billy’s body in the Pasig River.

“They said suicide.” Jim began to shake his head again, bringing his fingers to his temples. “I don’t believe it. Billy would have talked to me.”

Milagros reached for Jim and kissed him, in the empty bedroom. She was glad to comfort him, if that’s what you could call it, to lie down by the drafting table with him, to calm him all the way to sleep after.

At dawn he woke wanting to write, and she took dictation on Billy Batanglobo’s vellum sketchpad. He thought Billy deserved a profile in the Herald ’s Sunday magazine. His arc from Joe ’Kano to paranoid survivalist to conscientious objector to drowning victim in just thirty years. No editor, Milagros still asked Jim why he left out the second bomb shelter. “One shelter gets the point across,” Jim said. He wanted to spare Billy’s memory, his mind, the judgment of outsiders. Instead, Jim mentioned other “suicides”: four Philcag Filipinos, in the last six months, who’d come home questioning their place in Vietnam — no history of suicide attempts between them, not even a tendency to wander.

Between the writing and dictation and typing and editing, he and Milagros came together: in the master bedroom, on the trundle, even on the floor of the basement, that bare, unfurnished safe haven that Billy had created before deciding all his fears had been bogus.

She woke early, before Jim, on Monday and took a last walk through the house — touching the bathroom doorknob, turning on the nursery light, running the kitchen faucet. Despite the grief and loss that hung over it like a net, she liked it here in Billy Batanglobo’s house, and would be sad to leave. She imagined the family that would move into it: a lawyer and a teacher, maybe; or a doctor and a housewife. One son, one daughter. What used to be the basement bomb shelter would be their playroom when it rained outside. There was enough yard for a dog to play endless rounds of fetch in, and bury countless bones.

While Jim slept, she began to pack up what was in the kitchen cupboards. All weekend long the favor they had come to do Billy’s family had been forgotten. She stacked white bowls, each blue at the rim. Billy must have eaten cornflakes from them, the cornflakes that still sat in a box on top of the refrigerator, using the single spoon that had long dried on the dish rack.

“We work well together here,” Jim said, startling her from the doorway as she unhooked pots and pans, as quietly as she could, from the wall. “Don’t we?”

Milagros turned around. “I was thinking the same thing.”

They were both wearing a dead man’s clothes. She had combed her hair with her fingers; they had used Billy’s toothpaste and soap, and gone into his dresser drawer to replace her uniform and Jim’s work shirt. They hadn’t planned to spend the weekend there together, away from home.

“What if we are home?” said Jim.

February 8, 1986

“I voted for her, ” says Milagros’s mother. “The widow.”

“What made you decide?” asks Milagros. “Her platform to eliminate crony capitalism and reform the military? Or did you just go with the candidate that has the strongest popular mandate?”

She hasn’t been this cruel to her mother since high school.

“I don’t know about all that,” says her mother. “I just like her face. She has a sweet voice, too.”

“And she prays,” says Milagros, unable to stop. “Don’t forget about that. If not for the five children, she’d practically be a nun.”

“You’re angry. I don’t blame you.” Her mother, caught up in the opposition fever, in her own way, has pinned a yellow ribbon to her shirt. But who’s counting? asks the radio announcer, about the election returns. I mean this literally. You’ve got two groups, both calling themselves official. On one side, the Commission on Elections, hailing the widow “Madam President.” On the other, Parliament, appointed by the President himself, has given it to their old boss by a landslide.

“I hope your vote is counted, Ma,” Milagros says. “And I hope this person you admire doesn’t let you down.”

“I doubt I’ll live long enough for anyone to let me down anymore,” says her mother.

The People and I have won, and we know it, the widow says. Any victory announced by the palace will be as cooked up as the President’s fake war medals. She vows to get her fans together for street protests if she’s cheated.

That night, Milagros tries, for the third time in three weeks, to join Vivi and her mother for dinner. Milagros could get through it if not for her daughter. Jackie clings to information like a dog beside the kitchen table. Any fact you throw her gets sucked dry.

“Jaime Jr. is on vacation,” says Milagros, fresh out of answers.

“But school’s not over yet,” says Jackie.

“So many questions!” snaps Milagros. She who once swore to be the kind of mother who encouraged questions. “Is this what I get for sending you to school like you wanted?”

“But you said before—”

“Forget what I said before,” says Milagros. “Jaime’s away.”

If mothering were an official job, someone would have docked her pay or fired Milagros months ago. She avoids her own daughter — bathes while Jackie’s at school, pees while she’s asleep — the way a late-arriving worker ducks the boss.

At the hospital, once upon a time, she was the patron saint of siblings. The young survivors — the ones that parents, drowning in their oceanic grief, forgot. “Your brother is dead,” Milagros would tell these lost little spares. She stooped to look into their wide dry eyes: “Do you know what dead means?” She gave them words their parents couldn’t bear to contemplate, not yet.

Who will take up Jackie’s cause? Milagros knows how to work hard at a job. But she can’t be both grieving parent and sensible nurse. Tama na! Sobra na! crowds are chanting at the palace. Enough already! It’s too much! So she feels at home, with Jackie. Enough questions, too many needs. Milagros wants to shake the girl by her small shoulders. She can’t forgive her for being so young and knowing so little. The only words Milagros wants to say would harm her:

Mama doesn’t want to see you.

I can’t be your mother right now.

You don’t understand! Come back when you are older, and finally intelligent.

1972–1973

In Batanglobo Village lived doctors and lawyers, teachers and engineers. Schooled on the sweat of their parents. Theirs was a poor country, with just a handful of rich people. And less than a handful — a pinch, maybe a sliver — of people neither rich nor poor, who had some talent and a little luck on their side. A tribe of men and women special in their ordinariness. They found their frontier in Batanglobo Village, and settled it as proudly as if no one else had ever attempted mortgages or marriages before them. Their sedans blazed a trail, lined with flower beds. They pushed their strollers as if touching down on the moon.