Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

In the middle bedroom, she replaced Billy Batanglobo’s drafting table with a writing desk for Jim. She found lithographs of Marcelo H. del Pilar and Thomas Jefferson and hung them on opposite walls, facing off as for a debate. Between the door and the desk, she hammered a row of iron nails, hooking on the last one a hundred and some odd press passes he’d kept. She imagined the umbrella and the suit jacket that would join them one day soon, again.

As she worked and shopped, drove and planned, she started to suspect that she, in all of this, was being watched. Which car it was she couldn’t say; and when she turned, she saw no one behind her. But some mist of surveillance hung over Avalon Row. She feared not danger but judgment: the invisible officer laughing at her housekeeping skills. Would the Metrocom have left Jim alone if they’d seen lace curtains in the windows, or gumamela in the garden? She scrubbed the sinks at demon speed and buffed the floors with halved coconut shells. I’m a better housewife than I’ll ever be, she wrote Jim, and you’re not here to benefit.

Near the end of her first trimester, Milagros’s own mother took pity on her and moved in, to keep Milagros company and help with the chores.

—

Visiting hours were from eleven to six on Sundays, in the prison amphitheater. The theater, they came to call it — like any other place a family might spend its weekend afternoon. Milagros cooked him pork rolls, pancit, milkfish stuffed with vegetables: painstaking dishes worthy of a baptismal party or Christmas. “Enjoy it while you can,” she said. “I’d never cook like this for a man outside of prison.” A radio was allowed, so long as they tuned it to music and not the news. She brought her mother and her brothers, who excelled at feasting in a dark hour. They sang songs, played Pik Pak Boom — anything but silence. And the guards couldn’t resist a party any more than her brothers could. As soon as they inspected the Tupperware boxes and bamboo steamers, they accepted plates of their own, chowing down on dumplings right alongside the Sandovals and Reyeses. Over the next few weeks, they went from greeting Milagros with a nod to saluting her, as a joke.

Caught up in that carnival atmosphere, tinged as it was with an End of Days feeling, Milagros and Jim decided to make it official. Milagros’s brother read aloud about Adam and Eve in the garden. “Isn’t that bad luck,” said her mother, “the way that story ends?” But Milagros liked the word helpmeet and pictured herself with Jim in the L-shaped yard, tagging every tree and flower and insect together. Father Duncan, a priest who’d taught Jim Latin at Ateneo, married them in the theater.

While the family danced around them, Jim stood behind her and measured her growing girth with his hands. “I have a plan,” he said. Milagros closed her eyes. On their wedding day, couldn’t the plan wait? She wanted to stand there, with her new husband’s palms on her belly, thinking of Adam and Eve on Avalon Row. Jim’s plans, she knew, would yank her back here, to this prison, amid khaki uniforms and black bars. Then she opened her eyes, ashamed to be thinking so small.

He’d been writing in his cell. Short pieces, which he’d need her help getting into print and to the right readers. She should expect deliveries, over the next few days, at 26 Avalon Row.

Until the arrest, Jim and Milagros had never really meant to keep the second bomb shelter a secret. They’d planned to host a housewarming, maybe: unveil it for the neighbors, repurpose it as a guest or play or storage room. But now it was clear Billy Batanglobo had left Jim more than a subject and a house. Milagros went home and studied the blueprints. She pulled the nested bed out on its wheels. Then she flipped a lever underneath the outer bed to hinge it open like a lid off the floor. She practiced descending the steel rungs of the chute, and reaching for the switch that closed the hatch and bed above her, until she could do it with her eyes closed, in five seconds flat. And one night, when her mother fried milkfish out in the yard, she added Billy’s blueprints to the open flame.

Code sentences began to surface in Jim’s letters. He would drop them, oddly worded, apropos of nothing, into otherwise plain paragraphs. According to Maria Lopez, duck eggs are good for pregnant women. When the duck-egg vendor comes, buy at least a dozen. And so the duck-egg vendor came, with pulleys and ink rollers in his cart. Milagros led him underground, where he began to build a mimeograph. She felt a guilty craving, then, for real duck eggs.

Soon she could locate those sentences in Jim’s letters as expertly as she could find, in the crease of a sick child’s arm, the one vein that rebounded to her touch. She palpated her way through each letter until the code rose from the page. An answer to a question she had never asked. Advice toward repairs the house didn’t need.

I won’t have you finishing the walls all on your own, in your delicate condition. The walls had been done, all Biscuit-colored, for months. The painter who arrived had ink and rubber blankets inside his tin cans.

Ask the Mercados next door to recommend a piano tuner. She and the so-called piano tuner had a close call. Not fifteen minutes after he’d arrived, a khaki officer came to the door. “Sorry to disturb, ma’am. We’re looking for a male suspect, about five-seven. Have you seen this man?”

Milagros shook her head at the police sketch of a stranger. “Not him, or anyone. It’s been quiet here.”

The khaki, looking past her head into the living room, asked if he could trouble her for a glass of water— It’s so hot outside —and a moment on her sofa.

Just as she had seated him and turned on the electric fan, out came the “piano tuner,” asking if she knew where Jim kept a wrench. “Of course when I say quiet I am not counting Tony,” said Milagros. “Tony is part of the furniture. Is there hope for the piano, Tony? Can you fix it in time?” She placed a hand on her belly.

Tony opened the lid of the instrument and toyed with a few strings. He pressed a key, with a thinking frown on his face, pressed another. Pure luck that the khaki had no clue about pianos. Pure luck that he stood and thanked Milagros for the water, without peering into the nursery, where the trundle bed lay on its side, the basement shelter open.

After that Jim canceled the deliveries. Too risky. Milagros had to pick up the parts herself.

If Soba’s loss of appetite is keeping you awake at night, then take her to the vet. My colleague used to rave about his golden retriever’s doctor in Makati. In Makati men loaded the trunk of her Ford Escort with stencils and paper, while Soba’s body throbbed lightly in her arms.

Piece by piece a crib came together in the nursery, while the mimeograph was assembled underground.

How Jim reached these men, Milagros didn’t know. But all of them held bits of what he planned to say. Their shorthand filled the backs of invoices, receipts, Soba’s prescription. At night, Milagros waited till her mother was asleep. When it was quiet, except for the patrol cars and the geckos, she went into Jim’s study. Typing by candlelight at first, then — having memorized the text beforehand — in the dark. She came to know the keys by heart, down to the distance between R and E, the way the space bar jammed with too much pressure. The dark brought back her mornings as a schoolgirl, waking before her brothers and dressing at dawn. How many breakfasts had she eaten, how many books packed, in the dark, by sense and muscle memory? How many evenings had the lights gone out over her homework, because no one had bothered with the bill? So many that in time her body memorized a link between homework and electricity themselves: if the teenage Milagros rested or stopped working some vast and complex circuit outside of her would die too. She was the conduit. And so she worked until the lights flickered back on. She kept reading, kept studying, kept dreaming of a home where the power never went out, not for that reason. That home was hers now, yet on nights like this, there seemed to have been no break at all between Avalon Row and girlhood.