Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

“His grief may not look like yours,” says Father Duncan. “But you’d know, if you talked to him, that he’s grieving too. Sharing grief helps dissipate it — you know that, from where you’ve worked. The more you hoard a grief, the bigger it grows.”

She says nothing, doesn’t even remember falling asleep. The priest has left by the time she wakes to more voices on the radio — politicians, “concerned citizens”—all saying get to EDSA now. What exactly will they do, Milagros wonders, when the tanks come? Will the rebel soldiers give them guns?

The more you hoard a grief.

Why should she share? The world has not been generous with her.

1982

Jacqueline Reyes arrived two months early. Under local anesthesia, Milagros felt the doctor’s scalpel zip her open layer by layer, like a silk purse. Gloved hands swimming busily inside her. A four-pound, three-ounce creature needing two sound smacks before wailing. Her undergrown lungs went straight into distress. The doctor put her — purple, sputtering — into an incubator. In poor shape herself, Milagros needed a blood transfusion. Only a week later did she get to the NICU to reach her own glove through the incubator hatch and feel Jackie’s tiny digits wrap around her index finger.

That was the most contact they had. None of the brass-band fanfare that had greeted Jaime Jr.’s birth.

After Jackie came home, Milagros’s milk broke her out in hives. Only a lactose-free formula agreed with her. Jackie had finicky tastes, like the princess in the pea-and-mattress story, thin-skinned to anything common. She cried if the person holding the bottle adjusted his arm. She cried when she startled herself awake at night. Once old enough to sit upright, she’d stamp her palms against a grown-up’s shoulders and push back to examine his or her face. Prove yourself, her scowl seemed to demand.

With Jaime Jr., Milagros feared excess. Raising a soft sort of man who couldn’t waddle up stairs without wheezing. With Jackie, she feared deficiencies. The wispy appetite that made her spit after every nibble. Disorders like anemia and jaundice.

Milagros tried to call her Jacqueline, but the world insisted on Jackie, or in some cases even Jacks, like the common street game, rubber balls and plastic stars hanging in net bags at every sari-sari store. And for all her littleness, her refusal to eat, her rashes and her weak lungs, Jackie did have something of the gutter rat about her: the wiry alertness, the stops and starts and darting side glances. In this way Milagros should have known that Jackie’d be the one to survive, the way a rodent could swim through pipes and chew through steel.

February 23, 1986

By some miracle Gloria makes it through the traffic to see her again. “I ran into your husband at the gate,” says Gloria. She doesn’t touch the canvas tote strapped to her shoulder. “We talked for a while.”

“Oh?” says Milagros. No use changing the subject; experience has taught her that when people say they talked for a while with Jim, armored tanks won’t stop them from saying more.

“He asked me if I’d gone to the barricades yet,” Gloria says. “  ‘Yet?’ I said. ‘You talk like it’s a given.’ My husband would kill me! Jim said he couldn’t understand that. He’d seen me right there, at City Hospital, when we went on strike. Remember?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Right. The stakes are higher now, I told Jim. Back then I could have lost my job. Now I could die, or my children could.” Gloria, hearing herself, panics. “I mean—”

“Did you bring them?” says Milagros. “The application forms?”

Gloria takes a folder from her bag and sets it on the nightstand, right beside the radio. “He said that wouldn’t happen. He said, what’s more likely is that you’ll live another fifty years or so. Your children will grow up to ask you where you were on February twenty-third, nineteen eighty-six. What will you tell them? That you played it safe? That history was happening, and all you wanted was to save your hide? They’ll ask, What was it like? And you will have to say, Go read a book on it, because you weren’t there.”

“He says a lot of things.” Milagros’s heart clenches, fist-like. “He has a way with words. But guess who’ll never ask where we were February twenty-third, nineteen eighty-six?”

That shuts Gloria up for a while. Then she says, “My mother told me life doesn’t happen to men the same way that it happens to a woman. It’s a mistake to think that, she said. A woman has her child, and she becomes a mother first. A man stays first a man. Especially a man like Jim.”

Turns out Manila people still do what their archbishop tells them, says the radio. They’ve flocked to the rebels with batteries, cigarettes, and flashlights. Colgate has sent toothpaste; Palmolive, soap. And food, of course! We are Pinoys, aren’t we?

“Sounds like you’ve made up your mind,” says Milagros, seeing an older Gloria, in the future, telling her children, We were too excited to be scared. “Have fun at EDSA.”

“It is a nice night to be out.” Gloria shrugs. Through the sheer curtain Milagros sees the almost full moon, its light landing on the folder on the nightstand by the radio.

1983

Within Jackie’s first year, routine ruled the weekday afternoons. Milagros rose before dawn for the early shift at City Hospital: a way to reunite with Jackie by afternoon and be with both her children until bedtime. At seven-thirty the school bus came for Jaime. Vivi attended to the clothes and meals and dust and baby. Milagros was home before the bus brought Jaime back at four o’clock. Bedtime was at ten, after prayers and two or three storybooks.

Bedtime for a young Milagros had varied with the moods of the man next door, who liked to hit his wife when drunk and make loud love to her when sober. The one routine she’d ever witnessed was that man’s son, Boyet, coming outside every morning to do what he called his Exercise. Slow, drooling, soft-in-the-brain Boyet. Neighbors liked to whisper that his father, convinced the unborn Boyet wasn’t his, had been extra heavy with his hands throughout the pregnancy. That she had tried and failed to get rid of Boyet. That Boyet had these reasons to thank for his large, lopsided head, the mouth that could barely cry Ma! and Pa! Boyet did his Exercise by the gutter in their barangay. Milagros could see him from her window: bending to the side, the front, the back. Arms up to the sky, fingertips down to the ground. Twist left, twist right. She heard him wailing sometimes through the wall they shared.

Now Jim and Milagros shared walls with no one, and Avalon Row was not the world of their parents. There were pet vaccines here, and the cinder blocks stood up against typhoons.

That same year, their Kuya was rumored to be coming home, after three years abroad. All over Manila people tied yellow ribbons around trees, after the song. Hoping the exiled former senator might run for President, at last.

The day of his return, Milagros had a typical shift at City Hospital, no busier than any other. At quitting time, she saw nurses, parents, doctors, and sick children’s siblings packed into the waiting room. A room that saw its share of grief, for sure. Milagros heard the muffled cries of one mother against one nurse’s shoulder, figuring another child — not one of hers — had died.

Which child was it? A favorite among the staff, judging by the crowd. The nurses wept so openly it embarrassed Milagros a little. Pull yourself together, Alma! Effie, that’s enough! These parents and doctors still had to trust them with IVs and dosage charts, after all. But a certain Dr. Tuazon was crying too. She neared the room: some parents were consoling nurses, not the other way around; some parents whose children were doing better, consoled each other. All of them repeating facts, phrases they couldn’t bring themselves to believe yet. Shot dead. Broad daylight. Cold blood. She understood, finally, when one of the nurses turned to her at the doorway, shaking her head and holding out her hand, inviting Milagros to share in the shock. Those not crying or embracing watched the black-and-white TV on the wall. Kuya, the former senator, facedown on the airport tarmac, steps from the plane that had flown him home.