Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

Jackie spins one of the stars on its short axis. It whirls before rattling to a stop.

“Jaime is dead,” says Milagros.

Jackie raises her arms in the air, bounces one ball and then the other as hard and high as she can.

“Do you know what dead means?” Milagros shouts over the TV, catching both balls and holding them aside, out of Jackie’s reach. It looks as though the President has lost at least one channel. On screen, a policeman lays down his badge and billy club, stands on the hood of his car, and plays the national anthem on his whistle. Students and nuns cheer.

Jackie’s finger presses on the knobbed end of a single jack, flipping it over. It lands, again and again, with a series of clicks, always at an angle. Click. Click-click. Click-click-click. Clickety-click.

“Jackie!” Milagros grabs her daughter’s hands, holds them to the floor. She has read Kübler-Ross, a gift among the cards and pastries. She will deliver this lesson whether Jackie wants to hear it or not. Stumbling through a speech about things that look like endings but are beginnings in disguise, Milagros asks if Jackie knows how a caterpillar makes a cocoon, then turns into a butterfly. “Does that make sense, Jackie?”

“Yes,” says Jackie, nodding and nodding. She is frightened and wants to get back to her game.

She hugs her daughter with such clumsy force that Jackie tumbles backward to the floor when she lets go.

From the bedroom she can hear Jackie start up again, flipping the jackstone. Click-click, clickety-click.

Jacks, they all call her. Maybe the name will self-fulfill. Maybe she will land like this — right side up, no matter which way she tumbles.

1985

They enrolled twelve-year-old Jaime at Ateneo, alma mater to Jim and Billy Batanglobo, to their dead Kuya and every other husband or father in the village. One day, Milagros realized, Father Duncan might even teach him Latin. But was he ready, her sweet soft boy, for high school at a place like that? Alumni bragged about the days they had to copy pages from the unabridged Webster’s or kneel on rock salt in the school yard, punishments that toughened boys into men. Jaime still woke with a start sometimes, reaching for his little sister’s cheek, then his mother’s. I had a bad dream and just wanted to make sure of you. His own cheeks had retained the baby fat that, for most, melted away in grade school. He never met an ice milk or turon he didn’t love. Please, Ma, just a half slice more?

Milagros thought of the Americans and their whole business with junior high. Could the American school in Taguig City be better, for Jaime? She went as far as sending for a brochure. Jaime could take his time, through sixth and seventh and eighth grades, with boys and girls. But she knew better than to expect a debate. One night her mother fried milkfish in the front yard, and Milagros threw the forms into the fire. She did not bring up Taguig City with Jim that day, or any other. Jaime, like his father, would be an Ateneo boy.

He started getting stomachaches — right after breakfast, just before the school bus. “Can Soba come with me to Ateneo?” he asked, knowing the answer. “What about Jackie?” He stared down at their smiles, waved from the bus window, looking bound for prison Camp.

Well, he did have to grow up, didn’t he? Milagros came down hard to help him. If he threw up after breakfast on a school day, she made him brush his teeth again, while Vivi ironed a new uniform. She peered into the chaos of his canvas knapsack every night. You can do better than that. She watched him sort by size — textbook, notebook, pencil case, calculator — and timed him, like a sergeant. She should have taken greater care with him in grade school, motivated him with more gold stars. So sloppy, wrote his teacher in the margin of one notebook. Much of the hassle of bringing up Jaime could be summed up by So sloppy.

Once her son was sorted, late at night, Milagros helped her husband, typing Jim’s latest reports on a movement that called itself RAM. Reform the Armed Forces. Outside his Entertainment beat, Jim had visited with the vice chief of the army. Between movie-star interviews, Jim talked to junior officers who complained about the flimsy shorts and rubber slippers they were sent to squelch insurgencies in, while aging bureaucrats who outranked them got rich behind desks. In a barong, Jim snuck out of red-carpet premieres to buy drinks for American diplomats, who were using the word coup. Jim brought home copies of undated warrants to arrest RAM leaders, CIA briefs on how useful RAM could be at the U.S. bases.

It didn’t occur to Milagros, as she typed and transcribed and copied, that Jim’s reports on RAM could offend the palace any more than other things he’d written. Already he’d done disappearances and killings, Parliament’s motion to impeach the President for padding his Swiss bank accounts with treasury pesos. She’d expected trouble then, those stories landing in the wrong hands. Khakis at her door again, taking Jim’s elbows. Follow us, boss. Sunday visits, with two kids in tow this time, back in the cold stone theater. But for a good five months no khakis came. Maybe that Bastille-style spectacle had been real after all. Maybe they’d been freer than she thought.

Looking back, she’d say she should have known. That RAM would be the last straw. That the OmniPresident would object most to a story where his name hardly appeared, that already counted him out. That the man they called Papa would punish them, above all, for giving his most wayward, disobedient children the spotlight.

—

“Walking Soba is your job,” she told Jaime, speaking as she would to a grown man. That afternoon, he’d begged her to come along on the errand. But Milagros had been doubling down on this, as on the knapsack, wanting to grow her son up a little. “Look around. Everyone in this house has a job to do, and everyone’s doing it.” She was in Jim’s study, balancing the checkbook; Vivi in the kitchen, prepping dinner.

“Jackie isn’t,” said Jaime.

“Jackie’s three. To play is her work. You are twelve years old, and responsible for Soba.”

And you need the exercise, she didn’t add.

Off he lumbered: first into the nursery, where she could hear Jackie refusing. Then he was outside, with a grumble, Soba’s bell tinkling. The dog came back an hour later, without her leash or collar, without Jaime.

She called Ruel, Jaime’s best friend. But Jaime hadn’t stopped at his house, hadn’t seen or spoken to Ruel since lunch. She called Oliver Castro, who walked his own cocker spaniel every day around the village too. She called Jim. She left Vivi with Jackie and got into the brown Ford Escort, driving past the church, the playground, out of Batanglobo Village and all the way to the school. But the school had sent her son home on the bus hours before. The school had done its job.

It made Milagros ill to think someone had watched her son and memorized his afternoons. Back at Avalon Row her eyes and throat burned. Vivi brewed soup. Jackie sat in Milagros’s lap as she dialed mother after mother. Had they seen Jaime? Did he by chance stop to play with Kokoy or Eddie or Paolo on his walk, and forget to call home? You know how selfish kids can be! Surely she had met these other mothers at school plays or parent-teacher meetings, but she knew their names and numbers only from the Xeroxed class directory. Who’s selfish now? Snips of strangers’ conversations — weekend beach plans, debt collections — kept cutting into the Manila party line. Vivi found Milagros banging the receiver against the table. In her gentle business manner, as if nothing in this crazy world could surprise her, Vivi took the phone from her and hung it up. You could use some soup, ma’am. Vivi was right. The ginger and the garlic soothed her throat. Thank God, Milagros would think many times throughout, for Vivi. By the time Jim came home, she’d drunk three cups of Vivi’s soup and was bouncing her knee so hard that Jackie had scrambled off it into Vivi’s arms.