Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

Imagining Jaime’s captor was so easy it hurt. Over the years Milagros’s own brothers, strapped for cash, had accepted every kind of odd job on earth. What threats or offers had been made in exchange for Jaime? His captor might have been a father too, thinking only of his sons, their mouths to feed.

After they drove together a second time through the city, she came home with Jim’s gray suit jacket over her own clothes, exhausted. Beside her Jim gave off the oily smell of someone up all night. Jackie was at the door. Milagros looked away from her and went to bed.

“Jaime is in the country, visiting relatives,” she could hear Jim saying. “Don’t ask your mother about it.”

—

In the days after, Milagros kept hearing things. A scratch at the door, a footfall on the grass. The gate would rattle, setting her on her feet; in seconds she’d unlatched it and swept her head left and right along Avalon Row. Nothing. Back inside she’d think: Jaime could be anywhere. One last sweep through the house might even turn him up. She sat beside Jackie and her alphabet, leaving her mind at the gate. When she looked down, she saw that her writing was a mad stranger’s: k ’s and v ’s deteriorating, across the page, into squiggles.

Visitors, the village that had once calmed her by filling the house in Jim’s absence, now threatened to drive her insane. Her family came, of course. Khakis, who claimed to be filing reports. Friends, with food. How to sort the real news from the noise? And the gate! What a fumble to unlatch it! By the time she got it open, the sound in the street was always gone.

They kept Jackie indoors for weeks. No, you cannot help Vivi hang the clothes. It’s more fun in here anyway! The TV’s here, and all your toys. “To play is your work,” Milagros said absently. Jackie couldn’t wait to work for real: she gazed at maids and street sweepers the way her parents had worshiped their professors. She loved laundry, her grandmother’s career: the soap-and-lemon smell, the cold, wet cotton on her cheek. But keeping Jackie indoors, now, was not an idea, not a slogan. “Outside is dangerous,” Milagros said. “Outside is just for grown-ups now.”

“But how come Jaime was allowed?”—Jackie obsessed, at that young age, with justice.

“In the country things are different,” said Milagros. “Here in the city there’s a giant lady who eats children for dinner. You just look at her the wrong way,” she said, “or laugh too loudly and poof! no more Jackie.”

Hadn’t she and Jim discussed, and sworn off, talking such nonsense to children? Children deserve the truth, not some mysterious code language: didn’t she believe that, still? “Go inside, Jackie. Now!”

After dark, in bed, she tossed like a new mother, waking to every fuss and startle.

They searched in shifts: Jim drove while she sat phoneside, or vice versa. One night, after another useless drive, she stepped over Jackie in the living room and walked past Vivi in the kitchen. There was no news, again. Tonight only Jim’s voice could keep her from crying. She approached the study door and heard him at his desk.

“I see,” he was saying into the phone. “Understood.”

He hung up and sat with tented fingers. On the wall hung his press passes. Jefferson and del Pilar stared across the room at one another.

What did Jim see? What did he understand? She, too, would have liked to see something, understand anything, in those dark days.

She pushed the door open; he turned. “No news,” she reported, flatly.

After that phone call, ending just as she walked in, she asked about his afternoons, made him explain his evenings. Could you blame her, tense and tired as she was, for worrying, as wives had worried since the dawn of husbands, that there might be Someone Else? Her mother, after all, had planted the idea for years. And once this Other Woman entered Milagros’s mind, she never left. Her son was gone; a stranger took his place. Milagros listened both for Jaime and for Her.

One day, after the sound of Jim’s engine had faded from the garage, she opened his top desk drawer. He’d left the key in the lock. They were not a husband and wife who locked each other out of desk drawers. Her fingers grazed the watermark of some letterhead, trifolded, off-white. Biscuit. She took the papers out, and yes: they matched the walls. She squinted at the seal on top. These couldn’t be school notices from Ateneo; Vivi would have handed those to her. Slowly she recognized the blue wheel. The yolk-yellow sun. THE OFFICE OF THE PRESS SECRETARY. Another love letter, like the kind Jim used to receive long ago. She turned the pages: more than one. Same seal, many dates. A long courtship.

They’d wept together over the torment of not knowing. Closed offices, tied hands, phones that rang and rang. Men at the Metrocom station who said, We’re doing all we can, while paring their nails, flagrantly, in front of her. For all Jim and Milagros knew, some ordinary nut job had kidnapped their son. They had no proof of more. For all I know, they’d both said, again and again. For all we know. At least they lived in the dark together. But here in this desk were letters, addressed to Jim, dated since Jaime had disappeared.

She shook her head, which made the spinning worse. She made bargain after swift bargain: she’d take an Other Woman, she’d accept receipts for dinners and lingerie, late nights and lipstick on his collar, over this. She flipped faster, reading words she promptly wanted to unread. No use: scholarship girls knew how to scan and skim for meaning.

…illegal press activity at 26 Avalon Row and the distribution of printed material without the proper media licenses.

…specific terms, as follows. You shall (1) cease and desist all printing at 26 Avalon Row; (2) submit to the conditions of house arrest as outlined in our previous memorandum dated 7 October 1985, including the surveillance of all incoming and outgoing communications; and (3) craft a letter of retraction to be printed in the Metro Manila Herald, and other outlets as necessary, discrediting all claims listed by date on the following page…

…under orders to enforce such consequences as the administration deems fit, for the failure to abide by said terms.

There may as well have been an Other Woman. Milagros felt every pang her poor, scorned friends had described. Their stomachs, too, had sunk to the floor. And then that floor had disappeared beneath them. Like her, they forgot how to breathe. When Jim came to the doorway, Milagros was caught, like any jealous wife, sniffing and rifling around.

To his credit, he didn’t insult her with denials. He looked at the letters and said, “I thought it premature to tell you.”

Of course he’d planned to tell her, sometime. Was there reason not to believe that? Because her hands were shaking, the edge of one page sliced into her thumb, which she brought, bleeding, to her mouth, dropping the papers.

“The regime is all but over,” Jim explained. But anyone could lose a job. For this country, after twenty years, Jim did not believe that was enough. After twenty years, a dictator didn’t simply get to be fired. Or worse, get to resign. Papa had to be called to account.

“And unlike him,” Jim said, “we’ll have the decency to do it right. With a trial. And with evidence like this. What hasn’t he done to stay in power? We’re far from the only ones, you know.”

“I never said we were the only ones,” Milagros said.

“The paper trail itself tells you a lot about his state.” Jim pointed to his brain.

“And Jaime’s state?” Milagros squeaked, like someone not all there herself.