Dwellers (5 page)

It has rained that night so the morning breeze is cool, as if it were January. Louis has opened my bedroom window before stepping out. I turn my face to the light wind and call out to Louis.

“Yes?” he says.

“Did you see that girl?” I ask.

“What girl?”

“The little girl? Across the street? She was wearing a mask.”

“No, I didn’t see her.”

She was the twins’ age, I want to say.

“Neighbor’s kid,” Louis says, and begins watering the plants.

I see her first. An hour has passed and Louis is busy weeding the flowers, his back to the gate, when I hear the whir of a bicycle going down the street. The girl is wearing a skirt over
leggings, a black shirt, a leather bag slung across her chest. She could have been any other girl, if not for the magenta hair.

A moment later, her bike tilts to the ground and she is falling. She must have bounced on a pothole, a tiny hump. I can’t see a thing, except for her legs under the wheels. She has
screamed before the spill—a loud, crisp
Ah!
—and now she is groaning, trying to push herself up. She starts to cry. She produces a soft sound like that of an abandoned kitten.

Louis runs to the gate when he hears her scream. He wraps his fingers around the gate’s bars.
Don’t let her in,
I implore to him in my head.
Don’t talk to
her.

Then Louis does the one thing he has never done ever since helping me into this house: he opens the gate and steps out.

Louis bends over the girl, hands on his knees, and talks to her. The girl stops crying long enough to raise her head and reply. He offers his hands and helps her up. She’s nearly as tall
as Louis. She wobbles on her feet. They look down at the same time, presumably at her torn leggings, the wounds on her legs.

Louis lets her hold his arm. He looks up, sees me through the bedroom window. I shake my head—
Don’t. Let. Her. In.
—even though I already know what he is going to do.

He lets her in.

He swings the gate as wide as it would go and tells her something. An invitation. A permission. The magenta-haired girl hesitates for a second, looking at the gate, probably remembering the
first time she was there.

She steps across the perimeter—I see her exhale, she has held her breath before stepping through—and walks down the driveway with her head bowed. She sits on the porch steps. Louis
rights the bicycle and wheels it into the front yard.

I watch all this with growing horror. When the girl glances over her shoulder, I duck and wheel away from the window like a criminal.

I hear them outside my door. They’re in the living room. “I’m sorry to put you out like this,” the girl says. “Thanks for helping.” The last word dissolves
into sobs. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Louis says. “My name is Louis.”

“Ivy,” the girl says, her voice shaking.

“Why don’t you sit here, Ivy?” Louis says. “I’ll be back with the first-aid kit and a glass of water.”

I have been hoping to catch Louis mid-stride, but by the time I open the door and wheel out, he is already in the kitchen, and I’m left facing the girl. She is sitting on one of the chairs
and staring into space.

She turns to me and her shoulders jerk in surprise. I see her glance quickly at my bound leg. “Oh,” she says. “Hello.”

“Hi,” I say.

Louis sweeps in at that moment, carrying the kit and a glass of water. He hands the water to Ivy.

“This is my brother, Jonah,” he says.

“Hi,” Ivy says.

“Hi,” I say again, like we’re a broken record. “Listen, I need to talk to my brother for a minute.”

Louis joins me in the room. “What?” he whispers after closing the door.

“What do you mean ‘what’?” I point to the living room. “What are you doing?”

“You can’t expect me to just leave her on the ground,” he says. “She could hardly walk.”

“But she
knows
Meryl. Why would you even invite her inside?”

Louis shakes his head and walks out to tend to his new patient.

When I leave my room, Ivy is taping down the gauze Louis holds in place on the large wound on her knee. Her leggings are on the floor. Her left elbow is bright with topical antiseptic.

“Damn,” Ivy says, sniffling. “Those were new leggings.” She chuckles weakly.

Louis says she can’t ride back on the bicycle again and offers to call her a cab. Ivy and I sit in awkward silence as Louis talks on the phone. She looks antsy and nervous.

“So,” I say, “do you live in the area?”

She smiles. “No.” The smile disappears and her lower lip trembles. She wipes her eyes. “Have you heard about the college girl who was found dead on-campus a few days
ago?”

Louis is back in the room with us. “The cab will be here in twenty minutes,” he says.

Silence. I try to thaw the ice that has formed in my chest. “You were talking about the Solomon girl,” I prompt Ivy. Louis glances at me and looks away in a blink of an eye.
“Meryl?”

Ivy doesn’t know who we are. She doesn’t know that Meryl was probably one of our former students.

Doesn’t know that Meryl’s real body is here with us.

“She’s a friend of mine,” Ivy says. “We’re roommates. The day before she failed to come home to the boarding house, I dropped her on this street.”

“Oh my God,” Louis says, which is probably the more appropriate thing to do, instead of steeling myself on my chair, bracing for impact.

“When was that?” Louis asks.

“January 16,” Ivy says, wiping away an errant teardrop. “It was a Wednesday. I was in Meycauayan for my brother’s birthday Tuesday night, and he lent me his car so I
could just drive to campus instead of taking the bus. I didn’t have class, so I picked up Meryl after hers and we had lunch. Then she asked me to drop her here, just at the intersection. She
said she just needs to take photos for a project. I offered to come with her, but she said she wanted to do it alone. She seemed a bit pissed off at me for insisting so much. That reaction got me
riled up as well—I was just being nice—so I left and I never saw her again.”

“And you don’t know where she went?”

Ivy shakes her head. “I’ve been biking around here ever since they found the body.” Her voice trembles at the last word. “I was wondering if there were any shops here,
anything colorful that she could photograph, but there was only a playground, residential homes. I did bring a picture of hers so I can show it to people here and ask if any of them saw her, but no
one did.” She shrugs, lowers her voice, as though she’s talking to herself. “And anyway, I don’t remember her bringing her DSLR.”

“They didn’t find a camera in her bag,” I say.

“Yes, so maybe she lied to me.” She looks at her hands.

“Have you told the police about this?” Louis asks.

She nods. “I was among the first to be interviewed. But there were conflicting reports. I remember letting her off here at around 2 pm. But some classmates of hers claimed to have seen her
at around the same time at Trudy’s, which is a small café nearby. I don’t know. Maybe I got the time wrong. Maybe her classmates saw someone else. Maybe after I left her here she
took a cab and went to have coffee on her own. No one is sure, so I guess the police just noted it down and went on their way.”

“I’m sorry about your friend,” Louis says.

Ivy nods and claws open her sling bag. “The week she was identified, I went through her things. It’s probably a bad thing, but her parents are coming over and Meryl might be keeping
something she didn’t want her folks to see.” She smiles and sniffs. “Friends, you know? You need to have a good friend around after you go so she can clear your search
history.”

She puts five glossy prints on the coffee table. My heart drops.

“I didn’t know.” Ivy wipes her eyes. “I didn’t know she felt this way. She is beautiful. She has no idea. She is beautiful and I should have told her.”

They are blown up high resolution prints of pages from Meryl’s planner. At least two are larger recreations of her collages. Her planner is the sketchbook of ideas and these are the
artwork you can frame and display. Alice in Meryl’s sad wonderland, her kingdom of lace.
Alice ate the Eat Me Cake, the foolish slut.

IVY ASKS IF she can have a smoke while waiting for her cab so I accompany her on the porch while Louis tidies up inside.

Small talk. I ask her about her major. “Journalism,” she says. She is sitting on the porch step, blowing smoke up to the sky, a protective arm across the sling bag she hugs to her
chest.

“You want to be a reporter?”

She chuckles. “You can work in media or PR. At the end of journalism school, the students will either be the reporters or the source of the story.”

“And who do you think you will be?”

“Neither. I’ll probably just work in a call center receiving daily abuse from American clients.”

She has been crying constantly ever since her bicycle fell. Maybe even long before. “You and Meryl were close,” I say.

She goes still and nods. The yellow chrysanthemum moves in the light breeze, nodding with her.

“The news says they were only able to identify the body based on the bag and its contents,” I say.

“I have this fantasy,” Ivy says, “that the girl they found in the building was someone else. A thief. Just a stranger who happened to have Meryl’s stuff, and Meryl is
somewhere else, alive and enjoying an early summer vacation.” She shrugs. “My mother says a mother’s intuition is never wrong. I spoke to Meryl’s mother on the phone. You
know what she said?”

She waits for me to shake my head. I shake my head.

“She says it’s horrible but she knows in her heart that her daughter is already dead.”

I feel the planner throbbing like a heart beneath the earth. I remember my dream and the shadow on the wall.

Ivy wipes her eyes. “You can’t argue with that.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

“I should have told her,” Ivy says. I remember the glossy prints hitting the coffee table with a splat.

“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” I say.

“No, I—” Ivy sighs and smiles at me. She shakes her head.

Louis helps Ivy with her bike when the cab arrives. “Thank you for all your help,” she says. “I promise to come back with some cake.”

“Come back any time,” Louis says. “Even without the cake.”

At that point I realize why Louis let her in, why he’s inviting her back. What better way to find out new developments about the case than through the victim’s adamant friend? This
way, we know what they know.

11

IVY COMES BACK after three days, carrying not only a box of cake, but also a covered Pyrex bowl filled with
pancit.
“I’m not sure if you like sweets, so I
brought something savory,” she explains. Louis, of course, lets her in once again, and takes out three plates and three forks, her invitation to stay.

In those three days, news about Meryl centered mostly on the university’s beefed-up security, CCTVs in the lobbies, and additional guards in civilian clothes carrying flashlights and
arnis
sticks. The University President implores students to avoid walking alone, especially at night.

I let Louis take care of the small talk. They talk about her fall, how her wounds are starting to scab. I help him when the conversation veers away from Ivy and into our general direction.

“So you live here together?” she asks.

“No,” Louis says, glancing at me. “This is just a temporary arrangement.”

I tap my knee immobilizer when I see her frown in confusion. Ivy presses her lips together and lifts her chin—
Oh
—and lapses into a heavy, awkward silence.

“So what are you up to now?” Louis asks as she burrows further into her slice of cake. She will be the only one touching that cake. After she leaves, Louis will return the rest to
the box and dump it in the trash.

She shrugs. “Exams. Papers.”

“Life goes on?” Louis says, with surprising tenderness.

Ivy nods. After a moment, she lifts her sling bag from the floor and takes out a laptop. She boots it up. She has Van Gogh’s
Blossoming Almond Tree
as wallpaper.

“I’ve been interviewing people about Meryl,” she says as she scrolls through her files. “I plan to make a video about her and the case. Can I show this to you? Maybe you
can give me some comments.”

It’s like manna from heaven. We try not to look too eager when we say yes.

Ivy warns us that it is a partial rough cut before playing the video.

Onscreen appears a girl Ivy’s age, her hair curled at the ends. She is wearing a maroon sash with the word, “Usher”. She helps people find their seats in an auditorium,
probably the university auditorium. Cut to the same girl posing with fellow ushers at a lobby. She makes a V with her forefinger and middle finger and flashes a smile at the camera. Cut to the same
girl in a corridor with other college students. She is wearing a dress. “Her?” she says, and laughs. “I wouldn’t invite her to the party. She’ll go insane. She’s
like the Fox News of people.”

“There’s supposed to be a VO over all that,” Ivy tells us. “‘Just three months after the death of—’ “

I look at the girl onscreen again.

“Who is she?” Louis asks.

“Mona. She’s also an Econ major, like Meryl, but from a lower batch.” She takes a sip of water. “She was found dead in December, before the break. She jumped from the
topmost floor of the Engineering building.”

“That’s horrible. Do they know why?”

Ivy shakes her head. “No letter. I don’t really know her, but her classmates say Mona looked pretty depressed the week before she jumped. A news story or two in the papers mentioned
her, you know, for background.” Ivy looks at the screen. “She’s popular, but girls hate her. You know what I mean? She has this reputation of being loose. Sleeping around.
Flirting with other girls’ boyfriends. Meryl thinks she must have been on drugs. She told me that at one time, during Econ, Mona suddenly started screaming and left the room in
tears.”

“She and Meryl were friends?” Louis asks.

Ivy snorts. “Meryl hated her.”