In the Country (19 page)

By the time she was expecting me, Dr. Delacruz continued, Westerners had lost interest in the miracle pill. Large shipments were made to pharmacies in Manila when it would no longer sell in Europe and America. My mother, in her suffering, begged Dr. Delacruz for a prescription. That was all she needed; with it, her American father could obtain any Western drug she wanted, even ones not readily available in Monte Ramon.

“I should have taken more time,” said the doctor, “done more research. But after my own wife's death, I simply couldn't stand by and watch a pregnant woman suffer without taking action. So I wrote the prescription. The day you were born, I saw my mistake.”

My mother looked pale and stunned, as if we had been robbed and found ourselves in a
sala
emptied of its sofa, its cabinet, its sepia portrait of my grandparents.

“It's my everlasting penance,” said Dr. Delacruz. “If there's anything you want or need, Danny, I'll do my best for you. And for your mother, too. I can't forgive myself. But I can't lie to you either,
anak.
These fairy stories that her father's war heroism begat a son with no legs…Even children deserve to know the truth.” He stood up. “You poor boy,” he added, in a voice laden with regret, and left the house.

His words and his departure sent me reeling, as if I'd been pushed downhill to the ravine at high speed, losing all control, nothing below to catch or save me. The idea I'd been polishing like a precious stone slipped from my hands. And with it, all ideas that had carried and sustained me through the years seemed to be crumbling too. If I'd been wrong about Dr. Delacruz and my grandfather, it seemed possible I might be wrong about my mother. It seemed possible for the first time that the defects of our bodies—mine, Annelise's, anyone's—were errors of nature, caused and cured by science, nothing more.

“Don't believe him,” said my mother, falling to her knees in the doctor's place. “Who is he? I am your
mother;
believe
me.
” All this kneeling was starting to remind me, perversely, of the children who mocked me at school. There was nothing left for us to do, my mother said, but pray. She threw herself forward, weeping on the empty fabric of my trousers. She crossed herself and gazed tearfully at her parents' wedding portrait, looking for a moment to be praying to them.

But I didn't feel like praying. My palms simply refused to meet. They went, instead, to the wheels of my chair and pulled, retreating from my mother. I turned my back to her—a first. “Danny,” I heard her call as I pushed myself to the foot of the stairs. I could hear her calling still as I pitched myself onto the steps and started climbing like a crab, on my knuckles and the heels of my hands, up to the forbidden room.

And what did I find there? Only the light, which had seemed otherworldly when it streamed down through the seldom-opened door, but which came from the sun—the same plain sun that shone on all Monte Ramon, no more than that. Only a bed that took up most of the room. A chest of drawers, clothes draped on the backs of chairs, and trinkets cluttered on surfaces—no big secret to settle my confusion. Still, I searched. I opened the drawers, rummaged through the silks and laces, pulled aside the wardrobe doors where dresses fell from their hangers, tore the lids off boxes and capsized them so that chains and beads and buttons clattered to the floor. I would have flipped the mattress if I'd had the strength, or torn the framed photographs off the walls if I were tall enough. By the time I reached the vanity, whose mirror was just low enough to show me my reflection—and my mother, coming through the doorway, weeping—I was not afraid to pull at it, and watch it crash to pieces on the floor.

In a
radionovela
I'd have found a key, a clue that would unlock a season's worth of mysteries. I found only my own shame and exhaustion. The room looked like a thief or vandal had attacked it. I felt sorry for disturbing all my mother's belongings, which she'd expressly made off-limits to me, and for denying her the trusting, dutiful son she'd always had. But something had been taken from me, too. Adults I had relied on to explain the world and my life to me—especially when children made that world and life so hostile—had kept the truth from me, then wrecked the fantasy that had replaced it. I turned back toward the stairs. I did not wish to look at another adult now, let alone console my mother. I wanted consolation for myself, and knew only one source for it.

As the school year ended, the monsoons began in earnest. Rain fell so hard and fast it struck up fat white stars along the ground. It became difficult to see in front of us. Still, on the last day of school, I insisted on seeing Annelise home. My chair gave us some trouble down the hill. Along the ravine, children were laughing in the storm, shirtless or bare-legged or naked altogether. Their rubber
tsinelas
clapped along the mud. Below them, the creek collected raindrops with a sound like frying oil. Some of these children might soon lose their houses. Annelise might have to sleep, as she sometimes did, in the Safety convent.

I noticed as the children played that they were trying not to slip and fall. The care they took had slowed their movements into a kind of dance. I turned to Annelise, who said, “The rain has crippled everyone,” and laughed. I laughed too. She curtsied to me, and I bowed my head: a joke, the first movements of the
kuratsa
we'd watched for months and never had to do ourselves. She promenaded around me, her arms outstretched, and I moved my wheels to turn with her. It wasn't easy. But for one brief moment, in the rain and mud, I saw a world where everyone was struggling in the body he or she'd been given. That world and struggle seemed bearable to me, and even beautiful.

Some squatters had dismantled their homes and were carrying the scraps to higher ground. Others stayed put and held up as hats what used to be their walls. Our cold, drenched uniforms clung to our skin. A mighty stench was rising from the creek. And soon the rain made it impossible to dance, even as a joke. Annelise gripped the handles of my chair and plowed it through the dirt toward a shining, solitary scrap of tin that we claimed as ours.

That morning you are woken by an airplane, humming so close overhead it seems to want to take you with it. The clock says five—an hour ahead of your alarm. You've lived close to two airports for almost two decades. You're used to planes. They even show up in your dreams. In last night's dream, you died; your body crumbled into ash. Before you could learn what came next, before you could see where your
soul
went, a machine—some giant vacuum cleaner, which in real life was this plane—came down to sweep you off the earth like dust.

After today, you'll never hear a plane in the same way again. But you don't know that yet.

The boy whose bedroom you sleep in is now a man. He moved out long ago. His mother, Doris, keeps his room the way it was when he lived here: school pennant, baseball trophies, dark plaid bedspread. You pay low rent, and have agreed to leave this room and sleep out on the sofa when the son visits. (He never does.)

You know you won't fall back asleep, so you switch on the lamp. Because the years of work have given you a bad back, bad knees, and bad feet, you like to pray in bed. A wooden Christ Child and Virgin Mary live inside the nightstand drawer. You lay them on the pillow next to you like shrunken lovers, wrap a rosary around your wrist. You interlace your fingers, shut your eyes, and squeeze your lips against your thumbs as if kissing His feet.

The God that you imagine looks like Father Brennan, the man who baptized you: tall and Irish, with white hair and kind blue eyes, shooting a basketball in black vestments on the parish playground. The Virgin is one of the nuns who ran the adjoining schoolhouse: a spinster with a downy chin, her veil a habit. Old and sacred words, they taught you. You would not invent your own any more than you would try to build your own cathedral.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Bead by bead, you whisper the same words Saint Peter spoke in Rome, the same words spoken today by all believers in São Paulo and Boston and Limerick and Cebu:

He rose again from the dead.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.

You pray by heart the way you'd plow a field of soil, the way you push a mop across a floor. One foot before the other. After looping your way around the rosary, you coil it in its pouch. You tuck Mary and the
Santo Niño
back into their drawer, thanking them for the strength to rise another day, on two aching feet.

“Like the gypsy,” John said, the night he asked your name.

You weren't listening.
“Eee, Ess, Em, Eee,”
you started spelling in reply, as you changed the trash bag from the can beside his desk.

“Mine's John. Not quite as fancy as yours.” He held out his hand.

“Please to meet you.” You stared at the freckles on his long, pale fingers. When he didn't pull them back, you wiped your latex glove, still damp from the dustrag, on your uniform. Then, embarrassed, you snapped off your glove and tossed it in the mother trash bag hanging from your cleaning cart. His hand was moist and smooth. The hand of a man who studied numbers on a screen and now and then picked up the phone.

He had the kind blue eyes of a priest. His hair was white (though he had all of it), his face almost as pale, but pink in sunburned places. On his desk, three computer screens folded outward like a panel painting at church. A woman with gold hair and green eyes, probably his wife, smiled in a frame beside his keyboard.

This new night job had just begun. You were still learning the floor, along whose windowed edges sat men like John, who had their own offices. These men stayed later than the ones who worked in open rows along the middle of the floor. You'd notice, over time, that John stayed latest out of everyone.

Since Doris is still asleep, you hold off on the vacuuming and step into the kind of fall morning that really does remind you of a big apple, bright and crisp. You buy skim milk and grapefruits, whole wheat bread and liquid eggs that pour out of a juice box and have less cholesterol. Nineteen years of Tuesdays you have shopped and cleaned for Doris. Longer than her son lived in the room you rent for two hundred a month. On Wednesdays you clean the apartment under you, for the Italian landlord and his wife, whose children you have watched grow up and have their own. Thursdays you are in the city early, cleaning Mrs. Helen Miller's loft downtown. And Fridays you clean uptown, for the Ronson family, who own a brownstone top to bottom. Saturdays your fingers smell like pine oil from polishing the wood pews of the same old church that found you Doris and her extra room, those nineteen years ago. And in between you've cleaned for other people, one-time deals—after a party, or before somebody sells or rents out their apartment, or as a gift from one friend to another—never saying no to an assignment. Nineteen years of cash in envelopes, from people who never asked to see your papers as long as you had references and kept their sinks and toilets spotless.

The other day you pulled a knot of Doris's white hair from the shower drain, trying to remember when those knots were brown.

Now that you're no longer hiding, you have one job on the books, at night, in the tower where John works.

The living room TV is on when you get home. “Good morning,” you call out, unloading bags onto the kitchen counter. Doris doesn't answer through the wall. She likes to do Pilates—counting bends and raises, panting—to the news.

Putting the milk away, you hear a sob.

“Doris?”

She isn't doing leg raises. You find her on the sofa, eyeballs red, fist covering her nose and mouth.

“Did Matthew call?” you ask. Over the years, her son has said things on the phone to make her cry.

She shakes her head and reaches for your hand. “Oh, Es.” Her other hand points at the TV screen. A city building, gashed along the side and bleeding smoke. You almost fail to recognize it. You never see it from this angle anymore: the air, the view on postcards and souvenir mugs.

A pipe or boiler must have burst,
you think, watching the ugly crooked mouth cough flame. You think,
A man in coveralls will lose his job today.
There's an Albanian gentleman whose name you know only because it's stitched across his shirt.
Valdrin.
You never speak to one another. He bows as you pass him in the staff lounge; he blows kisses as you leave the elevator.

You're wrong. They show a plane, show it and show it, flying straight into the tower's face and tearing through the glass.

“What if this happened late at night?” says Doris. “Es, thank God you're here.”

She weeps as you two watch, again, the black speck pierce the glass, the smoke spill from the wound.

Trying to count floors, you stand. “I have to go.”

“What? Absolutely not.”

“I'll clean when I come back.”

“Forget about that. Jesus! What I mean is, you're not going anywhere.”

“I have to see about…my job.”

But Doris will not hear of it. “No one's working now. Not your boss and not your boss's boss. You've been spared, don't you see? You're staying here. End of story.”

“OK.” You sit. “I'll get your coffee, then.” You stand and go into the kitchen, think. You pour Doris's coffee and bring her the cup. “I have to try to call my boss, at least.”

In Matthew's room, you lock the door. You change into your panty hose and uniform, as if it's afternoon. Beside the bedroom door, you hold your shoes, a pair of hard white clogs a nurse friend from your church suggested for your troubled feet, and listen to the wall. As soon as you hear Doris go into the bathroom, you tiptoe through the kitchen. You grab your bag and jacket from the closet by the door, race downstairs, and slip into your clogs outside.

A book sat open on John's desk, the next time you walked in.

“Aha!” he said. “There she is.” He pointed at the page and read aloud.
“La Esmeralda. Formidable name! She's an enchantress.”

You thought about hiding inside the cart, between the toilet paper rolls.

He stood and came around his desk, still reading.
“Your parents never found that name for you at the baptismal font.”
He closed the book and smiled. “Where did they find it, Esmeralda?”

“Not there,” you said, pointing your chin at the book. (Your parents would have used a book that size for kindling.) “They liked the sound of it. Or liked somebody with the name, maybe.”

John wanted to know, if you didn't mind saying, where you were from.

“So I was right,” he said, when you told him. “My wife's nurses are Filipina.”

“Your wife is a doctor?”

“No.” He looked down. Darkness, like the shadow from an airplane overhead, passed over his face. “A patient.”

“Oh.” The woman with green eyes and gold hair, smiling next to his keyboard, looked healthy, but you didn't say that.

Before John—and this is terrible to say; you'd never say it, but—the lives of Americans with money were not very interesting to you. Even the troubled ones, their troubles did not seem so hard. You'd ask, “How are you?” and they'd heave a sigh, winding up to tell you some sob story: how much they worked, who had it in for them, the things they'd wished for and were not getting.
Try hunger. Try losing your house,
a voice inside you, that would never leave your mouth of course, wanted to say.

But John's trouble—that moved you. Enough to ask, “Your wife is sick? What kind of sick?”

“The kind you don't come back from,” John said. She'd been sick for fifteen years. The photograph beside his keyboard was how he preferred to remember her. Before nerve cells inside her brain began to die, before the tremors started, before her muscles stiffened and her spine curled in. Back when she could walk without losing her balance, back when she could eat and use the bathroom on her own, without John's help, and then a Filipina nurse, and then a second one for nighttime. Before she started to talk slowly, like the voice in a cassette recorder on low battery, and then stopped talking altogether. Back when she still knew who John, her husband, was.

“I'm sorry.”

“I am too,” he said. “It started fast, and now it's ending slowly. When you love someone you never think a time will come when they're a stranger.” He looked and must have felt alone. But the photo that you kept at home, on Matthew's nightstand, was your brother's baby portrait. Long before the lies, the cruelties, the face scarred up beyond recognition.

John's family was Irish, and he grew up in a harbor town where his brothers still lived. “All five of them,” he said. “All firefighters, like our father. Or policemen, like our uncle.”

“You are not a fire- or policeman,” you said.

John shook his head. “Did you ever hear of a family where the finance guy's the rebel? Me, and my cousin Sean, the priest. Plus we're the only two who didn't have kids. No sons to raise into cops or firefighters, either. I guess I never grew up dreaming I'd be some hero. No, I just looked across the bay at this skyline and thought,
I'll work there someday.
Plus”—he tapped his wedding ring against the picture frame—“
she
wanted to work in publishing. No better place for that than in this city. And we decided that if one of us was gonna work in books, the other better work in money.”

He asked after your family. You told him that your parents raised coconuts, coaxed copra oil from them, sold gallon cans of it to men who came in boats once a month. That you had just one brother. “Pepe.”

He said, “You're not a farmer.”

“No. I'm not.”

“Are you and Pepe close?”

The first time Doris asked you this, you shook your head.
Almost nine thousand miles.
She laughed. “I don't mean close on a
map,
” she said. “I know he's far away. I mean, how
distant
are you? Your relationship.” This threw you. How “distant” could the blood, running through your own veins, be? “So you
are
close,” Doris said. You learned to keep it simple with Americans who asked you after that.
Yes, very close.

But here, with John, you answered like some old and lonely bag lady, whose cart was filled with stories, waiting for an audience.

“I never had a doll when I was small,” you said. “So Pepe—I was ten when he was born—was like my parents' gift to me. He had the whitest skin. Almost as white as yours. And he didn't know anything! He have to be protected all the time. One day I'm cleaning eggs: he took one from the basket and bit it. Like an apple. I heard a scream and I see Pepe there, with blood and yolk and shells and dirt and feathers in his mouth.”

You yammered on. About the dreams you had for Pepe. A boy that fair could finish school, grow up to star in movies, run for office. Being a girl—a poor and dark one, no less—you wouldn't dare dream these things for yourself. You left school at thirteen, to help with the coconuts and Pepe's chances.

John looked so much like priests you'd known, there might as well have been a penance grille between you. Is that another reason you said all this to a stranger?

“Even seven, eight years old,” you told John, “Pepe slept with his knees up, his fist like this on his mouth, like he still wanted to suck his thumb.”

“I was not my brothers' doll,” said John, with a laugh. “Their football, maybe.”

Main Street looks different early in the morning. The jade pendants and roast ducks have not shown up yet in the Chinese shop windows. A strip of orange tape is stretched across the top of the stairs you would have taken to catch the train.