In the Country (3 page)

My mother turned with a gasp, her eyes wide. Moonlight through the window fell onto the bed and, for the second time in my life, the silhouette of my father, bare-chested, the sheet pulled down to his waist. Her back, bent over him in a ministering pose, straightened up. “
Anak,
don't!” She raised her hand to stop me, mittened by a white washcloth, her body twisting to cover his.

I shut my eyes and the door. My stomach turned. I couldn't go back to their bed now, the place where I'd first walked in on them. Like a child once again, I ran through the living room and kitchen for escape.

The screen door to the
sari-sari
was locked. I shook it, panicked, before remembering the loop hook above the handle. My fingers searched the wall to switch on the light and ceiling fan. I headed for the wicket as if I could flee through it, then climbed and sat on the counter. A mouse darted across the floor to its hiding place behind the freezer. Moths buzzed around the fluorescent strip above me, and another gecko made its clicking sound. It seemed that all the secret forms of life and movement that took place in this house at night had decided to expose themselves to me, and by the time I forced myself back to bed, the sweat on my neck and face had turned cold.

In the morning I heard a man's voice through the wall. I startled, thinking at first that my father had recovered. Then I recognized it, from long-distance phone calls in New York. The doctor. My father was dead.

At his bedside the doctor was removing the buds of a stethoscope from his ears. He gave me a collegial nod. My mother paced across the room. Pins from her hair had scattered at the foot of the bed. “…peacefully,” Dr. Ramos was saying. “In his sleep.” But my father looked far from peaceful. In death his face had gone thuggish again, the underbite and squashed nose giving him as aggressive and paranoid a look as ever. In forty, fifty, sixty years this was how I might die: with my worst impulses petrified on my face.

My mother had stopped pacing but kept rubbing her hands flat against her lap, as if this time she couldn't get them clean. “Loretta?” Dr. Ramos said. Only when he called her name a second time did I notice her head rolling backward, her eyes to their whites. I caught her just before she fainted to the floor.

“I'm sorry” were her first words upon coming to. Her eyes bounced from me to the doctor to my father.

“You're in shock,” said Dr. Ramos. “Happens all the time.”

I opened the fan on the nightstand and waved it over her face. “Nothing to be sorry about,” I said.

And there wasn't. The doctor assumed that my father had passed in a morphine-softened sleep, but now I wondered if he'd gone into cardiac arrest while my mother satisfied some dying wish. Perhaps this would haunt her in the days to come. The hair she usually pinned back hung loose around her face. But I felt calmer than I had the night before; there was no mystery. She'd served him to the end. I should have known she would.

In the basement of the Immaculate Conception Funeral Home, the mortician curved a sponge between his fingers, spackling my father's face with brown grease. An American parlor would never have allowed me downstairs. But Manila wasn't so strict, and I liked to keep a close eye on everyone I paid. The mortician had gone darker than my father's current skin tone, closer to the shade he was before the illness. I wondered if my mother had shown him a photograph.

The funeral directors led us to their Holy Family room. “We asked for the penthouse,” I said. They apologized; a service was running long in their Epiphany suite. “Then tell them it's time to leave.” My father had relatives coming from all over the archipelago to pay their respects, I explained—from all over the world, in fact. Again they were sorry, throwing in a
sir:
the funeral taking place in Epiphany was a child's. “Did the child pay you in American dollars?” I asked. Doing business in Manila hardened something in me, the same muscle I'd observed in men who stood up in hospital rooms and did all the talking for their families. I focused on the French doors of the penthouse as we skated my father past the displaced mourners and their four-foot coffin.

Our family brought in plates of fried rice, barbecued chicken, pineapple salad in condensed milk, sandwich halves stacked in pyramids. Only the corpse, really, distinguished the wake from any other party. People kissed and caught up. Bebot fiddled with the green Commodore computer. My uncles set up speakers beside the guestbook and blew into the microphones:
Testing, testing, one two three.

“Loretta, please eat,” an aunt was saying. “Next time we see you, you'll be invisible.”

My mother accepted a cheese pimiento sandwich. Then the room started to fill with the family's insistent clamor, and I longed for another escape. She looked like she could use that, too. My sandwich-pushing aunt noticed the bare platform around the coffin. “They call this a ‘full-service' funeral parlor,” she said to me, “but apparently that does not include flowers.”

I saw my chance. “The flowers aren't going to buy themselves,” I said, approaching my mother's chair. “Shall we?”

She abandoned the sandwich and took my arm. We stepped out onto Araneta Avenue, Manila's funeral district, walking past the parlor, stonemasons, chapels, coffin shops, and rent-a-hearse garages: one after another, like beads on a grim rosary. A rough and glittery dust filled the air, as if crematory ashes had mingled with fumes from the traffic.

We stopped at a flower stand outside the parlor. “How much?” I asked the vendor, pointing at a white spray of carnations and roses that my mother liked. I didn't know what flowers cost. I never bought them in New York—not for promoted colleagues or sick friends, certainly not for women. Flowers reminded me of my father and the hangdog contrition that followed his nights of drinking: the swooping, romantic gestures that came after he'd blackened an eye or broken a bone.

“Five thousand pesos,” said the vendor, “plus fifty per letter on the banner.”

FONDEST REMEMBRANCES,
the display models said.
IN LOVING MEMORY.

“I can do two thousand,” I said, “banner included.”

The vendor shook his head. “This is difficult lettering, sir. The roses are imported.”

“That's a pity.” I took my mother's arm and headed for the next kiosk.

“Twenty-five hundred with banner,” the vendor shouted after us.

I walked on, to keep him guessing for a few paces, before doubling us back. I couldn't have cared less about the cost of flowers. I simply wanted every peddler in the city to know he didn't stand a chance against me.

None of the things I wished to say to my father were printable, so I took my mother's suggestion:
REST IN PEACE, YOUR LOVING FAMILY.
We strolled the avenue waiting for our banner. “Don't let anyone try that on the
sari-sari,
” I said.

“I don't think anyone could,” she said. “You still haggle like the best of them.”

“What choice do I have? They can read
balikbayan
written on my forehead.”

“Ah, no—it's too long to fit there.” Her words hung in the air a moment before I realized I should smile. Ten years before, I had arrived in New York with ideas of what I'd miss most about my mother: her cooking, her voice, the smell of rice and detergent in her skin and hair. I did not expect to miss her humor, the small wisecracks that escaped her mouth sometimes, often from behind her fingers, hard to hear.

When we returned for the flowers, my mother reached out as if to carry them. I waved her away as I paid. “This thing is nearly twice your size.”

“You underestimate me,” she said, pretending to flex her muscles.

After the memorial service, my uncles offered to stay with the body overnight. The last of our relatives were expected in the morning. We would bury my father in the afternoon.

Back in Mabini Heights, my old bedroom was mine again. The air conditioner seemed louder now that I was alone in the room, but I slept easily. I dreamed of winter in New York, walking alone in snow, pulling my collar up against the cold.

I woke in a sweat again. The AC had stopped. I turned the dial, but the vents stayed silent. I flipped the wall switch and got no light.

A brownout. My first since returning to Manila.

Moonlight from the window told me only a few hours had passed. A muffled sound, like crying, came through the wall. I stood, ready to console my mother on the sofa or at the kitchen table. But the living room was empty, the kitchen dark. The only light I saw flickered weakly from the
sari-sari.
Approaching the screen door, I saw a candle burning on the counter. Was she keeping vigil? Praying? I squinted in the shadows.

She certainly wasn't crying. In fact, she was laughing—a strange, sleepy laugh that dominoed through the
sari-sari.
She reached along the counter and picked up a white square. Succorol. I watched her slide it through the wicket. Then she was repeating my instructions, in my accent.

“This isn't Tylenol, if you know what I mean.” She drawled the words, like a cowboy trying to speak Tagalog, as if I'd lived in Texas, not New York, for the past ten years. She reached toward the wicket and came back with a fistful of cash.

I turned from the screen to the darkness, as if a film projector behind me had faltered. Her laughter followed me through the living room as I tripped against the furniture and nearly missed the sickroom doorway in the dark. I opened the drawer where we'd stored the yellow box. Six Succorol patches left, of the thirty I'd brought. Five days had passed since I'd arrived, four since I'd given them to her.

My skin itched with the humidity. I grabbed the fan beside my father's bed and flapped it at myself, then felt ridiculous and snapped it shut. Nothing about my mother—not her voice, soft as a lullaby, when I could hear it; not her hands, drying themselves on her lap; not her posture, a constant curtsy—squared with the woman in the
sari-sari.
I had to erase that strange laughter from my mind, the tongue that wet her thumb before it counted out the money.

Returning to the dresser, I fingered the box of Succorol. Would the world end if I indulged this once, crossed another boundary, broke one more rule?

I glanced again over my shoulder before peeling a patch from its backing. I pressed it to my chest as if saluting a flag or anthem. My heart raced under my hand. In the distance, my mother's laughter rose and fell. But nothing changed as I lay back on the cot. It seemed as if the years of virtue had made a fortress of me, a barricade that human appetites and weakness couldn't breach.

Then my bones began to melt. Things happened too quickly, at first, to feel good. The rosary, the notebook, and the fan, unfolding pleat by pleat, rose from the chair and hovered over my father's bed. The doors swayed. I gripped the edges of the cot, feeling control slip from me inch by inch. Only when the melting reached my fingers, loosening their hold, did I begin to enjoy it. Patches flew out of the box and lined up like a filmstrip in the air, each one a panel with a picture in it, and from there every square inside the house became a screen: song lyrics in the baby monitor; my father's face in the green computer. Even the windows and the wicket came alive with scenes of
bida,
kontrabida,
and the woman they both claimed. My body sailed up and out of the room like a streamer: through the corridor, the kitchen, the
sari-sari.
Walls and ceilings yielded to me as they would to a ghost. I heard my mother laughing and my father singing “Fly Me to the Moon,” the sounds and words escaping through the roof into the stars.

I woke the next morning to find my bedsheets balled on the sickroom floor, the Succorol patch still on my chest. Tearing it off, I wondered if my mother had checked in on me and seen it. In the bathroom I tried to soap off the patch's square footprint, but the adhesive was stubborn. I needed a washcloth to work at the residue.

Rubbing away the evidence, I looked down. As if I'd never seen my own hand before. I stretched my arm out and stared at the white cloth, wrapped around my fingers like a mitten. A bandage.

I rushed from the sink to the doorway of the sickroom, thinking back to the night he died. Here was where the moonlight had shone over the bed. Here was the step I took before seeing them. Here was where she gasped, stopping me in my tracks, and bent to hide his body. My mind shuffled through the kinds of scenes you saw in those trashy Tagalog melodramas: on-screen villains, polishing their guns and planting their poisons; my mother, not ministering to him as she had when I was four years old, but instead waiting for me to fall asleep, kneeling at my father's bedside, removing his shirt and applying a patch to his chest. I pictured her adding another patch and then another, a week's worth, her fingertips blanching his skin briefly at each point of pressure. I could see her laying an ear to his chest. After midnight, when his breath and heartbeat stopped, she must have peeled off the patches, soaked the washcloth, and tackled the sticky residue just as I opened the door for some cold air.

Now I opened the candy box and counted again: five. Only three should have gone to my father on my second, third, and fourth days home; one to me. I'd seen my mother sell one. Of the other twenty that were missing, how many had she sold? Had she sold some in the nights before as well, while I slept? How many would it take to finish off a dying man?

I must have known a drug so powerful could end his life. So what? Didn't I want him gone, hadn't I always? My mother was better off.

But at what cost? I had to ask myself. If she had killed him, I had handed her the weapon. If I'd kept track, a closer eye on the supply, I might have caught it all sooner. What kind of pharmacist lets days go by without taking inventory? Someone incompetent as well as criminal. Like him, in other words.