In the Country (40 page)

“It's not defecting. I just can't live here, and stay alive. What other way is there?”

He grips her hand and pulls her to her knees at the bedside. He glares, through river silt and seeping water.

“I can't do that,” she says. “I have a daughter.”

“What good will you do her, abroad? We still have no idea what kind of country you're leaving her in. EDSA could turn bloody any minute. But the generals will probably get off without a scratch. Like you. They don't care what happens to the sheep, as long as their own hides are saved. The lambs, I should say.”

“You're wrong about me,” says Milagros, and to prove it she stands, pulling away from Billy Batanglobo. But his grip is tight, his eyes and the soaked bed, standing in a pool of water on the floor, compelling her to join him. She pries off his fingers, soily around the nails and cuticles, and goes to the living room.

“Jackie.” Milagros crouches beside her daughter.

Jackie looks up from her rubber balls and plastic stars, a game she still is young enough to think was named for her. The TV's still on, but Vivi's in the kitchen now, her mother doing laundry out back, the neighbors gone.

“Your brother isn't coming back,” says Milagros.

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.

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.