I

The call demanding ransom came four days after Bibo’s funeral. Abu Sayyaf wanted 30 million pesos and they wanted it in two weeks or Laird would be executed. Laird’s parents, Richard and Crystal, had arrived in Manila along with my tita Remi’s granddaughter, the girl Laird was marrying. I didn’t want to meet the parents. I reminded myself that I was in no way responsible for Laird, that I hardly knew him. But this in itself produced an element of shame. He had admired my writing and I should at least have appreciated that. He had been serious in his desire to improve things, although the particulars of this desire remained unknown. I had been successful in protecting myself from him and now he was just a mystery sealed in silence.

José Martin had also been caught by surprise by the abduction. He thought that Laird didn’t fit the profile. Abu Sayyaf kidnapped a lot of people and at the current moment were thought to have twenty hostages, but the ones who made the headlines were the white guys: the two Canadians, John Ridsdel and Robert Hall, who had their boats moored at a resort, easy prey with access to dollars. The Canadian government did not do business with terrorists and first Robert Hall had been executed, the matter of his final moments unflinchingly recorded. Ridsdel’s family had desperately attempted to collect the funds for his release, but while they were still counting the dollars as they trickled in, he too had been killed. I remember following the story, after watching the fate of Jürgen Kantner, the German who had been snatched from his boat, his wife shot as he looked on. These three had all been beheaded. John Ridsdel’s head had been left on the streets of Jolo township in a plastic bag. Townsfolk had seen two men on a motorcycle deposit the bag and then track quickly out of town. Then they were absorbed back into the jungle, improbably disappearing without a trace.

I had been called to the dining room to report any knowledge I had to the Bontotots. My family presented me as a person with connections to other journalists, someone who might know something, but I was as in the dark as a person could be. We had all considered that Laird might have been kidnapped by Abu Sayyaf, but the truth is none of us had believed it.

The Bontotots were at my aunt’s house because they were underfoot in Tita Remi’s house. My aunt had volunteered to help any way she could and this was the responsibility that had fallen to her: to keep the Bontotots distracted so that Tita Remi’s family could focus on the investigation. Was it a kindness that Laird’s mother turned out to be dead? That his father, Richard, seemed as emotionally ill-equipped as I was? Crystal, his second wife, was a weepy blonde who seemed tailored for disaster, and I wondered if her marriage to Laird’s father was a dress rehearsal for future sorrow. I suspected from his clothes and manners that Richard was a laborer of some sort, but he knew—confronted with our houses and servants and general ease greased with privilege—to keep this to himself. He was a “businessman” who lived in Los Angeles, as joyless as Laird, narrow eyed, and mean looking. Crystal was oblivious to Manila’s Byzantine class structure and code of behavior. She staved off waves of tears with sweets, mostly biko, which we kept in steady supply at my tita Rosa’s, and whatever else was available to eat. We did keep offering the food, but she really ought to have occasionally refused, as it was considered proper to do so. I didn’t disdain this response to stress, although I felt bad for the woman because other members of my family were less understanding. Or maybe my aunts and cousins were just desperate for something funny, and this woman’s impressive eating provided that. Life went on behind the scenes, and that was real, if everything else seemed less so.

My tita Rosa was the only member of our family skilled in small talk, and this she was deploying in an expert way, the result of close to a century of practice. Weather exhausted, Richard and I looked on as the conversation turned to Tito Iñigo. Crystal was wondering what sort of dog he was, to which my aunt replied that he was a native dog, even though he was clearly mostly Chihuahua. I sat in silence, unable to think of what might engage Laird’s father, who was inhaling and exhaling in a regular, loud, and performative way. The ancient fan made its transit hitting each spot with a beam of focused cool, rustling the flowers on the table, blowing my hair across my eyes.

“Richard,” I said. “Do you smoke? Would you like to join me outside for a cigarette?”

He nodded and stood from the table.

On the porch, he sat down on the cracked tile of the topmost step and rested his head in his hands. I hadn’t sat on these steps since I was a child, but I seated myself at a comfortable distance beside him. I offered him a cigarette and he took one. I lit it for him and then lit one for myself.

“I’m sorry I’m not more help to you,” I said.

“What are you supposed to do? What am I supposed to do?” He shrugged. “You know, I have a hard time believing it’s really happening. I read the newspaper and I say, ‘This is what’s real.’ But a part of me can’t make myself believe it.” He looked at me and his expression softened from the hard look to one of complete bewilderment. “What can I do? I don’t have the money and the State Department knows the situation.”

No one in the Philippines would help to pay the ransom for the same reason that governments hesitated to get involved. Raising the money supported the system of kidnapping. It made targets of your family members. What we hoped is that Laird could be located and a raid made on the camp. But Abu Sayyaf moved quickly, their headquarters always changing.

“Is there anything you can tell me about Laird, what he might have been up to in Mindanao? I don’t know if it will help, but sometimes a little information like that adds up to something when you put the facts together.”

“What do I know about Laird?” He had addressed the question to himself. “I’d never met his in-laws until this week. I’d never even met his fiancée.”

I studied the man’s face—lined, dark. Laird had gotten his cheekbones from his father, but Bontotot pére was a more horizontal being, broad shoulders, thick legs.

“Richard,” I said. “When was the last time you saw Laird?”

He grimaced. “They said you were the smart one.”

In my family there could be only one smart one, one pretty one, or one nice one.

“I haven’t seen Laird in four years. He wanted little to do with me after I left his mother, and after she died, well . . . He never cared for Crystal. I think I embarrassed him.” He looked out across the lawn and I tracked his gaze. A houseboy was dragging a bucket of water along a flowerbed, watering the plants with a repurposed can. “I have a hard time believing that this is happening to Laird because he isn’t a person that things happen to. He’s a person who makes things happen. He’s always in charge. He controlled all his friends, his mother. He was always at the top of his class. Even when he was little, he was very organized. He’d lay out his clothes each night before school. And we didn’t have a lot of money to get nice things, but he managed. He never looked untidy. He’s not the kind of guy to do something stupid like get kidnapped.” Mr. Bontotot’s eyes were open with disbelief. “He has a master’s in political science from Berkeley.”

The security guard had emerged from the guardhouse, his shirt hiked up, and he stood in the sun scratching his belly, yawning.

“So who did Laird get his brains from?”

“His brains? That’s me. His mother was a good person, but she was all hard work and prayers. Me, I like to read.” He turned to look at me, as if I might challenge him. But I saw no reason to.

When we reentered the house, my tita Rosa was showing Crystal a photo album, pictures of the siblings in the fifties, black-and-white relics of my titas and titos leaning on swanky cars or picnicking together. She must have been getting desperate for ways of entertaining her guests. I was relieved by my phone’s pinging with a text from Chet, who had been threatening to make an appearance for hours, something that I’d hoped would not happen because we didn’t need another person in the mix, but that I now recognized as my escape. I texted back that I would meet him outside.

“You have to excuse me,” I said. My aunt looked up from the album with a disapproving frown. “I have to meet a friend.”

I sat next to Chet as he backed down the drive at high speed, looking past Top Gun, who, as usual, was sitting in the center of the back seat. “I thought you didn’t want to come to Makati today. You said you had to be with your family.”

“I changed my mind. There’s only so much of this stuff you can take. There’s nothing happening, which is anxiety provoking, but it’s hard to think of news that would make it better.”

“Laird is—” Chet stopped himself and shook his head.

“What?” I waited for Chet to respond.

“I feel bad for his parents,” he said.

By the time we reached Makati the sky had begun to grow dark and the wind was picking up. Trees were nodding and on the sidewalk newspapers were spiraling up in an ominous way. When we got out of the car, I could hear dogs barking, although where we were, in a landscape of concrete and glass, I could not see the dogs that were responsible.

“Is there a storm coming in?” I asked.

“Yeah, but it’s not supposed to be so bad. Just stay for dinner. The cook’s making bagnet.”

“She’s always making bagnet.”

“That’s because you’re always eating it.”

By the time we had finished dinner, the rain was blowing against the windows in sheets. I rested my face against the cool glass, seeing people—tiny from this distance—running along the sidewalks to take shelter.

“I have to head home,” I said. “It’s not looking very good out there.”

Chet checked his phone, scrolling through, I assumed, to follow up on the weather, when the phone began to ring. He picked up and after an initial angry response, he began to deliver directions on how to secure a construction site that must have been one of his projects. He was being very specific at making sure that they stored all the corrugated iron safely as that had a tendency to blow around in storms and had been known to kill people. He reassured whoever was on the other end of the line and said to call him when all the actions had been completed.

“Ting,” he said. “You’re not going anywhere. Power lines are coming down. It’s not safe.”

I thought about the implications of this statement. “And here, is it safe?”

Chet rolled his eyes. “I just want to hold your hand.” He took my hand and began to bend back the fingers one at a time. Then he flipped my hand over as if he were reading my palm.

I left my hand in his. I wanted both to take it back and to leave it there, but my mind had left my body and seemed to be hovering over the proceedings as if I had no say in what was happening. I said, “It’ll be my hand and next thing you’ll want my elbow.”

Chet nodded, his hand now on my elbow. He closed his fingers, which now touched, encircling it. “Yes, and then your shoulder.”

“It’s like being eaten by a snake,” I said. Whatever was about to happen seemed inevitable. I could have pushed him off, stepped away, but I was curious and, also, strangely sad.

Chet laughed. “There you are, thinking and thinking.”

“I don’t want to be inside the snake,” I said.

“Ting,” Chet replied, putting his arms around me, pulling me to him. “Inside the snake is the safest place to be.”