MY MOTHER WAS waiting in front of our house when I rode up in a taxi. “There you are,” she said, as if we’d simply lost each other for an hour or two at a party. I only half embraced her, afraid she might break if I held too tight. She hadn’t been able to collect me from the airport herself. Years ago my father had forbidden her to drive, though I supposed he could do little to prevent it now.
“Let me,” she said, reaching for my suitcase. I waved her away. I would no sooner allow my mother to carry my suitcase than allow her to carry me. “Oh, Steve,” she protested. “You don’t know my strength!” She dropped her arms, flattening the palms against her lap, a habit I remembered well. Throughout my childhood she often looked to be drying her hands on an apron, whether or not she was wearing one.
In the decade since I left she hadn’t aged, exactly. To my eyes she seemed not older but more. More frail; more tired; softer-spoken; her dark, teaspoon-shaped face cast farther down. Every feature I remembered had settled in her and been more deeply confirmed.
My parents still lived in Mabini Heights, a suburb of Manila and a monument to a time when they belonged to the middle class. My father had called himself an import-export businessman before sliding, through the years, down a spiral of unrelated jobs, each more menial than the last, and harder for him to keep. And my mother had been a nurse before he banned her from working outside the house altogether. But if they’d come down in the world, so had Mabini Heights. Ever since my childhood in the seventies, when so much of that middle class fled Marcos and martial law, houses had been left unfinished or carved up for different uses. Squatters set up camp amid the scaffolding and roofless rooms. Families took in boarders or relatives. Our house had changed too: on its right, a gray, unpainted cinder-block cell had been added, taking up what used to be a yard. My parents had cemented over the grass and built this sari-sari store five years earlier, selling snacks and other odds and ends through a sliding wicket to people on the street. The sari-sari compromised what I imagine was the dream of my parents, who grew up poor: a green buffer between the world and their world.
The addition seemed to shrink the main house to a toy, its windows tiny and its clay roof something storybook elves might have built. Next to it, I felt gigantic. I hunched my shoulders as I followed my mother inside. I was convinced, walking behind her, that the dishes on the shelves were rattling.
“Papa’s in here,” said my mother, opening the door to my old bedroom. The blast of cold came as a shock, then a relief. There was an air conditioner now, in the window under which I used to sleep as a child, and my old bed, where my father lay, was pushed into a corner. I saw, from the straw mat rolled up beside him, that my mother had been sleeping on the floor at night. Otherwise the room was clean and bare and quiet as I remembered—same white cinder-block walls, same wood-tiled floors, same smell of mothballs from the same chest of drawers—if all faded a little, like an old photograph. My mother kept a tidy house—a trait we shared—and things probably lasted longer in her care.
Two oxygen tanks stood beside my father’s bed. He breathed through a tube. The sight of him brought me back to New York, where I lived, and to the hospital where I worked as a clinical pharmacist. My father no longer resembled me. The short boxer’s physique, a bullish muscularity I’d always detested sharing with him, was gone. In fact he no longer resembled anyone in the family; he belonged now to that transnational tribe of the sick and the dying. Without the dentures he’d worn most of his adult life, my father’s mouth was a pit, a wrinkled open wound below the nose. What I could see of his eyes, under lids that were three-quarters closed, did not appear to see me back. He looked not only thin but vacuum-dried, desiccated—less a human than the prehistoric remains of one.
He groaned, a low and heavy sound.
“All right, Papa. All right.” My mother took a brown dropper bottle from a chair next to the bed. “This used to hold him for a while,” she said. “But lately he’s complaining round the clock.” Steadying his chin, she released a dose of liquid morphine into his mouth, with the dainty caution of a woman ladling hot soup or lighting a church candle. He let out another groan. “Shhh.” She stroked the sides of his face. Even bedridden and in pain, my father had managed to preserve their old arrangement: when he called, she was there to wait on him.
I’d predicted this, and how much I would hate to watch. In my suitcase, I carried an answer. Succorol was the newest therapy for chronic pain on the market in America. White and square, the size of movie ticket stubs, Succorol patches adhered to the skin, releasing opiates much stronger than morphine. Doctors had just started prescribing them to terminal patients in New York. Succorol could take years to reach the Philippines, a country whose premier pharmacy chain boasted LAGING BAGO ANG GAMOT DITO! (WE DO NOT SELL EXPIRED DRUGS HERE!) as its tagline. Still, something kept me from unpacking the patches right then. I did not want my mother to see my hands shaking—to know what I had done to bring them here in the first place, let alone the price I’d pay if anyone found out.
“Is that better, Papa?” My mother returned the morphine to the chair next to a rosary, a spiral notebook, a folded white hand fan. She logged the dose in the notebook like the nurse she’d once been. I picked up the fan and opened it, rib by wooden rib. Its lace edge had frayed, but the linen pleats remained bright and clean. I remembered sitting in her lap as a child during Sunday Mass, as she flicked her wrist back and forth to cool me with it.
She’d brought my father to the doctor eight months before, when he had trouble breathing and couldn’t finish a meal without hunching over in pain. His belly had grown to the size of a watermelon and, from the veins straining against the skin, nearly as green. When my mother called me in New York and said “liver cancer,” I imagined my parents as clearly as if I’d been sitting in the free clinic with them. I saw my father shrug or grunt each time the doctor addressed him, as proud and stubbornly tongue-tied as he always became around people with titles and offices. I saw my mother frown in concentration and move her lips in time with the doctor’s, as if that would help her understand. I saw her dab the corners of my father’s mouth with the white handkerchief she always carried in her purse.
Because of his age and his refusal, even after this diagnosis, to stop drinking, he never qualified for a transplant. At my mother’s request, I wired money into a Philippine National Bank account that I kept open for the family. Whenever someone needed rent or medicine or tuition back home, I sent what I could, having no wife or children of my own to support. In my father’s case, I thought about refusing. But it occurred to me a relative might say he could get better care in America. His coming to New York for treatment and staying with me—or, worse, in the hospital where I made my living—was something I’d have wired any sum to avoid.
When chemotherapy did not stop the cancer’s spread to his lungs, when radiation did not shrink the masses, my father’s doctor began to speak in a code we both understood: pain management instead of treatment; not recovery but comfort in his last days. My money turned from doxorubicin and radiotherapy to oxygen tanks, air-conditioning, the dark-brown bottle of morphine. Still, I expected my father to survive. For all the years I’d spent wishing him dead, it was my mother’s role in the family drama, not his, to suffer. Esteban has got some heavy hands, the family always said. Loretta is a saint. When she called to tell me end-stage, my mother may as well have said we’d never lived under a clay roof in Mabini Heights, that I remembered my entire childhood wrong.
• • •
I insisted on seeing the inside of the sari-sari store before lunch. “Corporate headquarters,” said my mother. She pulled aside the screen door that once led from the kitchen onto grass.
Once more, I felt like an ogre in a dollhouse. The vast and open yard of my childhood amounted now to just ten feet from the screen door to the wicket, and barely six across. Sacks of rice, tanks of soy sauce, and bricks of dry glass noodles, stacked against the walls, narrowed it even more. Candy in glass jars, each with its own metal scoop, sat in rows upon the shelves above. Reels of shampoo and detergent hung from the ceiling, dispensing Palmolive or Tide in single-use packets. I thought of the thin, sealed sleeves of Succorol, flanked by dental floss and blister-packed vitamins, in a side pocket of the toiletry bag lodged between my socks and shirts. A complete amateur’s attempt at smuggling, which nearly froze my heart nonetheless as I sent my luggage down the airport X-ray belt.
I closed my eyes and tried to breathe. Sari-sari meant “assorted” or “sundry,” and so the store smelled: like a heady mix of bubble gum and vinegar, salt and soap, floor wax and cologne. My mother switched on a ceiling fan that hung between the fluorescent striplight and the wheels of Tide and Palmolive.
“We should get you another air conditioner,” I said. “There’s a lot that could melt or spoil in here.”
I walked to the far end of the store and ran my palm along the wooden counter. Receipts were impaled on a spike next to a calculator with a roll of printing tape. Behind the scratched Plexiglas wicket, my mother had placed a call bell and a RING FOR SERVICE sign. They’d opened the sari-sari five years back, after my father was fired from another job, this time for stealing a crate of Tanduay rum from the restaurant where he’d been waiting tables. “He isn’t built to work under someone,” my mother had said. “It’s just not his nature, answering to another man.” I said nothing, just sent the money they needed to start. The sari-sari gave her a loophole, at least, in his law against her working outside the house.
At the time I hadn’t minded so much about the money, which I never expected to see again. But I knew I’d miss the yard, my refuge in the years before I could stand up to my father. When he called my mother a dog or a whore or a foul little cunt who’d ruined his life, she sent me outside. When he seized her by the hair and asked, What did you say? What did you just say to me? she sent me outside. When he struck her face with the underside of our telephone until she wept and begged, first for forgiveness and then for mercy, she sent me outside, into the grass of the yard, where twigs from the acacia tree would have fallen overnight.
• • •
In the kitchen, my mother set the table for two. Then she planted a baby monitor at the third chair and tuned it to a grainy black-and-white broadcast of my father snoring. “This thing saved me,” she said. “Now I can keep an eye on him while I work. Or while you and I sit and eat together.”
But she hardly sat or ate at all. Throughout lunch she alternated between serving him and serving me. She stood to answer a groan from the sickroom, then heaped my plate with fried rice and beef. She uncapped a bottle of San Miguel for me, then went to feed him a bowl of broth. I spent most of the meal alone with him: my father’s screen image and me, facing off across the table.
At this time three days earlier, I was in the hospital, taking inventory of the narcotics cabinet. As I unloaded the most recent shipment of Succorol, I found six more boxes than were counted on the packing slip, a surplus as unlikely as it was expensive. And immediately I imagined my mother, titrating morphine into his mouth by hand, as I recounted the boxes and rechecked my number against the invoice. I thought of my mother, running back and forth between the sari-sari and the sickroom, as I typed the lower figure into the inventory log. I thought of her, crying or praying after morphine had ceased to comfort him, as I wheeled the Pyxis in front of the surveillance camera and slipped a month’s supply of Succorol into the pockets of my lab coat.
“Bed or bath?” she asked, returning to the kitchen. A pail of water was filled and waiting for me in the bathroom; on the master bed, new sheets. Which did I want first? All that was missing was the “sir.”
The baby monitor groaned on the table. The call bell dinged in the store. My mother glanced from one to the other, torn.
“I’ve got the store,” I volunteered. “You take care of him.” Her eyebrows rose, but I said, “What is there to know? I saw price tags on your jars and a cashbox under the counter. I’ll print receipts from the calculator if people want them.”
As it turned out, I was no help at all. My first customer wanted shampoo. I pulled too hard on the Palmolive, unspooling hundreds of packets to the floor. My mother had to climb a stepladder to reel them back in. Another customer asked for detergent. I ripped a packet of Tide down the middle, sending a flurry of blue-flecked snow everywhere. My mother swept up after me with a broom. The women barely spoke above a whisper, sometimes covering their mouths to hide bad teeth. “Ano?” I asked, over and over. The louder I asked, the softer they answered. The farther they retreated from the wicket, the closer I stooped to read their faces, feeling more like a bully than a shop clerk.
My father’s groans, on the other hand, I heard perfectly well. In her trips back and forth from the sari-sari to the sickroom, my mother moved the baby monitor to the freezer case, rushing from the store as soon as he called or stirred on-screen. While she was gone, a teenage girl asked me for Sarsi cola. Relieved to understand, I handed her a bottle from the freezer. She giggled, staring, and said something else behind her hands. “. . . plastik” was all I heard. Remembering the jar of plastic straws on the counter and the bottle opener underneath, I uncapped the bottle and added a straw. She giggled and shook her head, asking again for “plastik.” I wondered if she meant a plastic shopping bag and searched the store, finding one crumpled on a shelf. Now she was giggling too hard to speak. I felt as confused as in my earliest days as a clinical pharmacy resident in New York—a beginner desperate to impress my superiors, bungling even the basics.
When my mother returned, she spoke to the girl and poured the Sarsi cola into a plastic sleeve, thin as a layer of onionskin. She stored the bottle in a crate that would go back to the factory. How had I forgotten? I’d drunk sodas from plastic sleeves up until the age of twenty-five. And yet the liquid bag I handed over made me think not of my childhood but of some dark, alien version of the waste pouches and IV fluids I’d see at the hospital. “Relax, anak.” Dragging a stool to the center of the store, my mother invited me to sit under the ceiling fan. “You’re sweating.” She handed me a mango Popsicle from the freezer case. The jaw-cramping sweetness of each bite felt vaguely humiliating as I sat and watched her work.
Unlike me, she had no trouble hearing her customers. No sooner had a face appeared at the wicket than she was reaching for the shoe polish or cooking oil. Her right hand could pop open a bottle cap while her left tore a foil packet from the shampoo reel. To the voice of a young boy, so small I couldn’t see him through the wicket, she sold three sheets, for ten centavos apiece, of the grainy, wide-ruled paper on which I’d learned to spell in grade school. It was a way of shopping I had completely forgotten: egg by egg, cigarette by cigarette, people spending what they earned in a day to buy what they would use in the next.
• • •
That night I lay in my parents’ bedroom. Jet lag and the whir of an electric fan kept me awake. Somewhere above me a gecko made its loud clicking noise, and I was no longer used to the Manila heat. But I refused to sleep any closer to my father, even if it meant losing out on the AC.
Down the hall, he groaned nonstop, as if to say, unless he slept, no one would.
Growing up in this house, I used to hear other noises from him at night. I must have been four or five years old, lying where he did now, the first time a lowing through the wall made me sit up. Until it had echoed once or twice, I didn’t know the voice was his. My father sounded more like a flagellant on Good Friday, parading through the streets of Tondo. I thought my mother had found a way to strike back: that he was the one, this time, suffering and forced to beg.
I rushed to the door they’d forgotten to close, and detected my parents’ shapes in the dark. He was sitting on the edge of the bed. Naked, but hidden from the waist down by my mother. She knelt, a sheet around her shoulders, wiping the floor with a washcloth. And though she was at his feet, though her shadow rose and fell as she cleaned, as if bowing to a king, my father did not look to be in charge at all. He peeled the lids off his eyes, unsticking his tongue from the roof of his mouth. His skin was waxen with sweat. Stripped and drained, limp and compromised—he could not have hit her, in this state.
Then he saw me in the doorway. “What now?” he said, alert again, his fists starting to lock.
My mother startled. “Anak!” She pointed past me, the wet washcloth covering her hand like a bandage. “Get out!”
I ran out to the yard. Not to escape him, but because I knew he’d punish her for every second of my presence there.
This was before I’d learned much about sex; I was too young to be disgusted by it. For a while after that, whenever I heard him groan in the darkness, I didn’t know enough to pull my pillow over my ears or run outside in embarrassment. Instead my father’s baying, and his stupor afterward, put me under a kind of spell. I’d listen through the cinder-block wall, believing he had fallen out of power, was in pain. Whatever else he might do to my mother, at any other hour, during this shimmering nighttime transaction he was the conquered one.
• • •
A swarm of aunts, uncles, cousins, and cousins’ children descended on the house early the next morning. I passed out all my pasalubong, or homecoming gifts: handheld digital games, pencil-and-stationery sets, duty-free liquor, nuts and chocolates I’d stockpiled on layovers in Honolulu and Tokyo. A balikbayan knew better than to show up empty-handed.
After the gifts came the inquisition. How cold was it in America? How often did it snow? I kept my lines brief. I had a role to perform: the balikbayan, who worked hard and missed home but didn’t complain, who’d moved up in New York but wasn’t down on Manila. “You get used to the winters,” I said. I didn’t tell them I loved the snow, was built for the American cold, and felt, upon entering my first job in a thermostat-controlled pharmacy, that I’d come home. What did I miss most about the Philippines? “The food, and Filipinos,” I said. “Good thing the nurses always bring me lumpia and let me tag along to Sunday Mass.” But my days in New York never involved Mass or lumpia: outside of work, I spent my free time exercising at the gym, or cleaning my apartment on the twenty-eighth floor of a building made of steel and glass. What about women—was there someone? An American? “The hospital keeps me busy,” I said. “No one special enough yet to meet you.” I didn’t describe the women who sometimes spent the night with me, how they chattered nonstop, intimidated by the tidy home I kept. “Is this an apartment or a lab?” said one, glancing at my countertops. “Are we getting laid here, or embalmed?” asked another, under the tightly tucked bedspread. In every case, I found a reason to stop calling: false modesty, too loud a voice, careless toothpaste spatters around the bathroom sink. Any time a woman opened her mouth and I could imagine myself clapping a hand over it, pinning her to the bed, I knew that my father still breathed somewhere inside of me. I couldn’t risk repeating his life.
The questions ended when the karaoke began. Bebot, my cousin’s son, had hooked the monitor of my old Commodore computer, outgrown since I first bought it in New York, to a DVD player. When he fed it a karaoke disc, song lyrics and video footage of couples on the beach appeared in green screen. I took on “Kawawang Cowboy” (“Pathetic Cowboy”), a Tagalog satire of “Rhinestone Cowboy,” to show I remembered my Tagalog and to cover my lack of singing talent with silliness. “A pathetic cowboy,” I sang. “I wish I could afford some bubble gum / Instead of dried-up salty Chinese plum. . . .” The family roared. In New York, the nurses would have shooed us out of any hospital. But here no one worried about disturbing my father, who loved karaoke and had a gift for it. In a voice like wine and honey, he used to croon everything from Elvis Presley to classic Tagalog love songs. Even I had to admit that, back then, his signature “Fly Me to the Moon” was charming.
My mother scuttled through our living room reunion like a servant, pulled in opposite directions by sick groans and the sari-sari bell. I thought again of the Succorol but stayed in my seat. Twice—first in Tagalog, then in English—I had taken a pharmacist’s oath to tell the truth and uphold the law. People lost jobs and licenses for less. If our suppliers discovered their mistake, called all their clients, and somehow—between timestamps, shift schedules, signatures, and security footage—found me out, I could land in jail, to say nothing of the damage to my name with colleagues and the department head who’d trusted me with inventory to begin with. Deceit of any kind was a foreign country to me. As a child, I’d never so much as shoplifted a comic book, or lied to a teacher, or cheated at a game of cards. This discipline earned me perfect grades in high school, scholarships through college, my first job at a Manila drugstore, a doctor of pharmacy degree from my school’s brother university in New York, fast promotions at the hospital. Whenever I saw classmates copy each other’s homework or make faces behind the priests’ backs, I thought of my father and how he, too, must have started small on the path to worse.
I considered hiring a live-in nurse, but my mother was the kind of woman who waited on even the people she’d paid to serve us, back when we could afford them: the laundress, the gardener, the yaya who watched me before I started school. Now she did the same for relatives who covered sari-sari shifts and friends who visited them. They all ate at our table and helped themselves to free snacks and sodas from the store. A paid nurse would only give her another plate to wash, another chair to pull out.
The next time the bell rang, I followed my mother into the kitchen and through the screen door. Away from my family’s relentless yammering, the sari-sari felt like a sanctuary again: in but not of the house, and cooler than the crowded living room. My mother helped a customer, then gazed at the baby monitor, perched up on a shelf between jars of Spanish shortbread and tamarind candy.
“I’ve got a gun without a bullet and a pocket without money,” she turned to me and sang, off-key. “You inherited my singing voice, anak. Sorry.”
“Apologize to your family,” I said. “They had to listen to it.” From the shelf I picked one of her favorites: pastillas de leche, soft mini-logs made with sugar and carabao’s milk. My mother had a sweet tooth that didn’t match her frame. I set the yellow box on the counter and reached into my pocket.
“Oh, no you don’t,” she said. “This is on the house.”
“Absolutely not,” I said.
“We’re a Filipino store; we don’t accept American dollars.”
“Nice try. I exchanged my money at the airport.”
“Your money’s no good here.”
“Stop giving things away for free.” I unwrapped one of the pastillas, knowing she wouldn’t start ahead of me. “That’s no way to keep a business afloat. There’s my first piece of advice for you.”
“It’s your second,” she said. “Yesterday you said it was too hot in here.” She pointed at the whirling blades on the ceiling. “People pay all kinds of money for good business advice, don’t they? So I’m not giving anything away for free.” She frowned as she bit into a pastilla, as if eating required all her concentration.
I took my hand from my pocket, and we crunched for a while without speaking.
“If I ever leave the hospital and open my own pharmacy,” I said, “it will be a lot like this.” I walked her through my rather old-fashioned vision: tinctures and powders in rows, a mortar and pestle here, a pill counter and weighing scale there.
“Oh, anak.” I’d become her young son again, pointing at a mansion in Forbes Park or a gown in a shop window, luxuries I vowed to provide her in the future. My mother’s eyes filled with tears. “Your pharmacy will be fancier than this. And you could have built it years ago, if you hadn’t been busy helping us.”
That settled it. Nothing disturbed me more than the sight of her crying. It was time to end her call-button servitude once and for all. “Ma,” I began, “I’ve given everyone their pasalubong, except you.”
The baby monitor groaned, bringing her to her feet. “You’ve given me so much already.” She wiped her eyes. “Pastillas, free advice . . .” Setting down the call bell and the SERVICE sign, she rushed out, again, to attend to him.
I dropped five hundred pesos into the cashbox and brought the rest of the candy to my relatives in the living room. Once they’d emptied the box, I took it to my room and filled it with the patches of Succorol, then went to the sickroom and closed the door behind me.
My mother was pressing a washcloth to his forehead. “You’re a CEO, not a slave,” I said. “No more scurrying around. You’ve got a business to run.” I showed her the Succorol and how to use it, peeling a square from its adhesive backing and pressing it to my father’s side. “Remove this and apply a new one at the same time tomorrow,” I said. “On his back, or arm—anywhere there isn’t hair. Rotate or you’ll irritate the skin.” In my mother’s notebook I started a new page and recorded the dose. “So we don’t double up,” I said. “This isn’t Tylenol, if you know what I mean.”
We stayed until my father quieted and slept. I closed the yellow box, now full of Succorol, and placed it in the top drawer of the dresser. Before we left the sickroom, she touched my cheek.
“You’re home,” she said. “All the pasalubong I need.”
In the living room the family had switched from karaoke to a Tagalog movie. Even in green it looked familiar, observing the rules of every melodrama I’d grown up watching: a bida, or hero, fought a kontrabida, or villain, for the love of a beautiful woman. The oldest films would even cast a pale, fair-haired American as the bida and a dusky, slick-mustachioed Spaniard as the kontrabida. Between them, the woman spent her time batting her eyelashes or being swept off her feet; peeking out from behind lace fans; fainting or weeping; clutching a handkerchief to her heart or dangling it from the window as a signal; being abducted at night, or rescued from a tower, or carried away on a horse. My relatives talked back to the screen as it played. Kiss! Kiss! they insisted, not with any delight or romantic excitement but in a nearly hostile way, heckling the protagonists and the plot to quit stalling and hurry along to the payoff. Even I joined the chorus. When, at last, the bida won the woman, we cheered and whistled, again not out of joy so much as a malicious sort of triumph. The script had succumbed, in the end, to our demands.
• • •
For three days my father dozed peacefully, waking only when my mother fed him or shifted a bedpan under his haunches. With the Succorol, he never groaned again. At first she ran to check his breathing throughout breakfast and lunch, but by the second day she trusted the baby monitor to show the rise and fall of his chest, his mouth dilating and shrinking. Seeing her relax, I slept better too.
Meanwhile the heat climbed to ninety-three degrees. I woke on my fourth night in the country feeling stained by my own sweat. Next door the air conditioner was humming, and I craved the cold rush that first greeted me there. If I could just stand in that doorway a moment, I might feel better and fall back asleep. I found my way through the dark living room, running my fingertips along the cinder block. The door creaked on my push. I stepped forward into the chill but didn’t enjoy it for long.
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.
• • •
In spite of what I’d told the staff, my father did not have a vast global fan club traveling to see him. No need to drag the wake on for days, as other Filipino families might for more beloved men: we would bury him later that second day. At the cemetery, a block of earth had been hollowed out for the grave. My aunts cooled themselves with lace fans, or brochures they’d lifted from the funeral parlor and folded into pleats. A priest read from his small black Bible. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. In this kind of heat the valley of the shadow of death sounded inviting.
My cousins’ children broke flowers from the bouquet set on the coffin. Before the lid was closed and locked for good, I looked for the last time at my father’s face, under its sheet of viewing glass. The mortician had not only restored the color but buoyed up the flesh itself, faking fullness in the hollows and droop. I could almost imagine that face moving again, the mouth stretching backward to spit. Nearby a headstone waited, even simpler than the banner on his flowers: ESTEBAN SANDOVAL, SR. 1935–1998. SON · BROTHER · HUSBAND · FATHER. My head ached, and my mouth felt dry; there was a grit behind my eyelids I couldn’t blink away.
Now, at his grave, my mother wept into her white handkerchief. She still looked frail, the woman who cleared platters and pulled out chairs, who knelt at my father’s feet and mopped up after him. Her tears affected me the way they always had. I swore to stop them; I’d do anything. I reached for her, then froze—afraid, for the first time in all my years consoling her, that I might cry myself. For years there’d been no question of how much she leaned on me, like any mother on her overseas son. It never dawned on me how much I’d leaned on her: to play her part, stick to the script. Her saintliness was an idea I loved more than I had ever hated him. I put my arms around her, making vow after silent vow. I’d never cut corners again, no matter what the value, who the victim; I would never violate any code, professional or otherwise. I would take her with me to New York. I would never leave her again. I’d bury the patches somewhere no one would find them, so long as she could always remain the mother I knew, not some stranger laughing in the dark.
My uncles turned a crank to lower their brother into the ground. They picked up shovels and began to bury him scoop by scoop. My mother passed her fan to me, then her handkerchief. It felt damp in my palm, the cloth worn thin and soft from all its time in the wash. She stepped forward to join her in-laws, struggling with the shovel’s weight.
A smell of grass and earth took me back to the yard that once existed in Mabini Heights, and I half expected an acacia tree to appear beside me, or my mother’s voice to call me to dinner through the kitchen screen. I remembered how I used to climb that tree and sling a branch onto my shoulder, aiming sniper-style at the place in the house where my father might be standing. Another time I stabbed a fallen twig into the grass and twisted it, imagining his blood. But I’d fought tooth and nail to rise above that yard. Even in return for all the harm he’d done my mother, to harm him, to be capable of harm to him, was to honor what was in my blood. His blood. I trained myself into his opposite: competent, restrained. The hero in an old Tagalog movie did not win by stooping to revenge; there was a pristine, fundamental goodness in his soul that radiated out to crush the villain. Character and destiny—I believed in all of that, I guess. My mother raised her foot and staked the spade into the ground. She heaved the dirt into the plot and made a noise, almost a grunt. You don’t know my strength! Through all the melodramas that my family and I had seen over the years, in which the bida and the kontrabida crossed their swords over a woman, I never guessed that she might be the one to watch.