There was a Ferrari burning in the middle of the street when Angel walked to the MRT station this morning.
The replica was about one-third the size of an actual car, but the bright red paint and slanted windows were so lifelike that Angel joined a gathering of neighbours to watch the flames engulf it. The cardboard took time to crack and succumb to the fire, and the black twists of rising smoke made her eyes sting. There is a store up the road that sells the biggest paper replicas to send into the afterlife: towering mansions, pressed shirts, iPhones, model kitchens, and laptops. Angel once saw a Louis Vuitton handbag detailed to the last buckle and logo that she was tempted to buy and send to Joy with a note: More affordable than the real thing, just don’t try to wash or put anything inside it. She took a picture instead and sent it with the comment because she knew Joy would chide her for wasting money on a joke.
She arrives at Tiong Bahru Station and crosses the main intersection to Moh Guan Terrace. The quiet neighbourhood is filled with charming low-slung apartment buildings and breakfast cafés. Angel stops to take in the wall murals of old Singapore—a sari-clad woman reaching into her woven straw basket for money to purchase vegetables from a vendor’s bicycle; four sitting men in white undershirts peering at wooden birdcages. The apartment she’s looking for is a brick-covered walk-up opposite a bookstore painted with a rainbow and the sign love is love. The gate and door are open. “Come in,” calls Zamir, whose voice Angel recognizes from the phone call.
He is swaying from side to side to calm the newborn strapped to his chest. “It’s like a bomb went off in here,” he jokes. Angel’s gaze sweeps over the table scattered with breast-pump parts and packets of wet wipes to the swing chair and the play gym and the half-assembled bouncer. “Don’t worry, sir. It’s the same for all new parents,” she says. It’s not the mess Angel is worried about—it’s all the possible places for hidden cameras.
Before shortlisting potential employers, Angel did some research online and found that cameras could be nestled in any household object. There were light fixtures sold with tiny embedded cameras, books that blended in with libraries that had beady little eyes watching everything. She even came across one in a framed image of The Starry Night—Suzan’s favourite painting. The bulky gilded frame hiding the camera fought for attention with the whorls of wind and clouds reprinted in an unnatural hue.
Once the baby’s mewling settles, the wife, Shu-yen, tiptoes out of the bedroom. “Sorry,” she whispers. “We are trying to train Lin to sleep on somebody other than me. It only works when I’m out of the room.” She peers at the baby and adjusts the moss-green fabric wrap keeping the baby bound to her husband’s chest. “My maternity leave ends in three weeks,” she tells Angel. “So of course your main duty will be Lin. You’ve taken care of infants before?”
“Yes, ma’am.” In her third job, she was expected to stay up all night with a shrieking colicky infant named Rushani. The flat overlooked the Old Airport Road food centre, which was open twenty-four hours, and watching the people downstairs go about their lives at two in the morning made Angel forget her fatigue. Rushani’s parents also required Angel to keep a logbook detailing their child’s every bowel movement, feeding (quantity, duration), nap time, and mood.
Will this be a similarly round-the-clock job? It’s hard to say, but Zamir and Shu-yen seem more reasonable.
“I’ll show you around,” says Shu-yen. She takes Angel through a narrow corridor to the kitchen first, where she points out the second freezer for storing breast milk and the area of the kitchen they have cleared for her. “You’ll get a weekly allowance to buy your own food,” Shu-yen says before leading Angel through the rest of the apartment. A wide window in the master bedroom looks out over the community gardens, where plump tomatoes blush between tall vines and wooden stakes.
Angel tells the couple she will think about it, and at the door, Zamir says, “I’m sure you have your pick of jobs. That was an impressive advertisement your employer posted.”
Angel bows her head deferentially to suggest the compliment is too good for her. She knows he is right.
This morning, she interviewed with a ma’am in a Toast Box outlet in Buona Vista who said she chose a public place for the first meeting because she wanted Angel to feel safe and able to leave at any time. After that, Angel inched her way east to a redbrick apartment building where a cheerful teenage boy tried to practice his Tagalog with her. “I’ve been learning from an app,” he said proudly. And there is a German expat family in Mount Sophia who offered her such a high salary over the phone that she almost accepted the job without meeting them.
In each interview, Angel dutifully recited a list of skills, but her mind lingered on what she would miss about her life in the Vijays’ home—the smell of wet leaves after a night rainfall, and orioles shooting like stars between tree branches; the dogs lolling in the hallway and the occasional shudder from the fridge. The everyday things. This morning, she ran into Rubylyn, the helper from upstairs, who commented that she looked nice.
“Interviews,” Angel said, feeling a pang of sadness as she explained that she would be moving on from the Vijays’ home.
“I’ll see if there’s anything in this area,” Rubylyn told Angel. “It would be nice if you didn’t have to leave.” They exchanged numbers for the first time.
Angel goes down the stairs and watches the neighbourhood from under the shelter of the rounded balcony. Could she work here? Could she live here? The thought of starting afresh fills her with hope and trepidation. Every household is its own world, with its own rules and rhythms, and Angel knows that the decision she makes now will affect how she lives her life for the next few years.
Tables are being set up on the pavement outside a café and a young woman is standing against a mural in the wide alley between shops, posing for a professional photographer. The morning is unfurling, and Angel is looking for a new place to call home.
Angel sees the high cast-iron gates of the Botanic Gardens towering over Cora’s lone figure. Angel hasn’t spent a Sunday here since she came for a picnic with Suzan and they’d managed to find a shaded private spot in a gazebo to watch turtles stretch their necks on the black rocks sprouting along the edges of the shallow pond. Tourists pour from the nearby MRT station and crowd at the entrance, the brims of their hats casting shadowy bands over their eyes. With the greenery of the park frothing behind them, the air is so thick with moisture that Angel could almost scoop it up with her hands.
“Am I late?” she asks, because Cora looks stricken. It’s probably only a grimace against the stinging sunlight.
“No,” Cora says. “Let’s talk inside.”
They shuffle along with the crowd, and as soon as they enter, it is like walking into the outstretched arms of a relative. The gardens, abundant and serene, the electric chirps of crickets. Two little boys wearing identical bucket hats prance around the shaggy shrubs where a monitor lizard is taking deliberate steps. “Dinosaur,” they whisper, enthralled.
“You live so near and you still wanted to come here on your day off?” Angel jokes. Cora returns a weak smile. Something is wrong, Angel can tell. They come to a fork in the path; one trail runs under the shade of a long trellis, while the other drops away to a rolling green field so bright that Angel has to make a visor of her palm to shield her eyes from the sun.
“I wanted to see you.” Cora has her arms crossed tightly around her chest as if she is holding pieces of herself together. “I need to tell somebody . . .” she manages to say before the sobs take over her body.
“Cora, what happened?” Angel asks, steering Cora to an angsana tree with wide branches drooping over a carpet of shed yellow flowers. Angel takes her hand and presses it between her two palms. Only grief can destroy a person like this. “Raymond?” she asks softly.
At the sound of her nephew’s name, Cora squeezes her eyes shut. “He didn’t do anything wrong. Why couldn’t they leave him alone?”
Angel keeps Cora’s hands in hers and tries to understand Cora’s teary rambling. Something about Raymond, something about his university friends. When she says Ma’am Elizabeth’s name, Angel knows that this is not just about mourning something from the past. “Take a deep breath,” she says. Cora’s chest heaves. Her voice is halting as she unfolds the story for Angel to see: the Martells, the wealthy clique from Raymond’s university, Marco Vallares, the drugs, the betrayal—Raymond’s murder.
“Oh, Cora,” Angel gasps. She knows the power of confession, and she can feel something like relief coursing through Cora’s body as she tells this story, but she has to resist the urge to cover her ears. It was difficult enough to read about these dreadful injustices after the war on drugs was declared, but Raymond. Cora’s boy. Angel fights back tears.
“Afterward, the whole neighbourhood became afraid to talk to me or be seen with me. I didn’t care. Every chance I had, I told people that Raymond was innocent. They knew him. They knew he wasn’t capable of something like this.”
“Was it his friend Marco?” Angel asks.
“I don’t know for sure,” Cora says. “But he was with the Martells that night in the club. There was a picture of all of them in the news the next day: ‘Society Girls in Drug Bust, Police Say Shabu Supplier Caught.’ I don’t know if he gave them Raymond’s name to deflect the blame from himself or if Sabrina Martell offered Raymond’s name to the police so they would leave them alone. I went around telling everybody that the Martell family had my Raymond’s blood on their hands.”
Now Angel remembers the nasty comment that she saw on Cora’s Facebook page before it was taken down. May God forgive Raymond’s sins. Despite the sun’s hard glare on the grass, she feels a chill throughout her body. She can imagine the fiery Cora she knew from years ago walking through the lanes of the barangay, pushing her way into gossip circles to correct everybody who dishonoured her late nephew’s name. She knows too how dangerous this would have been. “Did they come after you then?” Angel asks.
“Didn’t take them long. Exactly a week later, they showed up at my door and warned me to stop spreading false rumours. It was three men wearing shorts and sandals and white undershirts. I didn’t know if they were policemen in plain clothes or hired thugs.”
“Hired by the Martells?”
“Possibly,” Cora says. “But who knows anymore? One man kicked a glass bottle through my gate. The glass smashed and scattered into the house. I was picking out glass from my shoes when I realized they would come back for me. I made up a story about road closures and asked my employers if I could stay with them in Dasmariñas.”
“Thank goodness,” Angel murmurs. Those thugs wouldn’t have gotten past security in a gated neighbourhood.
“I thought I was safe there too,” Cora says. “But then a journalist from a newspaper in Hong Kong heard about the story and wrote an article about it. No names were mentioned, so the Calverts never made the connection; the journalist wrote about a relative going door to door to save a young man’s reputation. It could have been anyone in any place in the Philippines. But they focused on me because I blamed the Martell family.”
“So that is why you came back to Singapore,” Angel says, understanding now. Cora’s quiet reentry, her deflated demeanour, her insistence that they not become involved with Flordeliza’s arrest even though Cora used to be so outspoken—they were signs of what she had endured in her final weeks back home, a hasty escape after roaring through her barangay, her grief and fury spreading like a fire through its streets.
“Luckily I stayed in touch with my old employer Ma’am Anne-Marie Gomez all these years. She connected me with Ma’am Elizabeth,” Cora says, her voice breaking again. Angel knows she must be worrying about losing her job.
“She is very understanding,” Angel assures Cora. “She will know it’s not your fault.”
“It’s not just that, though.” Cora’s voice is strangled. “It’s Ma’am Elizabeth’s business. My reputation could tarnish it.”
“Oh, Cora.” Angel scoots closer to Cora and envelops her in a hug. There aren’t any words of consolation for what Cora is going through. All she can offer is silence.
“Cora,” Angel says finally. “It wasn’t your fault. You were just trying to protect Raymond.”
Cora hesitates and gives Angel a furtive look. “Yes,” she says finally, wiping her eyes. “That was all I was doing.”
Is there more Cora hasn’t told her? In any case, her friend was surely only doing her best.
“Cora, I know you. I’m sure you wouldn’t have done anything without a good reason.”
They sit together in silence, watching the grass darken under the shadows of merging clouds. The blades prickle Angel’s bare ankles. Her mind goes back to her first Sunday catch-up with Cora in Orchard Road after Cora got in touch. She should have asked Cora then about what was weighing her down instead of letting her struggle with her grief alone for so long. Maybe she can offer Cora some advice from her own afternoon of interviews.
“Sometimes a change of scenery isn’t such a bad thing,” Angel says. She thinks about the cosy atmosphere of Tiong Bahru or the possibility of working in Mount Sophia. “If you’re interested in changing jobs, I could get you in touch with some of the families that I interviewed with today.”
Cora shakes her head. “I can’t keep running away.”
“Running away from what?” Angel asks.
Cora takes a long swig from her water bottle and doesn’t reply. Angel wants to ask again, but she’s afraid of pushing Cora too far. The clouds in the sky have shifted and the sun is suddenly blindingly bright.
“I need something to drink too,” Angel says, eyeing a vending machine near the visitor information centre. It’s not just thirst that compels her to move; Cora’s story, the injustice of it, fills Angel with adrenaline. She doesn’t know what to do with this energy except walk it off.
“I’ll wait here,” Cora says.
As Angel crosses the field and finds herself on the concrete path again, her mind churns with angry thoughts about the Martells. She is also filled with admiration for Cora—only a brave or foolish person would dare to say anything about those people. Cora is brave. Angel wants her to know that. This is what she’ll say to Cora: You are brave. You don’t have anything to apologize for.
Angel puts her coins into the vending machine slot and chooses a can of Pokka Jasmine Green Tea. It lands with a thunk; as she bends to pick it up, her eye catches the headline “Maid Mutiny?” printed across the front page of the free daily newspaper Big Island Weekly. Somebody has left this copy on the bench next to the vending machine.
Below the headline is a picture of Mr. Hong and his daughter and a subhead: “Big Island Weekly Exclusive! Family of Slain Woman Says Filipina Woman Lurking Behind Their Home.”
Angel picks up the newspaper and reads the rest of the article.
The Hong family has been through their share of tragedy recently. Carolyn Hong was allegedly murdered by her domestic helper during a robbery gone wrong, leaving her only daughter, Elise, without a mother. Now Mrs. Hong’s widower says that they have fallen victim to a cruel prank. A Filipina woman dressed as a ghost visited the house on Friday evening to scare Elise into declaring the alleged killer Flordeliza Martinez innocent.
“My daughter is grieving and she’s very impressionable,” said Mr. Hong. “She went along with whatever that woman told her to say because she was scared. I don’t know who would do a thing like this in a time when we are just looking for answers and closure.”
Police are now investigating the incident. Ms. Martinez maintains her innocence. She is due to be formally charged next week.
Angel fishes out her phone. An alert came in earlier this morning, but she was so busy with her interviews that she didn’t notice. There is a link to an online version of the article, which Angel skims quickly before breathing a sigh of relief. As far as she can see, there is no description of Donita.
She races back to Cora, waving the newspaper at her. “Have you seen this?” she asks breathlessly. “The Hong family says they caught some woman lurking behind their house. They made a police report yesterday.”
“Who was it?” Cora asks.
“Who do you think?”
“Donita?” Panic deepens the lines on Cora’s forehead.
“Possibly,” Angel says. “Have you heard from her?”
Cora shakes her head and takes the newspaper from Angel. She reads silently but her mouth twitches as she quickly takes in the information. “I wonder why he defended his daughter like that,” Cora says.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean saying, ‘My daughter is grieving’ and ‘She was scared.’ It’s like he’s rushing to make an excuse for her. What did she tell Donita?”
Angel takes out her phone and searches for the article. In the online version, a gallery of photographs heads the page. Angel clicks through them, seeing the same pictures that have accompanied every article about the Hong murder: the two-story house rising behind iron gates; the headshot of Carolyn Hong; a photograph of the bedroom where the murder took place. Cora’s question echoes in her mind, followed by another one: What has happened to Donita? She hasn’t been in touch; in fact, all of Angel’s messages since Friday have gone unanswered. That’s not unusual for Donita because Mrs. Fann controls how much she uses her phone, but what if she is sitting in a jail cell?
Her thumb continues to swipe through the photos, a reassuring rhythmic gesture, while her mind bounces from one possibility to the next. The last photo, Angel hasn’t seen before—Mr. Hong and his daughter sitting on a settee in the master bedroom. The caption under it says: Looking for closure. Mr. Hong found his wife’s body in this room. His daughter’s stare is wide and vacant, her pale hands resting awkwardly on her lap.
Then something catches Angel’s attention, and with pinched fingers, she expands the picture. She gasps. On the dresser, there is a framed photograph of The Starry Night. The colours are odd. The frame, a thick gilded square, is exactly the same as the one Angel saw on the hidden-camera website.