Manolo knew that she’d promised Inday, and herself, that she’d confront Charo about Baitan—it was the least she could do. She could not even wait to check into a hotel before leading Manolo to a bar called the Hideaway—a front for Charo’s dirty business. They walked through the gurgling belly of the city she knew by heart to find it, the dense air tainted by dumpsters along one bend, by exhaust from a running motor on another. Horns honked around them, a thumping disco song escaped from a nightclub, voices of every pitch ascended and faded, and one could only guess at the errands curious wanderers pursued in their determined strides through empty streets that cut into the shadows. It was dark, but they couldn’t imagine the setting around them dressed in anything but the deep pitch of night. Tala concluded that daylight must not exist—not here.
Their destination was so inconspicuous they almost missed it altogether. When they entered the little hut-like structure, a large man on a small stool nodded at them to come in. The lighting was dim and the hanging bulbs emitted a buzz. There was just a handful of painted wooden tables in the joint, spaced far apart on a hardwood floor, with bare walls around them, the worn paint unable to disguise all the dents. A jukebox stood silent in one corner. Seated at the bar, the man held a newspaper with one hand, helping himself to a plate of food with the other. On a far table, a couple sat isolated from the rest of the world, conspiring in whispers. Their faces nearly touched, so at first glance Manolo thought he saw one head with two bodies. Manolo noticed the remaining patron last of all, even though he’d been sitting at a center table with his legs crossed, a toothpick in his mouth. The toothpick swirled from side to side, a prop to engage the tongue, and he imagined this man who did not speak kept a bundle of toothpicks at the ready in his pocket, never going through a day without one twirling in his mouth. Facing the door, this man stared them down without apology, eyes sweeping over both their faces. He wasn’t a patron.
She told him they were looking for a little boy named Baitan. And she asked to see Charo, her brother. The toothpick man seemed to expect them. Without a word, he led them from entryway to entryway, through bizarre outdoor foyers and little courtyards that connected a series of buildings. After a few turns, Manolo looked over his shoulder, unsure how they’d find their way back if they were forced to try. But Tala walked determinedly on, unruffled and confident. They found themselves in a modest office, papers cluttered on a desk, a chair tucked behind it. Manolo did not notice another door until they walked through it to a warehouse, packed floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes. The boxes were arranged in rows, with narrow hallways of space between them to navigate through. Their guide wound them along the passages, and at the end of one Manolo noticed an open box filled with smaller ones. Shoeboxes. They were in a small factory. Around them, the people were sorting, piling, sewing, snapping, clasping, and boxing. White-haired grandmothers and young children barely old enough to pour their own cereal. Dull and sluggish; half-asleep, half-alive. Their arms and legs moved, but their faces did not, aside from the mechanical blinking of the eyes. The sound was eerie, too, so much bustling and bumping around and a machine’s steady hum as the sneakers went down the line for emblems and packaging. The children never chattered.
Sneakers, and most of them counterfeit. Would she be able to recognize the difference—between the real and the fake?
They kept on walking, down a hallway, through a door.
“Oops. Wrong door,” the toothpick man announced.
They moved farther along a smoky hallway, where they were asked to wait, catching a glimpse of the room the toothpick man had entered. Four men gambled around a table, two others stood watching, and a third sat on an upturned crate against the wall.
The toothpick man emerged with tidings on Baitan. He was not at the factory. He was out in the field with Charo—on-the-job training, learning the ropes and the lay of the land.
“No idea when they’ll be back. Don’t worry, he’s in your brother’s hands.”
The next day, when they arrived at the cemetery, Manolo did not follow behind Tala, who ambled off on a leaf-strewn path without a word, making her way across the cobblestones. Since the Hideaway she’d been locked in her own thoughts, and it was just as well; his heart felt equally heavy.
He watched her crisscross aimlessly among the gravestones, without direction through a cemetery where the toothpick man had said Charo’s mother was buried in an unmarked grave. Around them, a dreary stretch of ground, a waste of beauty in a patch of city untouched by commerce and cars and the busy grind of it all. It was a place of death, but he did not feel death, the dead beneath them long gone—he felt awake. He mourned all the time wasted on worries and lies, secrets and doubts.
At the perimeter of the graveyard, Manolo waited against a spot on the brick wall. Iron bars protruded vertically from the top edge of the bricks, separating the dead from the living. He itched for a smoke and reached for a stick, lighting it deftly and breathing in its contents. Cigarette in hand, he assessed the scene in front of him with some degree of calm.
He no longer saw Tala and directed his attention to a mourner who had entered the cemetery at some fissure in the haze of time. The man was about seventy, and something in his carriage was seeped in familiarity. Manolo placed him in his mind; at some crumbling city church, this old man would be the worshipper who attended faithfully at the same hour, always wearing his Sunday best, as he had today. He would be one of the few people in the pews praying in earnest, leaving quietly and unnoticed. He had a full bouquet of red carnations in his hand, which he placed at the base of an indiscreet gravestone on the western end of the cemetery. His clothes were neat but not fancy, his shoes shined, and his gray hair trimmed and combed. Manolo felt certain that he came to the cemetery every week, and that each week, the faces around him were new—another set of anonymous mourners being summoned by the long reach of the departed. In this unwelcoming expanse he would appear through the rusty gates, regularly and out of nowhere as others came and went. He alone would be faithful and punctual for the dead.
The man sat now beside the resting place of the one he had lost, unmoving then looking to the trees in the distance, the outline of skyscrapers beyond them, and the sky that encompassed it all, finding, Manolo was certain, traces of his lost love everywhere. He was sure that he’d be sitting there still, looking after the gravestone, remembering and honoring the one in his heart, long after he and Tala went on their way. Manolo wondered how long the mourning lover stayed.
But he soon left the old man to his personal sanctity. Tala had returned.
“I found you.” She placed her long, slim fingers upon his, leaning her head against the bricks and closing her eyes, the smile fading into repose.
The sun was still high and the weather was hot and stuffy. Manolo did not wear his jacket, but carried it with him foolishly, forgetting that even nights in the city were hot, unlike those in the mountains. He slipped his free hand into the folds of his coat till he felt the hard edges of the box he’d quickly stashed there. He well remembered lying like an insect in the dark, his antennae connected to whatever was inside of it. Funny thing is, he had never opened it. It had been enough to know that the box involved him, too, that he wouldn’t be left in the cold. He’d always been more interested in her, the way she maneuvered around him with her secrets and surprises.
He thought back on their visit with the albularyo. She was not the young woman in an unflattering pantsuit and yellow bandanna, who had handed Tala the box on the day he followed her. The older woman with the wild hair had looked right into him, seeing the box in his eyes. He could feel it. And she had wanted it for herself. Since that day, Manolo had never quite felt safe around the trinket.
Tala still had her eyes closed. He listened to the sound of maya birds chirping, watched them hopping around on the nearby branches of a tree. Now and again he glanced over at Tala’s face, not knowing if she was listening, dreaming, mourning, or thinking.
He loosened his hand from hers and reached for the box. It fell with a heavy weight, and he nearly dropped it. The commotion roused her, and as she looked at him and the box, he felt the weight fly. All the while that he’d carried it in his jacket, the sensation of carrying the box had never shifted in such a manner.
“Surprise,” he said, withholding his own surprise at the way the box had suddenly come to life.
“What’s this?”
“Show me what’s inside. Tell me what you see, Tala. Describe everything.” He studied her face. She did not seem to recognize the box. Tala opened it and seemed disappointed.
“Nothing. It’s empty.”
The lid was up, but he could not see past it to the interior. Instead, he looked at the texture of the box in Tala’s hand, the grainy, dead wood against her soft, living skin. How frivolous it would be to look too closely at the hands, close enough to get lost in the endless network of lines that crisscrossed every millimeter of skin, close enough to lose sight of the hand itself.
“Tala, there’s something I want to tell you.”
“That you forgot the surprise at home?”
“Do you remember the night we met?”
“Please, Manolo, not the dream. Not again.”
“No, not that. Do you remember what I told you about my compadre, Palong?”
“He was the one who drowned. You’d just found out.”
“Years before I met you I had been engaged to another woman. She was Palong’s sister. She left me on the morning of the day before we were to marry.”
Tala looked surprised, then thoughtful. She gazed into the distance, as though envisioning his past somewhere there, the other woman a speck on the horizon. The box felt like a shell in his hand, weightless and thin.
“Why are you telling me this now?” she asked.
“Every time I saw a patient, I saw pity in their eyes. Here’s the man who was abandoned on his wedding day, they all seemed to be thinking. Here’s the neighborhood cuckold. I didn’t want to dig her up again. I don’t even know why I thought of her now. I just remembered. And I thought you should know.”
He considered placing a feather in the box, a feather from her wings. After giving this to her he’d take her to the wings themselves. The idea cheered him, then felt futile.
“So you’ve surprised me with a memory. A gift of knowledge about your past. How many more secrets are in that red box?” she asked. She held her hands on her hips, elbows up, as though she were scolding him. The city beyond them dilated in the heat and the graveyard stretched barren. Life could not thrive in such desolate places. Tala walked ahead, absorbed in thought.
When she was a good distance away, Manolo found a rock with sharp edges and began to dig, as quickly as his two hands would allow. The hole was about a foot deep when Manolo felt satisfied. He wedged the box in and replenished the hole with earth, then patted it down so that it was smooth. Then it looked too smooth, and he rumpled the surface with the stone so that it resembled the surrounding landscape. He scratched an X on the face of the bricks alongside him and placed the stone atop the burial ground.
Just as he finished, a thought crossed Manolo’s mind, and he looked quickly to where the old man had been not too long before. The mourning lover was gone.
A week later, Tala gave birth. He never imagined that she, too, would go, before their baby would be old enough to walk, and in spite of his struggle to keep her from the moment he’d laid eyes on her, he would do nothing to stop her.