Prose by Manelle Aruta
Edited by Brandon Lo
After three years, your mother’s bedroom has barely changed.
There’s a faint pungent smell of oranges somewhere in the cloying, musty air. Valencia had told you that the window wouldn’t budge no matter what she threw at it; you look at the grime and don’t question it. Not even your mother must have opened it in months, you figure. The faded wallpaper of your early adulthood has new stains deeply embedded into the striped pattern, presumably coffee; it still holds up better than the singular lightbulb overhead, still and shattered. You can barely see the floor past the crumpled up newspapers scattered everywhere, and something deep in your chest, growing and traitorous, thanks some higher being for it.
The wish scrapes your collarbones, wanting release, but you aren’t strong enough to be honest, so you take a seat on the bed instead. The sheets crinkle as you sink into them and for a moment, the room coalesces to your mother’s arms around you and a warm diamond-cut smile that stains the floorboards. Just this.
The phone rings. “So, did you find anything?” Valencia says as soon as you pick up.
Just like her to not waste a single breath. You force back a chuckle, partly because you feel like you might choke if you take too deep of a breath. You tell yourself it’s the room. It’s the room. “No. Did you expect me to?”
She doesn’t laugh, but the huff she lets out is amused enough that you count it as a victory. As much of a victory as anything the last few weeks can produce, anyway, though you’re not exactly sure what holds you back. “No, but, well…”
She stops herself, but it’s not hard to guess her intentions. You breathe in the tangy scent of orange rinds and try not to gag. “Yeah. But I didn’t, so.”
Valencia doesn’t say much else. She hums into the phone, something she only does when she’s nervous, and tells you to just head home for now, they’ll file a missing persons report and go searching through her stuff tomorrow, and you must have replied with an affirmative because the call ends before you can register anything she said.
You look around again. Listen to the air conditioning sputter in the corner, the curtains flutter senselessly. The sunlight streaming through gradually retreats, a sliver of dying light catching your ankle and winding warmth into your veins before letting go. The shadows that replace it are hesitant, creeping up with an intensity that threatens to welcome you back, and you decide it’s time to go.
(“It’s time to go,” Ma said, and her hand was warm and callous against yours as you stared at the doorway. You didn’t know why, but something deep inside your head begged you to dig your heels in and stay and set roots here. Unable to say anything, you tugged on her sleeve with your free hand. She turned, and you could feel her arm freeze as she really, fully looked at your stupid, teary-eyed face.
“Oh, sweetheart, don’t cry,” she said, smoothing a thumb over your dry cheeks. You knew she was using That Voice, the one that made you believe that the stars themselves would kiss your wounds better, but you let yourself get swept in it anyway. A stray strand of black hair fell over her crestfallen expression. “We’ll have a new home, a better home, shh, I promise.”
“But Pa,” you gasped, and the world was ending, “how’s he gonna know where we are?”
The words tumbled out like crystalline tears, jagged and wrong. They cut your mouth as they passed. They cut your mother too; you watched as she recoiled and that ugly emotion entered her again, the same one she had when the door slammed shut that last time. You wished you hadn’t said anything.
“He’s not coming back,” she said, softer than you had ever heard her. When she squeezed her eyes shut, her hands falling from your shoulders, you saw the sunset streak across her hair and you saw as she ceased to be your mother, just for a moment, and you saw as she became just another lost person. Someone else just hauling grief around.)
“Can’t believe you actually hauled all your blankets in here,” Valencia murmurs loudly, shifting her car into gear. You shrug, aware of her eyes. “Hey, careful, don’t get anything tangled in the middle.”
“Right.” You eye her ominous bundle of wires, two of which are hooked up to phones. One, sitting on the dashboard, chirps to turn right onto the next intersection in point five miles. The other hasn’t stopped buzzing since she started the car. “I’m the one who needs to be careful.”
“Hey, shut up!” Yet she unplugs the raucous phone and chucks it into the glove box. You both magnanimously pretend it went silent. “Anyway, they’re just. Updating me. So don’t worry about it.”
Like she could go five minutes without mentioning her private investigator gig, or you could go five minutes without thinking about how this is the second time this year that her job has intersected with your personal life—or perhaps the better term is ‘forcefully inserted’, always fond of trade secrets and looking the savior… but you don’t want to think of her like that. You don’t.
She lapses into silence, tapping a finger against the wheel like she’s waiting on a dice roll. You kind of hate how her silences create a liminal area of their own, all veiny honesty and vulnerable, thread-like dreams, so you let your head fall backward and observe the road.
Swampy cattails swaying back and forth is your only company for three miles. Vaguely, you recall that it hasn’t rained in three weeks. You watch the clumped-up mud, tracing your finger on the window until it smudges, and wait three extra moments before you speak. “Who gave you the lead?”
“Your aunt,” Valencia says, eyes firmly fixed on the road. You wonder if she’s ever found half-dead cattails as interesting as she does at that moment. “Said your mother dropped by last week to ask for a screwdriver, and now she doesn’t know where she went. Odd request.”
Not really. When it got extra bad, she’d get obsessed with fixing stuff. Said maybe Bathala would forgive her if she could even out everything she ever broke. You privately think it’s stupid, since every katalonan that could’ve corrected her is gone, but you know that you don’t know anything.
In the silence, you turn back to stare at the endless expanse. Briefly, you wonder how your father ever could have found this beautiful enough to stay.
“So,” Valencia says. Her voice doesn’t quite sever the odd tension settling over the two of you, but you turn to her regardless. “Tell me what happened. The whole story.”
(“A story?” Papa picks you up and swings you in the air, cooing all the while. You’re young enough to be fearless about it, squealing with joy and beating at his arms as your way of a plea. “Fine, pangga, just for you. Don’t tell your mother, okay?”
You nodded. He laughed and ruffled your hair; back then, he was always laughing. Even when he told you the story of his initiatory crisis, which had been horrific nightmares of falling from a tree and losing limbs, he had punctuated it with a reassurance that he got training for free, isn’t that great, inday?
He spoke of being a katalonan with such pride—that’s what stuck with you when everything else splintered away. You hungered for his time, or at least you thought you did. Really, you hungered for the stories, for these last, lost tethers to a time you’ll never get to know.)
“I don’t know any,” you lie. The faint scent of jasmine and lemon hits you as the edge of violet brushes the corner of your mouth. You’ll hit the mountains soon; you’ll really have to slow down then.
The radio slams into silence with little more than a dying echo. All that’s left is the overworked air conditioner beating out its last prayer. “Lie,” Valencia says. “You know why your mother dropped by for a screwdriver, don’t you.”
Not a question. You hate when she gets this… imperious. “No,” you say, pursing your lips against her disappointed frown.
“Hey,” she prompts. When you say nothing: “Hey.” She flicks the headlights on in waiting. You blearily glare at the empty dirt expanse.
Then you look closer. “Hold your breath,” you say abruptly.
“What?” Valencia snaps.
Wisps of silver call out, leave sawdust in your mouth; your soul shudders. “Hold your breath!”
She shuts her mouth. You keep your eyes wide open in gratitude as the car rolls through the thin sliver of fog untouched, not a hint of chill lingering on the windshield wiper.
“…What was that?” Valencia asks, taking her eyes off the road for long enough to stare into you. You hate when she does that, she’s too good at it, so you turn away.
“That enough of a story?” you mutter, slumping over in your seat now that you can afford to inhale. Her hum in reply is good enough to tide you over for the evening.
(Papa hummed, leaning on the doorway to your room the way he did most evenings. Your eyes caught on his new brown loafers, the way they shone in the moonlight. “A horror story? At your age?”
You hit his leg again.
“Okay, okay! If you get nightmares, don’t tell your mother!” He was always saying that, even back then. “It’s too late to tell you about the aswang, but maybe next time.”
“What about the katalonan?” you asked. That was the ticket to unlocking that treasure chest of something you always craved. There was always something magical about him having the key, of giving it to you someday. You’ll wonder later when that started, when it ever stopped, but for now, Papa laughed and reached over to turn the light off.
“Go to bed, palangga.”
But he told you the story of the mist that stole people’s souls if you breathed in the crossroads, anyway. Once he got going, it was hard to ever get him to stop. He told you stories of the shifting jaws of the countryside, of aswang who ate people alive and stalked their prey in the skies. Of the manananggal and the way it severs its upper torso. Of mangkukulam lurking in plain sight ready to curse and condemn. Pa only ever spoke Ilonggo to you at night, and you treasured the rolling cadence of his voice, the way it felt like a soothing balm over your soul.)
“You can sleep, you know,” Valencia says, probably trying to be soothing, her voice scratchy as she starts the car. If you’re gonna keep complaining about this goes unsaid, but it doesn’t need to be made explicit. She’s been grumpier since last night. Probably couldn’t sleep.
You eye the still-dark sky as you clamber into the passenger seat, nearly slipping on one of the blankets you left in here. “Nah. I’m just saying, we didn’t have to leave this early.”
“We have a lead, we’ve gotta chase it!” she yells. It rips into the shaky peace of the car. “Not every case is as clear-cut as yours! Come on, you still haven’t told me—”
“Can’t you drop that already?” You fiddle with your phone, thumbing a message to no one in particular. “It’s not important.”
Tranquility for a moment. Then: “Almost like I care more about finding your mom than you do.”
The words claw themselves into some unoccupied cavity in your chest and begin to gnaw. You wonder what she would say if you told her what you knew. If you told her all of what you were keeping so close, it could sting. But all you’ll do is wonder; you aren’t strong enough to be honest.
Thirty minutes into the self-imposed exile, unearthly blue cascades onto the mountainside roads. The usual suspects have returned on a road like this: bicycles swerving into other lanes every other second and waving off near-crashes with grace; taxis beeping their way through traffic, garish western yellow against the thick foliage; vans forcing their bulk through sharp curves, at least two faces sticking out any given window as it jolts its way to safety.
Valencia swears under her breath as she hits yet another bump. You look at her for the first time this morning, burning red encircling her scowling face, and ignore the way it looks familiar.
“She just wanted to fix things,” you say, too loudly. Valencia flinches and you watch her eyes dart to the rearview mirror before you roll down the windows faster than you thought possible.
(Faster than you thought possible, everything collapsed.
After Pa left, Ma wasn’t very good at being a person half the time. She floated through rooms of the new apartment she had picked out, only remembering to make a sandwich for herself every other week. You handled making eggs because the stove was new territory and you weren’t ready to mess with it alone yet.
All your pretense of holding a culture close disappeared. She didn’t tell you stories. She didn’t tell you much of anything. On the days you could muster it, you hardly blamed her for it; on worse days, it was all you could do not to scream and beat stupidly small fists against your doorframe.
But on her good days, she hugged you and combed your hair and taught you how to use the stove. She bought you new clothes and took you to the park and cheered as you learned how to ride a bike. She had more good days as you got older. She gave you food and signed you up to Christian classes and called it home, and you played along so she could smile again.
You missed your father but you missed his language more. You miss the key most of all, if the key existed at all. If it ever existed for him, or his grandparents, or anyone before another man’s language became yours and planted roots that shouldn’t exist, that made you before you were old enough to know better, that will deny you until the end of your life and unlock some distorted version of the world you never asked for. The years left nothing but the rolling lull of those familiar syllables, out of reach, because he never taught you anything beyond basic manners and the acute knowledge of just how much was slipping through your bony, shaking fingers.
Years later, you looked at your yearbook and realized you forgot how to say thank you in Ilonggo. For just a split second, you felt unmoored.
You don’t know who you hate more.)
When you can’t aim your scattered hatred anywhere productive, Valencia’s frustration becomes palpable. You roll your window down further and nearly get smacked by a leaf.
You know why she’s angry. You know what she would say if you brought this up, too, many of them accusations you’re too tired to disprove. She’s never liked liars and she has good reason not to, having sat through her last breakup, but if she knew how big of a lie you were withholding, she might just throw you out the car. Given the sharpness of the turn she’s taken, you might careen straight off the edge. Some part of you wants to face it, to dare it, and the sensible part of you tucks it away.
The truth is that your mother was never missing. She’s at your aunt’s, and you know because your mother called right before she had your aunt lie to Valencia’s face.
“That girl’s getting involved again. Just play along?” she begged, the first words she’d said to you in months. You were really bad at saying no. But you weren’t as bad at speaking your mind.
“She’ll say I wasted her time. She hates liars.” You stopped yourself from saying po just in time, but it’s too close.
“So?” she hissed, crackly. “Who’s more important to you, hah? Your family or this girl?”
But it’s not about Valencia. It hardly ever was about Valencia, and more about what Ma always feared would happen: outsiders encroaching in, forcing her to evaluate what she never wanted to.
You knew the answer. You know it still. No one will forgive you after this.
(Pa left on an unforgiving Sunday morning, the heat beating down your back, the water basin nowhere in sight. Ma was on the floor, cursing every spirit Pa ever told you about and then a lot of spirits that he didn’t. She sobbed into tiles you had cleaned last week, and absurdly your first thought is thank god they fought after I got rid of all the ants.
When Pa sent a letter the next week, you cracked it open without permission. All you managed to read was sorry and don’t want to stop talking before Ma caught you at the mailbox, all broken rage and sharp cuts. The street lights that day had been flickering and her face had turned into an unknown. It was different from the day she told you she was selling the house: there was a darkness in her face, seeping into you like a bruise.
You weren’t sure what exactly you had said, but she grabbed a fistful of your hair and yanked you back past the gate. All you could hear were wind chimes in your ear as she yelled and yelled and yelled. What eventually ended up snagging your attention was:
“He’s been telling you his stories, huh? Hah?” Another sharp yank. It took all of your strength to not collapse. Anger bubbled in your stomach, muted. “When were you going to figure out that he was lying about his stories! Honestly…”
Pa left on a Sunday morning, and Ma’s been leaving ever since.)
Valencia’s never threatened to leave, but she might now. You think she might have wanted to, at one point, and you guess you’ll see if it sticks. After another sharp turn, you roll the window back up and say, to empty air, “I lied.”
She nearly sends both of you off the cliff.
“You’re going to have to listen to me,” you say, steamrolling over her anger, “okay?”
Some part of you will miss the blurred greens that had been spinning by next to the both of you this entire time, but as she pulls over, the stringy tension nestled in your heart relaxes a little. Her face is unreadable. Something in your stupid little heart is eight again and loves her like you can afford to.
To the whirs of other engines, you turn to Valencia and say, “Let me tell you a story.”
(Let me tell you a story, pangga. Are you listening? You’re nodding off a little, look at you!
Haha. Ay nako, what will your mother and I do with you when you grow up! You’re already so rowdy. You got that from me, huh?
Look, do you remember when I told you about the katalonan? It’s part of our indigenous culture. Huh? ‘What’s that?’ Eh… you know all those crosses Ma keeps around the house? That didn’t used to be ours but everyone follows it now. ‘Why do we have it?’ …Who knows, inday, who knows.
Listen to me. If I leave—and I’d never want to leave you behind, ay nako, don’t give me that look pangga—if I leave, you gotta remember everything I told you. I’m not actually that interesting, you’ll understand when you’re older, but you gotta believe in this. Your culture. Our culture. Okay?
You gotta remember that me being a katalonan is real, ‘kay? Maybe I, uh, made up how I got initiated just a bit, but that was real and that was us. That was us! You remember the streamers in the photo albums and all the parades I told you about? That was always us! Wholly ours!
Everything in this world has a spirit. You too—no, you can’t see it, haha—it’s inside your chest, below your heart. Your soul has two halves and so does the world around us. The leaves you were plucking earlier had their own spirit too, y’know!
Ah, wait—inday, don’t cry, shh. The Anito know you’re with me! Wanna know a secret? Someone’s always watching over you. No, not a guardian angel—abyan, anak. They’ll see you through this whole life and meet you in the next one. But in return, you have to leave something behind for them; some proof that we’re not destroyed.
How? I know traditional ceremonies are too much, huh, so just keep speaking the language! …I know, I know Ma says to cut it out, but just do it when she’s not listening. She’s pretty absentminded, haha!
Aw, there’s that smile. Do you promise? We have to prove them wrong.
…Everyone thinks we’ve been destroyed, anak. Sometimes, I think so too.)
To the gentle part of your soul you tore out in chunks at eight and properly carved out years later, this is your moment of destruction:
“I know where Ma—my mother is,” you tell Valencia. You refuse to meet her gaze. “I’ve known this whole time. So.”
You expect her to scream. You expect her to throw you out of the car, in all honesty. She’s never been anything but a whirlwind of confrontation in all the years you’ve known her, and it’s part of why you admire her, and it’s part of why you’ve always been ready to say goodbye. And she does look angry. You watch her lips purse, her hand tighten on the wheel.
“She’s at my aunt’s. Knew work would call in sick, didn’t care. She’s always been…” you pause, dare to look up. The sharpness in Valencia’s eyes is only ever this pronounced in the darkness, pinpricks of intent boring into you, refusing to die. There’s nothing else for it. You continue. “She’s always been like this. Leaving.”
When I was a child, when I asked her what Ilonggo was, when I asked her to tell me a story. She never delivered. As you grew apart and away, it only cleaved your relationship further. It’s so stupid to be resentful over this, when she was there for you in every other way, every other cavity life could have left in you. It’s so stupid because you’re mad at your father for the same damn thing.
Everyone thinks we’ve been destroyed. But that’s just it, isn’t it. Because you think you’ve been destroyed too, and she never taught you anything other than fear and the fastest way to strike, the furthest way to escape. He never taught you anything more than the veil of hope, or what to do when someone you trusted rips it up. You’ll never get that innocence back. You’ll never go back.
“Why did you cover for her,” Valencia says. And you hear it: the tone she takes with suspects.
You knew it. “Really? You really want to ask me like that?”
“You lied to—”
It bursts out of you like stolen glass. “You keep getting involved for no reason! When have I ever asked for help?”
Valencia doesn’t even turn. You don’t know why that stings the most. “You clearly needed it.”
And all you can hear is this: the steadfast rushing of faraway traffic roaring down the empty streets, a promise of reunion or demolition or anything in between. The way the ground shudders is known to you, as intimate and reliable as a heartbeat.
You were twelve when the reliability of your father’s stories were thrown into question. Which wasn’t a fair thing to be pitting against what you should keep close and what you should discard, because when you thought about what stretched beyond your beloved katalonan heritage, a gaping black hole rose up to greet you. Your dreams reflected in its shiny maw like stardust. It felt like snapping a string you could never mend.
And so Ma kept going. Berated you whenever you called her po, her scowl prepared if you so much as tried to beg for a nighttime story. Your tiny little head wasn’t very surprised when she withdrew like this, because it looked so much like her bad days that you just planned for those.
They never let up, so you planned for a lifetime. You tried to make her happy, but by the time you thought to check your surroundings, all you could see was an endless expanse of nothing. You used to fancy yourself the bearer of a legacy, but the fleeting thought feels embarrassing now.
Ma told you that Pa was a katalonan, yes, but all his fantastical stories of festivals and spiritual happenings had been fantastical at best, outlandish at worst. Ma told you about the sheer density of Christianity, how katalonan was hardly a recognizable term anymore. Ma told you about the sneers she got when she indulged him in public, the accusations of witchcraft, the ability to feel safe sheared out of her own skin through years of this. And maybe you had already known, somewhat, since you’d never even heard of the grand celebrations Pa so readily described, and maybe you were prepared to look through a Wikipedia article or three to unearth the truth for yourself, but finding out like this, so plastered over with frayed strings and broken promises, left you feeling. Well. Stupid.
It was foolish to hope.
It was foolish to say even a fraction of it aloud, but you said enough. You said enough.
“That’s…” Valencia scrambles for words, looking for all the world like her fire’s been extinguished. In all fairness, you try to reason with yourself, you wouldn’t know what to say had you been the one on the receiving end. “I see.”
You don’t think she does.
“It’s fine.” Is it? You stare out the windshield. The late afternoon sun breaches the air now, creeping past the visors; so much time has passed. “I have a lot to say to her.”
At this, she sits up straight. Some of her remaining anger flows out of her in tiny ripples, pooling into shock. “You’re going by yourself?”
You raise an eyebrow, bemused. You can’t be your parents; you can’t run from this. It’ll just happen again. “What, did you think I was just going to move?”
“No, I thought you’d arrest her.” Valencia’s voice goes hard. “Are you just going to let a grown woman keep running away—”
“She’s still my mother,” you point out, hands digging into the leather covering your seat. There’s no point in senseless destruction but there’s no point in fighting right now, yet. “And who are you to say that? To say anything about this?” To say anything about me?
A scoff. It rings out like a bullet, stings like a wound. “Are you serious? It’s my job! Since you’re apparently too incompetent to fix things yourself—”
“Stop trying to save me!” you snap. It feels like something else caves in with it, Valencia’s unforged honesty carving itself into something neither of you can come back from. What you could trust about her was that she’d never lie to you; you’re not so sure her honesty is so unwavering anymore. “Stop acting so high-and-mighty! You think you know so much about me—”
“Clearly, I don’t, but I know who I am,” Valencia says through gritted teeth. “You don’t.”
Your eyes widen. Valencia must realize in whatever expression you’ve forced on that she went too far, and opens her mouth, but you slam a hand on the dashboard. Some sort of creeping emotion clutches at your chest, its grip icy and strong and real, and yet. And yet.
“Okay,” you say. “Okay. Drive.”
Her eyes widen as if it’s hit her, long after the end credits. “Wait, hey, I’m—”
“Drive!”
It tumbles out, clumsy and raw and new, and isn’t something you realize you let slip until the car goes dead silent. No one will forgive you, but you don’t think you’re ready to forgive, either.
You wondered if you could have forgiven more of the world, had you shut your mouth for once.
Because you knew why Ma did it. She didn’t lie when she mentioned the stares or the malice, nor did you imagine the tremble in her grip as she steered you away from the crowd as a single mother. Back then, all you could do was hunger; she, you know now, still had to feed you. She kept you safe. She loved you. And wasn’t that enough?
You don’t know why you have to be the one to wrestle with this.
You don’t know if your speech is good enough. There’s too much to say and you’ve never been the articulate one of the family. You still wish you had Pa’s enthralling cadence to lead you along.
Instead you have Valencia standing stiffly by the car, her hand tapping a rhythm into the car door that you can hear all the way from here. It’s enough to tide you over as you knock. As she keeps her face turned away from the door, per your request, you think, I should talk to her properly, someday.
There are a lot of things you need to do properly. Like this:
The door swings open, the distinct smell of tangerines following your mother’s absurdly elegant gasp. She stands in place, eyes narrowing in on Valencia’s car, your curt expression. After three years, this scene is familiar, but you are tired of running.
You take a deep breath. Listen to your heartbeat, fast and fearful. There’s nothing else for it.
Your name is Myrna. You open your mouth.
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