by Angie Abdou
her forefinger, feels nausea clawing its way up her gut, bubbling in her
chest, a slow burn behind her eyes.
“Kotse! Kotse! Kotse!” Jamal squeals, reaching for the picture of the
car. Vero drops the string, goes to the chair, and pulls Jamal into her
lap, wrapping both arms tight around her boy. Leave him alone, she
wants to say. Shane stands passively at the wall as he’s been instructed
to do. Vero wants to scream. She hates the red-haired secretary, she
hates Dr Wagner, she hates this room with talking animals taped to
the ceiling, and she hates Shane.
“And this?” Dr Wagner holds up a picture of a green apple. Shane
moves his body ever so slightly, just enough that he can look out the
window rather than at Jamal.
“We eat red ones,” Vero says. “He might not recognize that.”
“Mahn-snahs,” Jamal says, his tone languid. He’s bored with Dr
TailWag/NerfBall and this silly exercise.
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Please make it stop, Vero thinks, and then, as if she’s said it aloud, Dr Wagner puts his stack of cards aside and slaps his palms against
his knees.
“Well, Mr and Mrs Schoeman—”
“Nanton,” Vero says. “My name is Nanton.” She wields her name
because it’s all she has, his small error.
“My apologies,” Dr Wagner says with a polite smile. “Ms Nanton.
Jamal is a very smart boy. I can assure you he has no problem with
speech. No learning disabilities that you need to worry about at this
point. I see no reason to pursue further testing.”
He pauses. Shane and Vero wait. Then what? There must be more.
Vero tries again to synch her breathing with her son’s. She fails.
“Do you have a foreign nanny by chance?” The slightest hint of
laughter presses against Dr Wagner’s professional voice.
Vero and Shane nod mutely in unison.
“From the Philippines, perhaps?”
Vero knows what Dr Wagner will say before he says it. She would
like to rise and silently walk out of the office before she has to hear it,
but she stays sitting.
“Your son,” Dr Wagner has the bright, upward look of a man
on a barstool about to deliver his favourite punch line, “is speaking
Tagalog.”
◊◊◊
“Well,” Shane says with one hand on the steering wheel and his eyes
on the road. “Well.” The word closes the conversation rather than
opening it. Shane’s well is a period, a drawn curtain, a final buzzer.
An error of this magnitude will necessitate blame. Blunders like this
don’t simply happen. Someone commits them. Someone must accept
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responsibility. Vero knows the someone will be her. It’s all there in
that single word. Well.
Jamal falls asleep almost as soon as the car rolls. His parents’ emo-
tion too much for him, he escapes through sleep. His breath grates
rhythmically over their red-hot silence.
“At least he snores in English.” Shane doesn’t look at Vero when he
says this. A vein, the full length of his neck, pulses.
Vero says nothing. She can be mad too. She counts her reasons. She
will forsake sleep—she does not deserve it—she will count injustices
instead of sheep. That will keep her awake. Their anger grows into
another person in the car, sitting between them, a foot kicking into
Vero’s face, a hand straight-arming Shane in the chest.
When it becomes clear the silence needs to break, Shane says, “He’s
a smart boy. Learning Tagalog.” Shane licks his lips and looks out the
side window before adding, almost quietly, “But any boy should, at
the very least, speak the language of his mother.” He narrowly beats
Vero’s own angry words. She chews on the inside of her cheek. She
will win through silence.
For the rest of the ride, they listen to the sound of the tires circling
against the wet pavement. When they most need to talk, Shane turns
silent. There will be no “Shane Overshare” today.
In the driveway, Vero lifts Jamal out of the car. He’s nearly too big
to carry without waking, but he flings his arm around her and nestles
his sweaty cheek into her neck. Shane sits, one hand on the steering
wheel, eyes on the garage. When Vero closes the car door, he backs
slowly down the drive, looking at neither of them.
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Vero works through the night. First she washes underwear in her
bathroom sink while LiLi sleeps. She moves furtively and keeps the
room dimly lit. If she hangs the garments by midnight, they will be
dry by eight in the morning, and she can put them away before LiLi
starts work. Shane’s voice rings in her head, You don’t think that’s a little
weird? Vero feels the shame of it, a heavy wetness in her chest, her rib-
cage made of freshly poured concrete. She turns the water taps off and
on slowly, hoping the rattle of pipes won’t wake LiLi in the basement.
Their whole life is a little weird.
All lives are weird from the inside. Something Cheryl would say.
While the boys sleep, Vero silently cleans their closets. She must
invent work. LiLi keeps the house show-suite clean. “I learned to
clean—to really clean—in Hong Kong,” LiLi told her. “My employer
there, the Poons, they is very strict.”
Are we strict? Vero wonders, but LiLi’s cleaning never allows them
space to exercise their authority, to explore the outer edges of their
strictness on this matter. LiLi cleans things Vero did not even know
needed to be cleaned. LiLi washes walls. She sterilizes telephone
receivers. She takes a toothbrush to the crevices in the dishwasher
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door. She spreads the shower curtain flat on the back lawn, attacks
it with the pot scrubber. LiLi’s diligence has left nothing for Vero to
clean in this wakeful night.
But only work will keep Vero awake, and she does not want Shane
to catch her asleep, her head thrown back, mouth hanging slack. She
wants to be ready for him and his accusations. Instead, she watches
Jamal sleep, wondering that her dark-haired child should be the one
to speak Tagalog. He could easily be mistaken for LiLi’s own son. But,
of course, his speech has nothing to do with the colour of his hair.
Jamal is simply the youngest, the most susceptible, the one who did
not yet speak English when LiLi arrived.
“You clever boy.” Vero rests a finger at his hairline, always wet with
sweat when he sleeps, and traces a soft line across his forehead, around
his ear. “You will learn many languages.”
As she hangs and folds his clothes, sorting the items he’s outgrown
into a bag to send to LiLi’s village, Vero listens for the click of the
front door. Maybe she and Shane will talk. Shane will put his hand
on her knee, but not in that way that means shh. Instead, it will mean:
/>
Don’t worry, I will hold you together, we will help each other. She will
place her hand over his to show her gratitude.
Let’s start over, she will say. That’s what Eliot always says when he’s
in trouble, tears pooled in his mossy eyes. Let’s just start over.
But there is no click, no soft pad of sock feet up the stairs to the
bedroom.
Vero loses her battle against fatigue, the body’s demands disregard-
ing the mind’s efforts. In the morning, she wakes curled on the floor
of Jamal’s closet, clutching his toddler T-shirts. The logos—a giraffe,
a monkey, a bear—remind her of the posters taped to Dr Wagner’s
ceiling. As easily as that, the day before comes crashing down on her
before she’s fully pulled herself into this one.
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A child should speak the language of his mother. At the very least.
That alone cannot account for Shane’s anger, an anger so big it has
kept him out through the night. Vero does not understand.
Jamal’s bed is empty, the sheets pulled tightly across its surface. You
could bounce a quarter off that bed, Vero thinks, and then wonders who
would want to bounce a quarter off a bed anyway. None of it matters,
these first-world standards.
She opens Eliot’s bedroom door slowly, quietly against the creak,
but Eliot is gone too, his bed made just as tightly. It’s easy to imagine
he never slept there at all. His stuffed animals, a St Bernard named
Barnie and a Dalmatian named Spot, flop across the mattress, posed
perfectly, the room photo-shoot ready. I am the room of a happy normal
boy in a happy normal family. That’s what the picture will say.
Vero used to sleep there in that slim bed with Eliot and Barnie and
Spot, the exhaustion of early motherhood pulling her into dreams
when she’d only meant to lie down for a moment, to comfort Eliot.
It was her favourite part of parenting, sleeping with her babies. Her
drifting. Their pliancy. The synching breath. The warm sighs on her
bare skin. That sweetness feels like such a long time ago. Has she slept
with Eliot since LiLi arrived? She must have. Surely. But she cannot
recall. She closes the door, slowly, as if the creak might disturb Barnie
and Spot.
She descends the stairs and enters the kitchen apologetically, like a
late house guest. Even though she’s been home for nearly two weeks,
their house still feels too big after a week in the narrow space of a
hotel room. Vero wants to pull the walls in so they fit more snugly
around her shoulders. She’s drowning in the loose bag of her own
home. Needs are not the same as wants, she’d lectured Shane about his
bikes. But nobody needs this much space. The stairs wear her out. She’s
desperate for a chair by the time she reaches the kitchen.
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LiLi feeds the boys scrambled eggs and bacon, a meal she has
learned to cook in North America. In the Philippines, they ate rice
for breakfast. “Rice and salt fish. We eat rice breakfast, lunch, and
dinner,” she tells Eliot and Jamal, again and again, the flickering light
of laughter in her voice. It’s become an old joke between them.
◊◊◊
Ligaya squats at the children’s table with Eliot and Jamal, encouraging
each bite, but when she notices Vero standing behind them, she hands
Eliot his spoon. “You eat by your own. You big boy now. You show
your mama.” She picks a spoon off the table and puts it in Jamal’s
hand, squeezing his fingers until he grips the utensil by himself. “You
big too, JJ. Show your mother how big you are.”
Something has changed.
Shane and Vero’s holiday—their temporary absence—has allowed
Ligaya to find her place in this house, to begin to get a foothold. Even
when Shane and Vero return, Ligaya feels herself to be less of an inter-
loper. She is thankful for this new confidence. Especially now. Shane
and Vero act so peculiarly upon their return that the boys need Ligaya
at her strongest.
“Yes, good, JJ. Show your mother.”
JJ and Eliot sit still, each with a spoon in hand, lips pressed tight.
Their quiet politeness in Vero’s presence is new. Ligaya thinks Vero
should be concerned, but in Vero’s expression Ligaya sees only relief.
She looks so tired—the kind of exhaustion that weighs down a face,
the strain of gravity pulling on her features. Ligaya sees the heavy sag
and imagines Vero’s face made of an old dried apple, raisons for eyes,
a peppercorn in the place of her nose. She knows Vero will accept the
gift of these quiet, timid boys and be grateful for it.
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Vero takes a seat at the dining room table, tall above the rest of her
family. Ligaya must turn awkwardly in her seat to make conversa-
tion. “You working today? In house? I keep boys quiet. We go to park,
maybe. How do you like that, boys?” She swings around to face Eliot
and Jamal when she addresses them, resting a small hand between
each set of shoulder blades.
Vero puts her own hands on the table in front of her, twists her
fingers.
She should have work to do, shouldn’t she? thinks Ligaya. From the war
tank plant? The instruction booklets she writes for their blasters? Or she
could have the yoga or the running. Or the friend. Something to do.
Vero’s friend Joss telephoned yesterday afternoon, but when Ligaya
said “Vero?” into the receiver, turning her eyes subtly in Vero’s direc-
tion, Vero shook her head fast twice and dropped her eyes. “No, she not
home now, Joss. I will tell her you call. When she come back home.”
Ligaya watched Vero, her blank eyes fixed out the front window. “Yes,
I think she have a very nice vacation. She and Mister Shane. They
both get darker skin, but seem happy.” Ligaya added the “happy” as
an afterthought. A lie. She sees the lie even more now—after Shane
has stayed out all night and Vero—whom she found asleep on Eliot’s
closet floor—has come downstairs looking like she has not slept at all.
None of this is Ligaya’s business. Yet she lives here. In the middle of it.
Vero should have talked to Joss yesterday. She needs her friend.
Neither of them will phone each other again for weeks now, Ligaya
knows. Everybody is so busy. That is the favourite word in this place:
bizz-ee. But Vero does not look busy now. She sits perfectly still.
Where is my husband? I’ve lost my husband.
That is the look on Vero’s face.
Are you okay? What can I do?
Ligaya wants to ask, but cannot bring herself to voice these questions.
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To offer this help. To intrude. This is not her place. The words burn in
her chest like globules of undigested animal fat. Not my place.
“I wanted to be a writer,” Vero says suddenly. “Once, that is what
I wanted to be. When
I was very young. Did I tell you that, LiLi?
I started a project once, before you arrived, sort of, about caring for
children.” She moves her fingers back and forth across her lips as if
she’d like to rub them right off. “A is for Asylum, I was going to call it.
I thought Shane and I had made some progress since then, but maybe
we’re still there.” Her hand falls from her lips to the table with a clunk,
like it does not belong to her. “We were talking about you, LiLi, Shane
and I. Shane says we know you. I say we don’t. I say we know nothing
about you.”
There is anger in the last sentence. It’s as if Vero hangs the words
in the air one at a time. Ligaya pictures Nanay in a mood back home,
pinning the clothes on the line, violently shaking out each piece before
she attaches it. Ligaya will not take Vero’s sullenness personally. Today
Vero has a portion of blame for everyone. She has slept on a closet floor.
Her husband is gone. This is not my place.
◊◊◊
If I wait, she will say something. Vero knows this to be true. She can see
the words bubbling and forming behind LiLi’s determined eyes. But
LiLi will not speak until she gets the phrases just right.
And suddenly Vero does not want to hear LiLi’s story. Not really.
Fear surges through her body, hot at her throat.
Vero speaks quickly, forcing her words in front of LiLi’s. “Or maybe
we know each other as well as we need to. In the circumstances.”
The bubble of LiLi’s words fades to a simmer and then stops until
her face is nothing but calm water.
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“The Mommy’s Alphabet.” Vero has not thought of this silliness since
her night in the pantry, but it’s all there now. “That was the subtitle of
A is for Asylum. ” She recites:
C is for the condoms
Your mommy shoulda thought to use.
They woulda saved her lotsa money
On her monthly bill for booze.
“Oh.” LiLi wears the same expression that took hold of her face
when she first saw snow. She’s a goldfish in a bowl, face pressed to
the cold glass of the window. Oh, oh, oh. Eventually, the silence is
awkward, and LiLi drops her eyes to the floor, the skin from her neck
to her hairline a deep red.
“I’m culture shocking you?” Vero bobs like a drowning swimmer.
