by Angie Abdou
She winds her fingers into Ligaya’s thick black hair, freshly
brushed smooth for bed. She exhales hot boozy breath on the shal-
low dip in Ligaya’s throat, flicks a hint of tongue at her earlobe. Her
full weight bears down on Ligaya now, and she feels Ligaya’s nipples
harden, rising sharply to her own bare skin.
Vero is a guest here, in Ligaya’s room, but she no longer feels
apologetic. Ligaya’s flesh invites her in, welcomes her, she knows it
does.
This is how Vero would have liked to have been with Danielle—
alone in a room with no audience. But with Ligaya, it is better. Their
meeting has history behind it. History brings weight and meaning
and depth. What is a sexual encounter without weight and mean-
ing? No more than a back scratch. Danielle was a back scratch. Back
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scratch as performance art. Ligaya and Vero: they have built to this.
It was inevitable. Vero tells herself so again.
Finally, Vero lets herself taste the plastic-strawberry flavour of
Ligaya’s plump lips and then—there it is—the flick of Ligaya’s tongue
meeting her own.
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CHAPTER TWENTY
Vero does not know how late it is when Shane returns. She hears
him on the stairs, his hesitant descent pounding through her post-
wine headache. She holds her hand to her temples and pulls her body
away from Ligaya’s, keeping her eyes closed, squeezed tight. No, not
this. He’s looking for me now. Now?
Vero left the light on in the staircase. Shane has followed it to the
bottom of the stairs, where Vero has left Ligaya’s door a crack open,
and the trail of her clothes wends its way from the doorway to the
bed. Vero swallows, her mouth parched. She cannot open her eyes,
does not want to see the outline of his body in Ligaya’s doorway. His
nylon jacket rustles between his arms and torso when he steps into
the bedroom. Shane’s jeans creak as he kneels at the foot of the bed.
Vero braces herself for his attack, feels his words as a punch to the
face before he speaks them.
Slut! Whore! Cheat!
She flinches, preparing for the sting of them.
But she gets nothing except silence.
When Shane finally does speak, his voice is low and chesty. His
words hurt more than the ones she anticipated.
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“I’m sorry,” he says. “I should have known better.”
Vero’s whole body unclenches, her head relaxing into Ligaya’s
pillow. He should be sorry. It was his idea. Have sex with a woman!
He’d practically begged her. Girls gone wild. Everyone’s doing it. But
just as quickly, Vero’s relief is gone, the blame back in her own lap.
Shane is not a puppeteer. Vero is not made of socks and buttons. The
momentary reprieve of relief is swallowed by regret—What was she
thinking? And then, as quickly as Vero feels regret, anger shoves it
off: She is a grown woman. She can take responsibility for her own
actions. How dare Shane try to take that from her?
Even her emotions are fickle and unstable.
“You have nothing to be sorry for.” Vero throws on the lights,
wishes them off again as soon as she sees Ligaya, her back pressed
into the cold outside wall.
Ligaya’s eyes are wide and unblinking, her body so still she could
be dead but for the subtle move of the golden cross at the dip of her
throat, rising and falling with each timid breath. Ligaya’s vulnerability
reminds Vero of her own nakedness. She wants to grab the blanket to
cover herself, but that would leave Ligaya exposed.
Vero has to get out of here, can look at neither of them. She grabs
her clothes from the floor and strides for the stairs, anger fuelling her
movements. She dons this anger like a shield, taking the steps two at
a time, and then three. She pulls her sweatshirt over her head as she
runs.
Shane follows.
Neither of them says a thing to Ligaya as they leave, the bedroom
door wide open behind them.
◊◊◊
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Ligaya squeezes her eyes shut. If she does not open them—if she
refuses—this day will never start. She cannot turn time back, but
maybe, with an act of sheer will, she can stop it from moving forward.
She cannot imagine what’s on the other side of this chasm. Even in
the Philippines, on the bus, a full-day plane ride in front of her, she
could at least imagine the other side.
Finally, she slides her legs over the edge of her single bed. She is
naked. Ligaya never sleeps naked. She pulls the sheet tightly around
her body and holds her head in her hands.
Of course, the faces she sees are the ones she least wants to come to
her now. Nanay. Tatay. Pedro. Uncle Andres.
Well, fuck them.
It is Vero’s word. A word that is everywhere here in North America,
no ruder than shoot or darn. But the word has never passed Ligaya’s
lips before. She forces it out now, needs to.
“Fuck them. Fuck them. Fuck them.” The words mean nothing to
her. They release none of her frustration and despair. She tries again in
a harsher, louder voice, not caring who hears her. “Putang ina! ”
She hears the hysteria in her voice. For the first time since her
arrival, she is truly angry. Her family has sent her to this new place
with its new rules. They are not here, and she will not let them judge
her from that old place by the old rules. Rules they didn’t follow
anyway. Not in dark private rooms. Putang ina.
She says it again and pounds her hand into the wall. The room is
too small, the ceiling too low. She wants to rip the screen from the
window, force her head and shoulders out into the cool morning air.
There is a low hum in her body. Shame. She recognizes that.
But she recognizes something else too. Underneath the shame.
Satisfaction. Satiation.
She was thirsty, and she drank.
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A woman needs to drink.
She thinks this thought again—if she repeats it, says it over and
over, maybe she can feel its calm, its inevitability. She can be resolute.
I was thirsty, I drank.
But her breathing is too fast. The faster she breathes, the less air
she has. She gets down on her knees. One hand against her chest, she
feels its shallow rise and fall; her other hand pulls the box of pictures
from her bottom drawer. She will summon her home, her former self,
her other life. The palm trees out back, the tilapia swimming through
the living room in the monsoon, the chickens fluttering up to the
roof.
We survive, her father had said, the family table filled with chicken
and rice. But that—the chicken, the fish, the children eating
rice with
their hands—that was life. That was living. This—this room in some-
one else’s basement, these people she must face today in “the land of
opportunity”— this is survival.
She fumbles through her box of memories, the faces a blur through
her tears. She rips the picture of Pedro. Rips him in half and then in
half again, and then in half again. Tears him until he is tiny bits, and
then she does the same with her mother. Then her father. Tears them
all. Lets the minuscule bits of them fall to the floor. Only Nene and
Totoy she saves, taping them up carefully at the head of her bed.
She dresses with precision this morning. A long formal black skirt.
A white flowing blouse. She has not yet worn these clothes in her
new home. They are not practical, not for taking care of children, but
today the children will not be her focus. She looks at herself in the
square mirror propped at a slant on top of her dresser. With her but-
tons done up to her neck, she looks like she is ready for church in the
Philippines or in Hong Kong. She undoes two of the buttons. Today,
she will wear makeup—not like she and Cheska wear it on weekends,
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pasted on and deliberately playful, childlike. Today, Ligaya will apply
the makeup with the subtle hand of a grown woman getting ready for
work, for a business meeting in an office building. A high tower on a
busy street that speaks of wealth and success and opportunity. A city
in the movies. There is no such street here in Sprucedale.
◊◊◊
It is nearly lunch by the time Ligaya works up the courage to face
Shane. He has been holed up in his gah-raj-mahal all morning. That
is not the place Ligaya would choose to speak with him. But she has
made herself sick with worrying about this conversation that needs
to happen.
Ligaya opens the door and steps through. She pauses up in the
mezzanine, remembering the first time she saw this space. She’d
imagined it as a party hall in her home town, Pedro leaning over
the railing from up here in the mezzanine, watching her dance in
the space below. Ligaya barely recognizes herself in the woman who
had that fantasy. She takes a deep breath and forces herself down the
stairs.
Shane is surprised to see her. She sees it in the rise of his white eye-
brows, so high they disappear beneath the fringe of his hair. It is not
the good kind of surprise. He has the look Pedro wore when Ligaya
first told him she was with child, with Nene.
I am not ready for this.
Shane has the face of a street cat about to be clutched around its
tiny waist. The panic in his eyes is at odds with the calm in his voice.
“Hello, LiLi. Come in.”
Ligaya cannot tell what he has been doing out here. Working on
his bikes, she supposes. The green one is upside down and he spins the
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tire, watches it go around and around. When he finally turns his eyes
to her, they cannot find a place to rest. Eventually, he chooses a spot
over her right shoulder. Maybe he catches a glimpse of her right ear.
She supposes this is how she has looked at him over the past year. It
is annoying, she can see that now. She forces herself to meet his eyes.
To try to catch them with her own.
Be brave, my girl. For some reason, this is her father’s voice that
comes to her now. Be brave.
“Shane,” Ligaya’s heart pounds so forcefully against her breast bone
she is sure Shane can see it—the fast punching from the inside. She
wants to hold her hand over the spot, hide her fear from him. “I want
to meet with you and Vero today. A family meeting. Today.” Ligaya
fears that she sounds too forceful, like Pedro in a bad temper, growl-
ing at Totoy for some misstep. “Please,” she adds.
Shane does not seem surprised by her assertion. Ligaya wonders
what she had expected, what she had feared. He simply looks back to
his bike and spins the tire. The click, click, click of the free wheel fills the
silence in the massive room. When the clicking slows, Shane speaks
without turning to her. “Yes. We do need that. Good idea.”
There’s nothing for Ligaya to do now but turn and walk up the
stairs to the mezzanine where she can go back into the house and
leave Shane to his bicycles. But at the top of the stairs, she stops with
a hand on the door knob. She speaks down over the mezzanine rail-
ing. “We will have this meeting at three o’clock then. In your office.”
There.
Now Ligaya goes, holding her hand over the hard thudding
beneath her breastbone.
◊◊◊
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When Vero steps into the garage, she assumes Shane has gone away
again. She’s hoping to spend some time crouched amongst the bikes
in this cool space where Ligaya never comes, but she realizes her mis-
take as soon as she steps down the stairs from the mezzanine into a
cloud of heavy, sweet smoke. Shane’s there. His elbows rest on his
bike-maintenance stand, his posture stooped. His shoulders slouch
forward like he hasn’t the strength to hold them up. His chest col-
lapses in on itself. Like FrenchMan.
Shane has removed the picture of Vero that he had taped above
his bike bench after their trip. He’d scrawled My Pin-Up Girl under
the photo of her dressed in her Jamaica clothes, standing confidently,
hands on hips, shoulders thrust back. He has replaced Vero’s photo
with a picture of Lance Armstrong leaning into his handlebars,
expression fierce. Unity is strength, knowledge is power, and attitude is
everything is written in black block capitals against a lemon-yellow
background.
“Family meeting,” Shane says without turning around. He’s hold-
ing his breath, keeping that marijuana in his lungs as long as he can.
Vero waits for him to exhale loudly and watches his shoulders folding
in further with the release of breath. “In my office in fifteen.”
“Okay.” It’s all Vero can say.
“Vero.” Shane does not turn around, does not unfold his shoul-
ders. “I was going to say sorry. For disappearing. Before I came home
and…Before everything. I get tired too.”
“I know,” she says softly, to the back of his head. It is not enough—
this I know—it’s nothing of what she feels, of what she needs to say,
but she hasn’t yet found a place to start.
When Vero goes up the stairs and opens the door to the house,
Shane stops her again with his words. “It’s not because of you I took
your picture down. It’s the rest of it. Hedonism. The clothes, the…”
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Without waiting for him to finish, Vero closes the door gently
behind her.
◊◊◊
Vero assumes Shane has called this meeting, but when she steps into
the offi
ce, nobody sits behind his desk. His chair is pulled out in
front of the desk and Ligaya perches there, stiff and awkward, freshly
painted nails gripping the leather arms. She’s not in the loose cotton
clothes she wears to care for the children, but has dressed in a long
skirt and a white, pressed blouse. She’s lined her eyes and wears a hint
of blusher. Vero looks away, tries to ignore the stirring in her own
body, the tingling energy that could be desire or shame. Or both.
Shane perches on the windowsill in the nook, his arms across his
chest. A reluctant child. Vero settles on the edge of the rocking chair
next to him without meeting his eyes.
Post-married.
She must swallow her laughter. Vero has brought them all here,
with her flirtation with madness. How could she not have known this
would happen?
Or not this exactly. But something like it.
Someone needs to apologize today. Someone needs to forgive.
Someone needs to express gratitude. I am sorry. I forgive you. Please.
Thank you. You’re welcome. These words all fall short. To utter any of
them now would diminish the situation. Vero holds her breath and
counts to ten. Shane and Ligaya watch her, matching expressions of
alarm and impatience. It is a child’s trick. She parts her lips, sipping
at the air.
“Where are Eliot and Jamal?” She has to say something. It’s all she
can think of.
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“Vince and Adele have them. Through the weekend. I figured we
needed the time.”
“Excellent. Drunkle Vinny can teach them how to bong beer.”
“And you’re in a position to judge? You want to talk about fit and
unfit caregivers?” Anger distorts Shane’s voice. He sounds like he
has a wet dishcloth lodged in his throat. Vero attempts to work up
some anger of her own, but Shane speaks again, too soon, his words
clear. “I’m sorry.”
Let’s just start over. It’s what Eliot would say. Vero wishes such a
simple sentiment could work for her. For all of them.
“I can forget this.” Ligaya interrupts them, her voice filled with
calmness and patience, her features soft and stern at the same time,
a combination Vero has seen her use on the children. “I forget very
many things.” Ligaya’s smile is so sad that Vero must look away,
again. “Forgetting is what I do. For now.”
