Between

by Angie Abdou

  The silence that follows is palatable, the air heavy with it. Vero

  imagines scooping it into her mouth, eating it like ice cream. The

  three of them in this room have become a broken family, just like

  any other. They can’t mend the fracture, but they will have to figure

  a way to duct-tape it together and hobble on. Vero feels the tickle of

  laughter at her lips, then it floods her body in a rushing tidal wave.

  Only the most inappropriate laughter can take hold of her like this.

  She puts a hand to her mouth. Tries to hold it in.

  “What’s so funny?”

  Shane has the wet cloth in his throat again, and Vero fights to

  claw back the response that flies into her mind. She will not allow

  herself to drown in the tidal wave of her own hysteria. Sex is just

  a metaphor, Shane. That’s what she wants to yell. But sex is not a

  metaphor. Vero chews on her lips. “Nothing. Sorry.” She will be like

  LiLi. Vero will retreat into silence. What else is there for her to do?

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  She balls her hands into fists, sits on them, fingernails pressing into

  her palms.

  This would never happen, thinks Vero, even as it’s happening. Or, this

  is the kind of thing that only happens behind closed doors, the kind of

  thing that people never talk about. Shame and propriety have rendered

  this situation absurd, impossible.

  Vero wants her mother. She cannot remember wanting her mother

  since childhood. Not like this. Perhaps she thought she wanted her

  mother during Jamal’s birth—the excruciating pain, the impossibil-

  ity of it. I want my mom, Vero thought then, but it wasn’t Cheryl she

  wanted. God, no. Not Cheryl. It was some abstract concept of mom

  that Vero was after. Comfort. Solace. Love. But now, Cheryl is who

  Vero wants. Cheryl would have an idea. Something about the sister-

  hood, about first-world women building their careers on the backs of

  third-world women, about needing a revolution. But whether an idea

  birthed in Cheryl’s world could stand up in Vero and Ligaya’s world—

  that was another matter. Still, an idea would be something. An idea

  would be a start. Vero could work with an idea.

  “Really.” Vero puts energy into the words now, draws on Cheryl’s

  strength. She wants to be sure she sounds like she truly means what she

  is about to say. “I am—so sorry.” The apology floats high above them,

  attaching itself to no one.

  “People from my country do worse. They sell sex to survive. And

  they survive that too.” Again, Ligaya is patience and calm personified.

  This is the Ligaya of their first phone interview. She has practiced what

  she needs to say, and she will say it clearly, independent of Shane and

  Vero’s words and actions. She looks right through them. Vero has never

  felt so irrelevant. “What happen here: it not as bad as that.” Ligaya does

  not focus her gaze on them, but there is authority in her voice. “We

  make some house rules, please. Like the nanny manual say. We go on.”

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  Vero’s skin pulls tight with fear. She remembers their talk about

  the sex trade on the porch last night. Was it really only last night?

  What has happened between then and now has rendered them all

  barely recognizable. What had Ligaya said? You can make money and

  enjoy it too. With a punch to the gut, Vero knows that Ligaya has

  misunderstood—their conversation, their union, all of it. Ligaya is

  going to ask to be paid. For what happened. For what Vero did to

  Ligaya in Ligaya’s bed. Hot shame grips Vero’s intestines, claws its

  way up her neck. The prickle of sweat itches at her hairline.

  But Ligaya presses her lips tight, eyes resting on the window

  behind Shane. She says nothing.

  Shane clears his throat. Vero tries to measure how high he is. His

  eyes don’t droop shut, but they are a subtle pink. “There’s an issue

  with power imbalance that makes this especially awkward.” He’s

  trying hard to sound sober. He continues slowly, as if weighing each

  word on his tongue before adding it to the sentence. “A domestic

  worker from the developing world whose fate rests in an emp—”

  “We cannot talk about all that,” Ligaya interrupts, though her

  posture is meek. She speaks softly into her hands folded across her

  lap. “I am just me. You, just you.”

  Vero wants to applaud. Ligaya has staged a coup. Us women—we

  won’t let Shane take charge. You show him, Ligaya!

  But Ligaya continues talking without casting a glance in Vero’s

  direction. She’s not looking for an allegiance. “People in your coun-

  try are good at remembering. Always they want talk, talk, talk.”

  Ligaya’s voice is so quiet that Vero must lean forward to hear her.

  She sounds tired, but her tone is firm. Ligaya wipes her forearm in

  the air in front of her face as if cleaning a window with her sleeve.

  “Sometimes, the best way is wipe clean. Begin again. Sometimes, the

  only way.”

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  Let’s start over. Her statement amounts to no more than that. Vero

  wants more. This much Eliot could give her. Let’s just start over.

  But then there’s that energy in Ligaya’s eyes. Ligaya has something

  important to say, but she will hold off speaking until she gets the

  words just perfect. This time Vero will wait. She watches Ligaya’s

  fingers fidget at the dip in her throat, but the golden cross is gone.

  People never change. That is the common saying. But the opposite is

  true. People are ever-changing. Before Vero figures out who they are,

  before she can really focus in on their essence, they’ve already become

  someone else.

  “I get my open-work visa in one more year. Less, maybe. I don’t

  go back without it to my Philippines. I scared to lose job. I cannot

  go back to my family with the empty hands.” Ligaya’s fingers float

  away from her neck and land firmly on her lap again. She meets their

  eyes for just a moment. “To my children.” Her gaze flits back to the

  window, her face so still that even her lips do not seem to move when

  she speaks again. “I cannot go back to my children with nothing.

  After all the sacrifice.”

  The word rushes through Vero, pure adrenaline. Children. She sits

  with it for a moment— my children, Ligaya’s children— and realizes that

  she knew. Of course she knew. In Vero’s body, where it counts, she has

  known since Ligaya first entered her basement bedroom and saw the

  framed photos of her own family. Those photos took the last bit of life

  out of Ligaya’s face. Only a mother’s remorse could explain the extent

  of the impact. That wasn’t a sister missing her younger siblings. That

  was an amputee looking at a photo of her bleeding, severed limb.

  Vero looks to Shane’s face for confusion. There is none. They’ve

  both pretended to believe what was easiest. For them.

  “Their father?” Shane clears hi
s throat again. “The children. Their

  father…”

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  “Pedro.” Ligaya has no patience for Shane’s search for the right

  question. “He not wait for me. I am gone a long time. Too long for

  a man to wait.” There’s no wetness in her eyes, no tremble in her lip.

  Who’s the strong one? Who’s the one who can cope in this world, as it is?

  “Maybe Pedro take me back when I have put in my years to bring

  our whole family to North America. Then.” Ligaya shrugs. “But

  maybe I not take him back. Then it will be my choice.”

  Vero tries to absorb the strength in that my, in that choice.

  While Ligaya talks, Shane puts his hand on Vero’s knee. It can’t

  mean shh because she’s been quiet. It’s warm and heavy. She sneaks

  a look at his profile, wondering what she will see—apology, resigna-

  tion, despair, goodbye—but he looks straight ahead, eyes not waver-

  ing from Ligaya’s face. Vero cannot look there. Instead, she watches

  Shane’s hand. After a while, she lets hers rest gently on top of it.

  “We both need something.” Ligaya’s eyes do not plead. They’re as

  hard as they are when she tells Eliot and Jamal: It is the house rule.

  Mommy and Daddy’s rule. “Maybe we give what each need to one

  other.”

  “Because that’s the way the world works.” Shane lets out the words

  in a cynical huff of judgment.

  “I not talk about the way world works. I talk about us. Here.” Ligaya

  takes a deep breath and tries again. She’s scared. Vero can see that

  now. “I think I come here and it be easy. I think a big house like this

  be mine. I think like child.” She lifts her hand to her mouth, pinches

  her lower lip. When her hand falls, she looks straight to their faces

  and holds their eyes, though doing so is clearly an effort. “My family

  led me to this thinking. My government too. The advertisements. But

  I do it. I. The child’s think. Now we all be adults. We must.”

  This outpouring of words brings Ligaya into focus. She’s more than

  a mole, a golden cross, a pair of tiny hands. Vero can almost see the

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  whole. Before now, Ligaya has let her words go grudgingly, each sen-

  tence a reluctant gift. Now, she thrusts them upon Shane and Vero.

  “Ligaya—”

  “No, Vero. Don’t call me that. In the Philippines, we take many

  nicknames. Here, in your home, I am LiLi.”

  Vero studies the set of Ligaya’s features for some resemblance to

  the timid girl she met at the Sprucedale airport only a year ago. Has

  Ligaya found this strength here? Perhaps it was there all along, but

  Vero saw only what she expected to see.

  “This is not my home, and you, not my family. But I can make

  something for my family. Maybe.”

  I’m sorry, Vero thinks again. But this time she does not say it. It’s

  not enough. She feels the remorse in Shane too—in his heavy hand

  on her knee, in his heavier silence—but Vero understands now that

  remorse will not suffice. They will have to build something of their

  remorse. It is Vero’s turn to be silent, for a time. She will hold her

  words and make room for Ligaya—for LiLi. For whomever this

  woman decides to be here, in this new place.

  Vero opens herself to LiLi’s words and does not try to decode her.

  She does not try to make the words her own. Maybe we give what each

  need to one other. Vero simply breathes the words in and releases them.

  You have to make yourself strong, Vero once told Shane, cupping his

  shoulders in her palms, squaring his body to her own. Nobody can do

  it for you. Vero must taste this advice for herself. She squeezes Shane’s

  hands in her own. She does not reach for LiLi’s hand. It is not hers

  to hold.

  Vero turns to the window, pushing her knees against Shane, and

  lets her gaze follow LiLi’s to that glimmering water in the distance.

  All three of them sit quietly, eyes resting on that far-off spot of lake.

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  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Finally, Sprucedale is ready for LiLi to start her driving

  practice. She has waited all winter. Even Bernie insisted that the

  winter is no time to learn to drive. Not in Sprucedale. LiLi watched

  the snow fall for months. She remembered the feeling of Pedro’s red

  bike, the strength in her legs as she pedalled her way from one village

  to the next. She would like to feel that strength and freedom here.

  Over the winter, she imagined that driving a car would be like

  biking, but better. She imagined, and she watched the snow fall

  and fall, until city workers had to come and dig out the stop signs.

  Children threw themselves from second-storey windows into the

  deep white banks below.

  LiLi takes off her sweater as she waits on the front steps for Bernie.

  She sighs into the heat on her skin, lifts her face to it. The change

  of seasons in this country still surprises LiLi. In the frozen days of

  February, when the very inside of her own nose turns to ice, it is

  impossible to imagine a day like today, a day with dry roads and the

  sun high in an azure sky.

  The tulips filling the flower bed along LiLi’s bedroom window

  have burst into bloom overnight, a wealth of colour after the winter

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  of white. In the late fall, Cheryl—the grandmother whom LiLi heard

  about but never saw—finally came to visit, and she and Vero dug in

  bulbs, shoulder to shoulder, in the already-frozen ground. With her

  short hair, ball cap, and baggy overalls, Pedro would have called her a

  Man-Woman, contempt in his voice.

  “These tulips,” Cheryl smiled at LiLi. “Enjoy them at first bloom.

  The deer will have them all eaten by nightfall of day one.”

  LiLi enjoys them now. Already she is running out of time.

  Bernie pulls up to the sidewalk in Shauna’s compact Toyota Tercel.

  It is red like Pedro’s bicycle. LiLi expected the big blue van, the one

  Bernie uses to shuttle all the Sprucedale nannies to English lessons

  at the office.

  Bernie waves and jumps from the car, though she could have

  waited there in the front seat. LiLi has already risen from the stairs

  and pulled her sweater back over her bare shoulders.

  She is funny, this Bernie. Her hair has grown over the winter and

  springs out of the sides of her head in two small but spirited pigtails.

  “Driving! Are we ready for this?” She stands on the car’s door frame

  and pounds her flat palms against the red roof, shining in the spring

  sun. LiLi loves Bernie for these grand gestures.

  Even though the sun is only warm enough to briefly tempt LiLi

  out of her heavy sweater, Bernie is already in a T-shirt and shorts. She

  will make the most out of this sunny occasion.

  Bernie’s driving instructions are minimal. She points at the gas and

  then at the brake. “You’ve studied. You know
what to do. Just take her

  easy to start. Soft touch. If you lurch a bit, slow down, breathe, start

  over. It’s easier than it seems at first. You’ll get the hang of it.”

  In the heat of a Sprucedale summer, LiLi will stick to these black

  leather seats, but now they are comfortably warm against her back.

  She wishes Nene and Totoy could see this: their mama driving a car!

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  It’s not her car. She’s not in her country. She doesn’t even have a

  true license. But she puts her foot on the gas, places her hands at ten

  and two, and then grips the wheel so tightly that her fingers ache as

  she eases her way into the deserted street.

  Ligaya drives.

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For enthusiastic support of the project, thank you to my agent

  Chris Bucci of Anne McDermid and Associates. For being a delight

  to work with, thank you to the Arsenal Pulp Press team. My initial

  impression of Brian Lam (publisher) and Susan Safyan (associate

  editor) was so positive that I figured I could only be disappointed.

  Nope. At each stage of the publishing process, my admiration and

  fondness for both of them have grown. Thank you also to Cynara

  Geissler (marketing) and Gerilee McBride (book design).

  My gratitude also goes out to: Ruth Nina Pangan and her family;

  Robert Majzels for his work on women in the Philippines; Isabel

  Craig for translation/discussion of Majzel’s work; Jaclyn Qua

  Hiansen for geographical/cultural insight; Susan McLelland for her

  March 2005 article about foreign nannies in The Walrus; Geraldine

  Sherman for “A Nanny’s Life” ( Toronto Life, September 2006); and

  the sharp-witted Jay Fraser for “Garage-Mahal.”

  For reading all the chapters long before they were ready, thanks to

  Andy Sinclair. For reading a full draft before I felt confident enough

  to send it anywhere else, thanks to Gyllian Phillips. For reading it

  when I dared let you, thanks to Marty Hafke. For reading it when

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  I’d given up hope and needed a cheering section, thanks to Robin

  Spano. For helping me out of various (metaphorical) pantries, thanks