He had the kind blue eyes of a priest. His hair was white (though he had all of it), his face almost as pale, but pink in sunburned places. On his desk, three computer screens folded outward like a panel painting at church. A woman with gold hair and green eyes, probably his wife, smiled in a frame beside his keyboard.
This new night job had just begun. You were still learning the floor, along whose windowed edges sat men like John, who had their own offices. These men stayed later than the ones who worked in open rows along the middle of the floor. You’d notice, over time, that John stayed latest out of everyone.
SINCE DORIS IS still asleep, you hold off on the vacuuming and step into the kind of fall morning that really does remind you of a big apple, bright and crisp. You buy skim milk and grapefruits, whole wheat bread and liquid eggs that pour out of a juice box and have less cholesterol. Nineteen years of Tuesdays you have shopped and cleaned for Doris. Longer than her son lived in the room you rent for two hundred a month. On Wednesdays you clean the apartment under you, for the Italian landlord and his wife, whose children you have watched grow up and have their own. Thursdays you are in the city early, cleaning Mrs. Helen Miller’s loft downtown. And Fridays you clean uptown, for the Ronson family, who own a brownstone top to bottom. Saturdays your fingers smell like pine oil from polishing the wood pews of the same old church that found you Doris and her extra room, those nineteen years ago. And in between you’ve cleaned for other people, onetime deals—after a party, or before somebody sells or rents out their apartment, or as a gift from one friend to another—never saying no to an assignment. Nineteen years of cash in envelopes, from people who never asked to see your papers as long as you had references and kept their sinks and toilets spotless.
The other day you pulled a knot of Doris’s white hair from the shower drain, trying to remember when those knots were brown.
Now that you’re no longer hiding, you have one job on the books, at night, in the tower where John works.
The living room TV is on when you get home. “Good morning,” you call out, unloading bags onto the kitchen counter. Doris doesn’t answer through the wall. She likes to do Pilates—counting bends and raises, panting—to the news.
Putting the milk away, you hear a sob.
“Doris?”
She isn’t doing leg raises. You find her on the sofa, eyeballs red, fist covering her nose and mouth.
“Did Matthew call?” you ask. Over the years, her son has said things on the phone to make her cry.
She shakes her head and reaches for your hand. “Oh, Es.” Her other hand points at the TV screen. A city building, gashed along the side and bleeding smoke. You almost fail to recognize it. You never see it from this angle anymore: the air, the view on postcards and souvenir mugs.
A pipe or boiler must have burst, you think, watching the ugly crooked mouth cough flame. You think, A man in coveralls will lose his job today. There’s an Albanian gentleman whose name you know only because it’s stitched across his shirt. Valdrin. You never speak to one another. He bows as you pass him in the staff lounge; he blows kisses as you leave the elevator.
You’re wrong. They show a plane, show it and show it, flying straight into the tower’s face and tearing through the glass.
“What if this happened late at night?” says Doris. “Es, thank God you’re here.”
She weeps as you two watch, again, the black speck pierce the glass, the smoke spill from the wound.
Trying to count floors, you stand. “I have to go.”
“What? Absolutely not.”
“I’ll clean when I come back.”
“Forget about that. Jesus! What I mean is, you’re not going anywhere.”
“I have to see about . . . my job.”
But Doris will not hear of it. “No one’s working now. Not your boss and not your boss’s boss. You’ve been spared, don’t you see? You’re staying here. End of story.”
“OK.” You sit. “I’ll get your coffee, then.” You stand and go into the kitchen, think. You pour Doris’s coffee and bring her the cup. “I have to try to call my boss, at least.”
In Matthew’s room, you lock the door. You change into your panty hose and uniform, as if it’s afternoon. Beside the bedroom door, you hold your shoes, a pair of hard white clogs a nurse friend from your church suggested for your troubled feet, and listen to the wall. As soon as you hear Doris go into the bathroom, you tiptoe through the kitchen. You grab your bag and jacket from the closet by the door, race downstairs, and slip into your clogs outside.
A BOOK SAT open on John’s desk, the next time you walked in.
“Aha!” he said. “There she is.” He pointed at the page and read aloud. “La Esmeralda. Formidable name! She’s an enchantress.”
You thought about hiding inside the cart, between the toilet paper rolls.
He stood and came around his desk, still reading. “Your parents never found that name for you at the baptismal font.” He closed the book and smiled. “Where did they find it, Esmeralda?”
“Not there,” you said, pointing your chin at the book. (Your parents would have used a book that size for kindling.) “They liked the sound of it. Or liked somebody with the name, maybe.”
John wanted to know, if you didn’t mind saying, where you were from.
“So I was right,” he said, when you told him. “My wife’s nurses are Filipina.”
“Your wife is a doctor?”
“No.” He looked down. Darkness, like the shadow from an airplane overhead, passed over his face. “A patient.”
“Oh.” The woman with green eyes and gold hair, smiling next to his keyboard, looked healthy, but you didn’t say that.
Before John—and this is terrible to say; you’d never say it, but—the lives of Americans with money were not very interesting to you. Even the troubled ones, their troubles did not seem so hard. You’d ask, “How are you?” and they’d heave a sigh, winding up to tell you some sob story: how much they worked, who had it in for them, the things they’d wished for and were not getting. Try hunger. Try losing your house, a voice inside you, that would never leave your mouth of course, wanted to say.
But John’s trouble—that moved you. Enough to ask, “Your wife is sick? What kind of sick?”
“The kind you don’t come back from,” John said. She’d been sick for fifteen years. The photograph beside his keyboard was how he preferred to remember her. Before nerve cells inside her brain began to die, before the tremors started, before her muscles stiffened and her spine curled in. Back when she could walk without losing her balance, back when she could eat and use the bathroom on her own, without John’s help, and then a Filipina nurse, and then a second one for nighttime. Before she started to talk slowly, like the voice in a cassette recorder on low battery, and then stopped talking altogether. Back when she still knew who John, her husband, was.
“I’m sorry.”
“I am too,” he said. “It started fast, and now it’s ending slowly. When you love someone you never think a time will come when they’re a stranger.” He looked and must have felt alone. But the photo that you kept at home, on Matthew’s nightstand, was your brother’s baby portrait. Long before the lies, the cruelties, the face scarred up beyond recognition.
John’s family was Irish, and he grew up in a harbor town where his brothers still lived. “All five of them,” he said. “All firefighters, like our father. Or policemen, like our uncle.”
“You are not a fire- or policeman,” you said.
John shook his head. “Did you ever hear of a family where the finance guy’s the rebel? Me, and my cousin Sean, the priest. Plus we’re the only two who didn’t have kids. No sons to raise into cops or firefighters, either. I guess I never grew up dreaming I’d be some hero. No, I just looked across the bay at this skyline and thought, I’ll work there someday. “Plus”—he tapped his wedding ring against the picture frame—“she wanted to work in publishing. No better place for that than in this city. And we de
cided that if one of us was gonna work in books, the other better work in money.”
He asked after your family. You told him that your parents raised coconuts, coaxed copra oil from them, sold gallon cans of it to men who came in boats once a month. That you had just one brother. “Pepe.”
He said, “You’re not a farmer.”
“No. I’m not.”
“Are you and Pepe close?”
The first time Doris asked you this, you shook your head. Almost nine thousand miles. She laughed. “I don’t mean close on a map,” she said. “I know he’s far away. I mean, how distant are you? Your relationship.” This threw you. How “distant” could the blood, running through your own veins, be? “So you are close,” Doris said. You learned to keep it simple with Americans who asked you after that. Yes, very close.
But here, with John, you answered like some old and lonely bag lady, whose cart was filled with stories, waiting for an audience.
“I never had a doll when I was small,” you said. “So Pepe—I was ten when he was born—was like my parents’ gift to me. He had the whitest skin. Almost as white as yours. And he didn’t know anything! He have to be protected all the time. One day I’m cleaning eggs: he took one from the basket and bit it. Like an apple. I heard a scream and I see Pepe there, with blood and yolk and shells and dirt and feathers in his mouth.”
You yammered on. About the dreams you had for Pepe. A boy that fair could finish school, grow up to star in movies, run for office. Being a girl—a poor and dark one, no less—you wouldn’t dare dream these things for yourself. You left school at thirteen, to help with the coconuts and Pepe’s chances.
John looked so much like priests you’d known, there might as well have been a penance grille between you. Is that another reason you said all this to a stranger?
“Even seven, eight years old,” you told John, “Pepe slept with his knees up, his fist like this on his mouth, like he still wanted to suck his thumb.”
“I was not my brothers’ doll,” said John, with a laugh. “Their football, maybe.”
MAIN STREET LOOKS different early in the morning. The jade pendants and roast ducks have not shown up yet in the Chinese shop windows. A strip of orange tape is stretched across the top of the stairs you would have taken to catch the train.
A nearby cop confirms. No service. Not today.
But there has got to be a way into the city. There was a way nineteen years ago, wasn’t there? When the Guzman family brought you with them from Manila to New York, only to send you back? I wish we could afford to keep you, Esmeralda, Mrs. Guzman said, once she had learned just how expensive New York was. People in this city do it for themselves. She handed you a one-way ticket back to Manila and the number of a good family there who needed a maid. You found a way to stay then, and you will now. In your bag you hook your thumb into the chaplet, whose gold-plate knobs have been rubbed black from years of prayer.
You turn and walk south underneath the rusty, quiet elevated tracks.
City people pride themselves on walking everywhere. “We’re more like Europe than like the rest of America that way,” Doris has said. John says his brothers live inside their cars (an insult). My nieces can’t go ten blocks in the city without whining. What’s wrong with cars? you’d like to know. Your clogs crunch over pebbles, twigs, and broken glass. Your feet are rioting already, every pain you’ve been contending with for years fired up. The pinpricks—quick and sharp along your arches—started at sixteen, the year you left your family’s farm for Manila, to nanny and clean house for a city cousin who had married well. The bruise between your third and fourth left toes—a swollen nerve, your nurse friend tells you, but to you it feels round, like a pebble in a horse’s hoof—grew the year that cousin moved to Qatar and bequeathed you, like a car or a perfectly good table, to the Guzmans. The L-shaped tendon from your right shin to the instep has been sore for six years, as long as you’ve had your green card. Since meeting John, you’ve noticed both your big-toe knuckles have gone numb.
Farther down the avenue, the Chinese characters turn into spoken Spanish in the streets. Small children in blue uniforms stream out of school, canceled today. At first they laugh and babble, as kids do when they get a taste of freedom. Then some look up at their teachers, smell their parents’ fear.
“Why aren’t you at work?” says one girl to the father who’s arrived to pick her up.
You know some words in Spanish; you know trabajar and nunca and mañana.
One boy starts to cry. You think of carabao back home, who’d snort and stamp and know to head inland before a storm. One girl drifts from her class to join the crowd a block away. They’re gathered at the window of an electronics store, watching the news, again and again, on screen after screen after screen.
Only because you know a bit of Spanish do you catch the words la segunda torre. You would not, less than two miles back, have understood these whispers in Mandarin or Cantonese.
“Otro avión,” they’re saying.
“Ocurrió otra vez.”
OFTEN, WHEN YOU came in, he’d be reading. His screens would have gone dark, with white and red and green and blue windows that grew in size as they flew closer—meaning he hadn’t touched the keys in a while, and his computer was asleep. And he didn’t like just any book. He liked them thick as cement bricks, and probably as heavy: books to prop a steel door open. With tiny print on thin pages that crackled as he turned them. When a colleague knocked, John moved his mouse to send the flying windows away and hid the book under his desk, next to his shoes.
Or else he’d be typing away: an email in a white window, so many lines of words that looked like they could add up to a thick book of their own. He’d click his way out of them when a colleague came, the way he’d hide his book.
He was writing to his family, his wife’s family, the doctors, lawyers, all the people needing answers about her, and what he planned to do. “It takes me so long to say things,” he said. “I don’t know why. The irony is, she was all about the phone. She always said she could take care of something in a two-minute call that I’d spend an hour emailing about. She thought I was long-winded. She’d look over my shoulder and say, No one’s gonna read all that. She thought most everyone was long-winded, including God and Tolstoy. I’m the crusty old one—I like novels long enough to age you while you read them. Ninety-nine percent of books should have been thirty-three percent shorter, she would say. She quantified a lot of things. Sometimes we wondered if the wrong one of us ended up in books and the wrong one in money.”
You bowed your head while changing out his garbage bag, his wife’s picture like an altar you’d just passed.
“Wow. That’s a lot I spewed out, Esmeralda. Let’s talk about you. You must email all the time. With your family so far?”
You shook your head. “I don’t have a computer,” you said, thinking with pride of all the ones you’ve bought for people in your village. “I type too slow. My mother doesn’t know how to email.”
“You get home to her much?” he asked, which set you off again. You, Esmeralda, whom nuns and priests and parents always praised for being such a quiet child. Doris likes to say, Nineteen years under one roof and that is news to me, whenever she learns anything about you.
“I always thought that once we bought the land,” you started, “I’d go home for good.”
But once those 1.6 hectares were all paid for, the dirt floor needed wood; the tin walls needed cinder blocks. Of course, a house that sturdy should also have faucets and a flush toilet. And even when the house was finished, there was always family to think about. Pepe ran off, but others came to need things in his place. Cousins had babies, who grew up to go to private school and college. Aunts and uncles got sick, needing medicine. And when they died, it cost money to bury them. Then there was the larger family: the village, and they knew about you too. The church could use a new roof after Typhoon Vera tore it off. Who else would pay for it? Who else could they depend upon? Not the sw
eet plantation daughters who ended up dancing go-go at Manila bars. Not the men who gave up looking for jobs in the capital and hunted scraps from garbage dumps instead.
“A trip home costs a lot of money,” you told John, “and time off work. My family needs some things more than I need a vacation.”
“And your brother, what does he do?” John asked.
You thought about it. “He gets into trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“All the kinds.”
You told him about Pepe in grade four, sniffing glue and paint thinners with older friends. About his disappearance from the farm at twelve, and his return, months later, with a motorcycle. How he’d paid for it, no one could tell. About the accident on that motorcycle that scarred his face for good. About the botched electronics-store robbery that landed him in jail.
“He’s at the farm every few months,” you said. “He stays one day, a week, two weeks before he disappears again. If I stopped sending anything, who knows when my mother would see him?”
“I’m sorry.” John gave you the same eyes Doris did, when she asked if you got tired of supporting all those people. Doesn’t it get heavy, Esmeralda—the weight of the world?
You shrugged. “I think having no one to lean on you is worse.” Sometimes it did get heavy, sure. But then, you did get to go home, each week on Sunday, to the one House and one Father who were never far away. Each day, His Book reminded you—chapter by chapter, verse by verse—what joy it was to serve, to bear another’s load. Those loads weren’t heavier than a crown of thorns, were they? No heavier than a cross.
THEY’VE CLOSED THE bridge’s westbound lane. Everyone else is streaming east out of the city, as far from the smoke as they can get. Not all of them move fast. Some stop at the pink cables and snap pictures. Even if you had a camera with you, you wouldn’t need to. You will not forget the way the towers look today. Like chimneys of a house the sea has swallowed.
Go Home! Page 14
