I’m gonna find Roni, Hero said.
Rosalyn looked at her. Hero watched her considering, and then discarding, things to say.
Okay, go get her. The song’s like nine years long anyway—
Hero watched as Rosalyn ran off then, shaking something off, then crashing purposely into Jaime, who was already fully in step with a group of aunties. He turned to Rosalyn easily, like he knew by heart the shape of her next to him, knew just how far back to step so they could slip into the dance.
The spotlights circled the floor in a dizzying figure eight, shining green and orange light onto the dancers, so Jaime and Rosalyn’s faces looked gauzy and sheer, like veils dappled in human features. Jaime’s face was tilted down at the floor, and the breadth of the hand he held up was angled and open, so she could gently dip into its space, then dip out. Rosalyn shoved at his shoulder when they did the turn and she was facing his back, then kept her hand there, steadying herself. They were performing, exaggerated, but there was too much well-worn ease in the movements for the performance to come off as just performance. Hero thought to herself: You don’t ever really stop having a song. It’s easier to stop having a person, than to stop having a song.
Hero stood up. It had been a lie, but she might as well make good on her word. She went to look for Roni.
* * *
Hero surveyed the tables for Roni’s face among the guests and strangers, but she was nowhere to be found. She lifted some of the tablecloths, peeking underneath the tables, calling her name in a shout, which still barely registered against the deafening backdrop of music. She passed Charmaine and her parents, seated at one of the tables, Charmaine’s father looking at his watch. Charmaine was tugging simultaneously at her mother’s sleeve and the itchy neckline of her dress, her voice high and anguished: I wanna go home, pagod na ako—
After she’d searched the entire hall, she saw some of the guests leave through the entrance, men who looked like they were going for a smoke; Hero remembered that there was also a kind of lobby, just outside the hall. Maybe Roni had gone out there to play with her friends, escaping the raucous noise of adults having fun at their children’s expense. She pushed through the doors, searching. There were several kids who looked about Roni’s age playing with each other, but no Roni.
Hero made her way through the empty back halls of the community center, winding her way past what looked like a series of smaller conference rooms; this felt like the wrong direction, Roni wouldn’t have gone this far. She backtracked, made her way back toward the lobby, then down another corridor, which took her through the supply closets and then, farther down, into what looked like an industrial kitchen, all of the lights off, just the light from the hallway bouncing off the stainless steel countertops and fixtures. From that direction, she heard noises. She quickened her pace.
As she approached, she recognized male voices. Huh, why not? You don’t even come to the house anymore. Don’t you miss playing—
Another male voice. Come over, we’ll sing karaoke again.
Roni saying, laughing but with no joy in it, Just stop—
The first voice, a genuine laugh, So ticklish!
Hero reached the doorway to the kitchen, grabbing at the threshold to steady herself, to catch her breath—she didn’t even know why, until she understood that she had run. Roni was sitting on one of the stainless steel counters, which was too high for her to climb up onto by herself. Jejo and Freddie were standing in front of her, posture loose. Jejo was playing with the sleeve of her dress, his thumb in her armpit, dragging pained giggling out of Roni, who hadn’t noticed Hero yet. Freddie stood, his body blocking the path out of the kitchen.
Roni, Hero said.
Roni whipped her head around. She probably would have jumped down, but Hero was striding toward her, fast, her arms outstretched, wanting to be there when or if she jumped, ready to yank her down if necessary, pushing past Freddie, their shoulders jostling. Her hand touched Jejo’s for a stomach-upturning moment when she hooked her arms around Roni, lifted her off the counter with all her strength, cradled her heaviness, and bolted from the kitchen.
Hoy, hoy, hoy—one of them was calling, but Hero didn’t, couldn’t, stop moving, was still carrying Roni when she made her way down the corridor, almost running, toward the lobby, Jaime, her throat thick with words that wouldn’t come or even form, wanting to say something to Roni but not knowing what to say, knowing only to keep moving, to hold on.
They were halfway through the hall, Ruben and Isagani playing VST & Company’s Awitin Mo, Isasayaw Ko. There was a sensation, warm breath over Hero’s ears, a dull sound. She ignored it, but then there came a thump on her shoulder blade. She leaned back; Roni was telling her something, her face scrunched up. The tendons in Roni’s throat were strained; she was shouting.
What, Hero shouted back, practically into her face, unable to control the volume of her own voice.
You can put me down now! Roni yelled.
Hero stared back at her, registering the words but not their meaning. Her arms were frozen and unyielding around Roni’s body, like they would stop working if she tried to unlock their grip. The glitter on Roni’s shoulders had been sweated, or wiped, off. Hero tightened her hold.
Roni!
Hero turned around, saw Paz and Pol approaching. Despite the heat in the room, Pol was still wearing his jacket and blazer, his tie unloosened, pin in place. Paz had started the evening in a jacket with strong shoulders; now the jacket was off, and her strong shoulders had come off with it. She looked small next to Pol, furious. She was holding a plate of pancit.
Where were you? Paz cried. Hero felt Roni shrink in her arms. We’ve been looking everywhere for you!
Playing hide and seek, Roni said. Ate Hero found me.
You have to eat pancit. It’s almost midnight, you have to eat it right now!
Roni looked up at her father. I’m not hungry.
Just one bite is fine! For long life!
Hero felt Roni tug away from her; obeying the silent request, she finally put the girl down, was surprised to find she could. Roni approached her parents. Paz was forking up a spoonful of pancit far too large for Roni’s mouth.
Pol tsk-ed and said, Ang dami naman. That’s too much, she’ll choke.
Paz let a few noodles slip back onto the plate. Roni opened her mouth obediently. Paz fed the bite into her mouth, watched her daughter’s lips close around the noodles, watched their length and promise disappear as she chewed, her cheeks puffed out with the volume of food contained by them. Pol tsk-ed again, but on Paz’s face came a look of relief so acute it discomfited Hero to witness it.
Okay, Paz said, low, anchored. Okay, good.
She stood back up, then looked down at the still full plate of pancit in her hands, unsure of what to do with it. Nimang, gutom ka? You can have this if you want—
I’m full, Hero said. She gestured to Pol, but Paz shook her head on his behalf before Pol could even react.
Ayaw siya, she said. He doesn’t like pancit.
Hero looked at Pol, and remembered: Pol in the De Vera house, theatrically sliding his portion of pancit onto Hamin’s plate while he wasn’t looking, then gesturing, fake-frantically, for a ten-year-old Hero to do the same. Hero didn’t like pancit, either.
Pol turned to Paz.
Magsigarilyo lang muna ako, ha, mahal.
It’s cold outside, Paz warned.
Pol tugged on the lapel of his jacket. Just for one cigarette.
Can I come? Roni asked.
Pol shook his head. No. It’s too cold. Stay inside, there’s still cake.
Roni glanced up at Paz, then at Hero. But the other kids are still playing hide and seek—
Stay in this room, Hero nearly bellowed. Stay where we can see you.
Roni flinched, then looked up at Paz, who looked just as surprised as her daughter. Stay in this room, Paz confi
rmed.
Hero turned, to tell her what she’d seen, with Roni and Jejomar and Freddie, what it—but she saw Paz’s face, sunken and lost, lit up in a pink and blue halo of moving spotlights. She couldn’t yell it into her ear now, fighting to be heard over Menage’s disco version of Memory.
Gutom ka, Nimang, Paz was saying, slightly too low to be heard, but too tired to speak up louder. Hero shook her head.
Paz straightened the jacket thrown over her arm. Maybe I’ll eat something.
She took a step, then turned back to face Hero. Salamat, ha, Nimang? For finding her. I was looking everywhere.
It’s nothing, Hero said. Paz shook her head minutely, dismissing Hero’s words. Then she made her way over to the buffet table, where most of the food had been ravaged through. There was no one there, and Paz made a lonely shadow with her plate of pancit, adding it to a miscellany of leathery lechon-skin scraps and lumpia ends.
The hell?
Hero turned. There was a film of sweat on Rosalyn’s face, her ponytail loose from dancing. We just saw you fuckin’ haul Roni in like you stole her. What happened?
Hero opened her mouth, trying to focus in on Rosalyn’s face, but found she couldn’t say anything other than:
Paz was looking for her. I found her.
O-kay, Rosalyn said slowly. Come dance then. She took Hero by the arm, dragging her just by force of will for several steps, almost making it there, before she felt Hero’s weight suddenly give resistance.
Don’t gimme some bullshit like you don’t dance or whatever—
No, I. Hero stopped, leaning one hand against a tabletop, bunching the tablecloth there.
Rosalyn stopped. Stepped closer, which didn’t help.
Hey. You good?
Hero turned her head, just to make sure Roni was still in the room. She was there, at the table, distributing cards in what looked like a game of B.S., a boy leaning over her shoulder to watch.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, and Rosalyn was ducking into Hero’s space, thrusting a shoulder underneath Hero’s arm as she felt her hand lose strength, felt her lower body give way beneath her.
Rosalyn lowered her into the nearest chair. Whoa. You okay? You need air? Water? Want me to go get you some water?
I’m fine, Hero said.
Stay here, I’m gonna get you some water, it’s hot as balls in here—
I’m fine, she repeated rigidly. Thank you.
It had been a long night, it was too noisy, she’d eaten too little, there were too many people, she was tired, she’d—she was tired. I’ll go get you some ice water, wait here, she heard Rosalyn saying.
She didn’t look up at Rosalyn when she returned, yanking a chair around to position it directly in front of Hero. A plastic cup was put to Hero’s lips; she didn’t even have the energy to keep up her pride and say that she could hold it herself. She sipped at the water, cringing as the ice touched her sensitive teeth.
Thank you. I’m fine now. Just tired.
Rosalyn didn’t respond, but brought the cup back up. Hero sipped at it again, longer this time. She glanced over at the dance floor, where Jaime was dancing with Janelle and Lea at the same time.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Paz walk toward the table where Roni was sitting with a couple of friends. But instead of sitting down with them, Paz sat down at a table just behind them, so she could watch from a distance, picking at a piece of what looked like kutsinta.
I told Gani to look for Hate by Talk Talk so he could play it tonight, Rosalyn said without looking at Hero. He couldn’t find it, though.
Hero lifted her head, reached for the cup herself and shook an ice cube into her mouth, crunching down onto it. Let out a breath without taking her eyes off the dance floor. Hero saw Rosalyn watching the way Hero picked up the cup, by the base using mostly her palms instead of her fingers; the instinctive way she’d adapted, to avoid putting stress on her fingers when she was tired. Hero was too tired to pretend to hold the cup normally. It looked like Rosalyn wanted to say something, but she kept her mouth closed.
I’m fine now, Hero said again. You can get back on the dance floor for the last few songs.
The muscles in Rosalyn’s jaw worked. Then she picked up the cup to drink from it herself, finishing it in a few gulps, leaving just the ice clinking dully against the plastic.
I’ll just get you some more water, she said.
Unthinking, Hero put a hand out to stop her from leaving, instinctively grabbing onto the first thing she could touch, which happened to be Rosalyn’s hand, the meat of her palm. Rosalyn froze. Hero thought about letting go, but letting go took too much effort; even thinking about letting go was exhausting. She put her head down on the table, the white cloth cool and sticky against her face. Actually could you just stay here for a minute, she said, still holding Rosalyn’s hand, the sweaty, bony, mortal warmth of it. Sure, Rosalyn said, her voice cracking.
Flores de Mayo
Hero was in her first and only year of medical school when she saw the White Lady in her dorm at UST. It felt like everybody in the dorms but Hero knew about her, about the genre of woman from which she issued. White Lady ghosts were the ghosts that started appearing, supposedly, when Spanish friars moved into the Philippines, and they remained when those friars were replaced by American soldiers. According to most of the stories, the White Lady ghost was a murdered woman: some abandoned daughter, some betrayed nobya. Sometimes she had a Spanish friar or American soldier father who denied paternity, some bruto who pushed the girl off a building just to get rid of her, some bilyano in blue jeans who promised to marry her and never did.
The most famous White Lady was the White Lady of Balete Drive in Quezon City, of course. Even Hero, who’d come to Manila ignorant of the city’s mythologies, knew about that one. She was killed in a car accident, they said, so it was often late-night taxi drivers who saw her, picking up some girl wandering around the streets late at night, only noticing the smell of old blood once they’d dropped her off at a far-flung and abandoned outpost. Other people said that the White Lady was a girl who’d been raped by a taxi driver; that was why she often visited them, seeking vengeance.
Hero’s own sighting happened late at night. She was alone, taking a shower in the communal bathrooms. After a while, she grasped that she wasn’t alone—in one of the stalls on the opposite side of the room was another person taking a shower. Hero could hear the jagged sound of running water cascading along the planes of a human body, and so she did something wholly uncharacteristic of herself and yet familiar to anyone living in a dormitory: she started chatting aloud mindlessly, to dissipate that always eerie feeling of being in an institutional building late at night.
But the woman didn’t answer. When Hero got out of the stall, it turned out that the woman had already finished her shower. She could only see the woman from the back, putting on her white clothes. Hero observed that the woman had long, long black hair, entirely covering her ass. She still hadn’t said a word. Hero shook herself out of staring at her and dressed hurriedly, having given up on small talk, now only thinking of drying off and getting to her bed.
The woman left the shower rooms just before Hero, so that once Hero was fully dressed and back out in the corridor, the woman was nearly twenty feet ahead of her down the hall. Hero could barely hear the steps she made, so soft was her footfall. She caught herself in a stare again, openly admiring: the long elegant line of the woman’s back, obscured and then revealed by the sway of her hair; her slender ankles; her regal silence, heavy and safe, like a velvet curtain. Hero gave her a wide berth.
Finally, to Hero’s relief, or to her disappointment—she couldn’t quite tell anymore—their paths diverged, and the woman made a turn. The minute she was gone from view, the world jolted back into place. The woman was gone; Hero was sober again, ordinary again.
It was only later that night, in bed, that Hero reme
mbered that the area the woman had turned into had been under construction at the time—there would have been no floor to walk upon, there where she was walking. Hero fell asleep, turning this over and over in her head, trying to figure it out.
The next morning, Hero told some of her older classmates about the woman she saw. Long hair, down to here? one of them asked Hero, gesturing at her own ass. Hero nodded.
They looked at each other again. Finally, they told Hero that the woman had been a medical student, who, years ago, had fallen out of the bunk of her dorm room bed and hit her head on the way down. Hero’s classmate said that new medical students were the ones she showed herself to most often.
Hero was still waiting for the secret bruto to enter the story. But no matter whom she asked, the story stayed the same: the girl was a medical student, and she fell out of her dorm bed. She died quickly, and without pain. There wasn’t even a hint of a bruto in the character list.
Hero felt strangely disappointed—and then, strange for feeling disappointed. The accident was an accident. The White Lady she’d heard so much about and finally seen, the ghost she’d been so awestruck by, was a student, just like Hero. She wasn’t killed by or didn’t kill herself over some asshole. Tragedy could be unsensational.
* * *
One evening not long after the party, she and Paz passed each other in the hallway between the bedrooms. No time like the present, Hero thought to herself, and held up her hand to stop Paz in her tracks. It was just then that she realized she had no idea how to tell Paz about what she’d seen in the community center kitchen with Roni and Jejomar and Freddie. She didn’t know what she’d seen. She was about to tell Paz that she’d seen her brothers—nephews—doing what, exactly.
Jejo and Freddie, Hero began, waiting to see if just the names alone would spark some buried knowledge in Paz’s eyes, but Paz just looked at her, blank. They were with Roni when I found her. They—they were tickling her.
America Is Not the Heart Page 27
