America Is Not the Heart

by Elaine Castillo

  Hero heard her father say in Ilocano: Get Pol, he’s out on the terrace smoking.

  There was a long silence on the line. Rosalyn covered the mouthpiece with her hand and whispered, They’re getting him.

  I can hear, Hero said.

  Her ear stayed alert to any other leaked-out sounds, but Hamin didn’t say anything else. He’d probably walked away.

  Hello? Apolonio De Vera speaking.

  Rosalyn froze, said, Ah, then shoved the phone unceremoniously into Hero’s forehead.

  Wh—

  We didn’t say I was gonna talk to him! Rosalyn hissed in a stage whisper. I don’t know what to say!

  Hello, po?

  Hero took the phone. She opened her mouth, closed it again. Then told herself, Grow up, and said,

  Siak datoy, Tito Pol.

  Ni—Pol cut himself off; maybe Hamin was still within hearing range. Neither of them spoke for a minute.

  Agmaúyongka, Pol finally said, soft despite the words. You’re crazy. What if they’d picked up the phone?

  Bring Roni back home. That’s all I called to say.

  Nimang.

  Just bring her home.

  Nimang, Pol started again. His voice was low, like he was speaking discreetly into his collar.

  What you’re doing is wrong, Hero said. If nobody’s told you that yet, then I’ll tell you.

  Nimang, I’m not going to talk about this with you. Roni’s doing well. She likes it here. We’ll see you again very soon. You have no reason to be upset.

  She doesn’t like it there, Hero said. Her voice wavered, so she forged her way through until it didn’t. If she likes it there, then she likes it there because you like it there and she’ll follow you anywhere.

  Believe me, she added. I know.

  Nimang, I love you like my own child.

  What you’re doing is wrong. You know it. And you’ll regret it—

  You don’t have a say in how I raise my daughter, Pol cut in. Not even you.

  She doesn’t belong there.

  She’s a De Vera. This is her home.

  Then Pol’s voice turned gentle again, diplomatic, the voice of the person Hero ran to when everyone else’s voice was all malice, gossip, indifference; a safe voice, serene and reserved, a steady hand before the first cut. How many times had she comforted herself with the knowledge that she was looked upon lovingly by that voice and its owner? Pol said,

  I’m finished talking about this, Nimang. I don’t want to fight, especially not with you.

  That’s not her home. You know that.

  Hero felt a hand reach out to cup, warm and firm, around her knee. She didn’t look up to meet Rosalyn’s eyes.

  You know that, she repeated into the phone. Her home is here. Her family is here.

  This is her family, Pol argued.

  Hero let out a sound that might have been a laugh, another time, another life. I know you don’t believe that.

  Geronima, I’m hanging up now.

  Wait, Hero cried out, her hand reaching out in the air instinctively. Then:

  I didn’t know it was you who paid.

  Over the phone, she heard Pol’s breath catch.

  Thank you for. Everything, Hero said. Thank you for saving me. Thank you for lying to me.

  Pol let half the breath out. Ni—

  Bring her home.

  Pol was silent. Hamin was probably just in the next room, a room she couldn’t imagine and would never see. Maybe her mother was there, too, smelling of Mitsouko, ordering a servant to fetch her an empanada. Not on another planet, not in another life. Still the same one. Hero waited for breath to turn into word.

  Thank you for your call, Doktora Cruz. I’ll wait to hear more, Pol said quietly, then put the phone down.

  * * *

  See how easy that was, Rosalyn said, one hand on Hero’s knee, one hand slipping underneath her shirt through the back, by her neck, rubbing at the top of her bare shoulder blades. Hero kept her head bowed. Easy, easy, Rosalyn said as Hero tipped over into Rosalyn’s lap and stayed there.

  * * *

  Rosalyn drove Hero home, parked in the driveway of the empty house, leaned her head against the headrest and said, So I might have to move out of the house.

  Hero turned to look at her. What?

  Rosalyn closed her eyes. Sorry. I didn’t mean to tell you today. I don’t even know why I said that.

  What do you mean, move out of the house? Your house?

  Yeah, my house, what other house, Rosalyn said. Her eyes were still squeezed shut.

  My mom was asking about you. You and me. She’s been asking about you since that time you slept with me out in the garden. You know. After. You know.

  I remember.

  She hasn’t said she’s gonna kick me out, Rosalyn said. But.

  But she’s going to kick you out.

  Rosalyn lifted one shoulder, opening her eyes. Not in the first year after Grandpa’s funeral, she reasoned. She wouldn’t do that. So I have ’til winter to find a new place.

  You can’t talk to her?

  What a great idea, why didn’t I think of that, Rosalyn intoned dryly.

  Look, she’s been suspicious about me for years. She’s gonna take a while to. Be okay with it. If she’s ever gonna be okay with it. I don’t know. We’ve never—Rosalyn flinched. Anyway. Grandma knows, obviously. I didn’t even have to tell her and she knew. She knew about you and me before we even—like, before anything even happened, did you know that?

  Because you made her call me that first time trying to get me to come to karaoke, Hero said. Right after we met.

  Rosalyn shot up in her chair, only the seat belt preventing her from going any farther. What—you knew about that?

  Hero shrugged. Rosalyn slumped back in her seat and clicked her tongue. Damn.

  It was cute, Hero said. I thought it was cute. When I figured it out.

  Rosalyn brightened. Oh, well—

  Don’t get carried away.

  Ugh, Rosalyn grumbled. Anyway—what was I saying. Yeah. Grandma would usually back me up on this kind of stuff, but she’s been so tired, and. I don’t wanna pin more shit on her. Things have been good between her and my mom lately. They’ve gotten closer. I think that’s good for her. For both of them. Whatever.

  Just not so good for you.

  Rosalyn threw both palms up in the air, all What can you do? I just don’t wanna drive a wedge between them. Not when they’re finally starting to get along. I have some money saved. From when I thought, and here Rosalyn frowned. When I thought JR was still gonna go to college. I’d been saving up, but.

  She faltered but pushed past it. And working with Maricris is paying okay, since her gigs are getting bigger. If I went on tour with them next summer I could make even more money. Or I could get a job at the MAC counter at Valley Fair mall, maybe. It’s not that far. Think of all the discounts and free shit I could get. Or maybe in that new mall they’re gonna build in Milpitas. They said it’s supposed to be the biggest mall in Northern California. They’ll probably have a MAC counter in there. With that plus the restaurant plus my savings I could rent like a room. Maybe even a studio.

  In Milpitas.

  Obviously in Milpitas.

  Why don’t you live with Jaime?

  Please, and have him on my nutsack all the time for how messy I am? Rosalyn shook her head in disgust. And what would that do, if I lived like two feet away from my mom? It’d just make things weirder. Plus she and Auntie Loreta are starting to talk again, too, and that’s been good—

  Rosalyn leaned forward and put her elbows on the steering wheel, propped her chin on top of her wrists. Anyway. I’ll start looking for places pretty soon. Probably in those Sunnyhills apartments, right behind the restaurant. That’d be convenient.

  Okay,
Hero said. Let me know if you need help.

  Rosalyn turned just her head to face Hero, cheek now resting on the heels of her palms. You’re staying though, right? In Milpitas.

  Wryly, Hero replied: With no papers, it’s not like I can just live anywhere.

  Yeah, okay, but you don’t have to stay in Milpitas, Rosalyn said, face serious all of a sudden. Are you? Are you staying?

  Even if Roni doesn’t come back seemed to be how Rosalyn really wanted to finish that sentence. Yes, Hero answered.

  * * *

  Roni’s first semester at St. Michael’s would have ended the second week in December. She’d long ago lost her place in the school, and there were letters sent to the house, addressed to Paz and Pol, asking if Roni wanted to retake the test to begin the school year in the spring semester. St. Michael’s had already taken and cashed their nonrefundable deposit from Paz’s credit card, absentee student or not. Paz worked through all of the Christmas holidays, sixteen hours a day, double overtime paid out, while Hero stayed in the restaurant with Rosalyn and Jaime and debated the finer points of living closer to the restaurant, or maybe on the other side of Milpitas, closer to where the new mall was being built.

  On one of the lull days between Christmas and New Year’s, Hero was about to leave for work at the restaurant when the garage door opened. Hero peeked out to see Paz’s car slowly pulling back up into the driveway, approaching the empty space in the garage it had just left that morning.

  Maybe she’d forgotten something on her way to work, Hero thought to herself. Then she saw Pol in the front passenger seat.

  When the car was parked, Roni was the first one to hop out.

  We’re back, she announced, standing in the narrow passage between Paz’s Civic and Pol’s long-unused Corona. Her tone was of someone who’d just gone out to buy groceries.

  Hero stared down at her. Roni went up to her, head tilted expectantly.

  This is when you say Welcome home, Roni prompted.

  * * *

  In the kitchen, Paz and Pol didn’t say anything to each other, busying their hands making coffee, then busying their hands drinking it, and then busying their hands washing the cups in the sink, not side by side, but one after the other, rigid in their courtesy. Hero stared at them. She didn’t know what was harder to believe, that Pol and Roni were standing right in front of her, or that Paz had taken the day off.

  When did you—

  We got here this morning! Roni said. She was wide awake and manic, which probably meant that soon she would fall asleep for about twenty hours. Hero resisted the urge to squeeze her upper arms and pinch her ears, make sure she was real.

  We called mom from the airplane phone! Did you know they have phones on airplanes? Plus I threw up in the plane! Twice!

  There had been a phone on the Philippine Airlines flight she’d been on, too, Hero remembered, though it had been prohibitively expensive to use. She’d heard other people around her using it, though, delighted at the novelty of being able to call loved ones on the ground while they themselves were in the air. The line, she seemed to remember, was famously terrible, worse than long-distance collect calls. She tried to imagine Pol calling Paz at work with one of those phones. Telling her they were on the plane. Telling her, through the shattering line, that they were on the way home.

  Paz was staring at Roni fixedly. She can still enroll in the spring semester, she said to Pol without looking at him. She has to retake the test but I can put in another deposit.

  I’ll pay, Pol said.

  Paz still didn’t tear her eyes away from Roni. I’ve bought all her school supplies already, she said.

  Hero was late for work, though when she looked down at Roni in the chair next to her, she’d already half moved toward the phone to call the restaurant and take the day off. But Adela couldn’t afford for her not to come in, not on a Saturday, she knew that—and she couldn’t bring Roni with her, not with Paz looking like she’d savage the next person who came between them.

  I get off work at four, Hero said to the room in general, mostly to Roni. I’ll be home right after. Okay? Okay? She looked at Roni. Okay?

  Uh, okay, Roni said. Wait, can I give you my souvenir? I got you a turtle thingy.

  A what, Hero said, and then watched as Roni rummaged around in her backpack to pull out a turtle-shaped keychain, its lustrous shell carved from abalone or something made to look like abalone, bought at a tourist shop at the Hundred Islands National Park in Alaminos, as the handwritten scribble on the turtle’s underbelly declared.

  It’s a keychain, Roni explained.

  Yes, Hero said quickly.

  Well, it looked like you didn’t know! Roni said, defensive, mistaking Hero’s hasty reply for dismissal. Isn’t it pretty?

  Hero didn’t even look at it. It’s pretty.

  When it came time for Hero to get into her car, Roni stood at the edge of the doorway to the garage and waved, the same ritual she did when Paz or Pol left for work, calling out the same words Hero thought she’d never hear again. Drive safely, love you, drive safely, love you—

  When Hero walked through the door of the restaurant, Rosalyn was the one manning the counter, suffering through a lecture from a woman around her mother’s age, asking why she wore such baggy T-shirts when her figure wasn’t bad at all. Once freed from the haranguing, Rosalyn laid her eyes on Hero. She put her hands on her hips, having likely prepared a long, labored list of insults and scolding, laced with sexual innuendo. But she stopped short, at the look on Hero’s face.

  She’s back, Hero said, finding that she hadn’t believed it until that moment, saying it to somebody, hearing it out of her own mouth. Some part of her still didn’t believe it, knew that if she went back to the house, it would be empty as always, as it had been for weeks, months, and the entire morning would have just been another lonely dream she’d come up with, waking up inside a world she wanted to be in, and then waking up for real. But when she looked down at her hands, clasped around her car keys, the turtle looked up at her. The turtle was there, its fake abalone was there. She was awake. She didn’t have to wake up a second time, to wake up for real.

  * * *

  Paz filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy the week that Roni began at her new school. It was the only way she had of preventing the IRS from placing a lien on the house: she paid off her debt with credit cards, then declared bankruptcy. Rich people file for bankruptcy all the time, Paz brushed off, once she was sure that they weren’t going to lose the house. It’s normal. Your credit score’s only bad for seven years. Paz had paid off the first year of Roni’s new school with the credit card before filing; they’d worry about next year, next year.

  Between Paz and Pol, Hero had expected fights, screaming, or at least pained tension, poisonous silences. But Paz didn’t seem inclined to reach for any of those options. Hero didn’t see Paz speak to or even really look at Pol at all that first month, except for one evening when she came home late from Rosalyn’s house and ran into the two of them in the kitchen, Pol’s hand stretching out toward Paz across the table, and Paz stock-still, staring at him. Pol didn’t turn to face her, but Paz caught Hero’s eye, blanched, then looked away, tucking her hands under her armpits.

  Sorry, Hero mumbled, and hurried out of the kitchen and upstairs to her room. Whatever they said after that, they whispered.

  Hero tried to forget the expression Paz had been wearing. Of all the things she’d expected to see on Paz’s face, she hadn’t expected what had been there. It wasn’t anger—or at least it wasn’t anger alone. Instead, muddying the clarity of that expected fury was a look of lovestruck relief and agony, stringing Paz’s entire body so tight that her back was glued against the chair, every atom of her resisting the clamorous desire to give in, to close the distance between them at last. When Paz realized Hero had seen her, she looked. Caught.

  There was a difference, then, bet
ween loving someone and being in love with him. Hero felt that she would be able to resist leaning toward Pol for a long, long time.

  Hero didn’t have to drive Roni to school or pick her up anymore. Paz and Belen had worked out a system between themselves, which quickly became the only thing Paz allowed herself to rant about, when it came to Belen’s family: the fact that Charmaine was chronically late to be ready in the mornings when Paz and Roni drove to her house to pick her up, uncaring that Paz was driving them to school on her way to work and couldn’t afford to be an hour late for her shift—a fact to which Belen, who didn’t work, was oblivious.

  Equally, Roni often arrived at home late, either because Belen had decided to do some errand—errand made it sound like work, when more often than not it consisted of visiting a friend, some fellow mayaman housewife in a Chanel jacket—in between picking the girls up from school and dropping Roni off at home.

  Roni returned tired and sullen. She didn’t like Belen’s friends, who’d picked up on the fact that Charmaine’s little morena playmate wasn’t anything special or issued from anyone special; the fact of Roni’s father having once been bigatin or at least from a bigatin family had little bearing on the girl herself, who was still as quick to fight as ever, and conspicuously darkened by her time away in the Philippines. And she didn’t like many of her new schoolmates, judging from the time after school she asked Hero,

  Are Filipinos not real Asians?

  Hero did a double take. What? Who told you that?

  Alison Teng. She said she goes to Shanghai every summer. I said I’ve been to Asia once, too, and she said Filipinos aren’t real Asians so the Philippines doesn’t count.

  Hero didn’t know how to respond to that, and Roni kept going. She said we’re more like Mexicans. And the only girl I like in school is Mexican. Alicia Galvez. She lives in San Jose and I’m invited to her house whenever. Does that mean we’re not Asian?

  It took a few weeks for Hero to ask Roni the question that she really wanted to ask. When she and Roni were sitting on the couch watching television while both Paz and Pol were at work, Hero began, afraid to know the answer: Did you like it over there?