by Nicki Chen
She flipped and pushed off the other wall, changing back to freestyle. She’d taught herself not to remember scenes of Daddy in the hospital or—even worse—her last glimpse of his body in the coffin. But she couldn’t forget those images of Mom, sitting at the kitchen table staring into a cup of cold coffee, her hair flat against her skull and frizzy on the ends. Day after day, she wore the same red-and-green plaid pajamas and navy-blue terrycloth robe, fuzzy slippers on her feet. She probably wasn’t much older than Diana was now, but she’d looked old.
It had scared Diana, seeing her like that. When she walked into the kitchen after school, her mom wouldn’t register her presence until she called out to her or touched her shoulder. Then, she’d force a pathetic smile and ask about school. An empty courtesy since she obviously was incapable of hearing what Diana needed to tell her. “Fine,” Diana would say, even though being the object all day of her teachers’ self-conscious sympathy and her classmates’ whispered comments and curious looks was far from fine. She held back her tears because she was sure her mother would break into a thousand pieces if she cried.
Each day Diana had brought the mail in, but it remained unopened in the fruit bowl or on the counter or on top of the toaster oven. Once, Diana set a new stack on the table next to her mother’s coffee cup. On top was a bill from the electric company. Surely, she’d thought, her mom would open that one.
Instead, she had given Diana a quick, apologetic glance and looked away. “Oh, honey,” she said. “I know I ought to . . .” She let out a weary sigh that morphed into a sob. Then, clutching the table, she pulled herself up. “Maybe later.”
Later? Diana had thought as her mother scuffed across the floor. And when will that be? She stared at the cracks in her mother’s heels and the mottled white skin of her ankles. It wasn’t fair, she thought, blinking hard in a vain attempt to stop her tears. He was your husband, but he was my daddy. And I want him back.
It hadn’t been fair, Diana thought now as she rolled onto her back for her backstroke lap. Hadn’t her mother known how frightening it would have been for her children if the lights and heat had been cut? And where was Andrew all this time? He’d been sixteen years old, for god’s sake. Diana had mentioned the bills to him once, and he’d assured her with a shrug that Mom would take care of it. He might have been too busy with soccer and band practice and history homework to notice that Mom wasn’t taking care of anything. But Diana suspected he just didn’t want to admit that their mom had fallen apart and that until she recovered, she was incapable of taking care of her children. Whatever the reason, he shouldn’t have left the family’s finances in the hands of his twelve-year-old sister.
She remembered how helpless she’d felt that day, how all she’d wanted was for someone to hold her and comfort her and take care of her. But who? There was no one left. As far as she could tell, she had no choice but to squeeze back her tears and pay the bills herself. She gathered them up and stacked them on the kitchen table. Then she walked over to the wooden pencil holder her grandpa made and took out the beautiful brass letter opener. Her dad had taught her how to use it when she was nine years old. She used to love the feel of that shiny brass blade slicing through paper, and she’d loved sitting next to Daddy and helping—separating out the advertisements, licking the stamps and return address labels. He didn’t teach her how to write a check until the year before he died. He was coughing a lot in those days, complaining that his cold wouldn’t go away. No one knew yet that it was lung cancer.
Filling out and recording the checks was no problem. But what if Mom wouldn’t sign them? Finding her lying on the couch, an afghan tucked under her chin, Diana opened the blinds and turned off the TV. “Here, Mom,” she said, handing her a pen and a notebook to write on. “Could you sign these?”
If she thought her efforts would help her mom snap out of it, she was mistaken. Instead, they gave her an opportunity to sink deeper into her grief. “Oh, sweetheart,” she’d said when she’d finished signing. She dropped the pen and fell back on the sofa cushion. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. You’re such a good girl.”
By the time the life insurance check arrived, her mother seemed to have returned to normal. She became once again the lively, concerned parent she’d always been. But Daddy had always taken care of the finances. So when she saw the insurance check, she took one look at it, endorsed it, and handed it to Diana. “Such a lot of money,” she sighed. “Sweetheart, can you figure out what to do with it?”
And that was how it all began. As long as Diana lived at home, her mom never paid another bill or made a financial decision. “I’m just a crazy artist,” she’d tell people. “But my Diana, I tell you, she’s a genius when it comes to money.”
A genius? Ha. Diana did a flip turn and started another lap. It didn’t take a genius to ask the bank manager for advice and then bring home the papers for a CD ladder for Mom to sign.
She swam another lap. And then another and another, swimming laps until all her thoughts and remembrances were washed away. By the time she climbed out of the pool, she was tired, but she felt calmer than she had for a long time. Maybe if I swim laps every day, she thought as she padded across the tiles, dripping water on the way to her towel, maybe that will change something inside me. Maybe then . . .
She left it like that, somewhere between a hazy thought and a hope. If she were to line up all the intermediate steps between swimming and holding a baby in her arms, the flaw in the plan might become clear. And she did so want to believe.
“Ma’am.”
She was only halfway through the door when Clarita came running, wiping her hands on her apron. “Mrs. Rahman called when you were out, ma’am. Three times.”
Diana sucked air through her teeth. Saudur must have told her about Vanuatu. “Thanks, Clarita. I’ll call her.”
“She sounded, um . . . not right, ma’am.” Clarita pinched her eyebrows together. “Something not good.”
“I’ll call her right away.”
Passing through the dining room, Diana grabbed a wine glass and an open bottle of merlot. This would not be an easy phone call.
She was holding the wine in her mouth, feeling its tingle and waiting for Abby to answer, when the doorbell rang.
“Damn! Damn! Damn!” Dispensing with hello, Abby marched past Diana and into the dining room, her flip-flops slapping against her heels, her red curls springing out at awkward angles. “I’ve been trying to call you.”
“I know. I was just about to call you.”
“Clarita told me you were swimming, but when I got to Seafront . . .” Her eyes were wet with hurt and accusation. “You were already gone.”
“Oh!”
Diana held her arms out, and for a moment Abby collapsed against her. Then she pushed Diana away. “Don’t. You’ll make me cry.”
“I’ll get you a glass. I have an open bottle of merlot.”
“Saudur acts as though my opinion doesn’t matter. I’m just the little wife who will go along with whatever he decides. He didn’t see fit to tell me anything until today at lunchtime.” She swung around. “You and Jay already knew, didn’t you?”
“Jay told me last night.” She held out the glass of merlot, the wine such a deep red, it was almost black.
“You see.” Abby accepted the glass and took a big swallow. “First I give up my job and my beautiful London for him. And now he expects me to pick up and move to some godforsaken village in the middle of nowhere.”
“Has he accepted the job?”
“No, but he talked to Marshall Charbonneau this morning before I was up. Then he shaved in our bathroom and ate breakfast across the table from me like it was any other day. All the while he was planning to tear our lives apart. He couldn’t tell me sooner, he said. He had to be certain the job offer was firm. Bloody hell! He couldn’t talk to me before he had everything worked out? How does that make any sense?”
“He’s worried, Abby. He doesn’t want to lose his job and leave
you and the boys high and dry.” Diana was surprised to hear herself sounding like Saudur’s apologist. She didn’t like what he and Jay had done any more than Abby did.
“Right. The bloody breadwinner. The bloke who brings home the bacon.”
“He told you about Akiyama, right?”
“Of course. All that shit about Akiyama scheming to give his job to the nephew of the former prime minister of Japan. So? All these men—your Jay among them—assume that Saudur has already lost before he starts fighting.” She shook her head in disgust. “I tell you, Diana, if somebody tried to take my job away, they’d have a bloody big fight on their hands.”
8
It was four o’clock, and Diana was in no mood for an early morning phone call. Not after last night and her run-in with the mad flying cockroach.
Cockroaches that stayed on the floor didn’t bother her. They were huge—two inches long here in the Philippines—and disgusting, but they were harmless. At night when she spied one in the kitchen, it usually scurried away the moment she turned the light on. She’d been known to stomp on a cockroach that didn’t move fast enough.
Last night was different, though. She wasn’t in the kitchen; she was in the shower. And the cockroach wasn’t scurrying away; he was flying, madly spinning and bouncing off walls. Worst of all, he landed on her neck. For a moment, his disgusting scratchy feet clung to her. She screamed, swatting at him, and ran out of the shower, grabbing a towel to wrap around her.
Snatching her robe from the hook, she shoved her arms into the sleeves while he buzzed around the bathroom like a drunken bomber pilot.
He was quiet just long enough for her to slide into some shoes and wrap a scarf around her neck. Then he started up again, darting first one way and then the other. He dived toward her, and she ducked. How the hell was she going to kill him when he was so fast and unpredictable?
She found a broom, a shoe, and a book. Her weapons. Then she opened the sliding glass door to the balcony, and for the next hour she chased him around the room. He’d light somewhere, and she’d swat at him with one weapon or another. Before her strike connected though, he’d spin away, up or down or—worst of all—straight at her. Sometimes he hid, and she waited.
When she finally saw him fly out the door, she didn’t know whether to trust her eyes or not. She slammed and latched the door. Then she sat on the edge of the bed, her heart pounding. When she was finally satisfied he’d flown away, she finished her shower and got ready for bed. After fixing herself a cup of tea, she sat up in bed reading until midnight.
So when a jangling phone startled her out of an uneasy sleep, she was not happy. Who the—? She reached for the phone, cleared her throat, and squinted at the clock. Four o’clock? Really? “Hello,” she croaked.
“Diana, hi. Eddie Wu here.”
“Eddie, Jay’s on mission.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m calling you. To warn you. There’s a coup in progress.”
“A coup? Again?” Hadn’t there been six or seven already? There’d been a failed coup d’etat or two or three every year since Diana and Jay moved to the Philippines.
“This one’s the real thing. Early this morning rebels took over Fort Bonifacio. They captured HQ and the Army Operations Center. Word has it the soldiers didn’t put up any significant resistance.”
“Oh,” she mumbled. The mention of Fort Bonifacio woke her up. The fort was in Makati, not far from the houses of people she knew.
“My sources say the rebels have control of Villamor Air Base, the domestic airport, and two television stations.”
She rubbed her eyes. Why was he telling her this now? What was she supposed to do about it?
“Minutes ago there was gunfire at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.”
He was loving this, Diana realized. A big news event with him smack in the middle of it. Eddie would always be the young reporter he’d been before joining D-TAP, the guy with sources and contacts all over Asia.
“You should be safe where you are,” he said. “But, Diana, keep your head down. And if you have any questions, call me. I’ll check back with you later.”
“Thanks, Eddie.”
Despite Eddie’s breathless description of events, it was hard to take these coup attempts seriously. Like brown-outs and traffic and huge cockroaches, you had to accept coup attempts as a part of life in the Philippines. So far, most attempts to overthrow Cory Aquino’s government had fizzled before they started or soon thereafter. The worst loss of life had been in 1987 when fifty-three people were killed, many of them bystanders, shot for daring to jeer at the rebels.
Diana hung up. She glanced again at the clock. It was only 4:10. Maybe she could go back to sleep.
She lay back on her pillow. But every time she tried to close her eyes, her eyelids resisted. It seemed that the time for sleep was past. Sitting up, she switched on the bedside lamp and reached for the remote. Eddie was right, channels two and four were off the air. She scrolled down to channel nine. Live coverage, but nothing was happening. The camera’s view rested on men in camouflage conferring beside a tank, scanned a group of curious civilians, and returned to the men in camouflage.
Diana sighed and opened her side table drawer. She took out her thermometer and notebook. Every day since their first appointment with Dr. Feliciano, she’d recorded her morning temperature. When it rose by one degree, she circled that day in blue on her calendar to indicate ovulation. The first day of her period she circled in red. Her six-day fertility window was bright green—green for new life. She’d made the first fat green mark in this cycle on November thirtieth, yesterday. The day Jay left for Korea.
She slid the thermometer under her tongue. When enough time had passed, she read and recorded the result. The numbers were all there, neatly noted, making it perfectly clear that another month would be wasted, another opportunity lost.
The air conditioner rattled, almost blotting out the occasional grind and whir of early morning traffic down on the boulevard. A fuzzy-edged strip of yellowish light escaped through a crack in the curtains. Moonlight? All-night lights on balconies? She leaned back against the headboard and gazed at Jay’s side of the bed, the covers unwrinkled and cold. How long would it be before he heard about the coup?
Returning the thermometer and notebook to the drawer, she noticed her new bottle of coral nail polish. She shrugged. In the absence of a better idea for passing the time during the early hours of a coup d’etat, she might as well polish her nails.
She was applying the base coat on her right hand when the phone rang again. “Diana. Sorry to get you up so early.” It was Franz, another colleague and friend. She held the phone with her left hand and fanned the air with her right while he repeated more or less what Eddie had already told her.
“I’ll be careful, Franz. Thanks so much for calling. Say hi to Anna and the girls.” Diana blew on her wet fingernails, picturing Anna at the pool at Seafront with her adorable little daughters. Their smooth, suntanned arms and legs, their curls—one honey, the other the color of mahogany—almost eclipsing Anna’s shapely, sophisticated beauty.
Between phone calls, Diana managed to polish her fingernails without much more than the usual number of smudges.
Diana was applying the top coat when President Aquino came on television. She was wearing a bright yellow dress, the color that had come to symbolize both her husband’s assassination and the peaceful revolution that had brought her to power. Looking down at her paper, the president spoke in a gentle, womanly tone, assuring her people. “We shall smash this naked attempt once more,” she said in a vain attempt to sound angry and strong. Diana loved Cory Aquino, but—and not for the first time—she wished Cory were able to project a stronger image to her fractious countrymen.
After breakfast, channel nine went off the air, and Diana switched off the TV. From her balcony, she gazed at women in bathrobes and men in T-shirts and shorts on balconies across the way. They’d dragged chairs out and were drinkin
g coffee and combing their hair. When bombs exploded, they hung over their railings to see where they’d landed. Everyone likes a spectacle.
Three funny little planes that looked like old Japanese Zeros from World War II kept flying over. Tora tora planes, they called them on TV. It was hard to take this coup seriously if the rebels were going to use what looked like toy planes. Diana ran inside to get her sketch pad. The tora toras and the half-dressed people on their balconies were crying out to be turned into cartoons for her to send to Andrew.
She’d tried writing letters to her brother Andrew after she and Jay moved to the Philippines. But when she reread them, imagining how they must sound to him, she’d wanted to throw them away. Sometimes she did. Her life seemed so small. So insignificant. When she gave up her job to move here, she’d given up a big part of her identity. All she was left with were her dinner parties and charitable work, her women’s club meetings, bazaars, and outings. And that wasn’t her. She was living the life of a woman from another century. How could her brother, a Jesuit priest, be interested in her trips to the dressmaker or the trouble she had getting used to having a maid?
Finally she’d given up, and instead of letters, she’d started sending him little cartoons and doodles with funny comments or clever commentary below. Because Andrew taught history at Gonzaga University, she’d concentrated on subjects of historical significance. She’d never been able to compete with her older brother.
As she passed the aquarium, she paused for a moment to watch the fish. These past few days they’d begun to live up to their promise. She’d stopped forcing herself to sit and gaze at them, but every time she passed the aquarium, she would pause and enjoy their graceful movements. When she walked away, she always felt just a little bit more relaxed.
