Once Upon a Sunset

by Tif Marcelo

  Chapter Four

  Diana tucked her chin into her quarter-zip when she stepped out her door, and the shock of cold sent shivers up her spine. It had snowed the previous week, and a fuzz of white coated the tops of bushes and tree branches. The temperature had stayed at a balmy thirty-nine degrees during the day, cold enough that even at a sprint she didn’t break into a sweat but warm enough so a windbreaker wasn’t necessary. She shook her arms and legs out to wake them. Exhaustion had permeated every part of her being, but after a night like she’d had, a run would do her good, and Sam had given her the perfect reason to head back out into the sunshine.

  She took off at a jog, choosing the sidewalk through a block, then hopping off onto the street, minding the cobblestones and potholes. At 9:00 a.m., Old Town was just starting to wake, with deliveries to local businesses underway and parents walking their kids to school. After a quarter mile, she got into a rhythm, and slowly, her night faded away.

  A half mile later, Diana arrived at the Georgian town house business front and jogged in place, waiting for the door’s swing. Sam was notoriously on time, so when five, six minutes passed, Diana entered the Old Town Women’s Center to retrieve her running partner.

  Unlike the bright, glitzy, sleek hospital building, the center was a long-ago renovated home. Crown moldings trimmed the ceiling and doorways, but the hardwood original floors squeaked with every step. A staircase with formidable banisters led to a second floor of rooms that stored equipment and files, and the staff break room.

  “Good morning, Diana!” Sherry Escalante, a nurse educator, bounded down the steps. Black hair in a French braid and wearing Tweety Bird scrubs, she had a life-sized infant doll in her arms, though she held it like a real baby. Like she were breastfeeding.

  Diana eyed the position of the doll. Sherry looked down, snorted out a laugh. “I’m prepping the room for an infant-care class. Volunteering today?” She reached around Diana to grab a basket of blankets.

  “Not today. I’m here to see the boss.” She shied at the answer, guilt riding up her back. It had been months since she’d volunteered, due in part to work and in part to wanting to be buried by work.

  “Hopefully we’ll see you here soon.” With a nod goodbye, Sherry hustled down the hallway to the farthermost room, a classroom.

  Diana grabbed a mint from the reception desk, suffering a slap of the hand from the secretary, Paula. She stuck the candy into her mouth and scooted into the office a door down.

  It wasn’t much of an office but more of a catchall room. To the side were stacked supplies their supply room couldn’t fit. In the middle, a large desk burgeoned with papers and books. The desk was shared by everyone on the staff, and each had commandeered a small area as theirs. On the wall behind the desk hung pictures of the babies for whom they’d provided prenatal and infant care throughout the years. Some were now toddlers, some school-aged, and some even in their late teen years. Over a decade’s proof of care in a clinic that had somehow weathered the rise and fall of politicians, lack of money, and support.

  Currently, Sam Rodale, one of the center’s doctors and its founder, was hunched over a chart wearing a multicolored fabric headband that covered her ears. Her black hair was pulled back into a ponytail.

  “Give me one second, else I’m going to forget all of this.” With a flourish, she scribbled onto the paper, stabbed a period at the end of a sentence, and slapped the chart closed. Unlike the hospital, with its top-of-the line medical records system, the center did most of their work the old-fashioned way: pen and paper. She pushed herself back from the table. Then, as if remembering the time, looked at her watch. “You got here quick!” Sam peered at Diana with dark, all-knowing eyes. She was a decade older than Diana but had the energy of a twenty-year-old, with stamina that had gotten her through three marathons in the last eighteen months.

  “I had to get out of the house.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Ugh, not all great, so I’d rather not talk about it.” Diana hedged on her answer. Sam was an idealist, the perfect kind of personality to head up a community center. The thoughtful sort, empathetic, and open-minded from serving underserved populations. While she’d never said anything scathing about Diana’s current job, her opinion had been written all over her face when Diana made the announcement that she would be working for Alexandria Specialty and not for her, evident in the thin line she’d created with her lips. “It’s just the same old, same old. Moms. Babies.”

  As predicted, Sam kept a poker face. “Saw the news that Preston was in labor.”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny. HIPAA, you know.” She sipped in a breath, tamping down the bubbles that had begun to overflow from her belly. “Ready to go? Or did something else come up?”

  “Ugh. Just got a call in literally the short time since we texted.” Sam leaned back in her chair, as if it took all her effort, the air escaping from her lips. “About … what else?”

  “Money?”

  She nodded. “Money. Our classes are overflowing. We need another educator. We also need an outreach coordinator for communities who don’t know about us so we can serve more people. All of it requiring money. Perhaps we should have a fund-raiser? Network for more donors? Speaking of, any new connections on your end?”

  Twelve hours ago, Diana would have been all for the idea, but now … “You know I’m the first to put this place’s business card in everyone’s hand. But after last night … ?”

  “What happened last night?”

  Diana cracked the door of her worry after a short pause. “I broke policy. I put a noninsured patient in one of the VIP suites.”

  Sam gasped. “Oh no.”

  “But I had a good reason. L and D was packed, and we were starting to divert patients. A VIP was on the way, but an emergent case walked in first.” Diana lowered her voice. “I made a call. A right one, but I’m officially—and I quote—‘on vacation.’ ”

  “How’s the patient?”

  “Fine. Delivered, Baby in the NICU, Mom still hypertensive, but better. As soon as someone is discharged on the ward, she’ll be moved.”

  “So you absolutely did the right thing.”

  Diana nodded and leaned back. “That’s the only thought that’s given me some peace. If we’d transferred …” She didn’t even want to think about it, that the stress of the transfer might have put either the mom or baby in distress.

  Relief spilled out of her with her admission. She’d returned home from the shift overwhelmed with thoughts about the repercussions of her actions but unable to convey it to her mother. She had never been the type to hold back what happened at work, but seeing Margo there, on the couch talking to Granny, wearing plaid bell-bottoms and a denim shirt with its tails tied together like she was straight out of Saturday Night Fever, and with her stuff everywhere and then bringing up Ms. Margo?

  What was that phrase? The days were long, but the years were short? It not only applied to children but to parents, too. Diana could recount the afternoons spent with her mother, the long talks with her about boys and life. She was an only child, and Margo, laissez-faire in her parenting, creative and whimsical, was more of a friend to Diana rather than a mom.

  Diana hadn’t expected her mother to get old. Hadn’t expected her skin to wrinkle, her hands to shake. It wasn’t as if Diana was in awe of this change in her mother’s physical being, but sometimes it would happen overnight. Like this morning, when she realized that potentially, she might become her mother’s caregiver one day, much like Margo had been for Granny.

  The inevitability of responsibility—it was too much. Diana’s plate was perpetually full. She expected a lot of herself, and she just wished she could have a break from all of it.

  Just not in the form of a forced vacation.

  Diana shook her head, feeling selfish now. Here she was harboring hard feelings for her mother, who had been a saint to Granny. “Anyway, I’m not in the networking mood.”

  Sam’s l
ips screwed into a grin. “Should we skip the run and take you out for breakfast instead? Will bacon therapy help your morning?”

  “As tempting as that sounds, no. I want to forget my night. Let’s brainstorm fund-raising ideas while we run.”

  “Great.” Sam stood and donned her gloves.

  Meanwhile, Diana looked out the window, at Old Town. The clinic was off Burg Street by a couple of blocks, away from tourist traffic. Here, businesses were on the first floors of newly converted condos and dotted with families who had lived in the area for generations. It was still the kind of neighborhood where there were equal parts tourists and generational residents, where people still biked to the local farmers market and jogged in general safety.

  Diana had admittedly rolled an ankle more than once on its cobblestone streets.

  “How about a race?” Diana said out loud, her brain catching up a second later. “A 5K through Old Town?”

  Sam laughed, raised a hand up. “Only the hardest thing to plan. And I don’t know when you’d get a chance to do all of that with your work schedule.” A grin appeared on her lips.

  “Wait a minute, I thought I was just brainstorming ideas, not spearheading the project.”

  “C’mon, I can’t do everything. And you’re an official center volunteer. Besides, hanging out here these next couple of weeks might do you some good. Serving—”

  “Serving is healing,” Diana finished the sentence, already feeling better at the idea of it. Her best friend was right. A thread of an idea began. “Okay, so the race could have a low buy-in—twenty dollars a participant. We can involve one of the running stores. Get corporate sponsorships, like Rings and Roses, the wedding shop down the street. I’ll think about a race proposal.” She started to jog in place; she craved the rush of endorphins. “But c’mon, let’s head out before your first patient arrives.”

  Sam half laughed and shook her head. They both knew it was a matter of time before Diana planned something for the center. When her mind was set on something, nothing would deter it.

  If anything, the project would at least distract her from everything she didn’t want to deal with.

  Chapter Five

  As a photographer in her twenties, Margo had managed to coordinate a roomful of indignant theater actors who hated each other and refused to stand within two feet of one another. Later on, she’d taken on the challenge of photographing ten babies lined up in peapod costumes for the rededication of Alexandria Specialty’s labor and delivery ward. And in one of her workshops, she’d camped out in a deer stand in the mountains of Shenandoah National Park for hours to snap the perfect shot of a bald eagle. She was a patient woman.

  But Margo’s patience now was as thin as the tape of the box in front of her, which she popped easily with one of Diana’s fancy butter knives. Everything was taking so long. So far, she’d unpacked only one box, though she couldn’t get herself to throw anything away. Each item she encountered had a specific event or occasion tied to it, and with every attempt at decluttering, Margo felt a part of herself torn away.

  She really didn’t want to be a burden to Diana; she’d wanted to surprise her daughter by showing her how much she could accomplish this morning. But unpacking was proving to be painful.

  When Margo lifted the box flaps, the scent of old wafted from the box. Yes, Margo was old herself—how could she deny it—and she had the right to call a spade a spade. Her friends and her mother had carried those scents, in their cars, their homes, their clothing and sheets. It was the sum total of nose-numbing floral perfume, creams to ease the joints, and lotions to ease dry, papery skin. Margo, to this day, was insistent on updating her perfumes to whatever her Ulta ad had advertised, and avoided baby-powder-scented anything because of these smells.

  Not that she wasn’t proud of the dozens of candles on her cake every year. The stigma of age and the feeling of erasure, on the other hand? That was another thing.

  The box was labeled Leora’s closet in a stranger’s left-leaning penmanship. Margo had paid for two movers to pack up her mother’s things and seal up boxes, then splurged on a cleaning team to wash away the years of her mother’s memories from their home before the Realtor put it up for sale.

  Guilt ran up her spine. Margo, in her eagerness for some freedom from caregiving—it was as if she had walked out into the sun after a year of being underground—had rushed the movers. She didn’t take the time to go through her mother’s things after she died, and Margo had no idea what she would encounter in this box. Would it make her laugh? Or bring her to tears?

  She tossed the rumpled packing paper to the side. Inside was a folded stack of threadbare linens: a yellowed cotton tablecloth with four napkins, a handkerchief edged in blue thread with a delicately embroidered letter A in one corner.

  She gulped in a breath. A, for Antonio Cruz—her father. All at once, a memory flashed in her head of sitting at her mother’s round kitchen table, lit dimly from above. They had just finished a breakfast of oatmeal with raisins. Her mother, wearing her standard maid’s uniform, stood at their narrow countertop making Margo’s school lunch. It would be the last time Margo would see her for the day. Later on, after school, she would let herself into the apartment, park herself in front of the television, and do her homework until her mother returned, late in the evening.

  It had always been the two of them, for as long as she could remember. Margo had had a series of aunties—all passed on now—who took up her mother’s free time with bridge and bingo. Leora never married, her heart tied to Antonio until the day she died.

  But this—Margo had never seen this handkerchief.

  She pulled her phone from her pocket and clicked the Instagram app. She squared the handkerchief in the screen’s view, tilting it slightly for an artistic effect, and pressed the button to capture it. She typed out a post: The things you find when you move … and uploaded it to her feed. Almost immediately, a notification window dropped down from the top of the screen: someone “hearted” it. And then another, and another …

  Her cheeks warmed and she reveled in the moment. She couldn’t explain it to her daughter, but those tiny beeps sometimes reassured her. They reminded her that she was still alive, still seen. Even during a short hiatus after her mother’s death, which she’d shared with her followers, she had received private messages from absolute strangers. It would have been a lonely time otherwise. The social media experience had been so fulfilling that she even brought her best friends, Roberta and Cameron, into the fray, and they, too created second careers for themselves.

  Deep into her thoughts, Margo pulled out another set of linens, wool this time, and unwrapped it to find a picture frame, flipped upside down. When she turned the frame over and saw the picture, she leaned into the kitchen counter for support.

  It was a picture she didn’t recognize, but the woman was undoubtedly Leora, with her strawberry-blond hair—part pinned upward in a roll—grazing the tops of her shoulders, and Antonio, dark-skinned, slim but formidable, wearing a soldier’s brown uniform.

  Her father.

  Margo touched the hesitant smiles on her parents’ faces. Noticed her mother’s faraway look, not quite at the camera. Margo knew about the time when this was taken—that part of the story she’d been privy to—the 1940s, when Antonio joined the United States Army to serve with the First Filipino Infantry Regiment in World War II. His story was a hero’s, one that she had heard time and again, though it was as threadbare as the embroidered handkerchief, with just enough information that Margo had been satisfied with the story until adulthood.

  “God, you were just babies,” she said aloud. “Babies and brave.”

  Leora had repeated this same statement in the past, when Margo had questions about their romance, about her father. It was the kind of statement that cast magic in her imagination but also invariably ended the conversation. What child didn’t want their parents to be brave, to be superheroes in their own right, to have some kind of a happily-ever-after? />
  Margo propped up the picture so her parents looked back at her. There was more in the box, tucked under a large wad of crumpled packing paper. A bit of digging recovered a wooden box with a latch, which she fiddled with and popped open.

  Inside was a stack of envelopes, yellowed with age, marked by a red border, and stamped with the distinct emblem of V-mail.

  Victory mail.

  She fanned the envelopes in front of her. The first, which stood out from the rest, was a plain white envelope from someone named Flora Reyes. But the rest were from Antonio, with the last addressed from the Philippines in 1945.

  Which wasn’t possible. Her mother had said her father had died in New Guinea in 1944.

  * * *

  Margo fell into a spiral of memory and history. She couldn’t stop reading, couldn’t stop rereading. In chronological order, from the first letter to the last from Flora Reyes—a scathing note that left her with more questions than answers, a letter that would forever haunt her—Margo scanned each of her father’s words for clues. She checked them against her mind’s cupboards, which were filled with snippets of conversations with her mother, like the one on her thirteenth birthday, when she’d said she wanted to know more about being half-Filipino. At eighteen, when she’d saved enough money for a flight overseas, a solo trip to the Philippines, but chose to go to her first photography course instead. Moments where she’d insisted on more information from her mother, just to be placated by Leora’s declaration that she had known no other family history than what she’d told Margo: Antonio had been an orphan. He was an only child. He and Leora weren’t married; therefore, she received the barest of news when he died.

  Margo was petting Flossy in her lap when the side door opened.

  “Hello?” Diana called in.

  The dog bounced from the couch to greet Diana.

  “Sorry I took a little longer. We decided to take the scenic route this time. But Lenny called. His crew’s running late at their other job—” Her voice caught. “Hey. What’s up?”