On the night she came to bed after being too long in my office, I knew she had discovered my secret. She shook like a leaf, her eyes infused with silent panic.
“Manolo, what have you done? What have you done?” she asked with every angle of her body, from the slumped shoulders and crumpled hair to the desperate elongation of her neck.
We clung to each other tightly through the night. Her inner suffering manifested into physical illness. As she sweated through alternating fits of fever and chill, I did not encourage her to speak. It was a sorry refuge for my shame; I could not bear to imagine the first word in a conversation I’d skirted for so long. I shushed her like a coward when she murmured senseless words like Boatman and the Land of the Dead. “Baitan can’t go,” she whispered, then recited the names Dalisay, Imee, Florencita, Alma, Sampaguita, and Ligaya. She repeated Ligaya most often, interchanging the name with yours, and at times I could not tell if she was saying “Ligaya” or “Malaya.” Your mother’s anguish invoked you from sleep, and we combined our efforts to pacify your discomfort. She promised me she would never leave us, but only stopped shaking when I insisted she must take her wings and fly. “I’m sorry for what I’ve done,” I managed to finally say. Or perhaps, I had grown so tired that I convinced myself I had said what I’d been willing myself to say for years.
“Fly, Tala. Go. Release me from my crime. Fly.”
When I awoke in the morning, cursing myself for having fallen asleep, she was gone.
I went straight to my office, where I sat for hours until my mother found me and salvaged me from the wreckage. I fully believed your mother would return, if not after a day, then a week. When they found the woman’s body in the river, I still believed she would return, if not in a month, then two, if not in a year, then in five years.
After she had gone, they knew it would be useless to convince me out of the self-pity. I was like a man who’d thrown myself into the sea, not knowing how to swim, but still refusing to drown. In time I began to smell like I’d in fact emerged from the ocean. My own stink convinced me to take a shower, put on a fresh shirt, comb my hair, and sit at the breakfast table with my parents and with you, Malaya. No one mentioned the empty seat. My parents behaved as if it were just another ordinary day.
At the time, Old Luchie was still alive. You wouldn’t remember her—she moved out soon after Tala left, said she couldn’t live in a house with so many “bad vibes.” After breakfast, I drove to her place. It was easy enough to find, as if Luchie had worn a path into the ground between our house and hers. I asked her what she’d known of Tala, anything she noticed about her at home when I’d been out working. She could think of nothing, she said. More likely, judging from the uncharacteristically motherly look on her face, she felt too much pity for me to say anything and risk incurring any more pain. When I threatened not to leave without some answer, she suddenly remembered the day of her dark misgivings, after a visit to the albularyo. She told me her suspicions after that day, when Tala had somehow become the albularyo, become two women in one. Perhaps Tala had given herself up, she said, sold her soul for love, and whether the angels had saved her or the devil had stolen her, she did not know.
Straight from there I set off for the Hideaway, to question Charo once and for all. Tala couldn’t have been his sister. What was she to him? I thought it would take determination, and perhaps days, to find Charo now that I really wanted to. When I got to the spot where the Hideaway had been, I was sure this would be the case. I saw nothing but buildings—flat, dull warehouses flanked by businesses and restaurants I had never cared to notice on my previous trip, when Tala had been by my side. I walked between edifices, looking over fences and climbing a few. The pebbled landscapes stretched far back, the hallways and courtyards were still there, connecting one building to the next. But the hut out front, wedged into incongruity, with its barstools and patrons like escapees from the night—it was simply gone.
By now I could hardly function, and I realized hunger had gotten the best of me. I decided to eat at the nearest restaurant. There, standing beside a fat man with a newspaper, was Charo, scarfing down his chow mein with a pair of chopsticks. I considered rushing straight for his throat, but didn’t have the energy or the will.
“Where’s the boy,” I said more than asked. Much later, I would learn from Inday that Baitan had abandoned the factory after sharing a pedicab with a descendant of Bandalay, who spent an hour detailing her tribe’s forced and violent evacuation, followed by the government’s possession of their native lands. She invited Baitan to join a guerilla training camp, of which she herself had graduated, and after months of learning how to wield a gun and counteract local corruption, Baitan had linked up with the Bandalayan forces scattered in the Ogtong mountains.
“I know you,” Charo said. “I never forget a face. Baitan’s not here. He ran off.”
“Prove it.”
“You don’t have to prove a thing to this toothpick!” the fat man, standing up from his stool, said to Charo. “Walking in here like you owe him something!”
“I think it’s you who owes me something,” Charo said to Manolo. “Baitan robbed me on the day he left. And we both know your wife was in on it.”
“My wife. You mean your sister?”
“I have no sister, man. The only sister I have took the first ticket out of this rat maze.” I pushed past the two men to the kitchen behind the restaurant and to a small, cramped office behind that. The fat man was too slow on his feet to catch me. I shuffled through papers and hunted through the trash bin, not knowing what I was looking for.
“What do you think you’ll find?” Charo asked behind me, gesturing to the fat man to calmly step aside. “Your wife in the kitchen, washing dishes?”
“What happened to the hut, the Hideaway?” I asked, remembering the warehouse, its stacks of shoeboxes, and the wan-looking factory workers at the machines.
“Look, man, I don’t know what you’re looking for. Baitan’s gone. He came here on his own a few weeks ago, begging for work as a delivery boy. He showed me his address on a piece of paper and told me my sister sent him, and a few days later, he was gone. With a day’s profit. I think we both know someone’s got to be accountable.”
“I will be. I’ll pay you back everything the boy owes. Just tell me how you knew Tala. She wasn’t your sister. So how did you know my wife?”
Charo had been waiting for the mention of money. I gave him all that had been in my pockets, which was much more than typical that day, since I thought I’d be gone for a while, and he started talking, shoving the wad in his pocket without counting it.
“Don’t you remember me, man? She was with you when we met,” Charo began.
He gave me pieces, and they connected with my own, so I could see a missing portion of the puzzle that made Tala. It was like watching something being made from thin air, but rather than invention, it was a memory someone else owned. I remember thinking it was a miracle how a possession such as memory could be shared. I watched it rather than heard it.
It had been during one of our first trips. Tala had wanted to explore the islands. We didn’t go too far that day, just to Tagarro Bay, to see the great naval ships and the rows of uniformed soldiers who occupied them. I remembered Tala’s comments, about all the different kinds of people we saw: those with white skin, those with brown skin, and all the shades in between. There were people from every part of the world there, she’d noted. And people from every background. She’d said everyone has their own story. Then she asked me, if I could be part of someone’s story, whose would it be? Yours, I’d said, I’d be part of yours. And she had replied that I was already the main character. Continuing our little game, she said the answers seem obvious. Look at that healthy sailor with a family waiting at home. Look at the fishermen, busy in their trade. Look at the women selling their crafts, bargaining and cajoling every buyer. Look at the crazy preacher poking the sinners with his crucifix. They all had the energy of support, she said, a
backbone that came from somewhere, someone. Then she’d pointed to a man, all bones underneath his clothes, baggy-eyed, smoking a cigarette, and watching the scene as if he owned it. She said, I’d be in his story, because he looks rather lonely. His story, she went on, isn’t an easy one to be in. But it wouldn’t be fair if we all chose the fairy tales.
And when I had gone off to get Tala the food she craved from the seafood vendor, she approached that lonely phantom. Charo told me that he had noticed us all along, the two country bumpkins, believing he had guessed everything there was to know about us before we realized he was there. But he never expected her to ask all those questions. She was one weird girl, he said. He answered her because it was always easy for him to talk when he was drunk. He told her about his mother, and how sick she had always been, the days she brought sailors home when she was well, and about his sister, who’d left them years before, just before she could have married someone who would pay up big, help everyone out. After that, she’d asked him to look at her closely, to remember that she was in fact his sister, their mother’s daughter. She gave him an address in Manlapaz. The address matched the one the boy Baitan later brought with him.
Charo told me that Tala seemed to anticipate his replies, nodding as if confirming what she already knew. And she looked so much like her, the sister he had barely looked at for years. Of course, he didn’t believe she was his sister and thought she was either crazy or referring to some general human connectedness in saying so. He reminded me that we, too, had met that day. I had tossed him a few coins before leading Tala to a little seating area filled with tourists, where we ate our shellfish platters.
“So you thought you could come to our home and start stalking us, then?”
“I’ve never been out of Tagarro Bay, man. What are you on?”
“What about your mother?”
“She had a stroke soon after my sister left. She’s been dead for years.”
After leaving Charo, I walked. As dark set in, the sounds of lovers unwilling to part and of loud groups on joy rides began to fade, then disappeared altogether. I thought of how back at home, Mother had been worried about me going out in the dark. But I knew the most frightening thing under the stars—the emptiness in the heart of a man who walks alone.
I passed the abandoned church and entered the graveyard. In the presence of so many deaths, I felt at home and unafraid. It was not from bravery. I would not have had the strength to fight death if it found me then. I walked deeper into the cemetery, where only the moon and stars could guide me. I passed brick wall after brick wall until I found the one facing the wilderness. It made me shudder to look into the black density of trees beyond. Skimming my eyes across the surfaces of the bricks I realized—the X was not visible or it was gone. I gazed around, calculating the distance between the nearest gravestones and the wall. Then I got to my knees and began digging with my bare hands. The upper surface was rough and hard and tough to penetrate. I felt the ground for a stone, and, finding one, used it to grind through the surface into the softer earth. Finding nothing, I took a few steps to the left and dug again. Then I moved backward and tried. I kept on moving and digging until I grew tired. I knew it had been along that side. I sat and leaned against the wall. Tomorrow, I thought, the mourners would see the holes I had dug and think it the work of a wild animal.
I blinked into the stars, wondering. I did not want to give up. Then I looked at the surface of the ground in front of me and saw a bare patch just three feet away. I crawled there and dug deep with my fingernails. I scratched and pawed the earth until my knuckle hit a hard obstacle. I’d found it. I pulled the box free and opened it.
Not recognizing the sound of my own laughter, I thought I heard howling in the distance. When I’d opened the box, I’d seen a reflection of myself in the river. From her eyes. Eyes that loved me hiding in the leaves, eyes that had forsaken the wings long before I’d hidden them. I saw myself under the moonlight, searching for a necklace that she told me she’d lost. I saw a city rising, from the first cobblestone she’d kicked into its perimeter to the wild garden of rubbish she had carefully planted in front of the Hideaway. I saw the haunting yet familiar face of a winged man, and my own divinity in the bottomlessness of the box, the eternity that belonged to Tala, and to me. Then. Emptiness that was fullness and then emptiness again. I saw her rushing to the mailbox to hide letters from the albularyo, the one who’d gone missing, then consulting with a woman selling eggs at the market, about a sister who was not a sister, someone who’d been running, like her, for her, and because of her. I saw her pregnant and leaning against a long, brown fence, shushing a little girl who crouched on the other side, entreating her to be good and stay quiet. I saw her kneeling in front of a hole in the wall, remembering everything, the accumulation of her past and of our life together, of those who should not have crossed paths at that juncture, and her wishing she could forsake her wings still. Still! Wishing she had a choice. For the man in the water. For me. Then I saw myself on the same patch of ground. I had just buried the box. I was watching an old man in a suit, mourning a lost love, seeking her everywhere, bringing her red carnations. The man had my face. I was watching myself, then, and now. Except something had changed, the entire horizon shifting slightly to the left, barely perceptible, the contents of the box reshuffling, as I could see, too late, that they could, that we had been the creators all along, not two characters at the mercy of someone else’s narration, and she, ever beautiful, ever brave, had always known, but I had learned too late, but now the mourning lover was not alone: beside him the child, unbroken by the fairy tales of others and wildly present in her own, gazed above at the same sky, searching with an even deeper longing, which I’d forsake all of my heartache to appease.
About the Author
Renee Macalino Rutledge was born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area from the age of four. A long-time local journalist, her articles and essays have appeared in ColorLines, Filipinas Magazine, Oakland and Alameda Magazine, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Literary Hub, Mutha Magazine, Ford City Anthology, Women of Color Anthology, and others. The Hour of Daydreams is her debut novel. She lives in Alameda, California, with her husband and two daughters.
Acknowledgments
Thank you, Chris. You know best how many hours this writing took over the course of how many years. I’m grateful to be married to you, the one I have the most interesting conversations with, who is always up for exploring a different path with me.
Maya and Raina, this book is dedicated to you, for renewing my sense of wonder daily. Life couldn’t be more full than it has been and continues to be as I live, laugh, and learn with the two of you.
Thank you, Mama and Papa, for placing family above all else and passing that value on. You dance to your own song, and because of this, I learned early on to embrace individuality. I’m so appreciative of your support and active presence in our lives.
Thanks, Laura Stanfill, my publisher and the force behind Forest Avenue Press. I couldn’t have found a better match for The Hour of Daydreams; your conviction, passion, tireless work, and ingenuity toward publishing this book have been the best gift a debut author could wish for.
Thank you to my kuyas, Noel and JC Macalino, for being the first two people I could trust to read the final draft of this book. I am lucky to have the both of you to count on.
To Bob Kanegis and Liz Mangual, my in-laws, for keeping folktales alive and inspiring me with your tales, and for gifting me with a copy of Tales from the 7,000 Isles (retold by Art R. Guillermo and Nimfa M. Rodeheaver), where I first came across the star maiden folktale.
Thank you to Meilan Carter-Gilkey, Fowzia Karimi, Allison Towata, and Muthoni Kiarie, with whom I met regularly over the course of writing this book to read aloud, feast, do nail art, take swimming breaks, ride gondolas, and discuss the many changes in our lives. The energy and connection have been invaluable to many a creative spark.
Thank you to all t
he professors I worked with at Mills College, particularly my thesis advisors, Yiyun Li and Cristina Garcia, who encouraged me to keep on going and write the story that I believe.
Thank you to Christine Garcia and Melanie Robinson, who read and shared valuable insight on very early drafts.
I’m appreciative, Gigi Little, for your vision and collaboration on the book cover. Your design captured the mood, symbolism, and magic of the story in the perfect way.
Thanks, Tesa Lauigan, for taking the author photo, bringing out the fun, and being up for spontaneity.
Everyone in the ’17 Scribes, I lucked out being connected to such a supportive, talented, and fun group of writers. You helped to make the journey to publication unforgettable.
To my Ulysses Press family for your enthusiasm and encouragement. Special thanks to Bryce Willett for going to bat for this book during the Ulysses Press sales conference slot, and to the PGW/Legato Publishers Group reps who took special care with my debut.
Finally, to Maya Myers, my copy editor, I’m grateful for your sharp eye and valuable suggestions that helped to bring the best version of this book to the reading public.
Readers’ Guide
1. A Filipino folktale of seven star maidens inspired the writing of The Hour of Daydreams. What other myths do you come across in the story? How do they influence your reading?
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