The worst typhoon your village ever saw began while you were in a tree. The tallest one on the plantation (Mahentoy, you called it, after the giant in a folktale) let you see as far as the bay on one side and the next village on the other. You were looking for your father. You didn’t know that he had hitched his way already to Manila, where the taxis needed drivers and cafés needed busboys regardless of the weather; or that you would not see him again. You thought there was still time to tell him that a Red Cross tent inland had food and water.
“Come down, Esme,” you heard your mother say. Pepe wasn’t with her.
You shimmied down. The water, when you landed, reached your knees.
“Where’s the baby?”
“Darna brought him to the tent this morning.”
But you’d already seen Darna, your neighbor, from high up in the tree, head inland with her children—three of them, all her own, and no more. Your mother trusted people who had never wished her well.
“All right.” You walked her to the flooded main road and put her on a rescue boat. Then you turned, the water thigh-high now, and ran back to the house.
“Esme!” your mother called. “You’ll drown.”
The wind whipped at your face; the water slowed your legs down like a dream of running. The house was far enough away you had a chance to look at it, still standing, and feel proud of your papa, whose own hands built it, while scraps of other houses were sailing through the storm. One tin sheet could have sliced you clear in half, but missed. Falling coconuts hit the water with louder splatters than their sound on soil. You ducked. And underwater, it was dark and quiet. You could move faster. You swam until your fingers touched the door.
You prayed for love, not just acceptance, of God’s will: even if that meant finding Pepe already bloated with floodwater. Farm girls saw their share of death, both animal and human: stillbirths, yellow fever, malnutrition. And who could blame God, anyway? Looking down on perfect Pepe, how could He not want him back in heaven for Himself?
Inside the house, the water nearly reached your ribs. And there you found him, floating in the wooden trough that had become his cradle. He cooed and gurgled, reaching for his toes. Not a scratch on him.
JOHN WAS THE closest you had ever come to an addiction. As a young girl, you never even longed for sweets. Each morning you sipped coffee next to Doris, but you never needed it. Smoking and drinking struck you as a man’s vices, and a waste of money besides. Gambling, too. But nights with John—the stars in your brain, the beggar that sex made of your body—gave you a taste of it, that life, those forces that held Pepe at their mercy.
You walked into the walls of houses you’d cleaned for years. You broke a vase that had belonged to Helen Miller’s mother. “Esmeralda! What’s with you?” said Mrs. Miller. She docked you for it, as if money could replace a priceless thing. I’m sorry, ma’am. You went into his office that same night. Watched his reflection grow taller behind you as you wiped the windows. As he trapped you in his arms and closed his mouth over your ear.
If this was anything like what Pepe had felt, you couldn’t blame him. You could understand almost everything your brother had done over the years, the lengths he went to for his appetites.
But Pepe, at this time, was trying to change. He’d checked himself into a rehab center in the north: the Farm, residents called it, which caused confusion for you and your mother on the phone, between discussing home and Pepe’s rehab. The men there lived like soldiers. Their commander was a former shabu addict, who’d found God in jail, was now a priest, and lived by the old proverb about idle hands. His soldiers rose at dawn, cleaned the grounds, made and mended their own clothes, and cooked food that they had grown or raised themselves. Only after chores and Mass and meetings could they spend one hour every evening on the one leisure activity allowed: wood carving. They learned to shape blocks of kamagong wood: first into planks, then into spheres. The men who mastered those would build the planks into a cross, the beads into a rosary. The veterans learned figures—Mary and the saints, and, finally, to put all previous skills together, a crucifix with Christ on it. Pepe sent his handiwork across the ocean to your nightstand drawer. The priest did not like to rank residents, but Pepe thought he noticed his quick mastery of figure after figure, saw him linger on his work for longer than he did on other men’s.
On the phone, in these months, Pepe spoke with all the fire, all the fever, of the new convert. He seemed to know what you were up to, in spirit if not form.
“Women your age forget what God expects of them,” he said. “Once they’re past childbearing and still not married, they stop guarding their virtue.”
He used words like fornication and adultery, words you hadn’t heard spoken this way since your days in the one-room parish schoolhouse. You almost felt his spittle through the phone line, landing on your sinful cheek. He said he had thought about becoming a priest.
Now you know you should have praised him more. Should have told him how much you looked forward to a crucifix made by his hands. But at that time you had your own urges to answer to. Sometimes you stopped listening, didn’t write him back. You fell asleep on the train home, too tired even to pray for him before bed.
You’re right, Pepe, you should have said.
In another time, another country, villagers would have stoned you to death.
YOU DID NOT expect to see shoes in the street, high heels that women kicked off as they ran. You think of hallways inside dark apartments, shoes and neckties and discarded bras forming a trail into the bedroom, sounds of muffled laughter and unbuckling, people so distracted by excitement sometimes they forget to shut the door. In those apartments, you’ve been trained to help and be of use no matter what.
And so, along your way, you stoop and start collecting them. The shoes, computer parts, and paper. As if this wave of people walking toward you has just left the party: you are here to clean up after. This much you know how to do. Your left arm gathers what your right turns up: shoe, shoe, battered keyboard, paper, paper, paper. Where will you bring them, Esmeralda? The wastebasket on the corner? People might want them back. EARNINGS REPORT, one paper says—no doubt something important. Some of these shoes cost more than your rent. And some are not in bad condition. Nicked and dusty, perhaps a bit charred at the heels. You can restore them, bring them to the lost and found. Those nice men at reception held an umbrella for you for two days when you forgot it.
So much turns up that you unzip your tote to carry it. It’s possible that you look crazy, heading straight toward disaster, scavenging for scraps, but you don’t care. The heaps grow higher the closer you get. One shoe, a patent leather pump, gives you more trouble than the others. You pull harder, then drop it. It’s too hot. Your fingertips have swiped into the dust a shiny band of leather that reflects your face. Something inside the shoe has weighed it down. Your eyes move, slowly as the cold blood in your veins, from the shank, over the slender, melted heel, to the ankle. A woman’s ankle, dressed in nylon panty hose like yours.
You cross yourself. Start digging through the rubble. You’ll bear any sight—a bone, a face—to close her lids for her, in case she left this world with her eyes open.
ONE NIGHT YOU fell asleep inside John’s office and woke up at two.
“Did I snore?”
“A little,” he said. “I’m sure I did too.”
In the basement, you didn’t know enough to skip the time clock, go straight home, pretend that punching out had slipped your mind. Someone like Pepe would have known. Instead, as you had done five nights a week for six months straight, you fed your time card to the clock and listened to it bite.
Thirteen days later, the supervisor’s call almost went to voice mail. You were coming back from the Laundromat with Doris’s clothes.
“I’m doing payroll and your card says two-thirteen,” the supervisor said. “Which means you either took too long to do your floors, or tried to steal time from the company. Which is it?”
She had a pretty accent. Stealing time, you thought: how strange, to imagine you could hold minutes in your hand and hide them in your pocket. Had Pepe thought of such a scheme yet? Time is money. People said that.
“Which is it, Esmeralda? Are you slow, or do you steal?”
You tried to think: which was the worse disgrace, in your profession? Neither one was true. You could turn the foulest six-stall ladies’ room into a lab, in minutes flat. You’d never lifted so much as a slice of bread from someone’s pantry.
“I can’t hear you, Esmeralda.”
By the age of twelve or thirteen, Pepe could spin great yarns of where he’d been and when. He hid things under the wooden floor slats. He sent lists of books and supplies he needed money for, long after he had stopped going to school.
Because you’d met this supervisor only once, barely remembered what she looked like—someone else had trained you—the woman you imagined on the other end had gold hair and green eyes. John’s wife, her time—you’d stolen that. Ashamed, you chose the other lie.
“I have problem with my feet, ma’am,” you told her. Broken English in a broken voice. You, Esmeralda, who’d never griped to an employer in your life—even when you stayed late and earned nothing extra.
“I suggest you get them checked, then. There are doctors just for feet, in the big city. Now that you have medical, you can. Not many cleaning jobs around that give you medical, are there, Esmeralda? That’s why there’s always applications on my desk.”
“Of course,” you said.
“I hope the doctor helps you, Esmeralda. But if you can’t continue due to problems with your feet, I need to know. You understand—don’t you?”
“Of course.”
She went on. Words like unacceptable. Like verbal warning.
So you checked yourself into your own kind of rehab. That night, when John turned his chair to look at you, you headed for the window, far from him. The glass squeaked as you rubbed at fingerprints that weren’t there.
“Es?”
“My boss. She could have fired me,” you said. Your night reflection faced you, checkered by the squares of light from other offices.
“That’s my fault,” John said. “I should have woken you. It won’t happen again.”
“No.” A line from Annie, which the Ronson children loved, came back to you. Miss Hannigan putting her girls to work until the orphanage shone like the top of the Chrysler Building. It takes a cruel master to keep cities clean. “It can’t happen again.”
“Es—“
“You know already,” you said, “all the reasons we must
stop.”
For many nights his eyes still followed you. To work, with your head down, while being looked at in this way, took more resolve than anything you’d ever given up for Lent. More will than your first graveyard shift. Your hands shook, as you pushed the vacuum down the corridor, and headaches almost split your skull in half. In time, though, he gave up. In three weeks you were back to nods. Hello and thank you. In another three weeks you were nothing but two workers, in one tower.
WHEN THE SPLINTERING happens—or the splinterings, a million pieces cracking into millions more—when the clouds come pouring through the street, you stare at them for longer than you should.
Your mouth and nostrils burn. A thousand knifepoints prick your skin. Something like sand rattles your hat. But you keep looking till the dust chalks up your eyes.
And then you close them.
The world grows quiet inside you, and outside time, slow as the center of a storm. You hear only your breath against the mask, the way John must have heard his on your dress, that night.
You clutch the shoes and papers to your chest like things you love. As if they’re what you came to save. The bodies running past you, left and right, are a commotion you’re not part of. You’re prepared to let the monster swallow you.
And now you know why saints crave suffering, invite all kinds of pain so they can feel in some small way what Christ, whom they love, felt.
The flood had risen to your neck when you carried Pepe out of the house. So many of the trees had fallen. Those that hadn’t yet were bowing to the ground as if to tell the wind, You win. You sat the baby on your shoulders and marched forward as the water reached your chin.
And then you heard the fibers come apart. Mahentoy, that old giant you had scaled to canvass for your father, started breaking at its base, and just missed you before falling like judgment’s sword. It cleaved your home in half, where, not a minute earlier, you’d found Pepe. You ducked and ran, underwater, for both your lives.
Now two arms grab you by the ribs, knocking your breath out. You are yanked back into time and through the ash on someone else’s feet, your own dangling. You cough, either from his grip around your lungs or from the soot that’s gathered in them. Your hearing’s back. And now it’s clear this roar is bigger than those typhoon sounds from home. The breaking trees; the thunder in the sky; the helicopter’s gun-like patter as it dipped to drop food sacks beside the rescue tent you reached with Pepe, by some miracle; the wave that rose fifty feet high and almost ate your hometown—those are smaller, even taken all together, than this roar, this day.
Your rescuer slams you into an iron fence. His badge is on your shoulder blade, his back a shield against the hail.
The world grows dark. You wonder if you’ve fainted, but you’re fine. You’re conscious. Night has, in fact, descended on this morning.
“Come on,” the voice over your shoulder says. His hand and flashlight lead you down a set of stairs. He has you stand against a wall. Something like a cloud climbs up your windpipe. When the flashlight shines into your face, you think your eyeballs might ignite.
After Pepe crashed his motorcycle, he woke up remembering some Good Samaritan who’d held his head in her lap and pulled the bits of gravel from his face. She left him when the ambulance arrived. My angel, Pepe said, my ghost. He could not forget her voice or her fingertips.
“You’ll be all right down here.” With that, your savior’s flashlight, and the portion of his black sleeve you can see, are gone.
You know you’re not alone. The coughs and sobs and choking sounds of others echo off the station walls. They find your hands and lead you up the platform in the dark.
“HE’S GONE,” YOUR mother said.
The rehab farm had released Pepe with a certificate and a kit of wood-carving tools. You’d bought him an apartment in the city, two hours from the plantation. But Pepe never showed to get his key. The rehab priest discovered money missing from his vault. Weeks later Pepe called your mother from Manila.
“He went to see about a business venture there,” your mother said, “with friends.”
“And you allowed it?” you said. “Don’t you know what business venture means with Pepe?”
“He said replacement parts for small electronics. You don’t think it sounds legit?”
“Do you?”
Your mother isn’t half as dumb as she pretends. “You think I could have stopped him?” she said. “You wouldn’t think so, not if you’d been here these years. He was a child when you last saw him. He might weigh next to nothing now, but there’s no making him do anything.”
That week, the lies you’d told the supervisor came true. Your feet clanged with such misery at work, you might as well have been stepping on glass. The bleach and toilet paper felt like bricks you had to push uphill. Even friends at church noticed a limp. That nurse you knew told you to toss your Keds for clogs that got her through her double shifts. You did. They didn’t help.
John waited by his door that Tuesday night. “You’ve looked so tired,” he said. “Can I help?”
You stepped back, fearing he might reach for you.
“I know I’m not supposed to care,” he said, steering you to the sofa. “Or act on caring, anyway. You don’t have to tell me why you’re sad, either. I have an idea, though: you rest here. I’ll clean the office.”
You almost laugh
ed. “I don’t think so.” And yet the leather felt so cool against your back. Your eyelids sank watching him take the handles of your cart.
Twelve minutes later, you woke with your feet up. John had finished at the window. He stared at the buildings.
“No one builds castles or cathedrals anymore,” he said. “I read that skyscrapers are how cities show off, in our time.”
The next night he was standing by the door again. The next night you removed your shoes. Each time, you fell asleep and woke to John dusting his cabinets or replacing his trash. These naps never lasted more than twenty minutes, but calmed you more than your own bed at night. You lay there—Esmeralda, daughter of the dirt, born to toil in God’s name till your hands or heart gave out—reclining like an infant or a queen, a hundred levels aboveground. Priests had promised you this kind of peace in heaven.
You shall feast on the fruits of your labor, and your works shall follow you.
One of those nights you dreamed about your work. The office floor had thickened into soil, and you were pulling the cleaning cart behind you by your teeth. As the cart grew heavier, you turned and saw Pepe, dropping his woodwork and tools and motorcycle and replacement parts for small electronics into your garbage bag. Your heart rejoiced: you hadn’t seen Pepe in years, and here he was. Visiting you! How did he find you? Still, it dawned on you in this dream that you had to keep walking and could not stop. And Pepe could not follow, only wave goodbye and shrink behind you as you carted his burdens away. You woke in tears, sitting straight up and swiveling your legs as if you’d just remembered an appointment. John was on his knees, dusting the table by the sofa. His gloved hands caught your stockinged feet before they hit the floor.
“Are you all right, Es?”
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