Mystère had its own lobby, filled with locals for this performance. Coral saw Althea’s boss Ed near the bar with a woman who looked like she couldn’t be twenty-one. Some Cirque performers, wearing skin-tight suits in green and orange and black, catapulted off the stairs leading to the balcony seats, and there was a little scurry of movement when Kevin Costner walked in. Koji excused himself and came back with a glass of white wine for her. She had barely started it when the doors opened, and people rushed to see the theater.
Inside, the room was filled with giant, abstract shapes in dark blues and greens. Coral craned her neck, looking to see what was above and behind. Koji pointed out the largest drum, the ō-daiko, high above their heads. He said it weighed a thousand pounds. All around her, she could hear the chatter of other people pointing out one inventive detail after another. They had excellent seats, and Koji smiled at her pleasure.
“Americans are so brash. They have fun. I love it.”
“Well, I don’t know if Vegas is very typical of America.”
“I think it is. I think it feels quintessentially American.”
“When I lived in California, my friends didn’t like Vegas. Most of them said they’d never even come here—’cept maybe to see me.”
“I bet they’d like to see this.”
“Yeah. I mean, people visit from all over the world.”
Koji grinned. “Yes. We do.”
There was a reception after the show, and Koji had been invited. Coral was uncomfortable there. She hadn’t realized Koji would know so many people, and she felt conspicuous; not Coral out on a date with the friend of a friend, but a young black woman on the arm of a Japanese businessman. It made her self-conscious. She excused herself to find a restroom, and coming back, she saw Marshall Dibb.
She knew who he was, of course. He was running the El Capitan now, with his mother. She tried to ignore the presence of the Dibbs in Las Vegas; told herself she had no reason to know anything about June or Marshall. From time to time, a story ran in the paper. The El Capitan was a classic, and the Dibbs kept it up even though the big casinos were corporations now, and everyone said the small resorts were on their way out.
Odell Dibb had been dead a long time.
Still, technically, this was her brother.
Marshall was fair and tall, and Coral was slight and dark. He looked like his father. Which meant that she probably looked like her mother, and even now, this thought hurt. But Coral had seen Marshall on the local news, she had studied him once when they were in the same restaurant. And as before, she saw herself in the way he moved, in something about how he was jointed, in the shape of his ears, in the way his hair lifted off his forehead. It wasn’t a resemblance a stranger would remark on, but it was unmistakable if one knew.
Marshall Dibb looked her way and smiled. He must have noticed her staring. She smiled back awkwardly and turned abruptly, looking for Koji. He was nearby, watching her.
“You’re not having fun?”
“Of course I am. It was an amazing show. The music, the drums, they were incredible.”
“But now, here, you’re not having fun.”
“I’m ready to go home.”
“I’ll call the car.”
“Thank you.”
In bed that night, Coral pulled a pillow over her head and tried not to think about Marshall Dibb.
How could he be her brother?
She felt no connection to him. He didn’t know she existed. And here they were, in the same small town if you were a local, and she might be running into him for the rest of her life.
Seeing Marshall made her feel like she didn’t have a home. Las Vegas was his town. He was practically royalty. Son of a casino family. Still, it was her town too. She’d grown up here. Where else would be home?
And that old feeling, that deep pressing emptiness, rushed back. The sense that she didn’t have a place, that she didn’t belong, that she had somehow been cut adrift when she was four days old, and also that, somewhere, someone wanted something from her.
“I’m a Jackson. I’m a Jackson as much as Ada and Althea and Ray Junior. Augusta Jackson is my mother.” It was ridiculous to say these things aloud, and yet doing so made her feel better.
Would she ever tell Marshall Dibb her story?
Would she ever sit down with him and say, “I think you’re my brother”?
And what would be his reply? Would he see the proof in her walk, in her ears, in the rise of her hair?
Could he know that she might exist? Could someone have told him?
That was the thing. She didn’t care if Marshall Dibb ever knew who she was. She didn’t want him for a brother. She didn’t want to live in Las Vegas as the bastard black child of a casino pioneer. She had thought through this scenario before, and while Althea and Ray Junior and Ada now knew everything that she and Augusta did, nobody else knew. Augusta had kept her secret for her, and if she could have a life in Las Vegas—a life separate from the mystery of her birth; a life that was hers and had nothing to do with the Dibbs; with all the people that would find her birth fascinating, a story worth telling, even a story about Vegas—if she had any chance to live free of that, it was possible because Augusta had kept this secret so well. Augusta and Odell.
But what if Marshall did know she existed? Or knew she might?
What if Marshall was the one person in the world who might know who she was?
Over the years, Coral had come close to contacting Marshall. She knew odd bits of information about him: the telephone number at his office, that he had bought a home the year after she bought hers, that he wasn’t married, that he played in a recreational baseball league. She didn’t want to know these things about him—didn’t want to think of Marshall Dibb at all—but each time she had considered reaching out to him, each time she had prepared herself for what he might say, she had learned a little more. And every time, she had changed her mind. There was more to lose than there was to win. Why would Del Dibb have told Marshall about her, if he had worked so hard to keep her a secret all these years?
Still, the desire to know something about the woman who had given birth to her never quite went away, and remembering Marshall Dibb’s casual smile in her direction made her scrunch the pillow down on her head and kick her feet, and finally stand up and find a movie and slip it into the VHS. There was the whir of the tape being pulled into the machine, and the clicking sound of it dropping into place, and then the film started: North by Northwest. It would be as good as anything else right now.
20
Going home was not as Honorata had imagined it would be. It took two days to get to Manila, and when she arrived, the airport smelled of gumamela, which made her think of Jimbo’s house instead of the bubble paste that she and the other children had once made from its flowers. She panicked in the airport—tired and dehydrated, of course—but more and more, she found she couldn’t settle down, she couldn’t rest still, she was stricken with moments of coursing emotion, when she felt she had to bolt, or scream, or twist the neck away from the head of an animal. These moments were terrifying in their suddenness and in their violence, but nothing she tried made them easier. Honorata found an empty room down a long hallway, and there she put her head between her knees.
From Manila, she took a jeepney to Mayoyao. When it stopped to pick up passengers in San Jose City, she got out and threw up in the bushes. She shuddered there until the driver honked, and then she wiped her mouth with some leaves and stumbled back onto the jeepney. It smelled of sweat and lumpia and cassava and garlic. Some children at the back argued about who was sitting by the window, and a group of young girls experimented with lipstick in purple and magenta and black.
Everything leapt at her: the colors, the smells, the sounds. After San Jose City, the brightly painted bus began to climb into the mountains, and the fields were so green, the sky so blue, the air so soft; it was even more beautiful than she remembered. And yet already Honorata felt strange. She was wearin
g pants, and the other women were wearing skirts. She wanted to lean out the window and look down the valleys—see the road hanging off the side of the mountain, and the river far below—but she could hardly keep her eyes focused on the seat in front of her. She felt sick. She didn’t want to throw up again, and every lurch and jostle of the jeepney threatened the possibility.
She had not told her mother she was coming, because she didn’t want her uncle to know. She hoped that he would not be in the village; that he would be in Manila. It hurt to think of him in the city, what he did, the women he found, the letters he had someone write for them. But she could not do anything about her uncle. She had traveled without stopping for days, and she wanted Nanay.
The jeepney let her off about a mile from her village. Honorata started to feel better as she walked the familiar route, even if her suitcase felt heavy. Coming around a bend, she saw her uncle standing with two other men. She stared at him, but to her surprise, he did not acknowledge her. He turned and left the path, and she did not see him again while she was in Buninan.
She had come to take her mother back with her. This is what she had decided. This is why she had come so far, so abruptly, without telling anyone she was coming, without stopping to rest, without stopping to think about what had happened in the middle of one night, in a casino, in Las Vegas, in America, in a place impossible to describe or quite to remember now that she was back home, in a world entirely green and quiet and fresh. If her mother was with her, Honorata would know what to do.
But her mother was not ready to leave her home, not ready to cross an ocean when she had never been more than fifty feet off its shore, and even that was only once, when she had traveled very far, perhaps a hundred miles, to the sea. In Honorata’s lifetime, her mother had never been to Manila. She did not want to go with her to the United States.
Still, what her mother knew, she knew well.
She knew instantly that Honorata was pregnant, which is how Honorata knew that it was true.
She knew quickly that Honorata would not return to Buninan.
She understood that the baby was not Kidlat Begtang’s, and that it belonged to a different world.
She could not know what her brother had done—she might never believe this—but she knew somehow that Honorata should not see her uncle.
And in knowing that, everything was settled.
Because one could not live there and not be fully of the family. She could not live near her mother and avoid her uncle. There wasn’t any way to separate family like this.
Perhaps in her mother’s mind, the choice that Honorata had made so many years before—to leave Buninan with the boy from the village across the fields—was the only choice that mattered. Everything else came of it, and her mother, who had never lived anywhere but Buninan, accepted that life was to be played forward. She taught her daughter this.
But Honorata’s mother didn’t know everything. Honorata had not left the village, the place where her father’s bones were kept, because she had been rebellious or unhappy. She had never dreamed of going away as a girl, and she hadn’t wanted any other life than the one she had known. She had run away to Manila because one day she had gone into a field with Kidlat—one day she had made a sudden and unexpected and defining choice: so human, so universal, so absolute in its impact—and after that, there had been no way back to the life she had lived or intended to live. The life with which she would have been happy.
Of course, another girl would not have had to leave. These things happened, even in Buninan. They were an ordinary fact of life: perhaps Honorata was one of the few girls unaware of this. But other girls had not fallen in love with this boy. Kidlat had an uncle who had lived in America. He had a cousin who had been to Jamaica, and a friend who worked in Taiwan. Kidlat was not willing to play his part in the village script: the one that would have allowed Honorata that afternoon in the field. Kidlat would not marry Honorata and take her home to his village. If Honorata wanted, she could come to Manila with him. They could have a new life there. That was the option he offered.
So she, the precious only daughter, the one who had never wanted to leave, she, Honorata, thick with regret, with longing, in a kind of shock but also wild with desire, with love, with the feel of Kidlat’s touch as vivid in her mind as it had been on her skin—insatiable skin—Honorata had followed Kidlat to Manila. And everything that came after, all of it—the tiny apartments; the city friends; the nights wondering where Kidlat was, and if he would come home bruised or even, once, burned; the movie; the bakery; her uncle; the flight to Chicago; Jimbo; the El Capitan; the coins clinking in the plastic bucket; the lights whirling and horns sounding when all the wheels spun to the same Megabucks logo (lucky Honorata—Honosuerte); the young men, drunk, running toward her in their polo shirts; the baby (not Kidlat’s) now inside her—all of it, came from that instant. It was that instant after she’d thought Kidlat had stopped loving her, after he had gone to Manila when they were seventeen and come back wanting nothing to do with her, after she had mourned losing him, and then bumped into him, and neither had expected to see the other, and their attraction was so strong, their bodies drawing nearer—as if they were each on one of those moving walkways she had not yet known existed—angling toward each other, magnets propelling to their own fates, their shoulders actually bumping when they finally met, so out of control of their forward movement to each other that they did not quite recognize when they had reached the same spot. They had bumped and then turned and walked forward, shoulder not quite grazing shoulder, elbows not quite touching, and casual words spoken: “I haven’t seen you.” “Will you be at the festival?” And before them, the field, so green, so silent, and nothing else said and nothing else thought, but knowing nonetheless where they were going and what they would do, even if the actual words would have startled her and stopped her and sent her to a different fate entirely.
After a few weeks, Honorata left the village. She had sobbed, wanting her nanay to come with her, and her nanay had held her tightly. It was true, she agreed, Honorata must go to America, but no, she would not go with her. She would not walk onto a plane, fly across an ocean, speak a language she did not know. It was not possible for her in the same way that living where she could see her uncle was not possible for Honorata. Somehow the world had dropped between them—Honorata and Nanay—and how it had happened did not matter. Life could not be reversed.
In the days after Honorata accepted that this was true, at least for now, everything about her time in the village felt precious. She sat underneath the wooden floor of her mother’s home, her back against one of the four thick trunks that held the house well above the ground, and remembered the games she had played there. At night, the rain fell softly on the grass roof. She walked about touching things, smelling them, rubbing against her cheek the dented pot her mother used for cooking and tasting the leaves of the bush with purple flowers. She did not know when she would return to Buninan or who she would then be. As she left her village, as she walked along the road to catch the jeepney, sipping the salabat her mother had said would ease the sickness, she imprinted every sensation: the shape of branches against the sky, the smell of rice growing, and the sounds: of birds, of children playing luksong-baka, of a cloud rat startled from its branch. In Chicago, she had heard the whistle and chug of busses, the honk of car horns. In Las Vegas, there had been clanking and bells, the crashing of coins into trays.
From Buninan, Honorata went first to a hotel in Manila. Not a grand hotel in Makati or Ortigas, but still her room was big and there was no garbage piled next to the building. At night, the shops closed, and the streets were quiet. She stayed there another week, looking for Kidlat, trying to find out where he had gone, if anyone was in touch with him. Finally, she found Rosauro, who told her that Kidlat had gone to Mindanao, that he was headed to Davao City, or perhaps he had changed his mind and found a way to Palawan.
Rosauro had been with Kidlat when he had found out what happened
to Honorata. Kidlat had shouted and said he would hurt her uncle, but they both knew that he would not hurt him. Kidlat and Rosauro already knew what her uncle did in the city; they had known for a long time, but Kidlat hadn’t thought there was any reason for Honorata to know. Nobody had imagined that her uncle could do what he did. Did Honorata need anything? Rosauro asked. Kidlat was his kuya. He would do anything for Honorata.
She left Manila the next day.
She had not given up on bringing her mother to the States, and she thought that her nanay would come eventually, after the baby was born, after she accepted what her brother had done to her daughter. But Honorata had given up on finding Kidlat. Too much had happened; it had been a mistake to want to find him. Perhaps she had thought that Kidlat would persuade her to stay in Pilipinas, perhaps she had thought he would have a way to shield her from her uncle, perhaps she had imagined the life they would live with all her money. But seeing Rosauro brought it back: the way it was, not the way she pretended. There was the movie, what had happened, that she had done it for Kidlat, and that he had then left. There was her uncle, there were the months with Jimbo, and, strangely, there was the woman who had helped her in Las Vegas. All of this made not just Buninan, but even Manila—not just her village, but even Kidlat—wrong for her.
The Honorata who had lived in Manila did not exist anymore. Sitting on the edge of the bed, in that clean hotel room larger than any apartment she could have imagined a year ago, Honorata shook with this idea. For an instant, her teeth clenched, her muscles contracted, she wanted to strike something, she wanted to hit someone, she would not be able to bear it; the anger was a cold-hot rush of necessity. Then she inhaled, once, twice, she put the thought carefully aside, she unfolded her fingers and closed her eyes. She sat perfectly still for a long time.
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