At this, he reared back, looking as if he might slap her. But he stopped, turning his head and gritting his teeth so that his jaw jutted out from the fat fold near his neck.
Engracia put her hand back in the deep pocket of her pants.
“Don’t lie. Please don’t lie.”
“Don’t lie? Why shouldn’t I lie? Who are you to tell me anything? You barge in my house. You show me a gun. You throw me in this room. If I got up now, you would shoot me. You would shoot me! This is respect? This is respecting me?”
Her voice rose hysterically. She stood up, enraged. And the man did not move; he did not make her sit back down. He stood against the wall, several feet from her, and now his shoulders slumped.
Engracia slid the phone from her pocket, and slipped it quietly behind her in the chair.
“Rita.”
“My name is Honorata.”
“Honorata. How could you hate me this much? How could you have done this to me?”
“I do hate you. I hate you! I have always hated you. What do you mean, how could I hate you? I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”
Ms. Navarro was screaming, her hands scrunched into fists, her small body leaping closer at him, like a mongoose at a cobra.
Engracia silently opened the lid of her phone and slid her fingers slowly across the face of the phone. She had to be sure of the button.
The man looked at Ms. Navarro, and tears welled in his eyes.
Engracia stopped what she was doing, just for a second, engrossed by what she was witnessing.
“All I wanted was a family.”
“Well, you can’t buy one. You can’t buy a person.”
“I didn’t buy you.”
“You thought you could buy me. You thought your money, your man, your white, these bought me. You took me from everything.”
He looked at her, still crying, and reached out his hand, as if to touch her arm.
“Don’t touch me!” she screamed. “Don’t touch me! Don’t be in my house. Get away from me! Get away from here!”
“No!” he said. “No. She’s my daughter. She’s my daughter too. I will not leave.”
“How do you know of her?”
“How do I know that Malaya is my daughter? That you hid her from me? That it’s you who had no respect for me?”
“This isn’t true.”
“Of course it’s true.”
Ms. Navarro glared at him.
“It was Malaya who found me.”
Engracia heard the shuddery sound of Ms. Navarro breathing. Otherwise silence.
“I got an email from a teenage girl who said she’d found me on the Internet, and she was pretty sure I was her father.”
Ms. Navarro sat motionless, only the unnatural stillness of her face, her body, belying the shock she felt.
“She sent me a photo.”
“Malaya sent you a picture of herself?”
“A photo of you.”
Ms. Navarro’s jaw tightened. Engracia could feel her rage. So could the man.
“You write to me. You ask me to marry you. You live in my home.” He was angry now. His voice was like a knife, and Engracia’s body lurched; the desire to run was so great.
“And then you win money. And I beg you to stay. But you go. And I let you. I never look for you. I leave you alone.”
The man stopped and looked down. His back shook. It was three times wider than Ms. Navarro.
“And all . . . this . . . time.” He drew the words out slowly. “All this time, you have our daughter.”
“She’s not yours.”
“She’s mine.”
“Malaya’s a young girl. She gets big stories in her head. She even has tattoos. She’s not easy. She thinks you’re her father, I don’t know how she found out about you, but you’re not her father. If she had asked me, I would have told her.”
Engracia thought Ms. Navarro was probably lying, but the man was apoplectic.
“Stop lying!”
“I’m not lying. You haven’t even seen her. You see a photo. She looks half white. You think you’re her dad. You’re not the only white man in the world, you know.”
“Stop lying. Please, Rita, stop lying.”
“I’m not lying.”
Engracia was amazed at her defiance. She had started to calm down. She could think more clearly. The man was angry, but he was not paying any attention to her. Engracia waited to push the button on her phone, thinking she might be able to leave the room; that she might get a chance to tell the operator what was happening. If the police barged in right now, anything could happen. The gun was right there. Engracia had already noticed Ms. Navarro looking at it. Ms. Navarro wanted the gun.
“Do you think I flew out here, barged into your home . . . with a gun . . . because a seventeen-year-old girl thinks I’m her father?”
Honorata did not reply.
“We got tests. Malaya and I. We did the tests. She’s my daughter, and you’ve always known this.”
The air came out of the room. Engracia pushed the button.
In one motion, Ms. Navarro turned, screamed, and lunged at Jimbo’s gun. He was a big man, but quick, and he dodged her easily. He clamped his hand on the gun but did not take it out of his waistband. Ms. Navarro slipped, banging her shin on the table and cracking her side into the chair, as she struggled not to fall. Engracia slid off the chair and made a run for the door.
“Stop!”
She kept going.
“I’ll shoot.”
“Run, Engracia, run!”
She couldn’t see him, didn’t know if he had the gun out. She had her phone; she could hear something on the other end of the line. English. She couldn’t think of any word in English. Taco. Did he have the gun out? Was she going to die? “Gun. Man,” she said, and closed the phone. She wanted to die, but she didn’t want to be shot. She stopped and turned. He did not have the gun out.
“Why didn’t you run? I told you to run!” Ms. Navarro’s face was red with anger.
Engracia looked at the big man. He seemed stunned, just as she felt.
“Did you call someone?” he demanded. “Is that your phone?”
Engracia did not answer. Honorata shrieked, “You’re going to die! You’re going to jail! We’re all going to die! What about Malaya then?”
The man turned pale, and Engracia wondered if he was well. Perhaps he would faint. He would collapse right there. He looked right at Engracia, right into her eyes, and with his big, fat, fleshy hand, he motioned for her to return to the study. She couldn’t think. Her mind was flooded with what was happening, with how she might have been shot, with how she might have made it out the door—would he have shot Ms. Navarro?—with how she still might be shot, with how she wouldn’t have to live. Her heart was pounding, she couldn’t think. He motioned again with his head, and Engracia walked back into the study.
As she did, a memory so vivid came over her that for a moment she forgot there was a man, there was Ms. Navarro, there was a gun. She was in a field with her mother, standing between two neat rows of beans. She had let go of her mother’s skirt, and walked along picking bugs off the leaves and smashing them between her chubby fingers exactly as she had been taught. She was much slower than Mama, in the row just next to her, so when her mother reached the end, she doubled back and walked toward the child, picking off bugs as she went. Each time they met, her mother made the sign of the cross on her forehead and said “Que Dios te bendiga.” Engracia heard her mother blessing her, as clearly as if she were in the room then. And so she knew she would die, because her mother had come to say this blessing again.
She looked around. The man still didn’t have the gun out, but he told Honorata to sit down—that they were all going to sit down. Nobody seemed to know what to do, but Honorata sat, and the man did, and finally Engracia. The three of them looked at one another.
28
He said he had never looked for her. He thought she was in Manila or home in her village. Was t
hat possible? That he’d never looked?
For years, Honorata had trembled anytime she was on the Strip. She had avoided the El Capitan and Caesars Palace. If the newspaper ran a story with a picture of either hotel, if there was mention of the woman who had helped her—June Dibb—she squinted her eyes and tried to make out everyone in the photo; every shadowy person in the background. Was Jimbo there? She didn’t think there was any way the Dibbs could know she was in Las Vegas. The worst part of coming here, of leaving the sad apartment in Los Angeles, had been the risk that somehow Jimbo would find out.
So why had she done it? Why, in that first rush of courage that swept in with Malaya’s birth, had she chosen the one place where Jimbo might also be? She was never going to play Megabucks again. She wasn’t interested in gambling. But all alone in that hospital, sending a message to her mother about her daughter’s birth, it had seemed to her that Las Vegas was the only place where something good had happened. Even before she had won the money, everyone in Vegas had been kind, everyone in the El Capitan had looked at her as if she were a person. She understood that they cared about her because Jimbo gambled a lot of money, but she felt it had been more than this. They had looked at her, and they had been able to guess who she was—what was happening to her—but they had not disdained her. They were kind.
That’s why she decided to move to Las Vegas.
She had never seen any of those people again. She had never once seen anyone she met in those strange days at the El Capitan. Jimbo had not found her—she had changed Malaya’s name, just in case—even though she had always believed he would.
He said he had never come back to Vegas.
He had never been here.
That was why she had never seen him.
And now he was sitting in her house—bigger and older and redder—with a gun jammed in his waistband and a fold of fat flopping over it, smearing sweat on the metal, and she was afraid and she was repulsed, and it didn’t seem possible that he was Malaya’s father. Though of course he was.
An image of Malaya—slim and taut and golden—wearing nothing but a T-shirt and boy shorts formed in her mind. Those boy shorts had astonished Honorata. They’d bought them together, and Honorata had been relieved when Malaya had not even asked to buy the tiny, lacy bits of underwear displayed on the main tables. Instead, she wanted cotton underwear that looked quite modest to her mother, so they had bought them in several colors. But the next Saturday, Malaya had wandered downstairs from her room wearing nothing but those underwear and that cropped shirt, and the boy shorts had been anything but modest.
Malaya was a freshman that year, and Honorata wondered how she had known what those shorts would do for her slim little figure. She saw too, for the first time, the body Malaya would have, how pretty she would be, how that little bit of Jimbo would fill out the curves of her slight bone structure. It was simultaneously pleasing and terrifying. She loved her daughter. She loved her beauty. She was not ready to think of Malaya in this way.
Also, seeing Malaya in those boy shorts had brought back her own adolescence. The wild desire she had felt for Kidlat even before she hit puberty, long before she had the words for what she was feeling. How old had they been? Maybe eleven. Two lean, narrow bodies, hardly different from each other, though one was a girl and one was a boy, and even then, being around Kidlat had set her skin to tingling, her heart to skipping.
They had gotten older, and their bodies had become different, and everyone knew that Kidlat and Honorata were in love, in adolescent love. Holding Kidlat’s hand would make her feel slightly lightheaded, and they would spend the times when they were alone together—which were not that easy to get, because everyone in each of their villages watched them—they would spend that precious time talking and laughing and gasping whenever a hand touched a thigh, or bare toes twisted together. And when they could, they would kiss—such innocent kisses, really—but they would nearly knock Honorata to the ground.
And this is how it had been until Honorata was seventeen, older than Malaya when she came down in the boy shorts, and then Kidlat had gone to Manila with his father, and when he came back four months later, he was not interested in Honorata. He said hello to her coolly and made no effort to talk with her directly, much less be alone with her. It was crushing. She wanted to die. She couldn’t understand it, and finally, one day when they met accidentally, she blurted out, “Kidlat, what happened? Why don’t you want me anymore?” And Kidlat looked embarrassed, just for a moment, and then he said that he was not a boy; that in Manila he had been with a woman, really been with her, and he wasn’t interested in Honorata anymore. He was trying to find a way to move to Manila.
It was unimaginable, what Kidlat had said.
He had been with a woman? Her Kidlat?
How could he have done this? It was horrible. It was a sin. It was disgusting to imagine. It could not be imagined. For weeks, she grieved, and she did not eat, and she avoided seeing Kidlat, and her nanay kept asking, “Honorata, what happened? Is it that boy? That Kidlat? Forget that boy.”
She had not forgotten him.
When she saw him again, he was preparing for the Imbayah Festival, lying on his back and leg wrestling with a friend. There was a group of boys watching, and everyone was laughing. When Kidlat won three in a row, he jumped up, and the boys yelled, “Imbayah! Imbayah!” while he grinned and slapped his friend on the back, the other boy smiling even though he had lost. Kidlat spied her watching, and, giddy as he was with winning, he came over to her. Then he waved away the younger boys, and after a few moments, she and Kidlat walked down the road and toward the green fields alone.
Honorata shook away this memory.
How could she be thinking of Malaya’s pubescent body, of her own first delirious forbidden ineffable experience of a man, there in the field with Kidlat, after months of not talking, not touching, months of imagining him with someone else, her heart so broken and then so full? Even now, it was a memory that could engulf her. And Malaya? Malaya in the boy shorts? That had been only the beginning. The boy shorts seemed innocent now, compared with the rainbow hair, the black clothes, the tattoos: all these ways that her daughter did not look exactly desirable—at least not to Honorata—but did look dangerous, the opposite of innocent.
Malaya’s father knew none of this. He was not part of her life.
She would not let him see Malaya.
No matter how much Jimbo frightened her, no matter what he did, she would protect her daughter. She would die here in this room, she would die, but she would not let him see Malaya. She would not let this man, this man who had haunted her thoughts, this man whose badness must be why Malaya had the peculiar hair, the serpent tattoo; she would not let this man see her daughter.
She felt sorry for the maid. Why did she have to be here today? Why was the world like this, that today, of all days, the maid should be here when Jimbo finally found her?
29
Coral had not gone in to school. She’d caught something when they were in Japan and wanted to shake it before Koji and the boys got home on Friday. The time change would be hard for them, and they hadn’t done the homework they’d brought along. Gus was already worried about whether his coach would ever let him play again. There wasn’t anything to be done about it. Koji’s brother was very ill, and they couldn’t wait for summer to see him.
Coral and Koji hadn’t been prepared for how hard Isa would take this news. Coral thought the fact that their uncle lived so far away would buffer the boys a bit; that Koji’s brother being ill would not upset them too much. But Isa, the namesake, was upset. He said he didn’t want to be the only Isamu Seiko in the family, which was a funny way to put it, and Coral had been careful not to smile. It moved her that her youngest child would feel so deeply for Koji’s brother. They were good kids, these labrapuggles of hers, avid for baseball and video games, at ease talking hip-hop with their cousin Trey or politely raising their hands to ask a question in Japanese at the gakuen on Saturd
ays. Would they remember her mama? Augusta had loved them so much. Coral wanted them to remember her; she could barely stand that Augusta had not seen Gus puffing out his cheeks to blow on his trumpet or Isa playing with Althea’s new puppy.
At five o’clock in the morning, Coral had turned off her alarm, called into the automatic message that notified the district to find a sub for her, and fallen into a thick, anxious sleep. By nine, her room was flooded with light and warm, even though they had replaced the air conditioner last month—one of many repairs—and while she knew she needed the sleep and would feel better for it, she did not feel better right then. She forced herself awake, and then wrenched free of the hot, wrinkled sheets. With her head clogged and heavy, she sucked in a deep gulp of air. A hot shower would help, but she didn’t have the energy to take it. She’d make some coffee, lie on the couch, try to rest.
Coral turned off her phone, so that she wouldn’t start reading her email, and tossed it in a basket on the shelf. It took half an hour to make coffee and a piece of toast, distracted as she was by everything lying uncared for in the kitchen. They had left for Japan quickly, and when she got back, she had spent every minute at the school, trying to get things ready for last night’s music program.
Her body ached, and she moved slowly. On an ordinary morning, Coral would make oatmeal for breakfast, pack three lunches, and start something for dinner, all before seven. She and Koji alternated kitchen duty: on his weeks, he packed the boys’ lunches carefully the night before and picked up fresh food from the market for dinner.
Even thinking about a normal routine made her tired. She walked over to lie down on the couch and then drifted in and out of sleep all morning, her raspy cough jerking her awake now and then. Coral finally got up to take a shower around one, and felt better after. She rubbed her body with a silky lotion, something that usually took too much time, and slipped on her favorite cotton pants, a soft old T-shirt, and flip-flops. She looked around the living room. There was Trey’s guitar, and Coral thought of him, on the night before they left for Japan, showing Gus how to play a funk riff on an acoustic.
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