In her ten years in Isabela, nobody had ever told Hero she would be safe. Hero thought she didn’t need those kinds of words, but then, most needs were inconstant things, mutable, malformed and full of shit. Or so she was beginning to figure out. It had been an easy, even welcome thing when she was hard and twenty, shearing her needs down to the bone, making herself into a bulwark, but. Needs weren’t hungers, or longings, or lives; they had nothing to do with the fatty bit of the crab that Teresa sometimes talked about, a Kapampangan dish she’d loved growing up, taba ng talangka, the paste of fat and roe that she used to eat by the spoonful before her father told her she’d have a heart attack at ten if she kept on like that. Teresa was famous among the cadres for her high blood pressure.
Hero couldn’t imagine Teresa at eight or nine, gorging herself on tiny oily crablets, but the fact that Hero couldn’t imagine it said less about Teresa and more about Hero. Teresa had been that girl, too, in another life. No—not in another life. The same one. Hero was starting to figure that out, too.
* * *
Hero got back to the house earlier than usual, accustomed to sneaking into the house long after midnight. She was long used to coming home to an empty house, so she couldn’t stop herself from yelping at the shadowy figure sitting at the kitchen table in the dark.
The shadow said, I was just eating, and Hero turned the light on and it was Paz.
Hero knew her eyes were still swollen, her face blotchy and used. She rubbed at her face, embarrassed; it would be obvious to anyone looking that she’d been crying. Paz wasn’t looking. She was sitting at the table, hands in her lap.
Hero glimpsed something in Paz’s hands; Paz felt her gaze and stiffened. When Paz brought her hands up to her mouth Hero realized she was holding a pair of dentures, the metal wiring glinting around the ivory teeth and viscera-pink base. Hero had never known until that moment that Paz wore dentures. Just before Paz hurried to refit the teeth back into her mouth, Hero saw for the first time what she looked like without them: the denuded rosy gums and the loose curl of her upper lip, collapsing slightly inward and shining with saliva.
When Paz was done, she still didn’t look at Hero. At last, she said: There’s pancit in the ref if you’re hungry.
Hero swallowed, nodded, and went to the refrigerator. She let the cool air settle on her face for a moment while she gathered herself. There was pancit from Gloria next to a plate of old longanisa, the sausages dried up and affixed in their own grease. She opened the freezer and saw the stack of Roni’s microwave pizzas, which Paz had kept buying, even though neither Hero nor Paz ever touched them.
Hero closed the freezer. She took out the pancit and longanisa and microwaved them both. When she put the plates in front of Paz, Paz didn’t move. Hero had to push the plate farther toward her for Paz to jolt awake, blinking. She picked a sausage up with a limp hand and started eating it. Hero followed suit, chewing slowly with a mouth that felt stuffed with gauze. Her eyes itched.
Were you at Adela’s, Paz filled the silence, rather than asked.
Hero looked up at Paz and nodded—and as she nodded, she realized that Paz was sitting in Roni’s customary seat, not her own. The feeling of nodding in that direction gripped Hero with a vivid sense memory of staring at Roni over microwave pizza, startled at a child’s kindness and trying not to cry from it, long before Roni had been anything to her, before she’d been anything to Roni.
Hero wanted to talk about her so badly that her throat felt clogged with it, only she couldn’t manage to shape her tongue to form Roni’s name. So instead she said,
She’s good at what she does. Adela.
Paz formed a mound of longanisa-greased rice with her fingers and nodded warily.
Hero swallowed and continued: The healing, I mean. I think. It was good that. that Roni went to her for so long. I think Adela helped.
Maybe, Paz said, after not saying anything for too long.
It got better, Hero said, trying to fill a silence that was making dread form in her stomach. The eczema got better.
Yes, Paz said, looking down. Hero saw hesitation pass over her face, saw her shake it away and nod. Yes. It got better.
What, Hero said.
Paz shook her head, didn’t say anything, but the glimmer of something that Hero had seen was still rippling there, just beneath the surface of her silence.
What, Hero said again, the worn, lived-in fear in her bones making her bold. What did—what?
Paz kept staring at the table, then finally sighed and looked at Hero, hard.
I started giving her Decadron around her birthday. Before that she only took it every now and then, but she started taking it regularly. I thought you knew.
Decadron, Hero repeated.
Dexamethasone, Paz translated.
Hero knew of it. She’d learned about it in an early pharmacology class that she hadn’t done particularly well in; too many things to memorize, too many long tests. Still, she remembered the name. A gluticosteroid, usually given to cancer patients to manage their symptoms, most commonly as an anti-inflammatory, meant to treat things like edema in the extremities, most common in patients with cancerous tumors, especially in the brain and the spine. It prevented infection-fighting white blood cells from congregating in areas of inflammation, often shutting down signs of inflammation altogether by shutting down the body’s natural immune response. It reduced swelling and soothed autoimmune skin disorders, but patients often became more susceptible to infection with long-term use.
Hero thought about Roni’s bout with the chicken pox over Christmas. Had she been on Decadron by then? Yes, according to Paz. She thought about Roni’s face, the burgeoning beauty of it, emerging from the receding scar tissue. Dexamethasone. Hero knew it made some patients irritable, sometimes insatiably hungry. Taken for years it would likely weaken Roni’s immune system, thin her spine. But the eczema would begin to disappear, at least as long as she took it. Hero didn’t know how Paz administered the drug, pills, or injections; she was certain Roni wouldn’t have had a prescription for it. Was she still taking it in the Philippines, had Pol known about it—Hero didn’t know. Couldn’t know.
Oh, she said.
Whatever Paz heard in that oh made her lips flatten, her face harden. She didn’t have to answer to Hero, and clearly didn’t care for being made to feel like she did, which hadn’t been Hero’s intention at all; she just didn’t know what to say. What would Hero know, really, about being a mother. She barely even knew anything about being a daughter.
Hero thought they were going to end the conversation there and go up to their separate rooms in silence, as usual. She was already pushing the plate of half-eaten longanisa away from her and readying herself to stand up when Paz suddenly spoke again, her voice faintly desperate—Hero realized with a pang that she must not have wanted to be alone yet, either.
The longanisa in Vigan is different.
Hero startled at the abrupt change of subject. Y—es. It’s different. Smaller.
You use vinegar. Sukang Ilocos. It makes it sour. It’s not sweet like the ones you get here.
Hero pulled her plate back toward herself and picked up one of the sausages. No. It’s sour.
Roni will like the longanisa in Vigan, Paz said tonelessly. Hero’s chest lurched. In the same blank voice, Paz went on: She likes things that are asim.
Hero’s teeth tore through the longanisa that she wasn’t tasting anymore. She swallowed before chewing it properly, choked quietly, and took another tasteless bite. Then she said, her voice raising with every word,
You can’t do this. You can’t let him do this.
Tama na, Paz said, low. Enough.
Roni can’t grow up there. She doesn’t belong there. Her life is here, her home is here. Her family is here.
Pol is her family.
Hero almost started laughing, unraveling. And you’re w
hat, nothing?
Both of us want what’s best for Roni, Paz said. She seemed to realize she was still holding a longanisa and put it down, wiping her fingers on the rice.
Pol thinks he can give Roni a better life in the Philippines. Away from—here, from, people like.
Wala akong pakialam, I don’t fucking care! Hero yelled. He took her for his own reasons, he wants to practice medicine again, you said that yourself, what the hell does he care what’s best for Roni? What the hell would he know about what’s best for anybody? Like every other De Vera all he cares about is himself, maybe that’s all he ever cared about—
And who do you think paid for your surgery, Paz replied evenly.
Hero went still.
You think your parents paid? Your mother and father wouldn’t even pick up your Tita Soly’s calls when you showed up at the house. Soly had to ask Pol for the money. Even though he barely had any left, he’d been paying off all of your Tito Melchior’s gambling debts after he died. Pol was the one who told Soly to tell you it was your parents.
* * *
It was sunny, the day Hero was released from the camp. She could feel the sun on her face, warming her neck, even under the hood they’d thrown over her head, making sweat spring up behind her ears and in her armpits. Someone took her by the arm, not that roughly, and guided her into the backseat of what felt like a minivan. It was probably the Ilocano guard, she thought she recognized the shape of his hand, the large ring he wore on his pinky, which once scratched her face from earlobe to chin. She’d thought that scratch would leave a scar, but after a month there was no trace of it. They untied the rope from around her wrists and shoved her out of the car, the last hard touch. There weren’t any final words, no good-byes. She was sure she was being taken to a field, or perhaps just along the side of a not-so-busy road, to be shot and dumped into the nearest ditch. She’d long accepted that inevitable outcome. When death seemed to be running late, she took the hood off herself. Pushed it off, more. She still couldn’t use her thumbs. When she looked around, she didn’t recognize where she was—a disused lot, with just one Dumpster filled with old wooden planks rotten from humidity. In the distance, the shape of what looked like a mall she didn’t recognize, newly built. She didn’t know Manila that well at all.
She’d stumbled toward the shape of the building, down the shoulder of a wide street, the occasional tricycle zooming past her contemptuously. The air around her was heavy and opaque, the damp heat settling on her neck like a shawl. She didn’t know how long it took her to walk. It’d been easier to move in the camp, where she couldn’t move much at all. Now she had to remember how to get from point A to point B again, how to lift her hand when a car came by and look like the kind of hitchhiker a good Samaritan might want to pick up. She’d been holding her numb hand up intermittently the whole way but nobody came for at least an hour, until she drew closer to the mall and the street became busy enough to merit a sidewalk. Just when she felt she would have to sit down to avoid collapsing entirely, a small van half-full of Franciscan nuns in gray habits pulled up to the curb and slid open the door. A man was driving. He was dressed casually; the driver, not a priest. One of the nuns, round with a large mole on her left cheek, said: Saan ka pupunta, hija? Hero, without even thinking about it, answered: Caloocan.
She didn’t remember much of the car ride, only that when someone tried to feed her something that tasted like a sandwich of white bread spread with condensed milk, she gagged and threw up bitter bile, into her own lap. The nun who gave it to her—older, thin-lipped, almost noble in her bearing—asked one of the younger sisters for a towel. Hero tried to apologize, but passed out instead.
When she woke up, they were idling in a gas station in Caloocan, and someone had put a lukewarm wet towel on her forehead. The rounder nun was waiting with a nylon lunch bag open on her lap. There were three boiled eggs and two more of those condensed milk sandwiches, probably the nun’s lunch for that day, and Hero used her palms to devour everything, boorish, licking sticky milk off her wrist when it dripped, gnawing the tasteless bread down to the crusts. She would have eaten the eggshells if the eggs hadn’t been peeled. The older nun reached out to help her, but jumped back when Hero snarled, involuntary. They let her eat alone, the car filling with the farty smell of the eggs.
Afterward, the driver and the nuns said they wanted to bring her to a hospital. The driver’s voice was kindly, accommodating. The kind of person who opened a car door to a gaunt stranger, half collapsed on a Manila street. But Hero shook her head to the kindness. Told them Soly’s address. She still knew it by heart, from writing it down in the dorm registration book, under the title MOTHER’S INFORMATION.
When Soly later escorted her—practically carried her—into a hospital somewhere in Quezon City, a place Hero wouldn’t be able to find again or recognize even if given a map and directions, she’d spun a long, rambling yarn about how Hamin and Concepcion had paid for the surgery, but were still angry with her and wouldn’t talk to her. Paying for the surgery had to mean that their hearts were still open to her, Soly reasoned, and Hero shouldn’t worry, Soly would work on them, they would come around eventually, and the important thing now was to focus on getting better. Hero hadn’t had the presence of mind to say anything back then, and they never returned to the conversation.
Soly had always been angry at Hero’s parents. She’d never been able to hide it. Back then, Hero thought Soly was angry at Hamin and Concepcion because all they’d done was pay for the surgery; no phone calls, no visits, only that. Now Hero understood that Soly had wanted her to believe that her parents had done at least that. She’d wanted to let Hero keep the universe in which her parents had done something.
Hero was grateful that she had already cried earlier in the day with Adela; there was nothing left inside to heave up and crest out of her. There was just a fist of emotion in her chest, but it was too tightly closed to tell just what emotion it was; she figured it was grief, or even just shock, but she knew it wasn’t that, not really. It was close to the feeling of someone finally turning out a light in a room that had long ago been emptied—shelves dustless, floor bare. Every time Pol had asked her if she wanted him to call her parents, Hero had only said things like, They won’t talk to me. When Soly had insisted that she was still trying to get through to them, she’d only said, It’s fine. But she had never told Pol or Soly to stop trying. She had never been able to bring herself to utter that last daughterly lie: I’ve given up on them.
Hero looked up to face Paz, whose mouth was downturned in regret. There were mercies, and there were mercies. The fist loosened.
* * *
You were his favorite, you know.
Hero didn’t reply. Paz got up to go to the cupboards and retrieve two glasses, which she filled with water from the sink faucet. She pushed one glass in front of Hero, who stared at it blankly for a long moment before finally picking it up with both hands.
He thought of you like his daughter. That’s why he named Roni after you.
We’re both named after Lola Geronima.
Paz smiled faintly. He always wanted to name a child after his mother, that’s true. When Manong Hamin beat him to it, he was mad, but I think he gave up on the idea. When he was married to Marcos’s cousin, he said Josefina never liked the name Geronima, anyway. And he loved you so much, anyway, how could he be mad for long?
When Pol found out I was pregnant, he said, I want to name her Geronima, after Nimang. We’ll call her Roni. Paz met Hero’s eyes. At that time, he was sure you were already dead.
At first, I didn’t want to name my first daughter after a woman who died the way Pol thought you died. I thought it was bad luck. But I did always like the name, it sounded. Classy.
And then the way he talked about you—there was never any other option. When she came out we knew it was her name.
Roni wasn’t even in kindergarten yet when Pol found ou
t about you. It was Manang Soly who called and told him—
And here Paz spoke to Hero for the first time in Ilocano since they’d met at the curb outside the Philippine Airlines arrival area of SFO, Paz behind the steering wheel and saying in English, I’m your Tita Paz, then switching seats with Pol so he could be the one to drive them home.
Sibibiag ni Nimang. Nimang is alive.
* * *
They were quiet together again for a long time, rinsed of any remaining will to speak.
Wait here, was the first thing Hero said when the breath returned to her chest.
What, Paz said, but Hero was standing from the table, walking out of the kitchen, and up to her bedroom. When she found what she was looking for, she took them downstairs, sat back in her chair, which was still warm. She put the stained but no longer sticky papers in front of Paz.
I found them in the trash and kept them, Hero said. You should have them.
Paz looked down at the application for Pol’s medical license. She took hold of the edge of the pages gingerly. Her grip became more confident when she turned the pages, saw the newer photo he’d taken.
I never saw this.
He took it before Roni’s birthday.
Ah, Paz said, still frowning down at the picture. Hero reached over to point at the paper underneath the application, the photocopy of Pol’s certificate for passing the board. Paz’s eyes widened.
America Is Not the Heart Page 40