Excel rejoins them. Maxima lets go of Jerry and dabs away tears (are they real? Excel can’t tell), then urges Jerry on his way, to make sure he doesn’t miss his flight. “I’ve got plenty of time,” he says, “I’ll walk you to the security checkpoint.”
Excel looks at Maxima. Maxima looks at the floor. The plan was for Jerry to go to the domestic terminal, then for Maxima and Excel to meet Roxy at the curb of the international. They were never meant to go anywhere near security. “Well, darling, mahal”—Maxima takes a few slow breaths like she’s biding her time to find an escape—“if you don’t mind, then thank you.”
They walk slowly toward the security checkpoint. Maxima and Excel say good-bye once more to Jerry, then walk to the end of the line.
In their blue shirts and badges, the TSA agents look like cops. The first one they encounter is an older white lady who looks like she’s just woken from a nap. Like the passengers ahead, Maxima shows her passport and boarding pass to the agent, who glances them over, nods and waves her through. The same thing happens for Excel.
“That wasn’t so bad,” he says.
“We’re not done,” Maxima says, and he sees what she sees: the long line twisting toward two TSA agents checking boarding passes, scanning passports.
The line moves slowly, but by the time they round the first bend, Jerry is still there, standing next to a recycling bin, watching. Maxima smiles and waves, motions for him to go. He doesn’t.
The line pauses. Excel counts the number of passengers separating them from the security agents—seventeen. “What do we do?” he asks Maxima, but she doesn’t answer, just wipes sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. She’s flustered, a little panicked. “Maybe we should step out of line,” Excel whispers, “tell Jerry our flight’s been delayed, or got canceled.”
“Don’t talk,” she say, “just let me think.”
The line moves again, only fourteen passengers ahead of them.
Excel turns around, sees Jerry in the same spot, arms folded and face perfectly calm, like he knows what’s to come.
Maybe they’re the ones being conned.
Ten passengers now and reality hits even harder: they are TNTs with fake passports, fake boarding passes, fake names, and mere feet away from TSA agents. “Next in line,” one calls out, “next in line,” and Excel wants to run, but Maxima has her head down, eyes closed and lips moving, just barely. If they stay in line, if they actually meet the agents face-to-face, what happens? Will they take them away together? Question them in separate rooms to see who’s telling the truth? To see who’s the better liar? Six people are ahead, time is running out, and Excel knows he’s the reason this is happening.
Maxima raises her head. Whatever her orasyon was, it’s done. “Just follow me,” she says.
“Tickets out, passports ready,” an agent shouts. Excel looks at his passport, at his picture; he looks the way he imagined he looked at the Greyhound station, when the attendant said he was too young to travel alone.
The line moves. Maxima and Excel are next. The security agent, a red-haired guy with a bushy mustache, calls Maxima over. She steps forward but accidentally drops her purse, her makeup, keys, and wallet spilling out. She bends down to gather the mess, looks up at the passenger behind Excel and says, “Please, go ahead of us.”
She puts everything back in her purse, stands up straight. The other security agent waves her over. Before she steps away, she takes Excel’s hand, her grip so tight it’s as though she means to hurt him or simply never let go.
Maxima goes forward. The agent is an older Filipino man, slightly hunched with gray slicked-back hair. “Kumusta, po,” she says, nodding respectfully. She hands him her documents, leans in close, says something at a level just above a whisper. At first, she looks like she’s exchanging pleasantries, paying respects to an elder. But then the agent glances over at Excel, up and down like he’s evaluating him, then looks back at Maxima, does the same. It’s over, Excel thinks, we’re done.
The agent looks at Maxima’s documents. He scans her passport, the pages not quite touching the glass, then lets her through. He waves Excel forward, does the same.
Excel looks up at the old man. “Go on,” the agent says, then calls over the next passenger in line.
Maxima and Excel do what everyone else does: they remove their shoes, wallets, and belts, set them in trays and load them onto the conveyer belt, followed by their bags. They go through the body scanners—Maxima first, then Excel—then retrieve their things on the other side. Excel looks back through the crowd, through the long, winding line of passengers, and there is Jerry, waving good-bye and smiling, knowing his investment is safe.
THEY WALK TO A BENCH AND PUT ON THEIR SHOES AND BELTS, TUCK their passports and boarding passes into their bags. Hunched over, hands on knees, Maxima looks out of breath, lines of hair pasted to her forehead with sweat, like she’s just gone twelve rounds with The Bod.
“Did that just happen?” Excel says. Like in a movie, he feels as if he could laugh and cry at once. “What did you tell that guy?”
“I told him”—she shuts her eyes and thinks, like the moment happened years instead of only minutes before—“I told him we’re just trying to get home. That’s all.”
“We got lucky.”
“Not lucky. Joker was watching over us, believe me.”
“Joker?”
“Who else? He took us in, and now he took us through. He’s always with us, Excel, believe it. Next time we visit him, you tell him thank you.”
Whether she’s right or not, Excel promises he will.
MAXIMA CALLS ROXY AND EXPLAINS WHAT HAPPENED, ARRANGES to meet at the curb in an hour, same place as yesterday. For now, the safest thing to do is stay inside until Jerry’s flight finally takes off. “I’m not taking any chances,” Maxima says.
They walk around, go in and out of gift shops. “Key chains, magnets, coffee mugs, ugly T-shirts,” she says. “What kind of pasalubong is that?”
Starving suddenly, they check out the food court, buy a ham sandwich and bag of Fritos to split. Every table is taken, so they decide to eat at their departing gate—94, according to the monitors—and walk farther into the terminal. They reach the gate, find all the seats occupied, the entire area overflowing with passengers, nearly all of them Filipino.
Maxima and Excel take two seats at gate 93, directly across. “I’m so close,” she says. “What if I go over there? What if I try to get on that plane?” He thinks she means it playfully, the way a person does when entertaining impossible things. But when he looks at her, she seems both hopeful and hopeless at once, her eyes unblinking as she stares at the people waiting to depart.
“We’ve made it this far,” he says. “Let’s not push it.”
“That flight I took, Manila to here, nineteen years ago”—she shakes her head, amazed at the thought—“that was my first flight. Maybe my last.”
“You don’t know that,” Excel says.
A small girl with pigtails charges toward them like she means to leap into their laps. Maxima hunches over and waves. The girl stops, laughs, hurries back to her parents. “Lots of families,” she points out, “lots of couples. It’s nice, that they can fly together.”
“It must have been tough,” he says, “coming here alone.”
“I wasn’t alone.” She looks over at him. “You were there, too.”
He splits the sandwich, gives Maxima the bigger half.
“I talked with Jerry last night,” she says. “He’ll give us the money. For Perfecto’s schooling. For Perfecta’s sad life. For all their problems.”
Excel doesn’t feel victorious—he didn’t expect to—but there’s no relief either, no sense of accomplishment. They simply got work done. “So he sends the money. What happens next?”
She shrugs. “I disappear. You disappear. That’s how it works.”
“What if he tries to track us down? For that kind of money—”
“That kind of money’
s not much for him, believe me. He’ll just think you and me were a big mistake, that we’re not the best kind of people. And then he moves on.”
He imagines Jerry boarding his own flight soon, looking back on the past day, already making plans for the next time they meet.
They finish the sandwich, the Fritos. Maxima crumples the cellophane and napkins into a ball, throws it at a trash can across the way, makes it in. “The good thing is, you can pay that professor back.”
“For sure,” he says, “right.”
Maybe it’s guilt, maybe it’s just exhaustion. Maybe it’s the fact that they somehow managed to achieve the impossible, and are sitting side by side in an actual airport terminal. Maybe the lie of the past day is finally too much, and he just needs to speak some truth. “There’s no professor,” he says. “I do owe money, a lot of it, but there’s no professor.” He tells her about a place in the desert where he lived for nine months (he doesn’t name it), how he accidentally burned the most important part of it down. But he says nothing about Sab’s pregnancy, or the remote possibility that he could have been a father, and Maxima a grandmother. For now, that’s too much truth to tell.
“When I left,” he says, “I told you it was a couple months. I lied. I wasn’t planning to come back.” He doesn’t look her in the eye, but he can tell that she’s not angry, not even fazed. She’s just listening. “I meant to be gone. Forever.”
“I knew you weren’t coming back,” she says. “You’re angry at me. For lots of reasons.”
Maxima has done so much—too much—for him already. It seems unfair, even cruel, to tell her more.
“Since Joker,” he says. He stares straight ahead through the windows, at the airplanes just beyond. “I’ve been angry since then. I think, sometimes”—he wants the right words but none exist, so he simply speaks—“that you let him die. You could’ve called 911 when we were still at the apartment. I wanted to do it, but you were the adult. You should’ve been the one. And then you made us act like strangers while they took him away, and then he was gone.” He turns to face Maxima, finally. “I’m saying a terrible thing, but it’s what I think is true. You let him die to save yourself.”
He has no idea how she’ll respond. She could slap him; she could weep. She could get up and walk away. But she just reaches over and straightens his collar, moves a strand of hair away from his face. “Not to save me,” she says. “To save you.” Her voice is steady, almost peaceful. “I did it to save you. That was Joker’s last request.”
“What do you mean?”
“Protektahan ang bata. ‘Protect the child.’ His last words. He was scared they’d take you. Separate us. We owed him everything, and in the end, that’s what he wanted. I couldn’t deny him that. You’re the future. You have to be saved.”
“Saved? For what?”
“Not this.” She looks away toward the other gates, at all the passengers waiting to fly. “I’m sorry it’s not a better life. When we came, I thought it was the best I could give.”
“Do you still think it is?”
She looks back at him, her face troubled and hopeful, mostly uncertain. “It could be.”
A voice on the PA system announces that Philippine Airlines flight 72, service from San Francisco to Manila, will now begin boarding at gate 94.
The people rise. They double-check passports and boarding passes, some nervously cross themselves with pre-flight prayers, but everyone is excited and ready, talking all at once, their voices a chorus of background noise, atmospheric, almost unnoticeable. But when Excel really listens, two words come through, not quite familiar, but he thinks he understands: umuwi and uuwi, the people say. Going home, coming home. As though everyone has two places where they belong.
31
In three days, and as promised, Jerry wires Maxima the money. “Twenty thousand,” Maxima says. “He was more generous than I thought.”
“We only took what we need, right?” Excel asks.
“And some extra. But he was fine with it.”
Everything with Jerry is in the past now. Maxima deleted Perfecta’s profile from Fil-Am Catholic Hearts Connections, the website where they met, Perfecta’s e-mail account, too. Excel has no doubt that Jerry will be fine—positive thinking will get him through anything—but he imagines Jerry searching for Perfecta and Perfecto online, Googling their names, looking for faces that match their own. He wonders when Jerry will call off the search, at what point he’ll understand that they were no one, just two made-up people he’d known for a handful of weeks and met in person, just once, in San Francisco.
But a few times, Excel checks Perfecto’s e-mail, just in case Jerry has written; he’s always a little disappointed to see he hasn’t. Once, he actually clicks the Compose button, and when the empty New Message box appears, he types, “Dear Sir Jerry,” and pauses, thinking of the things Perfecto would mention: his studies, recent volcano eruptions, the kinds of ships in a bottle he’s recently seen online and hopes to one day build. But the e-mail he composes in his head always begins with an apology for what they’d done, ends with a confession of who he really is.
He deletes the e-mail, then deletes Perfecto’s account.
Z is Excel’s priority now. Z has a passport, has been in contact with his daughter in Serbia, who’s eager for his return. Getting Z home is a matter of timing, of making sure Gunter doesn’t find out or get in the way. Excel considers asking Maxima for help; if trouble comes up, he knows, with 100 percent certainty, that she’ll get him out of it. But she’s helped him enough already. He can figure this out on his own.
The next day at The Pie, Excel sneaks away from his greeting post and meets Z outside the service door. He asks him again, in the simplest, most direct English: “Do you want to go home?”
“Yes,” he says, “unquestionable,” a new word used perfectly.
THEY WAIT UNTIL SATURDAY, THE BUSIEST DAY AT THE PIE. EXCEL isn’t scheduled to work, but he shows up in a taxi just past noon, when nonstop birthday parties have Gunter running back and forth between the dining room and the kitchen. Excel has the driver pull around the back, where Z stands waiting, dressed in his Pie shirt, a brown sports coat slung over his arm, backpack at his feet.
Excel gets out, takes Z’s backpack, opens the door for him. “Ready?” he asks, and Z says, “Let’s go.”
Before the airport, they stop by the Serbian cemetery in Colma, though the driver seems annoyed by the detour; pulling over to the curb, he says, “Meter’s running, FYI,” his tone gruff, mouth open as he chews his gum. “Give us fifteen minutes,” Excel says, helping Z out the door, “or however long we need, okay?” Hearing himself, he thinks he sounds confident, maybe cocky, but after all that’s happened these past few months, he might be tougher than he thinks.
He walks with Z to the end of a brick pathway. “I’ll wait here,” he says, “take your time.” Z looks down the row, his son’s grave at the very end. He takes a breath, straightens up and clenches his fists like he’s summoning strength, however much he needs to tell his son good-bye.
THEY STEP OUT OF THE TAXI IN FRONT OF THE LUFTHANSA SIGN AND walk into the international terminal. Twice in one week, Excel thinks, and I still go nowhere. He’s not bothered by it. For now, it’s just a fact.
They approach the Lufthansa counter, and before they get in line, Excel makes sure Z has brought all he needs for the flight in his backpack—one change of clothes, some bananas and cashews for the plane, a toothbrush—few enough items so that Gunter wouldn’t have been suspicious of what Z brought to The Pie that morning. Excel reaches into his own backpack, pulls out an envelope and gives it to Z. “Two thousand dollars,” he says. “Enough for a ticket, and something to save.” Maxima gave him the cash a few days before, in advance of Jerry’s deposit. He felt a little guilty, telling her he needed it for a cashier’s check, a first installment in paying back Hello City. But if there’s ever a good reason to lie, this is it.
They get in line, quickly reach the count
er. Z asks for a one-way ticket on the four p.m. flight to Belgrade, shows the agent his passport. After lots of clicking, typing, and entering data, the ticket costs $820, and Excel has no idea if that’s reasonable or not. Either way, it’s the price of going home.
In less than fifteen minutes, Z has his boarding pass, which he tucks between pages in his passport. Excel envies Z’s ability to fly, to arrive somewhere new and, if that place ends up being a mistake, to turn around and go back. One day, he thinks, maybe.
Together, they walk to the security checkpoint and stop at the entrance. “I can’t go any farther,” Excel says to Z. “You’ll be okay, the rest of the way?”
Z says he will.
“I wish things had worked out better for you,” Excel says.
Z shrugs, but smiles, too. “America good, America bad,” he says. “The life is like that.”
Excel nods, says it’s true.
“And I am sorry for my grandson. He is . . .” Z struggles for a word, says something in Serbian, then finally shakes his head and sighs. “But you quit soon. Get your pay, and you go.” Then he puts up a finger, like there’s one last thing to do, and reaches into his backpack for his dictionary, holds it out it to Excel.
“That’s yours,” Excel says, “I can’t take that.”
But Z insists. “I pick words for you,” he says. “You learn.” He hands over the book, and Excel sees dozens of pages marked with yellow Post-its.
“I’ll learn them. I promise.” He puts the dictionary into his backpack. “Thank you, Z.”
“Thank you, X.”
It’s time to go. Z puts on his sports coat, then his backpack, and Excel fixes his collar. “Come,” Z says, holding out his arms, and Excel, a little shy at first, holds out his own, gently pulls him in. How strange, almost miraculous, to hold someone so old, so closely—Excel missed his chance with Joker—and the fragility of the body startles him, like it could come apart at any moment. He holds Z a little while longer, to keep it together.
The Son of Good Fortune Page 23