Songs to Make You Stay (Playlist Book 3)

by Jay E. Tria

And you do not do much else, yeah

  Why did you think it would be easy?

  Why would you that’s so silly

  It takes more than a chance

  And a destined romance

  You can scream out your devotion

  From each mountain but when no motion

  Follows your love then

  Death follows your love to the grave

  And there’s not much else left

  Not much else to do or to say. (Son)

  October 16, Friday, afternoon

  His welcome-back party consisted of his mother’s arching eyebrows and clucking tongue, performed in front of a room full of college sophomores. He couldn’t really blame her. For one, he didn’t ask if he could barge into her Creative Writing class, and prior to that, he didn’t exactly tell her he was flying off to wander around another island for a good four days.

  “You look familiar,” Yuki said, her foot playing tap against the classroom’s red stone floor as Shinta approached. “You look like a face I once knew but have forgotten. Time apart does that, did you know?”

  Shinta pulled his mother into a tight embrace, his ears stinging at her words. “My dear woman, you always had a way with words,” he said as he kissed the cheek of her scowling face.

  Loud silence bore down on the room, the sound of pens scratching against notebooks dying down. Shinta looked up to see around 20 of his mother’s students gaping at him.

  “Konnichiwa. Forgive me for intruding.” Shinta bent down, remembering his manners. When he straightened up, he gave the class his most earnest smile. “I’m Professor Mori’s boyfriend.”

  A burst of shrill giggles pierced the heavy silence, sparking a wildfire of murmurs that quickly spread around the room. Shinta kept his face passive as he watched his mother throw an evil glare at the high ceiling, muttering what was surely his name married by a choice curse word.

  “Yes, class, here is my 24-year-old boyfriend. Please make sure to spread the word,” Yuki said, loud and clear over the rolling waves of whispers. She pounded a hardbound book against her desk until she reclaimed the silence. “Now go back to your 5-7-5s. Do not forget that we are doing a graded critique of those haikus in a few minutes.”

  Shinta expected her menacing glare, so he made sure to flash his most angelic grin when she turned to face him. “Where do I sit, Professor Mori? The front row is already full. Looks like you’ve got a lot of suck-ups in this class.”

  “What a lovely mood you’re in today, boy.” Yuki blessed his face with three soft smacks, the last hit ending with fingers tugging at the skin of his cheek. She peered closer, frowning at the red rims of his eyes. “You look terrible. What happened to you?”

  Shinta tried a smile, grasping his mother’s hand before she could proceed with further pinching. “You on the other hand, look like the sun, the moon, and the stars.”

  Yuki sighed, clutching his hand in return, and Shinta knew he had won this round.

  “Sit way over there. Take the farthest seat you can find, as far away from me as you can.” She thumped his arm once, then pointed to the back of the room. “And keep your negative, sarcastic energies to yourself. Have mercy.”

  There was a line of empty chairs where she banished him, but Shinta gravitated toward the saddest looking one. A desk chair made of battered wood, its arm and legs bearing markings left by its previous occupants. He found initials connected by arrow-poked hearts, drawn with permanent marker or carved meticulously with a ballpoint pen.

  Shinta studied each one with more intensity than the task required. He’d been doing a lot of that since he parted from Jill at the Manila airport. He counted his cab’s neighboring vehicles in traffic, and mouthed hellos to kids peddling strings of sampaguita on the streets. He read each sign he passed, and talked to each acacia tree that lined the way to his mother’s classroom.

  He’d been trying everything to occupy his mind and heart so both would stop dwelling on the fact that he had lost Jill. That she was right. Here he was bringing in change, a longer-distance relationship in terms of both time apart and space between. A change in the direction of his strums that broke the song open into something they both didn’t know what to do with. And he did so expecting her to accept it all with no argument. That everything else would stay the same.

  Goob job, Mori, you big lump of an idiot.

  “I think of your kiss/ When the rain drops on my face/ They all disappear.”

  Shinta looked up from the vandal art he was memorizing when the words reached his ears. One of the students was leaning forward in his chair, reading his partner’s work for the rest of the class to hear.

  Yuki paced the stone floor, fingers on her chin. “What do you think that means?”

  The student stared at his seatmate’s notebook as if the answer was written there too. “It means he got dumped while it was raining. And that’s got to suck, right? I mean. It was raining.”

  “Very delicate phrasing,” Yuki commented with a grim smile. “And fair point.”

  “It also sucks to be dumped at the airport. After four glorious days spent together eating and drinking and counting stars.”

  Shinta shot his hand up, two ringing sentences too late, as Yuki passed him a look loaded with warning. He stared back at her, then at the many sets of eyes peering nervously at him. He retracted his hand in slow motion, bowing back down to his scarred desk.

  The boy in front of him twisted to face him, depositing a pen and pages from a notebook on Shinta’s desk. “Your feelings have to go somewhere,” the stranger said with a kind smile.

  Shinta wanted to hug him and cry.

  He did neither. Instead he focused his energies on the blank sheets of paper. His mother’s lecture and the muted sounds of the rest of the room were background noise to his chore, putting down one awkward word after another. How was this supposed to help? Writing his feelings down not only made him relive them, but also made them permanent marks on paper.

  This isn’t how you do it, Miki, he thought, remembering how Jill’s best friend was an eternal spring of unrequited love songs. You write it, you preserve it. And nothing gets done.

  By his third haiku, Shinta was ready to throttle the kind stranger. And then cry.

  “I counted a total of four days with you vanished from the face of my world.”

  Yuki’s shadow hovered over his work. He turned his gaze to her face, and beyond that to see that the classroom was now empty save for a small huddle of students near the door. How time dies into the wind when you’re documenting your heartbreak.

  Shinta punctuated Haiku #5 with the drawing of a crying face, and put his tools away. “I’m sorry. I should have told you where I was going.”

  Yuki took the seat beside him. The chair she claimed was old too, yet less colorful and less chipped in places. “I spent the better part of my morning counselling Miki. I didn’t think I had to keep some reserves for you too.”

  “Heartbreak does not announce itself, Mother.” Shinta, for one, went from long waking hours with the woman he loved to screaming inside his head.

  “That is true,” Yuki agreed.

  “Is Miki okay?”

  “It’s slow going with that boy,” she said with a fond smile. “But I think he’s got it this time.”

  Shinta planted his chin in his hands. He was curious about Miki’s predicament. He could ask about it, and maybe that would keep his mind off his own deep pool of problems. But everything he knew about Miki paved a route that led straight to Jill, so prying might only make things worse.

  “These haikus are horrible.” Yuki swiped his work from under his arms, staring at the sheets of paper.

  “You’re telling me.” He moved his chair closer to hers, following the motion of her eyes as she read. There was a reason why he acted, and left the writing to the professionals. “But it’s okay. I had fun.”

  Yuki laughed at the look of consternation on his face as he reread his work, eyebrows like huddling caterpillars
on his forehead. “This exercise helped you, right?”

  “You’re my mother,” Shinta said with a small smile. “You’re always right.”

  “Ha!” Yuki patted his arm once. “This is why I miss you when you’re away.”

  “Do you want me to stay and live here with you?”

  Yuki returned his earnest stare with surprise and confusion in her eyes. “What kind of question is that?”

  Shinta had caught her hand, playing with her tiny, alabaster fingers. He’d been going through a spiral of thoughts all day, the spinning fast and turbulent. He’d tried holding on to one thing, tried finding something he could answer. His efforts only led him to an old familiar place, to that chink in his life where he kept questions he never felt brave enough to ask.

  He spoke looking at his mother’s fingers, trying to be brave this time.

  “You took this job and the scholarship that came with it when I was nine. I would sometimes think it was because you got tired of me and Father.”

  “Your father, maybe.” Yuki answered easily. “He can be very draining.”

  Shinta nodded. “That is true.”

  “But never you.” Her hand closed around his, and he was forced to meet her gaze. “You were a restless ball of energy. You chewed your socks. You took stray cats home and tucked them in bed with you. You drove us crazy. Good thing you’re cute.”

  “Thank you.” Shinta smiled. “But you loved Father too, didn’t you? You loved Akio, the stubborn and the ambitious, the flighty and strong.”

  “Of course I did.”

  The calmness on his mother’s face was driving him half-mad. “But still you left. You left him and you left me.”

  Yuki didn’t flinch, and Shinta realized he might have been the only one holding back on these questions. Not because they were gaping wounds that hurt him, but because he never thought the answers mattered anymore. He had grown up having a father here and a mother elsewhere, taking to the skies to bridge the gap every so often. It was his norm, and he had never questioned it. Not until now when he was facing a similar riddle.

  “We married young,” Yuki went on. “I was in love in the most delicious way. The kind that nourished my soul and made my universe small—one galaxy was my husband, and one was you. But soon I was presented with an opportunity to do something I always wanted to do. I was already teaching in Tokyo then, remember? Teenagers on the cusp of learning their first English ‘my name is’ and ‘this is a pen.’ But it wasn’t enough. My universe wanted to expand, and I let it.”

  “Did father try to stop you?”

  “Yes and no. Yes, he told me not to go. But also no, because he didn’t give me any options. I know now that the burden was on us both.” Her smile turned wistful. “I said no regrets, but I do feel that about missing two-thirds of your life. Two-thirds that is hurriedly extending to more, as the years go by. If I would allow that feeling to eat at my heart, it would finish me in a minute. I was selfish.”

  “You had dreams.” Dreams she had made. Dreams that had belonged to her. Maybe that was the difference.

  Yuki was silent, and for a while it looked like she had floated away. “I brought you here with me, do you remember?” she said, coming back to him. “We were going to stay together, you and I. That was the only way that made sense to me. But you were having a hard time.”

  Shinta closed his eyes, trying to summon the memories as his mother named them. Missing his friends, his room, missing his father, and his adopted cats. Having trouble at, and making trouble in school. Until going back home was the only answer left.

  “Your father and I decided then that it would be best if you went back and stayed with him.” She pulled in a breath, as if pushing herself to go on. “I meant to give you a few months, try to get you again. But you were happy there with your father, in the home you knew. And I was here, feeling myself taking root. I had my own little space, accomplishments that belonged to me.”

  She gripped his hand tight. The peace that was always in her eyes seemed to have crested and broken. “Sometimes I like to think it turned out to be good for you. Growing up away from your nagging, mollycoddling mother.”

  Shinta smirked, but he put her hand to his lips once. “Because it made me into a strapping, emotionally dysfunctional man?”

  “You are functioning just fine, believe me.” She pinched his chin, and when her thin mouth moved to a smile her eyes regained their sparkling calm. “Besides, if I had stayed I would have never allowed you to forgo your college education for this ridiculous acting thing that you call a career. Then I wouldn’t have been able to send Jill your way. And you wouldn’t have visited me as often as you did in the years that followed.”

  There was a crack in the transitivity of his mother’s logic. “I don’t come visit you because of Jill,” Shinta protested.

  Yuki’s gaze felt like laser beams coupled with raised eyebrows. “Your visits increased from once a year to twice a year after you met her.”

  “Okay fine, that’s true.” His mouth twisted into a grin. “So you’re the hand of fate, huh? You’re the cause of all my troubles.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Shinta barked out laughter, the sound dying a swift death as he buried his face between his palms. He felt his mother’s story weigh heavily on his shoulders. Not because of shared regret, or his own resentment. But because he somehow understood what it took for her to do as she did.

  “It shouldn’t be this hard,” he muttered. “Love shouldn’t take so much work.”

  “Of course it takes work. Otherwise every other fool in the world will be doing it right. And there would be a lot less songs and books and poetry written.” Yuki’s hand fell to the back of his head—first a sharp rap that sent his head flopping forward and back, then soft tugging on the longer threads of his hair. “But yes, some decisions shouldn’t be that hard. Maybe you’re just looking for the wrong answers.”

  It seemed Yuki allowed him a few moments, then she took his hands away from his face so she could look at him. “Now tell me. What happened? Are you leaving us for something you really want to do?”

  Shinta blinked back at her solemn gaze. “Nobody ever asked me that before.”

  “If you’re leaving?”

  “If it was something I really wanted to do.”

  “Ah. Well that changes things, don’t you think?”

  Of course it did. He was being pulled in a different direction, to new, wider territories, whereas Yuki had drawn up her own map, and followed her own signs. That was the difference. And because Yuki had made her own choices, Shinta decided that he would too.

  “Excuse me, Professor?”

  The kind pen-and-paper stranger was back, bursting their bubble.

  “I’m sorry to intrude,” said the student, looking very much like he didn’t mean it. “But we kind of have a bet going, and loser pays for cheese sticks and foot-long hotdogs.” He pointed at Shinta, tone mildly accusing. “He isn’t really your boyfriend, is he?”

  “No, I’m her son,” Shinta said, cutting through his mother’s shaking laughter. “And no, because I’m already someone’s boyfriend.”

  #1.

  I wanted to be

  Everything you expected

  But what does that mean?

  #2

  That one week in spring

  Almost summer, train, sushi

  Real or memory?

  #3

  My t-shirt looks good

  On your celebrity skin

  Please don’t return it

  #4

  She is wind and thunder

  Can’t keep rain in a bottle

  I should stop trying

  #5

  I’m living in dreams

  Whispered to me in my sleep

  Time to get up now (Shinta)

  October 17, Saturday, morning

  Manila didn’t have summers. Jill had educated him on this too many times before. Summer belonged to the cycle of seasons. Fall f
ollowed suit, then winter and spring. This tropical country didn’t have any of those. It had only two things—dry and wet. Or more accurately, a lifelong dry spell with sudden floods of rain and raging typhoon visits.

  This moment, looking up at the brooding sky and feeling the tactile precision with which the bullets of rain attacked his upturned face, Shinta knew that the dry spell had broken, and he was soaking in the middle of it.

  “I want ice cream,” he told the rain, his thoughts associating the taste of salted caramel sundae with Jill.

  He’d been standing a few paces past the gate to her house for five minutes now, drowning in rainwater, trespassing again. He had looked around the muddy earth for pebbles to toss at her window, hoping to wake her, until he noticed that the garage was missing a lime green Beetle.

  “It’s four in the morning, Jillian Marie.” His snarls were consumed by another bout of thunder. “Where the hell are you?”

  He heard the scraping of steel gate against concrete behind him before the blinding headlights fell on his soaking form. He spun, in time to see Jill slam the door as she got out of her car.

  “Mother of fuck—”

  “Where the hell were you?”

  They both paused mid-tirade, under the rain in a Mexican stand-off, until Jill broke it.

  “What the hell are you doing out here?” she demanded, reprising his question as she strode toward him.

  “It’s still early,” Shinta said, matter-of-fact. He crossed his arms over his Henley shirt, the fabric feeling like sodden paper sticking to his torso. “I wasn’t sure your mother would let me in.”

  “Not when you look like that.” Jill braked a few paces short of where he stood, splashing sludge and rainwater up her naked legs. Her words stuttered to a halt, eyes skimming the length of him, lingering on his drenched chest, before flicking back up his face to give him a proper glare. “You look like you’ve been pushed into a dam.”

  “You don’t look any less wet to me.”