Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(13)
Typically, Mama could find a medical solution to anything, but this accident got the best of her. Paolo was still crying in the car, too. He kept saying, “Sorry, sorry. I didn’t know, I didn’t know.”
Papa sang to keep me awake, calling me his sunshine and telling me I took away his gray skies. He looked straight into my eyes and I sang back to him in my head, in my heart. I wanted to tell him, I’m scared.
They took me to the nearest hospital, Santo Ni?o, where the lower class received medical care.
“She’ll be fine,” the doctor said. “Terrified and shocked, but she’s fine.” It was a skull injury, all on the surface—no concussions or brain damage at all, he said. Nothing too serious; I was just shocked. I had received a hard blow to the head when I hit the ground, but the ground didn’t break my skull nor shake my brain. It was a closed head injury, only causing scalp wounds and a fist-size goose egg on the back of my head. I was completely conscious but lay weak with vacant eyes, almost as if I had been put under a breath-holding spell. Shock, the doctor emphasized. Shock, the impact of the fall stunned me into silence and motionlessness. The doctor pulled my eyelids up and flashed a small light on my face.
“Are you sure?” Mama said, naming every possible diagnosis she’d read in pediatrics textbooks.
“I’m sure. She just needs to stay here until she’s able to move and walk without assistance. We need to monitor her for twenty-four hours,” the doctor said.
“Thank you, Doc,” Papa said, giving him a pat on the shoulder.
I’d been wetting my bed, waking up sweaty from nightmares, and had become increasingly afraid of the dark. And now, shock, the doctor said.
My yaya had always said that children were very intuitive.
Something was wrong.
“This is all your fault,” Mama said as soon as the doctor stepped out of the room.
“Estrella, please, our daughter almost died, for God’s sake,” Papa said in the angriest, most stern voice I’d ever heard him use.
Mama didn’t care. She nagged and she yelled and they bickered.
Paolo walked up to the edge of the gurney.
“Why’d you have to scare us like that?” he said to me. “I thought you were gonna die there for a second.”
I thought, He loves me after all, that silly kid.
“I promise to take care of you. I know I always trick you. I’m sorry. Here, you can have this.”
Between my arm and torso, on the crisp white hospital sheets that smelled like Clorox, he tucked his most-prized possession: his Game Boy.
Common Enemy
1991
Papa walked up the steps, calling out, “Where are my warriors?”
He passed my doorway, with a rolled-up world map in hand, and stepped into Paolo’s bedroom. The map alone was invitation for me to join in, to drop the brush with which I had been combing my doll’s hair, and to swoop out of my canopied bed, hurtle from my quarters to Paolo’s, and lie on my stomach on my brother’s Super Mario area rug.
Paolo sat with legs crisscrossed as Papa knelt between us and rolled out the map on the floor. He told Paolo to fetch his box of toy soldiers—the green army men my parents had brought back from Hong Kong.
“Do you know how armies are built?” Papa asked us as he pulled the soldiers out of the box and stood them on representations of land.
We shook our heads.
“Humans, by nature, will fight each other,” he said. “Unless they are fighting the same cause or fighting the same bad guy, they’re not likely to unite or peacefully coexist.”
Paolo pointed at the plastic men standing over the word China. “These guys, Papa, who are they fighting together?”
“Perhaps the same dragon?” Papa said, making a claw with one hand and swinging it at the soldiers, forcing them off the continent and into the ocean.
“What about these guys, Papa?” I asked, picking up a soldier he had positioned on the shape that looked the most familiar to me—a kneeling man with hands in prayer, made up of many shapes and speckles—the Philippines.
“Our country is unique,” he said. “It’s made up of over seven thousand islands, of many different tribes, dialects, classes, and beliefs. There are big wars and small wars, visible and invisible ones.”
“We’re at war, Papa?” I said.
Paolo paused and set down the two soldiers he’d been banging against each other.
“Something like it,” Papa said as he pulled us closer to him and sat us in his lap. With arms around us, he continued, “If you two band together, you can fight the Common Enemy. Now you two need to think about who and what you’re against, because those things will either bring you together or tear you apart.”
“You mean the war on TV?” Paolo said.
“That’s one of them, one of the big ones.”
“And people are dying? Killing each other with guns and grenades?” I said.
“Yes, but not everyone’s killing each other with guns and grenades. Some of our men are dying of diseases at the camps.”
“What camps?” Paolo and I said.
“Evacuation camps. They’re not very clean, not a lot of space, not a lot of fresh air or safe food.”
I didn’t know how else to respond, so I got up, leaned forward, and pinched his cheeks and pulled at them, stretching his face to a clown’s grin, and said in my G.I. Joe voice, “We are at war. And you, sir, are our captain!”