Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(24)
I opened the door and peered in.
“Papa, are you okay?” I said.
He sat on the floor with his back against the wall and the rotary phone between his knees. “If I could just get one more person on a flight,” he said, staring at the phone. “Hundreds of thousands of men and only eighty-three flights to get them home.”
“Are you talking about your men, Papa? The ones stuck at war?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t look at me. He just kept flipping through his Rolodex, calling people, asking questions, and praying under his breath, “God, please.”
The more he tried to save our empire, the more he sank into the middle-aged man’s abyss: failure, regret, and shame.
Paolo didn’t play with me when it rained. He replaced me with Super Nintendo. He powered on the television and game console, blared Street Fighter sounds from the speaker, and held the Nintendo control in one hand and a Pringles tube in the other—all while kicking his soccer ball onto the baseboard of his bed. The heavy clouds and lack of natural light made him a recluse. He adopted a manner of being quiet—so quiet that it sounded like a scream. I’d always known that Mama’s back-and-forth between personalities was something he experienced as well; that there was a reason why he could seamlessly go from throwing tantrums and being aggressive on the soccer field to gingerly playing with a caught beetle. I always knew that there was a reason why he loved scary movies and reptile-eating reptiles and four-loop roller coasters as much as he loved plush toys. Because I loved him and had grown up with him, I understood that it took no effort for him to be the best brother, but it took every bit of his person to be a boy.
And so when Paolo refused to play or joke around with me, I found other diversions. I played Tetris and Super Mario on the Game Boy he gave to me. But when video games got old or my battery power ran out, I talked Elma into taking a dip in the water. While everyone busied themselves with chores, business plans, ledgers, cosmetics, and fashion magazines, Elma and I got in ruffled, polka-dot swimsuits—I lent her mine—and splashed around in frothy, murky water at the base of the main steps. The garden became our private pool and the red-carpeted main steps the diving board to it. I had always been a tremendous swimmer since the day Mama had thrown me into three meters of water. Mama always insisted I swim well.
I wanted Elma to swim well, too.
So I pushed her in.
She flailed her arms and slipped underneath a few times, struggling and gurgling and kicking her way up.
I yelled, “Kick up! Kick up! If you move your legs, you won’t drown! Kick! C’mon! We’ll prove Mama wrong!”
She kicked and thrashed her body up and almost out of the water.
I yelled again, not minding the muck floating or the baby water snakes slithering, “C’mon! Kick!”
She kicked some more.
“You can do this!”
She popped her head up, swallowed a mouthful of air, ducked under, and kicked her biggest kick. She stroked her arms forward and toward the steps, and glided almost effortlessly with her legs behind her like a mermaid’s tail and her head tilted toward oxygen.
“You did it, Elma! You did it!” I reached for her hand and pulled her up to where I was sitting, wrapped my arm around her neck, touched my forehead with hers, and said, “You’re not mad at me now, are you?”
She smiled and shook her head, beads of water sparkling on her face and dripping from the tips of her hair. She coughed out her words. “I can swim.”
Where the hem of the water touched the edge of the mansion, Elma and I pat-a-caked and high-fived, proud of our triumph in the midst of torrential rain.
We wrapped towels around our shoulders and wore them like capes as we read at the top of the main steps. I picked out books about the ocean that day, thinking that the subject fit the weather and our being surrounded by water. The passages and pictures fueled our imagination and gave us more detail to work with for our inspired visions. Besides diving into floodwater, we pretended to wrestle giant squid, rescue sea turtles from flotsam and jetsam, and designed submarines fit for sunken-ship discovery. I read aloud to Elma, sometimes translating quotes from English to Tagalog. Some lines, some facts, however, needed no interpretation—for the ocean proclaimed truths that every ear understood.
“How far down can your submarine go, Captain?” Elma said in her sea-explorer voice.
“Down to the bottom of the Marianas, sir. Eleven kilometers to be exact,” I said in mine.
“Remember to avoid those sul-four bubbles when you go down.”
“Elma, I think it’s called sulfur bubbles,” I said.
“Right. Sul-fur bubbles.”
“Sir, what shall I look for?”
“Oh, the usual. Prove that mermaids exist!”
“Everything—everything—exists in the ocean, sir! Think it up and it is there! The ocean knows everything, holds everything; it even hears everything! It keeps all our dreams and secrets!” I said.
Elma saluted. “I believe it, my friend. I mean, Captain.”
After our deep-sea exploration, we pretended to be sunning at the beach, one hand as a visor and the other a rolled-up towel for a cushion between head and sand. We rolled over on our stomachs, paddling on our make-believe surfboards, ripping curls, and catching waves. Our skin smelled like sunscreen and tasted like salt. Our hair bleached in the sun. Our self-guided ocean tours led us to dolphin sanctuaries and hidden capes. We spearfished and wrestled giant squid, and before the sun’s lip dipped, we dismembered octopi, one tentacle at a time. Then we turned away from the deep and imaginary navy blue and back to shore, through softer sprays of azure.