Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(63)
The scream went on and then transformed into heaving-sobbing-groaning. I walked closer, fork still held straight out in front of me at throat level. I kicked the door open and swung myself back against the hallway wall, like they did in Paolo’s video games and Papa’s favorite Steven Seagal cop dramas. I poked my head in, followed by my fork, and lastly, by my foot. I smelled the concoction of whiskey and blood in the air. I saw splats of almost-black red on the wall—bigger splats at midway, and smaller specks toward the ceiling. The splash of blood had come from head level and the blunt force from somewhere below. Mama was curled up on her side, writhing on the floor like a worm in a salt bath. She looked smaller than a child and no bigger than the pool of crimson circled around her.
I knelt down, touched her head with my free hand, and felt a mat of sticky hair—the long, shiny black hair she or the maids used to brush a hundred strokes a night. Now her hair was shiny not from cautious combing but from the fragments of glass lodged in the crown of her forgotten beauty.
Norman sat up on his side of the bed, his lower half under the satin duvet. He leaned against the velvet headboard with eyes glazed from rage and alcohol, his lower lip drooping, and his jaw juddering and covered in spit. His left hand held a bottle of whiskey while his right curled up in the shape of an invisible wide-brimmed, thick-base old-fashioned glass. He never turned his head to me, so I didn’t know if he knew I was there. He looked straight ahead, examining his artwork on the wall: little dots and big dots of my mother’s blood.
“I’m here to help you, Mama,” I whispered as I put her arm around my neck.
“I’m sorry,” she said, as tears mixed with blood in the corners of her eyes and the wrinkles around her lips.
“It’s okay, Mama. We got to go. I got you.”
Norman grunted.
“Come on, Mama. Get up. Come on.”
Norman grunted again as he pulled off the satin duvet and uncovered his legs.
“Come on, Mama. Get up or we’ll both be dead,” I said as I hoisted her up with all my twelve-year-old, ninety-five-pound strength. I pulled her arms over my shoulders and around my neck, wearing her like a backpack, the fork still in my sweaty, bloody hand. Her breath felt warm on my neck, reminding me that she was, in fact, still alive.
I stumbled down the long dark hallway, the main steps, and the driveway, Mama breathing slower and slower, as I breathed faster and faster, panting and puffing with my every step. Her hair covered my hair, dampening it with the trickle from the crack on her crown. The blood covering my hands and her arms made us lose grip of each other several times. I re-clutched her arms and pulled her body up on my back again—the way Papa used to do when he’d piggyback me and I’d start slipping down. With every step, I told my body to keep on—heels and arches on and off the ground, legs advancing, pelvis and rib cage pressing away from Norman and toward the wrought-iron gates and the sinking sun. I nearly tripped over bundles of campaign T-shirts scattered on the floor. I stepped on chicken shit, lumps of turd caking on my bare soles.
After much struggle, I reached the end of the driveway, untangled the metal chain that held the gates closed, and slid the rusty, five-pound metal rod off the gate hook, one yank at a time. Moonlight and starlight led me to the side of the highway where I could hail a cab. None came. I prayed, “God, help us.”
Still, there came no cabs, no jeepneys, no passersby. I prayed again, “God, help us.”
A pedicab stopped. The young man got off the trike, tsk-tsking as he helped me get Mama on the plastic-wrapped, duct-taped seat. I recognized the young man—it was the boy who had given me, Elma, and our buckets of water a free ride from the pozo. He’d called me “Mam” and Elma “Maganda.” And now he was pedaling us away from the mansion and to Santo Ni?o Hospital, where I had once lain unconscious after falling off a slide. Although the low-class, low-tech hospital was my mother’s last choice for health care, it had saved me once before. And now it was to save me—and her—once again.
The pedicab boy parked his trike on the curb, carried Mama into the emergency room, and sat her between a bandaged man in grease-covered jeans and a laboring woman in a fraying dress. I wanted to give the pedicab boy something for his help, but I had nothing but a bloody fork. Before I could even thank him, he said, “It’s nothing.” Then he gave me a salute for a goodbye, turned around, and pedaled on.
I sat on the floor across the hall from Mama, about three meters away, leaning against the wall opposite from her. I crossed my arms in front of me, clutching the fork under my right arm. I watched Mama droop in her seat, be examined by a nurse, and then rolled off on a gurney to a curtained-off room. I watched through the part in the curtains how they wiped her clean of blood, shaved a patch of her hair, sewed her up, and bandaged her cracked head. I watched the doctors huddle around her, invite two cops into the room, and ask her what had happened.
I saw everything and heard everything, but could say nothing.
“I fell,” Mama said. “I fell down the stairs with a glass in this hand. My head landed where the glass had shattered.”
“Are you sure?” the cops asked a couple of times.
“Yes.”
That was it. I got up, took three steps to the nearest trash can, and flung the fork in. We both could’ve died that night, and there she was, lying to those who could’ve helped us, those who could’ve found a way out. They could’ve found Papa or Paolo or my yaya. They could’ve even taken us to the precinct, let us sleep on a cot on the floor, and kept us away from Norman. But no. Mama asked to be escorted home, to be driven in a clunky cop car back to the mansion.