Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(68)
Mama gasped. She opened her palm and swung it back behind her. But instead of slapping Elma, she cupped her hand over her mouth and fell to the floor. She wailed the same wail she let out the night my baby brother died, the night I first feared her.
Elma turned back around to my direction and opened the main doors. In the shaft of moonlight coming through, she embraced me one last time while weeping and said, “Your books and pictures will remind you of everything: heartaches, lessons, joys. Find the ocean. Write.”
“I’m sorry, Elma,” I said, holding her tight with eyes closed, as if to squeeze her spirit out of the dark skin that encased it—out of the life that entrapped her.
“Nothing is your fault. Now go.”
I let go of her and I let go of life in the mansion.
Amen.
I placed the crumpled letter I’d written to Mama on the console under the mirror and ran down the main steps—time tick-tocking to the hour of the birth of our dear Lord—and toward the garden where my dead baby brother slept almost two meters under. I knelt down and patted the now-grassless earth and said, “I love you.”
I stood back up and ran down the driveway and to the wrought-iron gates. I untangled the metal chain that held the gates closed. Moonlight and starlight led me to the side of the highway, where my other friend, the pedicab boy, waited. He took the duffel bag and escorted me to the cellophane-wrapped seat, where I sat as he pedaled away and away, to clear skies and toward the direction of the pozo. With his left foot’s every step on the pedal, I inhaled. And with his right foot’s every crank on the magical machine, I breathed out and healed.
We reached the well where I first met Diyosa, and where I had many times fetched water with Elma, and there we found a Mitsubishi L300 van that was reconfigured to look like a jeepney. A woman in her thirties stepped out of the vehicle and reached her hand to me and said, “Do you remember me, Neng? I am your sister, Lucia.” She took the duffel bag from my hand and brushed the hair off my face. She kissed me on the cheek and told me that Paolo had found Papa, and Papa had found her, but that Papa felt undeserving of my custody.
“Our father will always be chasing after opportunity,” she said. “But I have made a home with my husband and three kids, and we live next door to our brother, Luis, and his family. We will be your home now.”
Papa had always told me that we were not meant for normal, and for that, he was sorry. But at the end of the millennium, he finally accepted that although we had our eccentricities, what might have been best all along was a normal childhood, a normal family, a normal home—mercy in the mundane.
Lucia opened the door to the back of the van, slowly and delightedly, as if unwrapping for me my first Christmas present in ten years. I peered in and saw, dangling from bar handles, tumbling across seats, and poking at each other, toddlers and preschoolers and preteens: my new tribe.
They filled the van with giggling and the smell of shampoo. They were bathed and their clothes were clean and without holes. Lucia stood next to me and held the van door open. Her blouse felt soft against my elbow.
The man in the driver’s seat, Lucia’s husband, turned up the radio’s volume and said, “You like music? I have lots of mixed CDs. Here, pick one.”
He passed a book with transparent sleeves holding discs. One of the boys, wide-eyed and just learning to speak, crunched on a prawn cracker as he toddled to me with the discs. He handed me the book and offered me a bite of his snack.
The only girl in the group of children, about eight years old, brushed my hair with her fingers, and said, “Pretty.”
Lucia wrapped an arm around me as she sat me next to her in the van. She asked, “What’s your Christmas wish?”
I didn’t have to think. I had prayed for this moment many times.
“Can you take me to the ocean?”
“Christmas by the sea? Sounds like a good plan. Tell me, though, why there?” my sister asked me.
She would ask me this question at several other occasions between seventh grade and my college graduation: when I signed up to play soccer in Gothenburg, Sweden, when I saved my allowance to visit the largest bookstore in Hong Kong, when she moved to the suburbs, and I to the city, and when I transplanted to the South with my college boyfriend to start a handmade business, get a master of fine arts, and start a family by the sea. I looked at my sister and said, “Because I’ve never been a runner, but I sure can swim.” I was not simply leaving the mansion. I was going somewhere.
The Season of the Sun The sun has one kind of splendor,
the moon another
and the stars another;
and star differs from star in splendor.
—1 Corinthians 15:41
2016
I am married now and live close to the ocean.
The man whom I call my husband is kind, patient, loving, generous, and gentle, much like my father. But he lacks Papa’s desire to save the world. Instead, this man devotes himself to the daily building and rebuilding of mine: my world as his passion. He works from eight in the morning to nine at night, dividing his time between being a private school teacher, a college instructor, and a candlemaker. He works this hard and this much so I can spend my days at my home studio, writing, sketching, and dreaming up things.
He introduced himself to me at a rooftop event on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Thirty-Seventh Street. It was June 2006, my first summer as a college student in New York City.