In the Country (17 page)

“Maybe Danny's mother can get Annelise some medical help,” Jacinto Cortez said. “Doesn't Danny's mother know Dr. Delacruz?”

Ruben Delacruz balled his fists. “Did you say something?” he said, staring Jacinto down and away from the table. When the gymnasium began to empty and Annelise still had not appeared, I wheeled my way home.

In Annelise's absence, boys and girls alike went back to teasing me. After dismissal that Monday, Pedro Katigbak clutched his heart and forehead like a girl. “Help!” he falsettoed. “I'm bleeding to death! Oh, how can I stop this bleeding?” He placed a hand between his legs and made as if to faint.

Rizal Rojas lumbered over on his knees. “I am Manny-
manananggal,
” he said. “
I
can save you, Negrita.” He knelt at Pedro's standing legs and looked up. “Negrita, let me drink your blood! I'm a womb-eating vampire, after all—and look! I'm the perfect height! Somebody get me a straw!”

The girls howled in squeamish, scandalized delight. Ruben Delacruz clapped his hands. “Well done,” he said. I tried to picture myself as an actual
manananggal,
flying my half-body high above the school-yard laughter. This little piece of vaudeville wasn't the worst they'd inflicted on me, in my school career, but I felt new and unaccustomed to it. In the short time I'd spent with Annelise, I had forgotten what it was to be lonely.

After school, a group of students followed me home on their knees. They went as far as the gate and then abandoned me, knowing that our gardener would shoo them off with a giant pair of pruning shears. Once they had gone, I started to wheel myself past the front yard to the house, then stopped. Annelise lived down the other side of the hill, on the banks of the ravine dotted with squatters' shacks. Without pausing to consider why, I turned my wheelchair and pumped past the houses on our street, then coursed down the yellow grass to the ravine.

It took some doing: each rut in the hill's soil bumped me forward. I pressed my weight back to gain some balance. The slope seemed to grow steeper the further I rolled. I hooked an arm behind me, the wooden backrest in the bend of my elbow, while steering forward with the other hand. The grass gave way to rocks and mud, which clung to my wheels at every turn. Every few years, during the wet season, mudslides swept some houses clean off this bank into the creek. I feared toppling forward and landing in the water with my chair overturned, its dirt-caked wheels spinning.

By the time I reached the first shack, the air had thickened, with an overwhelming stench of smoke and urine and spoiled milk. The shacks were patched together from cardboard and plywood and other scraps, raised by stilts, and roofed with corrugated tin. Clotheslines joined one shack to the next like crude telephone wires. An old woman, her lips puckered inward where the teeth had fallen out, stood in front of the first shack. Some children kicked around a metal can beside her. When they saw me, they stopped and gathered to stare.

I recognized Annelise in their large bottomless eyes. Perhaps all the ravine's children learned to look at people this way. Suddenly I remembered what was said about the squatters: that their kind would dive into canals and landfills, scavenging scraps to sell or use or eat. What would they do with me, an outsider in a school uniform, with a steel chair and books hanging from his mouth? I resolved to give them anything they wanted, so long as I could see Annelise and make it back up the hill, using my bare hands if I had to. Like a dog who'd just fetched for its master, I released my books into my lap.

“I am looking for Annelise Moreno,” I told the children. “Do you know where she lives?” One boy, wearing a shirt but no pants, pointed down the row of houses. A small girl said she'd show the way if I let her push me. I agreed, blinking away another vision of my chair upended in the ravine. My wheels sank slightly into the earth and caught every so often on rocks within it. But my young guide pushed with surprising force. She left me beside a woman yanking clothes off a line. “Over there,” said the woman, jerking her head to the next shack. “Girl kept us up all night with her moaning and crying!”

I tapped lightly on the side of the house. Instead of a door, a faded green tarp covered a gap between the tin walls. Because of the stilts, I could not go inside even if I were someone who entered other people's houses uninvited.

When the tarp lifted, none other than the famous Dr. Delacruz emerged from the doorway, with his kind eyes and waves of gray hair.
“Anak,”
he said, surprised to see me there.

“Doctor?” I said, then explained: “Annelise and I are partners. For the fiesta. And her mother…works for mine.”

“But how on earth did you…?” The doctor looked from my wheelchair to the hilltop, in the direction of my house.

Annelise's mother, our laundress, lifted one side of the tarp and looked out, her arms cradling an infant. I could hear groans from behind the tarp.

“Anak,”
the laundress said, looking frightened, as if I'd come to scold her.

“Who's out there?” I heard Annelise call from inside. “Danny?” I was not prepared for the smell that came from beyond the tarp, magnified since the gymnasium to something like raw meat and burning sugar. But I was even less prepared for the wail that Annelise let out just then, a sound of pain so mighty that it seemed the walls and tin roof might not hold it.

“Let's go,
anak,
” said Dr. Delacruz. “The medicine might take some time to work. Right now your friend's not in a state for visitors.” He wheeled me around and pushed me through the dirt, where Annelise's smells gave way to the surrounding air of mud and smoke.

The doctor brought me up the hill and home. “And here I thought
I
was the only one from town who visits the ravine,” he said, kneeling to clean the mud off my wheelchair before we entered the
sala.

“I'd never visited before,” I said. “I haven't known Annelise long.”

Inside, he sat down on the sofa next to me. “How are the fiesta preparations coming?”

He was so kind I didn't feel the need to lie. “Annelise can't learn the dance everyone's learning, thanks to me.” I told him how my day had gone, the new
manananggal
insult, the children hobbling home beside me on their knees. I didn't mention Ruben, but the doctor winced anyway, as if my suffering were his fault. He stayed and listened until my mother came down from the bedroom with the electrician, who nodded quickly at the doctor as he hurried out.

When Dr. Delacruz greeted my mother, she barely nodded in return. On other days the doctor would bring food to us—
leche flan,
a macaroni salad—or send his cook to deliver them, but when my mother saw he had nothing like that on offer this time, she went back upstairs. We heard water running. Of all the men who visited our house, only Dr. Delacruz never followed my mother up the stairs. And for all his kindness and attention, my mother was as cold and distant with the doctor as she was warm and inviting with almost all other men. Sometimes she refused to greet or come down to see him at all. Instead, he'd sit with me, flipping through comic books Ruben had already read and thrown away, or asking how my day had gone, how I was feeling.

“What will you and your mother eat tonight?” the doctor asked, after she'd gone.

“Whatever Marivic prepares.” My mother had taught me always to present to the world that we had plenty, in the way of food and help.

“Are you sure?” asked Dr. Delacruz. “I can send Celia over with something after I get home.”

“No need,” I said, repeating words I'd heard my mother say to him before. “We have enough to feed a village. Thank you, Dr. Delacruz.”

We said good night.

With the doctor's help, I got better at navigating the slope between my house and the squatters' colony. On my third visit, I saw we weren't Annelise's only guests. Squatters had gathered at the steps of her shack, holding buckets of water. I recognized the old woman with the sunken mouth, as well as the young girl who'd pushed my wheelchair, among the others forming a passageway from the ladder and the tarp.

“This is good news,” said Dr. Delacruz. He rested his palm on the back of my chair. “It means your friend is doing better.”

Annelise was descending the bamboo steps and walking across the dirt. The squatters dipped their fingers into buckets and sprinkled her with water. Young children splashed her with glee. She trained her gaze a few paces before her, as if balancing a basket on her head. She stopped at my chair. “It's a tradition,” she said, with a flicker of embarrassment upon her face, slight as the mist of water on her arms and cheeks, and evaporating as quickly. “They don't let girls bathe in the creek during our time of month. So when it's over, they do this. I hate it, but that's life in the ravine.”

I thought of the maid that my mother had let go because of her smell. Once again I was at the foot of those stairs, catching perfumed air and sunlight from a momentary crack in the doorway. “You can use our house, Annelise,” I said, without thinking. As soon as I'd offered it, I knew it wouldn't be easy. My mother wouldn't abide it. She would have to be upstairs with a guest, or think that Annelise had come to do the wash again in her mother's place. But I wanted to give Annelise something, since I had nothing for her pain.

Dr. Delacruz patted my shoulder. “Annelise, your partner is a gentleman,” he said. “I might have to fight him for the title of Messiah of Monte Ramon.” He scraped some dirt from my left wheel with the tip of his shoe.

Dr. Delacruz helped us accomplish it. A few weeks later, the next time Annelise was banned from the creek, and girls at school said vicious things about her smell, Dr. Delacruz brought her up the hill to my house. “How many times will she send you to do her job for her?” my mother asked about the
labandera,
adding that she'd expect a discount for less experienced hands. Once we knew that my mother was occupied upstairs, Dr. Delacruz and I would take over the wash. We scrubbed and wrung, while Annelise finished her bath and then rested on the sofa with a hot water bottle, her face clenched against the pain. As soon as we heard my mother's door open upstairs, we switched places with Annelise.

Around this time, so much of which I spent with the doctor in the
labahan
behind our house, an idle wish began. “Pass me that bleach,
anak,
” said Dr. Delacruz, and for the first time in my life I paused over the word. Adults called us
anak
or “son” or “my child” all the time, but Dr. Delacruz said it with such soft regard as to sound literal. I began to imagine him as my father, living in this house, or any house, with me, married to my mother. A pipe dream—or was it? Now that Annelise had introduced me to her
radionovela,
I saw exchanges between Dr. Delacruz and my mother in a new light. This was courtship, from another angle. In
Pusong Sinugatan,
Reyna ended up in the arms of the one suitor she'd tried the hardest to fight off. And Joe had been admired by every woman about town except the one he loved most, which only strengthened his resolve to win her. He waited patiently, persisted for as long as he had to. Likewise, perhaps the reason Dr. Delacruz never remarried all these years since his wife's death was that he only wanted to marry my mother. My imagination, once ignited, went wild. If Dr. Delacruz married my mother, she'd have all the comfort and company she needed in him. All the men who passed me by in the
sala
without so much as a second look would step aside. Why else would Dr. Delacruz spend so much time with me, and in our house? Even granting how many people in Monte Ramon he cared for, why should my life, and my mother's, be of such special concern to him?

The fiesta was approaching. Church bells rang and cannons fired throughout our school days now, rousing us in the morning and distracting us from classroom lectures. Both were being fine-tuned for the ceremonies.

Annelise decided that she and I would bring our petitions to the Virgin early. During fiesta month, she reasoned, the Virgin fielded so many requests for love or health or babies or luck that we ought to lay our concerns at her feet before the others overwhelmed her. We set out with votive candles, a box of matches, and bananas from a tree outside my mother's house.

They kept the four-hundred-year-old statue behind glass in the church, but a plaster replica of her stood on a roofed pedestal outside. The Virgin's nose was fine and strong, her mouth tiny, her eyes bold. Annelise lay her palm on the Virgin's robe, which was brocaded with gold paint.

She had a theory about praying. “You must be specific,” Annelise told me. “Vague prayers end badly. There was a man who traveled up here from Manila and asked the Virgin for money. No specifics, just money. On his way home children threw worthless coins at him. They thought he was a beggar in his raggedy clothes. Well, he prayed for money, and he got it! The Virgin needs
specifics.
” She set her votive down before the statue.

I lit my own candle, and then a prayer came to me as easily as the tune of a familiar song. I prayed for Dr. Delacruz to become my father. I prayed that he would win my mother's heart at last, with all the gifts and dishes he brought us and the amount of time and care he lavished on me. I prayed that she would come around, as Reyna had with Joe in
Pusong Sinugatan,
to the one suitor she had overlooked. I asked the Virgin for a soap-operatic surprise that would change my life. Was this specific enough? Annelise was crossing herself already; I had no time to revise. We ate two of the bananas and placed the rest beside the candles. We looked up at the Virgin's face as if to read her answer, but her weathered plaster expression remained still.