In the Country (42 page)

Within an hour, Jim's quiet tour has ended. It seems like half of Manila has stormed the palace. Cries of
Soubenir! Soubenir!
bounce off the mahogany-paneled walls. Those who can't make off with a military helmet or a high-heeled shoe settle for a radio, a plant. Jim threads his way against the stampede. Outside, people smile for pictures against streetlamps, under trees. He reaches for his Dictaphone, but when he bothers to stop someone for an interview—
Who are you? Were you at EDSA, too? What brought you to the palace?
—he feels like a Camp interrogator, and his subject's in a rush to get inside.

Back at the
Herald
offices, the photo department is shredding pictures of the stampede, and filing others away. “While we're at it,” he can hear the harried City Desk editor suggesting, “let's brainstorm some other words?
Stampede
sounds so…negative.” Jim can hear the former President, his onetime godfather, call them all
balimbing
, ten-sided as star fruit. Wetting their fingertips to gauge the wind's direction. No better than the politicians.

We are talking about your children here.

He stands abruptly—turning all his colleagues' heads, never his style. Without saying good-bye he leaves the
Herald
newsroom.

At home, the door of the master bedroom is open, Milagros sitting on the edge of the bed. “Is it all true?” she asks, as Jim walks in. “We have a new President, and the old one's in Hawaii?”

Jim nods.

She says, “I have something to tell you.”

“So do I.”

She waits for him to go first, so he does. No time to change their habits all at once.

“I love my work,” Jim says. “It was my life.”

But she already knows that part.

“So I mistook it for my whole life.”

She looks up.

“They say prison does something to you. And I do wonder. If I'd have made the same decisions, living in this house with you—with him—all these years.”

Milagros, now and forever the good student, takes a moment to review. The man she never questioned till a year ago, admitting to an error.

“Today was big—the biggest news day of my life. But I'm not going to write about the President. All I plan to write, when I go into that study tonight, is my resignation letter.”

She sees he means it. An offer that the Jim she married years ago would never have extended.

Recant. Stop the presses. Cease and desist.
He'll do it all, and more. She watches his mouth move. She even hears some words from it. Something about not expecting forgiveness, or even a response.

She doesn't tell him it's too late. They've fought enough already. After she found the letters, all they did was fight. She's out of stones to throw at him. And yet.

A shred of her, still young and hopeful and capable of being inspired, considers it.

What could that life look like? She'd find work at another hospital, if City wouldn't take her back. He'd learn, like anyone changing his field, new skills: write in other, safer genres; teach. Together they'd raise Jackie as their only child—and who's to say there wouldn't, after they had patched things up, be more? On paper, it seems possible.

But no.

This house would still be this house, Manila still the city where she had her son, this country still the country that took everything away. You couldn't erase history, but you could close up chapters of it, just as in a textbook.

“Jim,” she says. Carefully, as if to an employer.
I am leaving the country.
A serious answer to a serious offer.

Jim nods, the fingers tenting at his forehead once again.

As with an employer—one who taught her things, one she's sad to leave—Milagros goes on. About green cards and graduate school. She even shows him the pamphlets and the forms. Brown nurses smiling at the bedside of white patients who look to be better already.

And he responds in kind.
Of course
and
opportunity.

Her eyes turn red. She senses there is more. In its effort not to cry her face looks like a young girl's. But he must continue.

“I remember when I first met you.”

She hears only some of the rest—how smart she was, how glad he felt getting to know her. Her passion and her point of view. But his words do take her back, all the way to June 1971, on the lawn outside of City Hospital. The girl with the bandanna and the picket sign, who must have seemed like someone who'd do anything to prove a point. And didn't that girl marry him? And take dictation, type, and print for him? As if it were her life's mission, to tend the flame of his work like a priestess at some temple. That girl lived in this house, where a man had died; that girl married Jim inside a prison; that girl let her children play, sometimes, above a shelter where objects no safer than bombs were made. And now that girl's son, her only son, is gone. But Jim is not the one—at least, he's not primarily the one—Milagros blames.

1985

Some say a phone never rings in Manila before breakfast, unless it's an emergency. But given Jim's work, all his sources and contacts abroad, theirs rang in the early morning all the time. When it happened that December, Milagros let herself hope it was D.C. or Berlin calling. Then Vivi answered, and Milagros watched her shoulders sink before she passed the phone to Jim. And to Milagros, Vivi whispered, “They found our boy.” A sentence like that had no room for good news. It never went,
they found our boy and he is fine
or
he's alive.
Jim took the phone, listened, and let it go. The receiver struck the floor. “Oh no,” he said, shaking his head, bringing his fingers to his temples. “No.” Milagros watched her husband cover his face and fall to his knees before the kitchen sink, as if the time for praying, or begging, had not yet passed.

This book wouldn't exist without my family. Along with the beloved cousins, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, in-laws, and honoraries who inspired and cheered on its creation, I especially thank my parents, Concepcion and Jose Alvar, and Josefina and Gerard Couture; and my sister, Anna Newsom.

Deep thanks to Julie Barer, my agent and early adopter, whose faith in these stories made a lifelong dream come true. And to the Barer Literary team, past and present, for being so kind and so good at what they do: William Boggess, Gemma Purdy, Anna Wiener, and Anna Geller.

I couldn't be more grateful to everyone at Knopf for their enthusiasm and hard work—in particular, Oliver Munday, Jaclyn Whalen, Susan Brown, Maria Massey, Helen Tobin, the wonderful and heroically patient Tom Pold, and of course my editor, Lexy Bloom. Thank you, Lexy, for taking on my work with such care and imagination, for asking the smartest questions, and for leaving the collection so much better than you found it.

Columbia University, SLS, the Blue Mountain Center, the Corporation of Yaddo, Sarah Lawrence College, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and the Sirenland Writers Conference generously provided the time, space, and support I needed to finish this thing, as well as the fantastic company of other writers and artists.

Thank you to the editors who found space for me in their magazines, and made these stories better in the process: Brock Clarke and Nicola Mason; Speer Morgan, Evelyn Somers, and Michael Nye; David Daley; Adina Talve-Goodman, Maribeth Batcha, and especially Hannah Tinti.

For their wisdom, encouragement, and example, I thank my teachers Cathy Blackburn, Patricia Powell, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Jaime Manrique, Nathan Englander, Sigrid Nunez, Mark Slouka, and Joan Silber. And all my workshop-mates, from St. Petersburg to Cambridge to the Upper West Side, who taught me too.

Thank you to the friends I laughed with and leaned on at various times while writing this book, and whose domain expertise I occasionally abused for story “research,” including Joy Somberg, Misha Wright, Ammie Hwang, Maya Rock, Jonathan Tze, Nina Hein, Ana Martínez, David Petersen, and Pia Wilson.

And to bring it back around to family, my last and deepest thanks go to the king of husbands, Glenn Nano, whose excellent love makes life and work worthwhile.

Mia Alvar was born in Manila and grew up in Bahrain and New York City. Her work has appeared in
One Story, The Missouri Review, FiveChapters, The Cincinnati Review,
and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Yaddo, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. A graduate of Harvard College and the School of the Arts at Columbia University, she lives in New York City.

To view the reading group guide for
In the Country
, please visit:

http://knopfdoubleday.com/​book/​237106/​in-the-country/