Moondogs (50 page)

“I see that,” Reynato said, nodding. “I do. I figure the tremor means you figured it out all by yourself.” He paused, regarding her cautiously. She realized that even now he thought he had a chance with her. It suddenly became impossible to comprehend how just a few days ago the sight and smell and sound of him had been so pleasant. “I knew it was only a matter of time until you did, and if you focus—”

“What are you talking about?” she cut him off. “I mean, what are you even saying? I have a life. I have a husband and I have children.”

He stared at her for a moment, eyes darting about as he tried to get his bearings. “I have a life, too,” he said. “And I share it with people that I love, but who will never know me the way that you do. Just like no one will ever know you the way …” he trailed off here, sensing this was a losing tack. “This is what you came back to the Philippines for. Tell yourself it was to find
home
, or whatever, but you came here because you didn’t fit in—”

She cut him off again, her voice not forgiving in the least: “Are you for real? You have no idea why I came back. And if you actually think I’m going to
stay
with you, then you don’t know half of what you think you do about me.”

Reynato reared up in bed, the hope in his face eroding. “Half is a lot, bruha.”

“God, enough with the bruha crap.” She waved him off. “What are you, five? Is this all just a game to you?”

Reynato laughed and winced and grabbed at his stitches. When he looked back up his expression had completely closed. “Everything is a game to me,” he said, his voice irritatingly high. “Why should you be any different?” He spoke slowly, almost sadly, as though inviting her to seek a promised undercurrent of ironic poignancy. But it wasn’t poignant—it was just a truism. With Reynato, face value was the only value. Monique felt drenched in revulsion like sea spray.

“Leave me alone,” she said, humiliated by how much she’d let this aging infant hurt her. “Don’t ever speak to me again.” She took a step backward. “You stay away from me and my family, or I’ll knock your goddamn house down.”

“Oh my goodness. A whole new Monique.” He laughed again and put his hands in the air like he was being held up. “I’m terrified.” Sarcasm—but she could tell by the tinny ring to his laugh that he really was.

A FEW DAYS LATER
Howard died, and a few days after that Joseph came back. The proximity of those events would trouble Monique for years. Howard passing away in the predawn quiet. Joseph, without any kind of announcement, leaving the kids with his sister and returning to Manila early. Howard’s funeral on a patch of scrub overlooking a choppy strait. Joseph home, his bags already unpacked, fresh Baguio roses splayed loose over his wilted lap, their leaves and thorns, as well as a few droplets of his own blood, plastered to the bottom of the kitchen sink. She had the odd feeling that these events were mutually conditional. As though if she was to be thankful for one then she must be thankful for them both.

She didn’t wake Joseph when she first found him. His worn loafers were propped up on the coffee table and his hands were folded over the roses, making his fingers look like pale wicker. He was still in his traveling clothes—his passport still in his shirt pocket. He stank just a little.

There was no big, warm, enveloping hug when he finally woke up. He pressed his closed mouth to her closed mouth and they started on dinner. The freezer was still full of Amartina’s food, and they picked a pair of chops she’d bought at the Cavite market; rubbery white rims of
skin and fat still hugging the lean. They defrosted the chops, dredged them in flour and fried them in corn oil. Joseph spread paper towels over a serving platter and as Monique took the dripping chops out of the pan she realized how long it had been since they’d cooked together. She remembered their first apartment in Columbia Heights, one elbow against the wall as she tended a half-size with electric burners. Joseph did prep on the other side of the kitchen. It was so small he could get at the stove, sink and fridge just by shifting his weight.

They ate in silence. Joseph meticulously sliced open a calamansi fruit and sprinkled the sour juice onto his pork. Some round green seeds came out as well and he used the tip of his knife to roll them, one by one, to the rim of his plate. He finally asked where Amartina was—it was a weekday, after all. He asked what happened to the lovebird and gecko—he’d gone to feed them while Monique was still at work and found them missing. She told him that Amartina had quit. She said that there had been an earthquake and the animals escaped. The insufficiency of these answers put him out, and he pouted.

They hardly loosened up after dinner, sitting at either end of the couch, legs in almost perfunctory contact. When it got late, Joseph retrieved a blanket from the linen closet and tucked it under the couch cushions. He went into the bedroom and came back with his pillow. Monique realized that he meant to spend the night out there.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, “but I’m going to be completely, brutally honest. I’m mad at you. And I’ll need space. Maybe for quite some time.”

Mad at her? He had every right, she supposed, but he didn’t know that yet. All he could possibly have been mad about now was feeling forced to end his vacation early because she needed him. If that was enough to send him to the couch, what would coming clean about her affair do? Just thinking about it made her queasy.

“That’s all right,” she said. “Have a good night. I love you.”

They did the closed-mouth kiss again and Monique went into the master bedroom, leaving the door open behind her. She undressed and lay down in bed, trying to remember what it was about Joseph that had
made Reynato seem like an appealing alternative—someone worth the risk of her life, as she knew it. It wasn’t just her wanderlust—her longing for and determination to find a connection in this city. The truth was that Reynato had lived up neatly to the cliché by being everything Joseph wasn’t. Confident, direct and singularly at home in the world. Just because she’d ended it with him, just because the thought of him now disgusted her, that didn’t make Joseph any more these things. He would still be neurotic. He would still be small and insecure and passive aggressive. Or at least he still
could
be. He could also be other things. He was capable of coming home early because he knew she needed him. And he was also capable of punishing her for it by sleeping on the couch.

After an hour Monique was still awake. She went into the den and saw that Joseph was, too. He didn’t protest when she squeezed onto the couch beside him and put a hand on his rising chest. His body filled itself with air, breathing deep and slow, trying to force sleep by mimicking it. She counted his gusts. She matched his rhythm and felt herself begin to drift. Together their breaths surged above them. Monique lifted her hand from Joseph’s chest and ran her fingers over it. Their lungs filled, and they emptied.

Chapter 34

And what of heartbroken, harried Reynato? He goes home after trying to kill Racha and finds, at bedtime, that sleep is an impossibility. It remains so for the next night, and the next. Reynato moves through the house trying different places and positions—curled up next to Lorna on an imported and as yet unpaid for Swedish foam, sprawled out on the big leather sofa in the living room, atop a pile of pillows in the
kitchen, even in the enormous guest bathtub—but everywhere he goes he feels Efrem’s eyes skitter over his skin like ants. In his paranoia he’s sure that the holier-than-thou gun savant is alive, watching him lather up and shave, wipe himself on the toilet, distract himself with soft-core Internet pornography.
It’s guilt
, Racha writes when Reynato returns to the hospital to make a third go at it.
It’s a natural thing for you to feel. You’re a lousy person. Take it from me; just put the knife down and you’ll sleep like a baby tonight
. But Reynato knows guilt, and this isn’t it. This is straight-up fear—so intense it infects his blameless family. So deep it wrecks his self-control, leaving him blubbering like a baby at Howard’s funeral.

More than a week goes by without proper sleep. Reynato tries hotel rooms and foldout sofas. He tries a sleeping bag under calamansi trees in the front yard. One night he remembers, with sudden hope, the expensive air mattress made into a pool toy by Bea. He finds it in the pool house, shakes it dry and spends half an hour hacking air into it before realizing it’s busted. A clean hole, big enough to accommodate a garden hose, runs right through. Reynato fingers the hole. He remembers Bea riding the mattress in the pool, waving up at him. He remembers the way it sank under her so suddenly, as though someone pulled the tap. Stripping down to his briefs, he jumps into the pool, chlorine burning his wounded shoulder through the gauze. He empties his lungs and floats along the bottom, fingering blue tiles. One near the middle feels different. What at first looks like a coin turns out to be the ass-end of a fifty-caliber BMG slug. With some wriggling he works the slug out, surfaces and fits it through the hole in the air mattress. Well. At least it’s settled.

Still dripping in his briefs, Reynato goes inside. He treads lightly on the stairs, careful not to wake Bea or Lorna up, and enters his study. It’s a mess. The window is riddled with bullet holes. His computer lies in pieces on the floor, all wires and plastic. The hanging uniforms on his wall have all been shot through their left breast pockets. Never mind. Reynato takes a big framed photo off the desk—the one with Erap, third president after the revolution, ousted by a smaller one himself—and writes three words across the back in permanent marker. He
returns to the yard, stopping by the kitchen to light his frayed cigar on the gas range.

It’s quiet outside. The moon tunnels above through cavern and vault, spilling blue light onto leaves. Reynato stands in the middle of the yard and holds the framed photo over his head.
I Dare You
, it says. He imagines he can hear the airy sound of something falling. Lights on the pool house go dark one by one. Underripe fruit falls from his papaya tree. A passing pigeon lands dead at his angled feet. Reynato is patient. He puffs deep, and waits.

Chapter 35

Benicio stayed in the Philippines long enough to get a special investor’s resident visa, legalizing his ownership of his father’s local estate. He sold his stake in the business to Hon at about half the value and listed all the properties at motivated prices. He spent his days in meetings or waiting for them. He tried his best to call Alice only every few days or so. As September rolled into October she wrote to let him know that the school was firing him, but that he should please try to cheer up. He did try to cheer up. On Saturday afternoons he drank mini-bar vodka and laughed his ass off to international versions of
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
on BBC World. At nights he cried a lot, wishing that he’d been able to do more of it when his mother died and less of it now.

On his last evening in the country he called Bobby Dancer and invited him out to the nearby Café Havana for a drink. Benicio arrived first and sat at a table outside, under newly slung Christmas lights. When Bobby approached he did so without the slightest trace of a limp. His face was finally the same color all over and looked as healed as it was ever going to get.

“I didn’t know you were still in town,” Bobby said. He lowered himself into a chair, slowly.

“Just for a few more hours. I leave early tomorrow.”

“Well, imagine that. I was the first to say mabuhay, and now here I am to bid you pamamaalam. That means farewell.” He summoned a bereted waitress over. “What are you drinking?”

“I wasn’t, yet.”

“Well, why not go out how you came in? We’ll have two lambanogs,” he said. “I wish I’d known you were still around. Charlie had this thing yesterday honoring the two surviving policemen who rescued Howard. I mean, they used to be surviving. One of them is missing, and the other died last weekend.”

“I’d heard.”

“I would have invited you, for sure.”