Philippine Speculative Fiction (15 page)

“It’s impossible.”

“Maybe we both dreamt it,” I said, which I knew, even as I said it, didn’t make any sense. I wasn’t drunk when I got here, or under the influence of any drug, and how do
you explain Lucas’s wounds, the blood on our clothes? I had held Noelle. I had held her, and I knew it wasn’t a dream or a hallucination.

“Let’s go back,” Lucas said as I placed gauze on his knee. “To the empty lot. Let’s see if she’s still there.”

It was already December but the temperature was still in the 30’s. Last night we drove from the Perezes to the house, but Lucas didn’t want to touch the car
anymore. So we walked. The sun was relentless. Lucas’s house was deep inside the sprawling subdivision, while the Perezes’ lot was near the main road. AS to the Infirmary, I thought,
thinking of the university where we first met. We met again last year, me fresh out of college and Lucas just finishing his junior year, at the wedding of common friends, eating slices of the
wedding cake—horribly sweet with inch-thick frosting—on paper towels.
I didn’t know you knew the couple. How have you been?

Noelle was not where we left her. The spot showed signs of her being there the night before–flattened grass, skid marks on concrete. But no body. We parted the weeds and walked around the
lot.

“She’s not here,” Lucas said.

We walked back without speaking another word.

WE FOUND NOELLE, freshly bathed, sitting on the sofa and reading a book. The sight of her still gave me a start. But would it have been better if we saw her dead body on the
empty lot?

“Relax,” she said, looking at Lucas. “I’ll be out of here in a day or two.”

“I’m taking a bath,” Lucas said to no one in particular.

“Oh, with Tom?” Noelle said, and laughed when Lucas stormed out of the room. “I was just kidding! What is
wrong
with him?”

I wanted to go home. I wanted to just leave this house and go back to Makati, back to my humdrum job and my humdrum life. Even without Lucas, who was never a permanent part of it anyway, like a
stray cat that enters and leaves through a window you never learned to close.

I sat down.

“How are you, Noelle?”

I must have looked so grim and determined. Noelle laughed. “I’m fine, Tom.”

“Where were you last night?”

“Didn’t Lucas tell you?” she said. “I hitched a ride with him, then I met up with my friend in San Agustin. I haven’t seen her since high school, and we used to be
so close. It was her brother’s party and we had an impromptu sleepover.”

“What’s her name?”

Noelle sighed, already bored with me. “Diane,” she said. She picked up her phone and swiped through her files. “Here.”

There were several photos of Noelle and Diane cheek-to-cheek, eyes and smiles bright, then of a group of people, some unsmiling parents. The photos, according to the file details, were all taken
last night, from 6 to 11 pm.

I TOOK A bath in the guest bathroom and was dressed and back in the bedroom before Lucas stepped out of the shower.

“She got to San Agustin,” I said.

“What?”

“She was able to see her friend. She said you dropped her off at the main road and she got on a tricycle.”

“That’s not what happened,” Lucas said, and stuck his head out of a new shirt.

“Then what did happen?” I said. “If she were supposed to go to San Agustin, there was no reason for you to drive her all the way to this house if she could just flag a tricycle
on the main road.”

“She said she left something here.”

“You didn’t tell me that last night.”

“Goddamn it, Tom!”

“Guys?” We fell silent. I opened the door, and Noelle was standing outside. “Aren’t you guys hungry? What’s for lunch?”

We couldn’t eat. We fried a cheese omelet for her and cooked rice, but in the end we couldn’t eat. We could only watch her.

“What?” she said, annoyed, and we looked elsewhere. She then began a long monologue about a classmate of hers who went home with a stranger who might or might not be married.

After a beat I looked up and thought of anything, anything at all to say that would inject a dose of normality into the day.
Did you die last night, Noelle? Did you meet someone there? Were
you told that it was not your time yet, and was allowed to go back to life unscathed?

“That looks new,” I said, pointing to her large earrings, pearl inlaid in silver. “Where’d you get it?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Seriously, Tom?”

I was surprised by her reaction.

“You guys bought this for me last month, when you went to Coron.”

Lucas and I shared a look. We had planned on going on a trip to Coron, just the two of us, but the plan fell through, Lucas curling up in fear with his father’s repeated questioning.
Who are you going with again? Who else? What do you mean just him?

“We didn’t go to Coron,” I said.

“Maybe you just bought the earrings in Greenhills,” she said. “But you showed me pictures. You went diving.” She let out an exasperated groan. “What have you guys
been smoking?”

“I WOULDN’T HAVE bought her anything, if we did go on a trip,” Lucas said.

We were back in the bedroom. I sat on the mattress on the floor, and after a moment, Lucas sat beside me. “She’s not the Noelle I know,” he said. “Not only that,
she’s talking about someone who doesn’t sound like me.”

“He sounds better than you, actually.” It was cruel, but it had been a long day.

Lucas didn’t answer for a while. “If you hated our situation so much,” he said, finally, “why did you come here?”

“Why did you even ask me to come here?”

“I wanted to see you. You could have said no.”

“Just shut the fuck up for a minute, Lucas.”

We both did. Eventually, I stood up and went downstairs. There were some old magazines in the living room. I read some until I fell asleep on the sofa.

I DREAMT OF Lucas killing a bird. He did kill a bird once; we were walking on campus when I spotted a tiny black bird hopping on the ground. It was a really small bird, smaller
than the usual brown tree sparrows we see all the time. Look at this thing, I said, marveling at the sight of it, and Lucas crushed the bird with his leather book bag. He said it was an accident,
he said the bag slipped as he leaned close. I felt a heavy weight on my chest when I realized what happened. I was cross with Lucas the entire day. How could I feel such horror over the death of an
animal, and yet manage to make myself throw away a sixteen-year-old girl’s body?

In the dream, Lucas crushed the bird, repeatedly, with a rock, leaving it a flattened mess of blood and black feathers. I helped him scrape the corpse off the ground and throw it into a field of
weed grass.

You killed it, I told him in the dream, and Lucas said, No, I didn’t.

The bird shot out of the field like a black missile.

I woke up with a jolt, and the living room was dark. It must have been five p.m.

I found Noelle in the kitchen, eating pork and beans from a can and playing a noisy game on her phone. She looked morose. “Well!” she said when I entered. “So nice to see
there’s someone else alive in this house.”

I tried not to think too much about what she just said. “You should learn how to cook,” I said.

“I know how to cook,” Noelle said, going back to her game. “I’m just lazy.”

I opened a can of tuna and heated the contents in a pan.

“Shouldn’t you call Lucas?” Noelle asked.

“I’m sure he’s not hungry,” I told the stove.

“Lovers’ quarrel?”

I glanced over a shoulder. Noelle had her chin in her hand. She was looking at me with a smirk.

“We’re just friends,” I said.

Noelle barked a laugh, a sharp
Ha!
“Sure you are,” she said.

There was something sinister in her smile. I thought of Lucas with his bruised face.
That tattletale.

I FOUND LUCAS on the bed under the covers. I thought he was asleep, but when I closed the door he stirred and said, “I’m sorry.”

I didn’t bother to turn on the light. I felt my way to the mattress. “There’s food downstairs, if you’re hungry.”

“I should be happy,” Lucas said. He was whispering, as though afraid Noelle might hear. “My cousin’s alive. There’s no dead body outside. I’m not going to
jail. But I’m scared.” I heard him turn on the bed to face me. “There is no way she just got up from that empty lot and walked here.”

“So what are you thinking?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“Maybe she stepped out of a different timeline,” I said.

“What?”

“From a parallel universe. Where she didn’t die, and we went on that trip.”

“Where I’m kinder,” Lucas said.

Where you’re braver, I wanted to say.

Lucas turned again, away from me, his voice muffled by the pillow. “I’m being punished,” he said. “She knows I killed her. She came back to punish me.”

I remembered my dream, the black bird flying from the grass.

“It was an accident,” I said.

“She makes no distinction. She’s evil.”

“She’s a teenager.”

“She knows we left her out in the dark,” Lucas said. “She’s toying with us, pretending to be sweet. I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with her.”

Sometime in the night I got up to get a glass of water. I passed by the guest bathroom and almost cried out when I saw a girl in white with her back to me standing inside.

It was Noelle, in a white nightgown, standing still, staring at her face in the mirror. I called her name. She didn’t move. I called her name again, and she glanced back, blinked, and
said, softly, “Want some?” She opened her hand and showed me two round pills on her palm, pink like flower petals.

I woke up on the mattress, but I stayed put, my thirst forgotten.

WE WOKE UP late, Noelle even later. That afternoon, while looking for a snack, I found two large bottles of cheap brandy in one of the kitchen cupboards. The refrigerator has a
bottle of Coke. I left Makati for this insanity. I deserved this.

Lucas and I sat on the floor, passing the bottle and a glass of Coke between us. He started reminiscing about our college days, and I leaned forward to kiss him. It was painful to keep caring
for him, with his dictator of a father, with all his fears and neuroses. I was the “friend,” or the “friend from college,” if he was courageous enough and merciful enough to
tag me with a more specific label.

“I have an idea,” Lucas said, when the room was already beginning to spin, and took out a mint tin from his backpack and opened it. My stomach lurched. Inside were five round pink
pills.

“What do they do?” I said, hearing Noelle say,
Want some?

“They make you happy, what else,” Lucas said, popping two of them in his mouth.

“Did you give these to Noelle?”

Lucas smiled. “This is better enjoyed outside. Come on.”

The shadows were already starting to lengthen when we left the house, which worried me because the darkness in the subdivision was absolute. The horizon glowed a sick orange. Lucas carried the
brandy bottle in one hand, his other arm wrapped around my shoulders. We stumbled across the empty lots.

“Lucas,” I said. “Stop walking.”

“She went through my things in the backseat,” he said. “She saw the mint tin and took two pills without even asking me.”

Want some?

“She took them, or you offered them to her?” I asked.

Lucas ran ahead. I ran after him. He darted from one lot to the next, disappearing and appearing through the grass.

I doubled over when he stopped. “Damn it, Lucas!” I said.

He was laughing. “I offered them to her,” he said. “Happy now? What difference does it make? She’s stupid enough to think they were mint, she got what she
deserved.”

“Jesus,” I said. With a shudder I realized we were standing on the edge of the Perezes’ lot.

“No,” Lucas said, wagging a finger at me. The brandy sloshed in the bottle. “You don’t give me that.”

“You killed a girl, Lucas!”

“She was going to tell my father about us!” he said.

I had asked myself if I would tell my own father about Lucas if I knew I would get a punch in return, and I had answered, over and over,
I would.
If only I could just stop caring for
him. If only I could be content to be found here, among the things he hid from the world: marijuana, the party drugs, murder, this dead place, me.

“So you killed her?” I said. I imagined Noelle running around this subdivision with Lucas on her heels, behind the wheel. I felt sick.

“You don’t know my father, Tom,” Lucas said. “He will kill you, too.”

“She’s sixteen!” I shouted.

“I did it for you, Tom.”

“Fuck you!” I said. “Fuck you, you don’t tell me that.”

I walked away. I could only see the silhouettes of houses and trees. How did I end up here? Why did I allow myself to end up here?

Lucas didn’t follow me. I looked back, but I could hardly see anything now. “Lucas?” I said. I walked back, calling his name. My head throbbed.

I wouldn’t be able to find him, even if I tried. I needed flashlights. I needed to be sober.

I needed to actually
want
to find him.

So I went back to the house. The kitchen was the only room lit. It was blessedly warm. Noelle, wearing a plain red apron, had tied her hair in a ponytail and was stirring something in a pot.

“I thought you didn’t cook,” I said, sitting at the kitchen table. There was meat thawing on a chopping board near the sink.

“Well,” she said. “I decided to be un-lazy. Where’s Lucas?”

“He’s outside,” I said, and laughed. The room was turning, slowly, gently, as if it were on the surface of an ocean. There were snakes in the grass. And stray dogs. Maybe Lucas
would pass out and die on the Perezes’ empty lot. First the fields giveth, then the fields taketh away. Maybe he would come back. Maybe he would be returned to me, a better person.

Oh my God.

“Oh my God,” I said, willing the walls to stop moving. “Noelle, Lucas is outside. We need to find him.”

Noelle didn’t seem to hear. She stood by the sink, her hand hovering over the knife rack, about to make a choice.