The Tesseract (16 page)

This boy with a strangely ruined chest, reeling under the dynamite shock. Son of Tata Vin, the man with the strangely ruined leg. Withered like a polio victim’s—the fingers of one hand could have closed around Tata Vin’s thigh. But at least Tata Vin had been better off than
his
father, Tata Ilad. Ilad had been born without any arms below the elbow. It made you wonder what a family could have done to be so cursed.

Perhaps a third
of a mile down the beach, Doming stopped and sat. He still held Rosa, managing to contain her rage with one entirely powerful arm, while the other was kept free to stroke her head. It took time for her red mist and wildcat strength to dissolve, but eventually it did.

When Doming released Rosa, he checked her eyes for the autopilot. And when he found it—found the blankness—he relaxed, partially because he knew that whatever the nature of this explosion, the autopilot would guide her through.

Doming was in an open casket. A good casket, white with brass handles and gold-plated edging, and a plastic viewing window. It had been paid for largely by Sonny, who—while Rosa was still an intern—was the family’s only real earner. He was congratulated
by several of the mourners for having honored his father-in-law with such a lavish send-off.

“I doubt I’d have done the same for my father-in-law,” whispered Turing, who already had a few San Miguels under his belt. And it was quite a belt. The spread of his girth had been so extreme that Rosa hadn’t been able to place him at first. “Turing,” he had prompted cheerfully. “I might not have married Leesha if I’d known she was such a good cook!”

Recognizing Leesha, however, was no problem. Of course she looked older, and three children had added a complementing weight to her, but in all other aspects she was the same. And anyway, in the five intervening years between Rosa’s last trip to Sarap, the two of them had exchanged photos—Leesha’s presumably taken by the ballooning Turing, his expansion hidden behind the camera.

And Rosa recognized Ella easily too. Where Leesha had glided, Ella had scuttled, tugging after her a thin man with a greasy, translucent complexion and a slightly haunted air.

“My deepest condolences,” Ella had said. “Everyone will miss your father.”

Knowing better than to open her mouth, for fear of what might come out, Rosa simply nodded. Then she turned away, to where Leesha was showering a somewhat bemused Lita with kisses and hugs. Ella and her husband left not long after.

Late into the night
, around twelve, the very oldest and the very youngest at the wake had either drifted or been taken
home, or were curled asleep in the house. Everyone else was outside. The teenagers were sitting in a circle around an oil lamp, taking turns singing recent pop songs. Relatively recent. Rosa noticed that there was still a detectable time lag between Manila and the barrio.

Sonny was in another circle—a circle of husbands. He had been roped into a
lambanog
drinking session organized by Turing. Unused to the locally distilled spirit, he discovered that he had got himself extremely drunk, but far too late to do anything about it.

Corazon was on her own, with the coffin, one hand laid on the plastic. She had been there since Rosa had arrived, as she would be until the casket was taken to the church the next day.

And Rosa and Leesha sat together, separate from the others, having the private chat they had been waiting for all evening.

“Now,” said Leesha, pouring herself a shot from her own supply of
lambanog.
“Do you want to talk about how you feel?”

“I don’t think so. I’d rather hear about you. You know, you look so good, and all your children are beautiful.”

“Thank you. I agree. I wish I could say the same about my man, though. Your photos of Sonny don’t do him justice, whereas perhaps you’ve noticed that Turing’s photos…”

“I haven’t seen photos of Turing. You didn’t send me any.”

“Exactly. I didn’t send you any pictures of a caribou’s ass, either.”

“Leesha!”

“Just a joke.”

“There aren’t…problems between you?”

“None at all. Everything’s fine. I’m very happily married, and I’m sure it’s going to stay that way.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Although I must admit, I have my doubts about the third baby. She’s a girl, so I’m hoping that if my doubts are confirmed, it won’t show up too much. But if it had been a boy…well, it doesn’t bear thinking about.”

Rosa frowned, turning this comment over in her mind. Then she said, “Oh.”

“Sison,” said Leesha, probably a little louder than she should have, and knocked back her shot. “Don’t look at me like that. I held back for
four
years. But it seemed like everywhere I looked, there he was, playing basketball, being handsome. It drove me crazy.”

So it turned out that Rosa had been wrong, because she managed a smile after all.

They never talked
about Lito. At one point, Rosa had been tempted to ask. From Leesha’s letters, Rosa knew that he was still a fisherman and that he was still unmarried. But now that Rosa and Leesha were face to face, talking about him didn’t seem easy.

Rosa had almost wanted him to appear at the wake. Even if they didn’t speak, just seeing him, she thought, would tell her what she needed to know. If he was okay. If he’d moved on in the way that she had.

To the extent that she had.

Guilty toward Sonny that she was thinking about Lito so much, guilty toward her father that Lito was the biggest reason why this return to Sarap was so hard.

Perhaps he would appear at the funeral tomorrow. Perhaps, if he did, that would be a good thing.

Leesha stayed the night with Rosa and the children, behind the curtain partition that had once made Rosa’s bedroom. Raphael lay in the protective arc formed by Rosa’s right arm. Lita lay similarly with Leesha, though she was too big to be completely encircled, so Leesha’s arm doubled as a pillow.

It left no space for Sonny, but by the time he realized how important it was for him to stop drinking and get some shut-eye, he was far beyond caring where that shut-eye might happen to be found. He woke at five the next morning, hung over and still extremely drunk, puzzled to discover Corazon’s toes only a few inches from his face. Puzzled, then appalled when he realized that his search for a bed had led him under the trestles that supported Doming’s coffin.

Which partly explained the fitful dream that had plagued him for each of the three hours he had been approximating sleep. His own death, repeatedly, by a variety of means, but always at the hands of the fat sawmill guy with the sadistic drinking games. “Just one more!” Turing would cry, pulling a
byenté nwebé
from his back pocket. “Just one more!” as he started stabbing
Sonny in the neck. “No,” Sonny would protest politely. “Really, I think I’ve had enough.” “Just one more!” And the next time, it would be a gun or a machete.

Coincidentally, Leesha also had dreamed of Turing. She was playing a game of one-on-one basketball with Sison, and the ball was Turing’s head.

“Corazon, I am
so
sorry. Please forgive me,
po
,” Sonny tried to say as he crawled out from beneath the coffin, but his lips were dry and stuck together, and didn’t open. Fortunately, Corazon was too exhausted to take much notice of the bizarre singsong whine that came from her son-in-law’s nose.

Sonny hauled himself up, desperately trying to produce saliva and massage some life into his mouth with his tongue. Once he’d pulled the creases out of his shirt and regained some dignity, he made a second go of the apology.

“I don’t know what to say,
po
…There’s nothing I
can
say. I am
so
sorry.”

“Oh, Sonny,” Corazon replied, gazing at him through bleary and bloodshot eyes. “I’m sorry too. I don’t know what I’ll do without him. But I know he is with Jesus now. He was a good man all his life, a
good
man, and I know he is with Jesus.”

Sonny blinked at her.

“And I want you to know that I was touched you spent the night keeping me company. You can be sure, I won’t forget it.”

“It…was…the least I could do.”

“It is a great source of happiness to me that my daughter has been blessed with such a husband. You are a very fine young man.”

“Thank you,” Sonny said, as his brain struggled with its toxicity,
attempting to keep pace with this endlessly twisting situation. “And you are a very fine old woman.”

Corazon’s bleary eyes widened. “Excuse me?”

“I said…I need some water.”

“Did you?”

“No,” Sonny replied—firmly, to compensate for the long hesitation. “I didn’t.” Then he blinked again. “About this water.”

“It’s over there, in the clay pot.”

“Ah yes,” he said, resting a light hand on the coffin to prevent himself from falling over. “So it is.”

“You are
a very fine old woman,” he was still muttering to himself, an hour later, sobered up on sugary black coffee and the morning air. “What was I
thinking
of?”

While Leesha
and Lita continued to sleep, Rosa suckled the baby and—through a slit in the
nipa
—watched Sonny walking around the vegetable garden. Every few steps he shuddered visibly, or tapped aggressively at his temples.

Rosa had no idea what lay behind his odd behavior, but she didn’t particularly care. Her dreams had been as vivid and circular as Sonny’s, and as unfaithful as Leesha’s, though nothing like as coded. She was simply relieved that, on waking, she could look at her husband and feel sure that she loved him.

The long walk to the church and the long service inside passed in a blur of nonthinking for Rosa. All morning, her mind was distracted by the smallest things. The yellowness of the dust on her black cotton dress. The length of Lita’s stride compared to her own (the ratio was almost exactly two steps to one). The drone in the priest’s voice that made it impossible to follow what he was saying.

In fact, until the funeral procession left the church and reached the graveyard, it was the priest who had provoked Rosa’s strongest emotional response. Watching him—this fleshy, closeted, virginal man who had gone out of his way to experience as little of life as possible—Rosa felt a surge of irritation. It seemed absurd that such a lifeless person should be called upon to clarify the end of someone else’s. “I knew Tata Doming well,” he intoned, and Rosa had to stop herself from interrupting his address. “Oh, shut up,” she imagined herself saying. “You don’t know anything well, let alone any
body.
” The urge caught her off guard and made her blush, afraid that her thoughts had somehow been loud enough to be heard by the mourners in the surrounding pews. And perhaps they had been. Without warning, Raphael started wailing loudly and fighting Rosa’s hold. Sonny gestured to pass the baby over, but instead Rosa took it as an opportunity to excuse herself from the service.

“He’s probably hungry, and he’s too hot in here,” she whispered as she eased past Sonny and Corazon, perfectly aware that these were not tears of hunger or discomfort. Corazon
probably knew too, but if she disapproved of Rosa’s exit, she didn’t show it. Instead she nodded and gave her daughter a vaguely awkward but sympathetic pat on the back of the leg.

It was while Rosa
was sitting in the café opposite the church, with the now docile Raphael chewing idly on a drinking straw, that she saw Lito.

She was about
sixty feet away from where he stood, sitting on a table, in the shadow cast by the café’s canvas awning. He was amazed by how much of her was so entirely familiar. Not just her features, build, posture—her mannerisms. When she tilted her head, he knew exactly how far her head would tilt. He could read the exact nature of the movement. He knew she was squinting at the sunshine and the bright road beneath his feet, and he knew that he was as recognizable to her as she had been to him. And he knew she was pleased to see him, even before she jumped up and began to run across the road.

Knew he could stop her, dead in her tracks, with a raised hand.

Knew
everything.

It terrified him.

Knew that when he turned to go, she wouldn’t follow.

The years that had changed nothing, the child in her arms, her eyes on his back, the ache in his chest, the bottle in his hands.

Small green bottle.

Terrified him.

Terrified her.

One look, she had thought, would tell her what she needed to know. If he’d moved on in the way she had; if he was okay. And she had been right, because one look was enough. He wasn’t okay at all.

“I’m not having
grandchildren
with
bits
of them
missing
!” Corazon had once screamed over the tail end of a typhoon.

Seeing Lito now, Rosa recognized that it was more than a part of his anatomy that was missing. Apparent in the shadow that had stood in the sunlight, radiating blankness: His anatomy had been vacated.
He
was missing.

When the priest’s
interminable service drew to a close and the mourners began to file out of the church, they found Rosa where she had been stopped by Lito’s raised hand. Raphael’s hair was plastered to his head with sweat, and his breathing was heavy. When Sonny tried to take the baby from Rosa, her arms felt like iron and didn’t give an inch.

“What is it?” he said, hating the stupidity of such a question at a funeral, feeling helpless. When Rosa didn’t answer, he almost tried to take the baby again, but decided against it when
he saw her frozen expression. He had been frightened away, if he was honest with himself.

Half a decade later, fixing a tire, he would tell Raphael that it wasn’t God who had burned his chest. Sonny would never let God take responsibilty for that moment of cowardice.

For Raphael, there would be a chain of events that would take many years to fully explain. Certain details would be held back, according to suitability of age. In its incomplete form, the chain of events took the form of a sad story about a jealous man. But in time, he would come to think of himself as a boy with two histories: one biological, the other anatomical. One with a nine-month gap between conception and birth, and the other with a gap of nine years. Ultimately, a boy with two fathers.