Chapter 17 - Sweet Haven

INTO the silent house, the madman was speaking. Daniel was pouring his heart out to empty air, his voice rising in waves of despair and oratory.

“My dearest friend.” A pregnant silence while he shot several puffs of air through his gritted teeth. “My longest and most esteemed friend and colleague. Dear friend in Christ.”

There was a long pause, followed by the clack of a keyboard.

“What a day.”

Luth knew this phrase. It was a refrain he might sigh out at any hour, even at eight in the morning, the syllables beautifully pronounced—a snippet of a conversation from decades before maybe, or an exclamation carefully rehearsed for some blond girl, on some warm afternoon by a brook, carefully rehearsed but never articulated.

“ ‘What-a-day’,” he said. “ ‘They’ll-wish-they’d-never-been-born’.”

A line of dialogue from a movie perhaps, or from one of the Penguins on his many shelves.

“ ‘I’m a stickler where right’s concerned. I’m a stickler where right’s concerned’.”

The syllables trailed off, then suddenly reshaped themselves into a cheerful song. Luth tried not to listen. She was bent over, her wet feet braced against sudsy floor tiles. The reek of bleach made her vision dim, but slowly and surely the mold was disappearing from Naia’s bathroom walls. The wreaths of black hair obstructing the drain had been gathered up and tucked in the garbage pail.

This ought to be your job, she silently berated Narita. Of course, she could easily have handed the task over to the maid, but there was a certain comfort in her martyrdom. It strengthened her moral authority over the household.

She washed her hands and feet. Time to take a break, to give the cleaning agents time to work their way through all that organic debris.

Naia was sitting on the unmade bed, watching her forlornly.

“Thank you, Lola,” she said.

Luth nodded, sat on the edge of the bed and began to towel her water-wrinkled feet dry.

“What is Mother doing here?”

She frowned, trying to decide on the best answer. It was imperative that the family cohere. “She wants to see that you are all right. Aren’t you happy that she’s back?”

“No. She makes me nervous. It’s as if she expects some kind of performance from me.”

Luth decided to ignore this. “Would you like to take a trip to Manila?”

“What is in Manila?”

Escape, Luth thought. A new life for you, a second chance. You will be sixteen in a few months. And she knows better than me how to handle an adolescent girl, or if not, it is time she learned. Yes, I am sending you away. Because I cannot go on taking care of you. For a time you helped me. You were the buffer between me and that sad, crazy man in the far room, but now it feels as though I have to perform for even you.

“I want to go to Aunt Antonia.” Tears rolled down Naia’s cheeks.

“You cannot go to Finland. There is no room for you in their house.” For some time after her aunt left they had gone through this awful, rending ritual, every few days, Naia pleading, Luth explaining, until eventually the girl seemed to subside into a stony sort of acceptance. Now it was all coming back.

“Then I want to stay,” sobbed Naia.

The very thought of your stealthy, treacherous life ravages my heart, she thought. Aloud, she said, “You cannot stay. You are ruined.”

“Lolo says I must be brave and take my punishment.”

Daniel was declaiming again, his voice, surprisingly full for such a narrow chest, booming through the wall.

“Crazy man.”

“He’s not crazy,” Naia said.

Pain shot through Luth’s left breast, so sharp and unmitigated she had to hold still, suppressing her breath until the spasm had gone.

“I know,” she said gingerly, not daring to relax until she could be sure there were no further twinges. She knew the next bolt of agony could start in her head. “That’s the way he’s always been.”

“I remember. I grew up on that.” But Naia was still a child, not a grown-up. “Why is he that way?”

Luth did not know what to tell her. She had never discussed Daniel’s nature outside their family, so she had no euphemisms to dignify him with. How could she explain that loquacious, vain, pathologically insecure man? He was the son of a respected Sweethaven teacher. His brothers, whom he loathed, had become doctors and moved to other cities: they never corresponded, and he was too proud to ask them for money, they who had disparaged his ambitions, saying a writer died with eyes stark and staring in an emaciated face. He had proved them wrong, he liked to crow. He’d had his moment of brilliance, of being educated overseas on several scholarships, and from the way he told it, describing what seemed to be black-tie dinners and brilliant debates in lecture halls, he had championed his countrymen admirably. Pleased with himself, he had allowed the university to lionize him, to dull and soften him. It was a haven, true to its name, where he could be certain of a modest but regular income. Where Luth’s co-teachers habitually praised his brains and his education to her face, in a tone that she now suspected to have been humoring all along. Where all the young people he knew called him “sir.” His daughters were the exception. She supposed he had never gotten used to the demanding way they addressed him as “Pa.” At Honors Day exercises each year, he sat onstage with his colleagues in the stifling hot gymnasium, a flock of black birds in their togas and caps, each perched on a folding metal chair. The gowns were banded in velvet and satin, in the colors of emeralds and rubies and sapphires. Each swatch represented a doctorate degree from overseas. The keynote speech was always rendered by a successful alumnus, never a politician, so there were no superlatives or empty kudos, only an abstract, ascetic idealism. Leadership. Excellence. Service. Sacrifice.

What sort of life would they all have had, had he been a banker, or a rice merchant, or a prosperous farmer, shoulder to shoulder with his own laborers at planting season? Other girls were protected by a small army of husky bodies at the paterfamilias’s command. But Narita and Antonia had had to fend for themselves. Just as Naia would learn to, without brothers or uncles, without henchmen on call. Had Daniel been a stronger, more awe-inspiring figure, the wall that had separated them from the rudeness of Donostia would never have been breached.

“He’s like a spurned suitor,” Naia said. “He can’t accept that he’s been dropped by his friend.”

“Who do you mean?” Luth said, but in her heart she knew: Daniel had only one friend. “Why would Mr. Holland abandon your grandfather?”

The girl shrugged. “Because Rinky thinks he’s superior to normal people? Just like his sons?”

Naia’s eyes were huge and still, but the corners of her mouth quivered as though she were suppressing an abashed smile, the kind that begged for forgiveness and approval. Luth remembered how the child used to gaze up at her, her face angelic but with mischief at the back of her eyes, daring her to figure out what she’d been up to. The bank book stained in lipstick, the new cushions crusted over with glue. A lovely collage made from fabric, and holes cut on the fold lines of a length of pink dress cloth. Holes in the shape of hearts.

Naia’s secrets, so awful and monstrous they excited her to a point beyond shame.

“What is it?” Luth said. “What else haven’t you told me?”

“That day that Mother Martha came to our school. The thing that happened afterward, in the armory.”

Luth felt sick.

“He wasn’t a stranger.”

“All right, you might as well tell me.”

“I’m sorry!”

“Tell me the truth, Naia.”

“It was Brent Holland.” She began to weep, her eyes screwing into slits, her mouth stretching like a frog’s. Runny-nosed and red-faced, she had never looked so ugly. “And he didn’t rape me.”

“Because you let him.”

Luth realized that she had always known.

THE phone rang. Luth jumped. It was a sound that had not been heard in the house for days.

“Cecilia,” she bellowed. “Who plugged in the telephone?”

There was no answer from the kitchen. The instrument kept up its nerve-shredding noise, temporarily drowning out the tune that Daniel was hissing between his teeth as he typed away. A door slammed somewhere. Narita cursed, charged out into the living room.

“Are you deaf? This thing has been ringing for one whole minute.”

“Don’t pick it up!” Luth warned, straining to reach the phone before her elder daughter did.

Narita glared at her. “Hello?” She was silent for a few moments, and when she spoke again, it was in Binisaya and in a high, tentative tone. “Yes, this is Naia.”

Luth stood, waiting for what would happen next, her heart racing.

“My cell phone is off.”

Nothing good would come of this.

“I can’t be friends with someone I don’t know.”

“Put that thing down,” Luth hissed, reaching for the hand that held the receiver, but Narita twisted out of the way:

“A special friend? What does that mean?”

Then an expression of astonishment came over Narita’s face. Luth caught hold of her daughter’s arm and wrenched the receiver from her limp hand. Poised to slam it down, she stopped—What did it take to be a special friend?—and allowed her own wretched curiosity to get the better of her.

It was a young man. The voice was thin and crepuscular, and an image came to her mind, an amalgam of schoolboy faces, what must have been hundreds of faces by now, all those who had exited her care and gone the way of all children.

“You can suck it,” the voice was saying. “You can suck my cock. I know you’re good at that. I saw what you were doing to your boyfriend. Your tongue went there and there, like a lizard’s.”

Luth slammed the phone down. They stood there, mother and daughter, feeling the heat creep up their spines and spread through their scalps, averting their eyes from one another in their shame.

Luth thought of the stream of messages arriving in Naia’s in-box, each one heralded by an annoying two-tone peep, and how, addicted to technology, the girl could never seem to turn off her mobile phone. In the first days of the siege, Luth had assumed the calls, to the landline as well as the mobile, came from an army of peers, supporting their fallen friend with love and understanding.

THE instrument rang again.

“Answer it,” Narita said.

“Don’t answer it,” said Luth.

“Answer it. This is your house.”

“I won’t. That’s why it’s disconnected.”

“It’s stupid to keep a phone you never use.”

“So it was you who put the connection back on. When your father told you not to. This is your fault.”

“For Godssakes, Ma, you’re acting like a peasant.”

It hit home, whatever Narita had intended by that. Luth snatched the receiver up and tossed it at her daughter.

“Bahala ka! Have it your way.”

“You dick cheese, you uncircumcised piece of shit,” Narita hissed into the phone.

Then she went limp. “I’m sorry,” she said, in a subdued and educated voice, a voice that seemed to belong to another person. “Yes, this is Naia’s mother. Let me apologize again …”

It’s a lawyer, she mouthed. Joel Fortun.