Chapter 2 - Sweet Haven

“LOLA Luth,” Naia said.

The girl’s voice was so quiet and deliberate that her grandmother looked up from the test papers she had been correcting, her heart thumping in fear.

“Lola, I can’t go to school today. Don’t be upset.”

Luth saw eyes rimmed red from weeping, hair that straggled out of a slept-in ponytail. Her mind raced through the morning tragedies that a fifteen-year-old girl might face. The child bent to kiss her grandmother on the cheek. Then she handed her a creased white envelope.

“I fished it out of the mailbox last night. I didn’t want you to see it. I’m sorry.”

The envelope was addressed to her husband, Prof. Daniel Pastor, PhD. The seal was unbroken. With shaking hands—God, what had the girl done this time?—she drew a sheaf of paper out. The top sheet was a letter of expulsion. It was signed by the high school principal and several other worthies within the Sweethaven community. “With deepest regret we inform you that due to acts that prove bad moral character, to wit, her lewd performance in a sexually explicit, commercial movie, Naia Pastor has been removed from the roster of students of Sweethaven High School.”

Swiftly, Luth read the details, and the pages slipped from her nerveless fingers.

“I had my graduation dress picked out,” Naia choked. Then she turned away from the dining table and stumbled back to the room where she slept. Luth stared after her, the blood draining from her limbs.

The girl shut the door and slid the bolt home.

That was four days ago. She had not emerged from the room since, despite all manner of pleas and threats. The sound of water running in the bathroom, the disappearance of plates of food left outside her door—these were the only signs of life from within. In those four days, as phone call after mortifying phone call came through, Luth’s worry turned to panic and then to a blinding, thwarted rage.

Her husband tapped gently on the varnished wood.

“Naia.” His voice was barely audible. He sounded frightened of her. “Naia. Get yourself ready. A man is coming to see you.”

“Just force the door,” Luth shouted in his ear. “Drag that demonita out.”

Daniel did not answer. Ear pressed to the wood, he tried the knob one more time. His finger absently traced a pale set of lines scored into the varnish. Made with an ice pick, thought Luth, watching him with a twinge of pain. Back when their two daughters were young. When the girls fought, it was with a violence that she’d thought only testosterone could produce.

“Naia,” Daniel persevered, in what Luth recognized as his counseling voice, reserved for the graduate students in crisis who showed up every so often on their doorstep. He taught English language and literature at the university, a daily ordeal that frustrated him and sapped his strength, but a piece of cake next to her job dealing with the rich brats at the elementary school every day.

Luth left him, lumbered to the kitchen. All this softness a sign of a weak man. She reached for a bottle of Spanish sardines, fumbled around in the bread box for salt buns, found a single crust. The house was a mess, the maid catatonic. No one had done any shopping in days. Coaxing scraps of fish out of the bottle with her fingers, she downed them still dripping oil. They had no taste. A frenzied barking from the front yard interrupted her nerveless orgy. The buzzer sounded once, twice.

A strange jeep was parked beyond the gate, in the cogon grass. A man stood at their gate smoking a cigarette, rather like one of those aimless types hanging around ten-peso variety stores waiting for prosperity to come and find them. The dogs growled, hind legs stiff, tails quivering, as Luth shuffled out to meet him, wiping her hands on her duster.

He ground the cigarette out in the gravel beneath his shoe and, with some embarrassment, introduced himself. Joel S. Fortun. Attorney Joel S. Fortun. He was the chief legal officer of Donostia, he said. His office was at city hall. And when she did not smile, he added, as if to smoothen things out, “I was a classmate of Narita’s in college. She might even remember me.”

Oh, she thought. He was about the same age as her elder daughter. And had he been one of her pupils as well? Her mind worked furiously, as it did nowadays when face-to-face with someone from a younger generation. One of the quiet little boys sitting in the front row of her classroom, copying down everything she wrote on the blackboard, to be memorized that very night? No, his was a face she was certain she had never seen before, and she could recognize many of them even today, though they looked careworn and disappointed, just as she did in the mirror, just as her husband appeared those afternoons when, as she hailed a tricycle outside the elementary school, he passed her unknowingly, steering their ancient sedan, his lips moving without sound through one of his old Men’s Glee Club tunes. So maybe this Joel Fortun had emerged from one of the Catholic schools. That would fit, if he had found a post at city hall; political connections with the mayor. He looked a bit mestizo. This was a detail that automatically registered with her: a hint of European ancestry meant money, power, and the arrogance that went with them.

He extended a hand in greeting, a gesture that seemed foreign, that he must have taken pains to learn.

As he settled into the sofa his gaze took in his surroundings, quickly, professionally, sizing up the family with an awareness that shamed her. Her own eyes darted this way and that over the living room, seeking comfort in the familiarity of the place. The objects Daniel had spent a lifetime accumulating now seemed random, hapless, cheap. How we used to show them off, she thought, telling the story of each knickknack to our guests. How our friends must have snickered at that torturous living room tour: the Japanese masks, Balinese statuettes, engraved plates and souvenir teaspoons; four mismatched guardsman dolls from Scotland, their bearskins furry with dust, their sporrans and braid and blue-painted eyes eaten away. On one blazing, yellow wall, a bullfighter and a flamenco dancer, mock-posters inscribed with her husband’s name and hers, which he had brought, as a present for the house, all the way back from Spain.

Around the time the girls were in high school, Daniel had stopped traveling—no more scholarships, no more grants, the funding gone to keener, younger men. And the junk stayed—why couldn’t they ever throw it away? How they had clung to the status of the past. No wonder the girls of the family had gone crazy: Narita living from pay envelope to pay envelope in Manila in her so-called career, and Antonia running off to another country without her mother’s blessing. And now Naia. The mistake, the child of bitterness. Now it was Naia’s turn.

“Is this her?” Fortun said, pointing to a photograph that sat on the table beside him. “Is this Naia?” He picked up the beadwork frame, shaking his head.

Say it, thought Luth. What a waste. Just say it.

Her husband joined them. “I still can’t get her out of the room, dear. I tried.” She sat very still, hating his obsequious voice, the tacit plea that she put up a front for the sake of the visitor.

JUST one week before, they had been normal. Naia had come, without speaking, to Luth’s fourth-grade science classroom, where the children were examining bowls of rooting yams. She wore her junior majorette’s uniform but hadn’t bothered to bind her hair—it fell like a black cape over her shoulders, making Luth’s heart thud, it was so lovely.

The class of ten-year-olds fell silent as she entered. That is my granddaughter, Luth said to herself with pride. Children, that slender, long-haired beauty is my granddaughter. Naia made a beeline for the teacher’s table at the back, where Luth sat writing the next day’s lessons in her plan book. The delicate scent of green tea heralded her arrival. Luth had bought her that perfume for her birthday.

“My braids,” was all the girl said, pulling up one of the well-worn wooden chairs and bowing her head. Luth reached into her handbag for the fine-tooth comb that resided there expressly for such moments. Deftly, she sectioned and pulled and twisted the silky black wings into the immaculate plaits required of each majorette. From the neighboring high school buildings came the squeal of a trumpet. A hundred and sixty pairs of boots thundered past the window. Seniors in their cadet fatigues, heading for the supply quarters of their citizens’ army training unit. A few minutes later they poured out once more, in the opposite direction, armed with the school’s ancient wooden rifles, en route to the Sweethaven quadrangle. Luth didn’t have to ask: it was the elaborate parade and review held every March, just before high school graduation. It seemed an unspeakable tragedy that the bright youngsters of her science class would eventually grow up into those sun-blackened, crew-cut adolescents barking orders and playing at war.

Luth freshened the rouge on her granddaughter’s lips and blotted a trace of oil from her nose. It was the last time Naia would wear the uniform, as she was graduating, too. The girl subjected herself to Luth’s ministrations with the faint disdain of a princess. Then she rose with a nod and strode off, thighs flashing, her hands empty but for the baton. She tapped one end lightly against her palm as though it were a truncheon. The casual gesture niggled at Luth: such a graceful child, and so naively assured. She had left her school satchel behind, with her mobile phone and all her money, expecting her grandmother to carry it home. Naia was like a boy, traveling light, perennially prepared for combat.

“How is the case coming along?” Daniel’s voice brought her back to the present.

“Very slowly, sir,” the lawyer replied. “Frustratingly slow. We have no witnesses. Plenty of rumors, and no hard facts. The mayor has put together a panel of investigators. I’m one of them. I was with him last week when a copy of this videotape arrived at his office. The Sweethaven Girls, or Sweetheaven Girls in some imprints. We put the video into the DVD player he keeps there, and I tell you, sir, all hell broke loose.”

“Well, thank him for us. We are grateful that he cares so much for the university’s reputation.”

“How could he not, sir? Sweethaven U is an important part of Donostia. This school put Donostia on the map. If not for it we would be just another sugarcane town.”

“The mayor’s a good man.”

“The problem is he demands sworn statements and arrests and trials and convictions, all due yesterday. He can’t understand the delay. He has no patience, sir, with Filipina modesty.”

They spoke rapidly, ignoring Luth, as though this were a matter too delicate for women’s ears and they had simply willed her away.

“Modesty?”

“We have been speaking to the families of the other two girls, sir,” the lawyer replied. “I’m sorry to say they have not been taking the video with the same … open-mindedness as you and your wife. But of course they are not as educated. One lady was a simple Bachelor of Arts graduate of the university. Worked as a clerk. The other comes from a family of roughs. She never even went to Sweethaven U, as I understand. Whoever made the video wanted to capitalize on the university’s name.”

“But will they testify?” Daniel spoke eagerly.

The lawyer hesitated over his next words. “We would be lucky, sir, to get them to cooperate.”

Seeing the alarm in the older man’s face, he fumbled for an explanation. “Think of it as a sort of rape, Mr. Pastor. In this society, a raped woman is damaged goods. We might feel sorry for her, she might even win a case in court. But no one will ever be able to look at her the same way again. With that to consider, it’s no wonder these two young ladies just want to disappear. Or should I say, their families want them to disappear.”

“How can you compare this to a rape?” Daniel spluttered. “Those two older women, they consented to it. How could they not? Who could be so stupid as to claim they didn’t know they were videotaped having sex?”

“Sir, we don’t know that. I have seen the video, and I tell you what they say is absolutely possible.”

“We just want to clear our granddaughter’s name,” Daniel said. “Bottom line.”

Luth found her voice, and it came out hoarse and unpleasant. “I’ve heard the rumors.” The lawyer shot her a surprised glance. “They say the women in that video were really whores. They got paid for what they did, and had no reason to complain. How can you trust the word of a whore?”

“They say Naia is in the video, too, Luth,” her husband said. “Please don’t use that word on our granddaughter.” He was smiling broadly, as though she were a precocious child. She hated his patient, utterly hypocritical tone.

“That’s not Naia,” she snapped. “You haven’t even seen it. Why do you keep saying it is? Why do we have to go public with our problems? What good might an investigation, or a trial, do? Naia is going to Manila. Her mother’s been making arrangements. Naia must disappear.”

But she was so exhausted and confused she couldn’t keep track of what she was saying. She didn’t know what to believe anymore. The girls were whores—no, worse than whores, because they went for sex with an avidness that was beyond normal. What did you call a woman who enjoyed videotaping herself being used? A woman who gave it away for free? What words applied? Even the little Pastor girl, who looks so innocent—yes, that was her, that really was her. I’ve seen the video and there were the most revolting close-ups. She could still hear the voices of her co-teachers as they primped before the lavatory mirror, unaware that she crouched, holding her breath, her urine even, in one of the stalls. Serves them right. Mahilig kasi! Other voices: Naia must vanish; leave town—her daughters talking now, first one then the other, browbeating her from opposite ends of the world, over the phone.

And now her husband: No, Naia must protect her honor, she is a Sweethaven girl, the only way to clear her name is for her to stand up bravely in court and condemn each of the men responsible for her shame. Faith and prayer would give her strength. They would resume their evening rituals, as one family anew. The community would take her side, and never mind what the rest of the world said. The rest of the world was not Sweethaven, and had no influence whatsoever on Naia’s future.

As for Luth, part of her was shriveling, dying slowly; another part would have loved to take up a broomstick and beat Naia with it until it broke.

On the morning that had changed their lives, she left her fourth-graders and their sprouting yams in the care of the student teacher and, telling herself that she was only going to the lunchroom, slipped out after Naia. She would never understand what had motivated her. Grandmother’s intuition. Something in the sensual arrogance with which the girl had left the room, bouncing the baton’s head in her palm. Luth followed Naia as she sauntered past the grade-two classrooms, glancing without much interest at the children within, as though they were so many Made-in-China sneakers on a rack. Not once did Naia look back. She did not run, but moved lightly and determinedly in the direction of the drumbeats. At the exit gate, Luth stood panting; the girl was too fast for her. Close by was a vendor selling bananas in caramel. Luth was hungry, and was distracted by the smell of melting sugar. The old man swirled the starchy fruit in a vat of boiling oil, fishing each piece out and spearing it on a bamboo stick. By her side three boys waited as well, seventeen or eighteen years of age maybe, but still clad in the crested white shirts of high school students. Boys from the free government school—“outsiders,” as they were called—she could tell from the roughness of their speech, the pale fungal speckles on their napes, the lush odor of their armpits. And as they waited for the vendor to serve them, they talked among themselves. “I know that girl. That majorette.” “Pastor? The one who just went past?” “She fucks for money.” “I got a close look at her bulog. It’s as black as the outside of a pot.”

Luth knew about adolescent boys; she knew they invented stories about pretty girls, that a succession of boasts made those stories as good as true. Once a girl caught the eye of a rough boy, her reputation was finished. Perhaps Naia had smiled too carelessly at one of them as she marched down Felipe II Street. That evening, when the girl came home, Luth wrested the tasseled baton from her and in a rage that endlessly renewed itself, beat her about the buttocks and thighs. It was a fitting culmination to Naia’s career as a majorette. Honor was something no girl should ever take for granted.

For a day or so it seemed that the spirit of wickedness had been expunged from the house. And then the obscene phone calls began.

LUTH watched the lawyer and Daniel negotiate. At least, they appeared to be negotiating. Their lips were moving. They smiled.

The blood pounded in her head. She could not hear a word.

“Luth,” Daniel murmured, and nudged her. “Attorney Fortun asked you a question.”

“No!” The word sprang from her lips. She had no idea what she was responding to.

It seemed to make sense, in the context, whatever that was, because the lawyer smiled and reached across the table, as though to take her numb hand in his. He hesitated, caressed the woven runner instead.

“We can move, all right, but only with Naia’s cooperation. Think of it, ma’am,” he said. “It will be over before any of you realizes. A few seconds of pain, like having a bone set. We will provide the anesthesia. What is half a day down at the police station, her signature on a document, maybe another half day in a court in order to convict the malefactors, which could be months and months from now, her trauma well behind her? She doesn’t even have to speak, simply answer questions with a yes or a no. We will keep her name secret, her pictures away from the press. We do protect minors. This case is about child abuse as much as it is about obscene materials. A prosecution of this nature will go down in history. That’s why it’s so important that we do it right. So consider it, ma’am. A brief visit to the police station—tonight, or tomorrow even; there will be fewer onlookers on a Sunday. Or perhaps that might be too much. You are under stress. I shall try again some other time to talk with Naia. Is that all right, ma’am? Can we schedule our next appointment?”

Luth stared, uncomprehending, at the wall, at the twin Spanish posters, yellowed, put up even before her two daughters were born.

THE day that followed was designated for one of the ordeals of her life with Daniel: the Sunday service at the university church. Luth opened her eyes to gray dawn light. She turned over in the hope of getting more sleep and discovered her husband lying by her side. In discomfort she squirmed away. It was rare, nowadays, that they awakened in the same bed together. But last night he had crept in almost as soon as she had lain down. Perturbed from the meeting with the lawyer, she had immediately sought to lay a barrier between the two of them by means of a formal talk.

“How can you be serious?” she said in her normal voice now, picking up the conversation that had trailed off into nothingness the night before, when he had turned from her and lapsed into unconsciousness. “Why do you keep encouraging that man? Do you think I’m an imbecile, that I don’t know we’re being used?”

His eyes were wide open, too.

“You say you want to take her to the police station and then to court. Do you realize what that will do to all of us? The shame?”

She could not abide being next to him, the sweat-damp covers binding their limbs. Was he dead? she wondered suddenly. Had he had an attack of some sort, or was he asleep, like a frog, with eyes open? But she was afraid to drag herself up, lean over and verify, lest he, in this inappropriate moment, reach for her.

Her husband moved, stretched his thin limbs. He seemed to have gained ten years in the night. Luth escaped to the kitchen. In the sink was a used plate. An empty can of tuna fish sat on the counter, besieged by ants. Naia had crept out of her room some hours before to eat, and left the clean-up to her. Luth breakfasted furtively, chewing and swallowing long after the hunger had been sated. Daniel busied himself in the garage. He revved the car engine a couple of times, humming in an annoying, joyless way. Luth knew he was casting around for something to do so he wouldn’t have to talk to her. Why didn’t he just turn his computer on? In the last year or so he, a sixty-one-year-old PhD, had discovered video games. Atrocious military fantasies were his favorite.

The door to Naia’s room was closed, as always these days. Luth tried the knob anyway. The door opened without resistance this time. The girl was asleep, on her stomach, her breathing almost inaudible. The air-conditioner had shut down automatically hours before, but the atmosphere was chilly nonetheless. The drawn curtains kept out the harsh morning light.

She paused by the bed. Who was this creature? What was this horrible thing they had accused her of? When I was her age I was a good girl, thought Luth. Never went with boys, never read dirty books, never touched myself. There were bailes at the town plaza that the “ladies” could enter free of charge, but I never went to any of them. At fifteen I was a good girl—no, not a girl, a woman already. I had four siblings to take care of, and twice a month my father’s two bastards came to the back door to beg. We had no maid; I ran the house.

Naia had kicked the sheets to the foot of the bed; her legs were long and smooth, without the damaging insect bite scars that so many lesser creatures bore, those pale round flaws, edged in black, that in Luth’s childhood were called diez, after the ten-centavo coins. This perfect body, warm and breathing, submerged in the early morning light, had been host to God knows how many men, Luth grieved. The entire community had had her granddaughter. Lashed her and branded her with jets of hot seed. The Naia who lay there sleeping was irredeemably wealthy with experience.

Luth opened a drawer at random. It held the usual clutter a child cannot throw away: elementary school IDs, notebooks filled with messages from classmates, a grubby old Nokia phone. There was one photograph, of a baby. Luth squinted. Which one? It would have to be Naia, she thought; the photo was in color. The hand that supported the infant around the waist wore a white lace glove. Luth peered closer. It was not a glove. It was a bandage. The hand was Antonia’s, then. The old injury. She shook her head to dispel sad memories—the appalling violence, the damage in its wake. Where are you? she mouthed to her younger daughter, always her favorite. Why did you leave? Weren’t you happy here? Antonia had been gone two years. If she had stayed to guide the child, none of this would have happened.

A movement caught Luth’s eye. It was the computer, still running, a screensaver—a woman with wild red hair—silently flipping through the same four images. Impatient with such modernity, she pulled the plug on the machine, banishing the hungry, knowing face.

Naia rolled over on her back, exhaled. She was no longer beautiful, thought Luth. She was used. What a waste, those long eyelashes, that lovely, tragic mouth with the droopy upper lip. A waste, a waste.

The lashes fluttered: the girl was awake.

“Lola.”

Her voice was thin, as though from disuse. She sat up, smoothing down her T-shirt to cover her navel, the simple movements pained. “Lola, what are you doing? Those are my things.” Her head snapped around, checking the room to see what else had been disturbed. “I was downloading music!”

“Waste of electricity,” Luth managed, her heart thudding in her chest. She could not meet the girl’s gaze. The dark brows, the crescent eyes that were no longer perfect, that were damaged, diseased.

“Lola, this is my room!”

“You don’t own anything in this house. Get dressed. You should have talked to that man yesterday. He promised to save you from shame. But of course you’re the one who knows best. All the time. Now we go to church. This is a Sunday like any other.”

“Luth?” Daniel called from the next room. “Leave the child alone. Let her do as she wants.”

Now it was eight and the sky was cloudless, the heat unrelieved. Luth took a shower to cover her weeping. There was a great void within her. The warm water sluiced over the hull that was her flesh. Mercifully her husband left her alone as she dressed in the bedroom. Occasionally he liked to surprise her by easing himself through the door, watching her movements with the diffident smile she had once loved. She hated their mutual nakedness, hated the casualness with which, nowadays, she could shed her clothes and converse with him, impervious to the nut-brown shriveled organ nodding placidly at his groin. This was all it came to—the lust, the dreams, the dance.

The maid opened the gate for them, her gaze downcast, her movements self-conscious. Afraid of getting yelled at again. Daniel had washed the car. Wiped the windows with a squeegee, scraped off the layers of dirt flung up by the wheels. She knew he would be pleased with himself, and expect a few noises of approval from her. Luth could muster nothing. She got into the passenger’s seat. The backseat looked as always, a hodgepodge of books and student papers and, today, a crumpled supermarket bag. She gritted her teeth.

They chugged through the neighborhood, an enclave of fading wooden cottages sheltered by acacia trees. The Pastors had lived in a house rented from the university for nearly forty years, as did their neighbors, administrative staff and teachers like her and her husband. Luth had loved these unpaved lanes, their American names—Mercer, Dereham, Westbrook—the gardens bursting with bougainvillea and orchids and hibiscus, a riot of color all year round. Over time she had observed with chagrin the gradual decay of the houses. The university left maintenance to its tenants, but no one cared enough to spruce up their homes, not even with a fresh coat of paint now and then. It wasn’t part of the culture. But it was standard practice to gripe about how Sweethaven U worked its employees like slaves. On paper, their salaries had increased in proportion to their seniority, but those wages had failed to account for inflation or the devaluation of the peso that began in the 1980s.

Luth saw no one, but fancied eyes peering through the grimy screens at the windows of each cottage, the inhabitants gleefully tracking their progress. At last they reached Urbino Road, city territory, a route that connected their neighborhood of faculty homes to the university campus. Here they were just one vehicle among several traveling the two-lane stretch. The houses and store fronts had kept pace with the times—they passed a restaurant opened not two years before, a privately run kindergarten in a residential bungalow, and a handful of Internet stations, their glass doors papered with video game posters. Money from a generation working overseas. Luth and Daniel entered the university through one of the side gates, the guard on duty peering at their faces beyond the access sticker on the windshield. Small brown discs of acacia leaves, shed for the summer, spun up from their wheels as they drove down the avenue to the church. Luth cast a helpless glance at the edifice as they parked. Its concrete walls gleamed with a fresh coat of white paint, as in those early years, when she was a newly minted Protestant matron. The chimes sounded about their ears, calling to all of Sweethaven. Pretending to be searching in the glove compartment of the car, they waited until most of the worshippers had come up the walk and through the portals and been seated. Students mostly, dormers sent by alumni from the neighboring islands: boys and girls in shockingly casual jeans and flimsy Made-in-China cotton dresses. The old guard of Sweethaven would have arrived long ago and found their usual pews.

“Showtime!” Daniel said in that cheery performance voice of his, and together they marched up the steps and through the iron-bound winglike wooden doors and found an empty space in the center of the nave, just as the recorded chimes, broadcast from a speaker on the roof, came to an echoing end.

Luth sweated in her size-forty-eight silk dress, a gift that Antonia had sent her from Europe. The fabric that sheathed her was all wrong for this climate. Electric fans that stood in the side aisles brought the smells of fresh-soaped skin and a hundred different perfumes to her nose, but did nothing to dispel the heat. Last year she had sworn to keep her pain to herself—the humiliations of her marriage, the shock of her husband’s betrayal—and show up at church by Daniel’s side. Staking her claim. That had been in August. She had kept her dignity, put on clothes too fine for the lives they led, styled her hair. Above all, she had kept her face frozen and turned to the front. No one would ever catch her scanning the crowd for some foolish young graduate student face. The worst period of her life, and it was not yet over.

The scripture reading ended, and the minister claimed the pulpit. Daniel grunted approvingly by her side. He was always attentive to what was going on, or managed to put up a passable show. Wretchedly she pumped her palm frond fan.

Today the sermon was about listening. The minister used the patronizing, engulfing “we.” Were we attuned to the voices of our children, could we discern God’s word in the jumble of our mundane concerns? One could be an intellectual giant and yet remain a spiritual pygmy. Reverend Manguerra gripped the pulpit, glared at his congregation, looked directly at Luth and Daniel’s pew. Smug from a scholarship to—what was that American school now? Wesleyan. A scholarship to Wesleyan. What kind of school was that? Had he been there on a minority program? In his day her husband had competed with the best of them, the best of those whites. In his day.

Now people were reaching for their wallets, and the soft strains of a guitar penetrated Luth’s thoughts. In the center aisle, a man stood before a microphone, one foot up on a stool to support the instrument. He smiled as he sang the offertory melody, inviting the congregation to share in a moment of folksy intimacy, and at the sight and sound of him, Luth’s heart thudded violently once more and she thought she might throw up right on her pointed leather shoe tips. It was Rinky Holland. In his mid-fifties but with a voice as sweet and seductive as a youth’s. He wore a sports shirt and khakis, as though to mock the perfumes and embroidered barong tagalogs of the old guard. Two girls in the pew in front of her plucked at each other in delight.

Then Reverend Manguerra was praying for wisdom and courage, that dads and moms and, yes, grandparents, too, might gently guide the beloved among them who had strayed. Only God could condemn, and only God could forgive. Heads swiveled in their direction: the dean of women and her chemistry teacher husband, the head nurse at the pediatric ward, the grade school principal. There they sat, poor things, Daniel Pastor and his wife, Luzviminda, such a comedown, but oh, how they deserved it. How wonderful the Lord’s justice was, in the end. Rejoice! How he managed after years of seeming indifference to take the proud among them down.

A collective mumble and clatter and the peal of the organ in the choir loft marked the end of the service. Luth would have bolted, first out the door, but her husband was in the way. They stood trapped in the pew, while the congregation inched through the aisle before them, men beaming at one another, reaching out to clasp hands, women calling greetings to friends. Nobody addressed the Pastors, but their every breath was marked.

Rinky Holland made his way up the aisle, smiling to himself. His wife, Emily, followed. She was the high school principal; her signature was first on the letter that had informed them of Naia’s crime and punishment. They moved toward the rear of the church with a cat-clean confidence, the woman a beauty as she had been for as long as Luth had known her: pale, unlined skin; tiny, perfect figure; and dark, soulful Spanish-heiress eyes.

Emily stopped at their pew. “Dan, how are you? These must be terrible times.”

“How are you, Emily, and congratulations to Rinky. What a wonderful solo that was.”

Mrs. Holland frowned, took in his insane smile, then forged on.

“I know your present troubles are difficult to talk about. Our family has always been friends with yours. I would like to step in now and help you myself. Unfortunately it is not proper for a man to receive counseling from a woman. But your wife, Daniel, with all my heart I reach out to your wife.”

Luth’s eyes flickered warily from the upturned face. Emily had spoken as though she were not present. Her gaze fell on the young man who waited beyond his mother. His name was Brent; he was Naia’s age and was some kind of cadet officer at their high school. The almond eyes that met hers were unpleasant, watchful. Sweat trickled from Luth’s temples, down to her jawline and her throat. Her bosom heaved beneath the orchid-purple silk. She understood that he was laughing at her, laughing with his mouth in a perfect serious line, this dark, slender boy in trendy khaki trousers, fondling a late-model mobile phone, looking as if he came from a family of millionaire generals. Looking at her and laughing.

“Snake!” Luth spat.

The look of piety vanished from Emily’s face. “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Snake.’ You’re vampires. Snakes. You feed off people’s misery.”

Emily’s eyes narrowed. “People are in misery, Mrs. Pastor, because they bring it on themselves, in their solitude and pride.”

Brent Holland nodded to a friend, smirked, and, pocketing his mobile, sauntered off toward a wing exit. Luth lunged after him, determined to grab him and shake the arrogance out of him as she might have done had he been a fourth-grader in her charge, but Daniel checked her, clamping a hand on her arm.

She surrendered to panic, turning this way and that to seek support from the other parishioners and seeing nothing but malicious glee in their faces. They could have been peasants gawking at a knife fight. Daniel was quietly leading her down the aisle. She tried to snap off the press of his fingers at her elbow.

Emily had quite recovered herself and pursued them a few token steps. “Luth, I know you are under duress,” she said. “I cannot even imagine what pain you must be going through. You really, really must open up now.”

“Tell that woman to shut up,” she panted.

Daniel steered her out onto the lawn and in the direction of the science complex parking lot. A voice behind them declared, “Scandalosa.” Another gasped, “What happened? Who was it?” She could still hear Emily Holland’s parting shot: “You are very welcome to come to our home for a cup of tea.”

They walked rapidly away, heads down, two fugitives.