Chapter 22 - Sweet Haven

LUTH heard a door open. She stood up and moved on cramped limbs out into the living room. Daniel was heading for the front door, moving with rare energy. There was some change in him; she strained to see through the gathering darkness. He had replaced his house singlet with one of the barong tagalogs he sometimes wore to morning convocations or meetings with university officials.

“Where are you going?” she said.

He started; he had not seen her in the dark.

“Just for a short drive.”

“To where?”

He murmured a reply. He smelled of Tanduay rum.

“You’re going to the Hollands, aren’t you?” she said. She could not let him out on the road in his state; he would surely mow down a bicyclist, if not wreck the car.

He ignored her and shuffled to the door. His keys jingled in one hand, the other clutched a square of plastic that she realized was a DVD case.

“Dan!” she called after him, her feet sweeping the floor in search of her step-ins. She heard the squeal of the gate, then his feet crunching on the gravel of the driveway. She ran out to stop him. He was about to get into the car, swaying back and forth drunkenly—how much of this was feigned? She grabbed at his arm.

“Let me go,” he said in a heavy voice. She ran to the other side of the vehicle and, wrenching the door open, threw her weight into the passenger seat, so violently that the breath was knocked out of her. With an effort, she wriggled, adjusting her buttocks on the seat, her right leg still outside the car until she hauled it in with both her hands. She slammed the door shut and locked it. Further movement was momentarily impossible. She sat there, panting and sweating.

Daniel started the motor and drove the car backwards straight out of the gate. He screeched to a stop, spun the wheel, gunned the vehicle down the lane.

They sped down a road devoid of traffic for the summer, past the mission hospital, past the Sweethaven power station, past the gates that led to the residential section of the campus. She tried to keep calm. She had no idea what she might say to Emily and Rinky Holland, for unlike her husband, she was not one to rehearse her confrontations. She would let her husband do the talking, at the onset—whatever it was he needed to say. She only hoped he would not humiliate himself in the process of saying it. Was there a comb, some Eskinol, a travel pack of tissues in the glove compartment? Whatever. She would be silent, and only when he began to repeat himself, and to smile and—this she knew only too well—to simper, would she come to his rescue.

A series of violent lurches threw her almost to the dashboard. Their wheels had gone over a part of the sidewalk where acacia roots had thrown up thick sections of concrete.

“Stop!” she screamed. The motor died. “We’re not going further until you calm down. I won’t allow it. You’re completely crazy!”

Daniel clutched the steering wheel in both hands. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He began to sob and wail, horrible sounds, the noises made by a man who had never learned to weep for sympathy. He bellowed like a prisoner condemned to a lit oven. Frightened, she made no move to touch him, scrunching herself up on her side of the car.

Finally, he was exhausted, and sat there with the fingers of one hand taut over his heart.

“I ran this on the computer,” he said, and passed her the DVD Narita had brought from Manila, keeping his eyes averted from the images on the case.

She shuddered, refused to take the thing.

“I couldn’t finish—it is her. I hadn’t …”

“I know,” she said. The sight of the cover would have been enough for him.

“I’d been running on this hope, this vague hope, that all we were talking about were model pictures.” At the ridiculousness of the phrase he began to sob again. “I can’t breathe properly; I cannot think. All I ask of God is why.”

But ‘why’ was pointless now, she thought. What next—that was the significant thing.

“You shouldn’t have done what you knew you couldn’t handle,” she told him, trying to sound dry and calm. If he began to cough, to turn purple and to choke, she didn’t think she could run fast enough for help.

“You are so strong, Luth, you are so strong.”

“Yes,” she said. “Now please, turn the car back. We mustn’t make a scandal. Please, Dan, for the sake of the family.”

“He betrayed me,” he moaned. “He assured me Naia would be safe in his house.”

“That’s right,” she said. “But his sons will pay. That’s what the case is for. The authorities will prosecute them, with or without Naia. Let’s just go home, lock the house and go to sleep.”

“I want Rinky to talk to me. I want him to look me in the eye. I want him to say that he is sorry.”

That was it, then, she thought. No violence. It seemed reasonable enough. She might go along with him, wait for this valiant surge of masculine aggressiveness to exhaust itself. He might even turn the car back to the house, no harm done.

“All right,” she said aloud.

“Please hold me, Luth,” he begged.

“I can’t,” she said. It was too much to ask of her; she wasn’t a martyr.

“Hold my hand. Please hold my hand.”

Gingerly, she reached out and, with the tips of her fingers, touched the ridge of his knuckles where he gripped the steering wheel. He did not start, as she feared he might. His skin was papery, gray, like the frightening husk she had discovered one day as a girl fluffing back the soft fur on a rabbit’s foot that her father had given her.

She laid her soft old palm over the back of his hand.

“Thank you, Luth,” he said heavily. “That’s all I want. That’s enough for me.”

Tomorrow, she would divide the cattleya orchids. It was too dry for the task, but she would hang them in the shadows of the mango tree. She needed the small, repetitious work, the delight in discovering horns of new growth. The affirmation of it. She longed for a haven free of any reminders of the Hollands, free of any reminders of Sweethaven, for that matter. This semester, she would retire, a bit earlier than expected, but at the school she was not irreplaceable. She would clear her shelves of PTA minutes, ancient Green Revolution brochures, biographies of José Rizal, of I’m OK, You’re OK, three decades’ worth of typewritten quiz bee questions in science, math and Araling Panlipunan, various dust-covered wedding souvenirs, and, finally, her lesson plan books. Her lesson plan books. These she would burn. After that, she would wear loose dusters, watch the Fashion Channel all afternoon, see no one for weeks at a time. The maid would do her shopping. Her retreat from the world would be complete.

DANIEL slid to a stop at right angles to the Hollands’ driveway, blocking it.

The house was dark, except for a small light shining through the screened porch on the second floor, its source somewhere in the dining room.

“They’ve gone to bed,” said Luth.

The ground floor, walled in a lattice of whitewashed bamboo strips, seemed completely empty: no sound from within, no trembling flashlight beam, no clandestine movement glimpsed through the high screened windows.

The Hollands’ Toyota was missing from the driveway.

Daniel got out of their vehicle and advanced without hesitation to the steps.

“Rinky!” he bellowed.

Luth followed, more slowly, lest it be necessary to call him back.

“Rinky!” he called again, and rapped on the door.

Luth thought she heard breathing from deep within the ground floor. She did not know if it was her imagination. Her instincts told her the house was empty. Maybe it was ghosts, the ghosts of those still living; that seemed possible.

“Rinky!” Daniel bawled.

A door opened deep within the house. Footfalls on the wooden floor, a shuffle of slippers.

The bulb above their heads clicked on. No, every light bulb beneath the eaves of the house, and even in the yard, came on, a signal to the campus guards walking their beats, as though burglars had come to call. Luth felt no embarrassment, no fear. Let the public see.

They heard the sound of the main door being unbolted. Tentatively, it squeaked back. Luth peered through the screened outer door, at the small shape that stood just beyond, trying to discern its features. The light from the bulb above them dazzled her eyes.

“Let us in, Emily,” said Daniel.

The catch on the screen door slid back. Daniel wrenched the door open and stomped over the threshold. Luth followed to avert further tragedy. The living room had gone completely dark. Someone had extinguished the last lamp in the house. The woman shrank back against furniture with a small scream. The light from the eaves, falling through the porch screens, momentarily striped her face. It was the maid, Sebia. A small hammer was in her hand.

“Where’s your employer?” said Daniel. “Where are his sons?”

“They’re not home, sir,” she stammered. “They left this afternoon.”

“Where’d they go?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “They must have gone to the golf course. It’s a long drive.”

“You’re lying.”

The maid backed away, making a few futile jabs with the hammer in the air before her. She didn’t know whether to threaten them or beg for mercy.

“I don’t know, sir. Don’t ask me, sir. I don’t know.”

Luth sensed, before she saw, the new presence in the room, the woman who emerged from the depths of the shadows and said, in a taut voice, “Go away, Sebia, I’ll handle this.”

The maid shrank against Emily Holland, the hammer now firmly in the air, poised to strike at the intruders should they advance another step.

“These people should have been dealt with long ago,” her mistress said. “Give us some light.”

A fluorescent bar sprang to life. Luth had not seen Mrs. Holland since that Sunday at the church. She had been smiling and confident, powdered and coiffed, exactly as she had appeared in public every day of her life. Now the figure that confronted them, in a sagging cotton duster, seemed a ghost of itself, the hair in greasy tufts, the face devoid of makeup, sallow and wrinkled, like an old piece of garlic. But the eyes were livid and rimmed with red: vengeful spirit eyes.

“Goddamn you, Emily, your boys are going to jail.”

“Daniel Pastor. How dare you come here. When you promised never to harass us again.”

Daniel had not foreseen a counterattack. He stood stunned before her while she drew herself up. She was shaking, but not with fear.

“A man was here yesterday. A lawyer from the mayor’s office, a Fortun. Our boys weren’t home, thank God. We had to face him, Rinky and I. The questions he asked. We had nothing to hide. I told him all about your granddaughter. How many weeks I tried to help her. He wouldn’t stop at the answers we gave.” She shuddered violently at some memory. “And in the morning the police were back with more questions. Demanding to see my sons. They couldn’t arrest Brent; he’s only fifteen. But Adam, he turned pale at the sight of their jeep. My Adam, pale and trembling, jumping out of a window and running away in his shorts and sandals.”

“Where is Adam?” Daniel demanded.

“I don’t know, I don’t know! Brent’s gone, too. One moment he was here, and then he was gone.”

“He left before noon, ma’am,” the maid volunteered. “With a knapsack.”

“They could be anywhere. They could be lying in a gutter, hurt. Rinky’s gone out to find them; he’s been looking for hours. This is what you’ve done.”

Emily started to weep. “My sons. My eldest has a girlfriend in America, a Christian girl. They’ve sent each other promise rings, they’ve made vows. My youngest is starting college in Manila. They had their whole lives in front of them. And you did this to us.”

She must have been well admonished, in the convent school of her girlhood, against any attempts at violence, and now she stood, her small face raised and twisted by real tears, her fists clenched on either side of her wretched housedress.

“You son of a whore, how dare you do this to us. What have we done to you? This after all our help. You were nothing, Daniel Pastor, you had nothing left when you came to my husband for help: no dignity, no morals, no courage—worthless.”

She turned to Luth, seeing her for the first time. “And you, what are you looking at? Are you happy at last? Your mother sold rice cakes at the St. Joseph canteen. You’ve come up in the world, haven’t you?”

Emily took a stiff-legged step in Luth’s direction.

“That Naia,” she spat. “She was a joke. The girl who’d spread for anybody given half the chance. She tempted Adam, led him to ruin. Rinky confronted him as soon as the lawyer left.”

“What else did Adam admit, Emily?” Dan said. “Did he show you the footage, too? The footage he took up in that ceiling, of those two other women, and God knows who else? You damned hypocrite, I’ll sue you. You ruined my granddaughter.”

“Quiet,” Emily screamed. “There is no footage. Our sons are clean. Watch that porn video. You can get it anywhere. See for yourself. Are my sons in it? Do you see their faces? You tell me. All I see are those two prostitutes and that filthy little girl of yours, touching her body and posing. Baring herself without shame. If you’re too cowardly to look at that wretched video, do so now, because I have, in my capacity as principal I had to. It was the worst, the dirtiest, the most pathetic thing I have ever seen in my life. And I pray I forget it soon.”

Luth stood her ground, though her body shook uncontrollably, rot and fear and hatred rising in her gut until she felt them battering against her clamped jaws. She felt something snap in the back of her head—it could have been a capillary; it could have been a bone in her nape unlocking after being held rigid for so long. When she opened her mouth she thought a torrent of black fire might pour from her bowels; she felt a great singing energy along her arms and back, as though a pair of shivering membranous wings might burst in that moment through her skin.

But instead, a string of small, precise sounds issued from her throat: “No, Emily. It is you I pray we forget soon. Your eldest son is no artist. He is a pornographer, and you and your family are the dirtiest, most pathetic set of hypocrites Sweethaven has known. You are your own worst punishment. Mark my words.”

Daniel took her arm, exactly as he had done at the church, that day when she had been so afraid, so choked with shame and rage that she had wanted to slash every last one of the smirking faces turned toward her. Firmly and surely he guided her to the door, guarding her back, protecting her from the wrath of the other woman. They made their way down the stairs, each descending step a challenge, for Luth’s entire body was shaking so badly she thought she might collapse in a heap upon her husband. She could barely feel her extremities, they were so cold. Don’t run, she admonished herself. Do not hurry; there’s no need anymore. A flame of triumph leapt in her breast. Had she ever felt safer, ever felt stronger than in this moment, picking her way down the shadowy steps of this storied house in the very belly of Sweethaven? Above them, within the screened enclosure of the porch, flowerpots shattered and books tumbled to the polished floorboards as Emily wailed and wept.