Chapter 3 - Sweet Haven

LUTH survived the next few days by speaking to no one, outside the requirements for her classes. After thirty years, she knew the fourth-grade science lessons forward and backward and in her sleep. The only break in the routine was the appearance of Daniel in the car at exactly 11:30 in the morning. Lunch in the canteen with her colleagues was now out of the question. She would dismiss her pupils a couple of minutes before the scheduled time and, as thirty-eight children scraped their chairs back and donned their books and bags and slammed down the lids of their desks, slip quickly out of the room, down a hallway and over a gravel path to the auxiliary gate. She always went unnoticed, the teachers hollering last-minute admonitions to their charges. Precisely at the moment that Daniel drew abreast of the gate, the school bell would clang, and a torrent of children in white shirts and khakis and checked skirts would shrill out into the noon heat. And Luth, lowering her bulk into the front seat, would be spared the ordeal of greeting colleague after colleague as she pushed her way to the car.

Husband and wife would lunch together at the house, not speaking. From time to time Luth would glance at the telephone, waiting, unrewarded, for the peculiar two-note ring that heralded a long-distance call. Just moments before the afternoon bell sounded, Daniel would drive her back.

On Wednesday, the silenced man who was her husband wore an expression grimmer and more determined than ever. He took the car in the opposite direction, between the university gates, through the main street a-growl with motorcycles and tricycle taxis, down a side way white with the uniforms of loitering high school boys, and out into the wide boulevard that ran the length of the seafront. She braced herself. They parked at the police station, next to the city hall building.

Luth had never been here before; there had never been any need. Men in uniform repulsed her, as they had since the Marcos days, since martial law, when the sight of a Police Constabulary uniform might have prompted her to hunch her shoulders and hide her face. She had lived in constant worry of being arrested and questioned about her younger brothers’ associations with the Kabataang Makabayan, as much for their welfare—would they disappear into the stockade as had happened to so many other promising youths?—as for fear of being expelled from Sweethaven.

Now the Constabulary was defunct as a unit. These were simple policemen. Nonetheless, she tensed as, entering the shabby wooden building, she saw an expansive counter and, behind it, a massive creature in a blue uniform who registered no expression as she advanced. Deep grooves flanked his mouth. The nostrils, beneath Ray Ban aviator glasses, flared with each breath.

A chalkboard beyond the monster’s head marked the station’s efficiency record for the previous year: HOMICIDES, 12. ROBBERIES, 52. SOLVED CRIMES, 20. UNSOLVED CRIMES, 32. Unnerved, Luth turned back to Daniel, and realized that in this dim, humid space smelling of burst plumbing and sweat and stale smoke and engine oil and unlaundered denim, they were not alone. Men fell silent as she stared at them—men peering at her from between the bars of a holding cell just meters from where she stood. Men with skin the color of mahogany, roughened as though they had spent five lifetimes at sea, dark eyes starting from their faces, matching her stare for stare.

“The special panel?” Daniel said.

The policeman at the desk grunted. “Only those connected with the investigation, sir, ma’am.”

He used the titles perfunctorily, without deference.

“We are,” Daniel replied.

The aviator glasses swiveled to Luth, then to her husband, then back to Luth. A grunt came from the brown throat. “You are related therefore with the … actresses?”

For one second she had no idea what he was talking about. Then her face flamed, and the more she contemplated his pronunciation of the word—the way he aspirated the first syllable, as one might speak, caustically, of a king—the more she burned.

“Joel Fortun, the lawyer, is expecting us,” Daniel said.

“Second floor,” said the man, indicating the direction with his lips. “Second door on the left.”

Head down, almost running, she followed her husband up a sagging flight of stairs that magnified their every footfall. Behind one of the frosted doors on the second floor, the legal machinery was already humming. She had expected an air of silent shock, as in the hall outside an emergency ward, but the small room was filled with the noise and heat of men all talking at the same time. An air-conditioning unit thundered, futile, in a corner, sucking up rising plumes of cigarette smoke and spewing it over furniture and clothes and hair. She looked in one direction and saw a familiar face; it was the lawyer Joel Fortun. He looked grave and intelligent in his pale-blue barong tagalog—a handsome fellow, Luth realized, the sort her daughters ought to have married. He was speaking, she noted in dismay, with the dean of student affairs at Sweethaven. The dean did not acknowledge their presence. He seemed embarrassed by their arrival. A man, she thought. Why couldn’t they have sent a woman? Hovering about them, eavesdropping and looking important, were a couple of uniformed police, the older one of some rank.

Two more men slouched slightly apart from these personages, on molded plastic chairs, squinting through the smoke of their cigarettes. They stared at Luth and Daniel, then turned back as if to a conversation, but their lips were clamped shut.

“The young man is married to Gemma Bulauan,” Joel Fortun murmured, coming to them and bending over Luth as though to plant a kiss of greeting on her cheek. “She’s taking a break from the questioning. She’ll be back any minute.”

Gemma Bulauan. One of the girls in the video now had a name. The surname translated to “wealthy, possessed of much gold.” We’ll see, she thought, if she lives up to that promise.

“Who is the other?” Daniel said.

“Gemma’s father.”

They wore thin collared T-shirts—one read, LAND BANK, the other, CENTRAL AZUCARERA. The husband, in his mid-twenties, sported a bracelet of leather cords. The father looked wasted, flesh drawn down to the bone—by years of labor or drink or methamphetamines, Luth could not tell.

And at a desk, before a gargantuan postwar typewriter, sat a clerk, face empty, gears in idle as he awaited the command that might bring his fingers to life.

Joel lingered before her. “This is a special and confidential proceeding, ma’am, with the special panel of investigators.” Luth scowled at the slew of adjectives. Cops in the news were always referred to as special police officers—SPO 1, 2 or 3. She wondered if there were not-so-special police officers and what services they might be expected to render.

“The mayor himself brought us together. When the time comes, Naia will receive the same careful treatment.”

The door opened behind Luth and Daniel, and the occupants of the room glanced up expectantly—Luth sensed the rush of blood, as in a beer house when a hostess clips through the swinging doors. It was a young woman who entered, chin high, slipping sideways and making for a chair beside the man with the rawhide bracelet. Luth stared. This was the victim?

Long hair. Such inherent beauty in smooth, loose black hair. But this girl had bleached hers, crimped it and singed it and God knew what else. It was the same color as her skin. And how did tall, well-built women get their midsections so tiny? thought Luth. The girl wore makeup, trendy shimmering gobs of it. Her forearms were covered with fine down; the sight of it made Luth’s own arms prickle, as though she had entered a sitting room ruled by a cat. In between puffs of her cigarette, the girl cleared her sinuses with a staccato intake of air.

In the embarrassed, expectant silence, it was the clerk who moved first. He burst into an orgy of typing, so that the desk shuddered and the machine sung beneath his fists. He rammed the cartridge home, then once more lapsed into inactivity.

“Hey,” the older policeman said. “Hey, Beyoncé, welcome back.”

Nobody moved.

“Hey, Destiny’s Child. Aren’t you Destiny’s Child? You look just like Destiny’s Child, with that hair. Come over here. We’ve got to take your—”

“Take your temperature,” the younger cop interjected. Luth could tell from his hard, native pronunciation that he had survived school by rote memorization of English phrases.

“Take the rest of your testimony,” his senior finished.

In her platforms, the young woman called Gemma clomped to the desk and seated herself obediently beside the clerk.

“I don’t know what else to say. I already told my story to you, sir.” Her eyes slid pleadingly to Joel.

“Just a recap, please, madame,” the older cop drew up a chair beside her. “As you can see, all members of the special panel of investigators are now present, with some guests. They would like to hear you air your side.”

“My story is complicated, sir. I once had a boyfriend—”

“His name?”

“JP, sir. JP Torres.”

It was the first time Luth had heard the name, had heard any man’s name in connection with her granddaughter’s misdeeds.

“So. You are still with this man?”

“JP and I broke up two years ago,” Gemma continued softly, “and I met Tristan, who was very good to me, sir. Tristan and I got married last December. We are very happy—”

“So you had sex with this JP?” the captain said.

“Everyone does it nowadays, sir.”

“Indeed. Well, where did you commit the act? How many times?”

“In his house. He told me it was his house. It wasn’t really a house, just a one-room apartment with a bathroom, and a refrigerator, just like in a hotel, and not even a cooking stove, sir.”

“And you had no idea you were watched?”

Luth cast a glance at Gemma’s father and husband. A woman in her fifties now sat with them. A cheap old bitch, thought Luth: dry orange hair and a tight spangled tee that read, VERSACE, a thread of cigarette smoke winding to the ceiling. The mother.

“Why do we have to see this?” Luth whispered to her husband. Daniel shushed her. He was listening avidly.

“He did not pay me, sir,” the girl was saying. “That I swear to Lord. But he was generous. He had a motorcycle, and the time that I knew him he was driving a Revo. And he had good manners, sir; his people are the Fortuns.”

A general grunt of sympathy—or was it amusement?—made its way around the room. A couple of the men gave Joel Fortun the kind of long, challenging gaze they might issue a tricycle driver who had cut them off on the road, but the lawyer was carefully examining a sheaf of papers in his hands. The girl sobbed, affronted. A Coke was poured. The younger policeman handed Gemma a plastic tumbler.

“Here,” he said, with mock brusqueness, as though she were a stripper tabled for the evening. “Ladies’ drink.”

The older policeman resumed.

“He was gallant—he paid for all your treats—and you allowed him to do anything he wanted, free of charge. You did not think it was strange that he kept turning you up to face the ceiling? You just let him pet your flower?”

“I don’t remember. I wasn’t thinking … of those things.”

“She could be telling the truth, Captain,” the dean of student affairs cut in. “She herself says she had sex in that rigged-up bedroom too many times to count.”

The men fell silent, examining Gemma inch by inch as they ruminated upon this thought.

The police captain went on. “The information we have is that hours and hours of footage were taken. What we see in the commercialized video are”—he searched for a phrase—“the prize cuts.”

“What about the two other actresses?” grunted the younger cop. “You mean to say they also have hours and hours?”

Gemma spoke in an even smaller voice than ever. “I am not an actress, sir. I made no pornographic movie.”

The captain stared at her in disbelief. “But you admitted just now that it was you in the video.”

“Yes, but it was not my purpose to put a show. Please, sir, don’t call it pornography.”

“Did your flower appear in the video?”

“You have seen the video, sir.”

“Did it appear?”

“Yes.”

The police captain cleared his throat, looked peevishly around the room as though daring the others to cross him. “Then the video is pornographic and obscene. Because there is a flower that can be seen in it. That is enough. The law does not care about ‘on purpose’.”

Gemma pressed wads of bathroom tissue to her ruined face. Her shoulders heaved with sobs. As she hoisted herself out of the chair, she seemed, literally, to be holding herself together, pushing in the edges of a mortal wound, but her voice, ripping forth, silenced the entire room. “Are you people through? Are you through with me? How many times do I have to answer the same questions? You have seen the DVD. Isn’t that enough?”

Her mother grabbed her by the arm. “Shut up. You’re not in a movie anymore.”

“I can walk by myself,” the girl snapped. Her husband and father-in-law rose and followed the two women out the door—deflated, refusing to look back at the roomful of men, the panel of special investigators assembled by the mayor of the city. Luth could sense the rage rising like sap in the two men. The girl’s clogs resounded on the wooden stairs, the thumps soon blurring with her sobs and the footfalls of her companions. Holding her breath, Luth began to count, picking out Gemma’s progress, monitoring her passage to safety. Four. Five. Six. On the eighth riser down, the rhythm shattered, the girl screamed, a fist thudded into the wall. “Puta,” a man shouted. “I hate the way you cling to me.”

The clerk resumed his typing.

Not once did Daniel speak throughout the drive from the police station to their home. Luth’s spine, her limbs, gave out; she turned her cheek, gently, against the backrest of her seat and let it remain. Thus she rode home, in an attitude that would normally have made her bones scream in protest, and a single thought dominated all others: that it was over, that no way would she expose her granddaughter to that panel of tormentors, that as far as she was concerned the child was innocent, that the lawyer Fortun could dig up some other girl to shame. A sly tune wove itself round and round the monument of her resolve—it was the song she had heard rising from the holding cell of the police station as she and Daniel made their exit, a song from the throat of a dark-skinned fellow lolling upon a cot. “I saw a frog,” the jailed man crooned, “a frog with hair,” and though his main audience consisted of bars and damp cement and rancid fellow criminals, Luth knew he was celebrating the passage of Gemma, shrieking and bucking in her husband’s grip as she fled the building.

AND when they got home it seemed, for a second, that here another attack was under way, because the gate was half open and an adolescent figure besieged the front door. Daniel parked the car among the roadside weeds. As soon as the motor was cut, the boy called out a greeting, in polite Sweethaven English. He carried a large white confectioner’s box trimmed with a silver ribbon. “Our mother, our whole family, includes you in our prayers,” he pronounced as Luth stumbled past, and she realized it was one of the Holland brothers, the older one, Adam. But she couldn’t care about that now. Let Daniel deal with him.

The house stood in the yellow silence of the afternoon. “Naia,” Luth choked, barreling against the girl’s door. Unlocked, it gave beneath the full force of her weight. The bathroom door was ajar, and just beyond stood the girl, her face pressed to the tiles, her shoulders shaking. When Luth grabbed her and whirled her around she saw that her face, too, was a mess of tears. Weeping freely now, Luth ran her hands through the lank, acrid hair, mashing the tears from the girl’s cheeks with her thumbs. “They will never get you,” she moaned, embracing Naia. The girl sagged into her arms, and they stood there, unmindful of the odor of old urine stealing from the toilet bowl, of the stench of hair and face powder and sweat.

From the sunlit garden came the voices of men, an alternate reality, Daniel walking the boy to the gate, cheerily thanking him for the box, Adam wanting to know how they all were doing and that his mom was ready in case any of them might wish to unburden. Luth listened for the sounds of her husband at the front door, the bits of a tune and odd snatches of words that followed conversations with his Sweethaven peers. Visitors always got him excited.

She laid her granddaughter down on the bed and went to the window. Adam was still at the gate, all smiles gone, a mobile phone pressed to his ear. He wore a frown, seemed to be arguing with whoever was on the other end. His face was an odd blend of his parents’—his mother’s doll-like features and the flat planes of his father’s. Pacing over the gravel, he seemed a disjointed puppet, with his heavy shoulders and large skull and the childish curve of his forehead. As she watched, he mounted the bicycle and pedaled off, chubby but powerful, in khaki jeans and a wholesome sports shirt, as white of skin as his brother Brent was dark. She did not think he would be back. He would head straight home and report to that mother of his that the gift had been delivered. Luth was grateful, in that moment, for her husband’s social skills, his determination to always show a happy, lying face to the world.

Then she left her granddaughter, to search for Daniel, curious despite herself to find out what sweet treat Emily Holland was offering them. She found the box on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. Taped to the silver ribbon was an envelope, with a note, in the bold flowing hand of all who had grown up in Sweethaven in the 1950s and ’60s, the elegant script taught by the last of the American missionaries: Our hearts are with your family in this, your time of trial.

It was a cake, a wheel of pure chocolate. Her stomach growled; tears sprang to her eyes; the glands along her jaw sang out for a taste. Poison, Luth groaned, and commanded herself to shut the refrigerator door.