This story originally appeared in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on September 16, 1999.
He died one day, without a sound, without a struggle. My mother later wrote in the newspaper: ”He died as he had lived–no fuss, no frills.” It was in the shower stall that he fell, in silence. There was no one there to hear him fall, to catch him. It was very sudden, I’m told.
* * *
I enter the empty room where he last slept. I see the twin-sized bed and lie on it. I feel his clothes. I touch them. I reason that since his clothes are still here he might come back to get them so that I can see him one last time to say goodbye. It was a dream.
* * *
The doctors said he died of an aneurysm. They found two liters of blood trapped in his artery. ”He must have suffered for months,” they said. ”If this was treated earlier, he could have lived.” He was a quiet man. He didn’t like to make waves. It’ll go away, he probably said. When he was mugged as he was going to his car one night, he didn’t bother to tell us. He waited until we were at breakfast and we saw the bruises. It doesn’t hurt, he said. He didn’t call the police. ”Too much hassle,” he said, ”but I canceled everything, so they won’t get a thing.”
* * *
A boy gives me flowers, holds my hand, kisses me. They’re soft, unfamiliar touches. I try not to pull back. I’m safe, here, inside him. I had to let go of that house, wash it off my skin, so I could be with him. My mother says I’m lucky. My husband reminds her of the Australian man she once loved. ”Don’t let go of him,” she says.
My father comes alive in the words of strangers. I somehow get to see him through their words, his shadow lingering long after he is gone. I can see him, hear him. I feel him cradling me in his arms. He becomes tangible once more. I watch as others pay their respects to my father. I listen to what they are saying about him. ”A great man,” says one. ”A good friend,” says another. I never knew the man they are taking about.
* * *
I heard breaking glass in the other room. I went back inside our room and ran to my sister’s bed, waiting. I covered her ears to block out the noise, the cursing. It was useless. She started crying. I asked her to stop but she wouldn’t. I heard my mother’s footsteps. I quickly got up, dragging my sister across the room so we could hide in the closet.
I saw my mother through the cracks, frenzied, crazed. She yelled for us, but I didn’t answer. I covered my sister’s mouth, muffling her cries, so we wouldn’t be heard. My mother found out that my father was having an affair again. His mistress called and demanded to see him. It was Christmas Eve. I answered the phone. I told her to leave my dad alone and hung up. The phone continued to ring but I didn’t answer it. I stayed in the closet with my sister.
* * *
I approach his casket and open it. He looks peaceful, as if he isn’t dead, as if there has been a mistake, a cruel joke. But he feels cold–cold and lifeless.
* * *
Long after the funeral, long after the house was gone, long after the bad dreams, my mother told me I was only 2 when she met the man who wanted to rescue her from loneliness, her isolation. She was going to run away with the man, an Australian who loved her more than my father. My father found out and pleaded with her to stay. She was the only one he had ever loved, more than anything, more than anyone. But she had stopped believing.
I stayed for you, mother said, even if your father loved you most of all. She was jealous. She suffocated my sister with her love. When she again met the Australian, my mother was pregnant with my sister. He cried and he begged her to run away with him. He said he would love her forever. She never stopped believing him. I didn’t tell my mother I already knew. I knew about her other affairs, not just with the Australian. She didn’t know that I listened to everything but kept silent. I wanted to hear her speak.
I’ve always been just a presence to my mother, a mystery she is afraid to unlock. No one has shown her where to find the key, and she doesn’t want to find it. We’ve never held each other, a tacit agreement between us. We just blindly feel our way in and out of each other’s words. Never touched; it’s too dangerous. But sometimes, she’d inquire about what I’m doing, and I’d be surprised. I would say I’m doing well, and that’s it. We’ve been separated for so long that awkwardness looms above us like a dark cloud.
* * *
I need to look at his picture because I can’t remember his face. I can’t remember the last time we laughed. I can’t remember if he ever existed. It’s as if he never lived. His memory is disappearing. The funeral is long and no one talks about him anymore.
I remember the fights, the yelling. I remember the day I left home. Bitterness filled our lungs. I remember us hating until the hate swallowed us whole and we ceased to remember anything else.
* * *
My mother sat me down on the porch. She did this whenever my father left the house for a while, after one of their fights. She had me alone with her until my father returned. She was doing her duty as a mother. She temporarily took on my father’s role. For my sake. It was something automatic, like picking up broken glass. So I sat on the porch with my mother, and we saw a falling star. I wished that she and my father would stop fighting, stop asking me and my sister to choose between them, stop saying that divorce was imminent.
”It can’t be stopped,” she said. I often wished that they did get a divorce, separation, anything, just to get it over with, like a quick slash of a razor. But they stayed together, prolonging the pain, for all of us. ”Till death do you part.” She said she loved him but she wasn’t ”in love” with him anymore. There was no passion. ”I love you, you know,” my mother said. No I didn’t, I didn’t know.
* * *
A chasm formed between us in that house. I think we lost our way. We couldn’t find ourselves anymore. It was an unfamiliar place. I came home a stranger. I spoke to strangers in a place that was not really my home. Not my house–just one of many I’ve stayed in. When I left home, my father said to my mother, ”Let her go. She knows what she’s doing.” My mother said she felt relieved, relieved of anguish, frustration. It was something she didn’t wish to carry. ”Your father set you free,” she said. My father set her free, too. Free of those thoughts, free of one another. I don’t know when it started.
* * *
Words became distorted over the years, misconstrued between my father and me. So we just circled around one another, and finally gave up. Other times, other sounds came out. And they were loud, frightening. He couldn’t see that I was no longer a child, an image he kept of me until death. It was easier then, I suppose. He guided me, I followed. I went where words were spoken, directed. No questions asked. I came and went in that house so that it was hard for him to follow where I was going, where I was ending up. I know that now.
* * *
I wanted to say so many things to him before he went away, before he died. To say I’m sorry for being who I am, for being misunderstood, for not speaking. Months after I left home, he sent me a letter. He had never written to me before, not even when I was in boarding school. We just had terse conversations then on the phone. Like: ”Don’t get into trouble and try to eat well. Every time you come home, you keep getting thinner and thinner. We wouldn’t want you to disappear.”
The letter came as a surprise. He said he understood me. He understood my silence. He said he listened closely to my words as they flowed through the tears. Now I remember. We already said goodbye to each other and made our peace. I’ve forgotten all along.
