She wanted to say she had no bad memories, but she sure was making them as he spoke. What are you talking about? she wanted to say. Don’t you know I’ll never be unencumbered, never be free? Oh God! How easy it was to imagine the graffiti world he spray-painted with his words. “It will never be simple like that for me, Kai,” she said in a gutted voice. “Going with you—you know what that means.”
He bowed his head, fell back on the pillow. “I know. But children are resilient, Larissa. They adapt. They adjust. I know this. Soon they’ll be leaving home. The younger ones have short memories. They forget.”
“I won’t forget,” mouthed Larissa, stifling a groan.
“I’m sorry. Only you can tell me whether it’s possible or impossible.”
Even talking about it wasn’t possible.
“No kidding,” said Kai, and she realized she’d spoken out loud. She must be more careful. “Kai…we could try…I could tell Jared—”
“I don’t think your husband,” he cut in abruptly, “is going to let you go.”
“Why do you say this?” She sounded shocked.
Kai was quiet. “Something tells me he will not be Jonny.”
“
Why
do you say this?”
“Because,” said Kai. “I’ve had you in my bed. I know what he must feel when he has you in his.”
She ran her hand across his chest, down to his navel, she caressed him with tender fingertips, she ached for him again, and hurt from the navel all the way up to her eyeballs. Her skull was cracking with sadness. “You’re wrong about Jared, Kai. He doesn’t feel about me like that,” she said.
“You don’t know or understand men,” said Kai. “Trust me about Jared. But if you think you’re right, then go ahead and tell him about us. He’s a good manager and has sharp business acumen; he is mild-mannered and moderate. Why don’t you ease him into it, by explaining about his dry bed, and my overflowing heart, and the glare of the supermarket, and how love just
is
, how it’s not caught or found, it just is and becomes you, it swallows you whole. Explain that to him, sitting down in your dining room over a cup of tea. Tell him you’re going to leave him, leave your children, and go away to live with me. But please,” he added, “say goodbye
to me first. Because trust me when I tell you I won’t see you again.”
Dear Larissa,
Write to me! Tell me what you think of my unholy mess. Do you know what crazy Lorenzo has been saying during my visits? When the Peace Brigade makes bail for him, he says he and I are going to run into the mountains and stay with the Tasaday until everything blows over. The Tasaday! They’re natives who live in the rainforests of Mindanao. That’s six south islands away! The eye of all MILF trouble, and he wants us to escape there. We’d have to get there by outrigger canoe, by small merchant boats, by the kindness of strangers.
But Lorenzo says we’ll be safe with the Tasaday for a while. He says they live without money, radios, watches, modern medicine. They live in the woods and eat frogs. Also weeds and grubs. Sometimes they come down into the lowlands and fish. They make baskets out of bamboo and give them away. They spin and loom their own clothes. They live in bamboo mud huts, which they make themselves. Because they’re on high ground, they don’t get much flooding, except during the monsoon season, during which they sleep in hammocks and then rebuild the huts from scratch. A completely natural existence free from all the strife of modern life. No protests, no demonstrations, no Moro warriors, no murder, no 400,000 displaced-by-violence people. But I tell him, Lorenzo, what you’re proposing is that
we
are going to be displaced by violence.
We
are going to live in exile. He says we won’t need any money. This is what he dreams of, sitting in jail. Going to live like the Tasaday!
I said to him, Lorenzo, what about our baby? He
looked like he was surprised I brought it up. He looked almost like he was going to say, “What baby?”
“I’m about to have a baby, Lorenzo,” I said.
“What, the Tasaday don’t have children?”
“I don’t know. Do they? I’m eight months pregnant. I can’t fight my way through the jungle in my condition.”
And do you know what he said to me? “Che,” he said, “You can stay here. But I can’t. I have to go. Don’t you understand? I’m going to be put to death for murder. The president has not abolished the death penalty yet. So you pick. Either Mindanao, or death, or at best prison for the rest of my life.”
I said to him, what bail? We don’t have any money. I know he keeps hoping the Peace Brigade will come up with two and a half million pesos, but I find myself hoping we won’t get it, and he won’t get out. Is that terrible? It’s excruciating.
“Don’t you love me?” he says to me.
Would that it were that simple! Would that love were the answer to everything. I once thought it was. “Of course, I love you, Lorenzo,” I say, praying he won’t make bail. Why am I a bad person, Larissa? I’ve already been the girlfriend, the lover. I just want to be a mother.
2
Mothers
L
arissa kept looking at her hands. She and Emily painted their own nails nowadays with Michelangelo’s abstract art help, but all three of them weren’t very good with the cuticles. She must go back to Grace’s soon and get a proper manicure. In the meantime she and Kavanagh were having another unhelpful conversation about family. Why ask unanswerable questions, trying to get to the bottom of a bottomless morass, when all Larissa wanted was to be flying, up up up, not down down down like planes from skies? Talking about Jared, her home, her family was
so
depressing. Why do it?
“I don’t want to talk about them,” she said. “Can’t we talk about something else?”
“Sure,” said Kavanagh. “Let’s talk about your mother.”
Larissa groaned.
“You don’t want to talk about her either?” The doctor sighed. “Would you like to talk about movies? I just saw
The Prince of Tides
,” she said. “It was good.”
“My mother is an attractive woman,” Larissa said. “Okay? Pleasant. Nice.”
“Do you see her?”
“Of course. She is the children’s grandmother.”
“I didn’t ask if your children see her.”
“When they see her, I see her.”
“What about your father?”
“He’s dead. So I don’t see him as often as I’d like. Before that he was in Florida.” They were divorced the year Kai was born. Larissa went pale, had to gather herself for a few moments by remaining silent and licking her dry lips at the sour-bitter taste in her mouth.
“Amicable?”
“Not particularly.” Wasn’t that the understatement of the day.
“When you were growing up, what kind of a relationship did you have with your mother?”
Larissa paused. “Why do we need to talk about this? I’m an adult. I don’t live with my parents. What’s happening to me now has nothing to do with my mother or father.”
“Larissa. What’s happening to you now is you are having an imbalance in your feelings for your actual life on one end and your lover on the other.”
“He is also my life.”
“Yes. But—”
“My relationship with my mother was strained when I was growing up,” Larissa cut in. “My brothers were grown and out of the house. My parents had me late in life. I was their only daughter. My dad adored me.”
“And you?”
“I adored him back.”
“What about now?”
“Now he is dead.”
“What about before he died?”
“I really don’t want to talk about it,” said Larissa.
“How long were your parents married?”
“Thirty-three years.”
“That’s a long time.” Kavanagh studied Larissa, who was
realizing she absolutely
hated
to be studied. “Did he leave your mother for another woman?”
Deeply reluctantly Larissa answered. “Guess so.”
Kavanagh looked at her with understanding. “And you,” she said, “who always sided with your dad against your mother, as an adult was faced with the fact that your father did an unforgivable thing. Suddenly your mother needed your sympathy. How did that go?”
“Distantly. I was in college. I had my own life.”
Kavanagh was quiet. Larissa was quiet.
“Is your relationship with your mother strained now?”
“No, it’s polite. Cordial.”
“She’s polite?”
“And I’m cordial.”
“And underneath?”
“Don’t think much about it. Don’t need to.”
“Would you describe your mother and you as close?”
Larissa chewed her lip.
“Warm? Comfortable with each other?”
Larissa didn’t answer.
Kavanagh looked into her lap. “What about your own daughter?”
“What about her?”
“How is your relationship with her?”
“Very good. She is my
daughter
.” For some reason, like a steel trap door coming down, Larissa didn’t want to talk about Emily even more, if that were possible, than she didn’t want to talk about her own mother. Wow.
“Are you and Emily close?”
“Doctor…”
“I can see this is making you
extremely
uncomfortable; why?”
“Because it’s
so
unnecessary!”
“It’s making you uncomfortable because it’s unnecessary?”
“Not that.”
“What then? Talking about your children?”
“We’re not talking about my children, are we?” Larissa flared up.
“By all means, let’s talk about them.”
“No! Look,” she said, trying to sound calm. She was trying to emulate Kai. “Emily is fifteen. That’s not an easy age. She’s a good girl, a devoted girl, but sometimes she says I try to make her into something she isn’t. So I leave her alone, but then she accuses me of not caring about what she does.”
“Does that mirror your relationship with your own mother?”
Larissa quickly went on without replying. “It’s a fine histrionic line with her. With the boys everything is simpler. Moods are easy. Food, drink. Video games, trying to get away with stuff. Very normal. For some reason girls are harder for mothers.”
“Were you hard on your mother?”
“My mother was hard on me.”
“Was she? I thought you said she was hands off?”
“Our time is almost up,” Larissa said. “But I’ll tell you why I have minimum contact with my mother. Because when I was growing up, I hated myself and the person I was. Everything about me was awful to me, particularly when I was in my house. But when I was with my friend Che at her house, she and her mom were so close and human, and full of regular up and down human interaction: they fought and argued and laughed, and cooked together, that being there felt more comforting than being in my own home. So what I did when I left is I remade myself into a person I wanted to be. When I was with my mother, I didn’t like myself. And that’s probably why our contact is minimal. Because when I’m around her, I still don’t like myself.”
“Where is Che and her mother?”
“In the Philippines. Her mother died.” Larissa didn’t want to say it felt like losing her own imagined perfect mother, the mother she wished were hers and wasn’t.
“You do realize, Larissa, that you haven’t remade yourself at all, you just hid the parts you didn’t like?”
“Keeping the parts of yourself you hate under control is a tremendous feat, Dr. Kavanagh,” said Larissa. “It requires will and a strong spirit.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“But I can’t keep myself under control when my mother is around. So what I do is limit my exposure to the person who brings out the worst in me.”
Kavanagh was looking at her from the chair, wrinkled, frowning, wise. “And how would you describe what that is?”
Larissa stood up and grabbed her bag. “Always looking for a way out,” she coldly replied. “See you next Tuesday.”
Dear Larissa,
Lorenzo finally realized I’ve been dragging my feet on the bail. He accused me of wanting him to rot in jail. He told me if I really loved him, I would ask
you
for the money. I said, Lorenzo, are you out of your mind? Your bail is set at two and half million pesos because they’re afraid you’re going to run. Which is exactly what you’re going to do as soon as you walk out the jail doors. You do understand how bail works, don’t you? If you run, Larissa doesn’t get her money back. You’re asking me to ask her and her husband for over $50,000 that she will not see again. What world do you live in?
And he said to me, “Che, what world do
you
live in?”
I started to cry. I said, I just want to have my baby. That’s all I want. I want to have my baby.
And he said, what about me, Claire? Do you want to abandon me? He called me Claire. I don’t think he’s ever called me that before. I didn’t know if he was intensely imploring or detaching himself from me.
I said, it will work out, Lorenzo. It always does.
He said, “Work out, will it? How long do you think it will be before the scum I worked with will get caught, the scum that have been hiding all these months, even though they know I’m in jail and you’re about to have a kid? This band of thieves to save their own skins, you don’t think they’ll point you out to the police as my accomplice, so they can get a lighter sentence?”
They won’t point me out, I mouthed to him in terror.
“No? Didn’t you hear? They caught my friend Agas Ilocano! They found him finally, hiding out in the swamps of Batangas! I worked with Agas for over seven years. Seven years, and I thought we were tight. But after five minutes of interrogation he swore under oath that he never gave me the nail bomb. It’s now my word against his, the cops told me. They’re putting pressure on him to expose the others. How long do you think it’ll be before they reel in the whole nefarious gaggle of them? And to save their own craven asses, they will tell the cops I didn’t work alone, that I worked with you. And then what do you think is going to happen to you, Che?”