“Another drink for courage,” he insisted.
She waited until the phone stopped ringing. Then she drank. To confess herself was not a possibility. Too pathetic. Too risky. Furthermore, there was no chance a man like this would understand the stakes, which was why, when she started talking, she knew the liquor had already done its work: summoning the words, doling them out with an almost magnanimous ease. She described their arrival in the Philippines, their occupation of a condemned colonial manor on Manila’s outskirts. She outlined their newest and most ambitious project to date: the acquisition of nearly a thousand acres of mango orchards and their subsequent transformation into tobacco fields. She had been doing this sort of work, she assured the biologist, almost since birth. She knew exactly how to assist her father in his industrial transformations, which meant everything went precisely as it should have until the night he fell ill. At first, it didn’t seem like much: just a moderate fever, an aching in the joints, chills that made his limbs tremble but not shake. By morning, however, his skin was blazing and his eyes were dull, his arms and legs thrashing, his mouth spouting foamy green bile, his slender torso coiled desperately around the expulsions.