Of course, they had sex first. They went directly from the airport to a room at a nearby hotel. He had paid someone to take her things: the gray plaid suitcase her mother had given her and the small leather-like one that had belonged to her uncle. And when the sex was over—when he had showered and then offered his cock for a blow job after (it surprised her that he could do this, as fat as he was, as pale and large and soft as her uncle’s old couch)—after that, he called someone on the hotel phone. A few minutes later, a man in a round hat, such as a young boy might find in the boxes left by missionaries, brought the bags to her room. Jimbo said she could take a shower, that she could change her clothes, but not to unpack anything; the car would be coming to take them home in an hour.
So it was done. She was going to his house. According to her uncle’s agreement, he would marry her now. Just as he came—the first time, his heavy body pressing the design of the bed’s brocade cover onto her skin—he had cried out that they would be getting married in Las Vegas, that he had already made the arrangements, that his friends at the El Capitan would show her a wedding she could write home about.
He also mentioned the ring, as if he might give it to her then. He had showed it to her at O’Hare. Not two minutes after she had emerged from customs, hungry and disoriented, still in shock that this thing had happened to her, that the whole string of impossible, unlikely, unbelievable events had occurred one after another (as if some diabolical cherub had been given control of her fate and was wildly stacking the least likely scenarios on top of one another, laughing as the madcap pile teetered and grew), right then, with her fellow passengers still bunched around her, looking for whoever had come to meet them, he had caught her eye, called out her name, and held open the small black box with the ring in it. When she walked up to him, he closed the lid of the box and handed her only the receipt, which showed exactly what he had paid to a jeweler on East Walton Street.
The ring was her trump card. At least her uncle thought it was. He thought it was why she had agreed.
“You’ll be wearing a five-thousand-dollar ring,” her uncle said. “You can walk away anytime. It’s yours, and it’s on your finger. You’ll both know what that means.”
Honorata tried to imagine five thousand dollars. One hundred thirty thousand pesos. In Manila, she had laughed when Kidlat told her about the businessmen who paid fifteen hundred pesos for dinner in Makati. At the tinapayan, she made three thousand pesos a month, and gave a third to her mother in Buninan. It had been her mother’s whole income.
“I don’t want a ring.”
“Silly little fool. Do you think it was easy to talk him into that ring? Do you think it was easy to persuade him to give you something you could walk away with? You’re pretty, Honorata, but you’re spoiled meat. You think you’ll get another deal this good?”
She’d never known it was possible for her uncle to talk like this. She’d never known any man to talk like this, and certainly not her uncle, who walked with her mother up the hill to where the priest said Mass on Sunday mornings, and who had come to Manila after Kidlat disappeared, telling her that even after all this time, after everything that had happened, her family still wanted her; she should come home to her village.
She showered quickly, her body like a thing tethered to her. She wished it were something she could unhook and release, something that would slide off her and down the drain, something to be dispersed into the sewers beneath the airport. She didn’t bother to change her dress when she finished. It was wrinkled and limp, but even the tiny act of choosing another one seemed too much in that moment.
In the car—a big black sedan, with a driver wearing another one of those stupid hats—Jimbo brought up her name.
“You can’t be Honorata here. We’ll call you Rita.”
For an instant, something rose in her. The deal did not allow him to choose her name. Then, what did it matter? It wasn’t her body that had slipped down the hotel room drain, but her name.
He had not given her the ring.
She wondered when he would give it to her. If she would have to wait for Las Vegas. The car moved slowly in traffic. Outside the air was cold, there were heavy clouds, white and black and gray. She could only occasionally glimpse the lake, but it looked metallic and angry. She could not see more than a few hundred yards in any direction.
Next to her, Jimbo busied himself with papers in his briefcase. There was a phone in the car—her left knee kept bumping the plastic cradle that held it to the floor—but Jimbo had his own phone, with an antenna that extended rigidly from the top, the sight of which made her slightly sick.
She was starting to feel as if she might not be able to ride calmly after all. Her head ached. She had not eaten in at least twenty-four hours. All that had happened to her in the last two days was brewing in her now: kneeling on the dirt floor with her mother before the statue of the Sacred Heart; kissing her mother’s frail, sad face good-bye; her uncle’s clipped instructions, vaguely threatening; the long flight, and the smell of the man sitting next to her, who eyed her from the side, pressing his knee into her leg; the speed with which her uncle’s deal had been consummated. It was all brewing and stewing and fermenting in her to the rhythm of the phone’s wagging antenna as Jimbo talked and leaned forward and dug in his case for something the lawyer, the accountant, whoever it was on the other end, wanted.
What kind of name was Jimbo?
The black car pulled into a curved driveway and stopped. Jimbo kept talking on the phone. When the driver opened the door, she stepped out.
“Be careful, ma’am. The stones are wet.”
The stones were wet. Wet and slick and uneven. Not far from her was a mound of what she realized must be snow—so dirty, not pretty, not what she had imagined. She tottered unsteadily in the narrow strapped sandals that had seemed right back home. The driver offered his arm.
“I’ll do that,” said Jimbo. And there he was, at her side. The mass of him was alarming. She thought of the neighbor boy, the one with the Nike shirt, who brought his basketball to the park near where she and Kidlat had lived. “Kidlat, you are matangkad at mataba,” he would say. Jimbo was matangkad at mataba. Thinking of his size made her dizzy. She wobbled in her ridiculous shoes, and Jimbo steadied her.
“It’s okay, Rita. I’ve got you.”
He said it softly, kindly. Rita. That’s not my name, she wanted to say.