Everything leapt at her: the colors, the smells, the sounds. After San Jose City, the brightly painted bus began to climb into the mountains, and the fields were so green, the sky so blue, the air so soft; it was even more beautiful than she remembered. And yet already Honorata felt strange. She was wearing pants, and the other women were wearing skirts. She wanted to lean out the window and look down the valleys—see the road hanging off the side of the mountain, and the river far below—but she could hardly keep her eyes focused on the seat in front of her. She felt sick. She didn’t want to throw up again, and every lurch and jostle of the jeepney threatened the possibility.
She had not told her mother she was coming, because she didn’t want her uncle to know. She hoped that he would not be in the village; that he would be in Manila. It hurt to think of him in the city, what he did, the women he found, the letters he had someone write for them. But she could not do anything about her uncle. She had traveled without stopping for days, and she wanted Nanay.
The jeepney let her off about a mile from her village. Honorata started to feel better as she walked the familiar route, even if her suitcase felt heavy. Coming around a bend, she saw her uncle standing with two other men. She stared at him, but to her surprise, he did not acknowledge her. He turned and left the path, and she did not see him again while she was in Buninan.
She had come to take her mother back with her. This is what she had decided. This is why she had come so far, so abruptly, without telling anyone she was coming, without stopping to rest, without stopping to think about what had happened in the middle of one night, in a casino, in Las Vegas, in America, in a place impossible to describe or quite to remember now that she was back home, in a world entirely green and quiet and fresh. If her mother was with her, Honorata would know what to do.
But her mother was not ready to leave her home, not ready to cross an ocean when she had never been more than fifty feet off its shore, and even that was only once, when she had traveled very far, perhaps a hundred miles, to the sea. In Honorata’s lifetime, her mother had never been to Manila. She did not want to go with her to the United States.
Still, what her mother knew, she knew well.
She knew instantly that Honorata was pregnant, which is how Honorata knew that it was true.
She knew quickly that Honorata would not return to Buninan.
She understood that the baby was not Kidlat Begtang’s, and that it belonged to a different world.
She could not know what her brother had done—she might never believe this—but she knew somehow that Honorata should not see her uncle.
And in knowing that, everything was settled.
Because one could not live there and not be fully of the family. She could not live near her mother and avoid her uncle. There wasn’t any way to separate family like this.
Perhaps in her mother’s mind, the choice that Honorata had made so many years before—to leave Buninan with the boy from the village across the fields—was the only choice that mattered. Everything else came of it, and her mother, who had never lived anywhere but Buninan, accepted that life was to be played forward. She taught her daughter this.
But Honorata’s mother didn’t know everything. Honorata had not left the village, the place where her father’s bones were kept, because she had been rebellious or unhappy. She had never dreamed of going away as a girl, and she hadn’t wanted any other life than the one she had known. She had run away to Manila because one day she had gone into a field with Kidlat—one day she had made a sudden and unexpected and defining choice: so human, so universal, so absolute in its impact—and after that, there had been no way back to the life she had lived or intended to live. The life with which she would have been happy.
Of course, another girl would not have had to leave. These things happened, even in Buninan. They were an ordinary fact of life: perhaps Honorata was one of the few girls unaware of this. But other girls had not fallen in love with this boy. Kidlat had an uncle who had lived in America. He had a cousin who had been to Jamaica, and a friend who worked in Taiwan. Kidlat was not willing to play his part in the village script: the one that would have allowed Honorata that afternoon in the field. Kidlat would not marry Honorata and take her home to his village. If Honorata wanted, she could come to Manila with him. They could have a new life there. That was the option he offered.
So she, the precious only daughter, the one who had never wanted to leave, she, Honorata, thick with regret, with longing, in a kind of shock but also wild with desire, with love, with the feel of Kidlat’s touch as vivid in her mind as it had been on her skin—insatiable skin—Honorata had followed Kidlat to Manila. And everything that came after, all of it—the tiny apartments; the city friends; the nights wondering where Kidlat was, and if he would come home bruised or even, once, burned; the movie; the bakery; her uncle; the flight to Chicago; Jimbo; the El Capitan; the coins clinking in the plastic bucket; the lights whirling and horns sounding when all the wheels spun to the same Megabucks logo (lucky Honorata—Honosuerte); the young men, drunk, running toward her in their polo shirts; the baby (not Kidlat’s) now inside her—all of it, came from that instant. It was that instant after she’d thought Kidlat had stopped loving her, after he had gone to Manila when they were seventeen and come back wanting nothing to do with her, after she had mourned losing him, and then bumped into him, and neither had expected to see the other, and their attraction was so strong, their bodies drawing nearer—as if they were each on one of those moving walkways she had not yet known existed—angling toward each other, magnets propelling to their own fates, their shoulders actually bumping when they finally met, so out of control of their forward movement to each other that they did not quite recognize when they had reached the same spot. They had bumped and then turned and walked forward, shoulder not quite grazing shoulder, elbows not quite touching, and casual words spoken: “I haven’t seen you.” “Will you be at the festival?” And before them, the field, so green, so silent, and nothing else said and nothing else thought, but knowing nonetheless where they were going and what they would do, even if the actual words would have startled her and stopped her and sent her to a different fate entirely.