Honorata thought about these words. The enormity of what she had done, leaving Pilipinas after she had found a way back, felt like a wave sweeping her out to sea. She could not think about this now. She couldn’t think about whether she would buy a house in Eagle Rock or Inglewood, couldn’t imagine driving the maze of roads she had seen from the window of the plane, all those neighborhoods, all those people, all those communities—some with Pinoy and some without—and did she want to live with them? Would there be tamarind and pandan and lemongrass for cooking? Would her child speak Pilipino? Would she always be shunned, a mother without a husband?
It overwhelmed her, and the plan that she had worked out carefully—that she had written down and repeated to herself over and over as she flew all those hours—no longer seemed so clear. What was she doing in LA? She didn’t know anyone here. She didn’t know anything about the city. She couldn’t buy a house and set down her life, her child’s life, without knowing anything. It was too big. It was too much. Why had she thought she could do it? Where did she belong?
Honorata spent the months before her baby was born in the furnished apartment, ricocheting between days she felt strong and days she felt weak. There was almost never a day in the middle, a day of balance. She was super Honorata or she was disgusting Honorata, and the seesaw nature of her own temperament exhausted her. She began leaving the apartment only to attend morning Mass, or to talk quietly to the priest in the dark confessional stall on Saturday afternoons, or to buy food and the things she would need to bring a baby home. She didn’t call the realtor. She tried to avoid the woman from the church office, though the woman looked for Honorata sometimes and stopped to ask how she was feeling, if she needed anything. One day she brought a box of new baby supplies to Honorata’s apartment, and Honorata blinked back the tears as she showed her the diapers, the sterilized bottles, the baby wipes, and the blanket with a matching cap that a parishioner knitted for all the new babies.
“Do you have someone to go with you, into labor?” the woman from the office asked.
“Yes,” Honorata said.
The woman seemed to know she was lying, but she didn’t say anything. The next Saturday, after her confession, a priest came out from the sacristy, wearing street clothes, and waited until she was done praying, until she had awkwardly shifted her belly and pulled herself up from the kneeler. Then he reached over to help her stand fully upright. He asked if she had a minute to talk, if they could walk outside, and when Honorata went with him, he invited her to join a young adult group that met on Tuesday evenings. “Some people have children, and others are single,” he said, “but they will be people your age. You might enjoy it.”
Honorata did not commit to going, but she noticed that the priest was also about her age, that he had very large ears and that he walked gracefully, as if he might suddenly turn and spin. He wasn’t particularly earnest, which she appreciated.
Her contractions started in the morning.
They continued all day, and when she called the doctor’s office, they asked her to time them, and when she said they were coming every three minutes, they told her to go to the hospital, not to delay, and did she have a bag ready?
She had a bag.
Honorata had had little to do but prepare for this day for months, so she had a bag for herself and another for her baby, and on the top of that bag were the blanket and the cap the parishioner had knitted. She called the number of the taxi company she always used, but when she said she was having a baby and needed to go to the hospital, the dispatcher hung up. Frantic, she found the phone book someone had left under the brown leatherette couch in the main room. The front cover was ripped off, and Honorata was not sure how old it was, but there was an ad for a taxi company on the back cover. Shaking, she dialed it carefully.
When the dispatcher answered, she gave her address slowly, said she was ready right away, but not why she was going to the hospital. Then she stood outside on the sidewalk, and waited, and the taxi came in just minutes. The driver, from some African country—she couldn’t quite understand what he said to her: something about the baby, something about his wife—dropped her off at the emergency entrance, and she walked in by herself, doubling over when a contraction came, and carrying the two bags, one in each hand, like ballast.
The birth was easy.
Nanay had told her it would be easy—that her births were easy, and her mother’s too. When she said this, a look had passed across her face, and Honorata knew she was thinking that Honorata’s baby might be different, might not be like any other baby they had birthed. Her mother had this thought and decided not to say it, but Honorata had seen it, and her mother had seen her see it, and they said nothing of this to each other.
So Honorata was not counting on an easy birth, and yet it was.
Malaya was born just after midnight. When the nurse, a Pilipina, handed her the baby, already wrapped tightly in a pink blanket, with a pink bow fastened to a lock of hair that looked quite black, with her eyes squeezed narrow—from the antibiotic, the nurse said—and her face wide and red as a beet, Honorata experienced something she would later think of as the only true religious moment of her life. It was awkward to hold her, lying there almost flat in a bed, and the baby’s body wrapped too tight to fit naturally against her own, and yet the instant that she had the weight of her in her arms, the moment she looked into those ointment-smeared navy eyes, Honorata felt her own body begin to grow, as if the edges of her were expanding and then loosening, wavering, shimmering, dissipating; as if she were not held inside her body at all but existed everywhere and enormous and without shape. She was at once formless and formed: holding her baby carefully so there was no chance she would fall, though her physical body—her arms and shoulders and back—were weak and tired.
And that was the moment in which Honorata let go of the fear that had gripped her in the furnished apartment, with its stained tan carpet and its cream-colored walls and the plastic flower in an orange pot in the corner. That was the moment in which she knew she could do it, that she was free, that she had a daughter and a purpose and the strength to do whatever it would take. She was not a foreigner, an outcast, a sinner, a whore; she was a mother, and, incredibly, she had her own money, and nothing that came after this would be as hard as what had already been. This was the revelation.
They kept her in the hospital for two nights, bringing Malaya to her every three hours to nurse and also when she would not stop crying. Honorata could not get her to stop crying either, but it didn’t matter, it didn’t frighten her. In the village, there had been babies that cried all the time and babies that did not, and at a certain point, they all became children just like any other.
From the hospital, she sent a telegram to the church for her mother so that she would know she had a granddaughter, and then, in a moment of inspiration, she sent her a second telegram. She had decided to move to Las Vegas. She would buy a house there, and there would be a room for Nanay. Her mother could not live eight thousand miles away from her granddaughter, and as soon as possible, Honorata would be home to fetch her for a visit. Nanay would have to learn to fly.
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