They had gotten older, and their bodies had become different, and everyone knew that Kidlat and Honorata were in love, in adolescent love. Holding Kidlat’s hand would make her feel slightly lightheaded, and they would spend the times when they were alone together—which were not that easy to get, because everyone in each of their villages watched them—they would spend that precious time talking and laughing and gasping whenever a hand touched a thigh, or bare toes twisted together. And when they could, they would kiss—such innocent kisses, really—but they would nearly knock Honorata to the ground.
And this is how it had been until Honorata was seventeen, older than Malaya when she came down in the boy shorts, and then Kidlat had gone to Manila with his father, and when he came back four months later, he was not interested in Honorata. He said hello to her coolly and made no effort to talk with her directly, much less be alone with her. It was crushing. She wanted to die. She couldn’t understand it, and finally, one day when they met accidentally, she blurted out, “Kidlat, what happened? Why don’t you want me anymore?” And Kidlat looked embarrassed, just for a moment, and then he said that he was not a boy; that in Manila he had been with a woman, really been with her, and he wasn’t interested in Honorata anymore. He was trying to find a way to move to Manila.
It was unimaginable, what Kidlat had said.
He had been with a woman? Her Kidlat?
How could he have done this? It was horrible. It was a sin. It was disgusting to imagine. It could not be imagined. For weeks, she grieved, and she did not eat, and she avoided seeing Kidlat, and her nanay kept asking, “Honorata, what happened? Is it that boy? That Kidlat? Forget that boy.”
She had not forgotten him.
When she saw him again, he was preparing for the Imbayah Festival, lying on his back and leg wrestling with a friend. There was a group of boys watching, and everyone was laughing. When Kidlat won three in a row, he jumped up, and the boys yelled, “Imbayah! Imbayah!” while he grinned and slapped his friend on the back, the other boy smiling even though he had lost. Kidlat spied her watching, and, giddy as he was with winning, he came over to her. Then he waved away the younger boys, and after a few moments, she and Kidlat walked down the road and toward the green fields alone.
Honorata shook away this memory.
How could she be thinking of Malaya’s pubescent body, of her own first delirious forbidden ineffable experience of a man, there in the field with Kidlat, after months of not talking, not touching, months of imagining him with someone else, her heart so broken and then so full? Even now, it was a memory that could engulf her. And Malaya? Malaya in the boy shorts? That had been only the beginning. The boy shorts seemed innocent now, compared with the rainbow hair, the black clothes, the tattoos: all these ways that her daughter did not look exactly desirable—at least not to Honorata—but did look dangerous, the opposite of innocent.
Malaya’s father knew none of this. He was not part of her life.
She would not let him see Malaya.
No matter how much Jimbo frightened her, no matter what he did, she would protect her daughter. She would die here in this room, she would die, but she would not let him see Malaya. She would not let this man, this man who had haunted her thoughts, this man whose badness must be why Malaya had the peculiar hair, the serpent tattoo; she would not let this man see her daughter.
She felt sorry for the maid. Why did she have to be here today? Why was the world like this, that today, of all days, the maid should be here when Jimbo finally found her?
29
Coral had not gone in to school. She’d caught something when they were in Japan and wanted to shake it before Koji and the boys got home on Friday. The time change would be hard for them, and they hadn’t done the homework they’d brought along. Gus was already worried about whether his coach would ever let him play again. There wasn’t anything to be done about it. Koji’s brother was very ill, and they couldn’t wait for summer to see him.
Coral and Koji hadn’t been prepared for how hard Isa would take this news. Coral thought the fact that their uncle lived so far away would buffer the boys a bit; that Koji’s brother being ill would not upset them too much. But Isa, the namesake, was upset. He said he didn’t want to be the only Isamu Seiko in the family, which was a funny way to put it, and Coral had been careful not to smile. It moved her that her youngest child would feel so deeply for Koji’s brother. They were good kids, these labrapuggles of hers, avid for baseball and video games, at ease talking hip-hop with their cousin Trey or politely raising their hands to ask a question in Japanese at the gakuen on Saturdays. Would they remember her mama? Augusta had loved them so much. Coral wanted them to remember her; she could barely stand that Augusta had not seen Gus puffing out his cheeks to blow on his trumpet or Isa playing with Althea’s new puppy.
At five o’clock in the morning, Coral had turned off her alarm, called into the automatic message that notified the district to find a sub for her, and fallen into a thick, anxious sleep. By nine, her room was flooded with light and warm, even though they had replaced the air conditioner last month—one of many repairs—and while she knew she needed the sleep and would feel better for it, she did not feel better right then. She forced herself awake, and then wrenched free of the hot, wrinkled sheets. With her head clogged and heavy, she sucked in a deep gulp of air. A hot shower would help, but she didn’t have the energy to take it. She’d make some coffee, lie on the couch, try to rest.
Coral turned off her phone, so that she wouldn’t start reading her email, and tossed it in a basket on the shelf. It took half an hour to make coffee and a piece of toast, distracted as she was by everything lying uncared for in the kitchen. They had left for Japan quickly, and when she got back, she had spent every minute at the school, trying to get things ready for last night’s music program.
Her body ached, and she moved slowly. On an ordinary morning, Coral would make oatmeal for breakfast, pack three lunches, and start something for dinner, all before seven. She and Koji alternated kitchen duty: on his weeks, he packed the boys’ lunches carefully the night before and picked up fresh food from the market for dinner.