Moondogs (38 page)

Chapter 24

The next week was shit. Amartina returned on Monday morning, but only to demand that her résumé be passed along to incoming families—her threat to otherwise expose Monique’s affair unspoken but implied. Less than an hour after that news of the kidnapping hit
casual morning radio, the wire services, international cable—the works. Her telephone rang all day, harmonizing with other telephones in empty offices. She begged the consul general to pull some interviewers off the visa line to help her screen and answer calls. He responded with a curt e-mail.
You think you’re overwhelmed? Welcome to my world
.

The calls didn’t stop all week. They followed her home. Colleagues back at Main State arrived at their desks a little after dinnertime on Monique’s end of the world, and they called her on the IVG line with taskings, action items and info requests. She spent most nights bleary-eyed in front of her laptop, trying to ignore the gecko—still swollen with the undigested lovebird—as it scampered across the ceiling and walls. She made the mistake of reading up on the Abu Sayyaf. She made the bigger mistake of watching one of their execution videos online. It left her with nightmares of Joseph and Shawn and Leila tied to palm trees, getting their heads hacked off with bolo knives.

It got so bad that Reynato couldn’t hide his concern when he came over on Friday evening. He went straight to the dirty kitchen, washed out two mugs and put the kettle on. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Nothing more than you’re already doing,” she said, listlessly.

Reynato rooted about the pantry for tea bags. The kettle began to steam and he rushed to switch the burner off, knowing she preferred warm to hot. He steeped the tea, set the mugs on the table and pulled a chair out for her. He’d been like this all week.

They sat. “Still awful at the office?” he asked.

She nodded. The ambassador had called her a fuckup in front of the whole Country Team that afternoon. Later he apologized, in front of no one. He was just a little on edge, with this kidnapping business and the divorce and all. He was sure she understood. And she did.

“Hey.” Reynato rapped his knuckles lightly on the table like he was knocking on a door. “You still with me?”

“What? Sorry. Yes.” She sipped, the temperature on her lips just right. “Can we not talk about it?”

“Of course.” He looked down into his mug. “You know what I think might help, though? If we got you out of this empty place.” He gestured
at the dark apartment looming around them. “Out of this dirty city. You could use some fresh air. You could use … what do you call it? A mini-break.”

“That’s the English. The English say mini-break.”

“Same difference; you talk it, you are it.”

“You speak English. What does that make you?” She couldn’t help but smile, a little.

“Versatile. How long would it take you to pack an overnight bag?”

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t get away.”

“Why not? Tomorrow’s Saturday. And you’ve got e-mail on that phone of yours, it’s not like you’ll be out of touch. It’s a whole new futuristic world we’re living in.”

“But …” she stammered. “Where would we even go? Do I need evening clothes, or walking shoes, or—”

“You need nothing.” He took her hands in his. “You’re what you need. And what I need.” He hugged her, working his face into her neck. He smelled like fireworks and fruit.

“All right.” She hugged him back. “Why not? Let’s go.”

MONIQUE THREW SOME SWEATS
into one of Shawn’s backpacks and followed Reynato down to his parked Honda. She didn’t ask where they were going until they’d left Fort Bonifacio and turned onto EDSA. The answer cheered her more than she could have imagined.
Subic Bay
.

“I can’t believe that in a whole year your husband never took you back.”

“That’s not fair,” she protested. “I could have taken me back.”

“Fine then. You’re to blame. But it’s a wrong I’m righting.” Reynato smiled wide. He loved to see himself as a fixer.

Traffic was heavy in the city and didn’t get any better when they hit the northern expressway. He stopped the car once to buy boxed juices and twice more so he could pee beside other people peeing beside the road. Monique didn’t mind, consumed as she was by easy memories of life on the base—memories of home. She told him about their single-story house beside the officers’ barracks, about the front
walk lined with porous lava rocks. She told him about the cleaning woman and their trips to and from All Hands Beach. About flying foxes, macaques and turtle eggs. Reynato, normally so skeptical of easy sentiment, went right ahead and indulged her nostalgia. He even coaxed her with questions when she started to flag. What kind of spider was it that bit you? Where was your mother when she went into labor? Have your parents ever been back? Why not?

Traffic got better when they turned onto the Subic-Tipo Expressway and passed an overturned cattle truck blocking the left lane. Plump animals spilled out the back like a litter of stillborn kittens. Butterflies alit on horns and upturned hoofs, supping blood with their delicate curved mouthparts. A lone survivor munched cud in the median, her eyes round and running. Reynato wouldn’t look at her as they passed; he kept his eyes glued to oncoming billboards. Monique couldn’t stop looking.

Mount Pinatubo emerged as a dark shape against dark clouds in the distance. It looked smaller than she remembered. It
was
smaller than she remembered—the eruption in 1991 knocked nearly a thousand feet off the peak. She’d watched the coverage from her hospital room, recovering from labor while Walter slowly died. Clark Air Base was evacuated right about when he went into the incubator. Nonessential personnel left Subic when they brought him up to the ICU. Monique remembered the ash plume, higher than anything she’d seen since, including 9/11. It was like black-and-white footage of atomic bomb blasts. She never told anyone that she
felt
Pinatubo erupting. Felt it in her chest. Like there was a string tied around her lungs, running down her leg, out her foot, through the floor, all the way down through the hot, dark planet; attached to the volcano at the other end. The string tugged her lungs when Pinatubo went off. She tugged back and Pinatubo went off harder. She kept all of this from Reynato as well, not wanting to be called a bruha again, even if he was joking.

“I wouldn’t get your hopes up.” His voice broke the quiet in the warm Honda. “The bay is different since they made it a free port. Could be your house is kaput by now. But who knows, your ya-ya might still
be there.” He meant the cleaning lady. “What’s her name? We’ll look her up.”

“She wasn’t my ya-ya. And I don’t know her name.”

He glanced at her, sidelong. “I thought you said you were close.”

“We were, but I was little.” Monique chewed her lip. “It was a long time ago. I hardly knew my parents’ first names. I called her Tiya.”

“Auntie? That’s sweet. I’m sure all is forgiven.”

“She has nothing to forgive me of.”

“Sure now,” Reynato said, and went quiet. Sweet as he was trying to be, she could tell something was grating on him. But she couldn’t be bothered to push it, and they finished the drive in silence. The trees ahead became backlit by shimmering port lights. Passing the remains of an MP checkpoint, they rounded a bend and got their first good look at the old base. In a way it wasn’t all that different; the runway down south, the beaches, the orderly rows of housing like suburban sprawl were all familiar. But Olongapo had surged—it glowed bright as any Manila neighborhood—and the low skyline was spiked irregularly with neon.

“I’m starving,” Reynato announced, slowing so abruptly that Monique’s seatbelt locked. “Sorry. Just remembered that there’s a place here I love.” He pulled off the main road, returning the horn-honks of the jeepney behind them, and stopped at a shabby food stand slouching between American franchise burger joints. Greasy smoke rose from a little tin kiosk, licking a plywood sign on the roof that read
Junior’s Tapsihan
. Reynato ordered for them both: cured beef tapa, garlic rice and eggs over-easy, with bottles of banana ketchup and coconut vinegar for the table. The smell of the food redoubled Monique’s nostalgia. Why on earth had she suffered through Amartina’s faux-American cooking for a whole year when she could have been eating this? Joseph and the kids would have learned to love it.

They sat at one of several rotting picnic tables and ate. The other patrons watched Monique like she was a curious object. A man with horribly scarred arms stared with particular intensity, but turned away whenever she glanced back. Reynato ignored them all, speaking with
his mouth full, some yolk clotting the stubble on his upper lip. “You should know that it’s looking pretty good for this Bridgewater guy. It’s confirmed, without a doubt, that he’s alive. We’ve made contact with the kidnappers—”

Monique swallowed too fast and felt the brief vertigo of almost choking. “Can we talk about something else, please?”

“Hey, I know it’s not your favorite subject. But the news is
good
. One of my best people met them today—and if I trust a life in anybody’s hands, they’re his. Folks on TV say this kidnapping is going to be a long, drawn-out ordeal. But no. I promise you it ends in days, not weeks or months.”

“And how does it end?”

“Howard Bridgewater lives. Good guys go home happy. Bad guys don’t go home at all.”

“Good guys?” Monique grunted in a way that she hoped sounded good-natured. “You sound like my son.”

“Your son’s smarter than you give him credit for. And speaking of that—how’s Howard’s kid holding up?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t talk to me much.”

Reynato paused, as though he was giving Howard’s kid serious thought. “He’s lucky to have you.”

“Lucky?” Monique put down her large, bent spoon. “How do you figure? I mean, what good am I, exactly? Acting chief of American Citizen Services,” she sounded it out with revulsion. “Bullshit. I’m a
phony
! I do nothing all day but answer telephones. I carry tiny pieces of useless information from one person to another, and nothing I do makes that kid’s life—or anybody’s life, for that matter—any easier. And the few meaningful things I know—that the kidnappers are talking to police, for example—I can’t share because I’m not supposed to know them. I’m just as useless as all the people sitting at home and watching this awfulness on the news. More so, in fact, because they can at least turn it off when they want to.”

Reynato put his hand on hers. He still had egg on his lip. “You are not a phony.”

She pulled away. Of course she was a phony—it was just another word for
liar
. And he knew that. Saccharin sweet wasn’t in his usual repertoire. Nor was the quiet, supportive, steady behavior he’d practiced all week. He hadn’t even pulled any cute shit at Benicio’s briefing—he pretended not to know Monique from Eve.

“Why are you being so nice to me?” she asked. “I mean, why take me on a mini-break to Subic? Why feed me tapsilog? Why bring me ballroom dancing? Why help me confront the girl who sold my son drugs? What the hell are we even doing here?” She looked around at the outdoor seating and caught the man with scarred arms staring again.

Reynato shifted his weight and smiled cagily. “You fascinate me.”

“What about me?”

“Your bruha powers, that’s what.”

“Be serious. Don’t lie to me.”

“Honest and serious are different. Which do you want?”

“Honest, then. Give me honest.”

“Fine. It’s your bruha powers.” He dropped the evasive smile for a stone cold poker face and stared at her. “I’ve never met a bruha before, and believe me, I’ve been looking. I think this could be the start of something special.”

Monique avoided his eyes and sighed like she was put out. “You’re exhausting.” She took another bite of tapsilog but the tangy, greasy beef was cold and had lost its charm. Reynato cleaned his plate, and hers, and said nothing more.

THEY GOT BACK ON THE ROAD
, but instead of heading into the heart of the base they turned south, winding up the hills in the direction of Monique’s childhood home on Cubi Point. They drove just a few minutes and stopped at a cluster of low concrete bungalows that looked like opaque little greenhouses. It was the old bachelor officers quarters, subdivided and converted into a sort of interstate-style motel. An old administration building served as a front desk and lobby, and it looked out onto the officers’ pool that was dry and filled with brittle dead palm.
“It’s no Shangri-La,” Reynato said. “But I thought we’d get some proper sleep, and maybe tomorrow we’ll see if we can find that house of yours. Does that sound all right?”

“It sounds great,” she said, too tired to go on questioning his motives. Reynato got out and trotted across the gravel lot to check them in. Monique got out as well, leaned against the Honda and gazed out over Subic Bay. From this distance the beaches looked like slivers of granite between the black water and the incandescent buildings. Cars pulsed between the shipping warehouses, now converted to nightclubs or shopping arcades or some such. Clouds rolled thick, blotting out most of the stars and Pinatubo, which didn’t bother her one bit.