Chapter 1 The Arrival Gate at NAIA #2
She said something in Tagalog too fast and too quiet for Hal to catch any of it except the girl’s name, which she apparently already knew, and the girl said something back through her hands, and Mina laughed and put her thumb under the girl’s chin and tilted her face up and said something short.
Then she took the sunglasses off the top of her head and put them on the girl, badly, crooked, and walked away without looking back.
The noise that went up behind them had a different quality to it.
“You know her?” Hal said.
“She has been at fourteen of these.” Mina was moving again, brisk, her mouth still curved for the cameras and her eyes already somewhere past the doors. “Her name is Pia. She writes me a letter every Christmas and she is a better writer than the people who write my show.”
“You gave her your sunglasses.”
“I have seven pairs of sunglasses, Hal.”
“That is not what I said.”
Mina did not answer that, and one of the gray polo shirts opened a lane, and she put two fingers through the belt loop at the back of Hal’s jeans, which no camera in that building could see and which he felt all the way to his molars, and she walked him out of it.
The covered driveway was hotter than the hall by about twenty degrees and wetter than anywhere Hal had ever been in his life, including Savannah in August, including the inside of a shrimp boat.
“Dios mio,” he said.
“You said you were ready for this.”
“I said I was from Georgia. I now understand those are different claims.”
A black SUV pulled up. One of the gray polo shirts took the duffel from him, and Hal let it go this time, and there was a small negotiation of hands and doors and then the noise cut off as the door shut and the air conditioning came up and it was absurdly quiet.
Mina sat back against the leather and closed her eyes for exactly three seconds.
Hal watched her do it. Three seconds, no more, like a thing she had budgeted. Then her eyes came open and she was looking at him sideways with her head still back against the seat.
“So,” she said.
“So.”
“That was a lot.”
“That was a lot,” Hal agreed.
“I did tell you.”
“You did tell me. You told me in the way that a person tells you their house is a little messy.” He turned to face her properly, one knee up on the seat. “Baby, there were three hundred people out there. On a Tuesday. At eleven thirty in the morning. Do they know your flight schedule?”
“They know everything.” She said it the way you report a bus schedule. “There is a group chat. There are several group chats. There is one that only posts what I am wearing, and they are usually right about the designer before my own publicist is.”
“And that’s fine with you?”
“It is not a thing that has a fine.” She reached over and took his hand and turned it over and looked at the palm, at the calluses across the base of the fingers, with real curiosity, like she was checking whether that part had been true.
“It is weather. You do not have a feeling about weather. You have an umbrella.”
Hal looked at her looking at his hand.
“That,” he said, “is the single saddest thing anybody has ever said to me in a car.”
She laughed again, and this one was smaller and had nothing performed in it, and she kept his hand.
The SUV pulled out into traffic and stopped.
It stayed stopped. Hal looked out the window at eight lanes of vehicles occupying roughly the same volume of space as twelve lanes of vehicles, at a jeepney in the next lane with the back end full of people and a hand-painted sign along the roof that said SALAMAT PANGINOON, at three motorcycles threading between bumpers with an inch on either side.
“How far is it,” he asked.
“To the condo? Eight kilometers.”
“Eight.”
“Yes.”
“Five miles.”
“If you must.”
“And how long is that?”
Mina considered the traffic with the flat expression of a person consulting an internal table.
“Forty minutes,” she said. “Maybe fifty. It rained this morning so everyone is being stupid.”
Hal sat back and let out a slow breath through his nose.
“Eight kilometers in fifty minutes,” he said. “That is nine point six kilometers an hour. That is walking speed. Mina, a man could walk this.”
“A man could not walk this.”
“A man could theoretically walk this.”
“A man would be dead on C-5 in fourteen minutes and there would be a group chat about it.” She was grinning at him now. “You are doing the thing.”
“What thing.”
“The freight thing. You are looking at my city and you are doing throughput.” She tapped his temple with one finger, twice. “I can see it happening in there. You have already worked out that if this road ran at forty it would move four times the volume.”
“Six times,” Hal said, before he could stop himself.
Mina made a small triumphant noise and put her forehead against his shoulder, and Hal sat very still, because eleven months of wanting this had not prepared him for the ordinary weight of a head on a shoulder.
“How long do I have you,” she said into his sleeve.
“You know how long.”
“I want to hear you say the number.”
“Seventeen days.” Hal looked out at the stopped traffic. “I fly back on the eighteenth. Sunday. Six forty in the morning, which is a crime, but it was four hundred dollars cheaper than the civilized one.”
“Seventeen days.”
“Most of my year,” he said. “I had six days saved and I asked Dale for six more and Dale said no, and then Dale’s wife found out why I was asking and Dale said yes.”
Mina lifted her head and looked at him.
“You spent your whole year on me.”
“I spent my whole year on you,” Hal agreed. “Do not make it strange. It was an extremely easy decision and I made it in about nine seconds and then I spent four months being smug about it.”
She sat back against her own side of the seat then, still holding his hand, and looked out her own window for a while, and Hal could not see her face and did not think he was supposed to.
Outside the rain started again, hard and sudden and straight down, the way it had never once rained in Georgia.
The building in Bonifacio Global City had a lobby like the inside of a bank that had decided to become a hotel.
Marble, cold air, a wall of water running down black stone for no reason Hal could determine.
The security man behind the desk stood up when Mina came in, and stayed standing until she had crossed to the elevator.
“Good afternoon, Mister Rivera,” he said as Hal passed.
Hal stopped. “You know my name.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How do you know my name?”
The man smiled at some point over Hal’s left shoulder, and did not answer, and Mina called from the elevator, “Kuya Boy, do not torture him, he has been awake for a day,” and the man laughed and sat back down.
In the elevator Hal watched the floor numbers climb.
“He knew my name.”
“He is very good at his job.” Mina was checking something on her phone, thumb moving fast. “Also I gave him your photograph three weeks ago and told him if a large confused Puerto Rican arrived without me he was to be extremely kind to him.”
“Three weeks ago.”
“I plan things,” she said, and put the phone away, and did not look at him. “It is a whole thing I do.”
The doors opened directly into the apartment, which was the first moment Hal understood the money.
He had known it as a fact. He had seen the same photographs everybody had seen.
But there is a difference between knowing that a person is famous and standing in a room with a wall of glass forty-one floors above a city, looking out at towers going up into low cloud, with the rain coming across the glass sideways in long grabbing streaks.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?”
“I’m recalibrating.”
“Take your time. There is a whole guest room, which you are not going to use, but it exists, and I want credit for the gesture.”
A woman came out of the kitchen.
She was somewhere in her sixties, small, wearing a house dress and reading glasses pushed up into gray hair, and she stopped in the middle of the floor and folded her arms and looked at Hal from his boots to his head and back down again, taking her time about it, the way a person inspects a delivery.
“Meding,” Mina said, “this is Hal.”
“I can see it is Hal.” Her English was careful and slower than her Tagalog, and Hal understood that this was a choice and not a limitation. “Sit down, hijo, you look terrible.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do not call me ma’am.” She was already moving toward the kitchen. “You want coffee or you want to sleep.”
“Coffee, please.”
“Wrong answer, but okay.”
She did not go to the kitchen. She came two steps closer instead and looked at him some more, and Hal, who had been raised by women who did exactly this, sat up straighter and let her.
“You are the one from Georgia,” Meding said.
“Yes, po.”
“Which one?”
Hal looked up.
“Ma’am?”
“There are two.” Meding did not blink. “There is the one under Russia and there is the one under Tennessee. My nephew works on the ships and he has been to both, and he says the food is better in the one under Russia, and I have never known whether he was joking.”
“The one under Tennessee,” said Hal. “And your nephew is joking, po, but not by as much as I would like.”
Her eyebrows went up a quarter inch at the po, and stayed up.