Chapter 5 Uninvited Guests at the Penthouse #3
“I thought it was possible,” she said, “and I could not warn you without telling you, and I had decided to tell you tonight, and I am aware of exactly how that sounds from where you are sitting.”
Hal looked at her for a long moment. The bandage on her arm had already gone dark at the outside edge.
“That is not the part,” he said.
“What?”
“You think the part I am upset about is that you did not tell me.” He shook his head.
“Baby, you got five people out of that building. You got them out at eight in the morning on a hunch, and you did it so gently that they thought it was about weather, and every one of them is in Bulacan right now eating somebody’s mother’s cooking. ”
Mina was staring at him.
“You left one person in the apartment,” Hal said. “That is the part.”
And Mina Hermosa, senior field specialist, six years in, four men on her kitchen floor and eleven kilometers of drowning city going past the window, put her good hand over her eyes and did not say anything at all for a while.
The car came off the elevated section and down into Kalayaan, and the water on Kalayaan was over the curb.
“Where are we going?” Hal said, eventually.
“Marikina.”
“Marikina is a valley. I looked at a map on the plane.” He watched a bus go past them the other way with a bow wave coming off it. “Baby, you are driving toward a river basin in a typhoon.”
“I am driving toward the one building in this city that nobody has thought about since nineteen seventy-eight.” Mina took her hand off her eyes. “You are right and it is a valley and it is going to be bad there by tomorrow and we will not be there by tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“Ask the next one.”
“That was my one for today.”
“Hal.” She turned in the seat, wincing when the belt caught her arm.
“That rule is over. That rule was mine and I made it up and it was a way of managing you, and it worked for two days, and I am retiring it.” She held his eyes.
“Ask me anything. Right now, in this car, for as long as the drive takes. Anything you ask me I will answer, and I will answer it true, and if I cannot answer it I will say the words I cannot answer that instead of giving you something shaped like an answer.”
Hal thought about it.
Outside, an entire street of shophouses went by with their shutters down and their sandbags out and a man standing in the doorway of a hardware store with his arms folded, watching the water come, the way you watch a train you already know you have missed.
“Alright,” Hal said. “First one is not about you.”
“Okay.”
“That letter you read yesterday on the show. The lady from Tondo.” He turned to look at her. “Josephine.”
Mina went still.
“What about her?”
“Station 14 is at the end of her road. You said that this morning, in the kitchen, when you explained the pump to me.” He nodded at the green drive in the bag between his feet. “So those numbers on that paper. The nine minutes and the ninety minutes and the four hundred millimeters.”
“Yes.”
“That is her house,” Hal said. “That is not a case. That is a specific woman’s specific house, and you knew that yesterday afternoon while you were standing in a dress under eleven thousand watts promising her on national television that somebody would look into it.”
The wipers went twice.
“Yes,” Mina said.
“Okay.” Hal faced front again. “Then that is what we are doing.”
“Hal.”
“No, I am telling you, not asking. I have got a duffel I am not allowed to open and about nine hundred questions and I am going to be a mess about all of this by Friday.” He reached over, without looking, and found her good hand, and held it.
“But I want to be clear with you about what I think I am here for, because you are going to try to make this small later, and I want it on the record before you do. There is a woman in Tondo whose house went under eleven times last year because somebody changed three numbers in January. So that is what we are doing.”
Mina looked at their hands.
“You have known about all of this for four hours,” she said.
“Baby, I have known about it for four hours. You have known about it for six years.” Hal shrugged. “One of us is behind and it is not going to be me for long.”
Mina laughed, once, and it hurt her arm, and she said something under her breath in Tagalog that he did not catch.
“What was that?”
“I said my grandmother would have liked you.”
“Everybody’s grandmother likes me. It is my whole thing.” He watched the water. “What was she like?”
“Terrifying. She sold fish in Balintawak for forty years and she could take a man apart with one sentence and she never once raised her voice.” Mina let her head go back against the rest. “She died when I was seventeen and I have spent a great deal of my life trying to work out what she would have made of me.”
“She would have been proud of you.”
“You do not know that.”
“No,” Hal agreed. “But she sold fish for forty years in a market, mi reina, and a woman like that does not get through forty years without working out what people are.” He shrugged.
“And you are the easiest thing to work out I have ever met. You just take longer than most because there is more of you.”