Chapter 10 Where the Power Flows #3
The barangay hall at midnight was full of sleeping people, two hundred and eleven of them by Luz’s own manifest, in rows on the floor between the plastic chairs, and the generator was on its four hours off and the only light in the building was Hal’s torch and a candle on the far side by the door where an old woman was awake and praying and did not want company.
“You had a fight,” Luz said, without looking up.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The whole building had a fight.” She turned a page. “You are a very loud man.”
“I am aware. I am not usually.”
“Ay, ganun talaga.” Luz wrote something. “Was it about her arm?”
Hal put down the pen.
“No,” he said. “It was about a plane.”
Luz Ramos, who had not slept in two days and who was keeping two hundred and eleven people alive on a whiteboard, considered this.
“She tried to send you away,” she said.
“She booked a seat.”
“Without asking.”
“Without asking.”
Luz made a small noise that was not quite a laugh.
“My husband was on the Antonia,” she said.
“The ship. Nine years ago. He was second engineer and he was going to come off it and take the shore job at the terminal, and I made all the arrangements, and I told him on the phone from here after it was already done.” She turned another page of the notebook.
“He was so angry, kuya. So angry. For a week. He said, Luz, you cannot decide my life on a Tuesday and tell me on a Thursday.”
“And then?”
“And then he took the shore job, because it was the right job.” Luz shrugged. “And then in 2019 he had the stroke at the terminal and there was a clinic four hundred meters away and he lived. If he had been on the ship he would have died in the Bay of Bengal.”
She looked up at Hal for the first time.
“I am not telling you she was right,” Luz said.
“I am telling you that being right is not the part that hurt him, and it was not the part that hurt you either, and if you two are still confused about that on Saturday you should come and find me, because I have had nine years to think about it and I have got it down to about four sentences.”
Hal sat with his hands flat on a whiteboard-lit table in Isla Puting Bato.
“Ma’am,” he said, “what are the four sentences?”
“On Saturday,” said Luz, and went back to the list.
At half past one in the morning a nine-year-old came down the stairs in the dark, stepping over people, holding a school notebook.
She stopped by the table and stood there until Hal noticed her.
“She said four steps,” Divina said.
“What?”
“Ate Mina. She said the water would come to the fourth step tonight and then go back down half by morning.” Divina put the notebook on the table and turned it around so he could see the margin. “It came to the fourth step. I checked at twelve and I checked at one.”
Hal looked at the notebook, where somebody had written 4 steps and then, underneath, in the same careful hand, 4 steps. 11pm. 1am. correct.
“She also said tomorrow night it will be higher,” Divina said, “and that she did not know how much and she was going to find out.” She looked up at him. “Did she find out?”
The generator was off. The rain went on the roof. Two hundred and eleven people slept on the floor of a two-storey concrete building that was the highest ground for four hundred meters in any direction.
Hal Rivera looked at a nine-year-old girl holding a notebook and understood, with total and unwelcome clarity, that he was not going to be on any aircraft on Friday evening, and that this had stopped being about a fight upstairs some hours ago, and that Mina had known it before he did, which was why she had booked the seat on Tuesday.
“Yeah,” he said. “She found out.”
“How much?”
“Anak,” said Hal, “go and ask her. And take the notebook.”
Mina heard the stairs and thought it was him.
It was not him. It was a nine-year-old with a school notebook, who came in and stood in the doorway of a plywood room and said, “You were right about the four steps,” and then, before Mina could answer, “Kuya says you found out about tomorrow.”
Mina sat up on the mattress in the dark.
She had been lying there for two hours with her arm across her chest, not sleeping, running the same ninety seconds on a loop the way you do, finding the four places where she could have said Hal, there is a plane, what do you think, and watching herself not say it in all four.
“Come here,” she said. “Bring the light.”
Divina came and sat down cross-legged on the floor with the torch, and Mina took the notebook and looked at 4 steps. 11pm. 1am. correct. in a careful hand.
Then she turned to a clean page and held out her good hand for the pencil.
“I am going to tell you the truth,” Mina said, “and it is going to be frightening, and I am telling you anyway, because you are the only person in this building who is writing things down and checking them at fourteen and at one.”
“Okay.”
“Tomorrow night the tide is the highest it will be all year. It is highest at one o’clock on Saturday morning.” She drew the steps, badly, one-handed. “On its own that is about here. Two steps higher than tonight.”
Divina wrote 2 steps higher.
“But there are men across the water who are going to let a great deal of water go at the same time as the tide, on purpose.” Mina drew a second line.
“And I do not know exactly how much, and anybody who tells you they know exactly is lying to you. But it is more than the fourth step, and it is more than the eighth step, and Divina, the barangay hall has eleven steps.”
The girl looked at the drawing for a long time.
“Where is the highest place,” she said.
And Mina Hermosa, who had been asked that question by producers and directors and lighting designers her entire adult life and had always known the answer, found that she did not have one.
“That is the right question,” she said, “and I do not know yet, and I am going to know by tomorrow afternoon, and when I know I am going to tell your mother and your lolo first and not the television. Do you believe me?”
Divina took her time over it, with the seriousness of somebody who has been asked to check a number.
“Yes,” she said. “You told me four steps and it was four steps.”
She took her notebook back and went to the door, and stopped.
“Ate Mina.”
“Po?”
“He is downstairs writing a list with my mother,” Divina said. “He is not gone. Everybody upstairs thinks he is gone because of the shouting, and he is not, he is at the table.”
Then she went down, stepping over people, and Mina sat in the dark in a plywood room in Isla Puting Bato with two hundred and eleven people asleep below her and twenty-seven hours to go, and put her good hand over her mouth, and did not make any noise at all.