Chapter 39
I still couldn’t find Pa anywhere.
Every single place I can think of, anywhere that I remember he’s been to before—there were no signs of my father. The security guard at his old bank had to escort me out after I scanned the lobby area again for the tenth time.
After I came home with nothing to report, Ma told me that Achi said she was staying over at her own condo tonight. At least this means I don’t have to face a night of awkward silence with Achi in our bedroom.
Although I doubt that being alone and dehydrating my whole body is any better.
God. Stop crying. Stop crying!
Why are you still crying?!
If I keep this up, I’m going to flood the whole condo with my tears.
You know, this would be respectable crying if it were entirely about Pa—but there’s a small, tiny part of my brain that lingers on Seph.
It’s better this way. You won’t get hurt this way. I keep repeating the same thoughts even though I desperately want to call him and take back everything I said.
God. How am I still thinking about a stupid boy when my dad is literally gone?
If maturity means not feeling things anymore, maybe this is what being seventeen is all about—feeling sad and horny at the same time.
Once my eyes seem to finally run out of fluids, I grab for the ice pack I store in my bedside drawer. Lesson learned from years of experience: If I don’t ice my eyes after a night of crying, I’m going to wake up looking like mosquitoes assaulted my eyelids.
While my hand searches for the pack, it bumps into the book hiding Pa’s phone. I haven’t checked it ever since Pa’s ghost showed up. I plug the phone into my charger, and moments later, it lights up with a ton of notifications.
Most of them are messages from the contact labeled Sweetheart
Still thinking about seeing our baby go to prom. Did you ever think she’d be this grown up? —Beth
Wish you were here, sweetheart. —Beth
The last message was sent an hour ago.
I take the phone, creep outside, and notice the light seeping in from Ma’s bedroom. When I press my ear to her door, I try to listen for any signs that Ma’s already sleeping.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
I’m contemplating walking away when I hear a faint, “Nika?”
When I slowly push open the door, I see Ma is lying on the right side of the bed with her tablet propped up on the left. The left part was always Pa’s side of the bed.
Ma scooches to the middle as soon as I climb in.
I peer over her shoulder and see she’s watching the Pagpag movie.
If Achi were here, she’d convince Ma to switch the movie to something lighter.
I mean, the movie is literally about a woman making a deal with the devil to revive her dead husband—this has to be triggering for Ma.
“Are you sure you should be watching this?”
Ma holds up her finger and whispers, “The ghost knows where they are.”
I keep watching as Kathryn and her little brother, the character Macmac, hide underneath a white sheet at an abandoned house.
Roman the ghost murderer creeps into the room and swats away the other hanging sheets in the room with a wooden stake.
Kathryn hugs Macmac closer when the ghost slowly walks away …
“Ay!” Ma covers her eyes when the ghost catches them.
“Kathryn’s not going to die,” I assure Ma. “She’s the best character here. Movies never kill off the best characters.”
Ma still doesn’t look at the screen.
Like I predicted, Kathryn and her brother are able to escape from Roman’s grasp and run outside to the garden. But then the ghost catches up to them. Roman knocks over Macmac with his elbow and chokes Kathryn by the neck. He shoves her to the ground and raises his wooden stake …
No way. There’s no way the movie is actually going to let her die.
Ominous music plays …
Macmac yells for his sister …
Kathryn screams …
A gasp escapes my lips as Roman lifts the stake over her body, when suddenly, a dagger pierces the ghost’s heart. With very convenient and impossible timing, Daniel (who was completely passed out just a moment ago) miraculously kills the resurrected ghost.
I only remember to exhale when the screen shows Kathryn and her brother alive and well.
My mom peers at me. “You were scared too, ‘no?”
“I was not,” I lie. “Told you. They never kill the best characters.”
She pauses the tablet and adjusts her body so she’s facing me. “Niks.” Her hand brushes the hair from my eyes. “Have you been crying?”
“No.”
Ma purses her lips so I change tactics. “Allergies,” I say instead.
She answers with a heavy sigh and silence stretches between us.
“I know I’m the last person you want to talk through things with, but if you ever need somebody to talk to…” She eyes me with a sad smile. “Offer’s always open.”
My sister would want me to lie and deny for Ma’s sake. Tell her that everything’s okay, that I really have nothing I want to talk about—but something tells me that she can see right through me.
So I show her Pa’s old phone. “I saw your messages.”
Ma fidgets when she scans the texts she’s been sending the past few weeks. “You weren’t supposed to see those.”
“It’s not like I saw the dirty ones.”
“Nika.”
“Ma, it’s okay!” I tell her. “I send myself messages from Pa’s phone and pretend like they’re from him. That’s more embarrassing.”
Her eyes grow wide. “You message Ton?”
I nod. “Have you tried looking Pa up online?”
Ma’s brow scrunches. “Isn’t that dangerous?”
I type out Pa’s name in the YouTube search bar on her tablet. “Promise. This won’t lead to the kidnappers finding us,” I tell Ma when she still looks concerned.
With a heavy sigh, she finally relaxes enough so I can click on the video of Pa playing the piano at the mall. I laugh at the part where the people surrounding him start calling out song requests.
“Of course I’m going with Mariah Carey,” I say right before Pa says it.
“How many times have you watched this?” Ma asks me.
I shrug. “Achi watches it too.”
She stays silent and I worry that I said the wrong thing again.
But I finally voice the question I’ve been too scared to ask. “Did Pa tell you he was sick?”
Ma then stiffens and retreats to her scary, quiet place. Take the question back! my brain screams. I need to change the subject, make Ma forget about losing Pa, do something so I don’t hurt Ma even more. So many thoughts are tumbling in my head when Ma can’t even look at me.
Her eyes linger on the screen when I hear her reply. “Your dad made me promise not to tell.”
I’m holding my breath the whole time she speaks.
“Your angkong, your dad’s dad, was diagnosed with … terminal cancer when Ton was around your age,” Ma starts to say.
My dad’s side of the family always said my angkong was “gone too soon.” No one ever mentioned that he had cancer.
“His uncles told Ton not to tell your amah about the diagnosis.”
I pause to make sure I heard that correctly. “Why would they ask Pa not to tell his mom?”
“They were worried that your amah might not be able to handle that information, that it was too much for her. So Ton did everything he could to mask your angkong’s condition.”
Ma goes on to rationalize this by saying his uncles trusted Pa since he was the eldest son of the family, and my mind can’t shake the image of my dad at seventeen. How could he have handled a secret like that?
“Did you know that your angkong was a piano player too?” Ma tells me, a smile crossing her face when she reminisces. “He was the one who taught Ton how to play. Ton always used to call him his best friend whenever he’d tell me stories about his dad.”
Then my whole chest squeezes when I remember why Pa wasn’t scared about breaking the pagpag superstition. How Pa said that he wished his best friend’s spirit would follow him home so he could catch his friend up on all that he had missed.
I never knew that Pa was talking about his dad.
How could his uncles do that to Pa?!
“So they made Pa lie to amah that whole time?” I ask, feeling the heat rising in my neck.
“He wasn’t lying, Nika, he was protecting his mother,” Ma lectures me instead of seeing my side. “Tsai ya kha tsio, huan ho kha tsio. My parents used to tell me that—the less you know, the less you worry. Talking about things like sickness and death? That can do a lot more harm than good.”
There’s a throbbing in my head as I try to process everything Ma’s telling me. “Does protecting your family always mean you have to suffer alone?”
I’m worried I’ve lost Ma to the quiet place again when she doesn’t answer. Her voice comes out soft when she says, “I guess, sometimes.”
“It sounds so lonely.” The words fly out of my mouth before I can think twice.
The way Ma looks at me then makes my throat sting. While Pa can smile with his eyes, I always see Ma’s heart breaking in hers. Her eyes are so sad when she turns the question back on me. “Do you feel lonely, sweetheart?”
My mouth opens with the reflex to downplay things again, push back the building geyser in my throat, insist that I’m fine and have always been fine! But the moment I try speaking, the whole dam breaks apart—all the tears flood through and I can’t catch up.
“I’m here, Niks. I’m here,” Ma coos while trying to catch my sobs. I feel her hold me closer and I start bawling into her arms.
“I could hear you before when you would cry at night about Pa.” I wipe the edges of my eyes. “Then I made it worse when I would sing and hurt you all over again. I keep doing the wrong thing, Ma, and I’m so, so sorry that I always make your life harder.”
Ma rubs my shoulders when they rise and fall from my crying. “Nika.” She cups my face and wipes my cheeks. “You don’t make my life harder. Loving you is the easiest thing in the world.” Her heartbroken eyes are glistening when she asks, “And did you really stop performing because of me?”
“I—I saw you crying to Achi before my last show,” I confess. “I didn’t want you to go through that again.”
“But I loved watching you sing.” A small smile crosses her lips when she brushes my hair with her hand. “You’re so talented, just like your father.”
My heart still braces itself whenever Ma mentions Pa.
“When I saw you practicing that day, I got overwhelmed with so many emotions, and … I don’t know how to handle all of that sometimes.
It breaks my heart when I see you hurting and I think I push you too hard because I want to help so badly.
” Ma then shuts her eyes as if she’s reliving it all.
“I worry that I don’t know how to help you and Jackie,” she admits, her breath hitching.
“Before I go to the office in the morning, I usually walk a couple laps around the bakery contemplating all the things I could’ve done wrong.
Did I give you too much space? Did I give Jackie the right advice? Did I tell you the correct thing?”
Based on all the worries Ma lists, she must walk the whole of Metro Manila every morning.
“That’s why you have such nice calves.”
“Diba?” Ma chuckles and stretches her legs. “Worrying is great cardio.”
“But you really don’t have to worry about us, Ma,” I say, brushing off the tear sliding down her cheek.
She pauses and smooths my hair again. “Asking a mom not to worry is like asking her not to breathe,” she says, then sighs.
Hearing that makes me want to swallow all the emotions back down.
“When you say that you get overwhelmed with a lot of feelings…,” I start to say. “That happens to me, too, usually when I get mad about things. I don’t think clearly and I do some really shitty things I don’t mean. I’m sorry I was shitty about you and Dr. Derrick.”
“Nika, don’t call yourself a shit.”
“I’m not,” I argue. “I was using shitty as an adjective.”
Ma looks me in the eye then. “You lost your dad. People deserve forgiveness for the things they do when they’re hurt.”
“… But what if I’m always hurt?”
The room grows quiet after that.
I then feel the need to add, “But I realize he’s not … the worst guy in the world,” I assure her. “Like you could’ve done way worse, especially with all the kidnappers lurking around the internet.”
But Ma’s face still stays serious despite the joke.
“I should’ve been smarter about all of it,” she says.
“With everything that’s going on, being with Derrick, it felt like he understood…
” I notice how Ma’s face brightens with each mention of his name.
“I should’ve called off the wedding earlier when I saw how it was affecting you. ”
Then she ends with a wistful voice, “Maybe I got too carried away.”
“You were happy, Ma,” I tell her, and squeeze her hand. “I want you to be happy.”
She wipes her eyes and clutches my shoulder. “I thought people only cried this much in the movies.”
“Could be fun if they made one about us.” My mind wanders and imagines an Ilagan major motion picture. “We could star in the Pagpag sequel.”
Ma considers this. “That sounds too dark. Our family isn’t going to be in a horror movie. I want a happy film.”
“I think that’s hard with the whole dead dad thing.”
“Our family can still have a love story,” she insists.
“Maybe Pa would’ve gotten a different ending in the movie.”
I say it without really thinking—again. That part of my brain that’s supposed to be in charge of filtering out what I say? Pretty sure that’s nonexistent.
But then Ma nods like she understands. “Because movies never kill off the best characters.”
She smiles when I add, “They would never kill you off, either.”
Ma notices the clock on her tablet and tells me I should really get some sleep. “No more keeping everything to yourself, okay?”
Um.
Okay, from where I’m standing, I have two choices. One: Lie and basically cancel out the progress that Ma and I made in our heart-to-heart. Two: Tell the truth and risk getting sent to the hospital for grief hallucinations.
“Um. Ma?” I carefully ask. “There’s something you need to know.”
Ma looks at me and the words tumble out of my mouth. “When I didn’t pagpag after Pa’s death anniversary, his spirit came back. He was sort of a spirit, I think, but he felt real, Ma, so I thought Pa could stay with us permanently.”
Then I recap everything from the forty-day superstition to everything that went down during prom night, to how I’ve spent the last day searching for any signs of Pa.
“I don’t know if there’s a way we can contact him. There must be experts who know how to get in touch with spirits. Maybe we can ask Father Melvin, like that should be something they teach priests … Wait. Ma, where are you going?”
Before I finish talking, Ma climbs out of bed and changes out of her pajamas. She snatches the car keys from her drawer and tells me to go get her bag.
Lord, did I just shoot up my mother’s blood pressure?
She tells me to get dressed, too, and I repeat the same question.
And Ma says, “We’re going to bring back your father.”