Chapter 25
The workshop the next morning was, appropriately, held in a covered basketball court in a resettlement site on the city’s edge, folding tables, borrowed crayons, forty kids who’d all lived through some version of the same flood.
“This is our house,” one boy explained, showing Allan a drawing of a house with a boat parked improbably on its roof. “That’s where we slept when the water rose.”
“Were you scared?” Allan asked.
“A little,” the boy admitted. “But we have a story. The old folks always say, ‘Matumba man ng sakuna, babangon pa din kami.’ So it’s not just being scared. It’s knowing you’re not alone.”
Allan copied that line into his own sketchbook before he could stop himself, some instinct telling him it belonged somewhere in the mural back home, maybe painted small along the bottom edge where the tide line would go.
A girl at the next table, maybe eight, spent twenty minutes on a single drawing without adding a single house, person, or dog, just water, layer after layer of blue crayon, pressed so hard the paper had started to tear.
“What’s this?” Allan asked gently, crouching beside her.
“Just water,” she said, not looking up. “No house yet. I can’t draw the house yet.”
“That’s okay,” Allan said. “You can stop here, if you don’t want to add anything else.”
She looked up at him then, surprised, like she’d expected to be pushed. “Really?”
“Really,” Allan said. “Not every story has to be finished right away. Sometimes it’s just water first. Tomorrow, maybe there’s a house.”
She nodded slowly, considered her blue page a moment longer, then, carefully, in the corner, small, added a single stick figure standing at the very edge of the water, not drowning, just watching.
“There,” she said, satisfied, and moved on to a fresh sheet, done for the day.
Allan sat with that a moment longer than the workshop schedule strictly allowed, something about the girl’s small, unhurried courage landing harder than he expected from an eight-year-old with a broken crayon.
He spent three hours on the floor with crayons and glue sticks, coordinating with the local coordinator to gather the drawings into a binder for the same kind of documentation Robby was building back in San Andres: a language, it turned out, that didn’t much care which province you spoke it in.
Water. Houses. Dogs. Small, unbothered figures drawn laughing in the middle of disasters too big for them to fully understand yet, brave in that particular, uncomplicated way only children managed.
By the time he packed up, his phone had four new messages waiting.
JAKE
Mural status: aesthetic crisis averted?? Please advise before I panic to the engineer.
VER
Bring pasalubong or don’t come home. (Still not kidding.)
CORA
Workshop went okay? Eat something. Call me when you have time.
ROBBY
I’ll be at the gate tomorrow. Dog is with me. Brace yourself.
Allan smiled down at his phone in the middle of the noisy covered court, surrounded by children still arguing about whose storm drawing was scarier, and felt, for the first time since the ferry seven weeks ago, entirely uncomplicated about going home.
The airport in Virac was busier than he remembered, with weekend traffic, balikbayans, and kids in superhero shirts running in circles around the single baggage carousel.
Allan stepped off the plane and was hit with a wall of the familiar: humid air, coconut trees in the distance, and someone shouting a cousin’s name across the parking lot like it was the most urgent news in the world.
He hadn’t realized how tense his shoulders had been until they dropped, all at once, the second his feet hit provincial concrete.
He looked up, and there they were.
Robby leaned against the low concrete wall near the exit in a faded DRRM shirt and jeans, Oryo sitting at his feet, tail thumping like a metronome set to double time.
The moment Oryo spotted him, he let out an indignant bark and launched himself forward as far as the leash allowed, nearly taking Robby’s arm with him.
“Reunited,” Allan said, crouching to accept the dog’s frantic, thorough greeting, “with the actual love of my life.”
“Rude,” Robby said. “But fair.”
Oryo sniffed him frantically, checking, apparently, for any strange city dogs who might have tried to claim him, then settled for licking his hand like he was trying to erase the airplane smell completely.
“You,” Robby said, stepping closer, studying him properly now. “You look alive. Actually alive. Not just walking around half-dead.”
“That’s the new bar, apparently. Tired but alive.”
“How was it?” Robby asked, taking the handle of Allan’s bag without being asked.
“Loud. Smelly. Way too many people. Kind of like here, but the parking’s worse,” Allan said. “The kids at the workshop, they drew things, just like here. Different street, same water.”
Robby nodded, something soft crossing his face. “We need that in the module too. For the next mural.”
“Look at you,” Allan said. “Already planning the sequel.”
They walked to the parking area, Oryo trotting between them like a small, self-important chaperone, and Allan slipped his hand into Robby’s, letting himself lean into his shoulder as they walked without needing a reason, the whole weight of the past three days finally, properly settling.
“Have you eaten?” Robby asked.
“Yes, Mom.”
“Your mom called me and made sure I’d check.”
“Of course she did,” Allan said, laughing.
On the drive back, the sky over the island had cleared to an almost obnoxiously bright blue, like it too had decided to celebrate.
“There’s a storm brewing,” Robby said, as they passed the plaza. “Kapitan wants his face bigger in the mural.”
“He already has a whole corner holding a sandbag,” Allan said. “What else does he want? A crown?”
“He said, a sash.”
“‘Most Humble,’” Allan said. “I’ll paint it on there myself. In glitter.”
“That’s going to be a whole war,” Robby said, grinning.
They drove past Cine sa Isla, Jake already outside sweeping the front steps himself, waving them down without slowing his broom for a second.
“How’s the cinema?” Allan called out from the window.
“Alive!” Jake yelled back. “There’s talk of a test screening next month. Don’t you dare leave again, we’ve got a deadline!”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Allan said, and found, for the first time saying it out loud, that it was fully, uncomplicatedly true.
“I hate this town,” he told Robby, once they’d driven on, smiling the whole time he said it.
“Liar,” Robby said. “I know you love it.”
“…Fine. Don’t tell anyone.”
“The whole barangay will know,” Robby said. “Always.”
Allan laughed, leaned his head briefly against Robby’s shoulder at the next stoplight, and let himself, finally, arrive all the way home.