Chapter 11 #2
Singapore was supposed to be free, the sort of place where you could walk down Orchard Road and buy anything you wanted, where, even if you couldn’t afford the buttery soft Chanel or a Louis Vuitton bag, you could find the knock-off within the hour.
Singapore didn’t have limits, or if it did, they had been smoothed over, prettified with luxury, lit-up palm trees, and efficient waste management.
Whenever Pinky walked downtown on her day off, past Bottega Veneta and Ralph Lauren, she could smell the freon blowing out the revolving doors, masked with expensive perfume.
Inside, she could see the shop girls with their edgeless, powdered faces, walking as if they were floating, silky clouds.
Pinky had never felt so light, as if the wind could pick her up and blow her anywhere, to any adventure, to a faraway destination she could never predict.
It was fine. She was fine. She began to believe that she had never been stuck, never felt oppressed by the circle of women in her childhood home, or the black sand beaches that may as well have been impenetrable walls.
She made friends, other nannies who congregated on Sundays, their one day off, unrolling bamboo mats at their favourite park, the small one with the stone elephants and colourful umbrellas suspended in the trees.
They sat, unpacked their containers of sweet sticky rice, mochi from the supermarket, and stinky durian.
That smell. Surely it cleared the air and purified old feelings, kept the spectre of familial obligation away.
But then Pinky met a man, a Singaporean who worked for the university as a low-level network administrator.
He approached her on a Sunday at the park, where she was laughing loudly with her friends, and simply asked for her name.
When she answered, he didn’t laugh, like most people did, but nodded and said, “How fitting that your parents named you after the prettiest colour.” Pinky didn’t know how to reply, but she gave him her number and that was enough.
Later, when he told her about his work, his entire body felt tense under her touch, and she learned to massage his neck and shoulders and sing a soft song—any song—to help him forget that he did not yet earn enough to buy a condo or to care for his parents.
“I am a disappointment,” he sighed into her hair. “I haven’t made anyone’s life better.” It was precisely this sadness that Pinky loved, this mantle of gentle frustration. He would never be angry at her or anyone else. Only himself. His skin under her callused hands was softer than hers.
She could only see him in the evenings or on her one day off, and she never stayed over in the apartment he shared with his family, where he slept in a bedroom with his brother.
When they had sex, it was in rooms they rented with their pooled money—small hotel rooms off Haji Lane in wood-framed colonial buildings.
When he was on top of her, Pinky didn’t feel a driving passion.
She felt like she was under a quilt, one that had been washed so many times that it was soft beyond reason.
She didn’t consider that comfort could also be a prison. She relaxed. So, of course, she got pregnant.
From the very beginning of their relationship, they both knew that Singaporean citizens could not marry foreign nannies and that Pinky would never be allowed to apply for citizenship for herself or her baby.
In order for them to stay together as a family, they would have to move somewhere else, maybe back to the Philippines.
He would have to leave his job and his parents.
So, when she told him he was going to be a father, he stared out the seventeenth-floor window of the restaurant and blinked against the view of the taller towers beyond.
The buildings stretched outward and upward, and Pinky often wondered if they were their own forest, a grove that hid the demons she had once believed could devour her during any unguarded moment.
“I cannot see you anymore,” he finally said. At least he had the manners to pay the bill before he left.
That night, Pinky lay in her windowless room on her bed and wondered if the aswang from her lola’s old stories could find her here.
She was separated from the laundry room and the American family by a thin bifold door, the kind with wooden slats that allowed air to circulate.
Plenty of gaps for a long skinny tongue to slip through and suck her child away.
Come and get me , she thought as she stared at the sluggish ceiling fan above.
Maybe I believe in you again. And the next morning, when the blood filled the toilet bowl, Pinky felt relief and then cried with the shame of it all.
pinky had managed to keep her pregnancy and its end a secret.
She would not be deported. This was the only blessing she could think of as she moved through her days, following the children at the water park, always within arm’s reach.
There were sandwiches to make, noodles to boil, soccer cleats to clean.
But when Pinky walked by a mirror, she could see the sadness draped like a blanket over her thin shoulders, pulling her body into a slump that she was sure would never go away.
Asher and Ava. Pinky might have loved them once.
But that morning when the blood had emptied out of her in lumps and liquid, she had cried because she was alone.
Her baby hadn’t survived, and neither should her love for these two blond children who would one day learn to gaze in her direction without seeing her at all.
And so she flushed all of it away, every maternal feeling she had ever had.
Held captive by the children’s sticky hands and bottomless hunger, Pinky soon realized she could not stay in Singapore.
The day she left, she sat in the airplane, watching the lights of Changi Airport grow smaller and smaller, the island itself falling away, each glass tower flattening as she rose into the sky.
She felt her shoulders lifting, as if the bones and joints were pointed upward, carrying the rest of her along on their flight.
Maybe she was growing wings. Maybe she would be a different kind of beast, unrecognizable, beautiful, and worshipped when she landed in Canada, that vast country where, surely, she could run away for as long as she wanted and still never reach its borders.
Pinky closed her eyes and fell asleep, the lightness comforting her like a lullaby.
in vancouver, she was hired by a family who barely talked to her, whose fair-haired children learned to read as preschoolers and spent most of their playtime whispering in each other’s ears.
Pinky tiptoed through their modern white-and-grey house, acutely aware of every door she inadvertently slammed, every toilet flush in the middle of the night.
After they moved to Edmonton (Vancouver, the parents said, was too urban, too noisy), she was hired by a woman named Alice with a sharp-faced husband and two sad children.
In her small room in the basement, Pinky looked at the wood panelling, the recessed window high up on the wall, the double-paned glass.
She had been told the ocean was only ten kilometres away, but there were buildings, bus stations, and a highway in between.
She was in a house surrounded by other houses, in the middle of a street where families with babies slept peacefully each night, lulled by the familiar undulations of the ground beneath them, the vibrations from the network of roads that promised escape or adventure or just someplace else .
In an hour, she could be in the mountains, tracking waterfalls and paw prints.
In half an hour, she could be standing on a cliff, watching the tugboats bob in the icy inlet.
Every day she could be standing in the wind, wild salmonberries growing beside her, with no other human in sight.
She stayed for the vastness, for the distance between ocean and mountain, for the eyes of strangers who didn’t know where she had come from or what had triggered her need for escape.
There were diapers and preschool, mac and cheese and steamed broccoli, a night school community support worker program, beach picnics on weekends with her friends, where she sat with her back against a log, never taking her eyes off the deep blue Canadian tides.
She allowed herself to relax beside this colder, faster sea, so frigid that, even in summer, she could not imagine herself swimming without her body taking on ice, freezing her hair and hanging from her nose in icicles.
But she could squint all she liked and still never see an island on the horizon, only the sunset, a slow swallowing of light into the never-ending ocean.