Epilogue Sunbreak Over the Bay
Two weeks later the sun came back, and Manila did the thing it does, which is to behave as though none of it had happened while quietly rebuilding everything.
Hal Rivera walked the length of it with a paper bag in one hand and read the news on his phone with the other, which Mina had told him twice was going to get him killed.
The news, in order:
Undersecretary Vicente Calderon had been charged by the Office of the Ombudsman on eleven counts, and had surrendered on a Wednesday in a barong the color of weak tea, and said on the courthouse steps that he welcomed the opportunity to clear his name.
His wife’s brother had been charged separately.
The Baguio house had been the subject of a great deal of commentary.
Hansel Brand had been arrested at Frankfurt on a German warrant nine days after the storm, on charges that Hal did not fully understand and that Simone had described, in a voice of enormous satisfaction, as “the boring ones, which are the ones that work.” Singapore had opened its own file on HelixCompute APAC Ltd.
There was going to be litigation for years.
The eighty hectares were the subject of an injunction. The economic zone designation was under review. Nothing had been demolished.
And the news that mattered, which had run on Thursday: the Department of Public Works and Highways had announced an audit of the control parameters at all sixty-seven pumping stations in the National Capital Region, and had, in the same release, and without, as far as anyone could tell, hearing itself, named the audit after Engineer Benigno Santos.
Hal had read that one four times.
Mina was on the pier at the end, sitting on the boards with her legs over the water and her left arm in a proper brace.
The surgeon in Makati had gotten to her at twelve on Saturday morning, forty-one hours after the intake pipe, and had said a number of things about the tendon sheath that Mina had elected not to repeat to Tita Baby.
Six weeks in the brace. Physiotherapy into next year.
She would keep the arm and most of the use of it, and the scar was going to be about eight inches long on the outside of the forearm and was going to be visible in every sleeveless gown she ever wore again.
She had already decided what she was going to say about it on television, which was nothing.
Hal sat down beside her and handed over the paper bag.
“Pandesal,” he said. “And the other thing.”
“You found pasteles.”
“Baby, I did not find pasteles. There is not a pastel in this hemisphere.” He unwrapped his own.
“I made them. On Tuesday. In your kitchen, and I want you to know that banana leaf is not plantain leaf and that I have made my peace with it in the same way I have made my peace with the ají dulce situation.”
“In the pan with the sticker.”
“The pan with the sticker has been retired. The pan with the sticker was never a pan, it was a decoration.” Hal brushed crumbs off his knee.
“I went back to the apartment on Monday with the loss adjuster and the man from the building, because somebody had to sign for the damage, and there is a hole in your wall the size of a dinner plate that nobody can explain to me, and the whole kitchen has been photographed fourteen times by three different insurers.”
Mina had not been back. She had not said so and he had not asked.
“And,” Hal said, “the skillet was still on the counter.”
She turned her head.
“Right where I put it down,” he said. “Two weeks. Four men on the floor and a tactical entry and three insurance photographers and a man from the building, and every single one of them walked past a twelve-inch cast-iron skillet sitting in the middle of a granite countertop and left it exactly where it was.”
“You brought it.”
“I brought it home, I scrubbed the rust off it, I did it right, with salt, and I re-seasoned it in your oven on Tuesday morning at two hundred and thirty degrees for an hour, which set off the smoke alarm and which Meding has not forgiven me for.” He nodded at the paper bag. “And then I made those in it.”
Mina looked at the last of the pastel in her hand.
“That is the pan I told you to put down,” she said.
“That is the pan you told me to put down.”
“You could not open your hand.”
“I could not open my hand.” Hal was looking out at the bay.
“Baby, I have thought about that more than any other four seconds of the whole week. Not the men. Not the fight. That my hand would not open when I told it to, and that you stood there in the middle of it with blood coming off your fingers and gave me a second.”
Mina put her good hand over his.
“It is a good pan,” she said.
“It is now.”
Mina ate one, slowly, with the sun on her face.
“Well?”
“It is not right,” she said.
“It is not right.”
“It is the best thing I have ever eaten.”
“Those are both true,” said Hal, “and I have decided I can hold both of them.”
She laughed at him with her mouth full, which she did not do on camera.
They had been to Isla Puting Bato on Sunday.
The water had gone down by the Tuesday after the storm, the way it always does, leaving the line on the walls that everybody in that barangay could read like a date. The ground floors had been shoveled out. The smell would take a month.
Luz Ramos had reopened the store on the Thursday, six days after it went under, with about a third of her stock and a hand-lettered sign, and had told Mina, without looking up from a ledger, that the extension run had held all through the second week and that the labelled panel was the single most useful thing anybody had ever done for her.
Josephine Bayani had watched the broadcast on a phone on a port road at one in the morning with about forty other people, and had not said anything to anybody about it for eleven days, and then on the Sunday had come out onto her walkway when she saw Mina coming and had said, “You did it on the television.”
“Po.”
“You said it was not the rain.”
“I did.”
And Josephine Bayani had nodded once and gone back inside, and Mang Rey had said, afterward, in the boat, that this had been the most emotional he had seen the woman in nineteen years.
Divina had given Hal back the crucifix on the Sunday, on the steps of the barangay hall, in front of her mother and her grandfather, because she had been rehearsing it.
“You were ridiculous,” she said.
“I was.”
“Here.” She held it out on both palms. “I did not take it off. Not for swimming and not for sleeping.”
Hal took it and looked at it for a second.
Then he put it back over her head.
“Anak,” he said, “I told you on Friday. Whoever is holding it decides who is next, and that is how it works, and it was mine and I gave it to you, and now it is yours and it is not my business any more.”
Divina Ramos looked at him with enormous suspicion, which was, he had learned, the way that family said thank you.
“That is not how it works,” she said. “You made that up on Friday.”
“I did make it up on Friday.”
“I know. I could tell.”
“Well,” said Hal, “it is nine days old now, and where I am from that is basically a tradition.”
Doctor Dieter Wolffe had gone home on the ninth day, after two rounds of depositions and one very bad afternoon in front of a German consular official, and had begun treatment in Heidelberg on the eleventh.
Not with OncoMorph. That would take four years and the works council and a hospital, exactly as he had said.
He had started on the ordinary protocol, the one that had been available to him for two years, which he had also been refusing, and which Mina had discovered he had also been refusing, and about which she had said one sentence to him at the airport that he had received without any argument at all.
He wrote to her every Sunday after that. The letters were formal, precise, and slightly too long, and they always ended the same way, with a single line about the weather in Heidelberg, and Mina kept every one of them.
In the fourth one he mentioned, in passing, that the eleven mirrors had become nineteen, and that a group in S?o Paulo had already forked the pipeline, and that he had been asked to give the keynote at a conference in Lisbon in March and had said yes.
In the ninth one he mentioned that a woman had written to him from Rotterdam.
“So,” Mina said, on the pier, with the sun going down over the bay in the enormous vulgar way it does there.
“So.”
“Your flight was Sunday.”
“My flight was last Sunday,” Hal agreed. “Six forty in the morning, out of NAIA, four hundred dollars cheaper than the civilized one.”
“And you did not take it.”
“I did not take it.”
“Hal.”
“I want to be honest with you,” he said, “because we are doing that now. I did not miss it. I did not oversleep and I was not in a hospital corridor and there was no dramatic reason.” He turned the last of the pandesal over in his fingers.
“I woke up on Sunday morning at four, in your guest room, which I was finally using because of your arm, and I looked at the ceiling for about eight minutes, and then I turned my phone off and went back to sleep.”
“You turned your phone off.”
“I turned my phone off and went back to sleep, and at nine o’clock Meding came in and asked me if I was aware that it was nine o’clock, and I said yes, ma’am, I am aware.”
Mina was quiet for a moment.
“And Dale?”
“Dale is furious, and Dale’s wife is on my side, so I am going to be fine.” Hal shrugged. “I have got thirteen days of unpaid on top of what I burned and then I have got a decision to make about the whole thing, and I am not making it this week, and baby, I want to say the next part carefully.”
“Say it carefully.”
“I am not going to move here as a grand gesture,” Hal said.
“I have thought about it a great deal in two weeks and I have talked to my mother about it twice, and if I do it, it is going to be because I sat down and worked out the actual logistics of a life, and found somewhere for my tools, and figured out what a man with nine years of cold chain does in a port city with the second busiest container terminal in Southeast Asia sitting right there.” He looked at her.
“Because you do not get a man who quits his job on a pier at sunset, mi reina. You get a man who reads the tide table. That is the deal. I am sorry, it is a much worse story.”
Mina Hermosa looked at him for a long moment.
“Ask me,” she said.
“What?”
“You have been talking for four minutes about a decision you are making about your own life, which is correct, and which is exactly what I have been told about five times since Thursday week.” She turned so she could hear him properly. “But it is also about mine. So ask me.”
Hal put the paper bag down.
“Okay,” he said. “Guillermina. Would you like me to move to Manila?”
“Yes,” said Mina.
“That was fast.”
“I have had six years, three days and two weeks to think about it,” she said, “and about four hundred and sixty video calls, and I want to be clear that I would have said yes in March, and that I did not ask you then because I have spent my entire adult life arranging things for people without asking them, and I am trying to stop, and it turns out it is extremely difficult and I am going to be bad at it for a while.”
“You are going to be bad at it for a while,” Hal agreed.
“I am going to route you again. At least once. Probably at an airport.”
“Probably at an airport.”
“And you are going to have to say the thing.”
“I am going to say the thing,” said Hal, “and you are going to hate it, and then in about four hours you are going to say I was right, and Luz has got four sentences about all of this that she has still not told me.”
Mina laughed, and it went out over the water, and eleven meters away a man renting plastic chairs looked up, and recognized her, and did not do anything about it, because it was Saturday and the sun was out and she was sitting on a pier with somebody.
Meding came back from Bulacan on the Sunday after the storm and refused, for fifteen days, to discuss any of it.
She discussed the apartment. She discussed the hole in the wall and the insurers and the smoke alarm and the state of the guest room, at length, daily.
She did not discuss the four men, or the arm, or the seventeen hours, or the broadcast, or the fact that she had watched all fifty-one minutes of it at two in the morning on a phone in her son’s house in Bulacan with her whole family around her.
On the twelfth day she came out onto the balcony where Mina was sitting with her arm up on a cushion and put a cup of coffee down beside her and did not go back inside.
“Ano,” Mina said.
“Nothing.”
“Meding.”
Meding Bautista stood at the rail of a forty-first-floor balcony and looked out at a city that had drained.
“You told him,” she said. “You said you would tell him on the Wednesday and then everything happened on the Wednesday, and I have been assuming for two weeks that you did not, because that is what you did in Bacolod.” She still did not turn around.
“And then I watched you on a telephone at two in the morning saying it to eleven million people, and I thought, ay, she told him. She must have told him first. She would not have done it in that order.”
“I told him in a car.”
“On the Wednesday.”
“On the Wednesday,” Mina said. “In a car, in the rain, on the way to Marikina, about nine minutes after I stopped being able to lie to him.”
Meding nodded at the skyline.
“Fourteen years,” she said. “I have been the only one for fourteen years, anak, and I want to tell you that it has been a privilege and that I am extremely tired.” Then she turned around, and her eyes were not dry, and she was furious about it. “Do not say anything. I am going to make the lunch.”
She did the show on the Monday, of course. Twelve fifteen, three hours, a game and two guests and the letters, in a long-sleeved gown with the brace under it and nothing said about any of it.
The show got the highest noontime numbers in nine years.
And in the third block, in the segment called Sulat, which is the oldest thing on that programme and has been on the air since before Mina Hermosa was born, she read out a letter from a woman in Malabon whose street had gone under four times last year, and who wanted to know where the budget was.
Mina looked at the card.
Then she looked at Camera 2, and the whole country leaned in a little, because they had all been waiting eleven days to see what she would do with the first one.
“Ate Marisol,” she said. “Naku.”
And then, in an ordinary voice, the way you say a thing you intend to keep doing every weekday for as long as they let you:
“Give us until Friday.”