Chapter 19
Allan hadn’t slept. He’d made it about as far as realizing Robby had the fear backward, that it wasn’t Robby he was scared of, it was the offer, when his phone lit up with the barangay group chat, and every single message in it was about the weather.
Barangay Response Group Chat
Robby already there. MDRRMO too.
need more hands, sinong pwede?
Allan was already pulling on his shoes before he’d finished reading the third message, some part of him moving faster than the part still arguing with itself about whether he had any right to show up.
Outside, the storm had teeth. Rain came in at an angle that made umbrellas a joke, and the wind carried the particular, ugly sound of galvanized roofing deciding whether tonight was the night it gave up.
Allan borrowed Ver’s motorcycle without asking, because Ver was at the reception hall arguing with a caterer about backup power and there wasn’t time to explain, and rode the eleven minutes to Sitio Tawog with his heart somewhere near his teeth.
The riverside houses Allan had sketched a few weeks ago, the grandmother’s hands, the boy who’d criticized his line work, sat lower than he remembered, or the water sat higher.
Floodlights from a barangay truck threw everything into hard, shaking shadow.
Robby stood knee-deep at the edge of it, radio in one hand, his other arm braced under an old man’s elbow, walking him toward the truck one careful step at a time while an MDRRMO staffer shouted headcounts into a second radio.
“Sector’s not fully clear,” Robby was saying, flat, focused, and none of his usual warmth in it because there wasn’t room for it right now. “Manang Loring’s still on the second floor with her daughter’s kids; water’s coming up the stairs—”
“I’ll get them,” Allan said.
Robby’s head snapped around. For one full second, in the floodlight and the rain, Allan watched every version of Robby’s face happen at once: relief that there were more hands, and underneath it, immediate, naked fear.
“No,” Robby said. “Absolutely not, you don’t know this water, you don’t know where it drops—”
“Then tell me. Fast.” Allan was already moving toward the house because someone’s family was on the second floor with water on the stairs, and this was not a conversation with time attached to it. “Robby. Tell me and let me go.”
Robby’s jaw worked. Then, because there wasn’t a version of this where he could physically hold Allan back and also do his job, he rattled off a path.
“Stay left of the mango tree, the ground drops hard past it, don’t let go of the rope, I mean it, do not let go,” and shoved a length of guide rope into Allan’s hands with fingers that weren’t quite steady.
Robby thumbed his radio without letting go of Allan’s arm first. “Base, MDRRMO Two, be advised—single civilian assist entering water, tethered, one line, request spotter posted downstream of the mango tree.” He waited for the crackle of acknowledgment before he let go.
“That’s not for you,” he said. “That’s so there’s a record, and so somebody besides me is watching that water. ”
The water was colder and stronger than Allan expected, dragging at his knees, then his thighs, the current carrying debris he tried very hard not to look at directly.
He found them huddled on a stairwell landing that had maybe fifteen more minutes of being above water: the grandmother from the mangrove sketch, her daughter, and the same boy who’d told Allan he’d drawn Robby’s arms too skinny, now soaked through and gripping his mother’s sleeve like it was the only fixed point left in the world.
Allan pulled the boy onto his back, Manang Loring leaning hard on her daughter’s arm, and walked them out hand over hand on the rope exactly the way Robby had said, left of the mango tree, don’t let go, don’t let go, don’t let go.
He didn’t see the current shift near the tree until it had already taken his footing.
For one full, silent second, the rope was the only thing between Allan and the part of the river that had actual opinions about where he should go, and then hands, several sets, someone’s shout of “Kuya, may nahulog!”, hauled him and the kid both back onto solid ground so fast the world blurred.
Robby reached him half a second after everyone else did, and the sound he made when he grabbed Allan’s face in both hands wasn’t relief. It was something closer to what grief sounds like right before it finds out it doesn’t have to happen tonight.
“You said you wouldn’t—” Robby’s voice cracked clean in half. “I told you the current, I told you—”
“I’m here,” Allan said, teeth chattering, the boy still clinging piggyback-style to his back like he had no intention of being anyone else’s problem, one small fist twisted into Allan’s collar. “Robby. I’m here. I’m okay.”
It took another forty minutes to clear the rest of the sitio, Robby working the whole time with a kind of controlled, silent focus Allan had never seen from him, not even at the drill, and Allan staying exactly where he was told to stay, doing exactly what he was told to do, the knowledge landing somewhere lower than his head, in his knees, his locked jaw, the cold still climbing his spine: what it actually cost Robby to do this every single typhoon season, alone, without anyone to come home shaking to, afterward.
They ended up, eventually, in the back of the barangay truck, wrapped in the same scratchy relief blanket, engine running for the heat, rain drumming steady on the roof instead of sideways into anyone’s house anymore.
“You could have died,” Robby said, quiet now, all the adrenaline gone out of his voice and left something rawer in its place. “Right there. In that water. Because I let you go.”
“You didn’t let me. I went.”
“Same thing, from where I was standing.” He exhaled, some of the professional disaster person finally creeping back into his voice, like it was easier to hold onto than the fear.
“And it can’t happen again, Allan. I mean it.
You weren’t trained for that water. You didn’t have a vest. You didn’t have backup.
If Kapitan finds out I handed you that rope, I would lose my certification for it.
I don’t care that it worked. It cannot be how we do this. ”
“It worked,” Allan said, quieter now, chastened. “I know. It won’t happen again.”
Allan reached over and took Robby’s hand, the way Robby had reached for his in the library weeks ago, slow, giving him every chance to pull back.
“This is the part you never told me,” Allan said. “Not really. Not what it’s actually like, standing where you stand every single year. I get it now. Why you’re always a little bit braced for something.”
“I can’t lose you like that,” Robby said, and it wasn’t dramatic, wasn’t performed, just flat and terrified and true. “Not like, not the way I lost her. I can survive you leaving for Manila. I don’t know if I can survive that.”
“I’m not going anywhere tonight,” Allan said, and reached for the rest of the reassurance automatically, the way he always did when a conversation got too close to something he couldn’t fix with a sentence.
Robby pulled his hand back, gentle about it, but firm.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t do the thing where you make it smaller so it’s easier to hold,” Robby said.
“I almost watched you go under a river tonight. And underneath being scared about that, I’m still exactly as angry as I was at dinner two hours ago.
Both things are true at the same time. I don’t need you to fix that for me right now. I just need you to let it be true.”
Allan sat with that, the reassurance dying in his throat.
“Okay,” he said finally.
They didn’t talk much on the ride back, Robby’s hands steady on the wheel in a way that felt, to Allan, like the opposite of comfort, careful in the deliberate way people were careful with something they were trying not to drop.
Robby’s phone buzzed once against the dashboard, Ver’s name lighting up the screen, something about the reception hall’s backup generator, entirely unaware that this particular night had already had its own emergency. Robby glanced at it, didn’t answer, and kept driving.
At the gate, Robby cut the engine and didn’t get out right away.
“I’m glad you’re alive,” he said, staring straight ahead. “I need you to know that comes first, before anything else I say tonight.”
“Okay.”
“But I keep doing the math,” Robby said. “If that current had taken you all the way, the last real thing between us would’ve been you hiding something from me for two weeks. That’s what I keep landing on. Not the water. That.”
“Robby—”
“I’m not trying to punish you with it,” Robby said, cutting him off gently. “I just need you to know it’s still there. Tonight didn’t erase it. It just scared me into remembering how much it would’ve mattered if I’d never gotten the chance to say so.”
He got out of the truck then, and for a second Allan thought he might offer a hand, the way he always did, but he didn’t, not this time, just walked ahead toward the house with his shoulders set in a way Allan recognized from ten years of watching people decide, silently, how much distance felt safe.
Outside, Signal No. 2 held through the rest of the night and dropped to Signal No.
1 by morning, and somewhere past the riverside houses, a boy who still owed Allan an apology about his line work slept through the rest of the storm in a borrowed cot, safe, dry, and entirely unaware of how close a Tuesday had come to being the kind of story the barangay told for years.
Robby didn’t reach for his hand again before they reached the house.
It wasn’t anger exactly, not anymore, though he kept his hands to himself the whole walk back to the house, close enough that Allan could feel the heat coming off his arm, careful never to close the last few inches between them.
Allan recognized the shape of it now, from a decade of watching titas do the same thing over lesser slights: tampo, the particular, cold-shouldered quiet that wasn’t punishment so much as a wound too raw yet to be touched, gone the second it was actually addressed, but not one second sooner.