Larissa! My Lorenzo has been charged with murder! Nineteen people saw him throw the bomb. He told his public defender that he absolutely didn’t know it was a nail bomb, or he never would’ve thrown it. So the prosecutor asked Lorenzo to name names of the leaders of the Brigade, and Lorenzo refused.
Bail has been set for two and half million pesos! It might as well be two hundred and eleventy bazillion pesos. We don’t have a hundred pesos for a bus to the free clinic. I, with my big belly, have been visiting the people Lorenzo worked with, trying to elicit sympathy, but no one is willing to risk even ten pesos on him because they all say he is a flight risk. They take one look at my belly and say he is a flight risk!
They’re right. He is. If he got out, he wouldn’t stay a second in Manila to await trial. He says the Brigade leaders tricked him, deceived him and abandoned him. They knew he never would’ve thrown a nail bomb. And so far they’re in hiding, and none of them has come forward to say Lorenzo didn’t know it was a real bomb. No one. But he’s still not willing to rat them out, because he says he wouldn’t survive five minutes on the street if he did. He thinks even as they’re quiet, they’re secretly raising money for his bail. He is so deluded! But I keep saying, Lorenzo, if you don’t tell the truth, you’re going to go down for murdering a cop!
I get money from Father Emilio to take the bus to come and see Lorenzo in the city jail. He says I’m the only person in the world who loves him. He says he is an orphan now and I’m all he’s got.
Thank you for the money you sent me last month. You know I’ve stopped even pretending I don’t need it. I live on that money you send me. I love you.
Remember I wrote to you about wars and rumors of wars? How it was just the beginnings of sorrows? All I keep praying for right now is, dear God, please please let this not be the beginnings of my sorrows. Do you know what I mean, Larissa?
It’s starting to feel like I’m running flat out of options. Do you know how that can be sometimes? When you’ve just flat run out?
“Larissa! I just got my free Jag. And it’s April already. Have you thought anymore about Pine Spring?” Kai asked. It was a Friday.
“Of course I have.”
“Well, you haven’t said anything. Hard for me to know.”
Fridays were difficult. She knew a whole weekend without him was about to descend on her. Friday afternoons were heavy, this one made particularly wearing by the weight of his question and the promise of his offer, like an anchor into quicksand. Is he for real? she wondered. And how will I know? How can I know? Is this a pursuit thing? Is it a pride thing? Is it malice? Is it true?
What if Kavanagh is right and I’m blind to the truth; can that be? Of course it can be; but is it? Kavanagh certainly thinks so. But she’s not in bed with him. Larissa is in his bed, and he is naked, so lean and young and beautiful, he’s almost ready to go again, they have ninety minutes today, he makes sure of that, and he gives himself to her prolonged and twice, so that the aching until she sees him again is doubled, not halved. And today he’s asking her questions to which he wants and expects an answer.
“What do you want me to say, Kai?” Why is it that the gift of her answers is divided not multiplied?
“Yes would be nice.” Slowly he gathered her nipple into his fingers and pulled on her gently, as if buzzing for an answer. His hand remained cupped around her breast.
“Kai, you know it’s not as easy as me saying yes. You know I want to say yes. But you also know I can’t. I have to think long and hard about what to do. I’m trying to figure a lot of things out. A lot of things.”
“What have you been doing all this time with me?”
“Drowning moans and flames.”
He gathered the whole of her into his arms, lay flush with her on the bed, inhaling the smell of her hair. “Larissa,” he whispered. “What we’ve been having is not enough for us. Not for you. Not for me. It’s not enough. We need more. Can you just imagine us, Larissa?”
When she did allow herself a blink’s worth of reversed imagery behind the eyes, the picture of the future was not like a sweet and sunny summer morning. It was more like photographic negatives of carnivals. Black was white, and white was black.
“You want more choices?”
She would. Choices not offered here.
“Alice Springs, Pine Spring, Missoula, Monte Carlo. It doesn’t matter. Without knowing the way, we’ll figure it out. We’ll go where no one knows us. We’ll go to lunch together, in a public place, not with paper bags in bed. We’ll have our own little place where we’ll go to sleep at night, naked in our bed, and we’ll wake up in the morning, naked in our bed. Together. I will make you eggs and coffee. And we’ll work together. We’ll travel everywhere. We’ll build a new life, far away from bad things, from bad memories, mine and yours. We’ll be unencumbered, like gypsies. We’ll be free.”
She wanted to say she had no bad memories, but she sure was making them as he spoke. What are you talking about? she wanted to say. Don’t you know I’ll never be unencumbered, never be free? Oh God! How easy it was to imagine the graffiti world he spray-painted with his words. “It will never be simple like that for me, Kai,” she said in a gutted voice. “Going with you—you know what that means.”
He bowed his head, fell back on the pillow. “I know. But children are resilient, Larissa. They adapt. They adjust. I know this. Soon they’ll be leaving home. The younger ones have short memories. They forget.”
“I won’t forget,” mouthed Larissa, stifling a groan.
“I’m sorry. Only you can tell me whether it’s possible or impossible.”
Even talking about it wasn’t possible.
“No kidding,” said Kai, and she realized she’d spoken out loud. She must be more careful. “Kai…we could try…I could tell Jared—”
“I don’t think your husband,” he cut in abruptly, “is going to let you go.”
“Why do you say this?” She sounded shocked.
Kai was quiet. “Something tells me he will not be Jonny.”
“Why do you say this?”
“Because,” said Kai. “I’ve had you in my bed. I know what he must feel when he has you in his.”
She ran her hand across his chest, down to his navel, she caressed him with tender fingertips, she ached for him again, and hurt from the navel all the way up to her eyeballs. Her skull was cracking with sadness. “You’re wrong about Jared, Kai. He doesn’t feel about me like that,” she said.
“You don’t know or understand men,” said Kai. “Trust me about Jared. But if you think you’re right, then go ahead and tell him about us. He’s a good manager and has sharp business acumen; he is mild-mannered and moderate. Why don’t you ease him into it, by explaining about his dry bed, and my overflowing heart, and the glare of the supermarket, and how love just is, how it’s not caught or found, it just is and becomes you, it swallows you whole. Explain that to him, sitting down in your dining room over a cup of tea. Tell him you’re going to leave him, leave your children, and go away to live with me. But please,” he added, “say goodbye to me first. Because trust me when I tell you I won’t see you again.”
Dear Larissa,
Write to me! Tell me what you think of my unholy mess. Do you know what crazy Lorenzo has been saying during my visits? When the Peace Brigade makes bail for him, he says he and I are going to run into the mountains and stay with the Tasaday until everything blows over. The Tasaday! They’re natives who live in the rainforests of Mindanao. That’s six south islands away! The eye of all MILF trouble, and he wants us to escape there. We’d have to get there by outrigger canoe, by small merchant boats, by the kindness of strangers.
But Lorenzo says we’ll be safe with the Tasaday for a while. He says they live without money, radios, watches, modern medicine. They live in the woods and eat frogs. Also weeds and grubs. Sometimes they come down into the lowlands and fish. They make baskets out of bamboo and give them away. They spin and loom their own clothes. They live in bam
boo mud huts, which they make themselves. Because they’re on high ground, they don’t get much flooding, except during the monsoon season, during which they sleep in hammocks and then rebuild the huts from scratch. A completely natural existence free from all the strife of modern life. No protests, no demonstrations, no Moro warriors, no murder, no 400,000 displaced-by-violence people. But I tell him, Lorenzo, what you’re proposing is that we are going to be displaced by violence. We are going to live in exile. He says we won’t need any money. This is what he dreams of, sitting in jail. Going to live like the Tasaday!
I said to him, Lorenzo, what about our baby? He looked like he was surprised I brought it up. He looked almost like he was going to say, “What baby?”
“I’m about to have a baby, Lorenzo,” I said.
“What, the Tasaday don’t have children?”
“I don’t know. Do they? I’m eight months pregnant. I can’t fight my way through the jungle in my condition.”
And do you know what he said to me? “Che,” he said, “You can stay here. But I can’t. I have to go. Don’t you understand? I’m going to be put to death for murder. The president has not abolished the death penalty yet. So you pick. Either Mindanao, or death, or at best prison for the rest of my life.”
I said to him, what bail? We don’t have any money. I know he keeps hoping the Peace Brigade will come up with two and a half million pesos, but I find myself hoping we won’t get it, and he won’t get out. Is that terrible? It’s excruciating.
“Don’t you love me?” he says to me.
Would that it were that simple! Would that love were the answer to everything. I once thought it was. “Of course, I love you, Lorenzo,” I say, praying he won’t make bail. Why am I a bad person, Larissa? I’ve already been the girlfriend, the lover. I just want to be a mother.
2
Mothers
Larissa kept looking at her hands. She and Emily painted their own nails nowadays with Michelangelo’s abstract art help, but all three of them weren’t very good with the cuticles. She must go back to Grace’s soon and get a proper manicure. In the meantime she and Kavanagh were having another unhelpful conversation about family. Why ask unanswerable questions, trying to get to the bottom of a bottomless morass, when all Larissa wanted was to be flying, up up up, not down down down like planes from skies? Talking about Jared, her home, her family was so depressing. Why do it?
“I don’t want to talk about them,” she said. “Can’t we talk about something else?”
“Sure,” said Kavanagh. “Let’s talk about your mother.”
Larissa groaned.
“You don’t want to talk about her either?” The doctor sighed. “Would you like to talk about movies? I just saw The Prince of Tides,” she said. “It was good.”
“My mother is an attractive woman,” Larissa said. “Okay? Pleasant. Nice.”
“Do you see her?”
“Of course. She is the children’s grandmother.”
“I didn’t ask if your children see her.”
“When they see her, I see her.”
“What about your father?”
“He’s dead. So I don’t see him as often as I’d like. Before that he was in Florida.” They were divorced the year Kai was born. Larissa went pale, had to gather herself for a few moments by remaining silent and licking her dry lips at the sour-bitter taste in her mouth.
“Amicable?”
“Not particularly.” Wasn’t that the understatement of the day.
“When you were growing up, what kind of a relationship did you have with your mother?”
Larissa paused. “Why do we need to talk about this? I’m an adult. I don’t live with my parents. What’s happening to me now has nothing to do with my mother or father.”
“Larissa. What’s happening to you now is you are having an imbalance in your feelings for your actual life on one end and your lover on the other.”
“He is also my life.”
“Yes. But—”
“My relationship with my mother was strained when I was growing up,” Larissa cut in. “My brothers were grown and out of the house. My parents had me late in life. I was their only daughter. My dad adored me.”
“And you?”
“I adored him back.”
“What about now?”
“Now he is dead.”
“What about before he died?”
“I really don’t want to talk about it,” said Larissa.
“How long were your parents married?”
“Thirty-three years.”
“That’s a long time.” Kavanagh studied Larissa, who was realizing she absolutely hated to be studied. “Did he leave your mother for another woman?”
Deeply reluctantly Larissa answered. “Guess so.”
Kavanagh looked at her with understanding. “And you,” she said, “who always sided with your dad against your mother, as an adult was faced with the fact that your father did an unforgivable thing. Suddenly your mother needed your sympathy. How did that go?”
“Distantly. I was in college. I had my own life.”
Kavanagh was quiet. Larissa was quiet.
“Is your relationship with your mother strained now?”
“No, it’s polite. Cordial.”
“She’s polite?”
“And I’m cordial.”
“And underneath?”
“Don’t think much about it. Don’t need to.”
“Would you describe your mother and you as close?”
Larissa chewed her lip.
“Warm? Comfortable with each other?”
Larissa didn’t answer.
Kavanagh looked into her lap. “What about your own daughter?”
“What about her?”
“How is your relationship with her?”
“Very good. She is my daughter.” For some reason, like a steel trap door coming down, Larissa didn’t want to talk about Emily even more, if that were possible, than she didn’t want to talk about her own mother. Wow.
“Are you and Emily close?”
“Doctor…”
“I can see this is making you extremely uncomfortable; why?”
“Because it’s so unnecessary!”
“It’s making you uncomfortable because it’s unnecessary?”
“Not that.”
“What then? Talking about your children?”
“We’re not talking about my children, are we?” Larissa flared up.
“By all means, let’s talk about them.”
“No! Look,” she said, trying to sound calm. She was trying to emulate Kai. “Emily is fifteen. That’s not an easy age. She’s a good girl, a devoted girl, but sometimes she says I try to make her into something she isn’t. So I leave her alone, but then she accuses me of not caring about what she does.”
“Does that mirror your relationship with your own mother?”
Larissa quickly went on without replying. “It’s a fine histrionic line with her. With the boys everything is simpler. Moods are easy. Food, drink. Video games, trying to get away with stuff. Very normal. For some reason girls are harder for mothers.”
“Were you hard on your mother?”
“My mother was hard on me.”
“Was she? I thought you said she was hands off?”
“Our time is almost up,” Larissa said. “But I’ll tell you why I have minimum contact with my mother. Because when I was growing up, I hated myself and the person I was. Everything about me was awful to me, particularly when I was in my house. But when I was with my friend Che at her house, she and her mom were so close and human, and full of regular up and down human interaction: they fought and argued and laughed, and cooked together, that being there felt more comforting than being in my own home. So what I did when I left is I remade myself into a person I wanted to be. When I was with my mother, I didn’t like myself. And that’s probably why our contact is minimal. Because when I’m around her, I still don’t like myself.”
“Wh
ere is Che and her mother?”
“In the Philippines. Her mother died.” Larissa didn’t want to say it felt like losing her own imagined perfect mother, the mother she wished were hers and wasn’t.
“You do realize, Larissa, that you haven’t remade yourself at all, you just hid the parts you didn’t like?”
“Keeping the parts of yourself you hate under control is a tremendous feat, Dr. Kavanagh,” said Larissa. “It requires will and a strong spirit.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“But I can’t keep myself under control when my mother is around. So what I do is limit my exposure to the person who brings out the worst in me.”
Kavanagh was looking at her from the chair, wrinkled, frowning, wise. “And how would you describe what that is?”
Larissa stood up and grabbed her bag. “Always looking for a way out,” she coldly replied. “See you next Tuesday.”
Dear Larissa,
Lorenzo finally realized I’ve been dragging my feet on the bail. He accused me of wanting him to rot in jail. He told me if I really loved him, I would ask you for the money. I said, Lorenzo, are you out of your mind? Your bail is set at two and half million pesos because they’re afraid you’re going to run. Which is exactly what you’re going to do as soon as you walk out the jail doors. You do understand how bail works, don’t you? If you run, Larissa doesn’t get her money back. You’re asking me to ask her and her husband for over $50,000 that she will not see again. What world do you live in?
And he said to me, “Che, what world do you live in?”
I started to cry. I said, I just want to have my baby. That’s all I want. I want to have my baby.
And he said, what about me, Claire? Do you want to abandon me? He called me Claire. I don’t think he’s ever called me that before. I didn’t know if he was intensely imploring or detaching himself from me.