Philippine Speculative Fiction 9 Page 11

  “What happened,” I said, after what felt like hours, my voice falling flat, making it not sound like a question but like a whisper in a dream. We were sitting on the floor by the coffee table in the dusty living room, Noelle’s blood drying on our clothes.

  “I was planning to drive back to Manila,” Lucas said, a faraway look in his eyes. He idly scratched at the edges of his bleeding wounds. “She suddenly stepped out of the grass. I didn’t brake fast enough.”

  The Perezes, I remembered all of a sudden. The house and lot, and now Noelle’s grave, belonged to the Perezes.

  “You’re driving back to Manila? But you said I could meet you here.” I remembered the bus ride north, the branches knocking against the windows and whipping past.

  “I was planning to stay here for a while,” he said. “Noelle’s parents just made her hitch a ride with me. She was supposed to get on a tricycle to San Agustin to see her high school friend.”

  Lucas disliked Noelle, the way he disliked most teenagers. Also, a year ago, Noelle had caught him smoking marijuana in this house and told his parents. His father was furious. That tattletale, Lucas told me, his lip cut and his face swollen with bruises. It seemed to me that Lucas would never forgive her.

  “Then how the hell did you end up here?” I asked.

  “She jumped out of the car.”

  “She jumped out of the car?”

  Lucas shook his head, once, a quick movement. “Fuck,” he said.

  “Lucas—”

  “I parked out front and she jumped out of the car and ran away. I drove around looking for her, and she jumped out of the grass and I hit her. It was an accident, Tom.”

  We should have called the police, I thought. There were streaks of blood and loose soil on my hands. I am an accomplice, I thought. I wondered how long Lucas stayed in his car after the impact. He said the accident happened just seconds before I arrived.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me,” I said.

  “I won’t tell her parents,” Lucas said, not listening. “If they ask, I’ll say she went off to her friend and I haven’t seen her since. They’ll assume she ran away. It’s happened before.”

  That was true.

  “Lucas,” I said, “Noelle’s body’s not even covered.”

  “Who even goes to this place?”

  That was true as well.

  “And your car?” I said.

  “Shut up!” he said, and buried his face in his hands. As I watched him cry, I thought of my rented unit in Makati. That morning I had fixed my bed, I had done my laundry, I had checked my notifications on Facebook. I had had bread for breakfast, fish and rice for lunch, some quail eggs with salt on the bus. A normal, boring day, with a small moment of drama and excitement when Lucas sent me a text message, asking to meet him here. And now I had helped dispose of a body.

  “I’m so sorry,” Lucas said, sitting up.

  “Are we leaving her out there?” I asked. There were snakes in the grass, and stray dogs prowling around the empty lots.

  “I can’t—” He stood up. “I need to lie down, Tom.”

  I’m not coming with you, I thought.

  “Come with me?” he said.

  I stood up, but I placed an extra mattress on the floor and lay awake for hours. I debated with myself, over and over during the course of the night, whether I should go out and retrieve Noelle from the Perezes, or do nothing. I formulated reasons to support both sides.

  The next morning I opened the door and found Noelle standing there, looking impatient.

  I DID MANAGE to sleep. I read somewhere that only the guilty sleeps well in jail, knowing he is where he belongs, while the innocent remains awake, thinking of ways to escape his predicament. Lucas slept well. When I woke up the sun was bright and high in the sky. It was probably eleven when I heard the knock on the door.

  I felt something explode behind my eyes; fear, making me dizzy, nailing me to the spot. Nobody goes here, Lucas had said. Was it a relative? A new friend? The blood on my clothes had dried and made me feel as if I were wearing a newly starched shirt. I shook myself from my paralysis and started to take off the evidence.

  The knocking grew louder and more insistent. Should I pretend I wasn’t here?

  “Lucas! Open the door!”

  I stopped. “Noelle?” I said.

  “Is that you, Tom?” Her voice was muffled by the door, but it sounded like her. “Open the door, it’s hot out here.”

  This is a dream, I thought. I am dreaming. I opened the door and there was Noelle, in a spotless peach dress, sipping a fruit shake through a straw. Her bangs, damp with sweat, were plastered on her forehead. She was wearing the same peach dress last night, but now it was as spotless as her skin. No bruises, no blood. No broken bones.

  “Oh my God,” I said, but Noelle drowned my voice with her own scream.

  “Oh my God, Tom, is that blood?” She was staring at the shirt I didn’t manage to take off. But she was just being dramatic; she didn’t seem to be too jarred by it. She walked past me into the house, smelling like raspberries and the noonday sun.

  Lucas had stepped into the living room at that moment, hugging himself. He saw Noelle and took several steps back.

  “What?” Noelle said. “What is wrong with you two?” She looked from Lucas to me and said, “Wow. I sure hope that’s ketchup on your shirts because you look like you just killed somebody.”

  We couldn’t say anything. She sighed in frustration, left the living room, went up the stairs, and closed the door to the guest room with a soft click.

  FOR AN INSANE moment I was convinced that the moment she closed the door she would disappear in a puff of smoke, or simply disappear—a doppelganger, a hallucination. But we heard her click open the door again and enter the shower. We heard her humming.

  “Oh my God,” Lucas said. “Oh my God.”

  He ran up the stairs, averting his eyes from the door to the bathroom, and entered the master bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed, breathing hard. I closed the door.

  “Did you see that?” he said. “You saw that, didn’t you?”

  “Calm down.”

  Lucas shot forward and barricaded the door with a chair from the study table and an ottoman.

  “Calm down, Lucas.” I glanced at his elbows. “You haven’t even cleaned your wounds yet.”

  “But what is going on?” he wailed. “She wasn’t breathing last night. I checked before we—”

  “I don’t know.” I went to the bathroom and retrieved a first-aid kit.

  “It can’t be her.”

  I sat Lucas down, lifted his arm, and dabbed antiseptic on his wounds. He didn’t even flinch; he was so distraught by what he had seen. I felt as if I were going out of my mind, but Lucas’s panic had calmed me down, as what usually happened.

  “Who else could it be, Lucas?”

  I finished with his arms and started cleaning the big gash on his knee.

  “It’s impossible.”

  “Maybe we both dreamt it,” I said, which I knew, even as I said it, didn’t make any sense. I wasn’t drunk when I got here, or under the influence of any drug, and how do you explain Lucas’s wounds, the blood on our clothes? I had held Noelle. I had held her, and I knew it wasn’t a dream or a hallucination.

  “Let’s go back,” Lucas said as I placed gauze on his knee. “To the empty lot. Let’s see if she’s still there.”

  It was already December but the temperature was still in the 30’s. Last night we drove from the Perezes to the house, but Lucas didn’t want to touch the car anymore. So we walked. The sun was relentless. Lucas’s house was deep inside the sprawling subdivision, while the Perezes’ lot was near the main road. AS to the Infirmary, I thought, thinking of the university where we first met. We met again last year, me fresh out of college and Lucas just finishing his junior year, at the wedding of common friends, eating slices of the wedding cake—horribly sweet with inch-thick frosting—on paper towels. I didn’t know y
ou knew the couple. How have you been?

  Noelle was not where we left her. The spot showed signs of her being there the night before–flattened grass, skid marks on concrete. But no body. We parted the weeds and walked around the lot.

  “She’s not here,” Lucas said.

  We walked back without speaking another word.

  WE FOUND NOELLE, freshly bathed, sitting on the sofa and reading a book. The sight of her still gave me a start. But would it have been better if we saw her dead body on the empty lot?

  “Relax,” she said, looking at Lucas. “I’ll be out of here in a day or two.”

  “I’m taking a bath,” Lucas said to no one in particular.

  “Oh, with Tom?” Noelle said, and laughed when Lucas stormed out of the room. “I was just kidding! What is wrong with him?”

  I wanted to go home. I wanted to just leave this house and go back to Makati, back to my humdrum job and my humdrum life. Even without Lucas, who was never a permanent part of it anyway, like a stray cat that enters and leaves through a window you never learned to close.

  I sat down.

  “How are you, Noelle?”

  I must have looked so grim and determined. Noelle laughed. “I’m fine, Tom.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “Didn’t Lucas tell you?” she said. “I hitched a ride with him, then I met up with my friend in San Agustin. I haven’t seen her since high school, and we used to be so close. It was her brother’s party and we had an impromptu sleepover.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Noelle sighed, already bored with me. “Diane,” she said. She picked up her phone and swiped through her files. “Here.”

  There were several photos of Noelle and Diane cheek-to-cheek, eyes and smiles bright, then of a group of people, some unsmiling parents. The photos, according to the file details, were all taken last night, from 6 to 11 pm.

  I TOOK A bath in the guest bathroom and was dressed and back in the bedroom before Lucas stepped out of the shower.

  “She got to San Agustin,” I said.

  “What?”

  “She was able to see her friend. She said you dropped her off at the main road and she got on a tricycle.”

  “That’s not what happened,” Lucas said, and stuck his head out of a new shirt.

  “Then what did happen?” I said. “If she were supposed to go to San Agustin, there was no reason for you to drive her all the way to this house if she could just flag a tricycle on the main road.”

  “She said she left something here.”

  “You didn’t tell me that last night.”

  “Goddamn it, Tom!”

  “Guys?” We fell silent. I opened the door, and Noelle was standing outside. “Aren’t you guys hungry? What’s for lunch?”

  We couldn’t eat. We fried a cheese omelet for her and cooked rice, but in the end we couldn’t eat. We could only watch her.

  “What?” she said, annoyed, and we looked elsewhere. She then began a long monologue about a classmate of hers who went home with a stranger who might or might not be married.

  After a beat I looked up and thought of anything, anything at all to say that would inject a dose of normality into the day. Did you die last night, Noelle? Did you meet someone there? Were you told that it was not your time yet, and was allowed to go back to life unscathed?

  “That looks new,” I said, pointing to her large earrings, pearl inlaid in silver. “Where’d you get it?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Seriously, Tom?”

  I was surprised by her reaction.

  “You guys bought this for me last month, when you went to Coron.”

  Lucas and I shared a look. We had planned on going on a trip to Coron, just the two of us, but the plan fell through, Lucas curling up in fear with his father’s repeated questioning. Who are you going with again? Who else? What do you mean just him?

  “We didn’t go to Coron,” I said.

  “Maybe you just bought the earrings in Greenhills,” she said. “But you showed me pictures. You went diving.” She let out an exasperated groan. “What have you guys been smoking?”

  “I WOULDN’T HAVE bought her anything, if we did go on a trip,” Lucas said.

  We were back in the bedroom. I sat on the mattress on the floor, and after a moment, Lucas sat beside me. “She’s not the Noelle I know,” he said. “Not only that, she’s talking about someone who doesn’t sound like me.”

  “He sounds better than you, actually.” It was cruel, but it had been a long day.

  Lucas didn’t answer for a while. “If you hated our situation so much,” he said, finally, “why did you come here?”

  “Why did you even ask me to come here?”

  “I wanted to see you. You could have said no.”

  “Just shut the fuck up for a minute, Lucas.”

  We both did. Eventually, I stood up and went downstairs. There were some old magazines in the living room. I read some until I fell asleep on the sofa.

  I DREAMT OF Lucas killing a bird. He did kill a bird once; we were walking on campus when I spotted a tiny black bird hopping on the ground. It was a really small bird, smaller than the usual brown tree sparrows we see all the time. Look at this thing, I said, marveling at the sight of it, and Lucas crushed the bird with his leather book bag. He said it was an accident, he said the bag slipped as he leaned close. I felt a heavy weight on my chest when I realized what happened. I was cross with Lucas the entire day. How could I feel such horror over the death of an animal, and yet manage to make myself throw away a sixteen-year-old girl’s body?

  In the dream, Lucas crushed the bird, repeatedly, with a rock, leaving it a flattened mess of blood and black feathers. I helped him scrape the corpse off the ground and throw it into a field of weed grass.

  You killed it, I told him in the dream, and Lucas said, No, I didn’t.

  The bird shot out of the field like a black missile.

  I woke up with a jolt, and the living room was dark. It must have been five p.m.

  I found Noelle in the kitchen, eating pork and beans from a can and playing a noisy game on her phone. She looked morose. “Well!” she said when I entered. “So nice to see there’s someone else alive in this house.”

  I tried not to think too much about what she just said. “You should learn how to cook,” I said.

  “I know how to cook,” Noelle said, going back to her game. “I’m just lazy.”

  I opened a can of tuna and heated the contents in a pan.

  “Shouldn’t you call Lucas?” Noelle asked.

  “I’m sure he’s not hungry,” I told the stove.

  “Lovers’ quarrel?”

  I glanced over a shoulder. Noelle had her chin in her hand. She was looking at me with a smirk.

  “We’re just friends,” I said.

  Noelle barked a laugh, a sharp Ha! “Sure you are,” she said.

  There was something sinister in her smile. I thought of Lucas with his bruised face. That tattletale.

  I FOUND LUCAS on the bed under the covers. I thought he was asleep, but when I closed the door he stirred and said, “I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t bother to turn on the light. I felt my way to the mattress. “There’s food downstairs, if you’re hungry.”

  “I should be happy,” Lucas said. He was whispering, as though afraid Noelle might hear. “My cousin’s alive. There’s no dead body outside. I’m not going to jail. But I’m scared.” I heard him turn on the bed to face me. “There is no way she just got up from that empty lot and walked here.”

  “So what are you thinking?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “Maybe she stepped out of a different timeline,” I said.

  “What?”

  “From a parallel universe. Where she didn’t die, and we went on that trip.”

  “Where I’m kinder,” Lucas said.

  Where you’re braver, I wanted to say.

  Lucas turned again, away from me, his v
oice muffled by the pillow. “I’m being punished,” he said. “She knows I killed her. She came back to punish me.”

  I remembered my dream, the black bird flying from the grass.

  “It was an accident,” I said.

  “She makes no distinction. She’s evil.”

  “She’s a teenager.”

  “She knows we left her out in the dark,” Lucas said. “She’s toying with us, pretending to be sweet. I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with her.”

  Sometime in the night I got up to get a glass of water. I passed by the guest bathroom and almost cried out when I saw a girl in white with her back to me standing inside.

  It was Noelle, in a white nightgown, standing still, staring at her face in the mirror. I called her name. She didn’t move. I called her name again, and she glanced back, blinked, and said, softly, “Want some?” She opened her hand and showed me two round pills on her palm, pink like flower petals.

  I woke up on the mattress, but I stayed put, my thirst forgotten.

  WE WOKE UP late, Noelle even later. That afternoon, while looking for a snack, I found two large bottles of cheap brandy in one of the kitchen cupboards. The refrigerator has a bottle of Coke. I left Makati for this insanity. I deserved this.

  Lucas and I sat on the floor, passing the bottle and a glass of Coke between us. He started reminiscing about our college days, and I leaned forward to kiss him. It was painful to keep caring for him, with his dictator of a father, with all his fears and neuroses. I was the “friend,” or the “friend from college,” if he was courageous enough and merciful enough to tag me with a more specific label.

  “I have an idea,” Lucas said, when the room was already beginning to spin, and took out a mint tin from his backpack and opened it. My stomach lurched. Inside were five round pink pills.

  “What do they do?” I said, hearing Noelle say, Want some?

  “They make you happy, what else,” Lucas said, popping two of them in his mouth.

  “Did you give these to Noelle?”