Doctor Hansen watched the woman stand up and approach the receptionist. “Is there anything else I need to sign?” she said.
“No, that will be all,” Martha answered, without looking up, “Take a seat and the doctor will be with you in a moment.”
He approached the desk and skimmed her forms. The white walls and hard blue carpet echoed back the clicking as Martha typed. At the edge of his vision the woman shivered, looked up at the vent above her, then moved to a different chair, the fashion magazine still in her hand. She was Asian, perhaps even Filipino, though like most of his patients, she communicated an excess in time and money when she moved, even in her finger flipping a page.
“Victoria Fairhill?” he said, looking over his glasses.
Her jewelry swayed in counter swing with her stride as she walked towards him and when she rested her forearms on the counter top he noticed the word Mabuhay, each letter written on a separate tiny wooden block, strung together on her wrist as a bracelet. He knew what it meant---welcome, or more accurately, live long. He had last seen the word at the city limits of Concepcion on a metal arch over the road. They had been leaving then, and he had looked out the back window of the Jeep at the arch, feeling some first pangs of irony, thinking that he could now understand what the word meant.
He had wondered then if he would ever return. There was another feeling tied with that image, something he couldn’t quite explain, something buried under years of tongue depressors and, later, blood.
He shook his head. “If you’ll come with me, we can start your prepping.”
She nodded and they turned down the short hallway toward the room at the end which was clean and organized. She sat on the white table while he faced her on a stool and they went over the procedure again.
“Do you have any questions?” he offered in conclusion.
“No.”
“Sige.”
Her eyebrow raised and he realized his mistake. “I’m sorry,” he said with a sigh, “Sige means okay or alright in the Philippines. You look like . . .”
“My father was born there,” she interrupted, “but I’ve never been.”
“Well I spent some time there as a boy after the war.”
She seemed uncomfortable and he quickly changed the subject, calling in Stacey with a gown so she could change. He left the room and found the sink one door over. He adjusted his glasses and spread soap over his hands, thinking that he probably had ten more years before his hands would fail him, as his eyes had already done.
Her face stayed in his mind, shifting into faces more familiar. He could feel the heat of that first summer in the Philippines, when the air felt like hot breath and he sat under the bamboo on a plastic chair and sweated in the shade. But that had been far away from his family’s bungalow in the town proper, where giant gates set in giant walls protected the riches of the rich. He preferred the barrio and the rice fields laid out in green squares from horizon to horizon, looking like he could run across them barefoot all the way to the end of the world.
At first the children—to him they had all seemed like children, though some were teenagers like himself—had gathered around him for hours, pointing at his white skin, laughing at his accent, pulling his light brown hair and asking him for chocolates in broken English. Their fascination waned, however, after a couple weeks of visits and no chocolates; they left him to his musings beneath the green bamboo.
One day, shortly after he started bringing books to read, someone joined him in the shade. A man of about forty-five years smiled at him with two teeth and said, “You are American, yes?”
“Yes sir.”
His smile seemed to widen, if it were possible, and he nodded and spoke again, “My name is Lito Arsiga. What is your name?”
“Chuck Hansen,” he replied.
“Chak?” It sounded different when he said it.
His hands were raw by now from too much scrubbing. He grimaced and quickly rinsed, paused, and then removed his glasses to splash his face. After drying off, he returned to the room at the end of the hall, knocking as he entered.
He opened the door quickly and in the half second before she could react, he saw her standing by the window in the white medical gown, staring at something in the distance with her brow wrinkled and her lip between her teeth. At the sound of the door, her face returned quickly to smooth confidence though something lingered in her eyes, and he thought she would have asked him a question had he waited for just a moment.
He did not wait but ushered her to the white table and had her lay down. They exchanged polite conversation about her parents and her early upbringing in Los Angeles. He did not ask her about her own family, though she told him her husband was a professor at the university, his second guess after corporate lawyer. She became quiet after the sedative took effect and he started with the smallest dilator, checking and double checking his procedure and time-frame though he had never once made a mistake. He flipped on the television above her and quietly exited the room.
He would have checked with Stacey but she knew the procedure and entered the room right as he left it. He stepped into his office and could hear Martha on the phone until he shut the door behind him. Florescent lights above him made the walls too white and he collapsed into his chair, removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. The hum of the computer filled his ears until he thought he heard in it the sound of muffled rain on the roof. In the Philippines rain would fall so thick and large that to walk out in it was like jumping in a swimming pool with your clothes on. He had discovered this early on, and often ran out into the street just to feel his clothes saturate and to watch the gutters overflow. Within minutes the street would flood and he would see people wading home with their wet tsinelas slapping against their feet. After he could understand the language, he would hear people worrying about his health as they passed.
“Look at that American standing in the rain with no umbrella. He’ll have a cough by tomorrow.”
“Where is his mother? He’s been completely ignored.”
“He must like the rain, no? He looks happy when he’s wet.”
Sometimes he would hear children wanting to join him as they were quickly pulled to safety under some tin roof.
Only once did he ever visit the barrio deliberately in the rain.
That morning had been unbearably hot. He woke up with his sheets plastered to his bare chest and sweaty back and although he showered first thing, his clothes were stuck to him within the next hour. His tutor didn’t show so he tried to read but his fingers made wet marks in the pages; never before had it been too hot for him to read. He ended up sitting directly in front of the electric fan in his parents room, listening to the radio and trying to pick out words that he knew.
At noon his mother found him and fed him lunch: sandwiches and fresh pineapple. The chance for fresh pineapple would have made enduring the heat worth it but by then heat had been replaced by clouds that formed in giant thunderheads above them. His visit to the barrio would have to be postponed. Or would it? He realized he had never seen the rice fields in the rain and something told him that if he went, he would not be disappointed.
He decided to walk because his bicycle would be useless in the mud. Just as he left the main road, he heard the sound of millions of water drops rushing toward him over tin roofs and suddenly the rain was upon him. He passed no one as he walked and he kept his eyes fixed on the muddy road; he did not want to see the fields yet. When he reached the bamboo stand, he looked up and out slowly, watching the wind made alive by the green rice stalks swaying in unison. The rain fell strong and he felt like he might be stranded in a boat on a vast green sea.
“Chak!”
He turned at the shout and saw Lito standing in the road holding a banana leaf over his head as a makeshift umbrella.
“You are getting wet,” he yelled in Kapampangan, “Let’s eat.”
Chuck smiled. Lito was always doing this. He ran over to him yelling back as he went, “I’m fine, I’m fine. Don’t worry, I’m waterproof.”
Lito laughed and tried to give him the leaf as they walked toward his house, which was only a room with a roof. Chuck had been there many times since the day they met underneath the bamboo. As they approached, Sia and Kokoy ran out to meet them, laughing and chattering on about how wet he was and how they had sent their father to get him when they had seen him standing in the rain. He would have refused dinner, but the rain on the tin roof was so loud that he could only be heard by shouting and even then, Josi, Lito’s wife, pretended not to hear him.
After a dinner of vegetables and rice, Josi sent them out to the kubo while she cleaned up and put the kids to bed. The kubo was made out of a bamboo frame with a grass roof. It was quiet there and Lito sat with one knee against his chest and the other dangling off the bamboo bench. He offered a cigarette, which Chuck refused.
“Is it ok?” he asked, holding up one for himself.
“Sure.” They spoke almost completely in Kapampangan now though Chuck could speak far less than he understood. “The rain is strong over the rice fields.”
“That’s true, Chak,” Lito said and smiled.
The little houses of the barrio lined the road, making yellow squares with their windows against the wet dark; their tin roofs hummed beneath the rain.
“How long will it go on?”
“I don’t know.” he said, still smiling.
Chuck took the smile as a challenge. “What if it floods and destroys all the houses?” he said, pointing at the yellow squares with his lips.
“Then we will build them again,” Lito said.
“What if you have nothing left to build with?”
He paused. “Then I will find some bamboo and make another kubo to keep my family from the rain.”
“What if the flood takes your family?” Chuck said, and regretted it.
Lito’s smile left and tears began to bud under his eyes. “Then maybe that is what God wants.”
Stacey’s knock pierced the silence of the office: time for the next dilator. He rose quickly and walked with her to the room at the end of the hall. Once inside, he put on a new pair of gloves and asked his patient how she felt.
“I’m fine,” she said with a vacant smile.
The sedative was obviously still in effect but he double checked her dosage with Stacey anyway, then moved on to the now-swollen dilator, which he removed carefully and replaced with the new one.
“Is this station okay?”he said, picking up the remote.
“Yeah.”
“If you need anything just call, alright?”
“Okay.”
Before he shut the door, he saw her face turned up toward the television as she stared right through it, her eyes glazed over as if they had seen something horrific and unforgettable and she had stopped thinking altogether.
He couldn’t return to his office right now.
“Stacey,” he called on his way out, “could you watch Mrs. Fairhill closely, and call me if she needs anything? I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
He was gone before she could reply, and he stepped quickly into the parking lot. Maybe a cold soda would calm his nerves.
A couple seconds after placing it in the cup-holder of his car, his cellphone vibrated loud against the plastic. It was a text message about his cellphone bill; he deleted it and would have driven off if the background on his phone had not been changed. There, waving at him out of the screen was his twelve-year-old daughter, Katie, in her pajamas. She must have taken the picture and set it as his background while he was getting ready for work this morning. He stared hard for almost a minute and then he began to shake, starting in his chest and moving outward to his extremities. He dropped his phone and gripped the steering wheel in front of him for support but his muscles continued to vibrate and his teeth began to chatter. He shook and his mind strained behind his eyes like grinding gears. Finally, he collapsed in exhaustion, his heart beating in his ears.
His office building hid the setting sun but he could see clearly the snow-covered mountains to the east. They glowed red and orange against the icy, cloudless sky, clothed, for a moment, in the glory of the dying day; and he wondered if he would ever forget what he saw. The feeling was the same he had felt looking out the back window of a jeep, watching the word Mabuhay fade into the distance.
He remembered now how it happened two months before he left and he often wondered if he would have ever known, had it happened after he was gone. The news reached him as soon as they saw him approaching the barrio.
“Chuck, he’s not here, your friend,” a voice called to him from a nearby doorstep.
Something in the man’s voice worried him and he stopped his bike. “Who do you mean?”
“Lito Arsiga, oh,” he said, pointing with his lips.
“What happened?”
“He had a fit. The police took him.”
“Why did they take him?”
“I told you he had a fit,” the man said and walked back into his house.
He should have pedaled hard but instead he rode slowly, watching the rice fields pass between the houses, green and full of life. He saw Josie first, sitting in the kubo, crying softly. One side of it was in pieces, a few shattered pieces of bamboo clinging to the half still standing. The walls of the house, which were thatched, had been similarly destroyed in one corner and he could see rice cooking on the fire inside.
When she saw him, she began to sob. He did not know what to do until she walked up and wrapped her arms around him; he embraced her not knowing everything, just that she needed something to hold on to.
“He’s gone,” she said between sobs, “They didn’t make it to the jail and he was dead already.”
Then Chuck held her and cried with her until neither of them had strength to make tears.
“I went to Angeles to buy more pantinda,” she told him later inside the house, “and his friend from Capas came while I was gone and got him to drink. He really doesn’t drink, Chuck. I don’t let him. His mind is simple but when he is drunk, he is made angry by the smallest things. Last night he became angry at his friend and they fought. His friend was able to get away but Lito attacked the kubo and our house with a machete until the police came. The neighbors say the police could not stop him so they hit him in the head.”
“Where are the children?” he almost asked but then he saw them sitting up on their bamboo bed, their hair still tussled from the sleep they didn’t get last night. He looked into their round brown eyes until he couldn’t anymore.
At the funeral they had a picture of Lito placed above the casket. It was from their wedding, back when he still had all his teeth. The smile was the same, though, and Doctor Hansen now knew it for what it really was: the smile of a child.
The sunset on the mountains had faded, and he looked at his watch, pocketed his cellphone and exited the car. He stopped in the lobby and asked Martha if they had any appointments for the coming week. She was to cancel all of them. I just need a break, he told her, and it’s not as if any of them are sick. He passed quickly into the room at the end of the hall and explained to Mrs. Fairhill that unexpected complications had surfaced.
“I’ve re-examined your ultrasound and you’re farther along than I thought,” he said, as he removed the dilator, “We’ll have to do another evaluation. It might be too late.”
At first she seemed confused, then her eyes cleared and she looked straight into him and saw what he meant. “Thank you, Doctor,” she said softly.
He would not see her again.
