ready.”
“Okay,” she said.
When he came back out twenty minutes later, dressed in jeans and a loose-fitting T-shirt, feeling vaguely refreshed from the hot shower, his suitcase was sitting open on the end of the bed with all his things inside. His clothes were all folded as if they were ready to go on the display shelves at Nordstrom’s. Isabel was standing nearby.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” she replied.
There was still another hour and a half until his car came for him, so Larry called down to the front desk and asked for a wake-up call in an hour. The suitcase closed and ready to go next to the door, Larry and Isabel, fully clothed and on top of the covers, lay down on the bed.
I don’t know what happened after that, not for that hour, anyway. Neither of them told me and, again, I didn’t ask.
What I do know was that instead of saying goodbye in the parking lot of the Las Palmas Hotel, Isabel went with Larry to Manila, saying goodbye on the sidewalk in front of the Philippine Airlines terminal at the airport.
Goodbye, but not farewell. Not yet.
CHAPTER TEN
I called Natt on my mobile phone before I returned to my room to check on Isabel. Being back in the Philippines was screwing with my head more than I thought it would. No, that wasn’t right. It was finding Isabel that was doing it. I could have suppressed everything, just forgotten it all, if I hadn’t been able to locate her. I could have left there with unanswered questions, but with the knowledge that I had tried. Done is done and what can’t be learned, can’t be learned. That’s what I would have told myself.
Only I wouldn’t have been able to forget. Maybe I could have dived into my Bangkok life and worked my ass off. Loved Natt as best I could. Gone to sleep each night dead tired, woken up each morning to start it all again. That would have worked, but only for a while. My brain had a funny way of waiting until I thought my life was going great, then reminding me of things I thought I’d put behind me.
Natt knew this. She knew why I’d come to the Philippines, encouraged it, even.
“You found her, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I can hear it in your voice. Will she tell you what you need to know?”
“She might, but…I’m not sure I should even ask her.”
She was silent for a moment. “You’ll do what you think best.”
After my disaster with Maureen, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to be with anyone again. And later, in Angeles, after I’d messed up my relationship with Cathy, I wasn’t sure I even knew how. I guess you’d call that a low point. It wasn’t self-pity, more self-devaluation. I was still happy, friendly Papa Jay, and it wasn’t an act. But when it came to me and women, I thought maybe it wasn’t meant to be. Natt proved me wrong.
I went back to the room, opening the door slowly in case Isabel was still asleep. Her bed was empty, but no sooner had I started to think she was gone then I heard the shower in the bathroom turn on.
I clicked on the TV to one of the international news channels and watched with my eyes but not with my mind. In my head, an entirely different show was on. Scenes were playing out rapidly, one after another. Scenes of possible conversations between Isabel and me about Larry. They ended in tears, in anger, one even in denial of Larry’s very existence. It was just my imagination running wild, thinking only the worst, unable to see anything else.
In the bathroom, the shower shut off. I rubbed a hand across my face, trying, if only for a few minutes, to think of nothing. When the bathroom door opened, I turned. Isabel came out wearing only a white towel. She jumped when she saw me.
“You scare me,” she shrieked. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
It was a lie. Her reaction was just a little too calculated, too planned. But lying was second nature to her now. For all bar girls, it was a basic mode of survival, and Isabel had been a bar girl too long to turn it off without a lot of extra effort.
When I didn’t say anything, she walked over and sat on the bed next to me. “Are you okay?” she asked, putting a hand on the back of my shoulder. “You look sad.”
“Do I?”
Her hand moved lightly downward, tracing my spine and stopping in the small of my back. She leaned into me, her towel-covered breast resting against my arm.
“You do.” Her voice was low, almost a whisper.
I could feel her breath on my shoulder, then on my chest as she leaned closer. Her wet hair draped down my back, soaking my shirt where it lay. I could feel my hands begin to tremble, and in my mind, my thoughts tumbled randomly as I desperately looked for something to anchor on.
For me, one weakness, if it was big enough, begat others, and my desire to know the truth about Larry, to fill that hole inside me, was making me weak in all things. Alone with Isabel, so beautiful and willing, and me filled with all the memories that had been playing out in my mind the last two days, I was on the edge of becoming lost.
Her lips hovered just above the skin at the nape of my neck. I wanted to pull away. I screamed at myself to pull away, but my body wasn’t listening.
“Let me make you feel better,” she said.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw her hand move to where the towel was tucked into itself. As she pulled at it, it began to fall open.
I suddenly had a vision of Natt, happy, feeding me some of the
I reached out and gently moved the towel back up over Isabel’s chest. I looked at her, her face still close to mine but now filled with confusion. I pulled her to me, hugging her tight.
“That’s not why I came,” I whispered in her ear.
At first there was nothing, and I thought maybe she hadn’t heard me. But then her body heaved as she began to sob. She hugged me, her fingers digging into my back. I continued to hold her, letting her know that I wasn’t going anywhere.
Finally, as her sobs grew quieter and farther apart, she said in a voice barely audible, “I’m sorry.”
“No,” I said. “No sorrys. If anything, it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have visited you at the bar.”
“You wish you didn’t come see me?”
“No. Not at all.”
She frowned. “But that’s not the only reason you are here.” This wasn’t a question. If it had been, I’m not sure how I would have responded.
We sat silently beside each other for several moments, then she whispered, “I know why you came.”
Of course she did. That’s why she’d tried to do whatever she could to distract me from it.
“It’s not important. I’m just happy to see you.”
“Larry,” she said. “You came because of him.”
“At first,” I admitted. “But now I just want to buy you breakfast, and not talk about anything.”
She took a deep breath. “No one ever loved me like he did.”
A tear ran down her cheek as she leaned against my shoulder, and began crying once more.
Maybe I wasn’t the only one who wanted to talk about Larry. Isabel
At that moment I realized, without her having to tell me, that she had never talked to anyone about what had happened, that she had bottled it up inside and tried to forget. But there was no forgetting. I was testament to that. She had stayed because deep down she wanted to talk,
