The Pull of Gravity

“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to explain.”

Now that I was there with her, I wasn’t sure what to do. Unconsciously, she pulled her hair back behind her ear in a gesture she’d done a million times. Only this time, instead of revealing her soft, brown cheek, she uncovered a dark, ugly bruise on her jaw, nearly a twin to the one Manfred had received. She realized what I was looking at and started to cover the bruise again, but stopped herself in mid-movement, obviously thinking she couldn’t make me not see it.

“He hit me,” she said.

“Do you need a doctor?”

She touched her jaw. “It will be okay.”

“I don’t mean just for that.”

Her eyes moistened as she tried not to cry. “No,” she said. “No doctor.”

I sat next to her, not touching her, not saying anything. I couldn’t even imagine what she was going through. Anger? Fear? Guilt? All I really knew was that those were the emotions racing through me.

“You know what happened,” she said. A statement, not a question. “You know what I did with him.”

“You didn’t do anything with him,” I told her. “What happened-that was all his doing.”

“It’s the same thing.”

She stared at the carpet, her breathing uneven. I kept expecting her to start sobbing, but it never happened.

I shouldn’t have come, I thought. I should have left as soon as I knew she was with Mariella. There was nothing I could do for her that her cousin couldn’t handle and probably do better.

But no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t make myself get up. We sat there like that for what could have been twenty minutes or twenty hours. There was no time under the canopy of Mariella’s bed, there was only Isabel and me.

And I still didn’t know what to do.

I got very little sleep that day. At some point Cathy came and got me from Mariella’s, a minor miracle in itself, but that day, the past meant nothing. The police turned out to be more helpful than I expected. It wasn’t the first time a girl had been raped in Angeles, and I had heard stories of varying degrees of official assistance. Maybe it was because Manfred, a foreigner, had also been hurt.

The cops posted two officers at the MacArthur Inn in hopes that Rudy would return. But what they didn’t know at the time and only figured out later was that he had grabbed all his important stuff, including his passport and airplane ticket, right after he’d smashed his fist into Manfred’s face and hightailed it directly to Aquino International Airport in Manila. By the time the police finally sorted it out, Rudy was already back in the States. Which meant it was the end of it, because none of the Philippine authorities were motivated enough to make an international case over the rape of a bar girl.

As far as I know, Rudy never came back to Angeles. A good thing, too, since there were several girls who would have let him bar fine them, then cut off his balls once they were alone in his hotel room. If I had ever seen him again, I wouldn’t have bothered with his balls. I would have simply killed him.

But the sad truth was, there would come a day when most of the people who knew who he was and what he had done would be gone from Fields, and, if he wanted to, he could probably return then to abuse again.

Isabel stayed away from The Lounge for four days. When she returned, I took her in back and asked her if she was sure she wanted to start working again so soon.

“I’m fine, Papa,” she said. “Please don’t worry about me.”

I knew she wasn’t fine, and I also knew I was sitting on a stack of cash that Larry had sent which would allow her to stop working as long as she wanted. I even suggested she do just that, but she would have none of it.

“Have you told him what happened?” she asked. Her eyes were full of fear. This was apparently something she hadn’t considered before.

“No,” I said. “I haven’t even talked to him.”

“You are telling me the truth?”

I nodded and said yes.

“You must promise me something,” she said.

“What?”

“You must promise me you will never tell Larry about…” She paused. “About him.” It was as if she had spoken the most disgusting word that existed.

“Don’t you think he’d want to know?”

“I don’t want him to know. That should be enough.”

I looked into her eyes and saw that this meant everything to her. “Okay,” I said. “I won’t tell him anything.”

About a week later, Larry called and said that Isabel didn’t sound the same. He wondered if there was something bothering her. I wanted to tell him. He deserved to know. He wasn’t the kind of guy who would have blamed her. In fact, he would have probably hopped on the next plane to come and comfort her.

But I had promised Isabel I would say nothing, so I told him she was probably just missing him.

I wasn’t sure if it was the biggest lie I’d ever told, but it felt like the worst.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

There were things about my time in Angeles that I would have rather not remembered. Rudy was one, but what I remembered wasn’t in my control. I had come back to the Philippines to face all of this, and couldn’t just choose what was important and what should stay forgotten. But Isabel didn’t need to be reminded of him, so I kept that memory to myself.

Instead we talked about the parties and the girls and the insanity, until it became harder and harder to avoid the difficult subjects.

“Do you remember Bibianna?” she asked.

“She was a friend of your cousin’s, wasn’t she?”

She took another bite of her fish, and chewed it thoroughly before answering. “For a while.”

“Remember the time they both came into The Lounge and wanted to bar fine you?” I smiled as I asked the question.

“Sure,” Isabel said, also beginning to smile. “You let me go, without even making them pay.”

“Just wanted you to have a night out.”

“Thanks,” she said, losing herself for a moment in the memory. “We had a good time. Someone tell me that Bibianna marry guy from Italy, move to Rome.”

“Really?”

She shrugged. “It’s what I hear.”

“Did Mariella tell you that?”

She said nothing for several seconds, then, “No. Not Mariella.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-”

“It’s okay. We have to talk about her sometime.”

“No we don’t,” I said, meaning it.

“Of course we do.”

She paused for only a moment, then started talking about her cousin, and I knew eventually she would talk of Larry, too. Of the end.

After the incident with Rudy, Isabel moved out of her shared room and into the spare bedroom at Mariella’s place. At the time she said it was her idea, but what really happened was Mariella insisted. This was the same