accident made her confused. She didn’t recognize the sounds for what they were. She waited for someone to pull her out, too, but nearly two minutes passed and no one came.
“Larry?” she called out.
Nothing.
“Someone, please. I need help.”
Still no reply.
“Larry!”
Something was wrong. She knew it. She had to get out. She had to find Larry.
She tried to pull herself back into what was left of the chair. Pain screamed from both her arm and her ankle. There was also pain in her side and her hip, though neither as intense as the first two.
Once she was upright again, she leaned through the door and looked out. It took her a second to realize the sidecar had somehow swung around so that it was now perpendicular to the street. She couldn’t see the motorcycle portion from where she was, or the car they had hit. What she did see was an empty street.
“Larry!” she called.
As she pushed herself out of the sidecar with her good arm, an older woman appeared around the front end.
“
Soon two people, the old woman and a girl not much older than Isabel, helped Isabel to the side of the road.
“My boyfriend. I don’t know what happened to him,” Isabel said.
“The driver?” the young woman asked.
“No,” Isabel said. “An American. My fiance.”
“There are only the two of you,” the woman said.
“He’s here,” Isabel insisted. “Someone pulled him out.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes!” Isabel yelled, nearly hysterical.
The young woman shook her head. “There’s only the two of you,” she repeated.
They found Larry’s body a few blocks away in an empty lot. It was a couple of kids who made the discovery. They were up early looking for anything valuable they might be able to sell for a few pesos.
Larry had been stabbed three times, any one of which would have been fatal.
The police came to my house at ten in the morning and woke me up. With Isabel in the hospital, they needed me to identify the body. How they knew my connection with Larry, I wasn’t sure. It didn’t really matter anyway.
His face seemed paler, and his skin looked almost like plastic, but it was Larry. No question about it. When I asked what had happened, they said it was a robbery gone bad. They then asked me if I wanted to see the wounds. I told them no.
At the time I had no reason to question their conclusion. Larry’s wallet was missing, and if he had anything else of value on him at the time of the incident, it was also gone.
After I had identified Larry and told the cops I would make the arrangements to send him home, I went to the hospital to see Isabel. She was in a large room with five other patients. Her arm was wrapped and immobilized, but not yet in a cast. I couldn’t see her foot, but the doctor told me the ankle was broken.
There were bruises on her face, and I was sure the damage continued underneath the blanket in areas I couldn’t see. She was in a drug-induced sleep. I asked the doctor when I should come back, and he told me he doubted she’d wake up before the next morning.
That evening I decided to give the girls the night off, and closed The Lounge. I knew if we had opened, it would have been a pretty somber place. All the girls liked Isabel, and most knew Larry, too. It was no time for a party.
I don’t know what everyone else did, but I stayed home, wandering the rooms of my home, taking stock of the possessions I had accumulated. Pictures and furniture and satellite TV and even the house itself, with its three bedrooms and its pool out back. They all represented who I had become in some way, an ex-pat who rented girls for the night, and whose closest friends were drunks and lechers. That’s what I was left with once Larry was gone.
I remember staring out my front window at a palm tree that grew in a neighbor’s yard, the lights from their house illuminating it like a piece of art in a museum. It was tall and thin and swayed slightly in the wind. It was so simple, and so beautiful. I remember thinking, wasn’t that what I had wanted in the beginning? Something simple? An early retirement and plenty of time to do nothing.
But I had damned myself the moment I decided to move to the Philippines.
When I finally turned away from the window, I looked at my house with new eyes. I would sell it as is, furnished and decorated. I would take only the things I really needed.
For me, the never-ending party stopped that night. Rowdy could run the bar himself once he got there.
I was done.
When I arrived at the hospital the next morning, the doctor told me Isabel was awake. He also told me something else.
“She’s been asking for the man,” he said. “Larry?”
“She doesn’t know?” I asked.
The doctor paused before answering. “We thought it best if it came from one of her friends.”
Which meant me.
I entered her room, my head swirling with anxiety and sadness and a deep desire to turn around and leave so that someone else could do what I was about to.
She didn’t see me at first. Her eyes were half shut, pain creasing her brow. I noticed her arm was now in a cast, and the bruises on her face had grown.
I stood at the side of her bed. “Isabel?”
She opened her eyes slowly, and they brightened some when she realized who I was. “Hi, Papa,” she said.
“You look like you’re in pain. Do you need something?” I asked.
“The nurse just gave me a pill,” she said. “I’ll feel better in a moment.”
“The doctor tells me that your arm will heal and your ankle, too. It’ll just take a little time.”
She tried to smile, but that only caused more pain.
“Is Larry here?” she asked. “I thought he would come visit me, but I haven’t seen him.”
I didn’t know how to begin, so I took what I hoped was the easy way out. “What’s important right now is you get some rest and get better,” I said.
“Where is he?” she asked, not letting it go. “Is he hurt?” She tried to push herself up, but didn’t get far before pain forced her back down. “I need to see him.”
“Isabel,” I said. “Larry’s not here. And he’s not coming.”
She looked at me, confused. Before she could ask another question, I said, “He died after the accident.”
I watched as panic overtook her, deforming her face and causing the hand of her unbroken arm to shake. She opened her mouth several times to speak, and when she finally did, her words piled on top of each other in a stuttered gasp. “But he was okay. He wasn’t hurt. Not like me.”
I noticed the doctor and one of the nurses hovering nearby. They had obviously anticipated Isabel’s reaction to the news they had fated me to deliver.
“Isabel, there’s nothing you can do. You just need to get better.”
I knew my words were inadequate. What do you tell someone when the man she’d loved for two years was dead? Whatever it was, I didn’t know it.
“I need to see him,” she said, her voice suddenly strong. “I need to see him now.”
Again she pushed herself up, this time succeeding in reaching a sitting position. Apparently that was the cue
