Windows

I live in a house with just the right number of windows. Two in every bedroom, two in the living room, two in the dining room, three in the kitchen, one in the utility room. They are glass windows encased in grill. They are just the right size to let enough light and air in without letting in the draft during the cold seasons.

I do not like looking out the windows, it gives me vertigo. Yet I appreciate their presence in my house. In my solitude I look at them from a distance, watch the light stream through them morning and night.

I was not always alone. I had a husband and children. They were my life, until the car accident that claimed Joseph, my husband and my daughters Martha and Ina.

It happened years ago, but the pain is as vivid as it was the day I learned I’m all alone in this planet. I was inconsolable for a time. I would cry for days on end, grieve over a twist of fate that left me feeling helpless. Then, my life turned around. The epiphany was not sudden; it was a gradual thawing of my heart that came after I made small realizations about the bad choices I made in my life and how I used my husband and children to escape the demons of my past.

Mine is an unusual story. I was raped, when I was quite young by my stepmother. My dad had died and in her grief she turned to me in the most destructive way. I was seven, an outgoing, extroverted child who wanted to be friends with each classmate, each teacher, each play mate who came my way. Jean loved my father; you can tell it by the way she looks at him. She loved him maybe to the point of obsession, but after a fashion she loved him.

Dad died of cancer, it was a lingering illness that claimed every ounce of love in Jean’s heart and stripped her of the ability to feel joy. She mourned him for years on end, and after I lost my own family, I saw the world through my stepmother’s eyes.

Now that I look back, I think maybe the grief made her a little crazy. Which is why she did what she did to me. On nights when she was lonely, she’d bid me come to her room. She would stick a scratchy moustache over my upper lip and make me lick her there at knife point. There were nights when sex toys were involved. I’d get sick afterwards, in my bathroom and life became hell from that moment on.

I wanted to run away, but the thought of becoming a street urchin did not appeal to me. I liked to know where my next meal would come from and I liked going to school. I knew at that young age what it would mean to give up the privileges that came with living with Jean. So I hatched a plan. I’d study real hard, make good grades and get a scholarship to a university north of the country, where seas would separate me from Jean. I made good on my promise to myself. I finished college third from the top of my class and got an invitation to teach English studies at a prestigious university in Singapore.

There I met and fell in love with Joseph and we were married after a two year courtship. Being a young mother to beautiful twin daughters occupied my time, along with my part time teaching stint in this foreign country.

Then the accident happened. I could not bear to be alive while my daughters and husband were six feet under. I thought how unfair that I be left behind when my family was already gone. I questioned God. I asked, why when I have made so many sacrifices, been through enough already, was robbed of my parents at an early age, was robbed of my childhood. Why, I asked.

I flew back to Manila to try and pick up the pieces of my life. I thought, maybe if I stayed far from the memories I would get to keep my sanity. So I took up a friend’s offer to look after her home here while trying to get a job in my alma mater. The house with plenty of windows and space enough to begin anew was to be my salvation, if only because I could not believe in my girlhood God anymore.

But it was not to be the start I hoped for. Jean found me through old friends I contacted upon coming back to my home country. I got a condolence card from her, along with her phone number, “if you want to talk,” it read.

She was not how I expected to be. The years were kind to her. Jean looked as if she has settled her dues with the universe and could take any curve ball life will throw her way without going berserk.

And I remembered. After her year of grief, it was like the sky cleared. The abuse stopped and through my years in grade school and high school I was given the chance to heal. And heal I did. She let me be, and intuition told me that she was doing so to make up for her crazy behavior. I had freedom to choose my friends, my subjects, my hobbies, my music, my ideas, even my clothes. She never said no, but I was wise enough not to abuse the liberties she granted me. I became the most cultured (I love theater and the orchestra), best dressed kid in my class. I blossomed.

But I forgot all these things because I chose to focus on the wrong Jean did to me. That year of hell canceled out the other years when she gave me the best gift of all: freedom.

Now that I am here face to face with her, I am torn apart. It’s like meeting God and the devil at the same time. She smiled tentatively, I smiled back. Jean did not look like her 63 years. She looked 45. And her eyes have lost that wild, crazed look I wanted to remember about her. In its place was a kind light, as if she discovered a way out of grief and into joy. I was amazed.

“How did you do it?” I asked. And then I sobbed and cried out all the anger and frustration that would not leave me.

Jean took me in her arms and suddenly I was five again and it was the first time I fell from the playground swing. She was my mom, because my real mom died while giving birth to me and there was no way on this earth that I could remember her.

“I want to talk about that year, so please let me. I feel it’s the only way we can ever move on from it. Every time I abused you, I wanted to say sorry. But I was proud. Then one day we were at the playground and I watched you. It was like I saw you for the first time. You were withdrawn, not like the kid I used to take care of before your Dad died. And I saw you, and that’s when I realized I had no right to do what I was doing to you. You are the offspring of the only man who ever made me feel love and I thought it would be unfair to destroy your childhood so early in the game,” she pleaded.

I wiped my tears and blew my nose. I said to her, “Say you’re sorry, and then let’s put the past behind us. You were good to me, all things considered.”

“Okay. Jasmine, I am sorry from the bottom of my heart. I did not mean to do you harm. Let me make it up to you,” she said, squeezing my hands tight.

“So tell me, what’s your secret? I can’t remember you being this happy,” I probed.

“I got in touch with you because of this,” Jean uttered, as if not hearing me. She took out two identical looking pills, both beige and the same size. “A friend gave me this on his deathbed; he said he didn’t want to waste it since he was sick and already dying.”

“Explain,” I urged.

“One is a sleeping pill, one is a cyanide pill. It’s poison. I need someone to take it with. It’s like a Russian roulette; you don’t know what you’re getting. If you wake up, that’s fine, if you don’t even better,” she said with an infectious grin.

“Wait, wait. Let me get this straight, you’ve been walking around with those—those things in your purse and the thought of skirting the immorality of suicide is keeping you happy?” I was incredulous.

“I haven’t thought about it, quite frankly until I heard about what happened to you. I thought, you’d be in the same boat, losing the man you love, losing your kids. So here I am.”

“Do you really want to die?”

“Nothing would be better. I go through the motions everyday. I’ve made my peace with the loss of your Dad, I did it with so much help from you, you know seeing you live at the edge of being, and it gave me a sense of purpose. But when you left I had to do it all over again.”

“I don’t think I’m ready Jean, let me think about it,” I balked.

I took my time thinking about Jean’s proposition. Here she was again, presenting me with a conundrum, putting me in between a very hard place and a rock.

I spent my days in the windowed house, contemplating the light that beamed through the windows and onto the owner’s beautiful things. I grew an herb garden. I started reading again. Jean and I met for lunch every other day and I would recall the fun memories I have of living with her and discovering the person I was meant to be under her roof.

I sifted through my friend’s recipe books and decided to make dinner for Jean and a handful of close friends.

One friend was a violinist so we had live entertainment for the night. When the party was about to end, Jean took me aside.

“I think we both made up our minds about the pills. I’ll come for you tomorrow morning. We’ll go for a drive,” she said in a tone that brooked no argument.

I did not sleep that night. I thought really hard about the possibility of putting an end to my life after only 34 years of being alive. Yet, if it meant a consequence free means of being with my departed family then, I was all for it.

Jean came in at seven a.m. We drove southwards to Tagaytay. When we got near Taal Volcano, she parked her car and hired a boat that would take us near the volcano, which was in the middle of a lake.

On the boat, Jean took out the pills and gave them to me. She said, “It’s your decision.”

I stared at the beige pills in my palm for a long time. I did not think about God then. I thought about my husband and my girls, and how they always looked to me to do the right thing. That made me want to do the right thing.

I dipped my palm in the lake and let the water wash away the pills. Jean smiled and hugged me. Then I knew, I’d be alright and my time would come, if I just waited— gracefully—as Jean was doing.

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