she reminds herself, will never be her own. They are only a job, and she
a minimum-wage worker. A cheap but reliable import.
Ligaya brings Eliot and Jamal down to sleep in her bed during
Shane and Vero’s absence. She hasn’t gotten used to this North
American custom of children sleeping alone, especially with Jamal.
Surely he is too young. Ligaya cannot let him awaken alone in this
giant dark house. Two storeys apart from her. A house this big brims
with hiding places, dark corners to hoard monsters, ghosts, and all
varieties of imagined evil. The boys would feel safer in her one-room
house in the Philippines, a cocoon where they would be always sur-
rounded by adults. Ligaya will, while Vero and Shane are away, keep
Jamal close where he knows he is protected. That, she tells herself, is
her job.
The boys love the sleepover—the adventure of it—down in LiLi’s
“house,” a space usually off limits after five in the evening. Under
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the covers, they curl into her, whispering Ligaya, as they tumble into the deep dreams known only to children. Jamal weaves his small fingers into her long hair, tickles the nape of her neck. “Ligaya,” he says,
“Ligaya.” The name as natural as breath. The boys love this foreign
word that they must never speak around their parents. They love it
more, she suspects, for the transgression of it.
“LiLi is my Canada name,” she tells them. “Only when we play
the Philippines game, only then I am Ligaya. There, in my country,
I am always Ligaya.” She holds her cheek against Eliot’s, saying the
name close to his ear. “Happiness. Ligaya means happiness.” Ligaya
always says “happiness” with tickles, and then, when they can take no
more tickles, she kisses them where their little necks meet their little
shoulders and smooths their wild hair behind their puppy-soft ears.
“Ligaya—” Eliot stretches his lips around the word in an exagger-
ated stage whisper. “—can we play the Philippines game the whole
time Mommy and Daddy are gone?” He cups his hands around his
mouth, protecting the secret from his mother and father, as if they can
see him from their fancy resort across the time zones.
“Yes,” Ligaya grins at him, cupping her own mouth, and dragging
out the ssss with a hungry serpent’s smile. “And in the Philippines, we
will all sleep in one bed.” She matches his stage whisper, puts the fun
of it in her eyes. Children, she knows, are expert eye readers.
“Ligaya!” The word is loud and full in Jamal’s mouth. “LIGAYA!”
Jamal does not know how to whisper. His enthusiasm reminds her
of Totoy. Nothing will ever be small, nothing ever quiet, with these
wild boys of hers. Ligaya hugs Eliot and Jamal close to her body and
pulls the blankets tight across their chests. “I get the middle,” she says,
“because I am the adult. I choose. And I choose no wrestling. I choose
no giggling. I choose only sleeping. You there, and you there.” She
keeps an arm around each.
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Ligaya’s bed is narrow, but she is only a small woman, and the boys
like to sleep close. She pulls them even tighter, so nobody will roll out.
They all fit. She kisses Eliot near his ear, and then Jamal. They smell
of baby shampoo. The exaggerated soapy scent fills her small room.
Happiness. “No more words for now,” she whispers. “Night is the time
for sleep in Philippines game. Tomorrow we talk.”
“Goodnight, LiLi.”
“Gudnayt, Ligaya.”
They are good boys, these two. She puts her nose close to Eliot’s
hair and lets the scent of baby shampoo carry her to sleep. It is a
luxury, she knows, an indulgence. But she takes it.
Deserves it?
She will not say.
◊◊◊
There were legal issues to resolve before Ligaya could be left alone
with the boys for an extended period. That’s how Vero had put it.
“LiLi, we must be careful…certain legal issues…we want to be
fair…always.”
“But as long as you’re happy to make the extra money,” Shane
rubbed his palms hard on his slacks as if trying to scrape off tree sap,
“then there shouldn’t be a problem.”
Ligaya tried to catch all of Vero’s words, but even after almost a year
with the family, Ligaya found Vero’s speech too fast. Ligaya couldn’t
hold onto the words long enough to string them together and find
their meaning. Trying to make sense of Vero’s words is like trying to
eat soup out of a pillowcase.
There was something in her speech about a labour scandal here in
Sprucedale at a coffee shop, something about a national politician
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breaking laws too, overworking his nanny, something about a govern-
ment “crackdown”— what is a crackdown? Ligaya wanted to ask but
Vero left no space for questions, didn’t allow for confusion, for the
possibility of absolute incomprehension. There was something also
about vigilance, Vero kept saying “government vigilance,” but Ligaya
did not know that word. It sounded strong. Ligaya imagined Popeye
the Sailor Man eating a can of vigilance, his muscles bulging with
new vigilance.
Vero said “a politician broke the law” with an odd smile, as if it were
a joke, a contradiction in terms, something that might need explain-
ing to the slow foreigner. Ligaya nodded and waved off Vero’s ram-
bling explanation. Vero must know very little about the Philippines
if she thought Ligaya needed lessons on corrupt politicians. In the
Philippines, there is no other kind of politician.
“So we’re not supposed to, technically speaking, leave you alone with
the kids overnight, if we’re going exactly by the book.” Vero paused
here as if waiting for Ligaya to speak, but Ligaya did not know what
she was meant to say. She felt relief when Vero continued. “But we
will pay you overtime for those extra hours. Overtime to sleep. It’s in
your best interest.” Supposed to’s, technicalities, bent rules, and best
interests—this is the language of the politicians Ligaya knows. This,
she understood. Ligaya nodded at Vero. “Yes, it is no problem. The
extra hours. It is fine. It is good.”
Fine. Ligaya would take Vero and Shane’s money to sleep. She cal-
culated how much she would need to save to send special presents
home to Nene and Totoy. Maybe a bright red Frisbee like the one
Eliot treasures. Totoy would be old enough now to catch and return
a decent throw to his sister. Maybe some nice-smelling shampoo for
Nanay too. She has heard nothing from Pedro, so she will send Pedro
nothing. Even though Ligaya has agreed to do the extra work, Vero
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and Shane still arrange for Gregory and Heather Schoeman to help
out.
The mention of their names surpri
ses Ligaya. This North American
concept of a family made up of people who are never around, of
grandparents who may as well live in another country, of grandpar-
ents who may as well go back to South Africa, who visit so seldom,
they may as well be dead, makes no sense to Ligaya. Less sense than
snow. Less sense than an extra house full of bicycles. Less sense than
hiring someone to care for your own children.
“They’re very busy,” Shane said.
“And they’re not crazy about kids,” Vero added.
But the Schoemans, the absentee grandparents, do respond to obli-
gation. Of a certain kind.
“We can’t have you working around the clock for a full week,”
Shane told Ligaya. “We’ll both end up behind bars. You’ll be stuck
with the boys for good.”
Ligaya glanced at Vero to see if these prison bars belonged to one
of Shane’s peculiar jokes.
“You’ll need some breaks while we’re away, LiLi. And it wouldn’t
kill Shane’s folks to spend some time with their own grandkids.”
This comes to Ligaya’s mind when Heather and Gregory appear.
They look like the visit with Eliot and Jamal might, in fact, kill them.
Gregory hobbles in the door, leaning his full weight on a golden
eagle head mounted atop a sturdy black cane. He swings his leg in an
odd half circle with every step, as if he has no hip joint. These North
American sports, so bad for the body’s health. He may have been an
athlete in his youth, but Ligaya cannot imagine him running now.
How else will he keep up with Eliot and Jamal?
Heather wears a perfectly pressed beige silk blouse. Beige! Who
wears beige when caring for children? It will be stained within
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minutes. Bright green squares of glass hang from her ears. Mr and
Mrs Schoeman look like they’ve never spent a moment with young
children in their entire lives. Ligaya suspects a nanny raised Shane
through the hardest years, back in South Africa. Jamal would love
to get his hands onto those bright squares dangling from Mrs
Schoeman’s ears and yank. Mr and Mrs Schoeman will never survive
the night. Ligaya wonders if she can in good conscience turn the chil-
dren over to these near strangers, these ill-prepared caregivers. But,
Ligaya reminds herself, Jamal and Eliot do not, after all, belong to her.
This unlikely couple, these are their blood relatives, their real family.
Ligaya half expects Jamal and Eliot to look at the pair of carefully
dressed geriatrics and ask their names, but the boys run to them, hurl-
ing their small thick bodies into the bony old legs hidden beneath
perfectly pressed pants.
“Granny!”
“Granddad!”
Jamal and Eliot’s faces glow, their bodies buzz with energy. They
run in tight, fast circles like puppies chasing their tails. They’re as
excited, as brimming with love, as they might be if this Granny and
Granddad showed up every afternoon to take the two of them for ice
cream.
The generosity of children, thinks Ligaya, but she cannot finish the
sentence. The thought is too big. She hopes Nene and Totoy will be
as generous with her when she finally sees them again. She will not
let herself think if.
“We’ll bring them back tomorrow morning,” Heather says to
Ligaya with a tight smile. She fingers the green glass squares hanging
from her ears with one hand and holds Eliot’s hand with the other.
The way she somehow holds Eliot’s hand while simultaneously push-
ing him away from her, using a stiff arm to keep him slightly apart
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where he won’t soil or crease her beige blouse—that rigid arm gives
Ligaya a sad liquid itch in her sinuses.
“You’re on emergency standby, though, right?” Gregory’s voice
belongs to a stronger man, the man he must have once been. He leans
clumsily into his cane, and Ligaya hopes he makes it back down the
front steps without incident. “We have you on some kind of 911 line?”
Ligaya sees now where Shane gets his odd way of speaking. “Oh
no,” she smiles. “No 911. But I am right here if you need.” She puts
a hand on Eliot’s head but quickly pulls it away in case Mr and Mrs
Schoeman think the gesture too proprietary. And then she instantly
regrets the furtive withdrawal. She does not wish to seem nervous,
untrustworthy. She is surprised to find herself auditioning for these
two. They are not, she reminds herself, her employers. She smiles
again in a way she hopes seems more natural. “The boys be good for
you. Good for their Granny and Granddad. Okay, boys?”
With Eliot and Jamal gone for the night, Ligaya invites Cheska
to the house. She rarely invites friends, even though when she first
arrived, Vero said, “Have friends over! This is your home!” Vero made
the invitation with her eyes stretched wide open, an expression Ligaya
still couldn’t decode. Ligaya took her at her word, though, and did
treat the basement as her home, at first. She and Cheska sat at the
tea table, cross-legged on the carpet, eating bowls of leftover curry,
pilfered from the upstairs’ fridge. They watched romantic comedies
that they bought at the Walmart and took photos of their fancy faces,
posting dozens on Facebook. Look! See the fun we’re having! In our new
country! Life is good! Still, the house never felt like her home. Cheska
scurried in the side door and straight down to the basement, scared of
being cornered by Vero, harassed by her well-intentioned questions.
“Do you like it here in Sprucedale?”
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“Is Mrs Parks treating you well?”
“Do you miss the Philippines?”
Ligaya hated to see Cheska stuck there between the side door
and the basement stairs, a look of stupid terror paralyzing her face
because Cheska feared misunderstanding Vero’s rapid-fire questions,
feared that Vero would be unable to interpret her heavy accent, feared
that she might answer the questions the wrong way. In Cheska’s face,
Ligaya saw a mirror of herself and felt humiliation rise in her, filling
her like hot water, from her feet up. This liquid heat would drown
her. Ligaya suppressed the bubbling rush of humiliation by telling
herself that she knew better than Cheska, she understood more than
Cheska—she would teach Cheska. She told herself that she only
imagined her own face in Cheska’s. It is not so.
“Don’t say okay,” Ligaya told Cheska when they were safely in the
basement. “North Americans do not like the word okay. Tell them it
is ‘great!’ Everything is wonderful! Don’t say ‘grand,’ though. If you
say grand, they think you mock them. It is too much, grand, but okay,
it is not enough. Say: Good! Good! Good!”
The ridiculousness of these distinctions made Ligaya and Cheska
smile and then, in a flood of relief, giggle, and forget their humilia-
tion. How could they be expected to know something is wrong with
“okay”? It would take them a lifetime to learn all these silly rules.
Even once they made it past Vero and downstairs—into “Ligaya’s
house,” as Eliot calls it—they were not entirely safe. Shane would
come jogging down to his weight room, his shirt off and tucked into
his waistband, his chest slick with the sweat of a recent bike ride, his
rear end comically exposed in spandex shorts. “Do you girls mind?” he
asked, wiping his face with the tail of his shirt. “If I do a few weights?”
They smiled and nodded, Ligaya hating their muteness in the face
of this man.
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“Just gonna pump some iron here, ladies,” he continued, flexing his
muscles, pushing an imaginary barbell from his chest. Ligaya won-
dered if he might be as uncomfortable as they were. “Wanna take a
turn? I could give you girls some lessons. We could make a run for the
Philippines’ Olympic team. The country’s first women weightlifters.”
“Oh no. No, no, no,” they giggled, backing away from Shane’s jokes,
his naked chest, backing toward Ligaya’s only truly private space. Safe
inside Ligaya’s bedroom, Cheska stuffed a roll of socks down her
pants, gyrated her hips, and flexed her muscles. Ligaya clamped her
palm flat over Cheska’s mouth so Shane couldn’t hear their giggles.
This country has transformed them into teenaged girls. The place that
promised to move them forward into prosperity has taken them back-
ward into adolescence.
Even with Vero and Shane away, Ligaya feels that Cheska’s pres-
ence in the house is a transgression. Cheska is not Shane’s friend,
and this is Shane’s house. Still, Ligaya puts a mattress on the floor
of the sitting room, by Shane’s weights, and invites Cheska to stay
overnight. “Cheska will be our secret,” she says to Eliot and Jamal.
“Part of the Philippines game.” Cheska looks much like Ligaya, could
be a younger sister, but Cheska smiles more than Ligaya does. Cheska
eats more too and talks more. Cheska does everything more. “Eliot
and Jamal will not tell,” Ligaya assures her. “They know this word,
sumbungero.” Tattletale. “My boys are no tattletales.” Eliot and Jamal