smell of stale tequila emanating from their unmade bed, and com-
mands herself not to cry.
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CHAPTER FOUR
Ligaya rises early on Christmas. Madam Poon has given
her most of the day off, but still Ligaya must prepare the congee
and finish the cleaning before she leaves the apartment. Because
she hopes to be gone by the time the family wakes, she set her
phone alarm for two hours before sunrise and placed it right
under her mattress where only she will hear its beep.
She slides on heavy socks and walks through the small apart-
ment on her tiptoes, inching cupboard doors open to avoid the
creak. She lays two towels out on the counter—one on top of
the other—and places pots and cooking dishes on that cushion so
they don’t clank and disturb the Poons. She commands her body
to be light. She will be a spirit, airy enough to walk through walls.
More than on any other day, Ligaya makes no noise. She has no
desire to be present, even on the outskirts, for the Poon family
Christmas.
Especially not on the outskirts.
Mister Poon came home last night. Ligaya has become so
accustomed to looking at the floor that he had to bow his head
to meet her eyes. She felt childish, as if she’d deliberately hidden
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them from him, a little girl curling into her mother’s skirts. For
him, she lifted her eyes and nodded, ever so slightly.
“Hello, Ligaya. You’ve had a good week, I trust.”
Just that, the three fat syllables of her name in his mouth, warmed
her to him, but as soon as she felt the unfamiliar stretch of a smile,
she stepped away and dropped her gaze, studying her brown house
slippers.
Mister Poon brought Ligaya a small wrapped present. He held it
out for her to see, a square of tissue paper the colour of mango, and
then placed it under the small tree with the other gifts. He will want
her to open that present this morning.
And Madam Poon? She will want Ligaya gone. Ligaya cannot pre-
tend, even to herself, that she does not understand that desire.
She fingers the mango paper before turning away from the small
package. Nobody has given Ligaya a present since she left home. The
morning of her departure, Pedro sent Totoy toddling over with a pile
of sliced coconut in the tiny cup of his palms. Pedro had climbed the
coconut tree himself. Ligaya watched from the porch steps, the mus-
cles of his bare brown back glistening in the sun. But Ligaya will not
think of them—not of Pedro, not of Nene, not of Totoy—not on this
day of all days. She turns to her work.
As she moves the pot of congee off the hotplate, she eyes the
small plastic Christmas tree on the window sill. Even in the near
dark, she can pick out her little square of mango, but she will leave
for Christmas mass without Mister Poon’s present. If she acciden-
tally wakes Madam, Ligaya fears she will find herself gutting fish and
scrubbing floors for Christmas day.
She has other plans. She will wear her one dress with formal shoes
and go to the church on Caine Road for the Tagalog mass, where
she will meet Corazon, her cousin from Batangas. Afterward, Centre
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Street will be thick with Filipina nannies, Tagalog words bubbling up
and rising to the skies. On this day, the streets of Hong Kong belong
to them.
Ligaya must be back to the Poons by dinner, to clean the dishes,
bathe Hui, and then lie with him, holding his chubby body close to
her chest until he falls asleep. But now, dinner feels so far away—first
Tagalog.
Corazon will gamble, getting playing cards from the ate at Kabayan.
Ate, they call her, “big sister,” the same name they use for all the old
Filipina women. They don’t know her real name. Corazon will lift
each tab, hoping for a straight flush or a full house to buy her way
home. Ligaya doesn’t dare purchase playing cards. Madam Poon has
warned her: “Gambling is illegal in Hong Kong!” But Madam Poon
herself bets on everything. She bets on mahjong games, on whether
a certain street cat will survive the birth of her kittens, on how long
it will take a fly to walk up a wall. Madam Poon bets on her own life:
if a hearse passes, she bets she will soon die. If she sees a car full of
nuns, she bets the nuns will save her. The skinny witch fills her days
with bets. But Madam Poon says Ligaya must not gamble, and Ligaya
does not wish to discover what will happen if she disobeys. Ligaya
will sit with Corazon, who hides her poker cards under a blanket in
her lap, her body falling into a fuller slouch of disappointment with
each newly opened tab.
Afterward, they will go back into the Filipino store. Ate will think
they want more cards and reach for the hidden box under her till as
she always does. But Ligaya and Corazon will wave her off and smile
toward the food—for Christmas, they will treat themselves to pancit
and chicken adobo, eating from the heaping containers in the streets,
huddled together against the damp December air. Ate, so small that
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only her head and shoulders are visible above the counter and so old
that she curls in on herself like a bloated earthworm, will pile a few
extra noodles into their boxes today.
Ligaya imagines herself later today, her belly full and her head
leaning into Corazon’s shoulder, their hands on each other’s knees,
wrapped in the comfort of their own language. Eager to see faces
from home, Ligaya gives one last sweep of the floor, sets the broom
in the closet next to her mattress, and grabs an umbrella. She lets out
her breath as she slips into the hallway of the high rise, gently closing
the door on the smell of sticky rice.
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CHAPTER FIVE
Sometimes Vero sneaks one of Shane’s Percocet pills
to add a pleasant fuzziness to her morning. Other days, she takes
two and, now that she’s no longer nursing, pours just a few drops of
Baileys into her morning coffee.
Today, she meets Joss for a morning jog instead. There’s no snow
this January; the ground is frozen hard but it’s bone dry, perfect for
running. Vero needs to be home in time for Shane to be at the phar-
macy by nine, so she and Joss often run in deep darkness through the
worst of the winter. Their planned route ends with a torturous climb
up Cardiac Hill to Joss’s house, where Ian meets them with water
and espresso and then drives Vero home on his way to work. Usually,
Joss starts running right after they say their quick hellos, leaving Vero
straining to keep up. Today, though, Joss hesitates, puts a mittened
hand on Vero’s arm.
Although Joss was raised by Buddhists, she never calls herself one.
“I’m interested in many religions,” she says. “I take a bite from each.”
Vero imagines Joss penning a book one day: World Religion: The All-
You-Can-Eat Smorgasbord. Joss insists she doesn’t “self-identify” as
Buddhist, but when people describe her, they never fail to mention
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the Buddhist parents. Looking into Joss’s eyes is a hit of Valium for
Vero. This morning, Joss’s golden curls are pushed up under a big wool
toque and a balaclava covers her full lips, protecting her face from the
cold. But still: the eyes. Anyone who knows Joss would recognize her
instantly, even with the rest of her face under cover.
At first, Joss says nothing with her mitten on Vero’s sleeve. She has
a habit of pausing before she speaks. This time, Joss is slower than
usual with her words, standing there on the cold corner, a mitten on
Vero’s arm, and only her eyes showing.
“You okay?” That’s all she finally says.
Vero nods.
“Let’s take the easy route this morning.” Joss runs her mitten to
Vero’s elbow and then to her wrist, gives her hand a squeeze before
letting go. “Let’s be kind to ourselves.”
Maybe even Joss can’t find wisdom before sun-up.
◊◊◊
By late afternoon, the air is still cold enough to sting Vero’s throat,
but the sun warms her face and casts a beautiful glow across the treed
hills to the west of Sprucedale. She wishes Joss were here now with
her and Jamal and Eliot, but Joss’s boys are too old for the playground.
“Look at the forest! E, come see! JJ-Bean, look!” Vero’s enthusiasm
isn’t her usual plastic-mother charade ( Oooooh! Tree! Look! ). This time,
that hint of awe is real. After Mexico, Vero sunk into a slump so
deep that she rarely looked up to take in the scene around her. Now
the grand beauty of the thickly forested hills assaults her, as it does
when Sprucedale’s been socked in for days and the sun finally appears,
the clouds lifting. This time, the clouds are inside her. Depression
isn’t heavy, as she’d imagined it. Rather, she’s light, a hot-air balloon
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floating high above her own life, all of it miniscule and irrelevant.
How could any of it possibly matter? “Aren’t the trees so beautiful, Eliot?
Jamal? Just like a postcard.” Vero forces herself to focus on the beauty,
suck it in as though her eyeballs are hungry, feel it inside her full and
solid.
But Eliot and Jamal don’t care about postcards. They know no other
view. They expect no less. Eliot runs for the slides, JJ-Bean toddling
full speed after him.
The chill air must be enough to dissuade most parents from an
evening outdoors; the playground is nearly empty. Normally, kids
coat the park equipment like ants swarming a puddle of Coke, and
Filipina nannies circle the perimeter, giggling and texting while dare-
devil children perform death-defying stunts on the monkey bars.
“Someone’s going to die,” Vero once charged, dragging a particu-
larly wild boy by the wrist and intruding on the Filipina cluster. “Can
one of you watch him before he breaks his neck?!” One nanny—Vero
couldn’t distinguish one from the other—reached for the boy, as all of
the women’s faces went blank. You get close, we’re not real.
“You overreact,” Shane told her when she complained that the kids
ran wild with no supervision. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
So Vero told him what could happen—kids torn in two by the semis
blazing down the nearby highway, brains smeared on windshields,
organs ripped open; toddlers floating face-down in the adjacent duck
pond, stomachs distended; hide-and-seekers hiding so well that
nobody finds them until they start to smell. “And that’s not even the
worst,” she said. “You don’t want to think about the worst.”
This afternoon, though, only one other kid plays on the park equip-
ment. Two parents sit on the far park bench, their attention deep
in the iPhones on their laps. Eliot runs traffic control on the jungle
gym. “No going up the slide,” he announces, “just going down.” He
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swings his arms in serious, grand gestures, the lift at the corners of
his mouth betraying his enthusiasm for a well-enforced rule, as long
as he gets to be the enforcer. “Up this way.” He points. “Down that
way. I’m the one who makes up the rules.” Shane must’ve said that to
him as a joke once: “Who declared you the person to make up all the rules?
You think you’re the boss? ” Pragmatic little Eliot would take that as an
invitation. “Why, yes. Yes, that’s exactly who I am. The boss who makes up
all the rules. ”
Life flows most smoothly when Jamal accepts Eliot’s role as
enforcer, which he’s doing today, trudging along behind his big
brother, as they crawl across the sliver-ridden bridge, climb over the
rusty train that Vero calls “the Tetanus Express,” swing up the climb-
ing wall meant for much bigger kids, and end right back at Vero’s feet.
“We flew to the North Pole, Mommy! Hunting for polar bears.” So
much of the adventure takes place in their minds. Vero wonders if the
same could said about the lives of adults.
The sun dips into the trees covering the big-bellied hills, and Vero
pulls her sweater tight around her shoulders. It’s barely past four, and
already the sun is falling. Traffic roars by on the highway, a tall wire
fence between them and it. Vero wonders where they’re all in such a
hurry to get to. She can’t think of anywhere she’d like to go, anything
she’d like to do. She wonders what used to give her pleasure.
Shane says she’s just tired. She’s shuffled through his deck of nanny
profiles, wondering if these mug shots really might, as Shane claims,
offer the portal to a blissful, easy future. She tries to imagine each one
of these women on a collision course with the Schoeman family. Their
dark, smooth complexions speak of youth and their big round eyes of
innocence. She can’t be responsible for exposing even one of them to
the likes of Drunkle Vince.
Vero hasn’t even told Joss she’s been looking at nanny profiles. She’s
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afraid Joss will think she’s hiring someone else to raise her children.
Or exploiting vulnerable foreign workers. Or maybe Vero simply
thinks that saying it aloud will make it happen, and she’s not ready.
The dad across the park on the bench looks up from his iPhone,
glancing at Vero and the boys. She smiles his way, but he drops his
head back to his lap. The woman beside him wears a familiar vacant
expression. Vero spends enough tim
e with new mothers that she barely
notices. They’ve all left their brains at home in the dryers. They’re
bumping around in there like old shoes fluffing up the down duvets.
The sunset turns the sky a brilliant pumpkin orange, especially stun-
ning this evening. The colour always shows best when the weather is
dry, the light refracting through airborne dust of the local coal mine.
The couple on the bench shows no interest in the sky. They must be
the parents of the bigger boy, an eight- or nine-year-old, giant next
to Vero’s kids. He wears a black ball cap with the Sprucedale city
motto— Where the Living Is Good— embroidered in red. He climbs up
the slide, his long legs conquering the slope in just two steps.
“Don’t,” Vero says, the command loud and deep. Dog-training
manuals claim that’s the surest way of encouraging obedience.
The boy stops to look at her, but says nothing.
“It’s against the rules, sweetie, to climb up the slide.” She lifts her
voice up out of her chest, loses the growl. “We don’t want you to get
hurt, do we?” This boy is a son just like her boys. She fills her voice
with sugar.
But again, he just looks at Vero. He doesn’t roll his eyes. He doesn’t
smirk. He says nothing, betrays no response at all. It’s as if he can’t
hear Vero, as if an impenetrable shield has grown up between them.
He takes another step up the slide.
Eliot and Jamal both watch Vero. She expects Eliot to get hyster-
ical, the way he does when people don’t follow his rules, closing his
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eyes and waving his hands, pounding his fists into his own thighs,
but he looks at Vero, and his face breaks into an impish grin she
doesn’t recognize. He takes a big step after the other boy. One step,
two steps—a look over his shoulder—three steps, four steps, right to
the top of the slide. He towers over Vero, glancing up at the big boy
close to his shoulder.
“Eliot!” Vero hears her own shrill voice. “No!” Someone has to
enforce the rules. The boy has to listen to Vero. It’s the natural order:
young people obey old people. “No walking up the slide,” she says
again, without the sugar. They could get hurt. “It’s the rule.” At the
bottom of the slide, Jamal scampers like a crab rolled on its back,