Project 17

5

Caleb was pretty much the same the next day: quiet but seething internally. Now that Lillian knew what was coming it no longer unnerved her, but she still tried her best to reach out, if only to break the monotonous day. During lunch, she took out a pack of Candy Stripe from her bag and slid it across the table to Caleb’s elbow.

“Thanks for buying me lunch yesterday,” Lillian said. “You don’t have to, you know. Your brother gave me a card. We could use it to buy merienda if you like.”

Silence for a minute or two.

“I used to be addicted to this,” Caleb said. He opened the pack and shared it with her.

That’s a start, Lillian thought.

“Do they still call them candy stripers?” Caleb asked. “The hospital volunteers?”

Lillian was a hospital volunteer once. “Yes. But I never wore the candy striper jumper.”

She waited for him to ask another question but he never did.

He was saving his questions for the next day, it turned out. “Do you live with your parents?” he asked from inside his room as Lillian sat on the chair in the hallway.

“No. I live on my own.”

“Where are your parents?”

Talking about her parents irked her. Caleb talked to her once in a blue moon, and it had to be about this. “They’re based in Ilocos, but I don’t know anymore. I divorced them when I turned sixteen.”

Lillian knew Caleb was going to ask why.

“He cheated on her,” she said. “He came home to us maybe twice a week? And my mother just shrugged it off, believing his lie about having to work extra hours. Once I saw him at the mall with his new girl. She was just a few years older than me. Even then my mother didn’t believe.”

It was the first time Lillian screamed in public. The girl was going to run away, but she dragged her and her father to the restaurant where she had planned to have dinner. “No, you’re not leaving now,” she told them, and made them squirm in their seats while she ate her sushi and shook in anger.

“After that, he promised to me that he won’t do it again. But how could you trust someone after that?”

“You get paranoid,” Caleb said. “You buy him a nice shirt for Father’s Day, and you start to wonder if he’ll wear it on a date with that girl, if he’ll say, I bought this instead of my son bought this.”

Lillian put down her phone.

“My brother and I didn’t legally divorce my parents but we left and never looked back,” Caleb said without turning around to face her. “We started from nothing, you know. My father worked as a welder, then a salesman. Sold everything he could. Even if he didn’t have much he gave money so my mother’s sisters could go to school. He sacrificed a lot, you know? Sometimes I wonder if he saw other women and took to the bottle because he thought he deserved it, after years of hard labor. Sometimes I wonder if maybe he did deserve it.”

“Maybe he should have just bought a goddamn yacht,” Lillian said, and Caleb shrugged.

 “I guess what hurt was he thought we weren’t enough.”

Lillian remembered how it hurt to think that her father had looked at her straight in the eye nearly every day and said that he had to stay at work. Her own father lied to her face. “Fuck him,” Lillian said, and Caleb nodded in solemn agreement.

After that the hours became easier to bear, but Caleb refused to volunteer any more information about himself or his brother. “Have you ever been married?” Lillian asked one time, and Caleb only shook his head. She tried to engage him by regaling him with stories about her past boyfriends, their quirks and why they left (worked at the city, went to school abroad, realized he’s gay), but Caleb remained silent.

On Friday, while Caleb slept in front of the TV, Lillian bit on a Candy Stripe and explored the house. If he was not going to share any more stories, then she’d look for the stories herself. She checked every nook and cranny in the rooms downstairs, but the most interesting thing she found was a print copy of the New Yorker, dated 2012, inside an old cabinet outside the washroom.

Caleb was still asleep. Lillian moved upstairs. The upstairs bathroom, which was right next door to Caleb’s room, has a bathtub with gold claws. She moved down the narrow corridor and bumped into a carton box.

She didn’t notice it on her first day because it was so dark. It looked like a collection of junk, the kind you throw into a box just to clear a room or a table. Coffee-stained mugs, broken pens, several notepads of various sizes, three empty card holders, a stapler, two broken tumblers from Starbucks. Paper clips, rubber bands, a slim volume titled The Feasibility of a Fully Mechanized Police Force, pencil stubs. Office junk.

There was a sketchpad included in the mess. She pulled it out and flipped through the pages. Industrial designs—a chair, a lamp, a table—followed by a remarkable, lifelike pencil sketch of Caleb laughing. At the bottom was a single word: Melancholy.

The next page showed a sketch of a man holding his face in his hands. Self-Portrait.

The sketchpad belonged to Paul.

It was as though she had seen them naked. Lillian placed the sketchpad back in the box, and waded through the other junk.

She found a rectangle of plastic, cracked, stained yellow with age. An ID card.

Abe Ruiz

VISITOR

0073

Northpoint-Pascual

* * *  *End of excerpt* * * *

Well, I hope that managed to whet your appetite. Project 17 (Visprint, 2013) is available in all major Philippine bookstores: Fully Booked, Bibliarch, Pandayan, National Book Store, Powerbooks, and Precious Pages Retail Outlets.

If you can't find the book, please inform the people behind the counter (or even Visprint on Facebook) so they would know to re-stock. Thank you for reading.