“Ate, it’s a chill ten-minute ride at most,” Mabel tried to reassure her over the phone as Mara huddled into the corner of her bench seat. “You’ll live.”
“Say that at my funeral, thanks.” Mara sighed dramatically. She leaned her forehead against the open window beside her. Her face desperately turned toward the sea, letting the weak breeze allay the dizziness that was threatening to overwhelm her with each rock of the boat. Inside, the fast craft was full of activity. Crew making sure the passengers were seated in the right places, porters who didn’t really have to be there getting PHP 50 per piece of luggage from the passengers who hired them,moreporters, and staff and passengers arguing about how the bags should be stacked up front, in a way that they were in the passengers’ view at all times.
Chaos, chaos.
“Anyway,” Mara continued, keeping her eyes on the calmer seas. “Are you still hiding from Mom and Dad?”
“You bet!” came Mabel’s overly cheery, sarcastic reply. “It’s all yelling and no communicating, and I thank god every day that I learned to drive in these insane streets so I can escape Mom and Dad creating more marriage counseling fodder.”
Mara laughed, mostly because Martin and Jasmine would never go to marriage counseling, even with their daughters’ urging. Another side effect of the three girls entering their thirties (or in various precipices of), was that very suddenly they were old enough to read between the lines of their parents’ arguments.
They could boil it down to this: waking up one day and realizing that the person you had been sleeping next to for the last thirty-something years wasn’t the same person you married. That you didn’t fully know or understand this new person, because you expected them to stay exactly the same. This resulted in a lot of yelling, lines being drawn, and three daughters playing unlicensed marriage counselor once a week. Mara was their particular favorite for this, the only daughter who didn’t snap at them for being unreasonable.
But as she was in a completely different group of islands at the moment (shout out to you, Visayas!), this left Mabel to be the one to say things like, “Why didn’t you tell her,” or “Maybe you could tell him,” or the classic, “Yes, that’s what we call communication.”
“I ran away to the mall because Mom had that‘I need to talk to you’look on her face,” Mabel explained. It wasn’t hard to hear the guilt laced in her tone. But by tacit agreement between the sisters, they made the decision to be firm with their boundaries, and that meant walking away from their parents sometimes. “And they wonder why we’re in no rush to get married!”
“Ikaw naman,” Mara chided her little sister. “Fighting is normal in a relationship, we know this.”
“Intheirrelationship,” Mabel corrected her. “We’re not supposed to be involved!”
Mara sighed. She’d had these conversations with her sisters about as many times as her parents blew up at each other. So there wasn’t really much she could say except, “Fair.”
“And yet we’re the ones who have to hear them yell at each other, commiserate when they complain about each other, and not be there at all when they make up!”
“Do youwantto be there when they make up?” Mara joked, and Mabel made a gagging noise in response.
But really, there was no need for her to explain any more, or for Mabel to rant any more, because they were sisters. And the great thing about having siblings with a group chat was that there was nobody else in the world who understood the phrase, “My parents are driving me up the wall,” more than them. They had the context, the language, the phrasing, the reassurances. Emotions waxed and waned like the tide. And Mara enjoyed that predictability of their relationships, as complex as it all was.
“You could always move out, Mabel,” Mara pointed out. “You don’t have to live at home.”
“Oh please.” Mabel snorted. “Inthiseconomy? We’re so fucked that I’m losing 40 percent of my income to a government who uses our money as a fun expense account. The salary I am paid is not equal to the amount of work that I put in to a company that doesn’t care about me, and I am expected to be able to afford my middle-class life on that? No.”
Facts. And it didn’t at all help that the supposed head of the government owed billions in taxes himself. It was a mess on all counts that, surprise, surprise, affected everyone. Both Mara and Mabel sighed. It was not a fun conversation for ten in the morning.
“It is what it is,” Mara told her sister. The best platitude she could give her at the moment. They knew there were worse things. But that didn’t change what it was—still pretty shitty.
“Isn’t it always. I’ll have brunch here at the mall and then do some errands before I go home. I’ll send updates on the group chat so Ate Marina knows, too.”
“Okay,” Mara said, the two of them promising to report their whereabouts later on in the chat.
“Rosplenda, Rosario and Rosemary” was a safe place online where the Barretto siblings could keep tabs on each other, talk about what restaurants were cool, share reels and discuss their dislike of Taylor Swift. There had been a recent debate on if David should be brought into the fold, but he stayed in a separate chat, now called, “Lady Whistledown’s Chika Room.”
She hung up just as the fast craft pulled away from the docks and the engines roared to life. Everything that rocked also started to vibrate, only magnifying Mara’s dizziness.
Ten minutes, she reminded herself, closing her eyes.It’s only going to take ten minutes.
She was pulled out of her own misery by the feeling of someone tugging her free hand. Someone small. She cracked an eye open and found herself holding hands with a small child. The child sat beside her on the bench seat, head facing forward, face mostly obscured by the cutest little checkered bucket hat crocheted with red and pink squares. Clutched in the child’s other hand was a very familiar-looking heart-shaped alien with tentacles. Why was it familiar?
The child turned their face toward Mara. Then the child smiled, and their entire face lit up, cheeks pressing up to the corners of their eyes. Mara’s heart felt like it was producing heart emojis out of cuteness. It was the kind of smile that could make any Grinch believe in Christmas.
“I’m being a good girl,” she announced.
“Uh, I guess you are,” said Mara, nodding. Although this child could tell her the sky was green and she would agree. She might be confused, but she did feel the strong urge to put this little girl in her pocket, she was so damn cute. “Hi.”
“Hi!” she said back, her little legs kicking under her. “Mama says you should hold hands on a boat.”
“That’s good advice.” Mara wondered how she could subtly ask this child if she was supervised. Because if she was not, then there was a high possibility that Mara was having heat stroke and imagining a ghost baby. “Um, your mama is…”Please don’t say a ghost.
