Prologue
Maxima in the dark. Half-lit by a Virgin Mary night-light and the glow of a screen saver, a slow-motion sweep of stars and planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Earth. Dressed in denim cutoffs and a Mickey Mouse tee, she doesn’t shiver, despite her wide-open bedroom window and the cold night beyond. She sits at the foot of her bed, cleaning her nails with the tip of a switchblade. “May bakas ka bang nakikita sa aking mukha?” she sings. “Masdan mo ang aking mata.” Like all her favorite Filipino love songs, this one is about heartbreak.
An alarm goes off. The digital clock glows red—10:10 p.m. She closes the switchblade.
She stands and stretches, takes quick jabs at the air—one-two, one-two, one-two—then flips on the desk lamp and sits, turns on the ball-shaped webcam atop her monitor. A tap to the space bar and the galaxy vanishes; now her face fills the screen. Using it as a mirror, she puts on maroon lipstick and dabs with a Kleenex, smiles wide to check her teeth. She undoes her ponytail and shakes out her hair, a long black wave, then turns her face side to side, searching for her best angle. She could easily pass for thirty but is somewhere in her fifties; her true age, she swears, is a mystery, even to herself. Her parents, long since dead, kept no birth certificate; the grandmother who took her in never bothered to learn her actual birthday.
Eyes closed and fingertips on the keyboard, she whispers to herself, so softly that a person standing next to her would have no hope of knowing what she says. She takes a deep and slow breath, opens her eyes, types and clicks until another browser window opens.
There is a man on the screen.
“My love,” he says.
“No,” she says. “In Tagalog.”
“Sorry. Hello, mahal.”
“That’s better.” She blows him a kiss.
“Oh, mahal, please don’t tease. It’s been a lousy few days.”
She leans into the screen. “Ano ba? What happened, Henry?”
“Where to start.” He removes his glasses, the stubbly flab of his cheeks moving up and down as he rubs his temples. He pours a shot of Jack Daniel’s into a coffee mug and recounts his terrible week—more layoffs at the plant and all the guys blame him, his ex-wife trashed the Miami time-share but won’t pay for repairs, his Benz is still in the shop and the best rental he could get is a three-year-old Camry, and just today an invitation to his high school reunion—“My freaking fortieth!” he says—arrived in the mail. “But the real downer”—he gulps the whiskey—“is the weather. End of spring and I’m still shoveling snow.”
“Snow, snow, snowy snowy snow,” she sings in a made-up tune. She puts her elbows on the desk, rests her chin on clasped hands. “My whole life, I never see snow.”
“Come to America. To North Dakota.”
“One day. If God is good.”
“God is always good.” He pours another shot, doesn’t drink. “Come closer. I want your face to fill my screen.”
She leans into the webcam, so close she could kiss it. He says she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.
These past three weeks of talking online, he says, are the best he’s had in years. A twice-divorced balding white guy on the edge of sixty doesn’t hope for much, but when he found her profile on Good Catholic Filipinas and saw that her favorite food was sweet-n-sour chicken, that her favorite singer was Shania Twain, and that her lifelong dream was “to live in joy with a good man in God’s country,” he convinced himself to send her a message. “It’s silly to reminisce,” he says, “but life before you seems so long ago. I didn’t realize how lonely I was.”
“I was lonely too,” she says.
“And I think that maybe, well, probably, that I might be”—he takes a deep breath, takes the shot—“falling in love with you.”
She pulls away from the screen.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Too much, too soon?”
She shakes her head. “Not too soon, mahal. I think, maybe, that I am falling in love, too.”
“With . . . me?”
She laughs. “Yes, with you. Tanga!”
“Tanga?”
“It means ‘stupid.’”
He lets out a breath, slaps his chest twice. “My heart. It’s racing.”
“‘Heart.’ In Tagalog, puso.”
“Puso.” He writes the word down. “That means ‘heart.’ Got it.”
“Soon, you’ll speak Tagalog. Then you can visit me in the Philippines, di ba?”
“Or you visit me first. Maybe you can be my date to the reunion?” He sets the scene: He enters his high school gym to the tune of his old prom song, “We’ve Only Just Begun” by the Carpenters, and though he hasn’t aged as well as his classmates, there’s no question that he has the sexiest, most gorgeous woman in the room on his arm. The other women are jealous of her, the men envious of him, and the bullies from his freshman year just stand to the side, giving him the thumbs-up. “And the whole night,” he says, “you and I just dance.”
He leans into his webcam. His whole head seems to inflate on Maxima’s screen. “When can we meet?”
“Philippines to America,” she sighs, “not so easy trip.” The lines in Manila for passports and visas take hours, she says, sometimes days (that’s just to apply), and never mind the near-zero chances of government approval. Their best hope for being together is to pray, to keep faith in God, and to wait. “And when I come to North Dakota,” she says, “will you show me the snow?”
“Count on it.”
“Okay. But one condition only: I don’t shovel.”
He laughs, which makes her laugh, harder and harder until she’s hunched over, laughter becoming gasps for air. “Mahal,” he says, “you okay?” She shakes her head, takes a breath and says it’s nothing, then keels over again.
“It’s definitely not nothing,” he says. “What’s wrong?”
She looks straight at the camera. “I’m hurt.”
“Hurt? Hurt where?”
She clears her throat, takes a breath. “Don’t worry, Henry. It’s nothing, okay?”
“Stop saying that. Just tell me.”
She looks at him for a moment, as though wondering if he can be trusted with something as private as pain. “If that’s what you want, mahal”—she stands up—“then okay.” She lifts her shirt slowly, adjusting the camera to make sure he sees, then turns in a slow circle to reveal a wound, a crusty gash that spans from the top of her hip to the middle of her abdomen. She explains: It happened in the typhoon two months before. A snap of bamboo, sharp as a spear, sliced across her body in the high-velocity winds. “I lost so much blood,” she says. “But I’m thinking, okay lang, it’s just a cut, bahala na. Pero now, I have an infection.” Her own grandmother, she tells him, died from an infected cut, but God’s good grace will keep her alive, she’s sure of it.
She lowers her shirt and sits. “But every day it hurts.”
“What can I do? How can I help?” He slumps in his chair. “I hate this. I hate being so far from you.” Before she can speak, he says that maybe the day to meet should come sooner than later; what if this is God and the universe telling them that he should be the one to fly to her and, depending on the current round-trip airfare from Grand Forks to Manila, now is the time to come together? But Maxima says no and promises him that there’s a better day ahead for them to meet, one when she is healthy and strong. For now, all she needs are his love, faith, and prayers. Nothing else.