Darren can hear the sound of footfalls in the next room. They must be his father’s—brisk, decisive. Every step comes down with the force of two men. Every step Darren’s father takes is a commitment.
Such hefty feet lack the control necessary to stop from thumping whenever they move across the boxy area of their home. Darren gets out of bed and tries to feel out the route of his father’s movement.
Thump, thump. The thumping stops. Darren believes his father is in the kitchen. He carries himself to the door to take a peek. His own feet are nimble by comparison, careful. He doesn’t want to disturb anybody else.
In the cot that neighbors Darren’s, Big Baby Theo lies still as a stone, heavy sleeper that he is. His bigness is, in some ways, what makes him his father’s child. Born two weeks after expected delivery, Theo was nearly twice as large as all the other babies in the nursery. Darren remembers what it was like to watch his brother in the undersized plastic box, to hear the passersby suggest there was no need to incubate grown kids. Darren told one of them that they were wrong, that Big Baby Theo was indeed newborn and had every right to be there. Once he had said that—defending his brother’s place in the world—Darren felt like he knew what it meant to be older than someone else.
Down the hall, the kitchen light goes on.
“… didn’t know what caused it,” his dad is saying. He finally appears past the doorway to the kitchen, pulling out one of the dining set chairs so that he can put on his shoes.
“Well, how long ago did they say it started?” asks Darren’s mother softly, unseen. Darren imagines the way his mother must be standing there in the kitchen. Arms crossed, trying as much as she can to stop her head from falling forward.
“The firefighters arrived about an hour ago, and they’re still working to put it out.”
Darren’s mother lets out a sigh. “What are you even going to do there?”
Darren’s father ties the laces on his second shoe, the exact same way he’s taught his son to do it. Over, under, loop-de-loop.
“I don’t know,” he says, shaking his head dismissively. When he stands up, he adds, “Whatever I can to help.”
Darren’s mom appears through the kitchen doorway now, standing exactly the way that Darren imagined. His father pulls himself close to her and whispers something small to her face. It must be important, Darren figures. When you say things that small, it must be important. His father kisses her, turns and heads down the other corridor out of the kitchen. A door closes, and Darren’s mother stays frozen to the spot for a few more seconds, long enough that she can be sure he’s gone.
Halfway back down the hall, she realizes that she’d forgotten to switch off the kitchen light. It’s when she looks up that her eyes meet Darren’s, peering through the sliver of space in his bedroom door.
◆
Annette has been wearing her hair short ever since they moved to the apartment. Not much shorter than the moms of Darren’s friends, she thinks, but at one in the morning, she finds it hard to recall who among them has shorter hair than hers.
Before Theodore was born, her hair was longer than ever, falling past her shoulders. Something about the intensity of the labor he’d put her through made her want to change part of herself. She didn’t know why she felt that way or what kind of change was needed, but hair seemed like the biggest and easiest thing. It was never a feeling she had when Darren was born, she remembered thinking as locks of her straight, brown-black hair dropped to the parlor floor. In some ways, the newness of the feeling frightens her as much as—if not more than—the memory of Theo’s birth does.
Still, her second born is proving to be less troublesome than she expected, largely because Darren has set himself to the role of big brother so wonderfully. Whenever she gets up thinking she can hear a late-night cry, she goes to the boys’ room and sees that Darren is already standing over the baby’s bed, Theo no longer crying.
She puts a mug of warm milk in front of her eldest son, sitting it down on a sturdy wooden coaster inlaid with cork. She takes her usual seat, which is around the corner of the table from where Darren is sitting, and that’s how Darren comes to realize that he’s not in his usual place. This is the head of the table, where Darren’s father sits. Without him there, everything feels different and dizzy. Darren steadies himself by watching the milk turn still, the ripples receding into a blank, noiseless surface.
“Were you having bad dreams again?” his mother asks.
“No,” Darren answers.
“So it was Dad who woke you up.” She says this matter-of-factly, not disappointed or upset. From the moment her husband pulled himself away from her, she had been asking herself the same thing over and over, a question whose answer was terribly slow in coming: what more could she do to protect her boys? It wasn’t a matter of when or whether her husband would return, but if—if Annette could imagine a world in which she was the only parent of her sons.
Annette’s own father had died when she was still too young to know him. She was the sole child raised by her mother, which is why she feels confident taking the position that it is easier to be raised by your mother if you are a girl. Of course, they had their share of fights. No upbringing is ever free of problems, but the logic behind her experience nevertheless felt easier to follow than that of the shared life she has been forcing herself to daydream for Theo and Darren.
It always comes back to whether what happened can happen again. It wasn’t long after Theo was born, when she nearly died herself. She remembers that horrible night so well—the moment her husband jumped up and reached for the bolo as he raced out of their room, the slow minute in which she had frozen up, one hand clinging to the edge of the mattress, all before a voice in her head ordered her to find her babies. It is all in the past, she knows very well, but sometimes she becomes conscious of the fact that she was still so slow to act on what she knew was the obvious thing to do. And even now, letting her husband go that night, it was happening again, wasn’t it? She could’ve stopped him. She knew that there was nothing he could do to get the fire to stop, so how did she let that happen?
“Where did he go?”
“Someone called to let him know that there was smoke coming from lolo and lola’s house. The firemen are there already, but he went over anyway.” This she says even more matter-of-factly now, to the point of being dry, which Darren reads as a sign of doubt. Not about the fire, he’s sure. The windows of both bedrooms faced the part of the city where Darren’s family home had been built. She tells him that as soon as he got up from bed, Darren’s father pulled the curtains to find a smoke trail going all the way up from one of the valleys, its underside lit by the sleeping city’s lights.
“He’s going to do something stupid,” she finally says.
“What do you mean?”
“He thinks he’s going to help, but they know what they’re doing. They’re the fire department. They train for that kind of thing, they don’t need his help. What’s he going to do? He’s just gonna get in the way.”
Darren tries not to look at his mother’s eyes, ashamed and startled at the same time. He has never heard her talk about his father this way. He recognizes her tone as the one she reserves for other kinds of people, the ones she doesn’t like—one of her ‘unthinking’ officemates, for example.
“Maybe he wants to guide them since he grew up there,” says Darren, conscious of himself that he must defend his father to his mother. His cheeks burn, and, in the silence that comes after, Darren looks down at the mug intently, picks it up with both hands, and sips loud enough to break her train of thought.
At once, Annette is overcome with the feeling of wanting to take back everything she’s said and done, even serving Darren the milk. She watches her son and thinks: he should be asleep by now. She should’ve just put him back to sleep. He’s up so often that it must be affecting him. She repeats this to herself over and over, until she realizes that it is happening again—she is trapped in the frozen minute, waiting for the voice to kick in and tell her what to do.
◆
A year ago, when they were living in their Lahug house, a man had broken Darren’s window while he was asleep and climbed into his room. Theo had just come home from the hospital when it happened. The intruder probably didn’t even know which room he was coming in through, just picked whichever window didn’t seem to lead directly into the master’s bedroom, took a rock, then smash.
Darren was too scared to scream. He sat up in bed, and he and the intruder shared a long look at each other in the total dark before Darren’s dad came running in with a bolo knife. He whacked the intruder with the flat side, the two then struggling for a good few minutes in Darren’s room. Darren obeyed the instinct telling him to get under his bed instead of running to his mom, wherever she was. He waited and watched the two pairs of feet change places over and over and over again. There was a splatter on the floor, its color indistinguishable in the dark. And then the fight was over. The intruder slumped down to the floor, unconscious, his body facing away from Darren.
Darren couldn’t help thinking that the intruder was trying to trick him. He worried that if he moved, the body would move too.
They moved to the apartment not long after that. Theo would be too young to remember anything of the house they used to live in. As for Darren, Darren was unsure what became of the intruder. He knew only that he’d been injured in the fight and was arrested, but any other mention of him seemed to vanish from the family history. It was as if they’d only moved to the apartment for a change of scene, not security. Darren’s mom started cutting her hair then, Big Theo started getting bigger, and no one remembered to talk to Darren about what had happened that night.
◆
“Why didn’t we ever live there?” Darren asks as he waits for his mother to finish washing up. “In lolo and lola’s house. Nobody was living there when we moved to the house in Lahug. Or when we had to leave it.”
She gives Darren a few possible reasons. She tells him that maybe his father wanted to rent it out, leave it available in case there was a chance for income. She tells him that he could’ve been tired of living there, having spent all of his childhood growing up in that house anyway. What she doesn’t think to tell him is a story that Darren’s father had told her when they were dating, years before Darren was born.
Darren’s father had killed his brother in the womb. That was the harsh way of putting it. What his parents actually told him was that they were expecting two children and ended up having just the one. Once when he was six, he asked his papa if he really killed his brother, and his papa sat him down in front of a short, stout candle and said, “You were each no bigger than that tongue of flame. If it suddenly went out now, would it be your fault that it did? Maybe rain would fall on the candle. Maybe the wind blew it out.”
Just then, the flame wavered and blazed back, filling Darren’s father with the great urge to purse his lips and blow. He did not say anything of it, neither of the feeling or what he feared. It was the timing of that flicker, how precise it was, that made his papa’s analogy suddenly so terrifying. It seemed to react to them both, Darren’s father thought, and the prospect of that kindled in the mind of Darren’s father for many years.
For him, the flame was what was left of his little baby brother. Some part of his soul had followed Darren’s father out of the womb and embedded itself now in every flame he could find. How it took six years for his lost brother to reveal himself was less bewildering than the question of what took him so long to notice him. From then on, whenever he chanced upon a light that danced in the dark, he felt that his brother was still there. Soon Darren’s father started stealing candles from the cupboard, and hid them in his room, lighting it whenever he needed to. Sometimes he talked to the flame, sometimes he brought it gifts. One morning, after Darren’s father had come back from a trip that took him and his parents to Bicol, he presented the flame with a stone he found at the foot of the Mayon Volcano, one that was uncannily shaped like a heart. Darren’s father told the flame that it must’ve been his heart, because didn’t stones come out of volcanoes and weren’t volcanoes the places where fires were the strongest? He hid the stone with the stolen candles, promising to keep it safe, behind a loose piece of wood in the floor of his bedroom.
Part of what made it easy for him to believe all of this, even after some time had passed since he first made the discovery, was that it gave him some reason to feel like he could care for something smaller than himself. In the fire, he could protect his little sibling from the winds and the rain, though there was not much that his brother could do for him in return.
Once, when Darren’s father was eight, his mama and papa invited over some neighbors who were colleagues in the hospital. Darren’s father dreaded their visit because they had two sons who were about the same age as him but both much bigger. He was secretly scared of them, but they knew that.
Their family home was built up atop a hill. He and the two boys were out in the backyard while the parents were up in the dining room enjoying their beverages and conversation. One of the boys, who was called Alvin, asked if he had ever been down the slope to see what was there. They knew there was some kind of cave or enclosure, because their host had mentioned it during the meal. But Darren’s father never ventured there himself, on account of the steepness.
“I heard there was a cave monster down there,” the other boy, Aaron, said.
“I heard that’s where Yamashita put his treasure!” Alvin answered.
“That can’t be true,” Darren’s father said. “Yamashita never even came here.”
“How would you know if you haven’t seen it yet, Petey? You haven’t seen it yet, have you?”
Darren’s father shook his head, fearing what would happen next. The clouds hung thick overhead, and the breezes seemed to push him closer to the edge of the slope. Standing there, it was even steeper than he thought. Darren’s father wished in the moment that his brother could be more than a tongue of flame, standing with him rather than rooted to a wick.
“See for yourself!” the boys shouted. They put their hands out and kept moving until he fell himself slipping down the slope. Gravity took effect, and his body raced to the bottom as the boys yelled and cheered.
When Darren’s father opened his eyes again, he saw that his shoulders had survived the fall intact. There was a stinging pain in one of them, like something had gone straight through it. He dusted off some leaves and mud that clung onto his clothes, and, turning, saw the mouth of the cave.
The rain started falling in huge drops to the bottom of the hill. Instinctively, Darren’s father hurried into the narrow stone opening, and kept going until the light could scarcely penetrate where he stood. He could no longer tell if his eyes were open or closed. In the dark, he found himself wishing that the cave would shut, swallow him up right at that very moment, so that he’d never have to explain to anyone how he ended up falling there in the first place.
◆
Darren lies in bed, unable to sleep as he watches Big Baby Theo in his cot. Theo’s practically outgrown it, although their family had only bought the cot earlier that year. It makes Darren wonder how much the phrase “big brother” will matter in the years to come—if Theo will ever outgrow Darren, if Darren will have time to catch up—as if size were the only thing that separated elders from the young.
He’s still half-awake when he hears voices in the corridor. He tries opening his eyes wider. The first thing he sees is the early morning trying to wrap itself around the window shade.
The conversation is indistinct, but he can make out certain words—happened, falling, huge, hit, wait don’t—!
The door to their bedroom opens. A smell fills the room and the smoke bothers Darren out of drowsiness. Some roasted thing has just entered, trailed by their mother worrying aloud that the smell will hurt the baby’s lungs somehow. Darren turns and sees that the remarkably frightening thing that has just walked in is his father, bathed head-to-toe in ash. His body looks like it is still draped in all the shadows of night. He’s smiling like crazy as he takes a seat at the edge of Darren’s bedside. The only part of him that isn’t covered in soot is a bright gash on his forehead, the flesh no longer bleeding but tender and likely to scar. Darren sees that his father has something clenched in his hand, the fingers held together so tightly, Darren for a moment thinks that nothing will never open them again. Does he think the fire still encloses him? No matter. He must protect its contents, no matter what the cost.
Darren’s ash-heap of a father leans close to him on the bed. Darren will remember this face for the rest of his life, will remember it every time he is asked who his role models are, will remember when he holds his son for the first time.
“Hey, buddy…” his father whispers, “buddy, look what I found.”
The fingers finally loosen before they reach Darren’s face. It was hard to make out what the thing was, if not for its shape. What else could Darren say sat there in the palm of his father’s hand, but a glazed and long forgotten, eerily human heart?