Episode 13: The Tape Keeps Running

Previously on the Chicken Chronicles... In Bulacan, at a house behind a church with a frangipani tree in the yard, Chester pressed play on Gregory Añonuevo's cassette tape. Gregory was Peping's cousin — the one who had disappeared in the nineties, the one who had been writing letters to a woman in Baguio for years without saying who she was. The tape ran in hiss and warble. At the end of it, just before the silence settled, Gregory's voice said two words: Anak ko. My child.

The Tape Keeps Running

The click of the tape reaching its end was the loudest thing in the room.

Henrietta had counted. Four minutes and forty-two seconds. She knew because she had been watching the second hand on Peping's wall clock — the only clock in the house, a yellow one with a rooster painted on the face, which seemed like either a coincidence or a sign — and she had watched it make four complete rotations and a little more, and for all of that time nobody had spoken, and Chester had not moved, and the photograph of Gregory Añonuevo at twenty-three was still in his hands.

She looked at his ears.

She didn't want to. She looked anyway.

They were the same ears.

"You should go to Vigan," Estrella said.

She was still in the sala, still in the monoblock chair, the untouched glass of water on the floor beside her. She had said the six words the way someone says a thing they have known for a long time and have been deciding whether to say.

"His last letter came from there," she said. "2004. A hostel. I don't think the hostel is still there — these places close, they get sold — but he mentioned the street. Calle Crisologo. He said there was a church he could see from his window."

She held out a bundle of letters, secured with a rubber band that had dried and cracked and been replaced at least once. Chester took them without looking up from the photograph.

"He wrote to you," Henrietta said.

"He wrote to everyone who stayed." Estrella folded her hands in her lap. "Gregory moved away, but he wrote."

Peping was in the doorway again. He had been in the doorway for most of the afternoon, Henrietta noticed — threshold man, occupier of in-between spaces.

"He looked for his father," Peping said. "His whole life. Their mother never told him who it was." He looked at Chester. "He would have been happy, knowing there was someone carrying the map."

Chester finally looked up. "How did you know about the map?"

Peping smiled — the first smile Henrietta had seen from him. "He described it in a letter. 1998. He said he was making something, just in case. For whoever came after."

The frangipani smelled sharp and sweet in the late afternoon, the white flowers trembling in the exhaust of a passing tricycle. Henrietta stood at the gate. Chester was beside her, the bundle of letters in one hand, the photograph in the other, the brass key in his pocket.

She waited.

"You don't have to go," she said.

"That's not what I'm thinking about."

"What are you thinking about?"

He looked at the frangipani. "If Gregory is my—" He stopped. Started again. "If the tape is what I think it is. Then who is the old woman in Baguio?"

Henrietta thought about the woman at the bell tower. The way she had looked at Chester. The way she had handed over the package without asking who he was, like she already knew.

"She was waiting for someone," Henrietta said.

"Yes."

"But not necessarily for his son."

"No." Chester finally put the photograph in his pocket, beside the key. "Maybe for his letter to arrive. Delivered by whoever found the map."

The tricycle turned the corner and disappeared. The frangipani went still.

"Maybe," Henrietta said. "Or maybe both."

She drove. This was notable; Chester always drove when they went anywhere together, ever since the incident with the parking structure in Makati that they had agreed, by mutual and unspoken consent, to never speak of again. Today she got in on the driver's side without discussion and Chester got in on the other side and she put the car in reverse and he didn't say anything about it.

The road north was clearer than the road south. The sky had gone to that specific shade of silver that happened in the hour before sunset, when the light stopped coming from any one direction.

"Nine hours to Vigan," she said. "More, if we stop."

"Mm."

"We should stop. You haven't eaten since Valenzuela."

"I'm not hungry."

"You're always hungry. That's — actually that's a character trait. It's in your character." She checked her mirrors. "When did you want to go?"

He was quiet. "Next week?" The word came out with a question mark on it, like he wasn't sure it was his to say.

"No," she said.

She took the north exit.

Chester turned. "What—"

"I put pandesal in the cooler before we left," she said. "Four pieces. There's also bottled water and the small peanut butter."

He stared at her. She kept her eyes on the road.

"You packed," he said.

"I prepared," she said. "There's a difference. Packing implies a bag. I used a cooler."

Five kilometers past the Tarlac exit, Chester's phone lit up on the dashboard.

The prefix was +63 77. Ilocos Sur.

He looked at it. It kept ringing. Henrietta reached over without asking and pressed the green button and put the phone on speaker.

"Hello?"

Silence. Then a voice — male, old, unhurried, the Ilocano accent pulling at certain vowels.

"Ibinigay niya sa iyo ang susi, hindi ba."

He gave you the key, didn't he.

Chester looked at Henrietta. She looked at the road.

The call went quiet.

Next week on the Chicken Chronicles: Chester won't tell Henrietta who the voice reminded him of. She drives the rest of the way in silence. They check into a pension in Vigan at two in the morning, and on the door of the room is a note, in Gregory's handwriting, dated 2004.