Apology by Jon Pineda (good novels to read .TXT) 📗

fact that she was mestiza. She had her grandfather Frank from Knoxville to thank for her straight nose, her hazel eyes.

“After you left, some evenings I would sit by the water and just listen for fish,” she said. “The startled ones surfacing. Splashing the moon into pieces. I would sit there and wait. The image always surprised me.”

“How could you do such a thing?” Manny asked.

She didn’t care that he would be confused by her story.

“I needed to see things come back together,” Fely said.

With that, she vanished.

Manny woke with the vague recollection that his son had been standing in front of him wearing a bright gold jersey. A number in the upper-right corner of the jersey, like one of the squares of his crossword puzzles, the emptiness of his son mocking him.

When Manny closed his eyes, he returned to Fely, but he had willed it this time.

“Do me a favor,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Don’t come back for me.”

“You don’t understand,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I had an opportunity to leave, and so I did. The money I made, I sent most of it home. My brother went to the university because of this money. My mother and father could finally make ends meet.”

“It would have happened without you,” she said and unfastened her hair.

He didn’t move.

He watched strands fall in long black lines. Blank music sheets, scores never written.

“When I was living in California for that brief time, no one would look at me,” he said. “My friends, yes, but on leave from the base, I would walk the streets downtown and most of the young pretty women I saw would never meet my eye.”

“You were thinking about me.”

“Yes.”

“You would see their passing reflections in the storefronts.”

“Yes, in the glass.”

“You would think you saw me and then would turn around, only to find that I wasn’t there. I was never there.”

“How did you do that?”

“What do you mean?”

“How could you appear and disappear that way?” he said.

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” she said.

It had not been a dream, though it had felt like one. Fely in his arms as they lay in the shallow boat and drifted out beyond the breakers. In the distance, they could hear faint explosions, and Manny knew his cousin Tranquilino and a gang of boys were throwing sticks of dynamite into the sea. Floating among the cluttered chunks of loosened coral was the occasional stunned fish, its yellow stripes blazing like flames on the water’s surface.

“He’s going to hurt himself,” Fely said, without looking at Manny. The silence on the water was a line of deep blue he could snag, even with the boat’s meager anchor, and pull to them.

“We should go back,” he said.

He thought he had seen a fin, triangular and dark.

“Why? The only things there are the same things. Your loud cousin. Your aunties’ wretched voices singing while they do their chores by the river.”

Manny laughed now.

“It’s terrible,” Fely said. “It’s a crime, really.”

“Where would we go then?”

She sat up, keeping one hand in his lap, and looked around. He wondered if she was aware of how close she was, how easily she could be seen. Back in town, she would have to lie to her family. She had been on a boat alone with Manny Serafino. Hindi, hindi. God, no.

She lay back against him, holding her arms out so that her fingers gripped the sides.

“I don’t care where we go,” she said, exasperated.

In the distance, another explosion.

“I can’t take you if you don’t tell me where,” he said.

She sighed. Her back pressed harder into him, her eyes softening. She sat up and turned around, grabbing the sides of the boat again, rocking this time.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“We’ll fake our deaths.”

“What?”

She said it again.

The boat dipped to one side and then slid back. The sloshing caused it to take on water. It was thirsty, wanting the ocean.

“Stop it,” he said.

“What’s wrong?” she said, laughing. “You’re a good swimmer. You can pull me to shore, can’t you? They’ll find the boat. They’ll assume we’re dead.”

Near the far edge of the island, they could see his cousin and the other boys coming around the bend. Before Manny could say anything else, she threw her weight in a jolt to one side. The boat dropped down and filled with a rush, as if a giant hand were pushing the gunwale toward the sea’s depths.

He and Fely both fell in.

The boat sprang back, righting itself, and then floated away. They both surfaced.

Manny frantically searched the water.

Fely laughed, squealing.

She was happy she had surprised him. He needed that.

“There’s a shark,” he said.

“Where?” she said. “I don’t think so.”

“Somewhere,” he said.

She swam over to him and put her arms around his neck. She whispered into his ear. He nodded, even though he was furious at her. Their boat had floated a good distance. He knew his cousin would spot it and bring it back.

The water was clear. She swam ahead of him. He watched her body, her legs noodling. He rose to take a breath. The shore was far away. He descended. She rose and he paused, floating underneath her, and watched how the cloth of her shirt grew undulant before she surfaced. From the spot where he was now, he could see sparkling lines ahead.

At first, he thought they were ghosts, shapes outlining swaths of silk-like material, shimmering purple and blue and white. Wedding dresses thrown into the sea. Floating in their emptiness. He thought he could see a processional in the way the shapes were lining up. He thought of the stories his lola had told him, ang mga aswang, evil spirits that roamed the islands, vampires and demons waiting to grab you at any moment.

Fely swam ahead of him again.

This time he chased her. He wanted to grab her legs and pull her back.

The shapes, he could see now, were of this world. Box jellyfish, fluffy and translucent. Fely had gone too close. In turning to