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When Jimmy called to tell her he was in a bus bound for Sagada, she had a flash of remembrance: towering trees holding up a green, glistening sky, raindrops sparkling down, the fragrance of smoldering charcoal and wood mingling with steam from rice, and a voice, soft and deep, calling her name.
The image filled her with such loneliness that she would have slumped down in a corner to cry then and there, but before she could do anything to make James feel guilty, he piped up, through the cellphone,
"Hon, I got to go. Doobi says we’re entering the first Point of No Signal."
Impotently, she sighed, "All right, love you." But he had hung up.
She stared at the phone in her hand and felt the urge to hurl it across the room. But depression was a less expensive emotion to wallow in, so she gulped her anger down with a tumbler-ful of water and geared herself up for a healthy bout of tears.
Only Mattie beat her to it. A fantastic, high-pitched wail erupted so suddenly from the crib that Lira flew back in a panic. The instant Mattie saw her, though, the infant quieted down and held up her pudgy arms.
"Tah-tah-tah," said baby Mattie, and for a minute Lira forgot all about James being in Sagada.
"What a spoiled little brat," she exclaimed as she lifted Mattie up and showered her with loud kisses. The baby laughed, kicking and wriggling in Lira’s arms. "Seven months and already so manipulative!"
The congee was cooking on the stove. Lira placed Mattie back in the crib, half-expecting her to start hollering again, but fortunately she was a normal baby, easily distracted and easy to please. In a moment, she had turned over on her tummy only to bend her head back to peer up at imagined patterns on the ceiling, expressing her wonder with discourses of tah-tah-tah.
Back in the kitchen, Lira peered into the rice pot and stirred. The rice had been soaked in water overnight, and in the boiling water the grains had bloomed swift and soft, blossoming into a perfect glutinous consistency. The scent of sinandomeng, wispy up the nostrils and almost minty in the throat—like the scent of trees and wood and drizzle. The memory of a voice. And James in Sagada.
She lowered the fire to its smallest blue and went back to Mattie’s crib, where the baby had wriggled her way to the corner where her toys were piled together with CD cases, brochures, chocolate foil wrappers, and other odds and ends that for some reason amused her. Lira watched absently as Mattie reached for one rattle after another, testing for music, and then started crumpling and un-crumpling a silver and green candy wrapper that glittered in the light, its cheap chocolate contents long gone.
Mattie wasn’t like the googoo-eyed, rosy babies of commercials at all. Her eyes were too small (like James’s), her skin too dark (like hers), her lips puckered from so much sucking, and she was bald as a bowling ball—ugly, really, if Lira was going to be frank about it. Lira had to wonder then whether it was Mattie’s ugly duckling quality that was so fascinating to watch.
She returned to the congee, switched off the stove, and transferred the sweet-smelling rice into one baby bowl and one adult bowl. She took out two boiled eggs from another pot, peeled off the crumbly shells, and placed one egg in each bowl. She mashed the hard-boiled yolk into Mattie’s bowl and set the rice-and-egg porridge down on the table to cool.
Returning to the crib, Lira found Mattie on her back, tah-tah-tah-ing, clapping her hands, which had become entangled in Lira’s old office ID tag. The other end of the cloth tag had found its way up the back of Mattie’s neck, threatening to snake its way around as Mattie continued her oblivious clapping and waving.
"Mattie, no!" she exclaimed, untangling Mattie, whose face crumpled into tears of indignation as Lira refused to return the tag. She wept and hollered despite Lira’s peace offerings of rattles and candy wrappers and Teddy bears and even her cellphone with its colorful flashing mechanisms—at which point Lira remembered that she had given Mattie the ID tag a couple of days ago in a similar attempt to calm her down. Lira picked her up and danced around the room twice to the tune of "I’m a Little Teapot," but Mattie continued to sob, as if stopping were an impossibility. Only when Lira sat down, lifted her shirt and touched Mattie’s cheek did the little baby accept the apology.
"Just hungry, but you sounded like you were being oppressed," Lira informed the infant suckling at her breast. In a few minutes the suckling stopped, as Mattie had fallen fast asleep.
