// 12 January 2018 - Forbes Park, Philippines //
On Friday morning, I skipped breakfast and visited Dad’s office located in the east wing of the house. I already sent a message to Yvonne that I was home, and to Mom too.
In the walls I saw my parents’ wedding photos and our childhood photos, including our family trip to Israel, France, and pilgrimage in Spain.
Dad, although a Buddhist, had adapted Mom’s Christian religion and Filipino tradition. Yvonne and I were baptized Catholics and had been living the Filipino way since we were a child.
On Dad’s wooden desk lies the family picture, taken near the blue waters of Santorini, Greece. It was a perfect picture. Was shot when Yvonne and I hadn’t reached the age of ten yet. When we were unaware of all the family cloaks-and-daggers.
Carefully, I touched each of Dad’s antique furnishings and found no traces of dust. I was glad that Betty, Annie’s mom and the oldest housemaid, had taken good care of everything.
Then I peeked at Dad’s mini library near the windows and went to pick a novel above the volumes of encyclopedia and self-help books.
Dad loved reading. As a child, I would often see him at the balcony with his spectacles drooping down his nose and a pile of fiction books before him, the likes of Stephen King’s and James Patterson’s.
Each time, when I arrived home from grade school and Dad arrived home earlier than me, he would ask me of how my day was and would invite me to the kitchen for a snack-time. He would sit me down and give me a small speech. About school. Business. And boys.
Yes, the boys. He said someday boys will look at me, and I laughed carelessly because at the time, at that burgeoning age of twelve, boys were already staring.
Dad would also laugh and explain the other meaning behind it. “Men will like you,” he said, his eyes filled with love but somehow worried. “It’s what men do,” he would add.
I was flattered but ashamed at the same time. Because boys in school were already doing it, their eyes afire as though they could melt me at any moment. Instead of preparing for exams, they were studying my body, my face, my thighs especially when my skirt was blown away by the rush of the late afternoon wind.
The boys didn’t bother me much. Instead, it was the girls, especially my then best-friend Jenny, who would lift an eyebrow each time, Mike, her crush, would follow me to the lady’s room during breaktime.
Mike was my first puppy love, who eventually became a model-turned-actor and since then went astray.
Mike wasn’t my first kiss. It was Ethan. It happened during one of the company celebrations at the house. I was about to turn thirteen at the time, and Ethan a year ahead. Both our parents would have conversations in the living room, with a toss of glasses in between laughs. Ethan and I would hide in my room and imprison ourselves in my closet. We weren’t officially lovers yet, but brave as he was that he already began kissing me in my cheeks, my lips, my neck down to my breasts, which had become bigger than the first time I wore a B-cup bra.
Many more kisses followed after that. Sometimes in the school gym after classes and most often, in Ethan’s car. The first time we did it was on the prom night.
Mike dumped me as soon as he learned about me and Ethan, and the wall between me and Jenny heightened right after and resulted in a dozen of girl-fights and detentions in school.
Dad did not look at me the same way after knowing it all.
I was certain he was very disappointed of me. The princess in his castle had now gone rogue. And an enemy, too. It became worse when I began sleeping at my friends’ houses and wouldn’t come home for days.
Dad’s health declined very quickly after then. But the gaps between me and him contracted more quickly when I learned he was diagnosed with cancer.
“Be good, okay?” These were the words Dad would tell me in his sick-bed. He would try to smile and hide his pain away, pretending everything was all right and that he would get well very soon.
It was difficult then. His doctors had already lectured us about his condition and warned us about the possibility of losing him within months.
I was the first person to sob when Dad took his last breath. It was in the house, in his sick-bed. I was on his side, with Mom and Yvonne, as we bid farewell holding his cold hands.
Many people, both employees and family friends, arrived in the house to grieve with us. Under their gloomy glances, I ran to my room, with Dad’s favorite white shirt in my hands, and cried and cried till there were no more tears left. It was the darkest moment in my life.