SEVENTEEN
At this stage of the story I feel it has come time to inform the reader about Setti’s family. This will be immediate and otherwise. For my dear Setti did have family. I’d met some of them at Mark’s funeral. Aunts, uncles, cousins, etcetera. Gray faces that hovered in the wisps of gossamer veils. Faces that looked dead as the man of the hour. Round cheeks of prune-skin solemnity. Liver-spotted nods from across the bright lilies. Moles. White hair. Skeletal, trembling hands.
Not all of them were old. It’s just the old whom I recall the best, perhaps because we stood in the demesne of our ultimate repose. And they understood as much far more acutely than the young.
Families stay close in the Philippines. Your parents don’t throw you out of the house on your eighteenth birthday, nor are you expected, on their eightieth, to dump those same parents into a nursing home. It simply doesn’t work that way here. Life means for life. Siblings seldom if ever drift apart. Parents stay close to their children. There is no isolation within clans. No brooding. No eating alone. A spine never faces the eyes of one in need, nor a hand remain closed while the mind feigns ignorance. A Filipino drinking by himself constitutes a serious problem. One hardly ever sees such a thing. After all, there is a family who loves him. It is strengthened by his presence. It is ever curious about the day he just had. It wants to hear his stories and jokes. And if for some reason he is in pain, it is a must that it be known, so a remedy may be found.
And Setti? She was certainly in pain.
Thus for many weeks after Mark’s passing, family visited the Greenheights home, there in the shade of the duhat trees. My eyes, sick with apathy born of a poorly developed benevolence of social design, conjured each member as a mere blur of dark skin. I saw them. I spoke to them. But our words were like spilled water, forming messy, meaningless shapes that evaporated quickly. Setti, on the other hand, responded well enough to their presence. On more than one occasion I caught her smiling, though never while I stood in the room. Her alleviation loitered in the recesses of door frames and archways. Once, as I read the newspaper on the living room sofa, I became aware that she was sitting at the kitchen table, having breakfast with some cousin or other. I turned my head to greet them good morning, only to find the table empty. A trick of the light had illustrated something that wasn’t really there.
On that morning I began to wonder whether I were truly there for Setti. Whether she actually saw Alfredo Trentinara when she looked at me. I hadn’t gotten a smile from her since late August. She spoke to me in single syllable words. She glided, like a ghost, from room to room of the Greenheights home. I couldn’t hear her steps. Her hair looked dry as straw in an autumn wind. Oh, and listen to this: Setti quit speaking to me directly while we were in the house. She called my name only from another room. Or sometimes from the top of the stairs. But never as we stood together. Together, those one syllable words were just about all I could expect.
I got spooked one night when her voice came through the wall.
This must have been around the middle of October. By then I’d been giving Setti a lot more space to interact—and be comforted by—her relatives. During the week I slept alone at the condo. On weekends I drove to Greenheights, there to watch Setti from a distance as the state of her well-being ever so slowly drew further away from the cliff-side of disaster. This, at least, is what I hoped for.
It was early Saturday morning—maybe one or two AM. I’d taken up lodgings for the night in the familiar closet-cozy bedroom I’d used while Mark was still alive. Setti had asked to have the master bedroom to herself for the weekend, and I didn’t argue. Things were too delicate between us.
I woke up after midnight and lay there for I don’t know how long. Thunder rumbled beyond the drapes of that room’s small window. A mongrel dog barked from the street. And then—ever so faintly over the buzzing of my fan—I heard it: Fredo.
It was of a girl sealed inside concrete. Setti’s voice. Uncertain of my cognizance (I’d dreamt something strange that took shelter from lucidity, unwilling to patronize recollection), I sat up, wondering if she’d call me again. She did.
Fredo.
I rose and went to the hall. But for the glow of a baseboard night-light, it was silent and dark. I called Setti’s name. The thunder answered. Somehow it sounded closer than my girlfriend’s voice as she called me again, this time from downstairs. Looking over the banister, I could see the rooms below were pitch dark around the tick, tick, tick of Mark’s old clock. Blackness seemed to reach for the landing like fingers from a cold grave.
Using soft, careful steps, I made my way down. There was a living room light switch at the bottom. I reached for it. A sudden, bright flash of lightning rebuked the effort. It illuminated the entire room, and by it I caught a glimpse of Setti. She was standing near the door, her gown white as her eyes, which were wide and full of terror. Through a black curtain of hair I saw a horrified face trapped in the ice of a silent scream. That all happened in the space of a second. Then the lightning vanished, and a tremendous explosion of thunder shook the entire house.
For what felt like minutes I stared into the darkness of the house, trying to pick out Setti’s shape. When it wouldn’t come, I clicked on the light. Furniture sprang into view. The television. Some magazines. At the front door, where Setti had been standing moments ago, there was nothing. At some point after the lightning flash she must have walked past me and into the kitchen. So my deductive reasoning attempted to explain. I took one step down, placing my feet on the living room floor. I turned...
And came face to face with the girl of the silent scream.
She regarded me with the austerity of a cursed doll, her face every bit as pale, her eyes wide and unshifting. In a drear, toneless voice, she told me that she’d had a bad dream. A dream of being trapped and drowning in a sunken car.
“I had a bad dream, too,” I told her.
The response was selfish and cruel. I realized as much almost instantly. The bow of my speech drew back to a gentle degree. The degree of remorse. Yet before I could release the arrow Setti flew into a rage.
“Why does it always have to be about YOU?”
Her eyes became yellow, her skin a blotchy green. I reached forth in attempt to placate her, only to be shoved by a pair of clawed, mantis-like arms.
“Do you really need this power? DO YOU?”
She shoved me again, standing on tip-toe to freeze me dead with those yellow eyes. Then I noticed another thing: Her hair was dripping wet, as if she’d just surfaced from a swim. Water pattered the floor. In utter incredulity I looked down to confirm what was happening. Setti’s nightgown was soaked. It clung to her skin. I could see the rise of her breasts, the curvature of her hips. Two cold, moist hands touched my face; they lifted me to meet the gaze of a demon mermaid, pulled from the depths of her domain by a steel hook of casual, ignorant brutality.
“Do you really need this?” Setti asked again, in the weak, garbled whisper of strained vocal cords. Vocal cords choked by a hateful hand...or inhaled liquid.
Then she let me go, turned, and walked slowly up the stairs. Stunned beyond all powers of response, I watched the dim recess of the upper hall swallow Setti whole. I heard the bedroom door open, click closed. The scene was over.
Yet I could not bear to follow her to the top. I went to the kitchen for some whiskey. There was a bottle of Emperador on the counter. I poured out, drank, and poured again. I hadn’t yet gotten drunk—nor anywhere near—when suddenly it came to me what Setti had actually asked:
Do you really need this, Oliver?
Not “power”, but “Oliver”. She’d mentioned Oliver.
I needed to go upstairs and ask what she’d meant, speaking that name aloud when she knew I’d come to loathe its sound. She had no right to mock me with it. To make a show of my ineptitude at PTN.
I went back to the stairs. Climbing them, I noticed by the peripheral vision of thought that they were dry, that Setti’s bizarre condition had done nothing to the wood, but paid it no mind. I opened the bedroom door. Setti’s tiny body scarcely made a shape against the dark. As a cat at midnight sketches its outline beneath the aegis of a black stone, so the girl’s outline was apparent to me. As a painter fondles the canvas with his brush to daintify his creation, by those means did this entity in the room seem dantified to me. She was charcoal in a cold hearth. The limb of a tree before a clouded moon. Barely there at all.
“Setti?” I called softly. Then louder: “Setti?”
She did not respond. Her repose was cause for concern. She’d been soaking wet at the bottom of the stairs (the thunder made me deduce that she’d for some reason gone outside before I appeared in the living room). Now, just minutes later, she lay in bed. Had those glasses of Emperador given her time to get changed and dry?
I moved closer to the bed. But for Setti’s breathing—and the occasional roll of retreating thunder—all looked serene. I couldn’t bear to call her name a third time. Her life was something less than pleasant of late. She had her father’s death in her heart. After that came the way I had treated her for giving my name to Detective Lopez. And after that we’d both lost little Tikki.
Whether she was feigning sleep as a way to detract my presence or no, I decided to let her be. With one short inspection of the counterpane (it was bone dry), I turned and left the room.
At breakfast that morning I asked if she was okay. She said she was fine. Had she slept well? Yes, she insisted that she had. And why, I tacked on at the last, had she ventured outside on a stormy night to get drenched in the rain? Here I received the same blinking, expressionless look that she’d given me every day, all day long, for close to a month. Then she told me without the slightest fluctuation in tone (this, too, was nothing new) that she didn’t remember going outside at all.
I put my coffee mug down. “Setti? You were out of bed after midnight. Soaked to the skin.”
“No.”
“You really don’t remember?”
“No.”
And that marked the end of the conversation.