Here is a thing I know about adults: when they're about to lie to you, their voices go up half a step, like the beginning of a song nobody wants to sing.
"It's going to be such an adventure," Mom said, in exactly that voice, at gate A12 of San Francisco International Airport. She was wearing the orange paper escort pass the airline gives you when your kids are flying as unaccompanied minors. Her one-day visa into our trip, good as far as the jet bridge and not one step farther. "A whole summer with Lola. Mango trees. Fireflies. A chance to unplug."
I wrote it down in my notebook. June 13, 9:42 a.m. "A chance to unplug." Right underneath the one from April: "Daddy's staying at Tito Boy's for a while." And the one from May: "We're just figuring some things out."
I keep a list. I started it in fourth grade when I figured out that adults don't lie the way kids lie. Kids lie to get out of trouble. Adults lie to keep you from asking the next question. If you write the lies down in order, sometimes you can read the true story hiding underneath them.
The true story underneath this one had a word in it that nobody in my family had said out loud yet. I wasn't going to be the one to say it first. I was twelve, not stupid.
By the time the plane pushed back from the gate, I'd filed my verdict, neat and underlined. My mother had stopped telling me the truth because she'd decided I couldn't take it. A good detective doesn't get mad about that. A good detective keeps the list, and waits, and turns out to be right. I was going to turn out to be so right.
"Emily." Mom crouched down so we were eye level, which she only does for "serious moments," which made it worse. "Take care of your brother. You're the big one."
"I know."
"Eat what Lola gives you. All of it. Even the fish with the head."
"I know."
"And call me every Sunday." Her voice did the half-step thing again, except this time it wobbled on the way up. I looked very hard at the carpet, which was blue with little gray diamonds, 9:47 a.m., because if I looked at her face I was going to lose it in front of gate A12 and approximately two hundred strangers.
Ethan, meanwhile — seven, glasses sliding down his nose the way they always did, hair that has never once in his life sat flat, a scrape on one knee he'd gotten that morning and already forgotten about — was telling a businessman about beetles.
"Some beetles can lift eight hundred and fifty times their own weight," he announced. "That's like if you lifted a whale. Do you like whales?"
The businessman did not appear to like whales, beetles, or seven-year-olds. Ethan was undiscouraged. Ethan has never been discouraged in his life. Bad news, long flights, other people's moods. Things bounce off him, like he's coated in something the rest of us don't have.
Fourteen hours, one entire bag of shrimp chips, half a bag of the yogurt-covered pretzels you buy from the bulk bin at the grocery store, and one flight attendant assigned to us like carry-on luggage later, we landed in Manila, where the air hugs you whether you ask it to or not. Then four more hours in a van, the city unraveling into rice fields, the rice fields into hills, the hills into a green so loud it didn't look real. I pressed my face to the window and watched banana trees whip past and practiced my list of Things to Survive This Summer:
- Keep track of Ethan. (Storm drain. Cat. Never again.)
- Eat the fish with the head.
- Don't say the word Mom and Dad won't say.
- Go home in August to whatever home is by then.
It was almost dark when the van turned down a dirt road I half-remembered from three summers ago, back when we'd come as a whole family, back when the only thing I kept lists of was fireflies. That was the kind of thing that used to count as data.
On the last stretch, the van's headlights swung across a big dark tree leaning over the road, and the driver took one hand off the wheel and touched two fingers to the dashboard, quick, like knocking on wood. He said something under his breath, too low to catch. He didn't explain it, and I didn't ask, and I filed it under tired man, long drive. It would be July before I understood I'd just watched somebody be careful.
And there was the house. Smaller than I remembered, up on its wooden legs like it was wading. There was the mango tree. And there, at the edge of the yard, was the balete.
A balete is a kind of strangler fig, which is exactly as friendly as it sounds. It starts life wrapped around another tree and grows until the first tree isn't there anymore. This one was huge, wide as a garage, roots braided down over themselves like melted candle wax, and somehow bigger than I remembered, which is not a thing trees should be able to do in three years.
And there was Lola Celia on the porch steps, small and sturdy, silver bun, arms already open, like she'd been standing in that exact spot since April.
"Ate Emily! Look!" Ethan was out of the van before it fully stopped. "Fireflies!"
He was right. The yard was full of them, dozens, hundreds, blinking on and off in the long grass like the stars had gotten tired of being so far away. I used to count them — where they gathered, what time they started, how the ones out by the balete never seemed to blink in time with the rest. Thirty-seven by the water drum was my record. The worst part was that the new list in my notebook didn't have a single thing on it worth counting twice.
Ethan got there first, because Ethan always gets there first. At the bottom step he stopped, grabbed her hand, and pressed the back of it to his forehead, the way Mom had drilled us at the gate. "Mano po!" he announced, to Lola, to the yard, to the fireflies. Lola laughed and hauled him in. Then she held her hand out to me, and I did it properly, quietly, her knuckles warm against my forehead for one second. It was the one piece of the drill I hadn't needed — my hands still remembered it from three summers ago. Then I walked into her arms, and she smelled like garlic and soap and something sweet underneath, and for about four seconds the word nobody was saying went quiet in my chest.
"Salamat sa Diyos," she said into my hair. Then she held me out at arm's length and looked at me the way she looks at fruit at the market: long, careful, missing nothing. "You're taller. And you're worried."
"I'm not worried."
"Mm," said Lola, which is Lola for I heard you, and no.
Dinner was rice and tinola and, yes, the fish with the head, which watched me eat it. Ethan talked enough for all three of us. The plane, the beetles, the whale math. Lola laughed in all the right places, her laugh lines folding deep, and kept refilling my bowl without asking, and I kept eating without being asked to, like she'd known exactly what I needed before I did.
After dinner the dark came in fast, the way it never does at home — one minute the windows were blue, the next they were black, and the night outside had frogs in it. There was no TV. I checked my phone, 7:51 p.m., one bar. A chance to unplug. Lola heated water on the stove and we washed from a bucket, which Ethan decided was the best thing that had ever happened to anyone. I brushed my teeth at the back door and spat into the grass and did not look at the balete, which was easy, because the balete was the kind of thing that looked back. By the time Lola steered us into the one bedroom, Ethan was running down like a wind-up toy, the beetle facts coming apart.
It wasn't until she was tucking us in, two beds, one room, a window looking out at the yard and the dark shape of the balete beyond, that her voice changed.
She sat on the edge of Ethan's bed and took one of his hands and one of mine, so we made a little chain, and when she spoke, her voice didn't go up half a step. It went down.
"This is a good place," she said. "The best place I know. But it is an old place, and old places have rules. There are two. Are you listening, Ethan?"
"Listening," said Ethan, who was holding a beetle.
"Rule one. After dark, you stay inside this house. I don't care what you hear. I don't care what you see. Inside."
"What's rule two?" I asked.
Lola looked at the window. It was a quick look, half a second, maybe less, but I clocked it, because looking where the danger is before you lie about it is number one on my list of Adult Tells.
Except she didn't lie.
"Rule two. If you ever hear a sound — tik, tik, tik, like a little bird counting — you never, ever follow it."
"What's a tiktik bird?" Ethan asked, delighted, because of course he was delighted.
Lola kissed his forehead. "Let's hope you never find out."
She turned off the lamp. She stopped in the doorway, a small silver-edged shape, and I thought she was going to say good night.
"Maingat na bata," she said instead. Careful child. Not a description. An instruction. Quietly, and just to me.
Then she was gone down the hall, and the house creaked and settled around us. Ethan was asleep in roughly ninety seconds, the way only Ethan can be, one arm hanging off the bed, the beetle escaped to who knows where.
I lay there doing the math on the time difference. It was early morning in California, fifteen hours behind me. Mom was at the kitchen counter. Dad was at an address I didn't know. I listened to the night, which was nothing like night at home. Home-night hums: freeway, refrigerator, someone's TV. This night was crowded. Crickets in layers. Frogs with opinions. Leaves moving against leaves.
I was almost asleep when I heard it.
Far away, past the yard, maybe past the balete, soft as a fingernail on a table:
Tik… tik… tik…
My eyes opened. I lay completely still and listened so hard my ears rang. Crickets. Frogs. Leaves.
Tik… tik… tik.
A gecko, I told myself. They have geckos here. They make clicking sounds. I'd looked it up on the plane, 2:15 p.m., seatback screen, Wildlife of the Philippine Islands. A gecko. Definitely. A fact is a flashlight, and I held that one against the dark until my eyes wouldn't stay open anymore.
Here is a thing I know about myself, and you should know it too, since we're going to be spending this whole summer together: when I'm about to lie to myself, my voice goes up half a step.
A gecko, I told myself again. And then I slept, like an idiot.
