“Flor, tell me another story. One about magical creatures.”
“Again?” I chuckle. “You never get tired of stories, do you? Well, it so happened that I have a new one.”
I’m sitting at the foot of Daniel’s bed. Daniel is eight years old, but his eyes have the loneliness of someone who has lived a million lives. I know that he’s very sick. His mother tells me that he has to stay in bed, but I don’t get why they can’t have friends over. There are at least five kids living on this same street. He always hears them playing together outside, and I know that it kills him inside. He tries to make do with my stories.
Thank goodness I’ve been a nanny and god knows else for as long as I can remember. I will never run out of stories.
“It’s another story about the sick little girl,” I begin. Daniel quiets down, snuggles closer to me, and listens closely. He knows that like him, I had once been a very sickly child. “One day, her parents introduced her to a new nanny. Unbeknownst to all of them, this nanny was a diwata.”
A diwata. A Filipino engkanto similar to a fairy. Daniel loved my stories about Filipino myths and legends. Sometimes, I would even sneak in history lessons about my homeland in the stories. There were kapres and higantes, tamawos and tikbalangs, alongside cruel colonial Spanish friars, American soldiers, and Japanese kempeitai. Aside from made-up tales, I told him about heroes likeJose Rizal and Gabriela Silang. His mother, a half-Filipina and half-American, didn’t mind, and sometimes she even listened along. These were stories she appreciated the most, but Daniel liked the magical ones the most. I somehow found a way to combine what they wanted.
Right now, I tell Daniel about how the diwata decided to teach the little girl how to fly. They flew above the city and reached the clouds. The diwata wanted to spare the child from the pains of Earth and death, but the little girl was worried about her family. In the end, she chose to follow her heart and the diwata respected that. She brought the little girl back to her family.
Near the end, Daniel is starting to yawn. “I wish a diwata would grant my wish and make me well again,” he whispers. “That way, Mommy wouldn’t cry so hard all the time.”
I pause. It was true that his mother kept crying at night, when she thought she was all alone. I could hear her from my room. It never occurred to me till then that Daniel could hear her too.
“And I could play with the kids on the street,” Daniel continues. “Won’t that be fun, Flor?”
“Yes,” I agree. In my mind, I was thinking, That is your choice to make, Daniel, and yours alone.
I kiss him goodnight and switch off his bedside lamp. Just as I’m about to open the door, he gasps. “Don’t close the door!” he screams.
“Indoor voice,” I remind him. “But alright, I’ll leave it open. That way, a bit of the hallway light could come in.” I let a stream of light enter the room. “Is this alright?”
Daniel looks at me and nods. “Don’t you ever, ever close it,” he says very seriously. “The red man hates light.”
“What?” I turn on the light and march to the window, drawing the curtains. “Who?”
“The red man. He has horns in his head and a long tail. Sometimes he sings outside the window and I fall asleep.”
There’s no one outside the window. It’s late in the evening and the streets are dark and empty. Plus, we’re on the second floor. I swallow hard and face Daniel.
“He sings?” I repeat. “What kind of songs?”
“Beautiful ones,” he says, frowning. “They make me fall asleep. Except I don’t want to sleep, not when he’s watching.”
“Does he hurt you?” I look out the window again, at the deserted streets with wind-swept leaves and fallen twigs, at the dark, cloudy and moonless sky.
“No—but I don’t feel safe when he’s there. He hates light. One time I turned on the lamp and he was gone.”
I turn on the lamp and sit by Daniel’s side again. “Whatever you do, Daniel,” I say firmly. “Don’t go with him. Don’t be tempted by what he says, or what he sings to you. He will ask you to make a wish. But it’s not worth it.”
Daniel is looking out the window. “If I could make a wish,” he says simply, “then I’ll wish that I could live forever.”
“Daniel! Don’t say that!”
“But it’s true! I could never get sick or tired, and I could play forever. It would be so fun!”
“Not if everyone you love dies first.”
“Then I’ll wish they’ll live forever too.”
I sigh. Sometimes you can’t pick who you end up loving and who you end up despising, but these are questions a sick eight-year-old shouldn’t contend with at night. “Alright,” I say. “I’ll leave the door open and the hallway light on. I’m going to bed now, although if you need anything just press the buzzer.”
“Alright, Flor.”
“Goodnight, Daniel.”
“Goodnight, Flor.”
I leave the door a little open and throw a flying kiss. Daniel throws another one back. He’s a sweet little kid. He deserves none of his problems. Then again, none of all the other kids – even the spoiled, bratty ones – deserved theirs.
I knock on his mother’s bedroom door. Of course, she’s still awake. “Come in,” she says, and I enter.
She’s sitting at her boudoir, facing a framed photo of her late husband who served in the army. Beside the photo are her antidepressants and sleeping pills. There’s also another, smaller heart-shaped framed photo of Daniel when he was two, way before he got sick.
I look out the window. The curtains are pulled open, and the moon begins to peek from behind the heavy, dark clouds. Otherwise, emptiness.
His mother turns to me and gestures at a nearby couch, which I sit on.
“I wish I could bring him back to life,” she begins. “It gets harder and harder every day without him.”
“It never gets easy.”
“Never.” For a moment, she sounds like she’s about to cry. But she holds it in, and studies me. “You know, do you?”
I nod. My first love also died in war.
“And now, I’m on the verge of losing my son.” She closes her eyes. “You know, Florentina, I will do everything for him. You know that.”
Please don’t make any rash decisions, I want to say. But I just nod. “Yes, yes I know.”
“If there’s a way to get rid of his illness, make him well again. So that he could play and be a normal kid.” She opens her eyes and wipes away a tear. “I’d give up my life to see that, you know. Any mother would.”
I suddenly remember my mother, feel the initial rush of hot rage, then the calmness. It had taken me this long to forgive her.
“I keep on having the same dreams,” she continues. “They’re not exactly nightmares. It’s of a man with blood-colored skin–”
“And horns and a tail,” I continue.
She gasps. “How did you know?”
“Daniel has the same nightmares,” I explain. “He says that he’s being sung to from outside the window. Maybe he could hear you sleeptalking.”
A wave of relief sweeps over her eyes. Temporarily. Then she says, “Last night was different. He wants to trade. A life for a life.”
“Oh.”
She stands up, walks to the window, and peers out. “He wants me and only me,” she continues. “I tried to offer you, but he said that wouldn’t do it. It had to be me.”
Of course it had to be you, I want to say. But instead, I ask, “You’re not really going to do it, are you?”
“You are the only one I can entrust my son with,” she says, as if she can’t hear me. “He loves you, and you’re the best, most efficient nanny he’s ever had.”
“What did he promise you?” I suddenly flare up. “He’s lying! What did he promise you?”
She opens the window. I make a mad dash to the other side of the room and pin her down to the floor.
“He’s lying!” Tears start flowing down my cheek. “Your son will heal, yes! Your son will live! But he’ll stay eight years old while everyone around him will grow up and move on and die. He might as well die.”
“Don’t you dare say that!” She reaches over and pulls me by the crook of my arm, until we’re lying on the floor next to each other. “My baby will get well!”
“He will die,” I seethe. “As he should! And if there’s an afterlife, he would thank you for it! Believe me!”
A rumbling of thunder. Then darkness, all over the street.
In the next room, Daniel cries out.
Stumbling in the dark, his mother and I scramble to our feet and make our way to his room. The light there is dim, but, thankfully, present, sifting from the pale glass from a half-hidden moon. Daniel’s mother rushes to him and soothes him, hugging him until he’s pacified. “Shush, Danny boy, you’re fine now. You’ll be safe. You’ll get well; I promise you, you’ll get well.”
“He wants you, Mommy,” Daniel sobs. “The demon wants to get you.”
“There’s no such thing as demons, Danny boy.”
“But I saw!”
As they talk and cry, I make my way to the window.
Come out, you coward, I want to say. But instead, I’m silent as electricity returns and brings light to windows of the other houses in the street. In ours, the aircon starts buzzing again, and the hallway floods with light.
“I don’t want the demon to get you, Mommy,” Daniel says. “Please don’t let him get you! I don’t want you to die!”
“Even if Nanny Flor is there?”
Daniel pauses, looking at me guiltily. I nod.
“It’s alright, Daniel,” I tell him. “The choice is yours.”
“Don’t you want to get well, Danny boy?” his mother continues. Tears are streaming down her face. “Don’t you want to run around and play like other little boys?”
I hold my breath. Daniel looks at me, then at his mother. Then he sobs.
“I don’t know,” he sobs. “It just hurts so much!”
“I’ll sleep with you tonight,” his mother volunteers. “Shush, shush now. Things will get better, I promise.” Her eyes order me to leave the room.
I obey.
The clouds hide the moon again. I enter my room and draw the curtains, peering outside. The lights are turned off. The room is almost entirely dark.
“Hello, Florentina.”
I know that taunting voice by heart.
It is useless to tell him to go away. To leave the family alone, to leave their child be. To let them choose. It is useless to cry and beg, just as useless as it is for me to try cutting myself open and jumping off a bridge. I know. I’ve tried. A hundred times, maybe a million in the course of nearly two hundred years.
I pull myself together and refuse to let him see a stray tear drop from my face. “You will not take him the way you’ve taken me!”
“You want him to die,” he spits out.
“I want him to die once, not over and over like I have!”
“It will hurt.”
“Since when hasn’t it?” There’s a slight tremor in my voice. It never gets easy. Juan, a Katipunero who died in the Philippine Revolution, once told me that to die for one’s cause was the greatest honor. Now, I knew he was wrong. It was his life that mattered, those precious years, climactic months, and tortured seconds before he eventually passed, fatally wounded in my arms. It was his short life, among others, that made the long wait for independence worth it.
If he were here today, would he agree with me?
“It only hurts because I’m still here,” I say with utmost confidence. “But those precious moments, frozen in time forever as memories? Yes, they’re temporary. But that’s why they’re beautiful. They were forever in a matter of minutes and seconds. To stretch them like this – to make you wait for pain that would never come – to see all your loved ones turn into memories themselves while you stay frozen in time and unable to see them again – to make you fear love the way the living feel pain. I refuse to let Daniel go through that!”
“But it will be his choice,” he reminds me.
I gulp. “Yes,” I say hollowly.
And just like that, he’s gone.
I walk down the hallway and peer through the crack. Mother and son are asleep, cradled next to each other. I hope I can make his mother understand. It’s about time I should tell someone the truth. I console myself with the thought that at least Daniel will have a choice, one that he’s certainly too young to make, but at least it will still be his. I never had that.