Chapter 56

Luz.

Luz’s breath snags in her throat. Will he smile at her, will he pretend he hasn’t seen her, or will he scowl at her?

He smiles.

“He’s coming over!” the others shrill.

Luz’s relief at Jomari’s smile fizzles out. If he comes over to them, her friends are sure to embarrass her—by accident or on purpose, or both.

“Hello! You’re even more handsome than Luz told us,” Fatima says.

Here we go, Luz thinks. Jomari blushes and looks down at the floor.

“Take a seat with us,” Ligaya says, making space for him on the picnic blanket where they’re all sitting.

Oh no, can he sit down on the ground with his prosthetic leg? Luz thinks.

“No, thanks,” he says, the smile instantly draining off his face.

Luz is mortified for him.

“Luz told us you had lost a leg and you were in a wheelchair. But now you’re standing and walking,” Ligaya says.

Jomari’s face clouds over. Luz cringes. If only she hadn’t looked at him and attracted her friends’ attention to him!

But then, suddenly, he smiles mischievously.

“I’ve got a secret under my clothes,” he says in a cheeky, suggestive tone.

The women wolf whistle and clamor, “Show us! Show us!”

Luz is embarrassed about her friends’ behavior but she’s also relieved. This Jomari looks happier than the one she met last time.

He lifts his trousers’ leg and shows a metal prosthetic.

“Wow! Can we touch it?” Luz’s friends ask, and Luz can see from their eyes that they’d like to touch more of Jomari than just his leg. She feels a prick of jealousy.

“Can we offer you some food?” Luz asks him, while her friends fuss over him.

“No, thanks. I was just on my way to—”

“We were also on our way to...” Fatima interrupts.

“... the toilets,” Bulan finishes her sentence.

Luz knows that they’re making it up to leave her alone with Jomari, and she wonders if he realizes too.

“Can you keep Luz company until we come back?” Bulan says.

Luz mentally rolls her eyes. If her friends had wanted to make their attempt to leave them alone, they couldn’t have made it any more obvious.

“Sure,” he says matter-of-factly as if her friends’ sudden mass migration to the toilets was perfectly normal.

The next moment, all six of her friends have got up and gone.

“I’m glad I didn’t accept your food if this is the effect it has on people,” Jomari says with a joking smile, watching her friends run towards the toilets.

Luz chuckles. She has never seen Jomari so relaxed and mirthful. After all, this is the first time they meet in circumstances that aren’t dangerous, difficult or life-threatening.

As he can’t sit down on the grass with her, she stands up next to him.

“I predict that my friends will be away for quite a while. Would you like a little walk?” she suggests, then bites her lip at the insensitivity of her proposal. She has no idea if Jomari can walk without pain or for any length.

“Or we could sit on that bench over there, from where I can still keep an eye on our food and bags,” she hurries to add.

“That’s a good idea,” he says, “but I wouldn’t worry too much about anyone stealing your food, after what’s happened to your friends.”

She chuckles, relieved that her insensitive suggestion of a walk hasn’t upset him. She hasn’t forgotten how they parted last time and the last thing she wants is to upset him again.

“Please, forgive my friends for all the stupid things they just said to you. Their hearts are in the right place but their mouths... Please, forget everything they said to you,” she says.

“Don’t worry, they haven’t said anything bad. And I quite liked the bit about me being more handsome than you told them.”

He looks at her mischievously and Luz’s cheeks warm.

“Besides, I’m the one who should apologize,” he says, suddenly turning serious. “I’ve wanted to do it for a while but had no way of getting in contact with you. I’m sorry about the way I behaved towards you at the court.”

“It’s okay,” Luz says quickly, to reassure him.

“No, it’s not. I was cruel when you were just trying to be nice. The thing is”—he swallows and clasps his hands together—“that until I got my prosthetic leg, I was in a bad place.”

“I’m very sorry. You wouldn’t have lost your leg if you hadn’t asked the paramedics to attend to me before you.”

He turns to her. “Luz, never, ever feel guilty about anything that’s happened since your kidnapping. Can you promise?”

No, Luz cannot promise that. She feels very guilty. As she hesitates to reply, he takes her hands in his. They feel warm and dry, calloused like a sailor’s hands, and strong. The moment her hands are in Jomari’s, she feels safe again.

Just like when he held her tight on the lifeboat, when she could feel his heart through their sodden boiler suits, under hard layers of muscles and bones. Like when he gently scooped her out of the lifeboat when they had finally landed in Singapore and she was too exhausted and weak to get out of the boat.

“What happened is none of your fault,” he continues. “You didn’t make our ship’s captain treat us like slaves, you didn’t cause the Italian mafioso to kidnap you, and you didn’t make those thugs chase our van. You didn’t cause my leg’s bone to shatter in too many places to be repaired, and sepsis to set in. You are a victim of all this, Luz, not the cause.”

Luz shudders. “Sepsis is dangerous. You could have died.”

He smiles wryly. “Luz, we could have died so many times.”

“But...if your leg was shattered, you must have been in so much pain, and yet, you didn’t make a sound or complain. You worked on the door’s lock and got us out of the van. I even suggested that we checked on the police officers, when you couldn’t stand up and were in terrible pain.”

“You’ll be glad to hear that those two guys are alive and well. They were in the same ward as me.”

“I’m so happy! I’ve been thinking about them too.”

“And, let me guess, you were feeling responsible for them too.”

Luz smiles and looks down.

“What happened is not your fault, Luz. Get that out of your mind and rebuild your life.”

She looks up at him again. “What about you? What are you doing at the moment? I thought you had gone back to the Philippines.”

He shakes his head.

“No. I have nothing to go back to.”

“No family?”

“No.”

Luz doesn’t dare ask if he’s got a job, not after she upset him last time. So she just waits to see if he will tell her.

“I’ve got a job here, helping people who are victims of modern slavery, and helping the police prosecute the perpetrators. It’s a job I love and I feel I’m a very lucky man, even if I don’t have a leg anymore.”

“That’s great.”

“That I don’t have a leg?”

“No, I mean, the job,” Luz says, flustered.

He smiles and squeezes her hands. She had forgotten they were still in his.

“I’m only teasing you. Now that I have made peace with what happened to my leg and I’ve made friends with my metal one, I can joke about it. People around me find my leg awkward and I see their relief when I make a joke about it. It makes everyone feel at ease and the ice is broken.”

Jomari looks in the distance. “I can see your friends huddling behind the ficus tree and spying on us. I suspect they’re not going to come back so long as we sit on this bench. Maybe we should walk towards them and release them from their prison.”

Luz smiles. “I think you’re right.”

“But before we do that, there’s one last thing I need to tell you,” Jomari says.

***

Gianluca.

I step back into the labor room and immediately sense that something is wrong. The obstetrician is talking fast and the midwife is passing her tools that look like plumbing equipment or torture instruments.

“Is everything okay?” I ask them.

“Yes, yes, just hold her hand,” the midwife tells me impatiently.

For a moment I think that she’s telling me to hold the hand of the obstetrician to stop her using that strange contraption cup on Claudia, but I quickly realize that she meant Claudia’s hand instead.

As I take her hand, Claudia opens her eyes—which were tightly shut in a grimace of pain—and looks up at me in silent reproach. “Where were you?” her eyes are telling me.

“I’m sorry, I had lost track of time...” I excuse myself lamely.

I had left her gently dozing, with no sign of the baby yet, and when I came back I found her in full labor!

“We’ll give you a little help with a ventouse,” the obstetrician tells Claudia.

Claudia doesn’t reply. She must be exhausted if I feel exhausted and I haven’t done any pushing.

“What’s a ventouse?” I ask.

“It’s like a suction pump.”

They’re going to suck the baby out of Claudia!

I remember reading about ventouses and forceps when I did my research about pregnancy and birth, but I had forgotten. I’m too terrified to remember anything I’ve read, and I’ve read too much not to be terrified.

“Can you manage another push?” the obstetrician asks gently.

“Yes! I’ll do anything!” I answer, before I realize that she’s talking to Claudia, not me.

Claudia squeezes my hand hard and grunts. I wish there was more I could do than just stand here and let her crush my hand.

“The head is out,” the doctor announces.

I really hope it’s still attached to the rest of the body.

“And now the shoulders,” the doctor announces.

Will we have a whole baby or a collection of body parts?

Then a scream pierces the room. I jump and look at Claudia. She’s not screaming—she’s smiling. The obstetrician and the nurse aren’t screaming either. There’s a new person in the room, and he’s the one doing the screaming.

“You’ve got a baby boy,” the doctor announces, lifting the baby up in the air.

He’s still attached to Claudia by a long purple cord, like a spring. They cut it off and she passes him to Claudia. He’s a dark pink bundle of naked flesh streaked with blood and white wax. For a moment, I feel shocked that he’s so naked and bare. I had unconsciously imagined him like all the babies I’ve seen, either swaddled or clothed, and certainly with a nappy.

He looks too small to have caused all this trouble, when cows push out massive calves with hooves and already able to stand up. But that’s the way we humans are, I suppose.

Claudia holds him with a tenderness that melts my heart, and tears bob in my eyes. Relief for sure, tiredness likely, and probably love.

“You can touch him,” she tells me.

I stroke his arm. That’s all I dare. His skin is so soft that it feels like it shouldn’t be exposed to the air but in some internal recesses of the body.

He’s still crying, but his eyes are wide open now. He looks a little bewildered and almost offended to have been taken out of a comfy womb. I wonder what it feels like to take a first breath of air. What this strange new world—so dry, loud and bright—feels like to a newborn. I hope to make this world nice for him, that he will feel that life is worth living.

The midwife whisks him off from us for checks and cleaning and I’m left with Claudia and the obstetrician.

“We’ll just give you a couple of stitches to help you heal, then we’ll take you to the ward and you’ll feed the baby,” she says.

Stitches? Oh no, poor Claudia, the birth must have torn her down there. The thought makes me queasy. Maybe it’s that we haven’t had any lunch or dinner yet. My hearing is going fuzzy. The world is turning grey. I feel heavy...