Page 29 of Signal No. Us

“Ah naks, Ma. When did you get so wise about all this?”

“I’ve always been wise,” Cora quipped. “You just weren’t listening before.”

“Ma,” he said after a while, quieter. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For everything. Even the things you never said out loud. You know we’re alive because of you.”

“Alam ko,” Cora said, and there, briefly, was the ghost of real emotion crossing her carefully composed face before she smothered it, teacher-practical, back into something manageable. “Now, help me, because if we don’t finish this before dark, there’ll be no ulam tomorrow.”

He helped her finish the beans, the radio still murmuring behind them, the evening cooling into that particular blue dark that only ever happened in the province, thick with cricket-song and the distant bark of some barangay dog answering Oryo’s opinions about the moon.

Later, lying in bed, Allan thought about the phrase again, alive first, and realized it fit more of his life than just the career part.

He thought about the actual night he’d come out to Cora and Ver, years into Manila, over a static-heavy phone call he’d rehearsed for a full week and then said in under ten seconds flat: Ma, I’m gay. Kuya, I like guys, in case that wasn’t obvious enough already.

Gay had come out easier than bakla ever had, funnily enough, lighter, less freighted, like it belonged to a life he was choosing for himself instead of a life other people had already decided about him in advance. Ver had said, “Yeah, I know, had known since we were nine, can we stop being dramatic now,” and gone back to whatever video game he’d been half-playing through the whole call.

Cora had gone quiet for one full second, long enough that his heart had tried to climb out through his ribs, before she said, plain as anything, “Okay. Kumain ka na ba?” No parade. No tragedy either. Just dinner, eventually, and a phone bill. She hadn’t brought it up again for weeks afterward, not because she was avoiding it, he understood eventually, but because to her it had simply never been a conversation that needed to be had twice.

He’d expected, after that, to feel done with it. He hadn’t. It turned out coming out wasn’t a door you walked through once and got to lock behind you—it was a hallway lined with doors: a coworker asking if he had a girlfriend yet, some tita’s well-meaning matchmaking, and an intake form at a clinic with exactly two boxes on it, and he had to keep choosing, over and over, whether to open the next one or let it stay shut for one more day. Nobody had warned him about that part. He wished, sometimes, someone had.

He thought about how much of his life in Manila had also been built on the opposite instinct from alive first: achieve first, prove first, and earn the right to exist comfortably in a room. He thought about the mural sketch still tucked in his desk drawer, half-finished, the paint box smell of it more honest than any performance review he’d ever received.

He thought, too, about Robby: about taking things slowly, about the careful, deliberate way they were both, finally, learning not to run.

For the first time in longer than he could remember, the quiet didn’t feel like something he needed to fill with a plan.

It just felt like rest.

CHAPTER 14

“This,” Allan said, “had better be worth losing an entire night of sleep for.”

“Trust me,” Robby said, already loading a thermos and two motorcycle helmets onto the porch railing before the sun had even considered coming up. “This only happens once a year.”

“That’s what you said about the fireflies. Which, correct me if I’m wrong, were just fireflies.”

“They’re still beautiful,” Robby said, unfazed. “But yeah, this one’s better.”

They left before five, the whole barangay still dark and hushed, Oryo trotting a few sleepy circles around Allan’s ankles before Cora firmly herded him back inside. “You’re not coming, you’re guarding the house,” she informed the dog, who accepted this demotion with visible betrayal.

Robby drove them toward Baras on his old motorcycle, Allan’s arms wrapped around his middle, then left it parked at the bottom of the trail so they could climb the rest of the way on foot, both of them not talking much over the wind. Just the cool predawn air and the smell of salt getting stronger the higher they climbed.

They reached the cliffs of Binurong Point just as the sky started to lighten, rolling grass hills dropping away into bare rock and the open Pacific beyond, the same highway of storms Allan had watched from the ferry three weeks ago. Except now the horizon was doing something extraordinary: a band of towering, sculptural clouds lit from within by lightning too far off to hear, glowing amber and violet where the earliest sun caught their edges.

“Anvil clouds,” Robby said, setting the thermos down and dropping onto a flat rock, patting the space beside him. “Baging mabagyo, the elders here say, when the clouds look like this. The storm is still whole out at sea, still far off, but you can already see it from here, when the wind’s direction is right, how it’s taking shape.”

He pointed further down the coastline, to a small white shape perched alone on its own hill. “Bote Lighthouse. From up here you can see three barangays and about half our problems.”

“That’s beautiful and slightly terrifying,” Allan said, sitting beside him, already fishing the battered sketchbook out of his bag without quite deciding to.

“You want to hear something actually terrifying?” Robby pointed further out, past the anvil clouds, to a second, smaller smudge of grey near the edge of the sky. “There’s two weather systems out there, not one. PAGASA’s been tracking both since Tuesday.”

“Is that bad?”

“Depends what they do next.” Robby traced a slow circle in the air with one finger, then a second, tighter circle around it, like two coins caught in the same current. “Get close enough to each other, storms stop moving on their own. They start pulling on each other instead, spinning around some center point that isn’t really either one of them. There’s a name for it. The Fujiwhara Effect.”