She spent the early hours soaked in a lavender bath, the hot perfumed water sharp on her skin, her face drinking up the rising steam that made limp the towels on the rack and blurred the candlelight. She had put a Bach CD, now playing Suite in G, Strings, a melancholy tune, her favorite; she could not hear the racket of her children and husband in the breakfast nook downstairs, and they, for their part, seemed to have put her aside for the moment -- just as well, for she did not wish to be disturbed.

 It was late October in California, and this was a gray morning covered in mist, the air cold and crisp. She had put identical blue and beige wool cardigans on the boys’ beds the night before, as there were times in the day when a biting wind blew in from the sea, and the school, standing high on a cliff, was prone in all directions—she hoped their father had noticed and put them on her little ones despite their characteristic protests: “It’s too itchy,” they would say, and one had to be both firm and sly to get those sweaters over their heads. She moved her fingers absently under the water, sending the thick white froth swirling about her, dancing, it seemed, to the slow, liquid drag of Bach. 

 The idea came to her, about the hot bath, sometime before dawn, after her mind had exhausted itself and drifted to some idea of comfort and relief; water—the strong, steady stream of it from the tap—had been the best thing, so she thought, about her move to California, all of eleven months now to the day. Water, as hot as I can take it, as soon as it is decent to rise, she thought. She did not sleep one minute all night and was thankful when the alarm sprung to life, at last, at 6:00.  Her husband was first to snooze the clock , which they kept on a bureau away from the bed, for he had been awake, too, all night. He had sat in front of the TV until way past midnight, and sometime around 2:00 had started to pack for his next day’s flight back to Manila. “You’ll do the kids today,” she said, a half-question, to which he grunted his agreement, and both went quietly to the bathroom, she to run the water in the bath, he to wash himself, brush his teeth, get dressed. He was out of there to wake the children before the large tub was even half-full, while she was busy with the candles, lighting all ten of them around the tiled rim.

 She would have stayed in the bath a longer time, but her mind was going to unpleasant places and she could not, try as she might, keep it out of those dark corners. She stood up, rinsed in the shower, and put on an outfit she would not ordinarily wear at home, and she painted her face slightly, reluctantly, as if ashamed of her need to look good. She stood on the bathroom scale, which reported two more pounds gone since last week, making it 24 pounds of her old self gone. It was a good part of her dissipated, for she had not weighed much to begin with. She thought: I’m disappearing.

 They had liked the house at first sight. It was airy and bright, with vaulted ceilings and large picture windows that looked over the large backyard and the ocean beyond it. It had five rooms upstairs including what they called a bonus room, a large space with a  balcony along the façade that looked to a panorama of east San Diego. The kids and her husband thought it would make a good entertainment center while she pictured a sanctuary, with shelves for her books, an easy chair, a desk. Brand new, it was almost ready for occupancy save for special finishes buyers were to pick from several choices, all equally good. He left the choice of finishes up to her—for the kitchen she chose dark blue countertops and natural varnish for the woodwork, white granite flooring extending to the family room, black for the fireplace, carpets everywhere else in slightly-off-white; the master bath was to be all beige tiles, she had said, and they had closed the sale quickly. She did the rounds of furniture stores around La Jolla, bought several couches with goose down fillings and loose slip covers. The soft cushions swallowed them up when they sat or slouched, and they had enjoyed the enveloping comfort of it. She decorated shabby-chic style, minimal and sparse, in blue and beige, some yellow for contrast, and she had liked it, as had her children and her friends living all over Southern California who had trooped over for one hilarious  reunion shortly after they settled in. 

Her husband had been only mildly excited, for shabby did not necessarily mean cheap in these parts, but he had chosen to keep his reservations to himself, better to keep her amused, he decided, to distract her from her grief. It would also do well to keep her attention as far away from him as possible. Their move had been precipitate, and only partial, for he could not join them—he would be commuting from Manila every three weeks, two if his schedule permitted, and he knew it was only a matter of time until she demanded more from him, that he made that final trip over and stayed with them for good. It was not going to happen, that he knew. His businesses were in Manila, and he was a practical man and too proud to even think of working for other people, least of all Americans. He dreaded the time she would dangle the question to his face for he loved her fiercely and was in great fear of disappointing her.

 He had just come back from driving the children to school and was sitting on a stool in the kitchen when she came down. There were four half-finished bowls of soggy cereal on the table, and he watched her take them one at a time and eat the leftovers on her way to the sink. 

“What are you doing?” he asked. He thought it funny and poignant at the same time, the way she had fitted herself with black apron and yellow rubber gloves, exquisitely awkward in her blue kitchen; the woman he loved so, whom until her sudden flight west had spent her mornings in boardrooms or in the fairway at Manila Golf, swinging her woods like a pro.

 “Gourmet breakfast, no?” she chirped.
 “You don’t have to…”
 “I have neither the space to keep nor heart to throw away their leftovers. I’ve become a waste disposal of sorts and I don’t know----”
 “This is not you,” he said.
“If it will gain me weight or access to heaven, or both.”
“This is not us.” 
 “Saves me time, dishes and food.”
 
 They hadn’t spoken of the kidnapping—she had tried, burdened as she was by her sense of profound violation, that black weight, but he dismissed her angrily: “The trouble with you is you love to dwell on the negatives. Isn’t it enough I am here and safe?” he had fumed. 

But she never drew a carefree breath, even in the safety of San Diego. There had been an unnamed wretchedness, a formless grief that persisted despite her home projects and the laundry and the dishwashing and the many demands of four children. It came to her at all hours, in her little moments of rest, invaded her dreams; it turned an otherwise beautiful ocean view into a symbol of her isolation that dampened her spirits until, at times, all the bones in her body ached and she felt sea-sick on dry land. Her husband did not sense she was deeply mired in a muck of depression, for she had contrived a level, almost upbeat disposition in his presence. She had wanted to spare him her difficulty--after all, he had remained constant to her, to the children. She knew his nerves had been stretched taut by the businesses he had to run without her help, and with the endless traveling between two homes. There had been times when he’d been small and mean and cruel, sure, and she had struggled with it nights, but by morning, she was convinced he was battling his own demons---jet lag, too, not to forget-- and that was that. Surely his trauma had ripped him raw, she thought, and he needed time to mend. She did not for a moment think of putting up a fight.
 

 He banged the mug on the granite counter by accident, making her jump slightly, her heart racing as she tensed her shoulder, as a child would, by instinct, cower in fear over a remembered violence. She stiffened, waited for something to hit her from behind, and, sensing this, he came over and wrapped his arms around her, and she winced when he grazed the large bruise on her rib.

 “What breakfast you want?” she asked, as she washed the last of the bowls. 
“You,” he said, sniffing her lavender pain.
 “Think food. You’re flying in four hours. Unless you want to eat on the plane.” 
 “Can I have both before I go?”
 “Why don’t we do pancakes at iHOP?” she said, pleased with the quickness of her thinking. “We didn’t have it the whole time you were here.”
 “Among other things,” he said.
 
In the car they held hands and sang along with Tina Turner on the radio. We don’t need another hero, she wailed. He kissed her—he thought her funny, and he was in awe of how she contained herself with such ease. He wished he could be more like her, wished he could have the same narrow range of emotion: little happy to very happy; wished he had her gentleness, her forgiving heart. He had been gripped by suffocating remorse all night, she was like a gale of fresh air. Lavender.

  He ate while she drank her coffee and talked. “Ok, so I was wearing my best jeans, right? They was pressed like hell, too, by Venus, back in Manila, you brought them over the last time, remember? Is Venus still with us?”

“Yes,” he said, “she’s still there.”
“Anyway, so I had Ferragamos on, too. I don’t know, it’s crazy, ‘cause I was only driving Wills to school, to his field trip carpool. And I was feeling good, like really good—I don’t know, the sun was shining and the sea that day! Gosh, it was speck-tack-ccular!
 He looked at her while he cut a piece of his chocolate marble pancakes and he noticed for the first time how small her face had become. He said, “Uh-huh. So you had to look spectacular yourself.”
 “Well,” she said, “Coming back I saw the garbage pail ---it was Wednesday, garbage day—and I went out the car to bring it back into the yard, right?”
 “Right.”
 “And it had a yellow tag on it that said: ‘ Your refuse was not collected because its weight exceeded the limit of 50 lbs,’ and I said to myself, gosh, how the hell did I collect that much crap, anyway?” she said.
 “In one trash drum?” 
“One trash drum! But see, I lifted the lid, and it was filled with water, and that’s the problem pala!”
“Why did it have water, anyway?” he said. 
“Rain. It rained that week. Seepage, I maybe did not put the lid on right, but that’s not the end of it,” she said.
“Eat,” he said, “you’re so thin already. You’re painful to look at.” 
She cut a small piece of her untouched stack of plain pancakes, and he poured maple syrup on it for her. 
“Thanks,” she said, “So I tilted the pail, gee it was heavy, you know—to let the water out, and well, it must have been taught in my Physics class exactly when I wasn’t paying attention---”
“Like you ever paid attention,” he said.
“Oh, touché. Anyway, the water had seeped through the garbage bag, and the weight had ripped the plastic, shit.”
“Of course it would rip,” he said. He picked up her fork and fed her himself.
“So the water surged out along with all our past meals and excesses. Bits of ampalaya and okra—Jenny was here over that weekend and cooked pinakbet; orange-colored chicken from left-over michado; a bottle of A-1, spare rib bones, and, for the life of me, used napkins, God!—they all sailed happily along the gutter!”
“Shit.”
“Some of the most vicious scraps clung to my pants for dear life while the big ones said,  “excuse me, may I pass on your Italian shoes?”
“Shit.” 
“So I ran over to where the debris had gone, and set my feet on the path like a dam.”
“Good thing they’re big.”
“Shut up. And I sat on the curb like the goddess of all idiots and looked around for witnesses! God, I felt like it was my own innards sprawled on the street!”
“Did anyone see you?”
“No one, thank God. But there was this dog—the Kurasawas’—locked in the garage, barking  like mad. He must have smelled the goodies --or my humiliation, I don’t know. And I swear, I could almost hear the houses laughing.
“My poor baby,” he said.
“I lifted all that filth with my bare hands, too.”
“You didn’t!”
“But I panicked! I like imagined the Home Association President driving along—they can be so anal about these things, you know. It’s surreal, that afternoon, I was thinking of CNN reporters smelling me out.”
“Eat.”
“I was so slapstick! I pressure-hosed the rest, and then the neighbor—in a Jag—came driving by, so I pretended to water the grass and stuff, and the driveway. Do you know that I slipped and landed on my butt, too, ‘cause I had the genius to change into rubber flip flops?
“Really.”
“Really! By then the dog was howling like a coyote and I was smelling of kanin-baboy. My life here… I’ve really crossed the dignity line somewhere.” 

She took another bite of her pancake and then passed on the plate to him. Her appetite had left her a long time ago. Eating was a chore to her, not different from vacuuming or doing the laundry or cleaning up rooms or playing wife---tedium all, needing strength and will and determination. 
“I thought of going home then, you know. I thought of my old life, and I got dizzy just remembering,” she said.
“Come home. It’s alright now. I’m sorry, hon, but I can’t leave my—our--  work. How are we going to live? Come home, you will have to sometime, anyway.”
Why didn’t you say that last night? she thought. Why did you have to punch a hole right through my side? 
“I took a scalding bath afterwards for like ten hours, I think,” she said, keeping his previous night’s blind rage under cover of her hundred-dollar sweater.
 

The airport shuttle came shortly after they arrived home, 9:45 in the morning, when the day had  taken on a bright character, the sky a blue-white marble and the heat of the sun slight but comforting against the biting sea wind. They had lingered on the driveway, below them the hysteria of the city, and made small talk with Madam Kurosawa, a frail, kindly woman who bowed a lot. He had rushed over inside to collect his suitcase and left a note: I love you, go shopping,” with a large check attached to it on the dining table under the vase of  forget-me-nots. 

“Give my love to them over there. Call Mommy—tell her we’re good,” she said. Already he looked corporate in his suit jacket and briefcase. First class life.

She waved goodbye to the dark window of the van, unsure if he was looking, her ribs throbbing from his tight embrace as she did.  She walked toward the empty house, thinking what to cook for the children and all other things she had to do to keep her home in shape. 

In the late afternoon she would sit in her garden and look out to the ocean, with the mist blurring the line between water and sky, she unable to tell purple-tinted cloud from distant ship. She would listen to the endless procession of waves in the dusk and do what she had learned to do over the many tedious days alone: reinvent her life, albeit in her imagination; live in a parallel reality that, she had discovered, relaxed her and took her to a place of calm, of relative painlessness if not joy. She would, in that other life, be an artist in a big airy studio, among her books and easels and paints and the noise of her children. Her skin would be stained with colors that did not hurt; and he would not be there
 

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