THREE
The woman’s voice was low, mesmeric, peppered with pauses when she’d look around the room as if casting about for the next part of her story. And as it went on, from a childhood spent with lepers, to an orphanage, and a friendship with a girl named for butterflies, and a crossing made on an abandoned boat, Sol should have become more sure that this is what it was: a story that Amihan was conjuring from the darkness.
But Sol knew, sure as the night-time silence, that it was true, that when Amihan stopped talking it was only to relive the words, to remember what she saw. And when she reached the butterfly swarm, Sol closed her eyes, remembering chasing the wings down the hillside. Her eyes ached and did not want to open, but she did not want to miss a word.
The longest pause stretched between Amihan telling of Nanay’s silence, the touch of Bondoc’s hand, and the coming of the monsoon. Sol looked up sharply.
‘Your nanay didn’t die?’ she asked, shocked. She could feel tears running down her cheeks but she didn’t care. She thought there would have been a happier ending to the story.
The woman nodded slowly. ‘I’m afraid she did.’
‘But that’s not fair!’
‘That,’ said the woman, ‘is not entirely true.’
Sol stared at her uncomprehendingly.
‘It is sad,’ said the woman. ‘It broke my heart. But she was very sick. She was in pain. It took me years to realize it, but it was kinder that way.’
‘Like Mari said?’ said Sol, keen to show she had been paying attention.
The woman’s voice went small and soft. ‘Yes, like Mari said.’
‘Did you find her? Or Kidlat?’
‘I looked for as long as I could stand the heartache. I went to every workhouse and orphanage I could find, but they were not in Manila, or any of the other big cities or towns. He must have taken them elsewhere. There was no trace of them.’
Sol could tell the woman didn’t want to talk more about Mari, so she searched rapidly for another question. ‘And all that happened to you?’
Sol could not quite reconcile this woman with the young girl she had once been. It is always hard to imagine adults having childhoods.
The woman laughed. ‘Other people’s pasts seem like another country, don’t they? Telling you made it strange for me, too. Though it is my own story.’
‘What happened to the butterflies?’
‘The monsoon happened,’ Ami said simply. ‘The next day the streets were awash with dead butterflies.’ Her expression softened slightly at Sol’s stricken face. ‘It’s not a very happy part of the story, is it?’
Sol shook her head, her jaw tight.
‘But it was incredible they came at all. That those few samples dropped by Mr Zamora grew into a swarm.’
‘I wish it could have been a happier ending,’ mumbled Sol.
‘But it is a happy ending,’ Ami gestured around them. ‘Look where I ended up.’
‘Why here?’ said Sol.
‘Don’t you recognize it?’ asked Ami kindly. ‘A house covered in flowers?’
Sol gasped. ‘You didn’t – you didn’t find him? Your father?’
Another sad smile flickered on Ami’s face. ‘No. I was too late for that. But I found the house. As soon as Bondoc and I arrived in Manila, we asked every person we knew, and many we didn’t, whether they had heard of a blue-roofed house in a valley, covered in red flowers. One day I asked a woman selling tea in the market and she told me she once passed such a house, a few miles from Manila.’
‘I thought your father was a leper – sorry, Touched.’ Sol paused, hoping she had remembered this detail correctly in amongst the flood of this woman’s life. ‘I thought all the Touched were brought to Culion?’
‘Well, the only people who knew he was there – here – were either dead or ignorant of the fact he was Touched. No one was going to bother a man living in the middle of nowhere. Except me, of course.’
She grinned and Sol saw a flash of the Ami from the story – youthful, amazed and delighted by the way the world worked.
‘So I bought some tea as a gift, and walked to see him. But the house was more forest than house. His illness had worsened shortly after Nanay was taken from him. I was years late. He had died at home and was buried in a grove nearby by some locals. His grave was overgrown when I arrived, vines growing up the wooden stake they used to mark it.’ She paused and swallowed hard. ‘I left it like that, so the butterflies visit him. But Bondoc helped me fix up the house and I suppose it is wrong to say I did not find a father here. Bondoc grew into a fine one. We had some very happy years together.’
‘Did Bondoc adopt you?’
‘No, nothing so official!’ Ami laughed. ‘But he loved me like a daughter, and he had loved Nanay like a wife. It was the greatest sorrow of his life that he never got to say goodbye to her. At least I had that, though it took me many years to feel grateful for it.’
‘But he had you,’ said Sol quickly, not wanting to return to the sadness. ‘And you were happy.’
‘Of course I was,’ said Ami. ‘I am. How can I not be, in a place like this? And I planted a grove full of Mari’s favourite oranges to keep part of her close by. If you have or make something someone loves, I believe it brings them to you, even if they are not there.’
‘Like your nanay’s basin under your pillow?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Is the butterfly swarm why you decided to be a butterfly zookeeper?’
‘It was not so much a decision as a happening.’
Sol waited until the woman explained.
‘Well, this house has always attracted them, and a couple of years after Bondoc died I was bored of selling herbs. A scientist who’d heard about “the butterfly house” came and photographed it.’
She pointed to a framed black-and-white print hanging above the door.
‘He said he was a lepidopterist and would I be interested in selling him some butterflies.’
‘Did you give him the butterflies?’
Ami shook her head. ‘He wouldn’t agree to keep them alive. But he gave my name to some other scientists in Asia, and I was asked to create butterfly zoos for them. Once, I even travelled to a place called London, in England, and talked about my techniques.’
‘You’ve been to England?’ Sol had never met anyone who’d left the Philippines, let alone crossed oceans.
‘Yes. I gave a lecture at one of their societies.’ She pointed to another framed photo on the opposite wall: a grainy picture of her standing at a podium. ‘But that is another story.’
‘What was it like?’
‘Cold.’
Sol nodded. She had heard this from Cook, who read books set there. ‘Do you still travel?’
Ami stretched. ‘Not so much now. I like it here. I mostly make zoos for wealthy local families now.’ She grimaced slightly. ‘Less science, more art.’
Sol hesitated before asking her next question. She did not want to pull Ami back into the dark places of her past, but longed to know one last thing.
‘What happened to . . . to—’
‘Mr Zamora?’ Ami pointed to her bookshelf. ‘Second row, eighth one along.’
Sol pushed her tired body to its feet and found the book. The spine was a rich red, with gold lettering stamped along it: Butterfly Lives by Dr N. Zamora. She gaped and pulled it out, holding it warily.
‘He finished his book?’
Ami nodded. ‘And many more besides, but I only bought the one he wrote at the orphanage. I didn’t want to fill his pockets.’
‘Why did you buy this one?’ Sol wrinkled her nose at the handsome tome.
‘Because it’s good,’ said Ami simply. ‘It taught me a lot. And if I can take one good thing from my encounter with him, it’s better than only bad things.’
Sol bristled. ‘He should be in prison.’
The woman chuckled. ‘I seem to remember someone having not dissimilar views only a few hours ago.’ Sol’s face flushed, but Ami’s expression was kindly. ‘And besides, he’s years dead. By all accounts he lived in a prison of his own making by the end. His sickness got worse and worse – it was punishment enough, I think.’
Sol frowned. ‘You sound almost sorry for him.’
‘I am very sorry for him.’ Ami’s face was in shadow. ‘He did not have a life even a quarter as good as mine has already been.’
There fell a great, deep silence that yawned almost as widely as Sol did. Ami smiled. ‘You should get some rest, we have to get going in a few hours.’
She settled Sol in her low bed, and took the chair by the fire for herself. It did not take long for Sol to fall into a sleep that swirled and shone with butterflies.