“Let’s keep in touch,” he said as the train doors opened and he kissed me goodbye. My only association with that phrase, “keep in touch,” was its frequent appearance in my high school yearbook, then never hearing from my friends again, so I thought of it as just a polite way of seeing me off. But when I arrived at a Getty-affiliated performance space in Santa Monica, where I would be an intern for three months, the administrator told me that Ralph had left a message. That message turned into late-night phone calls that lasted for hours, which turned into a two-week visit full of beach bike rides and happiness, which led to my decision to go back to Boston after the summer and live with that English gentleman whose name rhymes with “safe.” When Ralph announced four months later that the Beacon Hill apartment was too small and we should move, I began to peruse the rental classifieds, which was when he told me that he wanted to buy an apartment together because it felt right, for our lives to merge permanently, indefinitely, and I understood that the reason he was so hesitant to be with me in the first place was because he knew that once he did make that decision, he would want to be with me for good.

PART THREE

LADY WEDGWOOD

2000–2002

13.

I returned to the Philippines for the millennium, December 1999. My flight landed at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport near midnight, the coolest time of the coolest month. Even so, I bristled at the switch between the hermetic, air-conditioned confines of the arrivals area and the humid, cloying outdoor space where hordes of people waited to meet arriving passengers. Apart from the mingled sweat, there was that vague yet persistent odor of Manila I never noticed until I returned after a decade, and have since recognized as the faint rot of open sewage and never-collected trash.

It was Nanay Coro’s voice I picked out among the relatives who called my name, and my grandmother greeted me with a gush of tears, lamenting that I had not seen my grandfather before he died. As we hugged, I wished I’d kept in better touch, but I was too busy earning the life she wanted for me, too focused on notches of achievement instead of sentimental letters or expensive calls.