Of Tita Rosa’s four children, two now lived in the States. Charlie was a doctor, and all his children were also doctors. Carmi had built a house behind my aunt’s and ran a series of businesses but seemed to spend six months out of the year in Spain. Baby was in New Jersey and had made some money flipping houses. But Tita Rosa’s oldest son, Jim, had built an empire with tentacles in every sector of the Makati business district. He owned houses in the wealthiest neighborhoods of Forbes Park and Dasmariñas, in which his children and their wives and children lived. There was also a vacation compound in Batangas that in addition to the impressive holiday home had a twelve-room guesthouse, a horizon pool, a freestanding chapel, a helipad, and, most interestingly, its own museum built to honor his and his father’s dynasty. Much of the artwork that had once filled my aunt’s house had been moved to the family museum, including the life-size oil portraits of Tita Rosa and Tito Iñigo. The chandeliers that Tita Rosa had carried back from her honeymoon in Spain were also gone, now in one of my cousin’s houses. Even the great mirror from the foyer had been switched with a newer version, and your reflection—so much clearer than before—now greeted you with a superfluous abundance of information.

I faced my bath and the bucket of cold water. I could feel the heat rising off my body as I completed my ablutions and fell on the hard bed with its stiff, clean sheets. The bottle of water was sweating on the nightstand. I switched on the fan and off the light, wondering if I was too tired to actually fall asleep, if I should take a lorazepam, if one of my dead relatives whose spirits I could feel animating the humid air of the house would actually manifest, how long I would stay—all these things—when I fell into a deep sleep.

II

II

My aunt’s voice, shouting in the hallway, had entered my dream and woken me up. The matter of the dream itself had evaporated instantly, leaving me with an uninflected anxiety prickling through a fog of jet lag. I managed to roll over and pour myself a glass of water. As I’d slept, someone had placed a floral shift, like the one worn by my aunt, on the chair beside my bed, also a pair of slippers. I drank the water and poured myself another glass, then pulled myself out of bed. The shift was stiff but slipped easily over my head. It was tight around the sleeves, boxy, and hit two inches above my knee. I wondered who it belonged to.

In the hallway, Tita Rosa was scolding two maids and a grinning houseboy.

“He’s not my husband,” she said. She threw up her hands.