The Crocodile God

Part 7.

Rahil heats up a couple of plates in the microwave, shuttles a quilt onto her couch so they can take her room for the night, and technically stops crying.

They don't watch the news. They eat in the kitchen, backs turned to the TV's glassy black sheet, and when the dishes are stowed quietly in the sink, Haik tugs Mirasol into the bedroom.

It doesn't matter.

Haik and Mirasol can hear the aftermath of her decision, welling up through the soil:

"Why are y'all so uptight about Haik?" Imelda asks the ICE officer. "If you closed the borders for every brown guy with tattoos, we ain't gonna have no more football players."

"Do you think he kidnapped your cousin?" The officer asks Lloyd.

"She fucking grown, man, she just looks like a teenager. Ain't nobody gonna kidnap her without a fight."

"You can't just let her do things like this!" Her mother is crying, and Mirasol's disappointed but not surprised. "What if she gets sent to the Philippines with him?!"

"Then she stays with Grandma and Grandpa, and they sue the whole damn government for throwing her under the bus like this, and she buys Haik some useless pieces of paper with her eighty-million-dollar lawsuit," Lloyd snaps.

"Why didn't she just follow the law instead of--"

"Tita, her stupid white-girl neighbor followed the law!" Lloyd explodes. "Haik is fucking Australian! I ain't heard nobody saying they'll dump him over there!"

"Sir, he's not documented here or in Australia," the officer says. "He's living here illegally--"

"That make him a criminal, though? Y'all keep telling us there's nothing about him--that means no fucking rap sheet, either, or they would have been covering the news about the tatted-up Pinoy guy who stole office supplies five years ago!"

Imelda laughs hard, and Haik follows suit in the dark of the room. But Mirasol feels saltwater burning through her shirt, where his face is pressed into her shoulder.

"Do you want to hear a story?" Haik asks her again.

She tries to decide which one. How did the sharks betray the toothed whales, why did the dragons become living ships for the Tagalogs, and when did most of them die? "Whose face did Lumawig steal?"

"His first wife's," Haik says. "She was a diwat and very beautiful, but she was as proud and hot-tempered as he was. After a year they had their worst argument yet, where she said she'd married beneath her--though his mother was the North Wind, his father was human, and this must be why he was uglier and weaker than other gods."

"Really?" She hits her head on the wall. "Was he actually ugly, or was she just picking a fight?"

"The diwat aren't known for being humble." Haik chuckles. "So Lumawig sang an evil song to steal her face and all its beauty, mocking her when she became plain: 'If I am such a weakling, wife, it must be no trouble to take back your face!' She ran away crying and Lumawig knew something was wrong--she had never wept before, only shouted back at him and sometimes gone to her family's house for a while. He and the servants looked three days and could not find her, so Lumawig went to his mother for help. She almost didn't recognize him, so remarkable was he now, but she was a goddess and knew her own children in any shape.

"'My poor boy,' the North Wind said after she heard his story. 'No one can take back a god's gift nor their punishment, even if they regret it themselves. We will give your wife a new face, as pretty as she wants, but her old one is yours now, whether you still want it or not.'