The Candle She Did Not Light

Remedios kept the unlit candle on the windowsill for eleven days after her daughter stopped calling, which was itself three weeks after the last visit, which had ended the way most visits ended now — with Corazon gathering her things before the rice was even fully cooked, her sandals already on, her eyes already somewhere further down the road than Remedios could follow. The candle was a votive, pale yellow, smelling of artificial honey, the kind sold in clusters at the fiesta stalls near the cathedral. She had bought it on the feast of San Isidro meaning to offer it for the new job Corazon had taken in Cebu, the one with the call center that required her to sleep through the mornings and speak, for eight hours each night, in a voice that was not quite her own voice.

The house was a concrete-and-wood arrangement in Molo, old enough that the floorboards in the sala had developed a particular vocabulary — three syllables near the aparador, a single low complaint at the threshold of the kitchen — and Remedios had grown so fluent in it that she could tell, without looking, whether it was the cat crossing or the wind pressing through the poorly hung back door. There was no one else whose weight she needed to learn. Her husband Simeon had been gone fourteen years, not dead but remarried, living in Cagayan de Oro with a woman who, by all accounts, kept a very clean refrigerator. She did not think about Simeon unless reminded, and she was rarely reminded.

What she thought about, sitting with her afternoon coffee going cold in the cup, was whether Corazon's voice — the real one, the one that had argued over the proper spelling of her name at age eight, that had prayed the rosary badly and quickly in the dark during the brownouts of the nineties — whether that voice still existed somewhere inside the other voice, folded beneath it like a letter inside an envelope that had been sealed and addressed to a stranger.

On the twelfth day, the parish priest called not for Remedios but for her neighbor Aling Sosing, and he passed the window where Remedios sat and raised a hand, and she raised one back, and that small exchange of gestures seemed to her, in the strange arithmetic of her loneliness, to mean something. Not comfort exactly. More like evidence.

She lit the candle that evening, not at the altar corner she kept in the bedroom where the Santo Niño stood in his cracked glass case, but there at the windowsill, where the street outside was settling into its after-supper quiet. The tricycles thinning out. A child's voice calling a name she couldn't catch. The candle's flame pulled sideways once, steadied, and Remedios watched it with the particular attention she reserved for things that might not last.

She did not pray for Corazon's job, or for the job to end, or for her daughter to come back before the mango season was finished and the good ones were gone. She had tried specific prayers before and found them too much like placing an order at a counter, too much like expecting a receipt. Instead she sat with the flame and thought of the afternoon Corazon was seven years old and had demanded to water the garden herself and had flooded the kangkong bed and wept so sincerely over the damage that Remedios had forgiven the ruined plants immediately and without condition, had said, oo na, oo na, it's all right, everything comes back.

That had been true, then. The kangkong had come back.

She was not sentimental enough to believe the memory was a sign. She was, however, fifty-eight years old and had watched enough things return and enough things not return to know that the difference between them was rarely something you could influence from where you were standing. You could light the candle. You could tend the small life of the flame with a cupped hand when the draft came through. You could remain in the room.

The phone on the table did not ring. The candle burned through to its last centimeter and guttered against the tin dish she'd put beneath it, and Remedios let it finish. Outside, the street had gone fully dark except for the orange bleed of the lamppost two houses down, and a dog somewhere was answering another dog's question with what sounded, in the quiet, like genuine disagreement.

She brought the cold coffee to the kitchen, rinsed the cup, and went to bed, and did not dream of anything she could name in the morning, only a color — the particular greenish light that comes through the leaves of the santol tree before the rain — and a feeling that was not quite waiting and not quite peace but lived, stubbornly, somewhere between them.

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