Page 41 of Signal No. Us

“Okay,” Robby said. “Go catch your flight.”

Allan boarded with Tita Gemma’s suman in one hand and his sketchbook in the other, and spent most of the short flight watching the island shrink beneath the clouds, then disappear completely, the ferry route he’d taken in reverse now, at thirty thousand feet, in seventy-five comfortable minutes instead of a grueling half-day crossing.

Manila, when it appeared below, looked exactly as it always had: vast, gray, glittering, indifferent, a city that had never once noticed him leaving and wouldn’t necessarily notice if he came back, either. The realization arrived without much drama, more like a fact settling into place.

He landed a little after noon, into humidity thicker than San Andres’, traffic louder than any typhoon, and a text from Ms. Padilla already waiting:

Looking forward to tomorrow, Allan! We’re so excited about this.

He read it twice, feeling nothing that resembled excitement back, and texted Robby instead:

Landed. Still alive. Miss you already, weird as that sounds after three hours.

The reply came fast:

ROBBY

Not weird. Miss you too. Take care. Eat something.

Smiling at his phone in the middle of the crowded arrivals hall, surrounded by strangers and placards and that particular chaos of a city that had once been the entire shape of his ambition, he felt something that he hadn’t felt in two weeks: steady.

Whatever happened tomorrow, he thought, at least he wasn’t hiding from it anymore.

CHAPTER 23

The interview wasn’t until the next afternoon, which left Allan with one free evening in Manila and no clear idea what to do with it, until his feet decided for him and walked the six familiar blocks to his old apartment building anyway, some muscle memory older than good sense.

He didn’t go in. He just stood across the street for a while, looking up at the unit that used to be his, fourth floor, second window from the left, the one with the crack in the glass he’d never gotten around to reporting to the landlord in three years of living there. He thought, too, of the friend who’d been storing the last of his boxes since the day he’d rushed off to Catanduanes and made a note, finally, to call and arrange to pick them up.

“Allan? Oh my god, is that really you?”

He turned to find Marge, his old officemate from his DSWD days, staring at him with a grocery bag in each hand and an expression somewhere between delight and disbelief.

“Marge. Hi. Wow.”

“I thought you’d died,” she said, setting down her bags to hug him properly. “You just disappeared, no goodbye, it’s been, what, three years? Four?”

“Something like that,” Allan admitted. “I moved to the private sector. Then I quit that too, more recently.”

“You’re unbelievable,” she said, but fondly, steering him toward a nearby carinderia with the easy authority of someone who refused to let a reunion happen standing on a sidewalk. “Tell me everything. Starting with: why do you look better now than the last time I saw you? Are you going through something, or is there someone behind this?”

Over rice and pork sinigang that, Allan noted privately, tasted nothing at all like the ruined beach version and put it thoroughly to shame, he told her, the resignation, the ferry, his mother, the mural, Robby, all of it, watching her face move through surprise, then delight, then something gentler.

“You know,” she said, once he’d finished, “I used to think you’d be the one to end up director. Sitting at the boss’s desk, because you worked so hard, and you thought so clearly. But now, look at you, drawing, you’ve got a home, you, you look good. Better than before, actually.”

“Do you regret staying?” Allan asked. “At DSWD, the whole—grind?”

Marge considered the question seriously, stirring her rice.

“Sometimes,” she admitted. “I’m tired all the time. But every so often it actually lands, a family that’s better off than before I showed up. That’s the part I’d miss.” She shrugged, a little self-conscious at how much she’d just handed someone she hadn’t seen in years. “Anyway. For what it’s worth, you had value before the mural too. I don’t know your life anymore, obviously. But I’d bet that part didn’t change.”

Walking back to his hotel afterward, Allan found himself less anxious about the meeting than he’d expected, not because he’d decided anything yet, but because the city around him had, for once, stopped feeling like a verdict he was waiting to receive. Just a place he used to live. Not a referendum on whether he’d wasted the last ten years, or the last seven weeks, deciding what mattered.

He texted Robby before bed:

Ate a proper sinigang. Nothing for yours to be ashamed of, I promise, I just love yours more.

The reply came fast, as always.