An Excerpt from "Cruising"

By Isabel Yap

WHEN THE SHIP left the harbor, Caela was standing in the bathroom holding Erika’s hair back, while Erika vomited into the toilet. Caela could hear the other kids shouting from the patio.

“We’re leaving, we’re leaving!”

“Goodbye, L.A!”

“Look, seagulls!”

Erika flushed the toilet, took deep breaths, and clutched her knees.

“You okay?” Caela asked.

“I think so,” Erika answered. Caela gently laid down the knot of hair she had been holding and squeezed Erika’s shoulder. They were only a year apart, but there were times when Caela truly felt much older. Seventeen, she already knew, wasn’t mature by any stretch, but sometimes it felt otherwise.

“Maybe you should rest on the bed,” Caela said. Erika nodded and followed her into the room. Dad and the housekeepers had left. Now that the ship was moving, Caela could feel the floor swaying gently beneath them; see the walls shifting, almost imperceptibly, as they drifted out to sea. She looked toward the patio and watched the younger kids jump up and down. Chrissie had Tita Jackie’s camera and was snapping away. Beyond them one could see the tip of the harbor: silver trucks and huge metal boxes. Across from them was another ship that had yet to leave, Bounty Star painted across it in bright orange letters. After another minute land disappeared completely, replaced by an endless stretch of ocean, a mass of gray clouds advancing, a flock of birds darting away.

LOLA MARINA DIED on December 6, eight days before Caela’s exams ended, nineteen days before Christmas, three weeks before the grand reunion in Los Angeles. Caela was at the breakfast nook reading her Physics notes when Mom started sobbing in the kitchen. She felt her insides leaden, but her feet lurched into action, propelling her towards the kitchen. Mom was by the sink, one hand over her mouth, the phone pressed against her ear. She was shaking her head, saying, “Okay, okay.” Like the word okay could change something. The earth seemed to rock beneath Caela, a trick of gravity, reacting to her quickening pulse.

It wasn’t entirely unexpected. They had discovered Lola’s cancer two years earlier, and it had slowly eaten up her body, eroding the family’s peace. Caela didn’t think about it much, never let herself think about it much, except when she would accompany Lola to the hospital and hold her hand in the waiting room. The brave smile on Lola’s face would waver like a guttering candle, and the bony, spotted hand Caela was holding always quivered slightly. “Don’t mind me, anak,” Lola would often repeat.

Sometimes, Lola would peel off her wig, and carefully comb through the few white hairs she had left. Sometimes she would hand Caela a bottle of Visine and ask her to drop a little in each eye, carefully; the solution would be suspended in her eyes for a moment, before she blinked and they trailed down her cheeks.

November hadn’t been a good month for Lola. This outcome wasn’t entirely unexpected.

Caela had visited Lola in the hospital two days ago. She had leaned over the bed, watched the slow rise and fall of her grandmother’s chest. She knew that she was watching someone die. It was a curious feeling, like she was outside her own body, watching a movie where a girl was gazing at an old, dying woman. It had felt like music was going to simmer then swell, and she was going to suddenly break into dainty, noble sniffs. But this wasn’t an indie movie, and her grandmother wasn’t an actress pretending to die. There was no musical score. The tears, when they came, burned her eyes and made it hard to see. •

> Isabel Yap moved to California in 2010 where she recently received a degree in Marketing from Santa Clara University. Her short fiction and poetry have most recently appeared in The Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction 2005-2010, Santa Clara Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Lauriat: An Anthology of Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction. She won the 2013 Academy of American Poets Prize from her university, and is a graduate of the 2013 Clarion Writers’ Workshop in San Diego.