Chapter 1
Discovery
September 10th 2008 is a date representing ignominy for my
mom who came to pick me up from work. I was the last
to finish work that evening and was ecstatic to get out, but my
mom’s distressed look made all relief evaporate.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, expecting it would be something
minor such as losing a comb or a paper clip. My mom’s silence
was baffling and I continued my barrage of questions determined
to get to the root of that mystery.
“Cedric?”
“Yes Mom?”
“Can you …?” my mom stammered. “I don’t even know
where to begin or how to tell you but …”
“But what?”
“It’s about your dad?”
“Yes?” I asked, thinking maybe he had had an accident because
my mom was barely holding back tears.
“Did he have an accident?”
“No!”
A myriad of thoughts flashed through my mind as I pondered.
Whatever it was it couldn’t be that bad, right? Eight years earlier my parents had clashed over spending habits and the almost lavish
lifestyle my dad was trying to experiment with including horseracing
and other forms of gambling. Eventually they resolved it, but
my mom’s apprehensive behavior in subsequent years made me
wonder.
My mom’s growing distress was apparent and I was aghast at
the sudden outpouring of emotion in her body language. When
the paper cup was almost full to the brim, I made a clumsy attempt
to walk with it toward my mom. I almost dropped it when
my walking stick slid an inch after I had carelessly put it down in
the small puddle of water I had spilled on the floor.
“Be careful!” my mom lashed out more appalled by my clumsiness
than the secret she was attempting to keep from me.
“Are you going to tell me what’s troubling you, or are you just
gonna lash out at me in my workplace?”
“Your father has been having an affair!”
“With whom?”
“Rachel Loo!”
“Rachel Loo?”
The name shocked me because she worked as the secretary for
Caring Charities, an organization my dad helped once every two
weeks by accompanying their women’s choir either on organ or on
piano. My dad was introduced to that organization through my late
godfather who had been their previous organist. He was impressed
by my dad’s pianistic abilities and assumed that because my dad
seemed to have a clean image, he would have been a welcome addition
to that establishment. Unfortunately, my godfather did not live
long enough to see how wrong his assumption was.
I opened my mouth to utter a response. The thought of
Rachel being my father’s mistress never occurred to me because of the age gap, plus the fact she was a married woman with a disabled
husband and a thirteen-year-old son. Few would ever guess
a forty-two-year-old woman could crave the touch of a balding,
sixty-six-year-old man. The fact that I am disabled should have
been a deterrent to my dad’s escapades outside home – well, in
theory at least.
“Mom, you’ve got to be kidding. How do you know it’s
Rachel?”
“I got a call earlier this afternoon.”
“From whom?”
“From a former member of that organization. They’ve been
having an affair for over five years.”
On our journey home, my mom began to regurgitate what she
had been told over the phone including the bars they had been
seen in. I kept quiet, trying to make sense of the discovery, given
that Rachel Loo had a disabled husband and did not seem the
type to stray outside conjugal bonds, especially we were friends. I
mean, what could anyone say? I was lost for words.
Thinking back, maybe she was the type. Whenever my dad
and I hung out for lunch, she was never far away no matter how
hard I tried to shake her off by eating in different restaurants
which, were not always disabled friendly. However, Rachel would
often find us because my dad made an effort to text message his
lover from under the table while I was having my meal. My mom,
who believed my dad to be faithful, was often busy keeping our
home in order and attending to my needs, an almost thankless
task because I suffer from cerebral palsy.
That night when my dad returned home from another gig at
the hotel where he worked, sleep was next to impossible. Objects were thrown with occasional curses in Tagalog. My dad insisted
nothing was going on and insisted those who made up these stories
were “troublemakers.” My mom countered by telling my dad
he was the true troublemaker.
My dad tried in vain to physically restrain my mom, but one
push sent him onto the floor, bleeding from scratch marks on his
arms and hands when my mom pounced on him like a lioness.
For her part, my mom had minor bruises on her wrists after she
managed to break my dad’s grip. Almost every night from that
point onward would be a near repetition of the night before.
Even if I locked my bedroom door, the screams, the curses, and
the smashing of objects became the symphony serenading me
almost regularly.
I poured my rage into a single online game: Facebook Wrestler.
With a single click of the button, the madness outside my bedroom
vanished as I found myself in a wrestling ring watching
a different kind of madness, a controlled madness of my own
making and of others who wished to escape the conundrum of
life. The only problem was I kept losing way too many matches
for my avatar to be taken seriously in that part of cyber space.
