“Say it again,” Sol said, with her pencil hovering.
“Slowly. I want to spell it right.”
“Ma’am Dolores,” I said.
“Please don’t fail me in Chemistry. I’ll study. I promise.”
“Is that the whole thing?”
“There’s a second line. She says, ‘I’ll bring you mangoes.'”
Sol wrote it down, her tongue sticking out the side of her mouth.
Her notebook lay open across her knee, and a small pile of used erasers had gathered by her sneaker.
She sat cross-legged on the grass beneath the first Acacia, with a thermos of instant coffee wedged beside her and a paper bag of pandesal propped against the roots.
It was six-thirty on Saturday morning.
The sky was clear and pale.
The dew had not dried.
“That’s the sixth confession from this tree,” she said.
“And five of them are about bribing a teacher.”
“The first Acacia is the oldest. It hears a lot of exams.”
“I’m learning so much about the history of this school.” Sol bit into a pandesal.
“I’m going to write an exposé.”
“You can’t.”
“I know. It’s still funny.”
I laughed and leaned my forehead against the bark.
It was warm and rough.
A soft murmur rose through the wood, a layer of voices overlapping and fading like a tide.
I closed my eyes and let my breathing slow.
In for four.
I’d been practicing every morning since the exercise in the quadrangle, and the sounds came more easily now.
Last week I’d needed eleven breaths to hear a single name.
This morning, I needed three.
“Listen,” I whispered.
“There’s another one.”
Sol grabbed her pencil.
* * *
We’d decided to do this together.
Aris had told me to keep what I could do a secret.
Sol had listened to me explain, on Thursday night, in the dark of Room 212, with Kalasag asleep on my pillow.
When I finished, she’d stared at the ceiling for a full minute, then rolled over and said, “Can I be your secretary?”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll forget half of it. You’ll hear a hundred names and keep five. I’ll keep all of them.”
That was how it began.
Every morning before class, we walked the quadrangle.
I listened and she wrote.
By the end of the first week, we’d filled eleven pages.
Some of the names were funny.
A boy named Rommel who confessed to the second Acacia that he had loved a girl named Gwen for three years and had never worked up the courage to speak.
A student who had dropped a ring into the fountain on purpose, because she’d decided the engagement was a mistake.
A chorus of freshmen, year after year, who whispered the same plea to the same tree on the night before finals: Please, please, please.
Some were small and sad.
A girl whispering good night to a mother who had died.
A boy promising to come back and visit after graduation, and never coming.
An old man, a professor, who had touched the trunk of the fourth Acacia on his last day of teaching and murmured, Thank you for the shade.
I’d cried over that one.
Sol had too.
“I don’t think I knew,” she said, after I read it out, “that so many people were lonely here.”
“They’re not lonely now,” I said.
“Somebody’s listening.”
She sniffed, and wiped her nose on her sleeve.
“Next tree.”
* * *
The second Acacia was a gossip.
It held an enormous number of secrets about the Student Council.
The third, by the fountain, was full of love letters and apologies.
The fourth was strangely quiet.
The fifth was quieter still.
I noticed it as we walked toward the fourth tree.
I’d expected a flood.
The Acacias were the heart of the Prime Nexus, a hundred years of memory in each one, and every previous trunk had murmured at me before I even touched it.
This one only whispered, and the whispers were thin and sparse, like a radio with the volume turned low.
I laid my palm flat against the bark.
Thank you for the shade, said the old professor, very faintly.
Then a long silence. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Then a single word, half-broken, as if it had been chewed.
Mrs…
Silence again.
“What is it?” Sol asked.
“There are gaps.”
“Gaps?”
“Like the tree’s been…” I searched for the word.
“Like somebody pulled out teeth. There should be a name here. I can feel the shape of it. But it’s empty.”
I moved my hand a few inches along the bark.
A cold draft touched my fingers, though the air was warm.
The wood felt slightly damp and slightly wrong, like skin after a fever.
I snatched my hand away.
“Anchor Four,” Sol said, looking at her notes.
“Aris mentioned it. Weakening. Seventy-nine percent, then seventy-one.”
“It’s weak, and it’s losing them.” I swallowed.
“The names. Somebody is taking the names out.”
“Who would do that?”
“I don’t know.”
Sol tapped her pencil against her lip.
She wrote a line at the bottom of the page, underlined it twice, and added a small drawing of a tooth with a question mark.
I looked at her notebook and found that I was smiling, though my stomach felt cold.
We moved on to the fifth.
* * *
It was different, the moment I touched it.
The fifth Acacia stood near the bell tower, a little apart from the others.
Its trunk was thick and twisted, and its lowest branches hung almost to the ground.
Even in the early light, the shade beneath it was deeper than it should have been.
The bark felt cool as marble.
A faint hum rose through my palm, slow and weary, like an old man humming to himself in his sleep.
I closed my eyes.
In for four.
The names came slowly.
A few were ordinary.
A student saying good morning.
A woman whispering that she was pregnant.
A man thanking a tree for his job.
I waited, and let them pass.
Layers of voices rolled by, years falling away one by one, the 1980s, then the 1970s, then the long dark decade of the fifties.
Hold for two.
Then I heard it.
It came from deep down, far below the others, a voice that seemed to rise through the roots as though it had been waiting.
A woman’s voice, young, low and steady, speaking Tagalog with an old-fashioned lilt.
Somewhere behind her, a low rumble rolled over the ground, like thunder, but too regular.
Too rhythmic.
Artillery, said some part of my mind.
The woman’s voice trembled, and steadied again.
Hilario.
My breath caught.
Hilario, hintayin mo ako.
Wait for me.
I stood frozen.
The rumbling faded, and for a moment there was only the woman, whispering to the bark in the dark, her voice as soft and clear as if she were standing beside me.
Hilario, hintayin mo ako.
Babalik ako.
Pangako.
Hintayin mo lang ako.
I’ll come back.
I promise.
Just wait for me.
A wet sound followed, half a laugh and half a sob, and then the voice fell silent.
The roots hummed.
I realized my face was wet.
Out for five.
I let the breath go, and opened my eyes.
* * *
“Lira?” Sol’s hand closed on my arm.
“You’re crying.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re crying a lot.”
“A woman,” I said.
“From the war. From 1945, I think, or 1944. She was talking to someone. A man named Hilario. She told him to wait for her.”
Sol wrote it down, fast.
“Hilario,” she said.
“Hintayin mo ako. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Did he wait?”
“I don’t know.”
I wiped my cheeks with the heel of my hand.
“I don’t think she came back.”
A silence fell between us, long and heavy.
A breeze ruffled the leaves.
The tree swayed above us, creaking, and I had the strange feeling that it was listening, too.
A soft sound came from the ground beside my foot.
I looked down.
Kalasag sat in the grass, a gray shape against the green.
He had followed us all morning, a quiet shadow at my heels.
Now he sat very straight, with his ears flat against his skull and his tail curled tight around his paws.
His eyes were wide and glassy and fixed on the bark of the fifth Acacia.
Blue light flickered around his shoulders, faint and trembling.
“Kalasag?” I said.
He didn’t turn.
“Hilario,” I said again, softly, to test it.
The cat flinched.
It was a small movement, a twitch that ran along his whole body from nose to tail.
His ears pressed harder against his head.
A low noise came from his throat, thinner and more broken than a growl, like a whimper pushed through a closed door.
Then he stood, turned his back to the tree, and walked away across the grass with his head low.
I watched him go.
He padded around the base of the bell tower and disappeared into its shadow.
“Okay,” said Sol, in a very small voice.
“That was weird. Even for us.”
“He knew the name.”
“Did he?”
“I think so.” My heart was hammering.
“I think he knew her.”
Sol looked at the page, then at the tree, then at me.
“We should write that down,” she said.
“Carefully.”
“Yes.”
She turned to a fresh page, and in her careful, looping handwriting, she wrote:
Fifth Acacia.
A woman, 1940s.
“Hilario, hintayin mo ako.” K.
reacts to the name.
Tell nobody yet.
She underlined it twice.
* * *
We sat under the fifth Acacia until the sun climbed over the Main Building and the bell in the tower tolled seven.
Nobody spoke for a long time.
Sol handed me a pandesal, and I took it and held it without eating.
The shade around us seemed thinner now, and the hum in the roots had grown softer.
I felt very small, and very close to something very old.
“Do you think she’s still here?” Sol asked at last.
“Who?”
“The woman. In the tree.”
I looked up into the dark branches.
“I think she’s everywhere,” I said.
“I think when somebody says something that important to a place, it never really leaves.”
“That’s the saddest thing I’ve heard all week.”
“It’s also hopeful.”
“How?”
“It means,” I said slowly, “that nobody who spoke to us ever left. Not completely. Somebody’s still holding the words.”
Sol wiped her eyes again.
She picked up the thermos, poured a half-cup of coffee, and pressed it into my hands.
Then she picked up her pencil and bent over the notebook, and I heard the soft scratch of her handwriting as she added a few more lines.
I closed my fingers around the warm cup.
Behind us, high in the bell tower, a small blue light flared once in the shadow of the stairs, and a cat’s low, sorrowing voice, too soft for anyone but me to hear, whispered something into the stone.
I couldn’t hear the words.
But I thought I heard a name.