Here is what I know about being prepared. It feels excellent right up until the moment it doesn't.
I had forty-three pages of notes. I had a working theory about how the old things operated, what they wanted, what they feared, what the rules were. I had Lola's notebook, the big one, the official one, her half-finished entries translated now and cross-referenced with three folklore websites and one out-of-print library book I'd renewed four times before the librarian started giving me looks. Her name crossed out on the cover. Mine written under it. I had the notebook.
Since August, I'd been adding to it.
What I did not have, standing at gate A9 of San Francisco International Airport on December 12, was any idea that Manila was going to make all forty-three pages feel like homework I'd done for the wrong class.
Mom was at the gate with us. That was the first difference from last time. Not in an escort-pass, see-you-at-the-jet-bridge way. Actually at the gate, actually boarding, actually coming.
"You're coming!" Ethan had said approximately forty times since we'd found out, each time with full-body delight, as if the news hadn't stuck from the previous thirty-nine times. He was eight now, which mostly meant he'd gotten louder in slightly new directions. (There are, apparently, always more directions.) His hair was doing its usual thing of not lying flat, his glasses were already sliding down his nose, and under them was Mom's whole face, which people said about him so often he'd started answering "I know" before they finished.
"I'm coming," Mom said each time, with a smile that reached her eyes and a tension around her jaw that didn't quite reach her smile. I got the small notebook out of my pocket and wrote it down. December 12, 11:14 a.m., the jaw thing, file under: Mom and Manila, cross-reference: things she hasn't explained. Then I closed it and told myself I was imagining things.
Turns out, I probably wasn't imagining things.
This past year taught me something. Adults don't always lie in the half-step voice. Sometimes they go entirely still instead, like an animal that's been spotted, and the freeze is the tell. Mom had done it when Lola called in October. She'd done it again when the tickets were booked. And she did it now, at the gate, in the half-second before she smiled at the flight attendant.
Noted, and moved on. I was not twelve anymore. I could hold more than one theory at a time. (This turns out to be the actual definition of thirteen.)
There should have been four of us. There were three, and nobody said anything — which is how I knew it counted. Last Christmas we'd been home, all four of us, Dad carving the ham like it was surgery. This time it was going to be three of us, in Lola's house, on the other side of the world. I didn't write it down.
I think that was the reason, actually — the reason we'd come. Not the one Mom gave, which was a real Filipino Christmas, won't that be nice, in the bright October voice I'd been collecting since spring. The real one was quieter, and I'd had to assemble it myself. Manila didn't know what our Christmas used to look like. Here, nobody would set a fourth place and then have to take it away.
Fourteen hours is a long time, even with your mother in the seat next to you instead of seven thousand miles away. Ethan fell asleep in the first hour, which was medically impossible given the crackers he'd consumed, but Ethan operates outside normal biological parameters. Mom watched a movie with headphones on. I read, and somewhere over the Pacific I opened the notebook to the part I was proudest of.
The province entries were solid. Three creatures, documented start to finish. What they looked like, what they wanted, what stopped them. I'd written them up properly after the summer, cross-referenced, filled in the gaps where Lola had left half a sentence and a question mark. The manananggal entry alone was four pages. I'd done the work.
The city section was eleven lines.
The same places that had worked before, I tried again. The folklore sites, the library, one very confusing Reddit thread. The problem was that nobody had bothered writing city folklore down. Researchers loved the province stuff — aswang, tikbalang, the kind of thing that ends up in a book with a university's name on the cover. But the city kept its old things the old way, in neighborhoods and old families, passed mouth to mouth by grandmothers who didn't post things on the internet. My eleven lines had phrases like said to appear near lights and some sources suggest and, twice, just a question mark sitting alone on a line.
I had a plan, is what I'm telling you. Salt, yes, but also the small notebook with the soft cover so I could take it room to room, and the extra pen, always the extra pen. I'd thought about what to tell Ethan and what not to. I'd thought about Lola.
I had not, as it turned out, thought nearly enough about Mom, or about eleven lines, or about what it means when your research has question marks in it and you go anyway.
Manila in December is not Manila in summer.
Summer Manila is heat and noise and green everywhere, fruit on every corner, afternoon rain that smells like the ground deciding to breathe. December Manila is all of that plus Christmas, which in the Philippines is not a season so much as a competition nobody agreed to stop. Every house had a parol, the star-shaped lanterns, some simple bamboo and paper, some the size of a satellite dish, all of them glowing against the dark as the taxi came in from the airport. Every jeepney had tinsel and a Santa riding the hood. Every mall we passed was playing "Pasko Na Sinta Ko" loud enough to reach us with the windows up.
"It starts in September," Mom said, watching it go by. "The Christmas music. September first, every year. I used to love it."
Past tense.
Ethan had his face pressed to the glass, listing. "Parol, parol, big parol! Santa, parol, is that a disco ball —"
"Yes," said Mom.
"Cool!" Back to the window. "Parol, parol —"
He was still the kid who narrated the world at full volume. But I'd caught it on the plane and I caught it again now, and it was the one thing about him that was different since June. A beat before the delight. A flick of the eyes to a stranger's face, to the door handle, to where a thing was and where he could go if it turned out to be the wrong kind of thing, before he let himself love it. Last summer had taught him that some things smile back wrong.
I didn't write that one down. I just kept an eye on it, the way he'd started keeping an eye on everything else.
I watched Mom more than the city. She'd grown up here, gone to school here until she left at fourteen, met Dad years later at some college party in California that she'd described exactly once, with a particular softness she didn't use for much else. Now she watched the city with an expression I didn't have a file for — something past happy, short of sad. Alert, mostly, like she was checking whether it still recognized her.
I wrote that down in the small notebook. Dec 12, cab from airport, 8:10 p.m. Mom watching Manila. The jaw thing, probably connected.
Lola's city house was in Parañaque, tucked behind a wall with a green gate that had rusted at the hinges and been repainted around the rust, which I thought was very Lola. The house itself was two stories, old concrete, and tilted a little, like it had been standing long enough to have opinions. Parols in every window. Sampaguita climbing the gate.
Lola was on the front step.
Same small sturdy shape. Same silver bun, same arms already open, same quality of having stood in that exact spot for months.
Ethan got there first, as always. He stopped at the bottom step, took her hand, and pressed the back of it to his forehead, quick and sure, no drilling this time, no gate-side reminder from Mom. He didn't even say it out loud. His hands just did it. Then he launched himself, and Lola caught him like she'd been expecting it since June.
"Lola, Lola, did you know in Denmark they eat rice pudding at Christmas and whoever finds the almond gets a prize, can we have rice pudding —"
"We have bibingka," said Lola.
"Even better!" He let himself be held, which he was already getting too tall for and didn't care.
I did mine after, as I always do, quiet, her knuckles warm against my forehead for one second.
Lola looked at me over his head, the fruit-at-the-market look, long and careful and missing nothing.
"You're taller," she said. She tucked a piece of my hair back where the ponytail had let it escape, the way she used to, and her thumb stopped a second on my chin. "Still your father's." Then, letting go: "And you've been reading."
"I've been researching," I said. It felt like an important distinction.
"Mm," said Lola, unimpressed and pleased at once. Then, quieter, almost to herself. "Maalam." She'd been calling me that since I was small enough to ask her why five times in a row and wait for the sixth answer. I'd never once asked her what it meant.
That sound, I'd missed. More than I knew, until right then.
Mom went last. She took Lola's hand and did the mano herself, the grown, unhurried version, no announcement, and for a second neither of them let go. Then they hugged, brief and careful, the hug of two people working on something they haven't finished. I just watched. Some things are too big to fit on a line.
The house smelled like the province house and looked nothing like it. Tiled floors, a staircase, walls with photographs in frames. Lola young, by a river with another girl. Mom younger, in a school uniform, laughing at something off-camera, a little gold flower at each ear.
"Come," Lola called. "Eat first."
On the way, I noticed the furniture, old and heavy and dark-wooded everywhere. A carved sala set. And in the small room off the sala, an armchair that sat the way old things sit, like the floor had curved slightly over the years to hold it in place. I ran my hand along the arm as I passed.
"Careful," Lola said, from the kitchen, without looking.
It landed like more than one word.
I put my hand in my pocket. I went upstairs. I opened the small notebook to a fresh page, wrote the date, and started a list that mattered:
1. The jaw thing.
2. "Careful."
I left it there for now. Two items. Nothing I couldn't handle.
I was very sure about that.
