I opened the box… and almost held my breath.
There were no jewels inside.
There were papers.
A small silver rosary entwined with a red ribbon, an old black and white photograph of a baby wrapped in a blanket, and underneath, a yellowed envelope with my mother-in-law’s name written in blue ink: Rosario Dela Cruz, private .
I felt a chill.
“Did you open it, Mika?” I asked in a low voice.
My daughter immediately denied it, with those big eyes that always seemed to be asking for forgiveness even when they hadn’t done anything wrong.
—No, Mom. I just saw it under some blouses in Grandma’s drawer. I thought it was a box of candy.
I stroked his head.
-Alright.
Anna and Liza were already half asleep on the mat, huddled together.
The room we had rented in Tondo was so narrow that the four of us could barely fit, but that night it seemed safer than any brightly lit room in the Dela Cruz house.
I looked at the envelope for a few seconds. Then I opened it.
Inside were two documents folded with great care.
Not from Eduardo.
Of a boy named Gabriel Santos , born in a small clinic in Bulacán, more than thirty years ago.
I frowned.
The second document made me sit up abruptly in bed.
It was a medical report. Old, but perfectly legible.
It bore the letterhead of a fertility specialist in Makati and was addressed to Doña Rosario Dela Cruz and her husband, Don Ignacio Dela Cruz .
My eyes scanned the lines until they stopped on a sentence that left me frozen:
“Studies of the young Eduardo Dela Cruz show a genetic peculiarity in sperm production. If offspring are produced, the probability of conceiving male children is extraordinarily low. The wife has no fertility problems.
It is recommended not to blame the spouse.”
I kept reading with my heart pounding in my ears.
He didn’t say “impossible,” but he did repeat the essential point twice: if no male children had been born, it wasn’t because of the woman .
It wasn’t because of me.
It had never been because of me.
My hands began to tremble so much I almost dropped the paper. For years I had endured comments, cold stares, and my mother-in-law’s loud prayers in front of images of saints, all asking “that next time it’s a little boy to save the family name.” Each pregnancy had been a kind of trial. Each birth of a girl, a condemnation.
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