Chapter 3 - The Long Walk Home
The emergency wing of the Nueva Ecija Doctors Hospital in Cabanatuan smelled of floor wax, rubbing alcohol, and cold air conditioning.
It was three o'clock in the morning.
My team had moved fast. By midnight, Sheila had dispatched two private ambulances equipped with emergency medical technicians to the old house in San Isidro. They had gently wrapped my parents in warm blankets, lifted them onto wheeled stretchers, and brought them straight to the private wing of the hospital.
I sat in the corridor outside Suite 402, staring at the white vinyl floor.
Inside the room, a team of three specialists—a cardiologist, an ophthalmologist, and a clinical nutritionist—were working on my parents. The IV drips were already running, delivering saline, liquid nutrients, and high-dose vitamins into their dehydrated bodies.
The door to the suite opened softly, and Dr. Ariscon, a tall man with gentle eyes and grey hair at his temples, stepped out, pulling off his surgical mask.
"Mr. Mercado?" he asked.
I stood up immediately. "How are they, Doctor?"
Dr. Ariscon let out a long, weary sigh, looking down at his clipboard before meeting my eyes.
"Physically... it's severe," he said honestly. "Your father is suffering from advanced malnutrition, muscular atrophy in his lower limbs, and early-stage kidney impairment due to chronic dehydration. His body has been surviving on less than five hundred calories a day for God knows how long. The digestive damage from consuming non-human food pellets is significant, but thankfully, there is no permanent internal perforation."
My fists clenched so tightly inside my pockets that my fingernails cut into my palms.
"And my mother?" I asked, my voice trembling.
"Severe bilateral cataracts," Dr. Ariscon replied. "She has less than ten percent vision in her left eye and about twenty percent in her right. But the good news is that the retinas are intact. With a routine phacoemulsification surgery—which we can perform once her strength returns—we can restore almost eighty percent of her sight."
He paused, looking at me with a mixture of professional concern and quiet empathy.
"The physical wounds we can treat with medicine and surgery, Mr. Mercado," he added softly. "But the psychological trauma... they are terrified. Every time a nurse enters the room with a food tray, your mother tries to hide the bread inside her blanket. She thinks someone is going to take it away from her."
A lump formed in my throat so large I couldn't speak. I simply nodded, choking back the tears that threatened to break through again.
"You can go in now," Dr. Ariscon said, patting my shoulder gently. "They're awake."
I pushed the heavy door open and stepped inside.
The room was warm, filled with the soft, amber glow of a bedside lamp. My mother was lying on the high-tech hospital bed, wearing a clean, soft pink cotton gown. Her thin grey hair had been washed, brushed, and gathered neatly into a clip behind her head.
My father lay in the adjacent bed, his arm hooked up to a clear IV tube that shimmered under the light.
When the door clicked shut, my mother turned her head quickly toward the sound.
"Marco?" she called out softly, her voice still thin, but no longer choked with the dust of the old house.
"I'm here, Mom," I said, walking to her bedside.
I took her small, frail hand in mine. Her skin was clean now, smelling of soft baby soap, but her fingers were still so small, so impossibly light, like the dry wing of a bird.
My father turned his head toward me as well. He didn't speak, but his hand reached out across the small gap between their beds, resting gently against my forearm.
"Son," my father said, his voice clearer now that he had been given water and medication. "Where is Julian?"
The question hung in the warm, sterile air of the hospital room like an uninvited ghost.
I looked at my father's face. The deep lines on his forehead were etched with a lifetime of hard work, but his eyes—clouded as they were—held no anger. Only a profound, heartbreaking weariness.
"He's at his house, Dad," I said quietly, choosing my words with extreme care. "He won't be coming here."
My mother squeezed my hand. A tear trickled down her cheek, soaking into the white cotton pillowcase.
"He took everything, didn't he, Marco?" she whispered softly.
I looked down at her, startled. "Mom..."
"We knew," my mother said, her voice trembling with an old, buried grief. "We weren't completely blind, my boy. Three years ago, when the rice fields were sold, a man from the bank came to the house with papers. He thought Julian wasn't home. He told your father that the loan was three months behind. That's when we knew."
"Why didn't you say anything to anyone?" I asked, dropping to my knees beside her bed, my voice breaking. "Why didn't you go to the barangay? Why didn't you ask the neighbors for help?!"
My father let out a dry, raspy breath.
"Because he was our son, Marco," my father said softly, looking up at the white ceiling tiles. "If we told the neighbors, if we went to the police... our family would be ruined. People would laugh at us. They would say Mateo Mercado raised a thief for a eldest son, and a runaway for a youngest son. We thought... we thought if we just suffered quietly, maybe God would protect you in the city, and maybe Julian would eventually change his heart."
The sheer weight of their sacrifice hit me like a falling wall.
They hadn't just suffered because of Julian’s greed. They had suffered because of their pride—the old, fierce, stubborn pride of traditional provincial parents who would rather consume dry dog food in the dark than let the world know that their household had broken from within.
"He lied to me, Dad," I whispered, resting my head against the side of my mother's mattress. "He told me you hated me. He told me you kicked me out."
My father’s rough hand tightened on my arm with a sudden, surprising strength.
"A father never throws away his blood, Marco," my father said, his voice rising with a rare, fierce clarity. "Never. You were the one who built the fence with me. You were the one who stayed up all night when the storm broke the dike. Every time I looked at the rice fields for sixteen years, I saw your footprints in the mud."
I closed my eyes and let the tears flow silently onto the white hospital sheet.
For sixteen years, I had built an empire of concrete, glass, and steel in Manila. I had built high-rise condominiums, shopping malls, and highways. I had surrounded myself with luxury, convinced that success was the ultimate revenge against the parents who had abandoned me.
And all the while, the real foundation of my life had been sitting in a dark, leaking house three hours away, waiting for a letter that had never arrived, holding onto a love that sixteen years of lies had failed to kill.
"I'm taking you home," I said, looking up at both of them through my tears.
"To the old house?" my mother asked softly, a faint flicker of worry in her eyes.
"No," I said, wiping my face and standing up straight. "Not that house. We're going to build a new one. Right here in the valley. Where the sun hits the mountains every morning."
My father looked at me for a long time, then slowly, a small, weary smile broke across his cracked lips.
May you like
"Will it have a porch, son?" he asked. "A bamboo porch where we can watch the rain?"
"Yes, Dad," I replied, squeezing his hand. "The biggest bamboo porch in the entire province."
