The Last Broadcast of Marisol’s Wake

The summer of ’92 in the barrio of San Isidro, nestled against the Sierra Madre foothills, was a season of relentless heat and the drone of cicadas. My wife, Luz, and I lived in a modest nipa hut on the edge of the subdivision, just a stone’s throw from her mother’s two-story concrete house. Tita Ising had passed after a long battle with diabetes, her kidneys finally giving out. After a week of vigil at the municipal funeral parlor in the nearby town proper, we brought her home for the customary three-day wake before burial.

It was customary for the dead to spend one last night in their earthly home, so neighbors and relatives could pay their respects. The house, usually filled with her boisterous laughter and the smell of her ginger tea, now smelled of wilted flowers and candle wax. Her body lay in a rented coffin, draped in white, surrounded by votive candles and a portrait of her smiling in her younger years.

I remember that final night before the internment. The electric fans droned, but they only churned the muggy air. Around midnight, when most of the mourners had drifted home, it was just Luz, her brother Marco, and me. We were dozing in the sala, when the transistor radio on the altar—old, dusty, usually tuned to a local AM station—suddenly crackled to life. It wasn’t music. It was a voice, Marisol’s voice, but distorted, as if speaking through water. It said, ‘The pako fronds in the garden are unfolding to the east. Look out the window.’

We froze. Luz stirred, her face pale in the candlelight. ‘Did you hear that?’ she whispered. Marco, a skeptic, shook his head. ‘It’s just interference from the storm in the south,’ he said, but his hand trembled as he lit a cigarette.

Then the radio spoke again, clearer this time: ‘The mango tree by the well has a hollow branch. Behind it, there is a jar of herrings.’ This was something only I knew. Three years ago, I had hidden a jar of pickled herrings in that very hollow, a silly secret for a game with Luz that we never finished. No one else knew.

A chill that had nothing to do with the heat crawled up my spine. Luz grabbed my arm. ‘That’s her. She’s trying to tell us something.’

But Marco scoffed. ‘It’s a prank. Someone’s messing with the radio.’ He got up and turned the dial, but the static remained, and then the voice came again, now with a mournful edge: ‘The floorboards in the kitchen, third from the stove. Lift it. You’ll find a bundle of letters. They are not what they seem.’

We were all standing now, even Marco, his bravado fading. Luz hustled into the kitchen and, against her brother’s protests, pried up the loose floorboard. There, wrapped in oilskin, was a stack of letters tied with a faded ribbon. The top one was addressed to my mother-in-law, but the handwriting was not hers. It was a man’s, and the date was 1958. The letters were love letters, written to Marisol before she married Ising. But they were not from Ising. They were from a man named Rudy, who had died in a fishing accident the year before she married. The letters revealed that Marisol had been pregnant with Rudy’s child, and to save her reputation, she married Ising, who knew and accepted the child as his own. That child was Luz.

Luz’s face went ashen. ‘This can’t be…’ she whispered. ‘She never told us.’ The radio crackled again, and Marisol’s voice, now softer, said, ‘I’m sorry. I could not carry the secret to my grave. Forgive me. And look under the porch. There is something for my granddaughter.’

Before we could move, the candle by the coffin flickered and went out, plunging the room into darkness except for a sliver of moonlight. A cold wind swept through the house, rustling the curtains. Then we heard a scraping sound from under the porch. Marco grabbed a flashlight, and we went outside. Under the dilapidated porch, half-hidden by weeds, was a wooden box. Inside, wrapped in a baby blanket, was a stack of old currency notes and a tarnished locket. The locket contained a faded photograph of a young Marisol and a man who was not Ising—Rudy, presumably. And the money, enough to cover the funeral expenses and more, was a secret nest egg she had saved for Luz’s future.

We stood there, dumbstruck, the radio now silent. The rest of the night passed in uneasy silence. At dawn, we prepared for the funeral mass. As we carried the coffin to the funeral van, the radio in the house suddenly blared one last message, clear as if she were beside us: ‘The pako fronds are green again.’ And then it went dead.

We buried Marisol that afternoon, but the secrets she unearthed haunted us long after. Luz never spoke of the letters, but she kept the locket. And sometimes, in the still of the night, I think I hear snatches of a voice on the breeze, speaking of things that were buried, and things that should stay buried. But I never touch the radio again.