Marisol and John, Miles and James

Christyn Refuerzo ‘26

James was born in the afternoon on the perfect fall day in early November. One that felt like the movies—the kind of day that coats New York City in magic, the kind of season that makes a person fall in love with the city, desperately. 

The weather was crisp, the air flushing my cheeks pink but not biting. The leaves outside of our apartment window, tinted hues of yellow, orange, and red, grasp to its tree branches like a girl leaving her mother for her first day of school. 

That day, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, so blue and wide that I felt small under its expansiveness.

That morning, the morning James was born, I emerged from bed, slow and careful, and opened the window. The air, brisk and fresh, flew into the bedroom. Breathing became slightly easier. 

Then my water broke. 

—

The delivery was an easy one. I tore but didn’t need stitches. 

Choosing James’s name was easy too—it was biblical, chosen by our family. “If we have another boy,” John and I told our parents before we left the Philippines, “we will let you choose his name.” 

My mother wanted Peter, the man who built the first cathedral. John’s mother wanted Isaac, an ode to the Old Testament and the origins of Christianity. 

But John’s father wanted James. A simple fisherman, one who left his boat to follow Jesus with his brother John, and among the first disciples. “John and Miles and James,” John’s father said. “Father and sons.”

—

Father and sons. Father and son. Son. Alone. With a one-way ticket to the Philippines in January for the funeral.

—

Winter was John’s favorite. We landed in New York the same year John's father passed, and out of the four seasons New York put us through, winter seemed to get John. The way fall got me, maybe the way John and I should have understood one another because we were married and had children together. But this depth our relationship lacked didn’t bother us enough that we needed to talk about it. It didn't bother me the way it used to. Maybe it was the children. Maybe it was New York. 

The sun shines differently in the Philippines—it’s always gold and intense, so beautiful and burning that it made me proud to call myself an island girl. 

But John wasn’t like that. I knew that John loved the pale sun against a world covered in a dusting of white snow. He didn’t long for a golden sun, one meant to darken skin with its intensity. “Look, Mari,” he said, voice incredulous and like a child’s, during our first snow, in January of that year. “The snow...it’s sparkling. It sparkles.” I looked at him, Miles on my hip. He looked... he sounded so soft. 

We got the call on kitchen landline. It never rang this early in the morning. When I picked up, I held the phone close to my ear, and said, “Hi, it’s Marisol.” My voice still nasally from the cold I had two weeks ago, I angled my other ear toward the bedroom where the boys slept. 

“John?” I crept into the bedroom, where he was putting on his socks. He was a laboratory technician at Columbia in Harlem, near our apartment. 

“Mari, I have to go,” he said, gritty. “Can this wait?”

“You should take this. It’s your mother.”

James started crying. I heard Miles cry, “Mama.” 

John went to work.  

—

John went back on New Year’s Day. We didn’t have a car, so Miles, James, and I said goodbye to him from our stoop on his way to the subway toward the airport. “Wave bye to Daddy,” I told the boys, gently holding up James’ hand, so small that his middle finger barely reached the curve between my pointer finger and thumb. Miles sat beside me on the stoop, his grin so widely innocent. Naïve. 

For a month and a half, we lived without him. The hospital gave him paid leave, and we managed. The boys and I had our routine. After a week or so, I started taking sewing work again, for some extra money. I missed it. John wasn’t around to mind too much and for the first week after John left, I wondered, Why doesn’t this feel harder?

It was expensive to make overseas calls, so John and I often sent each other letters. They were cheap and, admittedly, romantic. I liked getting letters from him, with paper I knew his mother bought from the stationery store in the city and his father’s blue, ballpoint pen. It felt like he was sending me fragments from our home. The paper smelled like sun and salt from the Pacific. The indentations of John’s handwriting in smudged blue pen bled behind each leaf of paper. 

Still, I couldn’t shake the fact that John had finally started writing me letters, but it had come at the price of someone’s life. This bothered me. It sometimes felt like the thread that wove throughout my adult life—I got what I wanted, but it always came with a guilt that I didn’t know how to stomach.