Clap When You Land(16)
went down too fast. For life vests. Or safety plans.
Too perpendicular to readjust in time.
For a rescue to be mounted. By the time the Coast Guard reached the sinking tail, they’d been under water for hours. The impact alone would have killed them.
No one ever emerged. The doors never opened.
The air masks never even dropped down.
Without fail, most days I’m in school,
I get sent to the guidance counselor.
But I don’t have anything to tell her.
She asks me how I’m doing. Stupid fucking question.
I want to tell her some days I wake up
to find dents on the inside of my palms
from where I’ve fisted my hands while sleeping, my nails biting into the skin & leaving angry marks.
On the days I wake up with smooth palms I’m angry at myself.
There should be no breaks from this grief. Not even in sleep.
I don’t tell her that. I don’t tell her anything.
I chew on the little green mints she offers & wait for the bell.
On the days like today that I don’t go to school, I still go over to Dre’s house.
Even when she’s not there.
Dr. Johnson puts her arm around my shoulders & tells me to take my time. Her semester ended a few weeks ago, & she won’t teach a summer session for a few weeks more.
I decide to organize the books in their living room library while I wait for Dre to come home.
Clear steps: organize the books by genre, then alphabetize them on the dining room table.
Since they moved here, Dr. Johnson has let me borrow lots of books. Let me borrow games, & Wi-Fi, & a cup of sugar if Mami was baking.
& I wish I could borrow time, or space, or answers. I tell Dr. Johnson this, & she pat-pats my hand.
“Just let yourself mourn, sweetie.
You can’t run from what hurts you, or like a dog smelling fear, that grief will just keep chasing with ever-sharp teeth.”
I go back to stacking books.
Orderly. Logical. Safe.
Later that day, when Ma gets home I search her face for signs of how she feels.
She is as polished as when she left this morning.
But her face is pale, & her hands tremble when she hands me her purse. She does not say how much it must have cost her to smile today.
At six o’clock, Mami & I go to a grief counseling session.
It’s the third time the neighborhood association’s invited us.
There’s a Spanish-speaking counselor & a priest.
Mami grips my hand, her pale cheeks paler.
The room is full. & even before anyone speaks, there are several people silently weeping.
Pain hums in the room, like a TV on mute,
& there is no knob to turn it off.
The counselor asks us about loss.
I do not know how to say in Spanish:
I am a graceful loser.
Many times. Many things. I’ve made mistakes that lost the match.
Who were Mami & I playing against? Did God win?
Did Papi lose? I know we did.
How could the stakes have been so high?
We are sitting in a circle.
One man says both his parents were on the flight; they were returning to Santo Domingo to retire.
A young woman with straight hair that hangs to her waist says her husband had just got back from fighting overseas; he was going to visit his sister
& the place where he was born for the first time in twenty years.
We hear about a little girl going to visit her grandmother, about a young couple flying to their honeymoon.
The stories hang in the room like twinkling lights that I could touch. Over 80 percent of the people on the flight had connections to the island. Returning.
& when it’s Mami’s turn to talk, in a soft voice she simply says, “My husband travels back every year.
I feel as if I lose him again every morning I wake up.”
Anger swirls up my chest, gets tangled with the words I had meant to say. Mami’s pain seems hungry.
& for the first time I wonder if now that Papi’s dead, will she learn what I knew? What I haven’t been able to talk to her about for over a year, because I didn’t want her hurt? Because I was afraid of the kind of change these secrets would rain on our lives.
& if she doesn’t find out, does that mean the only person in my family who knows Papi’s secret is me?
When it’s my turn to speak, I bite the insides of my cheek.
The only thing I give the circle is a tight smile & shrug.
On silent accord, Mami & I agree, we will not go back.
The emotions at the group session
took up every vacancy in our body
& we have no room no room no room left.
My old chess coach calls when we get home after the grief session. I’m doing dishes, cleaning plates Mami & I filled with food but never ate from.
My hands are soapy when Mami hands me the phone.
Coach Lublin’s voice is gentle, soothing; it’s the voice he uses when a newbie
loses a tournament to a kid half their age.
“Yahaira, we are all thinking of you.”
Coach & I worked together for two years.
He seemed unsurprised when I quit the chess team, as if he’d always known I was not truly interested.