Clap When You Land(4)
always have the same comments:
Quiet in class, shows potential, needs to apply more effort.
I am a rule follower. A person whose report card always says Meets Expectations.
I do not exceed them. I do not do poorly.
I arrive & mind my business.
So I have no idea what anyone in the main office could possibly want with me.
How could I have guessed the truth of it?
Even as teachers in the halls gasped as the news spread, even as the main office was surrounded by parents & guidance counselors. How could I have known then there are no rules, no expectations, no rising to the occasion.
When you learn news like this, there is only falling.
I replay that moment again & again, circle it like a plane in a holding pattern.
How that morning, on the fifth day of June, the worst thing I could imagine
was being lectured for my progress report or getting another nudge to return to the chess club.
I didn’t know then that three hours before, as I’d arrived at school,
before lunch or Dre or the long walk down the school hallway, the door to my old life slammed shut.
When I walk into the office, Mami is here.
Wearing chancletas, her hair in rollers.
& that’s the move that telegraphs the play: Mami manages a nice spa uptown
& says her polished appearance is advertisement.
She never leaves the house anything less than Ms. Universe–perfect.
The principal’s assistant, Ms. Santos, comes from around her desk,
puts an arm around my shoulders.
She looks like she’s been weeping.
I want to shake her arm off.
Want to shove her back to her desk.
That arm is trying to tell me
something I don’t have the stomach to hear.
I don’t want her comfort. Don’t want Mami here, or anything about what’s to come.
I take a breath, the way I used to
before I walked into a room
where every single person wanted to see me lose. “Ma?”
When she looks at me, I notice her eyes are red & puffy, her bottom lip quivers, & she presses the tips of her fingers there as if to create a wall against the sob that threatens.
She answers, “Tu papi.”
The flight Papi was on departs
without incident on most days, I’m told.
Leaves from JFK International Airport & lands in Puerto Plata in exactly three hours & thirty-six minutes.
Routine, I’m told, a routine flight, with the same kind of plane that flies in daily & gets a mechanical check & had a veteran pilot & should have landed fine.
Mami says the panic hit most of the waiting families at the same time.
Here, in New York, with the Atlantic refereeing between us, we knew much earlier. Thirty minutes after the plane departed, it was reported that the tail had snapped, that like some fishing, hunting creature the jet plunged into the water completely vertical, hungry
for only God knows
what—prey.
Sank.
I sign myself out of school.
Ignore Ms. Santos’s condolences.
Mami is still crying.
We walk to my locker.
I leave my books in the cafeteria.
Mami is still crying.
I leave school without saying goodbye to Dre.
Mami can’t stop crying.
Mr. Henry waves. I wave back.
Outside the day is beautiful.
Mami cries.
The sun is shining.
The breeze a soft touch along my face.
Mami is still crying.
It’s almost as if the day has forgotten it’s stolen my father or maybe it’s rejoicing at its gain.
Mami is still crying,
but my eyes? They remain dry.
I learn via text I am one of four students at school who had been called to the office because of the flight.
In the neighborhood, las vecinas are on their stoops in their batas & chancletas,
everyone trying to learn
what the TV may not know:
Who was on the flight? Is it true everyone is dead?
Was it terrorists? A conspiracy de por allá? The government?
When the women call out to Mami
she does not turn her head their way.
We walk from the school to our apartment as if we are the ones who have been made ghosts.
The bodegueros & Danilo the tailor & the other store owners
stand outside their shops
making phone calls as viejitos
wring their hands in front of their bellies & shake their heads.
Here in Morningside Heights,
we are a mix of people: Dominicans & Puerto Ricans & Haitians, Black Americans & Riverside Drive white folk, & of course, the Columbia students who disrupt everything: clueless to our joys & pains.
But those of us from the island
will all know someone who died on that flight.
When we get to our building,
Do?a Gonzalez from the fifth floor calls out from her window,
pero Mami does not look up,
does not look sideways, does not stop until we walk through our apartment door, & then, as if pierced, she deflates, slides down to the floor
with her head in her hands, & I watch as the rollers slip free one by one, as her body shakes & she unravels. I do not slide down to join her.