Olga Dies Dreaming(107)
Again, Olga just shrugged. “I never thought of it as good or bad; it’s just always been.”
“When was the last time you heard from her?” her aunt asked. “Is this the last time?” She held up the last letter.
Olga felt like a child in that moment, too overwhelmed to worry about what she should or shouldn’t say. She told them about the visit from Karen, about the phone call. This led to more questions. Why did she call now? What did she want? Which led to more disclosures: Reggie, the Pa?uelos Negros, the solar panels. She watched the shock form on their faces.
“So,” Mabel asked, “if I’m following this, you went to see your ex on behalf of your mother?”
“Yes, but she didn’t know we were broken up.” She didn’t realize it was a lie until it was already out of her mouth. “And she didn’t know about Matteo—”
“Good! Because she would have probably told you to break up with him and go with this other motherfucker, because God forbid you have any joy…”
“You don’t know that, Mabel!” Olga pleaded, even though she, herself, knew that’s exactly what would have happened. That this was why she didn’t tell her mother about Matteo in the first place.
“Why do you defend her!? ?Co?o! She left you! She never called until she needed something—and then that something is fucking batshit crazy. You made a whole life without her and she’s literally been telling you that you aren’t shit for years, but you defend her!”
“Ay, Mabel,” Lola interjected, “calm down. You’re frustrated, I get it. But there’s no reason to take it out on Olga.”
“?No, Tía! This is too much. This woman hasn’t done dick for them, and my cousins twist themselves into knots to please her?”
“Do you know if she’s been writing to your brother, too?” Lola asked.
When Olga didn’t immediately answer, her tía just pulled out her phone and called Prieto directly. She went into the other room, and when she came back, she announced her plan.
“Your brother is coming back from D.C. on the first flight tomorrow; we’re gonna put all these letters together and air this shit out. Enough with the secrets!”
“I don’t want to see him,” Olga replied. “He’s a fucking piece of shit.”
“Why do you say that?” Mabel said, cutting her off. “Because of something your mother told you? Or one of her brainwashed friends?”
Fact stymied Olga from answering; it was her mother’s brainwashed friends who told her about her brother. That didn’t change the truth of what they had said; the heartbreak of it. From the day she went into Manhattan to begin high school she’d been navigating worlds that felt foreign to her: her language, her values, her way of seeing people and the world always requiring explanation and context. Only in Brooklyn did she feel at home. Yet year after year she watched this place—as she knew it, as it had been for generations—erode away. Corroded by the very people who, just years before, turned their noses at crossing the bridge. How could she explain to Mabel that each new development, each elegant restaurant and pop-up shop made Olga feel that she herself was disappearing? That she had counted on her brother to be their defender—of Brooklyn, of their culture, of their family—and that he had sold them all out … for cash?
“He’s been taking bribes for votes,” Olga said. “Money from developers. The ones who did Bush Terminal.”
Mabel and Lola seemed taken aback by this, and Olga wondered if it was the money or who the money was from that they were more disturbed by. Certainly, for Olga, it was the money. She’d always envied Prieto’s disinterest in the material, a virtue that cast his character as superior to her own—one that concurrently loved and loathed money and the things it could buy. But, at the end of the day, Matteo was right, and Prieto was just like every other politician.
“Well then,” Lola said, after a pause, “we’re gonna ask about that shit, too! ?Basta ya!”
* * *
IN THE END, Tía Lola decided against inviting their entire family for this exercise, out of concern that people clam up and figuring that if she included Mabel, all the salient details would make the rounds to everyone else within a week anyway. So, Prieto, Lola, Olga, and Mabel gathered around the dining room table at Fifty-third Street with all of the letters their mother had ever sent. Not just to Prieto and Olga, but the ones she’d sent to Papi and Abuelita, too. Letters Olga had never before considered, but whose existence seemed so obvious when her tía laid the small stack of them on the table, and Mabel placed them all in chronological order.
It was a brutal exercise, wrestling with objective reality. To see how their mother had manipulated their lives and their feelings. To see how she attempted to subtly poison the way they saw their aunts and uncles, their cousins, their father, and even, in some instances, their grandmother. All the people who had loved them in her absence. All the people, Olga thought, who loved them without condition. But most of all, to see how their mother tried, year after year, to sow discord and resentments between them.
The letter that hurt the most, though, was one neither of them had seen before. The one their mother had written to their father when she left, the one in which she lamented the lead weight he had become. The one that accused him of having tricked her into thinking their life would be extraordinary only to turn them into “a stereotype of a Puerto Rican family that the younger you would have despised.” Their father had loved them so much, their father who was dope sick and a crackhead, yes, but who still had feelings. Whom she still had no trouble kicking, even when he was down. Their father, who was the reason they existed.