Olga Dies Dreaming(64)

“You’re renewing your vows and are going to hire me to plan the whole thing?”

Reggie laughed.

“You’re hilarious. First of all, no, we aren’t. Second of all, if we were, I’d never hire you because it would be too awkward.”

“If you’re paying money, nothing is awkward about it, Reggie. I’m a professional.”

“Listen,” Reggie said, his tone becoming more serious. “The thing is, before I can tell you the good news, I need a guarantee of your secrecy here. Because the information I’m about to share with you could really fuck up people’s lives, mine included, okay?”

Olga stared at him with intense curiosity. Her stomach fluttered. She took in the scene outside the car.

“We’re going the wrong way,” she said. “I need to go uptown.”

“Olga, you need to go home, so we are driving you there—”

“Reggie? What the fuck?” Olga interrupted, her hands rising unconsciously to illustrate her anger. Reggie gently clasped them in his own.

“And once you get there, you’re going to stay home for the rest of the day, and then tomorrow, you’re going to go to work, like everything is normal.”

“Everything is normal, Reggie,” Olga said, though, already for the past few days, life had been anything but.

“Did your brother tell you he’d gone to see your aunt Karen a few weeks back?”

Adrenaline inundated Olga. She was trying to reconcile Reggie and her aunt Karen and her brother in her mind in a way that would make sense.

“What? No. We haven’t seen Aunt Karen in years.”

“You haven’t.” Reggie scoffed. “But you should ask him about it and see what he says.”

Olga took this in. Why would Prieto go to see her? And why wouldn’t he mention it to Olga?

“How do you even fucking know this?”

“Karen told me, and when I heard, I figured he would be too much of a pussy to tell you.”

“Why is my aunt talking to you? How does she even know you?”

“I’ll get into it, but I need you first to promise me that this conversation won’t go beyond this car.”

“I can’t promise that without knowing what we’re talking about.”

“That’s the only way to promise. It stays between me and you. And I will talk to you about this anytime you want, day or night, that I promise you. But you must swear on your grandmother’s grave not to discuss this with your family, and especially not your brother.”

Olga paused. Her hands still in Reggie’s grasp, she noticed now they were trembling. She nodded.

“Olga, your mother sent me here to talk with you today.”

Her mouth dropped open.

“How—”

She started to form a question, but Reggie put a finger over her lips, his body fully turned towards her now in the back of the truck.

“Your mother is a very important part of a group of patriots aiming to claim dignity again for Borikén, and all of us—”

Olga’s full body was now shaking. She shook off Reggie’s grasp.

“I don’t give a fuck about Borikén right now Reggie! Where the fuck is my mother and why the fuck do you know where she is, when me and my fucking brother don’t?”

“I’m trying to tell you, Olga—”

“I need you to tell me without the fucking political rhetoric, okay?”

Reggie put his hands on her arms, to try and stop her body from shaking, but she had lost control over herself. She felt sick from the pit of her stomach. She wanted to cry, but no tears would come. Did she feel despair? Betrayal? She certainly felt rejection. Her mother, so far from her, such a great and powerful Oz, yet fully realized to … Reggie? Reggie whom she had despised. Whom she had advised Olga herself to avoid. It made no sense.

“Tranquila, tranquila, tranquila,” he began to whisper. Her grandmother would always calm her that way, in the nights following her mother’s departure, when she would wake up crying. She would come in and lie next to her, stroking her hair, whispering the same words. Had she ever told Reggie that? She found herself responding to his command, her body slowly quieting itself. When her shaking stopped, Reggie took his hands off her shoulders. Though it was not quite 10 A.M., he leaned forward and pulled from a cabinet two heavy crystal tumblers and filled them each with a heavy pour of rum. He handed her one, and, locking his dark eyes with hers, clinked her glass.

“?Salud! This will make us both feel better.”

She took a sip, but he took a swallow.

“A few weeks after you ended things with us, I got a package in the mail to my home. It had no return address—”

“My mother.”

“Yes. It was not a terribly long letter, but I was shocked to get it. You had told me small bits about her, but honestly, that she had tracked me down weirded me out. Still, the letter, it was very poignant to me. No one had spoken to me that way before. She started by telling me that she didn’t feel I was appropriate for you, because you were a brilliant mind who had been raised for liberation, while I, like so many Puerto Ricans before me, was an anchor for our people. My mind had been colonized. She went on to articulate what she thought someone like me, who clearly had the ability to visualize futures for themselves that seem impossible, could do if they could look beyond the White Man’s goals. She didn’t say anything else about it, but she enclosed three books. One was a collection of essays by Hostos, a biography of Che Guevara, and a book of poems with Julia de Burgos and Pedro Pietri.