After the Hurricane(100)
Junior stood, and took his plate over to the sink. He was so used to doing everything at home that the old order of things on the island—women cooking, men sleeping, women serving, men drinking, women washing, men dirtying—never felt like it applied to him, no matter how many loving aunts or fearful uncles, sensing revolution, assured him that it did.
He could feel the boil on his back weeping, gently, mixing with his sweat, which was cooling and drying in the mountain air. Tiny San Sebastián, El Pepino, was like a postage stamp compared to the great letter of New York, but he knew New York far better, trusted it far more, than he knew this little mountain town. This place that he came from that never felt like a part of him, or if it was, it was one that he was eager to expunge, to cut out, to lance like his boils.
“Your father has off tomorrow,” Goli reminded him. Junior nodded, absently. His father was a postal service worker, and tomorrow was the Fourth of July. A national holiday for an island without a nation. Puerto Ricans celebrated it, though, any excuse not to work, his father would joke.
“He said he wants you ready early. He’s taking you to Luquillo with his children.” Goli never referred to them as Junior’s siblings, though of course that was what they were. He wondered if Goli knew how strange he felt about these siblings he had here, these little strangers who looked at him in awe. At home it was just him and Esperanza. They had moved out of her mother’s apartment, fleeing his grandmother’s crowded home, filled to the brim with the many children she had had with the many men she had defeated. Teofila, his grandmother, checked on them occasionally, treating Esperanza’s growing madness as others would try to treat a common cold, with deliveries of chicken soup and advice that if she walked about more, she might feel better.
“I’ll be ready,” Junior assured her, and Goli smiled, sadness leaking out of the edges of her upturned lips. “Are you coming?” he asked, hoping he wasn’t pleading, hoping she would ignore it if he was. While he loved his mother fiercely, he took care of her, he worried for her. His duty colored his love. Goli took care of him, and he wanted her to have the joys of life, a day at the sea, cold beers and fresh fish from one of the little shacks that littered the shores of Luquillo, time away from the backbreaking work of the farm.
Goli shook her head.
“This is time for you and your family.” Junior looked away, and without a word walked back to the couch, lying on it like a heap of laundry, boneless. Luis was already asleep, having gone into his and Goli’s bedroom, exhausted, his body metabolizing his food like a slumbering snake. Junior felt Goli’s lips brush over his forehead as she turned out the light, and went to join her husband.
They belonged together, Goli and Luis. They fit. They were the only people he knew who did. Junior’s parents had separated when he was an infant, divorced before his third birthday. His father had tried to stay in New York, but had given up on the winters, and the hardness, and had left it, and him, behind. The people he knew in New York, everyone who was with someone, clashed against each other, their romances fraught with broken hearts and bones. One of his mother’s boyfriends had almost put him through a wall of another of their old apartments, on Allen Street, while his grandmother had knocked out more than one of her husband’s teeth. His uncle Samuel, only a year older than Junior, who everyone called Rowdy, because he was, had new girlfriends every week, and they were always either crying or screaming. Chavela, his father’s second wife, was almost silent, kind to him, kind to everyone, but she was a woman with a plate of food where her voice should be.
Junior wished he knew how his father felt about him. He wished he knew how he felt about his father. Sometimes he hated him for leaving him behind. Sometimes he wanted to be like him, to do the leaving. Sometimes he admired him for the things he had done, given what he had come from. Sometimes he longed for him, wished he would be like the fathers Junior saw on television, in sweaters and asking about his day. But for that night, at least, it was enough to sleep, to wake with the dawn, to pile himself into the beaten Chevy his father drove like a visiting dignitary, his body squashed in between the sticky sweet forms of his much younger siblings, who clung to him, brown berries on a vine. To watch the never-ending sugarcane fields end, to climb through the hills and down the valleys, to span almost the entire island as the sun rose higher and higher, to pass San Juan by, and El Yunque, the rain forest, and panting dogs and women in printed dresses gossiping and a hundred churches and every house bright like candy, and not enough people, after New York everything felt empty, and to arrive, desperate for the ocean. To dive into the water with his father, silent, beside him. The other children splashed about in the shallows, and built sand castles, and screamed for food from Chavela, and pulled each other’s hair, and made new friends, and discarded them.
Junior merely stood in the ocean with his father, a man he barely knew, a man he craved something from that he would never be able to ask for, and never get, a man who had left an infant with a woman who was outside of her own mind, locked out, no keys, no window to break. He thought about asking his father why he had done it, why he hadn’t told Esperanza that he was taking his son with him. But he knew that would have been impossible. No one would have let that happen, not his grandmother, not his uncles, not even himself. Six years ago when Santiago Sr. left New York, he, Junior, already knew that without his help his mother would crumble and fall. He wouldn’t have left her then, even if he had a choice, just like he wouldn’t leave her now. Someday, a voice in his head murmured, but he ignored it. The thought made him sick, with guilt, and with longing.