After the Hurricane(101)

The ocean was blue enough to break hearts, and he wanted to stay in it forever. Instead, he sat with his father in a small beach shack, watching him drink beer after beer. He lay beside him, as he napped, his face red with alcohol and sun, and sat beside him on the way home, as Chavela and the children, drowsy from the sun, slept. He knew his siblings so little that he had a moment of absurd worry at one point that they had forgotten one of them, that he had counted wrong, that he had one more, or less. But Chavela wouldn’t forget her children, not like Esperanza sometimes forgot him. Junior was comforted by the thought that for all Chavela’s silence, her mind seemed to stay firmly in her head. She always greeted him as mi ni?o, my child. She was kind like that, to count him among her blessings. Sometimes, when the children were screaming at her, he had to clench his fists not to hit them, not to scream at them, Don’t you know how lucky you are? He had to work hard not to envy five-year-old children. He looked back at the littlest one, Juanito, who clung to Chavela even in sleep, holding on to her as if his life depended on it.

“How is your mother?” Santiago Sr. asked, his voice husky from lack of use, quiet, so as not to wake his sleeping wife, his many children.

On these trips to the island, there would always come a point when Santiago Sr. asked this. Junior knew this, and yet he never knew how to respond.

“Okay,” he said, shrugging. There was too much to say, so he said nothing, really. How could he tell his father about the days when she was normal, absolutely normal, and then she would get up from the lacework that she made and sold by the piece and leave their apartment and he would find her, in Union Square, certain she could communicate with the sun? How could he tell him about the days when she was catatonic, when she refused to move, to eat, she barely breathed? How could he tell him about all the things in between, about the fact that these summers in Puerto Rico were both escape and torture, that his fear for his mother ate him up from the inside, that he knew someday, soon, he would have to leave her behind, he could not take her with him, and that knowledge made his stomach into a lead casket? How could he say anything at all, to the man who had done the same? How could he tell him, Someday I think I will become you, without wanting to, without knowing you at all?

Santiago Sr. nodded.

“That’s good.”

Junior looked out the window, watching the light fade.

“She’s a good woman, your mother,” Santiago Sr. said, awkwardly. He stumbled over the words. Santiago said nothing. “Terrible cook. Goli is feeding you better?” He nodded. His mother was a terrible cook. She barely ate, both through lack of care, and because she was desperate to maintain her slim figure. She liked dating men, liked meeting them, having them take her out on the town. Junior wondered if she liked it because she could pretend, with a new person, that her mind was whole, unsplintered. Or maybe it was just that they could afford things Esperanza couldn’t.

“Has she gotten sicker?” Santiago Sr. asked, his tone tentative. Junior was confused. His father didn’t usually linger over this topic like this.

“I don’t know.” He really didn’t know. It was hard for him to tell, better, worse, about his mother. She changed so much all the time; how could he say what was sicker?

“Your grandmother thinks she has,” Santiago Sr. said, his voice heavy. Junior was startled. He didn’t know that his father even spoke to Teofila.

“She’s a bitch, that woman,” Santiago Sr. said, almost under his breath. Junior laughed, nervously, and his father joined him. They didn’t look alike, but when they laughed their faces were the same. They both laughed like they were afraid.

“She’s put Esperanza in the hospital,” Santiago Sr. said, and Junior realized that this, like the car winding up the mountain, was what his father had wanted to say the whole time, but he had tried to sneak up on it, approach it sideways. The whole day, the whole purpose of it, was to inform him of his mother’s captivity. He knew what hospital meant. It meant institution. It was a decision the family had debated and prayed over and lit candles about and pretended was an impossibility for the majority of Junior’s life. And now it had been made, without him.

“Which one?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

“Bellevue,” Santiago Sr. said, as the car turned a corner, rolling through sugarcane fields. They were close to Tía Goli’s house, close to safety, close to a place that was like a home but it was not his home, nothing was, not really. Even his home wasn’t his home anymore. Not while his mother wasn’t in it, not now that Teofila had had her own daughter committed.

“Your grandmother said it is for the best. It’s an expensive place. They will treat her well, help with her sickness,” Santiago Sr. said, his voice as doubtful as his words were confident.

Junior just nodded, unsure if his father could see him in the fading light, unsure if he cared.

“I will give you some money, when you go back. To help,” Santiago Sr. said. Junior nodded again. “She’s been sick for a long time.”

He wanted to ask his father when he knew, when he had seen Esperanza’s mind escape her body, when it had become clear to him that the pale pretty girl he had met in church in El Pepino, the town whose dust coated the Chevy’s tires even now, was a madwoman. Was it before Junior had been conceived? Was it when he had come out of her? Was it when he started to crawl? He wanted to ask his father what would happen now, and if Esperanza really could get better, and why, why, had he left his child with her, why had he left New York, why had he started a new family with a silent woman and made loud babies? Why had it taken him all day to tell him that his mother was in a mental institution? And what would happen now?