After the Hurricane(107)

He looks up once, before he makes the shot, and smiles at her. It is the same smile he wore when he first saw her, happiness to see her, the recognition that she is dear to him, but no surprise, no sense of remorse, no relief or sadness or regret. It is love, but with nothing else attached to it. None of the work, none of the effort, no promises of more than the feeling in his heart. If she doesn’t see him again for another decade, if she sees him tomorrow, she knows that this smile will be no different. There is nothing she can do to change it. Or him.

And so, after days of searching, after worrying and thinking and wondering if her father is alive or dead or in pain or happy, after thirty years of wanting more than she has gotten, Elena Vega walks out of the El Balcón Familiar bar in San Sebastián, Puerto Rico, without a backward glance. She found her father. Now she must let him go.





Twenty




By the time she has gotten on the road, the little green hills that look nothing like cucumbers in her rearview mirror, she is crying. She ignores the tears, the way she ignores the quick rain showers that douse the island with a burst and then run away. They will pass, all things do. She will cry until she does not need to cry anymore. Later, she will cry again, and again, until she finds herself crying less and less, until there are whole parts of each day in which she doesn’t think about her father at all. There will be a tragedy to that, too. She will mourn that pain when she gets to it.

She realizes she has been unconsciously following the signs to San Juan, rather than to Rincón, like a horse moving back to a stable, and she wipes her tears, and reroutes herself, following the signs to Rincón, every mile a chance to compose herself, to manufacture a sense of normalcy to present to Diego. She will visit him after she returns the car, she must, she knows. She does not know how she will get to San Juan from Rincón, but she trusts that she will find a way when she arrives, perhaps she will pay a taxi service far too much money, it will not matter. Her journey, her quest, is done, and all that is left is, well, the rest of her life.

She refuels in Aguada, and has the car in Rincón by evening, returning the keys to the kind-eyed attendant and walking toward Diego’s house. It’s a mile at least, but the breeze is strong and cooling. She finds Diego on the beach, gazing out at the ocean. There are inky gray clouds on the horizon, and he is watching them approach, waiting for the storm to come. She takes a photo of him from behind, noting how his body and the ocean blur into each other, just the way he wants, and then she sits beside him on the sand, looking out at the sea. It has already begun to rain over the ocean, she can see it, how water from the sky meets water from the land about a mile out from them.

“Did you find him?” Diego asks as Elena tries to calculate how long it will take for the rain to come, for them to be soaked.

“In a way,” she says. Diego nods. He says nothing else, asks for no details, and for this she will always be grateful. Someday soon she will recount all that has happened, this strange trip and its conclusion, both devastating and meaningless at the same time. But for now, not talking about it is a gift.

“Are you all right?” he asks, his voice kind. She shrugs.

“I guess I’ll go home, now,” she says. Diego turns to her.

“I thought you were home.” He smiles. She looks away, unable to bear his gaze.

“It’s a good thing you did,” he says. “Find him. Maybe it won’t be important to him. But maybe for you, it is, to know that you at least tried. Because really, I believe what we do is not really for other people, but for ourselves. And you did something for yourself that you will always know, even after he has forgotten. You didn’t give up. He is fading away, I know that. We are all fading away, we who have lost what we loved most. We are losing ourselves, too. I’ve been losing myself for decades. But you aren’t. Now whatever you have of him is your own.”

Water hits Elena’s cheeks, and she thinks for a moment that she is crying again. But she is not. The storm has found them, the sudden downpour of the Caribbean, as fierce as it is rapid. Diego makes no move to go inside, to run away from the rain, so neither does she. They merely sit on the dampening sand, letting the water soak them, letting the storm wash them clean.



Elena returns to San Juan the next day. Diego gives her a ride, and they stare silently out at the empty roads, the damaged island.

“What do you think is going to happen now?” Elena asks Diego. She means after Maria, but she also means to her. What is going to happen to her now?

“The island will recover. Slowly. Painfully, without as much help as it needs. Bastards in Washington.” Elena nods along with his words. “People will leave, but people are always leaving. And coming back. And they will fix some things, and other things will be tangled up and corrupt, and in the next storm it will happen all over again. That’s what I think, at least. It’s nice living here. Nothing ever really changes much. It’s soothing,” Diego says, wryly.

“I can’t believe that,” Elena says. Even with everything that has happened, she can’t.

“Give it time,” Diego tells her, smiling sadly. “And pain.” They pass a roadside snack stall that has been overturned by the storm from last night. Men have gathered around it, and are struggling to push it back into its correct place. Elena thinks again of the storm that blew away her grandfather’s garden shed all those years ago. She wonders if it became a food stall, if it landed somewhere and the people who found it thought it was a wonderful gift from the gods. Oh, the cruelty and generosity of the gods of storms.