After the Hurricane(108)

They are soon in San Juan, and Diego is pulling up to the house, without her instructions.

“What are you going to do now?” Diego asks her as she stands on the sidewalk in front of the house that may or may not be hers, may or may not be her father’s. But it’s all the same, isn’t it, really, she thinks, it is mine even if it is his, who else would own it? There is no one else left to receive whatever her father has to leave behind, no one else will inherit anything of him. All that he is on this earth is hers to take or throw away.

“I don’t know,” she says, honestly. “My life is in New York.” But of course it really isn’t anymore. She has no job. Her mother is in Philadelphia and Elena knows she will have to deal with that eventually, deal with Rosalind, but she has saturated herself with one parent, she needs a rest. Diego nods.

“Are you happy there?” Diego asks. He barely knows her, so she can be completely honest with him.

“Not really,” she says. “It just goes on and on. Nothing anchors me. Nothing weighs me down either. I almost wish something would.” But does she? She’s cast off every tie. A fiancé. Work. She keeps her friends at a distance, she looks at the city like she’s on the outside of a snow globe. She’s never tried to root herself in New York, not really.

“Are you happy here?” Diego asks. It is a hard question for her to answer. She hasn’t been here for years. She has spent her entire time here chasing her father. The island is crippled by the storm and will be crippled by new storms, by its debt, by its corruption, by its history. She doesn’t know anyone here, really. She wants so badly to belong here, but she doesn’t know if she ever will. She wants to be a part of this place desperately, and worries it will never want her back. She is still separating what parts of the island are the island, and what parts are her father. She may never be able to separate the two. This house is falling down, and there is someone who would buy it from her, free her to go back to her weightless life in New York. Her mother will kill her if she stays. She struggles with her Spanish, she struggles with everything.

She thinks of the feeling of the ocean, the way it calls to her body. The way she thinks about sinking to the bottom, but the ocean holds her up, keeping her light but anchored. Both at once.

“I am,” Elena says.

“I understand what it is to lose someone. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose someone who is still alive. But this place is yours, no matter what any document says, and I know he would like you to have it. I don’t know what will happen, if he will be alive tomorrow, even. If any of us will. For today, this is your home.”

“It’s a ruin,” she says. “It could fall apart at any time.” He smiles.

“These houses have been here for centuries. They’ve withstood floods and fires and bombs, earthquakes and even the Dutch. I wouldn’t underestimate them, if I were you.”

Elena smiles, too. It is true, she knows. Time has seeped into the foundations of these buildings, each one of them built to last. Diego kisses her on both cheeks, lightly, in the Latin way, and Elena blushes. He gives her a hug.

“I’m glad I met you. I always wanted to.”

“So did I,” Elena says, although she had not known of his existence. But she is not lying. She had always wanted to meet Diego, even before she knew of him, because she had always wanted to know her father, even just a little bit. If this is all she has of him, perhaps some of it is the best of him.

“Come by and see me sometime. You know where I live, and I always like visitors.”

“I didn’t say I was staying.”

“You didn’t say you were leaving either.” And then he is gone, the car tires bumping on the uneven cobblestones. Elena watches him until the car turns the corner, then lets herself into the house. She surveys it, the mess half sorted. She hears cooing, and sees that a pigeon has made itself comfortable in a pile of clothing on the second floor. She shoos it away, noting how its newfound nest has also become its bathroom.

The place is very much still a disaster, maybe even more so now that she tried to improve it. But it is not her mess, not really. She could take her things and go, buy a ticket at the airport, lock all this up and let it rot and go to ruin. Perhaps her father will come back for it, perhaps he won’t, but she does not have to take this on, does not have to accept it as hers. Because if she does, she will have to live with the knowledge that she made this decision, that this house is hers because she decided that it is, her inheritance. Because her father is alive, but gone, and this is what he has left her, and she accepts that, accepts what he has to give. Because accepting this means accepting all of it, all that he is, all that she will never know about him. Every person in the albums, every secret he keeps, all that is hidden and all that is gone and all that may come, all the madness she carries in her blood, all the pain he has lived, all the things she will never get to have. She cannot have the house and not the rest. It is an all-or-nothing deal.

Elena is a student of history. What’s past is not prologue. What’s past is present, future, eternal. It is no choice at all, really.

She puts down her tote bag, and gets to work.

The call comes later that day from the lawyer, Victor Padua, the one Diego had referred her father to, with the news that he had, in fact, prepared a will in Puerto Rico for her father, though of course the contents are sealed. Elena does not need to see the document to know what it contains. This house was always hers, always for her, like her father told her. He has broken many promises to her, through forgetting them entirely, but not this one.