After the Hurricane(12)

“Where you going?” says the driver in English, like she hasn’t already told the taxi stand monitor and gotten a receipt for the pre-fixed price for a trip to Puerto Rico’s capital.

“Viejo San Juan,” she says, softly, hoping to cover her pronunciation, not bad, but never so good as a native speaker’s, with low volume.

“Yeah, but where?” whines her driver.

“Just by the corner of Tanca and Sol. Near El Jibarito,” Elena says, in English. If her driver prefers it, she’s not going to insist on Spanish, even if it makes her feel like she has failed. She gives him the best landmark, a touristy restaurant that has seen better days, but still attracts crowds given its pride of place in every guidebook and top-ten dining spots list she has ever seen.

“What hotel is that?” he asks, turning the ignition. “You sure it’s open, or okay to stay at?”

“It’s not a hotel. It’s a house,” Elena replies. She doesn’t respond to the second part of his question. In truth, she knows very little about her father’s home anymore. Back when both of her parents bought it and owned it together she had visited a handful of times, marveling over the wooden ceiling beams, somehow impervious to insects, over the marble floors they restored, over the windows and thick plaster walls. Watching them renovate the house was the first time Elena saw a historic renovation, and she wrote about it later in her graduate school applications, how watching history reveal itself in that building activated her desire to study the past. How the idea that it would someday be hers has given her a sense that she carries history with her, herself.

In the years since the divorce, since her father’s self-imposed exile, Elena has not felt right visiting the house her mother built and abandoned in the wreckage of her marriage, visiting the house where the father who left her had curled up like a rat in his nest. While her father has invited her, the invitations have come as drunken ramblings over the rare phone calls and in the strange emails, never revisited in later, more sober moments. Elena does not think she ever really wanted to come. Now she finally is on her way, and he won’t be there to show her what goes where, how anything works, just to be there himself. That gives her a strange feeling, like she is going to stay with someone she is related to but doesn’t know very well. Which of course is true. Her father, his house, this island, she does not know them very well at all, though they are all supposed to be a part of her, belong to her.

The driver has lost interest in her, and Elena is free to look out the window. Her phone is working, with limited service, given how Maria knocked out many cell towers, making already spotty island conductivity even more sporadic, and Elena lets her mother know that she has arrived. There is no one else to tell, now, a sad thought. Adult friends don’t often let each other know when they’ve arrived safely anywhere. Boyfriends, fiancés, husbands, families, do that. Elena has friends that want to hear about her experience on the island, but they, like her boss, are more interested in the extent of the physical damage, the island’s functionality, than her personal problems. She knows that in the grand scheme of things her father might not matter very much, but he matters to her, and she doesn’t want to talk to someone who asks her all the wrong things, making her feel guilty for thinking about what is personal, rather than what is important.

It has been a long time since Elena left New York without knowing exactly when she would return. This trip could take no time at all, or weeks, she doesn’t know, but it makes her feel disconnected from her life in the city, all at once. If someone had asked her a week ago, Elena would have said that her life in New York is full, that she has her work, and her friends, like Isabelle, who runs a wine store in Ditmas Park and comes with Elena to museum exhibitions even though she finds them boring, and Sylvia, who is critical and loving and blames Elena’s problems on being an only child, and Eli, who works in advertising and always shows up to brunch hungover with the funniest stories from the night before. These people have known her for years, and they care for her, Elena is almost completely sure of it.

But Elena feels so far away from them all in this moment, and she wishes she could have brought one of them with her, even as she knows that would have been impossible, and strange. They know her father is different, difficult, and that Elena and he are distant, but there is no one in her life that Elena has ever told about everything, all the contradictions and pains that make up her feelings toward Santiago, not even Daniel, and she is struck by how isolated she has made herself, how everything that she feels now is her own fault. How much is inside her that she has never said, because saying it would make it too real. As long as she says nothing about her father, she can pretend she is a normal person with a normal parent. But how can you be close to people, really close to them, if you don’t tell them who you are? If you don’t know who you are, where you come from, what you are made of?

Elena is dislocated from so many things, and she dislocates herself from others. She never knows if people really like her, because she doesn’t know if she’s enough of a whole person to be liked. She never trusted that Daniel loved her. She hadn’t given him enough of her to love.

So much of her world in New York moves without her having to do anything about it. So much of it just fell into place, driven by demand, utility, practicality. Work, gym, home. Sometimes there are drinks or movies with friends, people from high school, from college, people she knows would like her to give more of herself to them, share more with them, ask more of them, give more to them. She would like to do this, like to feel truly close to them, but has never found the trick of it. It is like when she sees them she is talking to them through a thin pane of glass, and she cannot crack it, not even when they hug, when they reach for her, when she wants to reach for them. They feel the glass, she knows. People learn to keep their distance from her, learn to ask for less, until eventually they ask her for nothing at all.