After the Hurricane(14)
She pays her driver and pulls her bag onto the high sidewalk, off the blue street tiles, taken from the rivers of Spain and transported as ballast to the New World to become cobblestones. They make San Juan so pretty, and so dangerous when it rains, which it does for a little bit almost every day. The bright tiles turn slippery as wet glass, twisting more than a few ankles with slick ease.
The day has officially become night, and she is conscious of how alone she is, not just on the street, which is deserted, not even a stray cat to keep her company, but on the island. Apart from her father, who does she know here? Where is the nearest hospital, how would she call the police, if she needed to? Most of her life has been well researched, well planned, neatly ordered, safe. This part of it, though, is a wild garden, made ever more impenetrable by the storm. She has left it untouched, and now she does not know it from Adam.
Her key sticks in the lock for a moment, fighting rust. Elena feels panic, sharp in her side; if she cannot even get into the house, what will she do? Where will she go, sleep, be? She thinks of the empty hotels in Condado, shuttered and worthless to her now. The key turns, her panic lifts. She pushes, hard, at the door, and it opens, creaking at the hinges, the smell of mildew, distinct to the tropics, filling her nose instantly.
“Papi?” she calls. Why? She knows he is missing, somewhere that is not here. But, maybe he is not. Maybe it was all something silly, a broken phone, a bender, maybe he is here, sleeping in his bed, maybe he will laugh at this, laugh at the thought of her mother worrying about him, his eyes twinkling as if they are young again, as if she still loves him, and he will hug Elena, and show her that he has signed the house over to her years ago, that he remembers everything, that he is whole and fine, and laugh at her worry, and tomorrow they will go to the beach together, their bodies warm and cradled in the sand, in the ocean, in the world.
Nothing.
“Papi!” Her voice echoes in the house. She has never called him anything but papi. It is what he wanted to be called, and even when she realized it was a term of endearment for a lover or a child in other parts of Latin America, she could not think of him otherwise. Although when talking about him she describes him with more distance, as her father, when she speaks to him or calls to him, he is always Papi, nothing else. She listens, no response. He is not there. The place is dark, stagnant. Her heart lurches, and she hates herself for being stupid, for having hope.
She drags in her suitcase, sweat forming on her forehead, and looks around in the dying, dead light for a switch. Will the house even have power? Who would she call if it does not? She finds a switch, says a prayer, and flips it. Light fills the foyer with a suddenness that somehow surprises her, startling a small lizard and revealing dead flies and roaches in the corners of the room, and she thanks God for it, for the house having power, for the generators that have helped the city run, for the feeble grid repair that has focused on San Juan first, unfair as that might be to the rest of the island. Tonight, it is there for her, she is grateful, she will take it.
She looks around. When she was here last it had been a graceful space, the foyer; funny to have a foyer here, but this part of the house was constructed in the 1800s, a time when a foyer was as important as ten pounds of petticoats and a good horse. Her mother had restored the white marble floors, had the wooden stairs refinished and polished, painted the walls a calming pale blue, and made sure flowers were placed in a vase there when they visited, azucenas, fragrant lilies, brought down from the country and sold in San Juan by a street hawker. Now, the marble is dull, some tiles chipped. The stairs are fading and splintered and the blue paint has bubbled and cracked with humidity, shedding chips around the edges of the room. The vase has no flowers, instead it is filled by a broken umbrella and a bunch of rolled-up newspapers. Objects sit huddled in corners, piles of things, and Elena has no energy to explore them this evening. It is enough that she has made it, that she has opened the door, that some feeble current runs through the wiring. She needs water, and a place to sleep, and she can sort it all out tomorrow. Dust covers every surface, and as Elena inhales she catches it in her lungs, coughing deeply. Her wheeled suitcase makes tracks in it as she walks through the doorway, surveying the bedroom on the first floor.
The house is a two-story two-bedroom, the bedroom and bath on the bottom floor for her, the bedroom and other bath on the top for her parents. Then, all rooms for Santiago. Now, she supposes, all rooms for her.
Her old bedroom is populated with more things, so many more things. She does not recognize most of them. Where did her father get all of this? Light from the foyer shows her old dolls and bottles—green and clear and brown, empty, or at least without caps—and piles of books, and broken furniture, and unbroken furniture, and paintings, hung on the walls and stacked against the floor, a birdcage, more newspapers, more clothing, half of a mannequin, wooden statues with chipped paint of saints, and so much more, so much she cannot see. She turns the switch in this room, but nothing happens. The bulb must be out, she will go to the hardware store tomorrow; she hopes it is in the same place it was ten years ago, something that would have been almost impossible in New York, a bit unlikely in Philadelphia, but here, perhaps, it could be true.
She cannot sleep in this room. She isn’t even sure if there is a bed. Can she sleep in her father’s room? Is it all like this? How can he be living this way? The house, so far, doesn’t seem like one that someone has abandoned a few days ago, instead it seems like something that has been hibernating for years, layers of dust falling on layers of junk.