After the Hurricane(18)

“Have you ever heard of someone named Diego? Someone he knew?” she asks instead, closing her eyes and breathing deeply. She doesn’t really expect a real response.

“Why are you asking about Diego?” Elena’s eyes snap open at her mother’s words. Her mother knows this Diego?

“Who is that? Who is he?”

“Diego is someone we both knew once. But we haven’t spoken to him in a long time. I didn’t know your father . . . well. I don’t see how it matters, anyway. Honestly, a lot of Santiago’s life, I don’t want you knowing about it either.”

“Why?”

“Someone like your father, he was, is, always trying to get away from where he came from. He didn’t want to share it, didn’t want to get lost in it. Seems like he did anyway, though.” Rosalind’s voice is bitter. Elena wants to scream. Even separated for years her parents are united in hiding his life from her.

“You have to tell me something. Anything. I don’t know how to do this alone.”

“Have you spoken to Gloria?” Elena doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know how to explain her fears. “That should have been the first thing you did!” her mother scolds her.

“She was out. I’ll try tomorrow,” Elena lies, her voice leaden. “Who is Diego?”

“I am sure that’s not important now. I don’t see how that would help you, Elena.”

“How would you know?” Elena asks. She doesn’t want to tell her mother about his name on the map. Rosalind isn’t the only person who can keep things from someone.

“I don’t like your tone, Elena. If your father wanted you to know about his life, he would have told you. I’m sorry that you feel that you have to lash out at me because I’m the only remaining parent you have, but that’s not a very mature reaction and frankly, I’m surprised by it.” Elena wants to cry. She wants to apologize. She wants to slap her mother for deflecting like this, for making this about Elena’s bad behavior and not Rosalind’s own. Just tell me something, anything, please, I have so little of him.

“I’m sorry, Mom. I’m just . . . I’m frustrated. I saw the name somewhere, and I thought it might be important. Obviously I was wrong,” Elena says. Of course she does. Obedient, calm, defusing the tension, ignoring the problem. “I should go. I’ll talk to you later.” She almost throws her phone on the ground, but the floor is marble, it will break.

She is sure Diego is important. Something in Rosalind’s voice . . . there was a longing there. She knows who he is. He means something to her father, maybe even to her mother. But Elena will not find the answers alone. She will not find him alone. She is tired, hungry, disgusting with dirt and sweat. She knows, her heart hurting, she needs help. And if Rosalind won’t help her, she knows someone else who will.





Five




Santiago Vega looked around the parent-teacher conference for his fourteen-year-old daughter, Elena, surprised to find that he was one of the only men there wearing a suit. For him, the suit was armor. Essential. It insulated him against the world, it showed others what he was, and wasn’t. He had never seen his own father in a suit, even at his wedding to Rosalind. Even at his father’s own wedding to his second wife. Santiago wore suits, unlike his father. Santiago wore suits to prove he was nothing like his father. He was a professional. He was someone of importance. If he had been a man who wanted to consider himself more deeply, which he certainly was not, he would have thought of his suit as a disguise, just like a superhero’s, just like a con man’s. But he didn’t allow his mind to move in those directions.

After the hour of boring explanations of what the children would be learning this year as the September light faded slowly against the large windows of the cafeteria of the criminally expensive private school Rosalind had insisted on for their only child, Santiago felt like his tie was choking him. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about this. He did. He was, in fact, deeply invested in his daughter’s education. Elena would be everything, have everything, he hadn’t. But he couldn’t erase the faint whisper of judgment that he felt watching these white teachers with their nice clothing and expensive glasses speak seriously on the support and care they were providing for the children, on the challenges that awaited them in the coming school year. What challenges could a bubble like this offer children? What challenges ever really came to people with money? Each of Elena’s classmates, like Elena herself, would study the Silk Route and geometry and read The Catcher in the Rye in safety, with full stomachs and clean hands.

And he had given it to her. That was a source of true joy, it was. He just wasn’t sure all these other little shits deserved it.

When the talking finally, finally, ended, he slipped out at a side door, relieved that no fire alarm exploded as the sign on the glass door warned it would. He wondered if the students of the school knew how many of these signs were lies. They probably didn’t question them. The kids at this school might scrape their parents’ cars against each other and steal their parents’ scotch, but they probably never bothered to see if the fire alarms were real. They’d never have to run out of a building, never been chased. They would grow up to commit the crimes of the rich, not the petty ones of the poor, he thought. God, I hope Elena isn’t ruined by the life I’ve given her.