After the Hurricane(2)

“We should go over there. You want to go over there? I can show you my old neighborhood. We can take a walk. You got time?” Elena has class in an hour. She does not care. She has never missed a class in her life, not in college, not now. She is due a skip. She nods. He smiles at her, and for a moment he is not the man in front of her, his jowls sagging from the weight he has gained, hair thinning, his body sinking under the load of the alcohol and lithium and time. For a moment he is the way he was when she was ten years old, lean and tall and tan and vibrant, and it is enough for her, Elena, that he hug her, that is all she needs to know she is loved.

“Great. That’s great. I want to show you this. I can show you where I lived with my mother, all the places, we moved around a lot. And where my grandmother lived, everyone. My whole family was there. Did you know that?” She did not. He has never answered a single question about his family in her twenty-four years of life, never responded to any inquiry, never volunteered more than a morsel of information. Now he is offering her a feast. She feels frozen, unable to move. Her heart is beating and she can hear it, she can feel herself vibrating. She doesn’t know what to do with her body. She wants what he is offering her so badly she almost extends her hand, like this information is a tangible thing she can feel, hold.

He leans back in his chair.

“We can walk for a bit, but I have to go around four.” His words break the spell. Where is he going? He still has not told her why he is here. She got the call the night before, that he was coming, taking her out to lunch. He has never just come to New York before. This is why she wanted to say something, her planned feeble speech. Because he had come, and she thought that might be a sign of something.

“Your mother and I, we’ve decided to take some time apart. I’m heading down to San Juan for a while, give her a chance to cool off. You know how your mother is, more now than before, she just flies off the handle. She’s hysterical. No logic, turns herself against me. I’m going to wait out the storm down there until it’s safe, you know?” Her father is laughing, smiling, as the waitress brings him another beer. Elena remains as still as before, as pain replaces the anticipation in her body. “I’m just gonna be down on the island until she’s ready. Don’t you worry, though.”

She is never wrong about him. But he can still surprise her. He can always be worse than she imagined.

“When?” Elena forces the words past her mouth. Her father looks at her, uncomprehending.

“When are you going?”

“Tonight. From JFK. Cheaper flight.” Her parents have never once flown out of New York to go to Puerto Rico, not since Elena was born, at least. They fly from Philadelphia, regardless of the cost. And he said flight, singular. One-way.

“I see.” She had hoped so deeply that his calling her for lunch was an act of love. An opening of a door. But it was merely a rest stop.

“I’m gonna take a leak, okay, and then we’ll go for that walk. Sound good?” Elena nods, her neck stiff with tension. The walk. She will still have that. That is something, more than anything that has come before. That is an act of love, is it not? That is a gesture, he will show her his young life, one of the many parts of him she has never seen. Maybe he will talk to her, maybe they can discuss what he is telling her about her mother, about their marriage, maybe it is not so serious, like he says, just a storm passing over the horizon.

He kisses her on the forehead, and stumbles to the bathroom. She watches him, turning her head to see him as he goes, and then turns back to her meal. The soup she had ordered is a beef bone and leek soup with a milky broth and she usually loves it, leaves the bowl empty. Today it has cooled and it turns her stomach to smell it, to see the fat floating on the tepid broth. She picks up her father’s latest beer bottle and drinks it, mostly to prevent him from doing so, but also for courage, and a little numbness. She does not want to feel as deeply as she does, for fear she will not be able to stand it. She trembles. Her hands are shaking, and she doesn’t know if that’s from anticipation or panic. She clasps them together so hard her nails bite into her flesh, but it’s better than the shaking, she decides. He has to give her something real now. If he won’t try to fix himself, get better, at the very least he has to give her some part of himself, some history that she can have. She is sick of studying other people’s stories and not knowing her own.

Maybe if she knows him better, he will find her more worth loving, more worth changing for. She hates how much she hopes for this, longs for it, cannot cut her need for this out of her no matter how much she tries. She never knows who she is angrier with, him or herself.

This is why, forty-five minutes later, although she knows that he is gone, that he has left her there, and isn’t coming back—not for their walk, not to pay, not to be her father at all, to be there, with her—Elena sits at the table still, looking at the soup she will never order again, and the remains of his spicy stir-fried squid, and the many bottles of beer he had to drink to tell her he and her mother were over, and hopes against hope that all of this is a mistake, that any minute he will appear.

He does not. She would like to break the bottles, she would like to burn the restaurant down, she would like to cry because she has less now than she did before she saw him, at least earlier she had hope. But she learned from an early age to cover her father’s mistakes, and so she instead pays the bill and walks out of the restaurant.