After the Hurricane(23)
She is here for the Wi-Fi, and now that her work is done she doesn’t really need it, but still she uses it, marking time, delaying the inevitable. She looks at her phone, scrolling through social media apps, looking at people she knows better through their Instagram profiles than in real life. She thinks for a moment, and then searches for her aunt Beatriz, who lives in Florida and is her father’s youngest sister and often more than a bit of a train wreck. She posts a lot of photos of her beautiful children and Elena enjoys seeing them, likes to imagine being close to them, having a big family to surround and love her. It is a fantasy Elena loves, even when it cuts her. She passes photo after photo of the kids, a boy and a girl with tan skin and wild curls, and pauses when she sees something different from the usual content on her aunt’s feed. Instead of family photos or selfies, this photo shows a view of a beach from the ocean. It looks deserted, wild, with a horse caught mid-canter sprinting across it. Elena realizes it’s been reposted, from @vidaboricua12, with the line so proud of my Jessenia beautiful niece! written by her aunt as the caption. Who is Jessenia? Elena clicks on the handle.
The original profile says, Looking for Puerto Rico’s lost, or lost to me, history, one day at a time, in English and in Spanish. Scrolling through the photos, Elena realizes that they are images of things on the island, from historic structures to plants, from aging photographs from the past to images from the present of locals, and each image is described, the viewer urged to check out the full story in the linked blog post. Scrolling back farther Elena sees an image of the poster introducing herself, and she realizes that she knows who this is: her uncle Juanito’s wife’s daughter, from her first marriage, Jessenia. A cousin who is not really a cousin, a few years younger than Elena. She remembers her, vaguely, from the last full family dinner a decade ago, and her face hasn’t changed much. Still pretty, still bright and shining, surrounded by family who look like her. Her photos are as full as Elena’s are sparse.
Elena clicks on the blog link. She sees the titles of post after post, poems, stories, pieces of history that her not-cousin has been gathering and publishing. There is so much here, so much to read, so much that Elena could learn. She feels like she has stumbled upon a pot of gold, a secret treasure. She bookmarks the link, and stands. She would like to sit and read the blog, spend the day with all this history and insight, this connection to a not-really-family member whose life is, somehow, linked to hers. To Santiago’s. But she must keep it as a treat, the carrot to dangle in front of herself as she does her duty.
She walks outside, and takes a right; now she is on her way to Gloria’s place. When she misses the next road that would take her more directly there, well, she is simply taking the long way, she tells herself, seeing more of the city, it has been a long time and she has a right to see things, does she not? But this is all justification of her avoidance, and she knows this as well as she knows the fact that she will continue doing it, walking well out of her way, past the hulking fort El Morro that makes San Cristóbal look meek, down the road with a thousand napping cats, toward the one original gate to the city that still stands.
She looks around, realizing she has walked to one of her favorite parts of Old San Juan, a street called Caleta de San Juan, a little one that only runs for two blocks and slopes down toward the old gate. It has large trees gracefully providing a natural archway over it. Elena remembers being a child and walking down this street with her parents, the papaya ice cream in her hands melting as she looked around with wonder. It has barely changed since then, and she lets herself wander up it, telling herself she will just be a minute, lying even in her own head.
She spots a sign, Wilfredo Garcias Real Estate, and a bolt of recognition shoots through her. Of course, this is where the Realtor’s office was, the one who sold the house to her parents. They had looked at several homes with several people, overrunning her vacations in her first year of college with sojourns through dusty broken buildings, but Wilfredo, he of the sun-yellow hair, had ended up with the one they wanted. She and her mother had discussed his hair at length over dinner the night her parents signed on the place—a night her father had been too drunk to join them, another time she had pretended it was normal that he hurt them this way—and they wondered where Wilfredo got it done, and what had led him toward such a shade in the first place, a color no one could ever imagine to be natural. Blondes have more fun, she had reminded Rosalind, trying to entertain her, trying to distract from the sight of her father, sleeping, dead to the world, both of them forgotten. Elena wonders what her father remembers now, if she, Elena, exists in his mind or if she has become a ghost to him, the way he is to her. She tries to remember the smell of his aftershave, a kiss on her cheek, but instead all she can remember is stabbing pain, which she pushes down, trying to breathe normally.
Would Wilfredo know about the deed? she thinks, suddenly, her brain kindly distracting her. She should go to Gloria, she should try to find her father, but the insidious part of her that wants, wants, wants—a sign of his love, yes, but also the house itself, a piece of the history of the island for her own, the thing she was promised, the thing she is owed for all of his nothing—pushes her to the doorway of the office.
She opens the door and finds the man of her memory sitting at a desk in the cozy office, his face a little more lined, but his hair the same shade as it was a decade ago, ever more impossible in the bright daylight. A tiny flower, almost like a sticker, sits on his hair near his right ear, and Elena looks at it, transfixed.