After the Hurricane(27)
“You tell me about you. It’s been so long, I almost didn’t recognize you. Your father, he come in here, he talks about you all the time but never any good stuff. Just your job, you go to grad school, he say, but he never has the good stuff. Tell me, you got any kids now?” Gloria’s hand sweeps across Elena’s stomach like she’s reaching inside for the children already. Elena blushes, and shakes her head, holding up her ringless hand. “Girl, you don’t need a husband to have a baby!” Gloria reminds her. She would know, she had several with different partners over the years, all without a ring on her finger. Elena ducks her head, smiling. Gloria’s face sobers. “I was sorry about your parents. Your mom a real good lady. Your father lost without her.” Elena winces. Lost. That’s what she is here to talk about.
“Actually, Gloria, about my father—”
“He been missing!” Gloria said, like a revelation, like Elena hadn’t up and left her life in New York for that very reason. “He comes in here regular, twice a week, three times, I give him extra, he don’t eat, that man, and then what cushions his stomach against all that rum, I ask?”
Elena has heard the expression full-body blush but has never experienced it until now. Her father has always been so careful about people knowing about his drinking, people thinking a certain way about him. Elena has never told anyone much about her father, about his problems, not even Daniel, especially not Daniel, she gave him such an edited version of things. She has never heard someone say this except her mother, both of them keeping this strange covenant with her father even now. To hear it spoken of openly shocks Elena to her core.
“Not like he listen. Sometimes he goes off, but he always tell me, so this time, when I don’t see him, two, three weeks I don’t see him, I know something is wrong. I laugh, that man survive the hurricane like nothing, sitting on his roof getting soaked, not even a cold, electrical pole could’ve fall on him, killed him, hit that house of his, nothing. Then he just go off, just like that? Ridiculous. I tell your mom how he is every few weeks, months, anyway, so I call her this time, telling her he gone. Where he gonna go? Everything is a mess here. Crazy man.”
Elena couldn’t disagree, on any count. She had no idea that Gloria had been updating her mother all this time. Another thing to store inside her anger box, another thing Rosalind has been keeping from her. But she does not have time to focus on that now.
“Actually, Gloria, that’s why I came. After you talked to my mom, she wanted me to come down here and maybe see if I could, um . . . find him. My dad.” As she tells Gloria, it sounds so stupid. Find him? A grown man? He’s not a puppy, an umbrella, a set of keys. If he wants to be lost, he can be lost, can’t he? But Gloria is nodding, sagely.
“That’s a good idea. Your father. Well, you know, he a good man.” Gloria continues to nod as she talks, her face shaking vigorously. Elena cannot honestly say that she does know that. She does not think her father is a bad man. He is someone who does not think of others, someone who does not remember his promises, but is that morally wrong, or simply destructive, of himself, most of all? Is he good? Looking around his house here, filled with things she has never seen, things like that rosary with places she has never known were a part of him printed on it, she is surer than ever that she does not know much about her father at all.
“But he’s not right. He’s not there anymore. I mean, he never all totally, I mean, you know your father! So crazy!” Gloria says, laughing broadly. Elena nods, easier than the truth, coward again, always a coward. “He the life of the party, he always have a joke, two, three if you’re not lucky! He love life, I know that. But lately. Last couple years I been noticing, he forgetting things, he letting himself go sometimes, he not what he used to be. I don’t know, some kinda problem, maybe. Maybe some health issue. He couldn’t come down to the boats like I did, too busy, I guess,” Gloria says, kindly, glossing over all the things Elena is sure she must have seen, or understood: the years of alcohol consumption; the medication for his manic-depression that he took more and more absentmindedly, in public, despite his previous, lost, iron-clad discretion; the mania, the energy that comes with an upswing, when he talks and talks and barely makes sense.
Maybe some health issue.
“So I worry about him. He’s fine, I’m sure he’s fine, I’m probably just being crazy, too, but when I tell your mom I not seen him for a while, well, I just feel like someone should know. And I’m glad you come. Of course, he probably gonna come back tomorrow and laugh at us. He just like that. But still, good you’re here. Haven’t seen you in so long, too, Elenita. What happened, you don’t miss me?” Gloria asks, playful, swinging her body up off the chair and gesturing for Elena to follow her, like she used to when Elena was a little girl, when she was shorter than Gloria, even. Elena’s heart hurts at the idea, even in jest, that she didn’t miss Gloria, didn’t miss this place.
“Of course I did. Just . . . busy.”
“I know! College, graduate school, your father say you study some kind of history, he so proud of you. He show me photos from your graduation, when you move to New York, you travels, everything.” Gloria smiled. “You go all over but you don’t come here!”
Elena smiled too, unable to deny the truth of this. She went everywhere, but not here. How had her father gotten photos of her? She herself dutifully sent him a photo or two in emails, sporadically, but nothing substantive, and nothing from her everyday life. Had her mother sent them? But she and her father never spoke, did they? More things they don’t tell me, more things they hide. The wall of silence between Elena and her parents was thickening by the hour.