After the Hurricane(30)
“Thank you, Gloria,” Elena says.
“Maybe something happen. You never know,” Gloria says, wisely and meaninglessly. Elena nods. “He come back soon. He not gonna miss you visiting!”
“I’m sure,” Elena says, not sure at all.
“Good to see you, Elenita. You looking healthy. You come back for the chicken, should be one hour, maybe two.” Elena knows this means more like three, or even four. It can be her dinner just as easily as her lunch, she supposes.
Gloria has stirred and stirred the onions and garlic paste, and added more curry powder, more oil, water. She tips the chicken into the pan, curry meeting curry, oil meeting oil. The bubbling pan sends up sprays of liquid, coating Gloria’s round, sweet, smiling face. Elena smiles back, her heart heavy. She hugs Gloria, now fragrant with curry and sweat, and leaves her to her cooking.
The sun is high now, at the hottest part of the day. Elena thinks of the house, all she must do, what clues might live in it about this friend in Rincón, or showing her where her grandmother is from, or illuminating a path in some other direction, to another country, maybe, to a new woman in her father’s life, to something. The sheer unknowns, the weight of her task, flatten her heart, and she has to pause, to force herself to breathe. Rage fills her so deeply that her stomach hurts. Why does she have to do this? Chase her father down like a fugitive? The unfairness of her task will break her back.
An hour later, she is in the ocean.
Her father had told her once, in a rare lucid moment during a typical, delirious conversation on the phone, in between nonsensical advice on buying fruit and a description of the book he was reading about Cornelius Vanderbilt, that the city of San Juan had recently constructed a set of steps near the large statue of San Juan Bautista across from the capitol building, a twelve-minute walk from their home, that led to a beach. He told her that he only went to this beach now—so close to his home, so quiet because few people knew about the steps, discreetly tucked into the side of the road—rather than walking for thirty minutes, or walking down to the bus station across from the Sheraton Old San Juan to take a bus, to Escambrón, which had been the closest beach they could access for the entire time she had been coming to the island.
She had followed the directions he had given her, still clear in her mind although the conversation had been years ago. She had walked past San Cristóbal fort, flags fluttering in the wind at its parapets, and past the statue of San Juan Bautista, large and bluntly fashioned and stern, what did it have to be so stern about, it showed the saint before beheading, after all, and down the steps, thinking, What if he is on the beach? What if I go down and there he is, like he’s been waiting for me, like when I was little and we two would love the water, float in it for hours, stay all day even as Rosalind turned in, even as the sun set?
He is not there. Of course he is not. He’s never anywhere she hopes he might be. She does not know if she wants to see him, or never wants to see him again.
Before she can think much about it, her clothing is gone, the simple dress she had slid over her swimsuit when she had gone to the house to change now on the ground, with her bag, a tote containing keys, her phone, a book, sunscreen, water, nothing else, she will dry off in the sun, and she is walking toward the clear, impossibly blue, teal, turquoise, navy water. Its color depends on its depth and the sun and sometimes it is every shade of blue Elena can think of, but today it is a cool perfect teal and she wants to be in it more than her next breath.
When she reaches the line of the tide it is also impossibly warm, like bathwater. It will cool as she walks out, although she cannot go that far out, this beach, she can see, is shielded by a natural seawall, a line of rock formations some hundred yards from the shore. As the ocean hits her calves, her knees, her thighs, she can feel it leeching the tension from her body, pulling her pain out of her pores. She can never be unhappy in the ocean. Never divided, panicked, sick with fear, angry, tired, defeated. That is for the land. Here, she simply is.
She looks down, and can see straight through to the sand, her skin tinted slightly blue, slightly green, like sea glass. She holds her body under the waves for a long moment, feeling the sea, feeling that she is home in a way that she cannot describe, does not know if she likes, for it breaks her heart that this, here, is home, and she has been lost to it for so long. She breathes out, watching the bubbles trill from her mouth, watches small silver fish dart around her feet, curious and brave, and imagines what it would be like if she could live down here, where it is quiet, where nothing can touch her. She did not want to be a mermaid as a child. She wanted to be a fish, an anemone, a piece of seagrass, swaying with the movement of the water. She wanted to be allowed to be here forever. Her lungs begin to burn.
She emerges, sputtering, her hair streaming. If it weren’t for oxygen, she would have stayed, she knows. She looks out at the shore, a thin strip, a curve on one side, the side closer to the fort, and on the other, far in the distance, a wrecked building, only skeletal stone remains standing, half in water, half on the shore. She is alone. If she were alone on a street in New York she would be terrified. Here, it is bliss. She knows there is violence on the island, as there is everywhere. But somehow it seems far from her, in this moment. In her solitude, the ocean making her buoyant, she feels free, and safe.
She closes her eyes, letting her body fall back and float, and sees him in her mind, standing on the shore, the way he was when she was young and her family was happy. He reaches out to her, calling for her, telling her it is time to come in, time to come home, her mother has dinner ready for them, enough time in the water, enough time in the sun. But she knows he is lying, she knows they both think there will never be enough time in the water for a lifetime, for two lifetimes, his and hers. She floats, still as a corpse, letting the water lap at her body. In her mind, her father is now in the water with her, coming to get her, to try to take her home, but she slips away from him, a young porpoise, out and out and out into the ocean, away from real things. She focuses on that image, the two of them, lost in the waves, forever, embedding the fantasy in her memory until it becomes a reality, a better one than the real one, where they went in for dinner and then, years later, he left her life in stages, and then all at once he is gone, and she is here and does not know how to find him ever again.