After the Hurricane(32)
“You drink?” he calls out. She turns around.
“Yes,” she says, simply, offering nothing else, he has had enough from her.
“I go to El Batey most nights. Maybe I’ll see you there.”
“Maybe.” Elena smiles, to be polite, to help the conversation end, to be safe. She smiles for all the reasons women smile at men they do not know, to keep them calm, and happy, long enough for her to leave. She throws on her dress, feeling her suit soak through it, not caring. Soon she is up the steps, walking not too fast, not too slow, leaving the beach and Fernando and her own thoughts, her desire to hold her body underwater forever, her memories of her father as he once was—her friend, her protector, her home—behind her. There is only so much she can carry, after all.
Although part of her wants to, just to be near other people, she does not go to the bar that night. Instead, she works, and works, and works away at the house, poring over piles of junk, coughing through clouds of dust, and sipping from her glass of water and her glass of rum over ice alternately as she wades her way through her father’s messy life. Has she been on the island less than two days? Can that even be possible? She feels a hundred years must have passed, at least, since she felt her plane hit the runway.
Perhaps this is because the objects in her father’s home come from all over the world, and span decades in origin. There are resin bangles from the 1950s and copies of Mesoamerican pottery from the 1970s, and a shirt advertising Wharton Business School from the 1980s. There are books, so many books, from The Count of Monte Cristo to What Color Is Your Parachute?, from a thick hard-bound set of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire to a slim paperback with a bright magenta cover proudly declaring History Will Absolve Me. There are piles of clothing, ripped, stained, missing buttons or with broken zippers, as if their owner had meant to throw them out and then forgot they existed. Which well may have been what happened. Elena sorts these into “fixable,” “worth giving away,” and “worth cutting up for rags,” something she can use to clean the house when she has made her way through it, if that ever happens. Hanging in the closet is more clothing, suits from Santiago’s past life, a warm wool coat poked through with moth holes, a wedding gown. Elena fingers the torn lace around the neckline, feels the smooth satin of the bodice and the sweep of the skirt. This was not her mother’s. Whose was it?
It is not until it is late, when she is contemplating sleep, for her body is tired and her brain is numb, that she finds the albums. By this point, she has removed five large trash bags from her room alone, filling the bin on the corner of the street from which garbage is collected daily. Other bags sit in the dusty foyer, ready to be taken to the junk shop on the corner or the recycled-goods store a few blocks away, two institutions that Elena fervently hopes have survived the storm.
The albums are tucked behind a large beach umbrella and an ice-cream maker. When had her father made ice cream? As far as Elena knows, he couldn’t cook anything, let alone a multistep frozen treat.
She moves the ice-cream maker, planning on putting it into the trash pile, her sixth bag. When she does so, a stack of books leaning against it, ones she has not even noticed, slides down, falling with a dust-cloud thwap. The books are large, leather-bound, almost Victorian in their style, ornate, from a time when people thought books were something precious. She reaches for one, and hauls the heavy thing into her lap. Opening it, she realizes, it is not a book, it is an album, and flipping the pages, fast, she sees yellowed photos of a baby, held by a woman with a sweet face and dark wavy hair pinned into the styles of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Next to them stands a small man with a large mustache who reminds Elena of her own father, despite the fact that he looks nothing like him. It is something in the smile, some nervous aspect, some hesitation, like smiling is an act that he isn’t sure he is doing right.
Elena looks up, around the mess of the room that she has had to tear apart to start putting together again, the chaos around her. She gathers up the albums, five in all, and hauls them up the stairs, up up up to the roof. She climbs back down again, retrieving the glasses, and giving herself refills. Ice bobs in both glasses, and clinks as she ascends to the roof, the only sound in the house, other than the chirp of coqui, which permeates the city.
She sits down the rum and the water, places her chair directly under the roof light, and opens the album, the first she had found. She opens the next, and the next, searching the outfits and eyeglasses to tell the decade, to order the collection in time. The third album has photos of her mother in it, her hair long, ironed flat like Cher’s, looking at a college-age Santiago with stars in her eyes. The fourth is deep in the 1970s, and the fifth, the last one, is in the 1980s. Elena wants to thumb through that one the most, wants to catch sight of herself, to see her parents with her, as she will never see them again. But she has restraint, and besides, she has seen photos from her childhood. She has never seen any from her father’s.
As she was growing up, it was like her father had sprung, fully formed, like Athena, from the head of his own father, another person Elena knew little of beyond her childhood memories and her mother’s opinions. When asked about his childhood, his life before he met Rosalind, Santiago would change the subject or make a joke, telling her that he had no life before Rosalind, that she had invented him, like Pygmalion. Elena, who had been going through her Greek myth phase at the time, had giggled at the thought. He refused to talk about it, referring to it the way prisoners talk about prison, as both a physical place and a time period. What mattered was that he was never going back there. The there was unclear, and the more she wanted to know, the angrier he would become. By the time Elena was a freshman in college, there was so much that made her father angry, lost as he was in a yearlong manic state and freely drinking, that she made a decision not to ask, not to push. Someday he would tell her, when she was grown-up, and understood it. But he never had, and she did not know where he was, or how to find him, or what she would say to him if she did. Still, she had this, these. There could be answers in these albums. Wasn’t a picture worth a thousand words?