After the Hurricane(35)

Now Neil was.

“It’s happening, oh god, Santiago, where are you?” Where are you? He did not know how to answer that. Who was talking to him? He thought the voice was familiar but it was so strained with pain, who was that? “I’m having our baby!” she said, like something from a television show, or a movie. Our baby. Rosalind.

“Oh my god,” Santiago said, his words slurring with panic and drink. There was an inhalation of breath on the line.

“Santiago.” All the pain was gone, now, where had she put it? He could not put his pain away like his wife could, he could not cleanse his tone of emotion, he, the lawyer. She was the artist, she was supposed to be the emotional one, but she could wring her words dry of feeling in a way he had yet to manage. The woman was giving birth a country away from him, but she could still find a way to lecture him. “What are you doing right now? You need to go to the airport, and you need to buy a ticket, and you need to come home. Now.”

“The memorial,” was all he could think to say.

“Is over. I’m sorry, you know I’m so sorry. I hurt for you. For Diego. I loved Neil,” she said. Santiago took a deep swallow, straight from the bottle, finally realizing his glass was empty.

“Fuck you,” he said. And then he started crying. That in-drawn breath again, and a muffled scream, as Rosalind tried to contain her rage and let the pain of labor out at the same time.

“You have to come back now, Santiago. You have to have some coffee, and, and come back. Come be a father. Someone needs you now.”

“Rosalind, I’m sorry.”

“It’s not just me now. We need you. I’m putting down this phone, and I’m going to give birth to your child, and if you do not come back now, you cannot come back, ever. Do you understand me?” Her last words were another scream, as a contraction pummeled through her body, and she dropped the phone, the connection lost.

Santiago stared at the receiver for a long moment, his vision blurring. Perhaps that was what he wanted. To never go back. To walk away from it all, the responsibility, the work, being a person. Being normal. It drained him. He was not built to be this way. What did he know about families, about people?

“Who was that?” Diego asked, face emerging from the cradle of his palms. It looked like a tragedy mask, something Santiago had seen an image of in one of Rosalind’s art history books, a cartoonish face pulled into a pained sob forever.

“Rosalind. The baby is coming,” Santiago said, softly. He did not want to make the words loud for fear that they would engulf Diego in more pain, shoving joy into the face of a mourning man. Besides, the idea of it was too much for him, Santiago, to bear, really. Come be a father. He had never wanted to be a father, never wanted to have children. He was terrified of this, of what waited for him. She had offered him an out, had she not? His brain was fogged and whirling and pained but she had said if you do not come back now, you cannot come back, ever, and that meant he could not go back, could he not?

Is that what you want? To be like him? a voice asked in his mind, breaking through the haze. He knew the him his brain meant, thought of his father’s face. He reared back, violently, almost falling off the stool, but Diego caught him, a hand warm and congratulatory on his back, joy on the face of his friend, overlaying the tragedy mask with happiness.

“My friend. That is the most wonderful thing,” Diego said, careful, formal, in Spanish. He spoke like a Puerto Rican aristocrat, which was almost what he was, the son of wealthy plantation owners from the island, as far from Santiago’s own illiterate jibarito forebearers as one could be. In another age Santiago would have been Diego’s servant, not his friend. But no one here knew that, everyone saw them as just the same. And now he was the richer one, Santiago, the one whose life was filling as Diego’s was emptying.

“I’m sorry,” Santiago said, wishing the words could mean more and bigger things. Wishing they could encapsulate the world. Diego looked surprised, his drooping eyelids opening wide.

“Why?”

“Because, because of Neil. Because this is something happy and we shouldn’t feel this right now. Because I have to go, I can’t stay, and I—”

“Neil would have loved this,” Diego said, tears in his eyes. “Your child born on the day of his big gay memorial? He would have pretended to be offended, being upstaged like this, and said your kid was already a bitchy little queen, a diva, and that he never would forgive it, and in reality he would have been completely fucking delighted.” Diego coughed, once, then twice, and it took a moment for Santiago to realize he was laughing, hard and into the bottom of his lungs. He smiled, weakly. “Don’t tell me I have to comfort you,” Diego said, flatly. “I’m the person who lost the love of his life. This works one way right now, okay?”

“Okay,” Santiago said. Diego was right, of course he was. The blood was rushing in his ears and all he could think of was the panic, the panic, and the fact that Neil would never know Santiago’s child, that his child would never know Neil, and what a fucked-up cosmic prank that was. What a joke all this was, this plague killing his friends, these people who thought it was for the best, this president who didn’t care, this death robbing Neil of the future, this child who was right now pushing its way out of his wife’s body into that future without Neil in it.

“Sometimes I think it should have been me,” Diego said.