After the Hurricane(38)
He came home to the news that Rosalind had miscarried, and hated himself for the relief he felt. But by December 1986, she was pregnant again. She swelled with life as Neil withered. Santiago traveled to California as much as possible. He followed Dr. Moretti’s medical regime, he stopped drinking. He was, unconsciously, bargaining, hoping that if he was good, and did the right things, Neil would live, he would be spared the plague.
But he wasn’t. And Santiago knew that nothing he had done, would do, really mattered.
There was a freedom in that curse.
Eight
Elena’s aunt Maria’s home is one her cosmetics sales built, and it looks like a tropical Barbie Dreamhouse. It is pale mint, trimmed with pink, and its inside is full of gloss and chrome and marble and furniture, all violent teal and lavender dyed leather, heavy and strange. Nothing like what anyone should have in the Caribbean, but Maria compensates for the climate with constant air-conditioning, and Elena, sweaty from the walk from the car, a pink Cadillac that Maria won years ago for her strong sales, shivers.
Her aunt only kept her waiting for twenty-six minutes at the ferry terminal, so practically on time. She talks nonstop on the way back to her house, bright and bubbly, and Elena nods and smiles and supplies the words that Maria, despite her excellent English, sometimes loses in her enthusiasm for talking. Maria’s new dog, Charo, a ratlike thing Elena has seen in a thousand Facebook photos since Maria got him after the storm from an animal rescue center, now runs around them both as Maria deposits Elena in the living room and turns to summon her daughters.
“Mercedes! Innocenta! Tu prima, your cousin, she’s here!” Maria screams up the stairs, turning her already loud voice up several decibel levels. Elena winces but Charo doesn’t react, clearly the little dog is used to it. Elena hears footsteps and then there they are, two burgeoning teenagers with more cosmetics on their faces right now than Elena may ever wear in her life. Their curls are gelled and pulled sharply back from their faces, their eyebrows neat perfect lines, their tan skins powdered and buffed and shined so that they are somehow both glowing and matte. They don’t look like children, but like dolls, and Elena hugs them, gingerly, not wanting to smudge anything. They kiss her cheek, and she brushes her face afterward, but nothing has rubbed off on her. They smile uncertainly. They do not know each other well, she is a stranger they are related to, and it is Sunday, they probably have better things to do than talk to their weird grown-up cousin.
“Would you like something to drink?” one of them—Elena does not always know which name goes with which face, the two similar yet distinct, both through makeup and through nature—asks.
“Water?” Elena says, and they both nod, and disappear into what must be the kitchen.
This is a new house. When Elena was young, Maria and her family lived with her father, Elena’s abuelo, on the top floor of his two-story house, cooking for him and caring for his home after Maria’s mother died. Rosalind found this baffling, and made it clear that as far as she was concerned, her father-in-law could take care of himself, and she felt it was a waste of Maria’s life to wait on the man. Maria, though, always protested that she was happy to look after him, and when he died she was inconsolable. Still, no one could argue that his passing was without benefit to her, it had freed her, and the house she had built on the land she had inherited from him was clear proof of her prosperous new life. His old house still stood nearby; they hadn’t knocked it down. It turned out when he died that Elena’s abuelo, Santiago Sr., a cheap old man, had been very careful with his pensions, both the one from his years as a mailman and his army funds, and he had bought the land next to his house in some strange plan to extend his garden, building himself a little suburban farm. He had never gotten around to it, and now that land was Maria’s Technicolor mini-mansion, while his own home lingered, grubby and squat, next door.
So much of the island is like this, Elena thinks, new and shiny next to decrepit and old.
“What are you looking at, Charo?” Maria squeals to the dog, which is growling at the albums Elena placed on the coffee table.
“I brought something. I wanted your help, actually,” Elena explains.
“Mi ayuda? Of course, carina, anything I can. You want some concealer for that?” Maria points to Elena’s entire face. Elena smile-grimaces and shakes her head. “I got a good one. It blend right in, cover those dark circles.”
“I haven’t been sleeping well.” This is a lie, she slept like the dead, her body lulled into unconsciousness by physical exhaustion, anxiety, and a glass from her father’s bottle of rum. Charo noses the albums again, reminding Elena of the task at hand.
“My father is, um, missing.” Elena admits the thing they already both know. Maria’s face, which usually resembles that of an overly made-up Ewok, falls, becoming drawn and gray. She nods vigorously, relieved, Elena thinks, that she can drop the pretense that this is a normal trip.
“I talk to Gloria, she tell me she no see him!” When she is emotional, Maria’s English verbs and tenses are the first thing to go. When her grandfather passed away, over a decade ago, in the days before her father’s exile, Elena had come to the island for the funeral. Her father had spent it silently, rum soaked, unsteady, and dry-eyed. Maria, tearstained and wrecked, had repeated the same thing over and over again to Elena, her husband, everyone they knew, he gone, he gone, what I do now he gone? No one had had answers for her, least of all Elena’s own father.