After the Hurricane(39)

“I know. My mom is worried. That’s why I came, actually.” Maria’s eyes widen comically large at Elena’s words. The truth of her parents’ divorce must be more visible than her father had thought, for Maria clearly knows what a big thing it is that her mother, a woman who has cut her husband out of her life as cleanly as an expert kidney surgery, is trying to find said husband. “I’ve been staying at the house, it’s a mess, I don’t know how long he’s been gone. But I was trying to clean, because it’s, well—”

“Yo sé, yo sé! I try to help him but he so stubborn, Junior. He not let anyone do anything. He say it all where he want it.” Elena sighs internally at these words. Her father will be very angry at her when he finds out what she has done, how much she has thrown away. This thought spurs some anger of her own. Don’t fucking go missing if you don’t want people to clean your house.

“I found these, though. And I just, I thought maybe . . . he never talks about anything and I thought these might have some clues,” Elena finishes weakly, realizing she sounds like an idiot. “I also found this.” Elena pulls out the rosary, the one she found dedicated to Saint Sebastian, canonized because he survived a hail of arrows, a sagittation, a word Elena loves and would love to use someday, only to be clubbed to death. Elena knows a lot about the lives of saints for a Jewish girl, but who can resist such drama? Jewish prophets die in their sleep. Catholic saints die everywhere.

Maria takes the rosary and reads the words printed on it, smiling.

“How did he keep this? I got rid of mine when I joined our church.” Now that she’s calmer, Maria’s verbs have returned. She and Javi joined a Pentecostal church before Elena was born, despite the disapproval of Maria’s mother, Chavela, who died, as she lived, a Catholic. Elena’s abuelo never said anything about it, but then, he rarely commented on religion, and he was buried in a military cemetery, anyway, picking the U.S. Army over any other god.

“This is from his First Communion,” Maria explains, and Elena nods, not mentioning that she knows that part. “Back home.” That part is less understandable to Elena. Aren’t they home? Isn’t Bayamon home, at least for Maria? Does Maria mean New York?

“What do you mean, home? Is this church around here, somewhere?”

“No, no, El Pepino,” Maria says, almost absently. She is smiling at the rosary, and Elena wonders what it cost Maria to give up her own, what piece of herself she let go of when she changed from her own faith to the practice of her husband, Javi. Or maybe Maria herself instigated the change, Elena has never been sure. Trading one kind of Christianity for another baffles her, but she knows it is more complicated and difficult from the inside. Most things are.

“‘The cucumber’?” Elena says, after a minute. She likes to cook, and she just went to the grocery story, so food words in Spanish are close to the top of her memory. Her father, who never cooks, rarely knows food words for anything, despite his perfect Spanish. One thing Elena does know, because a waiter at a Mexican restaurant asked her father about it once, is that her father ironed out his Spanish in college, like a starched shirt. He sounds now like someone from Spain, or Venezuela, or anywhere, really, his accent is without region, hiding his origins as neatly as a mask. He’s like a newscaster, scrubbed clean of any markers of where he is from. His whole self is like that. Elena wonders how much of her father he has killed to be who he is now.

“That’s another name for San Sebastián. It in the mountains.” Maria looks a little off, her normally wide-open expression closing up. “It’s where Papa and Mama were from.”

This is news to Elena. There is a place, specifically, more than the island itself, that she is from? For if he is from this place then she, too, by extension, is from this place. A piece of her past, her unknown history, reaching out into the present. A place to be from.

“My grandmother, too?” Elena asks. Maria winces.

“I guess so.” Maria, close as she was to her father, was never comfortable that her mother, Chavela, had not been his first love, his first choice.

“I thought everyone was from here,” Elena says, looking around helplessly. Maria is already shaking her head.

“No. Little place. We live there when I was little, when bisabuelo was still alive.” Her great-grandfather, a man Elena knows nothing about. “Then, when he pass, we moved here. Papa got a new route for the mails, and the schools were better. Mama liked this better; up there, it’s like another century.”

“Why did they get a divorce?” Elena asks. She has always wanted to know. Maria looks at her, her eyes hardening.

“Sometimes things don’t work out,” Maria says, and Elena wants to shake her.

“There must have been a reason. Abuelo just left my dad behind, why? Why didn’t he have him move to the island?”

“He didn’t leave him! He send money, he send the ticket for him to come every year. Papa no do that, he would never. He was such a good papa. It was his mother. She didn’t want him around,” Maria says, and Elena looks at her. Maria never wants to hear anything negative about Santiago Sr.

“Was there something wrong with her?” Elena asks. She thinks about the photo she found, the way the woman’s eyes blazed.

“I don’t know,” Maria says, and Elena can tell that she is lying, she’s bad at it.