After the Hurricane(40)

“Well then, Abuelo just abandoned her and my father for no reason?” Elena knows this will incite a reaction. She just hopes it is one she can use.

“He didn’t! He . . . he had to go. She wasn’t good.”

“Well, if she wasn’t good, then why did Abuelo leave my father with her?” Elena asks, trapping Maria in her logic.

“No, she was. I mean, I never met her,” Maria says, cagily. “But Papa wouldn’t do something bad. She wanted to keep Junior, that’s all I know. It wasn’t Papa’s fault.”

Loyal to the end, Elena thinks. The man’s been dead for years, was drunk for most of the decades before, but his perfection shines forever. Whatever Elena feels for her father, she has nothing but disdain for her grandfather. Just like your mother, she thinks to herself. Is she too influenced by the way Rosalind sees this world, these people? But they are all a blur to her, really, this lost generation she will never know because no one will tell her anything.

“Please, tía, just tell me something. I feel so stupid, I don’t know enough, I don’t know how to find him, I don’t know anything about him. Tell me anything. Please?” Maria looks at her, biting her lip. “If you don’t, I’ll always think Abuelo just left my father,” Elena says, a gentle threat. Maria sighs.

“She have problems. Lots of mental problems.”

“But she looks so normal,” Elena says. It’s a stupid thing to say, she knows. What does the woman’s face have to do with what is in her mind? Mental issues don’t advertise themselves. But what does that mean, mental problems? Like what her father has?

“You see her?” Maria seems confused. Elena slides a photo out of the album sleeve, handing it to Maria. Maria looks at the woman, her burning eyes.

“She saw demons,” Maria says, moving to cross herself and then thinking better of it. “Your father tell me once, we were very little. She saw demons all around her. She want to kill them, make them bleed.”

“She was . . . what, did she have a disorder?”

“I think she spend some time in a facility. Papa help pay for it for a while, until your father could afford to do it. But I don’t know what she have, why she like that. It was different, too, we don’t talk about things the same way when I little. I don’t really know what she had. Junior never want to talk about it. He just want to get away.”

“I never knew her,” Elena says. A facility. That was serious.

“I guess she was also from there,” Maria says, softly. “That’s San Sebastián.” In the background of the photo is a house, a field, a horse. Gloria’s words echo in Elena’s head, he was going to see his mama. But she’s been dead for a long time. Was she buried there? Was that where he had gone?

“So it’s more rural?” Elena asks, but Maria wrinkles her forehead. “Farmland, I mean?”

“Oh yeah. All farming. That’s why we go, too. All you can do there is farm, what would we have done later? Of course, Papa, he no think I gonna work, but still. For the boys. Our family, Papa and Mama’s side, all jibaritos.” Elena’s confusion at the last term must show on her face. “How you say this. ‘Sugar people.’ They cut the cane, so you can make sugar, rum, whatever. Very poor, usually. That’s why Papa joined the army. He figure, he don’t wanna work the field, you know? And he could read. So he could do more. He was a very good father,” Maria says, firmly.

“Was he the same way to you as he was to my father?” Elena asks, just as firm. It sounds like he was good to some of his children. And completely absent for the life of another one. Maria looks away.

“He try his best,” Maria says. “He send him a ticket every year to come visit, like I say. Every year,” she adds. “Here, this was his First Communion.” Maria found the photo, one Elena had missed, between a photo of Rowdy, Irena, y Hermando, 1961, a trio of cute kids between the ages of fourteen and one, and a photo of Esperanza holding a young boy, his smile wide, missing a tooth in the front. The boy, Elena realizes, is her father, for it is the same face she sees, this time solemn, holding the rosary, between Chavela, young and smiling, holding a baby with a giant bow around her head to tell the world this is a girl despite her baldness, and Elena’s grandfather, looking stern, his hand on her father’s shoulder.

This is her father. She has never seen him as a child before. Not as a baby, or a teen. The oldest photo she had ever seen of her father, before these in the albums, comes from his graduation from college. He told her once that when he came to Stanford for college, a school that he knew nothing about, he realized that he was the only person in his class missing a front tooth. While he was able to get a gold one within his first year, scraping together savings from his scholarship as well as the jobs he worked on campus, he overheard a classmate, a rosy-cheeked farm girl from out in Wyoming who would end up serving on the California Supreme Court, joking with another girl that he looked like a pimp with it. So he had perfected his closed-mouth smile, never smiling another way, even when he was able to get a natural-looking tooth-colored implant years later. The stories about his past are so rare and precious to Elena that she committed it to memory, reciting it to herself like a myth or a prayer so that she would not forget it.

“He came once a year, every summer. Then he come when he was in law school, the summer he brought your mama.” Here Maria’s face darkens. “He didn’t come for a while after that. He and Papa, well, Junior has a temper.” From what Elena can remember, her abuelo had quite a temper, too, and a complete disinterest in being sober after 5:00 p.m., which only made it worse, but of course Maria wouldn’t deal with that.