After the Hurricane(41)

“After you born, he come back. We all want to meet you, of course. He come for our wedding, everybody’s wedding. You so cute at Jorge’s wedding, I got a photo.” Maria pulls a framed photo off a shelf, and Elena can see herself as a baby, her head swathed in a bow bigger than her face. Maria seems flustered, and Elena wonders if she is avoiding something.

“Did they have a fight?” Elena asks, and Maria sighs.

“It’s like I said. Your father has a temper. I think, your father, he have a lot to deal with. With his mama. Her family. All those people in New York. I think they fight about his mama. She was sick then. What to do about her. Why Papa didn’t give more for her care. Maybe they fought about that. I was planning my wedding, I wasn’t listening too much. I never liked fighting. And Papa didn’t owe her anything.” But what did he owe his own son? Elena cannot ask her aunt this question.

“He never take you out there? To El Pepino?” Maria has changed the subject to a safer place. Elena shakes her head. “We still have family there, you know. I go once a year, maybe. So boring. Pretty, though. I wonder if your grandmother buried over there. Since she from there?”

Elena does not know what to do, how to tell her aunt she does not know, had no idea that her family is more than the people she knows, that she has been asking herself the same questions about his mother’s grave.

“Do you think he would have gone there?” Elena asks. Maria knows who she means. She shrugs.

“I call Tía Goli last week. He not there, then.” Of course, it wouldn’t be that easy. “But maybe he going there soon. I don’t know. He’s been . . . off. That’s why I ask Gloria about him. Normally, I don’t hear from him, I don’t worry. But he never gone off like this before. And the island, after Maria, it’s different now. Roads are destroyed. People are desperate, they’ve lost a lot. They could take advantage of him being, well . . .” Elena wishes Maria would just say it. Maria bites her lip, her teeth digging into the rich pink color on her lips.

“Drunk.” Elena isn’t sure whose mouth it comes out of until Maria looks at her, surprised. Her aunt nods, once.

“Yeah. Like Papa,” Maria says, sadly. Elena wonders now if her father has inherited all of the bad things from his own parents, his mother’s mental illness—not the same as what she must have had but something—and his father’s love of the bottle. Painful gifts from damaged people.

“When I see him, he seem . . . different. He seem like something is wrong. He more . . . he not as here as before. Is he different when you talk to him?” Maria asks, and the question stings, although Elena knows it wasn’t meant to.

“We don’t really, um, talk. Sometimes I get a call, he emails. But we don’t talk much.” Elena looks away, knowing she will see pity in her aunt’s gaze.

“He’s all alone,” Maria says, and Elena says nothing.

Daniel had told her once that she was very angry at her father. It had come as a surprise to her, when he said it. You seem really angry at him. She had been telling him a story about Puerto Rico, because he had only been on some spring break trip in college with his AEPi frat brothers, and his understanding of the island was very different from Elena’s. She had been telling him about her birthday there one year, the way her father hadn’t made it to dinner because he was drunk, how it had made her feel. She was talking about being sad, and he had told her she wasn’t sad, she was mad, like he knew what was inside her. She had gone hot and cold all over her body and told him, I’m not angry at him, I’m angry at you, sparking a fight, setting a fire to distract from a flood. She told herself it wasn’t true, like a mantra, over and over again. What was there to be angry about, really? The fact that a grown man has gone missing. The fact that you are here, alone, trying to find him. The fact that he has been missing, in some way or another, for most of your life. It’s not true, it’s not true.

“Do you know anyone else in these?” Elena asks, changing the subject, unable to keep a thread of hope out of her voice. There might be clues, more clues, to where he went, to where she comes from. Maria takes the first album in her lap, and begins turning the pages. Her head shakes until she sees the first color photographs, marking the shift from the fifties and sixties into the seventies. She smiles.

“That’s Tía Goli and Luis, her husband. Papa’s sisters. They stayed in Bayamon. Luis is gone, but Goli is still here. This is Mariche, she marry some mean man, Eduardo, he died. Next she marry a nice one, Ronaldo. She died. He still here, too. This, oh, I know who this is.” Maria points to a woman who looks like she might be in her early twenties at the oldest in the photo, standing next to a younger man who shares her nose and looks stoned, in front of a house that looks like Elena’s grandfather’s house. “That is your papa’s aunt Irena and his uncle Hermando. They stayed with us for a while, in Papa’s house.”

“But, they look younger than he was then.” The back of the photo says 1978. Her father was twenty-eight in 1978, and the woman in the photo can’t be more than twenty-five. Maria looks at her oddly.

“They younger than him, sí. They move here, that’s how I know them. They live in Ponce now, she’s a witch.” Maria says this matter-of-factly, like she’s a plumber, she’s a chef. She’s a witch. Of course she is. “They mother is your father’s grandmother. She marry three, four times, I not remember. But she have lots of children for a long time, so your papa have aunts and uncles older, younger, same age.”