After the Hurricane(53)
“Try?” she said, still half asleep.
“For a baby.”
“You want to be a father?” she said, hope etched in every feature on her face. He nodded, once, not trusting his mouth. It was a lie, a horrible lie, but for the right reason. He didn’t want to be a father. But he wanted Rosalind. Her arms were around him, his face buried in her neck, then he didn’t have to smile, didn’t have to conceal his terror, his revulsion. But it would be worth it, he thought. They could both get what they needed. He would have Rosalind, and she would have a child.
It barely occurred to him, and when it did he pushed the thought down with will and whiskey, that he would have a child, too.
Ten
Fernando is late, and Elena is sure he is not coming. His offer to give her a ride was so fantastical, so coincidental, so perfect, that she cannot help but feel it was manufactured, that she made it up, dreamed it. Or maybe that he was lying, for what reason she does not know. But with every minute that passes, she is more and more sure that he will not show up, and anger starts to pool in her gut.
She looks at her phone, looking at more emails, more emails demanding work from her. Earlier that morning she had quickly looked through leases and run a few credit checks at a café with internet, and now there are already more emails, more work. She is on vacation. They had been so sympathetic. How quickly that had disappeared. The latest from her boss implies that she would have properties removed from her care if she didn’t improve her efficiency. She wants to throw her phone in the ocean.
She sits on the front steps of the house, where as a young woman she used to sit and watch Gloria cooking. Back then Gloria had lived, and worked, across from their home, and she could see straight from her front steps to Gloria’s kitchen, watch the habichuelas soften, watch the tostones crack under Gloria’s wooden mallet. Although there are tostone makers, two pieces of wood on a hinge, shaping them into perfect circles, Gloria told her those things were for tourists, making Elena feel sad about the fact that they had one back in their house in Philadelphia, one her mother said Elena’s aunt Maria had given her years before.
She hasn’t seen that thing for a long time. She wonders if her mother burned it. She wishes Rosalind had just given it to her, instead of throwing it away or wherever it’s gone. Just because her mother needs nothing of her father doesn’t mean she, Elena, is the same way. But doesn’t Rosalind want that to be the case? Elena wonders now if her mother’s choice to continue to tell Elena nothing about Santiago’s past is less a way to honor his wishes and more a way to erase him from Elena’s existence. Erasing something that was never really there.
These days Gloria works around the corner, and all Elena can see on the apartment that used to be hers is a sign, Se Vende, “for sale.” Who will buy here now? Who has ever bought here? When her parents brought her to the island for the first time all she saw was Bayamon. It wasn’t until Elena was ten or eleven that she saw San Juan for the first time. She can barely remember it, but there had been some kind of fight, and Rosalind had won, and they had taken a car, which must have been her grandfather’s, and driven to San Juan despite his protests. Thinking on that first trip, she remembers that every third building looked like a ruin, trees growing through the roofs, cats bounding through the nailed-up boards colored brightly with graffiti. It hasn’t changed all that much over the years, a building renovated here, another there, but slowly. On her last visit, years ago, Elena had seen a few more ruins turning to livable buildings, in various states of progress. There were still houses with trees peeping out the windows and rooftops, but there were also some beautiful, finished places. Places that looked the way this house used to, before her father let it rot. But would any of those nice places last, now, after the storm? Who had brought that money to the island, and would they take it away?
A horn beeps, startling her. Elena looks up, and sees a beat-up red compact car, she doesn’t know what type, she never notices things like that, idling on the road next to her father’s house. Fernando sticks his head out, looking at her in a concentrated way. This is the way he looks, she has decided, he is an examiner, his focus firm, pinning her down like a lepidopterist with a butterfly. He looks at things as though his glasses were microscopes. Perhaps he wishes they were.
“You coming?” he asks, and Elena frowns at him. He was the late one. But then, he is also giving her a ride, she supposes she can’t complain.
“Yes, of course. Thank you.”
She stands and shoulders her bag, a dusty tote with PBS give drive 1998 printed on it, which she found this morning between a pile of torn lace curtains and two stacks of Life magazines in her father’s room. She slides her body into Fernando’s car, a dusty thing. Cups, bric-a-brac, books, litter the interior. She smiles at him, grateful he is here, then a sudden thought gives her pause. She is doing what all children are taught not to do, she is taking a ride from a stranger. He knows your father, that’s not a stranger, is it? But her father knows so many people she does not know, all of whom are strangers to her. In his piles of papers she found letters from people, people she has never heard of. A letter from 1975 from a Corporal Ortiz asking to come stay with her parents; letters dating from 1972 onward in which Pearl Schultz asks her father how his constitutional law class is going and if he is eating enough and if the elites were slowly destroying him; letters from her grandmother that don’t have real words, just scrawling images. Elena is not sure, but they looked like monsters. There are reports on her grandmother’s health, all of them bad, all of them describing her condition in terms Elena does not really understand, listing medications and dry descriptions of “incidents,” “episodes,” full of euphemisms, why do we hide in words? But the reports are from Bellevue. The mental hospital. Rosalind had been right in this, at least. Her grandmother had not been sane. As far as Elena can tell, Esperanza had had some kind of mental issue involving voices or multiple personalities. She looked up what she could understand of the symptoms and though she cannot be sure, it sounds the most like paranoid schizophrenia. She doesn’t know much about it, although it’s different from her father’s own diagnosis, bipolar. Elena wonders if one mental illness flows into the other, like Russian nesting dolls, so the baby of bipolar would be what, exactly? What should she be worried about happening in her brain?