After the Hurricane(6)

“I tried to,” Rosalind insists. “He wouldn’t answer me. Gloria said his phone was broken by a power surge when the city grid came back on, but I don’t know. He might just not have wanted to talk to me. You know that he is difficult. I’m sorry.”

The storm hit the island in September, the height of hurricane season.

When Elena was nine, she had visited the island with her parents and gone to see her grandfather, a smiling happy man who made both of her parents very unhappy in very different ways. That year, Hurricane Hortense had blown Abuelo’s gardening shed away, and damaged his avocado tree. He teared up when describing the pain the tree felt, and her father had nodded, and said nothing when later her mother, livid, railed against Abuelo’s pain at the tree and disregard for the son he had abandoned. Elena, half asleep, her stomach swollen with her step-grandmother’s arroz y habichuelas, was woken up by her father, who, drunk, pained, stormed from the house and then drove their car off the road to avoid the truck that he had almost run into. They did not return to the island for a year after that, and she had wondered for a long time where the garden shed had landed, if someone else was using it now, if her grandfather had stayed sad about his aguacates.

Hortense had been a terrible storm. This one was worse.

“But today Gloria called me,” Rosalind says. Her nasal voice makes her sound like she is telling a joke, her tone makes Elena want to hold on to something, for safety. “She hasn’t seen your father in days, she says. Usually he gets food from her place, like I said, she said sometimes she checks on him because he can be in one of his bad periods. She thinks he might be missing.”

It is now mid-February. Months since the storm hit, and the island is creeping, slowly, toward recovery, denied the support it needed, needs, from the country that taxes it without representation, largely out of the headlines, an occasional piece popping up here and there to remind people that it exists, that it is still struggling. But as far as most people Elena knows go, despite their initial social media furor, their Instagram throwback vacation photos underscored with #prayforpuertorico, the hurricane is a thing of the past. Power has been restored, shakily, to parts of the island, to San Juan completely. The damage is very bad, but the storm is long gone. How can her father have disappeared now? Where has he gone? How has he left the house? And why doesn’t he have better timing?

“I hate to ask you this, honey, but would you be willing to go? I just . . . I can’t. I’m worried, but I can’t go there, Elena. It’s a haunted place for me. Would you go and just make sure your father is all right? And the house? The house is yours, anyway, or it’s supposed to be, when he’s gone.”

Rosalind will not say that he might be gone now, but they both know that this is a possibility. That the house might already be Elena’s. That Santiago Vega might already be dead. Elena cannot decide how she feels about that, and that fuels her anger, bile forming again in her mouth.

She swallows deeply.

“He was supposed to put it in your name, it might be yours already,” Rosalind says. Elena sighs, deeply. Might be mine? Of course Rosalind does not know. Of course. What a mess all this is, what a mess it always is. If the house is already hers there is so much Elena will need to do, taxes she will need to pay, but also if it is hers, well, she will have something, her own property to restore, a historic home in one of the New World’s most historic cities. A piece of the past would be hers. A part of history, a part of the island for her, all her own. The house is a piece of her. But she doesn’t want it to be hers this way.

Elena is silent, her heart twisting.

“You can find out when you go, you can see how the house is, look at what might need to be done, and you can also see if, if he is there. Please?”

“Mom. Please.”

“I can’t go, Elena. I just can’t.” Elena never wants to feel negatively toward her mother but the bile rises in her throat again at what she is being asked to do. She knows that since their divorce, Rosalind simply cannot deal with her father. She cannot, she will not, she won’t. She says that she has done it for too long, but the truth that she knows and Elena knows and neither of them discusses is that Elena’s father is still perfectly capable of breaking Rosalind’s heart and she is, despite her strength, her capability, her neatly tailored suits and beautifully designed life, a fragile thing. She is shattered bone held together with pins, a dinosaur in the museum, and if she breaks again, she is not sure she will be able to reassemble.

Elena so wants to say no. It is a haunted place for her, too. She barely speaks to her father, he barely speaks to her. She loves him, she barely knows him. She loves him, but she cannot forget the last time they saw each other, won’t even walk down that block of St. Marks, passing the restaurant that has changed hands three times since then but remains cheap and Korean. She loves him, yes, but she might hate him, too.

She wants to tell her mother to be the adult, to deal with her missing, mentally ill ex-husband, that this is not fair to Elena, that she is not qualified to do this. Elena wants to say all of that, very badly. But that is not who Elena is. Elena says yes when people ask her to do something. Elena says yes when Rosalind asks her to do something. So before she can let herself say something else, she says:

“I understand, Mom. Of course I’ll go.”





Three