After the Hurricane(64)

“Not at all. We are happy to welcome you to the Yale Law Class of 1975.”

“But, I thought, I mean, Yale doesn’t usually admit people like me. I don’t know if I will be comfortable there.” He was desperate, flailing, maybe he could offend the man, get the scholarship taken away, he couldn’t afford to go without it.

“I understand. We’ve had a very, well, specific kind of student in the past, but we want to change that. And you won’t be the only Puerto Rican kid here, I promise.”

“Really?” When he was growing up, he had frequently seen signs on restaurants saying No dogs or Puerto Ricans allowed. And now they were getting into Yale Law School. He wanted so badly to stay in California, to live a golden happy life here. He worried that going back east would eat away at him, corrode this happiness. But he knew he could not say no to this. He thought of the words of Mrs. Schultz, his English teacher, all those years ago at the celebration lunch after his high school graduation: You are going to go do something amazing with your life. Stanford will open doors for you, open up the world for you. He had not come this far not to keep going. Yale was better than Berkeley. Yale was better than just about anywhere else for law. He hadn’t come this far not to take the best thing he could.

“I’ll see you in the fall,” he said, a pit in his stomach he wondered if he would just fall right into, and never climb out again.



“I just don’t see the point of living anywhere other than California,” Santiago declared to Rosalind over breakfast in their tiny San Francisco apartment, throwing the application to Yale Law School into the trash with an easy toss. His New York accent, like his Puerto Rican accent, had all but disappeared through conscious labor, but some words, like California, remained sharp and overly enunciated, especially when he wasn’t thinking hard, and now the word came out like Cal-eee-fown-ya, his mouth tripping over itself.

They had moved in together that year, Rosalind’s second year of college and his fourth. It was a longer trip back to Stanford’s campus, but it was worth it to be in the city, and not in Palo Alto. At least, it was worth it for Rosalind, he had actually liked being out there. The bucolic suburban setting had been a stark contrast to the rest of Santiago’s early life and he loved it, the lawns and the quiet and the way it all felt normal, like a television show, a Leave It to Beaver life. Rosalind said it made her want to scream.

“I do,” Rosalind said, firmly. “California is a nightmare.” He smiled at her. He loved it out here, loved how far it was from New York, from Puerto Rico, how distance had cut him off from everything that tied him and bound him and dragged him under. How far it was from his mother, and his father.

She walked over to the trash can and pulled out the application.

“I’ll never get in there.”

“So there is no harm in applying, is there?” she said, smoothing it out. It was the best law school in the country, everyone had told him that. It admitted people who became presidents, Supreme Court justices, congressmen. They weren’t going to let some skinny Puerto Rican kid with no money and a missing front tooth in, he was sure.

“Why sign myself up for rejection?”

“Why not take a chance?”

“I suppose,” he said, taking the form from her.

“Besides. You’re brilliant. You’re a striver. Why wouldn’t they want you?” The look in her eyes took his breath away, it always did. There was such admiration, such belief in him. No one in his life had ever encouraged him, loved him, with such devotion and care as she did. If he applied, he could say he tried. And he wouldn’t be the one to disappoint her, that would be Yale’s action, not his. She wouldn’t lose this look on her face, the one she had now that he would do anything to maintain.

“Pass me a pen,” he said, smiling. He’d never get in, and even if he did, he’d never leave the West Coast. The farther he was from New York, the better, the freer, the happier, he would be. He was never going back there, not ever. That place, that coast, was poison for him. He’d escaped it once, but if he went back, he knew he would never escape again.





Twelve




“You went to Yale with him,” Elena says, for the second time, repeating the fact like a mantra, trying to place Diego, someone she has never heard of before, in space and time. Diego nods, smiling.

This man is her father’s best friend. This man she has never met, never heard of, who knows both her parents intimately. This man has been living on this island with her father, has known him longer than she, Elena, has been alive, and no one has ever told her about him. Rosalind has never told her about him. He knows her father, he knows her mother, and Elena knows nothing. Why has Elena allowed the past to be a distant country for her parents, the place they fled and never spoke of again? Because it’s not just her father, it’s Rosalind, too. Oh, Elena knows about her great-grandparents fleeing pogroms in Russia, and her mother’s high school friends and her Tyler colleagues, but Rosalind has blacked out the windows of so much of her life with Santiago that no light can get through. There is some loyalty that Rosalind has to Elena’s father that even now, all these years into their separation, is more important than telling Elena about her past. Her history. The places she comes from.

No wonder Elena has always felt so alone. She was raised by people more tied to each other than to her. Even now as they untie, fray, and disintegrate, neither is tethering her anew.