After the Hurricane(7)

That day in the fall of 2007 when they bought the house in Puerto Rico was the beginning of the end for Santiago Vega’s marriage. He would never know this, never would have believed it if told. By this point in his life, his sense of the world and other people was becoming shadowy, smeared at the edges. His condition included more than a little paranoia, more than a little delusion. There were people who fought that, medicated it, watched for it, and people who didn’t. He was in the latter group. He used to be better than this. He used to fight every day, and win, to own his conditions instead of letting them own him. There was a time when he was so careful with his medication, so sure that if he took what his doctor gave him he would be fixed, healed. He used to fear his mother’s mind and look for its heir in his own. They might not have shared the same diagnosis, but sometimes, very rarely, he let himself remember that he was her son, that her illness was like a gun he used as a paperweight. Different in his life than hers, but still there. He used to think of himself as recovering, striving, that even at his worst, he could be better. But something had snapped recently and he could feel the fight draining from him, washing away. He looked at his prescriptions now with disgust and longing, missing the days when they seemed to fix things in his mind. They were not magic, and if they could not fix him completely then what was the point of them? And why did he need fixing, anyway? He was becoming content with himself in a way that he used to fear. It was like drowning, but very slowly, and he had begun to find it comfortable underwater.

Another person, even a person with his issues, might have been able to connect the acquisition of a decrepit shell in Old San Juan with the breakdown of their own marriage, but it was Santiago’s newly formed ability to miss such connections, to be so blind to things that they might as well not have existed at all. To construct a world in his mind and believe it was the only real thing. Confabulation was the term Dr. Moretti would have used, but he had stopped listening in their sessions, waiting patiently until the end when the pills would be prescribed and he could leave. He had stopped listening to most people, to Rosalind, to Elena, so vocal at twenty and sure of the world she knew so little about, only really hearing himself. But he didn’t see any of it. His vision, for so long sharp and clear and full of the future, was blurring.

Instead, he decided that the acquisition of land on the island from which his parents had come was a new beginning, a new age of his marriage, by then decades old. It was an achievement that he was proud of in an almost violent way. He had achieved much, most of which felt empty now. There was a time when his only goal was escape, then advancement, then stability. He’d gotten each one. This was his latest vision, letting the others drop away. He, the grandchild of illiterate jibaritos, the son of a man who had left him to rot in poverty, could now afford more and better land on that island than anyone else in his family. Not some lot of grass out in Bayamon, some jungle patch in the interior, a condo by the beach. He was buying a house in Old San Juan, a piece of history, a stone chipped off one of the oldest cities in the New World. Signing the deed, smiling, just under Rosalind’s neat signature, his flourishes overlapping her square letters, he could feel sweet blood on his teeth. He was biting off a piece of the world.

His hand shook slightly in the way it had started doing recently, making his signature a little off. Rosalind looked at him, concerned, but he ignored her. Dr. Moretti had told him this was a common side effect of long-term lithium use and asked him if he had been drinking. He lied, the way he did when he felt this way, powerful, energized, high. When he felt this way, the lies came quickly and easily, he knew them to be true, he willed them into veracity. He wasn’t drinking like the doctor thought, it was just to calm down, it was to sleep. Dr. Moretti didn’t need to know, wouldn’t understand. Besides, hadn’t he said it was because of the lithium? Wasn’t he himself the one who had prescribed it all those years ago? Sometimes he didn’t even take it, wouldn’t that help his hands? He was medicated. He made money. He was fine.

He remembered the day, two years ago, when he had watched his only child graduate from high school. An expensive high school, one he had helped pay for, its campus covered in trees and sweating with privilege. She was dressed in white, like all her female classmates, her dark hair falling down her shoulders. She looked so clean, so untainted by anything. Eighteen then, and she had so much more than he had at her age. She walked up to get her diploma, to collect the prizes she’d won, his smart and wonderful child, and the audience, all children of privilege and their rich parents, clapped for her with manicured hands and white clean smiles. She was one of them. She had lived her life around people like them and would do so until she died. She was going off to college, there had never been any question of that. She had a future so secure it might as well have been a bank vault. If he died that day, he knew, she would still be fine, she would be supported and whole. He had felt pride but also, like a knife wound, a jealousy so strong it blinded him. He had loved his daughter in that moment, oh yes, he clapped like everyone else. But he might have hated her for a moment, too. Certainly resented her. He was jealous of his own child.

He had gotten drunker that night than he had in years. Something had opened up in him, and he couldn’t close it. Didn’t want to close it.

Now she was twenty, and she came home on vacations with stories about what she was learning, what she was doing. When she called something at the school stupid or pointless he wanted to wring her neck. He wanted to shove her into the gutter and make her crawl with the rats, so she could understand what she was taking for granted, what entitlement she lived in, how lucky she was. He shouldn’t want to do that to his child, but he did, and it made it hard to look at her, talk to her, sometimes. He wanted to rub her face in his past, but he also wanted her to never ever know about it, never let it taint her. It would change the way she saw him, she would pity him, the way he had pitied his mother. He couldn’t have that happen, not ever. He was no thing to be pitied, he had made himself something else, and the parts of him that were pathetic and poor and weak were parts Elena could never know. He settled for not speaking to her much at all. It was better this way. And of course, the drinking helped. He rarely thought of it as a problem anymore. Why should he? It was helping him. If Rosalind couldn’t see that, how was that any of his fault?