After the Hurricane(70)

“I think I’m pretty tired,” she says, in a voice she barely recognizes as her own. Diego nods.

It is dark as they drive home, and Elena hears the whir of the generators the moment they stop, and the town goes dark. It is like nothing she has ever experienced before. One minute she is in a normal place, and then it is all darkness, in every direction, except for their headlights, and the stars. The moon is a sliver.

“Strange, isn’t it?”

“Were you worried during Maria?” Elena asks. Her voice still sounds strange to her, but she will say anything to distract herself from her thoughts.

“I went inland, actually. I knew the coast would be hurt badly. I wasn’t worried, not for myself. I worried for other people. I worried my house might fall down, before I was ready for it to.”

“What would you have done if it did?” Elena wonders.

“Rebuilt. I want to die here. With any luck, the sea can take us both,” Diego says. “Here we are.”

Inside, Diego has candles ready, and he lights a few.

“Do you want to sit on the beach a bit, before we turn in?” he asks, and Elena says yes, she does want that. It is not late, really, but it feels like the middle of the night. The sky is devastating, and reflected by the waves like two paintings, one made by a realist, one made by an abstract artist. Elena gasps at the beauty of it, and can’t stop gasping, her breath shallow.

“How could anyone ever get tired of this?” she asks. The stars reflect off the sand, and Diego has brought candles with them, and she can see his face, dimly, see his smile. “What?” she asks.

“That’s what your father asked me, too,” Diego tells her. Elena is glad the night coats their vision, so he cannot see the liquid in her eyes.

“There are places around here to rent a car, you know.”

Elena looks at Diego. What does he want her to do with this information?

“If you want to go somewhere, that is.”

“I don’t know where to go,” Elena says.

“How’d you get here today?”

“I got a ride from, well, I would say a friend but I don’t think he’s that.”

“A fling, then?” Diego smirks at her and she realizes he was probably very popular with men when he was on the market. He’s still a handsome man, and very charming.

“Someone who wanted the house,” she says, because that’s how she has to think of Fernando now.

“Ah. Well. I think you’ll be needing to rent a car, then. To go . . . somewhere?”

Elena does not know what to say. Part of her wants to go to San Juan and just be done. Stop looking. Go back to the archives, clean out the house, stay put. Then it would be her father’s fault, for not coming to find her. But she knows that’s not what she is going to do.

“If you had to guess, where would you say he is?” Elena asks. Diego looks out at the dark sea.

“He’s a hard man to predict. But if I were him, well, I’m not, but just for the sake of argument, I suppose I would go to the place that felt the most like home.”

“I can’t imagine which place that is.”

“Well, is home people or a place?” It is a good question. To Elena home is people. And her father has people left in Ponce, family there. More than in San Sebastián. The question is, what is home to Santiago Vega Jr.? If it is indeed home he is looking for?

“I guess I’ll find out,” Elena says. Because she was never going to just leave. And she won’t be back in New York on Monday morning. She should be terrified. She hasn’t been unemployed since she left graduate school. She lives in the most expensive city in the United States. But she doesn’t feel a damn thing.

She takes out her phone and responds to Terrance, consider this my two weeks then. Hitting send, she can hear the ocean, a wailing whoosh of nothingness, like her future holds. Her mother is going to kill her.

Good. She might just kill Rosalind, all things considered, anyway. Sitting here with this man who both, both, her parents knew, maybe loved, she cannot let her mother off the hook anymore. There is so much her mother hasn’t told her and so much Elena has been apologizing for, for years, to make up for her father. Both of her parents have been leaving her in the dark alone. The only difference between them was that Rosalind knew she was doing it, and for the first time, Elena thinks this might be much worse. She has always thought her father hurt her because he could, and her mother tried to protect her. Now she thinks her father hurt her because he couldn’t help it, and her mother, well, she tried to protect them both, and helped neither of them.

The call of the coqui, the little brown frog native to the island, trills out into the night. She listens to it sing. She can hear it in San Juan, and here. Is there anywhere on the island where you can’t hear the coqui? And wouldn’t that be a very lonely place?

“I hope you find him,” Diego says.

“Do you find it hard? To stay friends with him, now that he’s like this?” No matter that it is dark, Diego’s smile, sad and sweet and calm, is visible.

“Not particularly. You see, your father introduced me to the love of my life. And then, when he died, he broke with me. I never really fixed myself. So I know what your father is. I am what your father is. I’m just a lot better at hiding it.”

“Who was that?” Elena asks. There is a hitch in Diego’s breathing.