After the Hurricane(8)
“Are you done?” Rosalind asked, bringing him back to the present. The signing. The success.
He looked down at the deed, and the pen he was holding, noting the tremor again. He could feel Rosalind watching his hand as he signed the paperwork on the house, even though he wasn’t looking at her, and it made him furious. What was she doing, watching him all the time like this, policing him? She was out to get him, she didn’t understand either, she was against him, she wanted to take away the things that helped him. Hadn’t he done everything right? Hadn’t he made money, sent Elena to school? She was done now, Elena, she was an adult, so what the fuck did Rosalind want of him?
His rage was sudden, electric, and he had to press it down, contain it. It made him laugh with its energy.
“I’m done!” he said, proudly, the anger gone as he chuckled. “It’s all done now!”
“Really? We have so much work to do now. It’s just beginning,” Rosalind said, dourly, in that way of hers, looking at him strangely as he laughed. His anger flared to life again, a salamander twisting inside his gut.
“Why do you have to be so negative?” he shot back, his voice sharp. Couldn’t she be happy?
Rosalind looked away, her eyes taking in the shell that they had bought, the mess of it all, the plants growing through the floor, the salt-stained wood and pitted plaster-cement walls.
“This is a ruin,” she said, calmly. Their real estate agent, Wilfredo, a little man with impossibly canary-yellow hair, neatly dyed and carefully combed back from his forehead, nodded enthusiastically.
“Una ruina!” he said, delighted. Strange creature.
“We’re ready for it,” Santiago assured him, in Spanish, and they nodded at each other with the confidence of men. Rosalind smiled limply. She had talked to friends in the architecture department at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, who had drawn up plans for them, found contractors on the island, and she communicated in her broken Spanish what they wanted, sourced local materials; looked into the permits they would need, how they could restore water and electricity to the long-empty building; what historic-board standards they would have to meet to pass the stringent rules of the city’s codes. But he, who had done nothing for the house, was so confident in their readiness. He felt that flash of gratitude he so often felt for her, that moment when someone else permitted his brain to rest for long enough to help him focus on them, and he kissed her cheek, promising himself, as he did each time, he would be better from now on. A bird cooed and fluttered in the corner of his eye, and he promptly forgot, as he watched Elena, now a college sophomore at the University of Chicago, her limbs pale and softened from long library nights, shoo a pigeon that had flown into the space through the unpaned windows.
His daughter. His daughter, who had achieved time and again, who was smart and sweet and strong, he looked at her and wondered at her existence, that she had come from him. He could see himself in her face, the only reminder sometimes that she was, indeed, his. He bit back that little bile he felt, that jealousy, that rage she made him feel. It was wrong to think that way, even in his deteriorating state he knew that. He had worked hard to give her everything. Why didn’t he want her to have it now? Enough, he swallowed it down. All of this was for her. He, they, would fix the house, restore it to the livability it had once had two hundred, three hundred years earlier, for it dated back to the 1700s, and then someday Elena would have it for her own. It would be his legacy to her.
Santiago had inherited nothing from his family but hunger. Want. He used to read the phrase in old-fashioned books when he was a child, I wanted for nothing. He had wanted for so much. For everything. Not Elena, though. She had been fed and clothed and loved and nurtured, and she would receive more, above all that. He would give her this, a piece of the island itself. He would stop telling himself she didn’t deserve it, stop loathing her just a little for having all he had given her. He wanted to hug her, to strangle her, his trembling hands itched and he didn’t know for which action. His conflicting needs almost felt like voices in his head, and that horrified him more than anything. He was different. He wasn’t his mother. God, he needed a drink. He needed a river of them.
“I’ll be back.” The Realtor was gone now, and Rosalind and Elena were walking around with a notebook, Elena noting Rosalind’s murmured thoughts. They looked up at his words, their faces twin reflections of annoyance warring with resignation.
Elena had until lately looked like him far more than she looked like her mother. Her skin was not as dark as his, a fact that would have delighted his own mother, had she lived to see her granddaughter. She had always wanted to be fairer. Elena was paler, yes, but her skin was still olive tinged, making her look pale sickly green without frequent sun exposure. Her hair was dark, and curly, and abundant, and her chin set, firm, her cheeks rounded like his. When she was a toddler, a little girl, she had grasped his face hard with her plump hands and squealed, asking him, Why is your face my face? And he had laughed and told her that she had stolen his, chasing her until she promised to give it back.
Now, though, she looked more and more like her mother, not in the architecture of her features, but in the expressions that haunted them. There was such knowledge there, as she looked at him, that he would let her down. Such judgment that he could not stand it. He walked to her, kissing her on her forehead, feeling it knit and furrow under his lips, and had to fight not to explode at her in anger, in shame. How dare she judge him? He paid for her education, he had just bought a house to leave her, and she thought to judge him? Her lack of gratitude made him breathless. He pulled back and looked at her for long moments, daring her to speak. But she didn’t. She never did.