After the Hurricane(80)
“Good luck,” Rosalind says, tentative. Elena’s immediate instinct is to reassure her, and she has to bite her tongue, actually bite it, to stop herself. “Thank you.” Elena hangs up before she can slip into old patterns, before she can displace her anger with obedience.
Outside the bedroom, Diego has coffee ready for her, and his clean, clean house makes Elena want to burn her father’s house to the ground and start all over again, but just for a moment. She accepts the coffee, gratefully.
“How is Rosalind?”
“How did you—”
“The walls aren’t very thick here, I’m sorry.” Diego smiles at her.
“Your mother went into labor on the same day as Neil’s memorial service. Did your father ever tell you that?”
Elena almost spits out the excellent coffee.
“I suppose not. He’d been gone for a week at that point, but year after year, I always celebrate his life on your birthday.”
“You can’t think that I’m somehow . . . Well.”
“His reincarnation? I’m a lapsed Catholic, not a Hindu. I just think that if he had lived, well, maybe we would have seen Santiago more. Neil’s death, it hit your father almost as hard as it hit me, and I was in love with Neil. He was the love of my life. But they were so close. They were each other’s first real friend, I think. And Rosalind, she loved them both so much. But when you were born, she could put all that into you. She grieved, she did, but she had made life. I always imagined your father was more split in half, between mourning and, well, you. And I was so jealous of him, in those first years. He had something to wake up for. What did I have? I was the one who . . . for years it was too hard for me to see him, your father, he just reminded me of everything that was lost. And by the time I was ready, so much time had passed. There was a country between us. I understand your parents, they are the ones you feel have let you down. But I let them down, too. I let you down. You just didn’t know I was doing it.”
Elena looks at him for a long moment, and then she leans over, and kisses him gently on the cheek. He smiles at her, a little sadly.
“So. Where to?”
Elena takes a moment, but she already knows the answer. She should go to San Sebastián, to the place her family is from. A strong person, a brave person, would do that.
“Ponce,” she tells him. She is a coward. Why change now?
The route to Ponce from Rincón takes her around the western and southern rims of the island. It’s a coastal road, and these are areas hit hard by the hurricane, the flood zones, fallen trees and evacuations. But now, as she barrels along the empty road in the car Diego drove her to rent, searching the landscape around her for signs of trauma, all she can see is the same beauty she remembers from her childhood trips to the island: rolling hills and little mountains dense with lush vegetation; sweeping vistas of the sea; farmland with cows chewing grass and the occasional horse; flowers that bloom year-round; small black birds with long tail feathers; and the occasional iguana, alive and running with their funny furious run, and a few, sadly, dead, roadkill. This is the season the iguanas mate, she remembers, recalling a trip around this same time as a teenager when she watched them chase each other down the beach, their bearded heads bristling in the sun.
She takes photos as she drives, stopping to frame different views, to try to get images of the birds and the lizards and the rich greenery and the normalcy of it all, the strange aching normalcy of this storm-tossed place that looks just as it ever did. How is it possible that this land is not marked more deeply by all that has happened to it? How is it so very forgiving? It’s like a beaten body that doesn’t show the bruises, inviting more pain with its apparent indifference.
Every once in a while, she sees the tree that Fernando has inked on his body and thinks of him. Can she really blame him for wanting the house? He wants it for the same reason she does, because it is a part of his history. His family. She wonders if she should contact him, but dismisses the thought. She barely knows him. But you wanted to, didn’t you?
It takes her three hours to get there, but she doesn’t mind. She has deliberately taken the longest route possible, driving along the western coast to Cabo Rojo, then continues following the sea until she finally arrives in Ponce, a city she has never visited before, named for the grandson of the conquistador. She knows this because she looked it up, another stall tactic. She knows where she is going, at least, the bar that her young cousin had found for her on Instagram, but somehow that makes it worse. Having a destination means she has to go there.
She drives around for a while, telling herself she should see the city, of course she should, she’s never been, and the bar is not even open yet. She wonders what has closed because of Hurricane Maria, and what has survived, and what will continue to survive, because the storm’s impact will ripple on and on over the island as the electrical grid stays broken and frayed and the tourists remain absent. She looks up the hurricane in Jessenia’s blog, wondering what she’d said about the storm, and saw a post dated two weeks after it hit.
Huracan, from Hurakan, the Taino god of storms. Even now, we all speak a little Taino, even though we don’t know it. Gone forever, and yet the Tainos live, somehow, in disaster, in grilled meats, barbacoa, in uncomfortable beds, hamaca, and in one of the plants that changed the new world, tabaco. Columbus wrote of them that “our highness may believe that in all the world there can be no better people,” before he slaughtered them by the thousands. But that’s genocide for you. Everyone knows, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of people.