After the Hurricane(87)

She is on the road by nine in the morning. Outside the car the island blows by. According to the Wikipedia page for Puerto Rico, which Elena looked up during the night, unable to sleep, the island is the smallest of the Greater Antilles, and just around 311 miles in circumference. Before Maria, it would be easy to drive around the whole of the island in a day; now, with the ripped roads and cracked bridges, it takes more time. Perhaps the next time Elena comes, it will be healed, or on the way, and she can try that, driving the entirety of the island. When will you be back here? she wonders to herself.

No matter what this is to him, she thinks to herself, this is yours, too. This belongs to you. You shouldn’t let anyone keep you away from here if here is where you want to be. She only wishes she knew where she wants to be most.





Fifteen




The envelope came in the mail for Santiago so long after that lunch with Mrs. Schultz that when he saw it, that thick packet with the words Stanford University printed on it in clear deep red letters next to his address, the return address describing an admissions office in Palo Alto, California, he was uncertain exactly what it was, uncertain up until the moment that he saw the words congratulations and full scholarship, and then his eyes began to blur, even with his glasses on.

It came late, so late he didn’t know it was coming at all. He had already received his admissions letters to Marymount Manhattan, Hunter College, and City University of New York. By that point, he almost thought he had imagined applying out of state, wondering what kind of dream that was. He had to stay here, anyway, to take care of his mother. To be in the place where he knew what the world was. Painful as his life in New York was, it was his, how could he leave it, really? Santiago felt he should stay put, stay where he had been born, where he had been placed, and know that was the life for him. To go so far, how would he find the way back again?

And now what? he asked himself, sitting in the tiny kitchen, in the empty apartment, his fingers stiff, page after page of information swimming before his eyes. Words like room and board, stipend for expenses, impressed with your performance floated in front of him, and he knew that this would change his life, if he let it. Don’t you want to change your life? But to change his life would mean changing everyone else’s as well. He might be alone, but his mother haunted the apartment like poverty haunted his life, ever present, inescapable, as much a part of him as his skin. Could he leave her behind? Could he cut his life into two pieces, and know they might never knit themselves back together again?

Outside one window hung the fire escape ladder. Junior opened the windows and reached out, pulling himself out and up, climbing onto the roof. He had discovered this years before, during one of his mother’s bad spells, when she had begged him to let her out, let her meet the great Earth Mother, when she had screamed and moaned and he had stuffed her hands in her winter mittens, so she could not turn the door locks, could not leave, could not physically disappear into the world as her mind had disappeared from reality. She was still a beautiful woman, despite her madness, and he did not know what people, men, might do to her, did not trust her to make her way home. He should have known she needed to be put away, then, but how could he do that? She had protected him, he had to do the same for her. But her keening cry, muffled by her attempts to bite the mittens off her hands, made staying in the same room with her impossible. He knew she would exhaust herself soon, she was rocking on the bed as she muttered and bit at the wool, but he could not stay, could not listen to it, and so he climbed out the window and realized he could keep going up, up, to the roof. Away from her, alone, the city laid out in front of him.

Since that day, it had become his sanctuary. Below him taxis beeped and pedestrians chattered, but he felt like he was on another planet, something from the Twilight Zone, some place quiet like nowhere in the city had ever been quiet.

Now, he sat, his knees curled into his skinny chest, on the edge of the building. It wasn’t tall, but sudden death lay below him should he fall. He was alone. Truly alone. He had carved out space for himself in this city, away from the suffocating rooms into which he had been born, away from the choking grasp that held his family, his uncles. Away, even, from the sweet stultifying world of the island, drowsy and dated, a life from another time. Both a trap. And now he had another open window, another place to escape to. He had sought it out, dreamed it for himself, but never thought it would become real. Could he bear to reach out and take it?

Junior’s grandfather, a jibarito, had cut cane until the day he died. All around San Sebastián, the sugar fields the man had worked and never owned a piece of stretched in every direction. When Santiago first visited the island, he would bring him lunch out in the fields, watching as the lines in his grandfather’s face deepened with every bite. His skin was deeply tanned, his back in a permanent bent curve from years and years of swinging a machete, making his body a capital C. He was a quiet man, and Junior had wondered where his own father’s words had come from, the way his father could talk and talk to other people. When his abuelo was finished, he would wipe his face with the napkin Chavela had packed for her father-in-law, a useless endeavor, Santiago had never seen his abuelo’s face dry. Then, he would straighten, as best he could, and return to the work, work he did not need to do for money, work he did because his hands had moved in that motion for too long to stop. He died before he turned fifty. How long would Santiago’s father live? And his mother? And all of the people he knew, each one consumed with what was just in front of them, like his abuelo, unable to see beyond the cane?