After the Hurricane(90)

“San Francisco is in the north, right?” he said. “Is that far from Hollywood?”

“Yes,” Pearl said, smiling.

“How far? As far as from here to Yonkers?” Pearl smiled again at Junior’s question.

“A bit farther than that, I believe.” Junior looked sad at her words, then brightened.

“Maybe if I do well and get a good job I can have a car sometime, that will make it easier. Do they have a subway between them?” Pearl shook her head. Santiago nodded. “That’s all right. I’ll be too busy with school, anyway. If I get in. Is this one really hard?” Pearl did not know how to answer him.

“Only one way to find out,” she said, smiling, feeling the weight of his future on her chest.

She spread out the pages of the application.

“Let’s begin.”



The summer before his senior year of high school Santiago did not return to the island. It was the first summer he could remember not visiting since his father had moved back. The ticket came in the mail, just like it always did, and he looked at it for a full day, sitting on the kitchen table, a rectangle of thin cardboard, an invitation to paradise.

He wanted to go to the island. Wanted it more than he had ever wanted it before. He wanted to escape all this, to spend a little time in a world where his life was not made up of visits to his mother, and dinners with his family here, and lying to everyone he knew about having parents, having care in his life. He wanted to be cared for, to let go of caring for his mother, himself. To eat the food Goli had prepared for him, to sit with Luis as the sun rose, to know that all he had to do each day was work and eat and sleep.

But he could not have it. He could not go and have that taste of goodness, and return here. He could not leave his mother behind, not as he had been left. He could not go and pretend that his father was a good man, watch him be a good husband and a good father to other people, while back here, his mother slowly faded beneath the onslaught of her insanity. His father had seen the madness lurking in her mind, and found a way out, leaving Santiago behind. He could see that, now, and he could never accept anything again from his father. Not this plane ticket, not anything. The next time he went to the island it would be because he himself had made it possible. And he would make it possible.

Mrs. Schultz had told him about scholarships, how he could apply to places that would give him money to go to them. He would apply to college, something no one else in his family cared about, and go wherever they paid for him to go and get a job and make something of himself. He would make enough that he could help his mother, keep her comfortable, keep her safe. He would make enough that he could buy his own plane tickets.

He tore up the ticket, and told his father his mother needed him here. The truth was, he didn’t know if it was better for him not to visit his mother at all, but he did, every other week, regular as clockwork.

The worst visits were when she did not recognize him at all. After those, he wondered if she was gone, completely gone from him. She came back, time and again, her face lighting up the next time she saw him, cari?o on her lips. But what if she did not, someday? What if she went away and never came back, her body there, her mind gone? Then they both would have left him, both parents, each of them abandoning him, leaving him completely alone.



Although he could never tell anyone this, the two years Santiago spent living alone while his mother lived in Bellevue Hospital, lost to herself, from August 1966 to August 1968, were the two happiest years he experienced in his early life.

Happiness would be a fickle visitor in the house of his mind, unfortunately, as the years wore on and he reached adulthood. It would approach as fast as a summer storm, and be gone just as quickly, a torrent of happiness that rapidly dissipated, leaving him drained and empty. He would never understand its comings and goings, never learn to read the signs that rain was on its way. But then, before all that, a skinny sixteen-year-old found happiness, much to his guilt, living alone in New York.

For as long as he could remember, his world had been filled with noise. New York was noise. When he and his mother had lived with his family, the noise had been constant, all-pervading. He had never been alone in the apartment, rarely alone in a single room for more than five minutes. He had not minded always; when it was him and his mother he was happy, for despite all the demons that plagued her mind, all the people crowding in her trying to emerge, he knew that she loved him. The violence of Esperanza Marin Vega’s life was confined to her mind, to herself, to scratching her own skin so hard it tore, to pulling out her own hair, chewing the flaking skin around her own fingernails until it bled.

The other people he knew were saner, but less kind. The hum of conversation, punctuated with yelling, screaming, shrieking, chattering, crying, haunted his life. Even when he and his mother finally moved into their own place, they were sandwiched between scores of other people, yelling, hitting, laughing, singing, crying, imploring, needing, living, around them. In their trim apartment at First Avenue and Second Street, for which they payed $35 a month, with its yellowed walls and rusted pipes and death-trap stairs between units, he choked on sound. At least, until his mother was gone.

Then, the apartment, which had always felt permeable to everything, made of paper walls, like the screens he had seen in a picture in his history book of a Japanese palace, was suddenly immune to sound. In the hallway it was the same rattle of tongues: Spanish and Greek and Ukrainian and Yiddish rang out with abandon. But in the apartment, it was silent, like a spell had been cast. The silence made it easier, easier to think, easier to read, to work hard, to count his limited money, to move through every day.