After the Hurricane(98)

“What is this?” she asks in Spanish, her voice hoarse. Naomi’s smile turns wry, and she sniffs at it.

“Pitorro. You’d say ‘moonshine,’ I think. It’s a liquor made from cane. She makes her own. Deadly stuff.” Naomi drinks hers down in one gulp.

“You like it?” Goli asks, her hand reaching for a bottle with no label on it. Elena puts her hand over her glass, smiling in a way that she hopes is polite.

“It’s very strong,” she says.

“Your father, he loves this,” Goli says, cheerfully. “I always bring it out when he comes.” Elena’s blood runs cold, and she finds herself sipping the stuff again, for courage. It still burns her, but she swallows it down.

“Have you seen my father? Recently?” Elena asks, trying not to seem desperate, trying not to get out of her seat and shake the little woman in the hopes the information will tumble out of her.

“He came by. He comes sometimes. He came by a few days ago, he brings me some things. He’s a good boy,” Goli says, nodding and smiling. Elena’s mouth opens to ask more—he’s been here recently, where did he go, is he still here—but she feels a pinch on her thigh. Naomi’s face turns a little sad, and as Goli bustles back into the kitchen with the bottle of pitorro, she turns to Elena.

“Her memory is not so good now. She thinks that people come visit her, people who have died. She don’t always remember what happen when.”

“Oh. Because I’m actually here looking for my father,” Elena says. Naomi nods.

“Okay. You should ask her, then. But just, it’s not all true, what she says. She think it’s true, maybe it was true, but it might not all be in the right order. I don’t want you to get upset. I don’t want you upset her.”

“I understand,” Elena says, but inside her stomach is rioting, from the stress and the drink and the futility of all this. The way hope is offered to her and then taken away. She tries to focus on the person in front of her, Goli, this new person she knew nothing about, another piece of her family, of her past. She can mourn her father, who is absent, or see the person who is here. Her task was to find him, but her task is also impossible, a quest meant for a better heroine than her. And besides, when one encounters an old woman in the woods, one must sit and listen to their tale, give them all one has, thank them for their generosity, everyone knows that. Elena cannot let this piece of history go just because it is not the thing she is looking for, just because it might offer her no answers in her task. It might offer her a host of other things instead. She has a translator, and a family member; she would be a fool to give those up.

Goli sits down on the couch, the first time she’s sat since they entered the house. Her little legs stick straight out, and she smiles again, a smile so sweet and unlike Elena’s grandfather’s perpetual grimace that Elena wonders how they can truly be related. But they are. And so is she.

“Tell me about my father,” Elena says. And Goli does not even blink at this request, at a child wanting to learn of their parent. Instead she just leans forward over her little legs, and begins to talk.





Seventeen




At night, when the air was swollen and the tiny tan frogs that sang their famous refrain were beginning their repertoire, coqui, coQUI, as the jungle sighed and the mountains stretched into themselves and the chickens fluttered their feathers in sleepy twitches, as the scent of sugar and earth and pig shit wafted together into a heady perfume, Junior’s Tía Goli would raise her arm, and with a steady hand, slash into his boils with a red-hot razor blade.

At sixteen he was slim as a snake, taller than his father, but then, most men were. In the army, his father had been called a midget by his fellow soldiers. Junior’s second family—his island family, people he saw once a year, children a decade younger than him who smiled shyly, his stepmother, Chavela, who was kind and soft—were all small. It was his mother’s side that had been tall, still were tall, pushing out of their genetic predisposition to stay close to the ground like bolting lettuce.

Back in New York he lived with his mother, Esperanza, and her wandering mind. She would be there, in the apartment with him, and then she would be gone. She would not be back for days. Sometimes her body, too, would disappear, and he would look for her, after school and at night when he should have been doing his homework, sleeping, dreaming of movie stars touching his body, but he never had time for things like that. Worrying about his mother was the life he knew.

His father had retreated to the island years six ago, defeated by her wandering mind, the way she would appear and disappear, the way her brain invented things, stretched out her fears, accused strangers of plotting against her, certain there was poison in her coffee, certain that Jesus was speaking through her, certain that the children she had miscarried were in the room, ready to carry her to hell. There had been no question that Junior would stay with his mother. Even if she had been willing to give him up, Esperanza’s mother was militant in her insistence that Junior be with his mother’s family, who were all in New York. Junior wasn’t sure why, as the woman seemed to hate him, although to be fair, she seemed to hate everyone. But his father, Santiago Sr., had capitulated easily. After all, he was the one doing the leaving, the one asking for the divorce. He sent money, and a plane ticket, every year, and Junior would put his clothing in a duffel bag and kiss his mother goodbye, uncertain if she was there or not, and take the A train miles and miles out to the airport, the only time he ever left Manhattan, and board a plane to the island where it was always summer.