The Paper Swan(90)

At the time, I didn’t know that Damian was reacting to something my father had done. My father had accepted that I was going to have Damian’s child, but he was never going to accept Damian in my life, child or no child, so he’d sent him a message in prison, a message that had provoked Damian into replying with one of his own. Theirs was a feud that put one man behind bars and another in his grave.

Sierra was a few months old when my father passed away.

“She has your mother’s eyes,” he said to me one morning. He’d been uneasy around Sierra for the first few weeks, but that day he bent over her crib and looked at her for the first time. “Yes. Adriana’s big, brown eyes.”

After a while, he picked her up and gave her three kisses when he thought I wasn’t looking. Our relationship had been strained, but he doted on Sierra. Eventually it proved impossible for him to hold a grudge against me for having her. She was the one thing that made him smile when everything else was collapsing around him. I was thankful that he died in his room, with his dignity intact, before we lost the mansion.

With his death, I was truly an orphan. I felt like a three-pronged hole in the wall, with empty spaces where my mother, my father, and MaMaLu had been. People plug in to you, and when they’re gone, you stop working for a while. You have to reconfigure yourself, rework your wiring, so you can get out of bed in the morning. Not only had I lost my father, but I had also lost the roof over my head, at a time when I needed it the most—when I had a little one to take care of. My father’s assets were long gone, picked over one by one to pay his debts. I collected all my designer clothes and shoes and bags, and dropped them off at a consignment store. Beautiful things are always hard to part with, but between the sales from that, and my jewelry and watches, I had enough for Sierra and I to get by until I figured things out. But first, I had to bury my father.

Nick came through in ways I never imagined he would. Things had changed after he found out I was pregnant. A child wasn’t something he had factored in, least of all one that wasn’t his. He backed off and stopped pursuing me, but when my father had a stroke, he showed up at the hospital. He tried not to stare at my round, pregnant belly and swollen ankles. He helped me wrap up my father’s estate after his death and flew with me and Sierra to Paza del Mar for the funeral.

I broke down as I stood at my parents’ graves, clutching Sierra. The soil around my father’s site was still fresh, unlike my mother’s and MaMaLu’s. I hadn’t realized the prison lot was in the same cemetery, and seeing MaMaLu’s name carved in stone made her death that much more final. I wanted Damian there so I could draw from his strength, so I could lean on him, as he held our daughter at his mother’s tomb. We had never made it that day, the day they’d stormed the island and captured him.

How do we end up like this? How do we make a mess of something so beautiful and true?

I felt lost and unanchored, like a ship in the storm. No mother, no father, no MaMaLu, and no Damian. But I had Sierra, and I held on to her tiny body like it was my lifeline.



I visited Valdemoros before we returned to San Diego. I wanted to see the place that had taken MaMaLu, and pay homage to the woman who’d filled my mother’s shoes. I took enough “lunch” to earn me an escorted tour.

Behind the ominous barbed wire and bleak, gray walls, hard-faced guards mauled through my bag before letting me in. My footsteps echoed in the dark tunnel that led to the main compound as I followed Daniela, the officer who was showing me around. The central area was all concrete, but it was nothing like the highly regimented place I’d been expecting. It was hard to tell the prisoners from their visitors because they wore no uniforms. Small kiosks were set up around the inner perimeter, selling food and other staples. Mothers carried babies on their hips in the exercise yard. Children weaved through the corridors, chasing each other. There was a makeshift nursery with colorful walls, a maze of swings and slides, and a jungle gym. Tough-looking women eyed me with curiosity, suspicion, or both, and then went back to bouncing toddlers on their knees or weaving or sewing.

Daniela told me that over half of the women had yet to see a judge. “In the meantime, the prison encourages entrepreneurship. Some of the inmates make money running the kiosks. Others sew soccer balls and clothes. They make jewelry, hammocks, picture frames.” Daniela pointed to groups of women sitting in circles, working on different projects.

“What happens to these items?” I picked up a hand-stitched leather bag and examined it. It was similar to the one I’d admired in the market, the day Damian and I had gone shopping.