Clap When You Land(11)
She said we shouldn’t hide what we are to each other.
& I told her I wasn’t hiding, I just wasn’t making
a loudspeaker announcement to my parents or anyone.
People who know me, know.
Dre’s quirks come out
in other ways too.
Sometimes Dre wants me to have a clear opinion on plastic straws, or
water rights, or my feelings about Papi, & she doesn’t always see I need time to watch the board,
to come to terms with the possibilities.
I’m telling you about my skin,
& my home, & mostly about Dre,
because it’s easier than telling you
Papiisdead.
If I say those words,
if I snap apart the air with them,
whatever is binding me together
will split too.
The house phone has been ringing off the hook all day.
Reporters from American
& Latin American channels & newspapers & magazines & podcasts & websites.
Family members
from the Bronx & DR.
The neighborhood association, which invites us to grief counseling, special sessions that will be held at the church.
The phone rings & rings, & Mami’s voice,
raw as unprocessed sugar, responds & responds but does not answer
where we’ll go from here.
Here is a thing that no one knows, & probably wouldn’t believe if I told them.
The night before Papi got on the plane, I almost asked him not to go.
It would have been the first full sentence I’d spoken to him in almost a year.
We haven’t been close, not like we were, since I stopped playing chess,
since he tried to force me to go back, since I saw the certificate in the sealed envelope.
When I quit playing chess,
he told me I broke his heart.
I never told him he’d broken mine.
In the Dominican Republic,
before he met Mami & came here
& started this life for us
Papi was an accountant,
a man of numbers & money,
but here he hustled his way into
owning a billiards on Dyckman Street.
I don’t believe in magic or premonitions. Not like Papi,
who crossed himself every time he left the house.
Not like Mami, who tries to interpret dreams.
But on the night before Papi left for DR, something yanked on my heart,
& I wanted to ask him to stay.
But I never said the words.
& Papi did something
he hadn’t done in over a year:
came to my room to say good night
& tangled his hand in my hair
while I was two-strand twisting my curls.
I hate when he messes up my fresh wash, but I also missed him. My fingers caught in his. Held.
Before I moved away. Removed myself from his reach.
“Me tengo que ir, los negocios. Ya tú sabes.”
He’s always back right before my birthday in September, but every year around this time,
Mami’s spine becomes rigid, her lips pulled tight as sneaker laces biting into the tongue.
As his departure nears it seems like I can see the space between my parents stretch & grow.
& she refuses to drive him to the airport despite how much I beg her so that I can be there when he leaves.
Papi stopped trying to joke her out of her ill humor years ago, & I wonder if she now regrets that his last few days here, at home, alive,
were spent in bed with her anger.
I did not reply to him. Whenever he left, he said it was for business. I now knew he was lying.
He fiddled with the light switch in my room.
“Negra bella, te quiero. I know things haven’t been normal between us, but I hope when I come back, we can talk about it.”
I peeked at him from the mirror
while my fingers twirled & twirled my hair.
I remember how I started to say something, then yanked the words before they could get loose.
He shook his head as if changing his mind.
“While I’m gone, cúidate, negra.”
& I never said a word.
Once, when I was still young to chess competitions, I was in a tournament with all older kids.
I’d made it to one of the last rounds
& had been playing well the whole time.
I was convinced I was going to win the whole thing.
But I missed an opponent’s trap & was put in check.
My hands shook, tears welled up in my eyes, the clock kept ticking, but I wouldn’t move.
When I finally looked up, I could see Papi watching through the glass of the double doors.
He didn’t blink, he didn’t shake his head, he didn’t do anything, but somehow I knew.
I straightened my back; I wiped my eyes.
I knocked down my king.
The train ride home was silent.
But before we got off at our stop,
Papi turned to my nine-year-old self & said: “Never, ever, let them see you sweat, negra.
Fight until you can’t breathe, & if you have to forfeit, you forfeit smiling, make them think you let them win.”
Four Days After