Clap When You Land(8)
Not even her own stubborn sister who said she was fine.
Not the little girl who was her niece’s
good friend. There were lots of funerals
that October. Rumor is, after Cero’s sister died he was never the same. Before I learned to fear him, there was one memory that kept coming back, the one I cannot shake even as I shake when he approaches: Cero has never appeared young to me. Always this same age, this same face. But he would come to school to pick Emily up. & she would stop
everything she was doing & run to him, arms spread wide.
He would catch her, swinging her in circles. & I was jealous.
Jealous I didn’t have a consistent male figure like Cero in my life.
Tía has kept the TV on since the accident.
She hasn’t blown out the three big candles under a picture of my father
on the ancestral altar.
This morning, divers began
pulling up pieces of the plane.
Papi loved the water, could hold his breath longer than anyone. The news coverage has died down; they say any chance of survivors has too.
It’s been seventy-two hours, & I go to school on Monday even though Tía tells me I should stay home. I want normal.
But my teachers do not ask me for homework, do not ask me questions.
In the afternoon, El Cero sits on a crate
near where my bus drops me off. Later he is outside the bar I have to walk past to get to the beach.
I try not to dread that he seems to appear on every corner.
But it feels like El Cero has sullied any sense of safety.
& since most of his dealings happen at the resort next door, I know that he won’t be leaving me or this sand alone; like a too-skinny cat who knows you hold scraps in one hand & a smack in the other, I give him a wide berth.
For dinner, I warm the days-old stew that I still can’t stomach.
At this point, we have no reason to hope but I can’t say the words because then it will become real.
Tía & I both act like not talking about it will make it not true.
I help her grind & dry herbs. We mend towels
& watch TV quietly.
Once or twice when I walk into the living room, I hear her murmuring on the phone; she’s always quick to hang up; I think she’s been making funeral arrangements
but knows she can’t tell me. Knows my shoulders are too narrow to bear that news just yet.
Camino Yahaira
Some people play chess, but I played chess.
Not like your abuelito at the park plays chess.
No offense to anybody’s grandfather. It’s just, my ranking’s more official than your abuelito’s.
Last year my FIDE ranking was higher
than the year I was born, well over the 2000s.
I scrubbed kids weekly at citywide competitions & was on a travel team for national tournaments.
Until last year.
I’m not the best student at A. C. Portalatín High School, but I was one of the best chess players in the entire city.
& I ensured our team won titles,
& the school loved me for it; so did the neighborhood.
I got us into the newspapers & on late-night TV
for something other than drugs or poor test scores or gentrification.
But last year, things changed. & so did I.
So did chess. & if the game taught me one thing, it’s once you lift a pawn off the board,
you have to move it forward. It cannot return where it was.
Papi was a good chess teacher.
He was not a good chess player.
Evidenced by how terribly he hid things.
You could always tell his next play.
At least, that’s what I used to think.
When Papi is in DR we do not speak often, but I never had to reach him the way I did one day last summer.
It felt like he might be
the only person to help me make sense of The Thing That Happened.
The thing I still find hard to talk about.
I called his cell. He didn’t answer.
I sent him a text, & no response.
I tried his email, but one day later my inbox was still empty.
I realized Papi always travels for negocios, but I didn’t have a single work number.
I called Tío Jorge to ask, but he said he didn’t have a phone to call.
Mami rubbed my back but said Papi would get to me when he could.
On a day Mami wasn’t home, I went through a folder of Papi’s papers. I thought one of his business forms might have a company number.
My fingers, drawn like magnets, landed on a closed envelope.
I know Mami had never
looked at it herself.
I know this for a fact because if she had she would know what I now know, what she cannot know
or nothing would have been like it was.
It depends on whether Mami or Papi is telling it, their story.
According to Papi, he saw Mami at El Malecón in Puerto Plata.
Sitting near the water’s edge, rocking high-waist jeans,
“Guapa y alta como un modelo.
Straight hair & the nose of a Roman empress.”
According to Mami,
she saw Papi creeping closer.
Dark like the skin of a vanilla bean, a barrel chest & the hands of a mechanic.