After the Hurricane(3)
After she has walked from Manhattan to Brooklyn because the energy inside of her, the anger, is buzzing so brightly she can’t sit on a train, she will call her mother and ask just what the hell is going on. During a phone call that feels like someone stabbing her in the gut, she will learn that it is her mother who has asked her father to leave, that she has exorcised him from her life, trimmed him out of photos and taken him off the deed to their Philadelphia home.
In that call, she will learn that her father has been in the grips of a manic spiral for over nine months. That he overdosed on his lithium, accidently or on purpose no one will ever know, and then, after a hospital visit to flush out his liver, declared he would never take it again, that it made him numb and too calm, that he couldn’t move fast with it. That in the spirit of moving fast he then crashed his car driving drunk on the New Jersey Turnpike, and somehow walked away from it whole, with nothing more than a black eye. And $15,000 of damage. She will learn that he lost his license to practice law, that he has left his life behind, or been pushed out of it, by her mother, who is finally done. The anger that will fill her veins and clog her throat learning these things will be overwhelming, a murderous rage that makes her tremble, that she tells herself she cannot feel, will not feel. It will seem historic in nature, ancient Greek, and humans can’t survive that kind of thing. She will ask why her mother didn’t tell her any of this, and neither of them will tell the truth, which is that between them they have formed a habit of silence on the subject of Santiago, and habits are hard to break. She would like to hate her mother for her silence, but she can only hate one parent at a time.
She will begin to edit her father out of her narratives. She will learn how to say she is visiting her mother, not her parents. She will find that no one questions her, or points this out, and this makes her sad and angry in a way she will tell no one about.
Her parents will divide territory, him on the island, her mother taking the mainland, and Elena will not venture to San Juan. It would feel disloyal, and while her mother will never say it, Elena will know she is happy Elena has chosen not to go. Elena has always been an obedient child. She had hoped that would earn her love. It rarely seems to.
She will get a call from him a few months later, which she will answer, despite the sight of his name on her phone inspiring dread in her stomach. He will not remember this lunch, this moment, his offer to give her a piece of his past. He will tell her life is wonderful and perfect and that she must visit him soon, and she will say nothing. He will ask her what classes are you taking, and she will end the call before she can start crying. Before she can scream. She will tell herself that she is sad, very sad. She lies.
He will look at the phone, puzzled, these devices never make much sense to him, and wonder if he has hurt her, but only for a moment, before the rum clouds his chaotic brain chemistry, before he can, really truly can, no longer think of anyone but himself. He will return to his life on the island. He will sink into this new way of being and it will be as though all of the things that came before—his marriage, his child, his ambition as a lawyer, his friends, the first and last he ever made, his deceptions, his distant past and childhood all buried deep, his mother most of all—are behind him. He will have escaped them, left them all in the past, where they belong. He wants to be light, he wants to carry as little with him as possible. That has always been his deepest and truest dream.
This day, this lunch he will not remember, as he stumbles out into the fall sunshine, looking at the world through a haze of cheap Japanese beer, will be the last time in his life that Santiago will ever see the East Village, the place where he was born, the place he thought was the whole world for so long until he thought it was a prison.
Six years later, it is September once again. Her brain buzzing from wine, Dutch courage, Elena will find herself alone at night in the neighborhood that her father lived in long ago. She will pass First and First. She will not notice the schools he once attended, the apartments belonging to the family she has never heard of, will never meet. Eventually, she will stop, and stand at Avenue A and Third Street, looking at the first housing project, her bleary eyes reading the sign mounted on the brick wall, and she will take a picture, the historian in her never truly dormant, no matter that she works in real estate now. She will have no idea that she is on the walk, the one he promised her, and that this would have been a place her father would have shown her, now will never show her. Then, she will take the subway home, and sleep, and wake, and go on with her life, and look at other daughters and fathers and think, Well, that’s it for that, then. She will, she knows, be done with him, her own father, forever. She is never wrong about him.
But sometimes she is wrong about herself.
The next day, the storm comes.
Two
When Elena wakes up four months, two weeks, and five days after Hurricane Maria landed in San Juan, she feels, for no particular reason, a sensation of deep dread. Her stomach rolls, and breathing through her nausea, she stumbles through her tiny apartment, her studio, single women in New York live in studios. Her head bows over her small porcelain sink, its white surface split by fine cracks that resemble the shoulder-length curly hairs on her head, and she retches. Thin yellow mucus, bitter and foul, floods her mouth, and then her sink. She leans backward, smiles weakly, grimly congratulating herself. At least you know you aren’t pregnant. She hasn’t had sex in a long time. Not since she ended things with Daniel. And besides, she knows, this happens, it means something bad is coming.