After the Hurricane(4)
For most of her adolescence, Elena Vega threw up every morning. Not after breakfast, not to be thinner, though she would have liked to be thinner, as would everyone. She would throw up after brushing her teeth, deep racking spasms throughout her body, saliva pooling in her mouth, and then, a flood of bile. She would brush her teeth once more, and descend the stairs of her unhappy home. She never told anyone about it. What would she have said? My body is trying to eject itself. My stomach is trying to escape. Even my insides want out.
It would have been another worry, another thing for her mother, Rosalind, named for the famous film actress her own mother had so adored, to worry about. Elena has never wanted anyone to worry about her. There is no room for worrying about her in their family.
She should have known the day her father met her, six years ago now, that it would be a bad day. She had thrown up that morning, too. But that was all before she understood that her nausea is a kind of prescience, that her innards are augury, foretelling the future.
She had thrown up after Daniel had asked her to marry him, and every day afterward until she gave him back his ring. It never fit her well, anyway, and after she did her stomach had left her alone, settling into solitude with more contentment than her mind. Even now she was unsure why she had done that, given it back, she who was so lonely, who had wanted to be with someone badly. Her mother, who she loves deeply, does not understand it. Daniel was so kind to Elena, and her mother has come to value kindness more with every passing year. He was so stable, and her mother has always always told her stability is more than passion will ever be. Elena knows her mother speaks from experience, and she would like to follow it, really she would. But Elena knows she would never be happy with Daniel. Daniel loved her the way her mother does, because she is obedient, because she does and says all the right things. Somewhere in Elena something is burning and angry and it wants to explode all over her life. Daniel did not deserve to be there when it does.
It is not, as one friend says, joking but not joking, because Elena is an only child, so no man’s love will be enough for her. Some only children are spoiled, or at least, that is the myth Elena knows well, the one she smiles at and pretends to be amused by, donning an invisible mimed princess tiara and making others laugh. But Elena was not spoiled, not in the sense of being given too much and placed in the center of the universe. But in other ways I am spoiled, milk allowed to sit too long in the sun, curdled now. Living with her parents, with their clouds of unhappiness, with her father and his so very many things, so very many things she had to account for, understand, avoid, she had never been the center of anything.
The phone rings. A photo pops up, a frozen image of her mother, Rosalind Goldberg, her full name spelled out in Elena’s phone book, just like everyone else’s. Elena likes names, full names, something about how much time she has spent looking at historic records bled into her and everyone now must be known in her life, in her devices and notebooks, the way they would want to be remembered throughout time.
Elena wipes her face, hiding from her mother as she always has; no matter that she cannot see her, Rosalind will know, and Elena cannot have that. She cannot have her mother worrying about her. Elena is already too worried about herself. She takes a deep breath and accepts the call.
“Elena, it’s me. It’s about your father. He’s gone missing.”
Whatever Elena’s guts were trying to reveal to her, she had not expected this. She cannot breathe. She can feel her stomach bile rising again, and imagines it choking her. She is silent for a long, long moment. It is insane to her to hear about her father from her mother. She has been a locked vault about him since the day he left. Before, even. Rosalind has never answered any of Elena’s questions about Santiago’s past. After they separated Elena thought she would finally get answers, but Rosalind was loyal to Santiago in this way, and gave Elena as little as he had. When Elena pressed, Rosalind said that Santiago’s past had dark things in it and he had wanted to protect Elena from that, and she, Rosalind, had to respect that. Elena does not feel protected. She feels lost. And so, apparently, is he.
“Elena? Did you hear me?”
“What does that mean, he’s gone?” she asks, trying to keep her voice calm, she can feel it rising, feel a keening cry at the back of her throat.
“He is missing, has been missing, actually, but we, I, didn’t know.” Rosalind’s voice sounds stuffy and nasal, as it always does when she has had a cold, or been crying.
“You said he was okay. After Maria. You said you talked to him.”
It has been months since the hurricane.
“I talked to his neighbor,” Rosalind admits, her voice small. Elena closes her eyes, containing herself.
Elena had been frantic after the hurricane, truly, deeply frantic. It had surprised her. She had thought on the subject of her father she was entirely neutral. Then the storm blew through the island and through her.
She works for a company that manages a group of buildings in Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Crown Heights, and Clinton Hill. Most of the time she works from home, or shows prospective renters apartments, but twice a month they have company meetings in their central office space in downtown Brooklyn. She had been in one the morning after the Category 4 storm hit Puerto Rico, on September 20, and while she was waiting for her turn to talk about the recent rentals she had completed, Daniel, who was still her fiancé at the time, sent her an article about the destruction. Doesn’t your father live there? She was shocked by what she saw. Storms were normal on the island, but the images she was looking at were all flooding and destruction, downed power lines and whole towns under the waves and rain, and deaths, lots of deaths. She stared at the words on her phone screen, wishing they would reconstitute into something else, something good.