After the Hurricane(5)
She realized she could not remember how words worked, their order, because she had lost all sense of nouns and verbs, how they interact. When she spoke, she sounded like she had taken every word in her head and jumbled them, a child’s block set of words, and then tried to arrange them again with no sense of meaning, just an interest in the color of each. She had excused herself and found a corner to curl into, breathing like she’d run up five flights of stairs, her heart burning with pain. A fellow agent, Jeff, found her and sat with her, silent and calm in the face of her panic. It was the closest she had felt to someone in months.
Elena and her father do not speak. Not really. He rarely called or texted her, preferring instead to email her random things he found on the internet, photos of cats in teacups, articles about cheese-making in Nepal and the Singaporean economy and the French legal system. She never knew what they meant, what he wanted to tell her with this information. She never responded, and he didn’t seem to care about her reaction. She dutifully sent him messages on his birthday and Father’s Day. She received emails twice or three times a month. That was the extent of their communication.
But after Maria, Elena thought he would call. He could not be so far from reality that he would not have noticed the storm, not have understood the way people would be fearful for him. He must have run out of alcohol at some point, sobered up enough to know that this was not business as usual, that the island was in crisis, that people would want to know that he was alive. But she heard nothing.
Her panic flared out at the edges, waking her at night. She went from trying to learn as little as possible about the problems, reading only the good-news articles, the stories of help and care and false positivity, to reading about disaster, starvation, anger, pain, planeloads of people fleeing to Florida, children turned away from hospitals, food running low, nights in total darkness, the crimes that darkness hides. She consumed everything, devoured everything, hoping to catch a glimpse of her father, but she never did.
Finally, after a week of this, after she realized that she hadn’t had a full meal since the storm, that her jeans were looser and she could not even celebrate the fact, Elena called her mother and demanded that she contact her father. Rosalind was reluctant, but understood, and she told Elena that everything was fine, that Santiago had found the only working liquor store on the island and was enjoying the evening sky without light pollution. Elena went home that night and made herself a roast chicken, a steak, a cacio e pepe, a salad as big as a cat, and a chocolate mousse. She ate them all by herself. A month later, she gave Daniel back his ring, and that night she slept with Jeff at his going-away party, relieved that the reality of him was a disappointment compared to the fantasy of him she had been building since he had comforted her. She is always relieved when people disappoint her, because she is always waiting for them to do so, anxious until they do, the way she feels deep relief on the way to the airport when she finally remembers whatever it was she had forgotten to pack.
All because she knew that her father was fine. And now Rosalind is telling her that her father is missing. She wants to curl up inside herself all over again. She wants to cry. She wants Daniel to hold her. She wants Jeff inside her again, however disappointing his performance. She wants Rosalind to laugh and tell her it isn’t true, that she is playing a horrible joke, that she will never do something like this again. She wants to hear her father laughing in the background, she wants to hear Rosalind shush him because he is spoiling her prank, she wants to be ten again when they were happy in San Juan and she watched her parents smile as the sun set and they sipped their wine.
And she is also angry. His house must be a mess. She doubts that he maintains it well, he never had a sense of maintenance, not like her mother has, not like Elena herself has, she does it for a living. That house is a piece of history, its floors from different centuries. Her father, she is sure, is letting it go to ruin. He never takes care of anything, anyone, Elena knows, and it enrages her, hurts her in her very soul.
“I talked to Gloria, you remember her, she has that little West Indian place, takeout lunches, she always puts it in Styrofoam, which I hated, but the food was good.”
Rosalind is rambling. She is talking about takeout containers instead of her missing ex-husband. That means that she, too, is nervous. Elena is as sensitive to her mother’s moods as a piano tuner is to vibrations. She can see her, a hundred miles away, as she picks at her nailbeds, turning the thin skin into a shredded mess of epidermis, red and swollen, easily infected, Rosalind’s long slim fingers ruined by her anxiety. This is why Elena can never worry her mother. She cannot be the reason for Rosalind’s hands to hurt.
“I remember Gloria, Mom,” Elena assures her, trying to quiet the screaming in her mind, the knowledge that she knows, always, that something is wrong, has known the whole time, somehow.
“She said she saw your father every day, he gets food from her, it’s not good for him, I’m sure it’s got a lot of oil, you know how Puerto Ricans are, they love their fat, his heart . . . I don’t even know the last time he’s seen a doctor.” Gloria is not Puerto Rican, although she speaks the lazy island Spanish well, far better than Elena, to her shame. Santiago never spoke Spanish with Elena. She learned it in college. Gloria is from Antigua, and her years in San Juan have given her more Spanish than Elena has.
Elena does not correct her mother.
“Why didn’t you talk to him?” Elena is trying to be calm, trying not to explode at her mother, trying to contain herself. She can feel steam hissing off her words, though, regardless.