by Jaquira Díaz
We would never see each other again.
We left Puerto Rico that summer, after Papi came back home one night, and both he and Mami acted as if he’d never left. We still didn’t know everything we would lose—the ceibas, the flamboyanes, the moriviví, the coquis singing us to sleep at night—everything we’d already lost. We wouldn’t know until it was too late.
We arrived in Miami Beach, Papi, Mami, Abuela, Anthony, Alaina, and me, our parents back together for the last time. We stayed in a hotel in South Beach until we found an apartment on West Avenue.
Anthony and I started a new school, where we would be stripped of our language, where we wouldn’t be allowed a hall pass to the bathroom unless we could ask in English, where boys ignored me and I ignored boys, where girls asked, like I knew they would, Why do you look like a boy? We walked the nine or ten blocks home from school alone, cutting through Flamingo Park, where I sometimes stopped to sit in the swings or watch the high school guys play ball.
We would move like six times that first year, and our parents would not stop fighting, and every new apartment would be smaller than the last. Eventually, we would run out of money, and Papi would work two jobs seven days a week to make ends meet, barely managing to support our family. Papi would leave Mami again, after one of their screaming matches turned into a fight, a fight that ended with Mami knocking him unconscious. We would get evicted after that, and Mami would take us to live with Mercy for a while, until her diagnosis, and then we’d finally have a name for the demons, for the people sending messages through the TV, for the man who had been following us around all these years. Mami would be in and out of hospitals, and Anthony, Alaina, and I would move in with Papi and Abuela.
The five of us were the kind of poor you could feel in your bones, in your teeth, in your stomach. Empty-refrigerator poor. Sleeping-on-the-floor-until-somebody-threw-out-a-sofabed poor. Stirring-sugar-into-water-and-calling-it-lemonade poor. And then we’d take off again, like runaways. One apartment, and then another, and then another, never staying long enough to put up a picture, leaving while the place still smelled like the people who lived there before us.
It wouldn’t occur to me until my teens—when I’m a hood rat running around Miami Beach, riding in cars with gun-toting gangsters, stealing vans from parking lots, joyriding down to Key Largo, sleeping in somebody’s truck bed. When I’m standing on another rooftop, passing a Dutch to a boy who doesn’t even know my real name, when I’m stepping up onto the ledge, when I’m looking down at the two stories below, when a two-story fall is not enough to kill me, when the boy is not a boy, but a man—that Abuela’s kitchen, that house in Fajardo, was the last place I ever felt safe. That maybe home is a place. That maybe my mother would never find her way back. That maybe I wouldn’t either.
PART Two
Monstruo
Monster Story
I.
It was the year they found a dead toddler in the bushes, head bashed in, bite marks and cigarette burns all over his body. He was wearing a T-shirt with lollipops across the front. It was November 1990. Police detectives were all over the news, searching for the baby’s parents, for some clue about his identity, but no one had come forward. My mother was homeless that year. Sometimes she crashed on Mercy and Tanisha’s couch, but she spent most nights on the streets with Pedro, one of her scutterhead boyfriends. I’d get a phone call in the middle of the night—Mami calling collect from Dade County Jail, begging me to convince Papi to bail her out. She’d promise to pay him back, promise me she’d change, stop using.
Until one day Pedro vanished, and Mami was left with nothing but her habit to keep her company. That’s when she decided she needed her kids back.
I was eleven.
After our parents’ divorce, a couple of years after we arrived in Miami Beach, Anthony, Alaina, and I moved with Papi and Abuela into a small apartment across the street from Flamingo Park. Papi was never home. He’d brought us from Puerto Rico in search of a better life, had left behind his life as a hustler, his penthouse apartment, his cars and properties, to work two jobs. One at a factory in North Miami, and one as a security guard at a high-rise apartment complex in Miami Beach.
Papi worked all the time, so it was Abuela who took us to school, dropped me off in front of Ida M. Fisher Elementary, walked Alaina across the courtyard to her second-grade classroom at Leroy D. Feinberg Elementary, where the little kids went. It was Abuela who ironed Anthony’s clothes for school, who helped with our homework, who hiked all the way to school when we forgot sweaters or science projects, who came calling for us when we were late for dinner. Sometimes she’d let us play in the alley out back so she could keep an eye on us from the kitchen window. That’s where we were the afternoon after the news about the dead toddler broke.
We were playing stickball with the other street kids and my best friend, Sara, who wasn’t really from the streets. Sara and I were complete opposites. I always ran wild around the neighborhood, sometimes with Alaina in tow, even though Abuela insisted that we stay on the block. Sara and her little brother Steven never even crossed the street without permission. I was abrasive, foulmouthed, and got suspended from school for fighting. Sara always said please and thank you and answered all of her mother’s questions with yes, ma’am or no, ma’am. She had silky blond hair and wore new clothes and clean sneakers. I had a tangled mess of curls, was constantly sunburned and dirty, and wore Tanisha’s hand-me-downs. Sara went to church every Sunday. I spent Sundays in the park shooting hoops with boys from the neighborhood. I had a thick Spanish accent, and Sara spoke perfect gringo English, but she never made fun of me or called me “Spanish girl” like some of the boys on my street. Sara’s mom, a single mother and schoolteacher, sometimes invited Alaina and me over for dinner. The only thing Sara and I had in common was that both our families lived in the ratty, bug-ridden, art-deco slums of South Beach.
During our game of stickball, I was on first base, and Sara was at bat, about to strike out, when Frankie showed up uninvited.
“What’s up, mamacitas?” he called.
Frankie was a high school kid who came around once in a while, always bugging us girls to play spin the bottle or seven minutes in heaven, which meant he wanted to feel you up behind the possum-infested dumpster. He walked around sucking his thumb, and sometimes, when you weren’t looking, he’d stick a spit-covered finger in your ear and yell, “Wet Willie!”
Some kids said Frankie was slow, that he was harmless, but I had my doubts. He was older than Anthony, and I’d heard he got kicked out of school for sneaking into the girls’ locker room and pulling out his dick.
Even though Alaina was pretty tough, and had more sense than most second-graders, I warned her to stay the hell away from him.
“Can I play?” he asked.
I rolled my eyes.
Alaina crossed her arms. “I don’t think so.”
Sara lowered her broomstick bat and shook her head. “No way!”
I took Sara’s bat, held it out in front of me, threateningly. “Go home, pervert.”
“Come on,” Frankie said. “If you let me play, I’ll show you where there’s a dead body.”
The other kids groaned and huffed and rolled their eyes, but I asked, “What do you mean ‘a dead body’?”
“I found a dead boy in the bushes.”
I didn’t buy it. It was the cops who’d found the baby, or so I thought. And they’d probably taken him away to the morgue or the police station or wherever it was they took murder victims. What were the chances that there’d be another body in the bushes? Still, I considered it. The prospect of seeing a real dead body seemed too good to pass up.
“Show us,” I said.
Frankie laughed, his thumb stuck in his mouth.
“You’re such a liar,” I said.
Sara stepped forward. “Get out of here, pervert.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Someone threw a tennis ball at him, but he ducked.
“Fuck you,” he said, throwing up his middle finger, and turned to run.
We chased him down the alley, throwing tennis balls and rocks. And me, waving my stick in the air like I was out for blood.
The media and the cops called the toddler “Baby Lollipops” because of the design on his shirt. The police had determined that he was about three years old, that he had been starved and tortured over the course of several weeks, maybe months. His two front teeth had been knocked out and his skull fractured by a blunt object. When they found him under the cherry hedge outside a bayfront home in Miami Beach, he weighed only eighteen pounds.
At first it was just a story on the six o’clock news—police detectives holding press conferences, offering a $1,000 reward, trying to learn the identity of the baby John Doe. But as the days turned to weeks and Baby Lollipops remained unclaimed, it became part of our daily lives. We followed the news on Channel 7, on Univision, on Telemundo. We picked up the early edition of the Miami Herald or El Nuevo Herald, our days sustained by the promise of more details, more story. Maybe it was because the dead baby had been found so close to our neighborhood, or maybe because we had cherry hedges right on our street, where we rode our bikes after school and egged each other on Halloween and break-danced on flattened cardboard boxes spread out on the sidewalk.
Every TV station was broadcasting reports about Baby Lollipops: Who was he? Where did he come from? Why hadn’t anyone claimed him? What kind of monster would torture such a precious little angel? They aired shows about child abuse and child trafficking and child labor and homeless children and the children of immigrants who had washed up on our shores on makeshift rafts. Before the discovery of the body, the news had been dominated by the infamous Miami drug wars, but now it sounded like it was more dangerous to be a child than a drug dealer.
News vans with reporters and camera crews pulled up to our playgrounds and softball fields and interviewed anyone who would speak to them, even though no one could really tell them anything. The story even made America’s Most Wanted.
Boy Scout volunteers took to the streets with flyers and questions: Do you know the parents of this baby? Do you know his name?
That picture, it was everywhere. All over the pages of the Miami Herald, strewn about Miami Beach supermarkets and parking lots, and taped to light posts in front of Fisher Elementary. The little bruised face, the lollipop T-shirt, the small eyes, closed as if he were sleeping, looking so innocent I could see how everyone called him an angel.
That picture. It was everywhere. Always with the same caption: “Toddler (unidentified).”
One night, several weeks after they found the body, I couldn’t sleep. We were lying on the sofa bed, Alaina snoring while I lay awake listening to Miami Beach’s late-night traffic: car horns blaring, taxicab doors slamming, tires screeching. Around midnight I heard a knock on the door.
It was my mother. She’d often show up late at night with gifts for Alaina and me: an embroidered sweater, a leopard-print blouse, a used Barbie with matted hair. She’d say she’d bought them from some fancy boutique on Lincoln Road, but her gifts always smelled like dumpster.
I let her in, shutting the door quietly so I wouldn’t wake Papi, Anthony, Alaina, or Abuela. Mami’s hair was platinum blond, her darker roots showing. She wore a black lace top with no bra and jeans cut so short her ass cheeks hung out. This had become my mother’s way. She was twenty-seven but dressed and acted like a teenager, flaunting her curves, using her body to get what she wanted from men—rides, cigarettes, scutter. She’d take us to the beach and sunbathe topless, and Alaina and I would spend the day trying to drive away the losers who offered her a light or a beer or told her how striking her eyes were, though we knew they just wanted a closer look at her tits. Once, when on a whim my mother insisted on walking me to school, I refused. I wouldn’t tell her why, didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but she kept nagging me and nagging me until I spilled it: “You look like a prostitute.” I regretted saying it the moment the words came out, thought of how she’d always taught us to love our bodies. She looked hurt at first, her eyebrows crinkling like she might burst into tears. Then she slapped me hard on the mouth. I could tell she did it not to discipline me but out of anger, to get back at me. That was also my mother’s way.
Mami sat next to Alaina on the sofa bed and shook her awake. “Get up,” she said, “we’re leaving.”
“What do you mean, ‘We’re leaving’?” I asked.
She picked up my sneakers and thrust them into my hands. “Put these on.”
Alaina sat up, looking confused. “Where we going?”
“Just get your shoes on,” Mami said.
I tried to think of a way to get this idea out of her head. We couldn’t just leave with her in the middle of the night. I asked if we could say goodbye to Papi and Abuela.
“We’ll call them in the morning.”
“But what if they wake up and we’re gone? They’ll be worried.”
“I’m your mother and I can take you wherever the hell I want. I don’t need permission.”
And so Mami took us. Pulled the front door shut and blocked it so we couldn’t get back inside. I thought about running or calling out for my father, but Mami was unpredictable. Once, she’d chased me down that same hallway, pulled off her chancleta, and beat me with it because I refused to get a haircut. When I went to Papi and complained about having to cut my hair, he said I’d better just do it to avoid problems. He worried my mother’s screaming would get us evicted.
Alaina and I wore pajamas, sneakers, no socks. We walked with Mami past the piss-soaked handball courts in Flamingo Park, past Ida M. Fisher Elementary, past the closed swim shops and jewelry stores on Lincoln Road. I held Alaina’s hand and searched the night for a police officer, a stranger, anyone I could walk up to and say, “Help! We’re being kidnapped.” But the cops never appeared, and when we did pass a stranger, he just stared at my mother’s tits.
Mami took us to a mildewy motel on Collins Avenue, across the street from the beach, one of those places people liked to call “boutique hotels” even though everybody knew they were the kind you could get for a few dollars an hour. Alaina and I got into one bed, and I spent most of the night thinking about Papi and Abuela, wondering how worried they’d be when they didn’t find us in the morning, and Anthony, who wouldn’t miss us at all. I thought of Sara, safe in her own bed, in the tiny bedroom she shared with Steven because their mom couldn’t afford a bigger apartment on her teacher’s salary. And I thought of ways Alaina and I could sneak out of the room without waking Mami. But I knew that if she caught us sneaking out, I would catch a beat-down.
When the sun started to seep in through the blinds, I turned on the TV. Every station was reporting on the new developments in the Baby Lollipops case. Police had finally identified him as three-year-old Lázaro Figueroa. According to the news, they’d found Ana María Cardona living somewhere in central Florida with her two other kids and Olivia González, who they called “her lover.” The two women had dumped his body under the bushes outside a house on North Bay Road, and once they saw on the news that he’d been found, they headed north. They were arrested in Orlando and brought back to Miami Beach, where they were charged with aggravated child abuse and first-degree murder.
The medical examiner had determined that it had taken Lázaro up to three days to die from his injuries. For three days he was under that cherry hedge, body swollen, brain damaged. People all over the city were outraged, told reporters that they were praying for Lázaro, how they hoped the two bitches who killed him got fried. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head: It was his mother who’d done it. His own mother.
When Mami got up to use the bathroom, she took her purse in there with her. I knew her morning routine: snort a couple of lines of scutter, smoke a cigarette, then brush her teeth. I’d seen her do this since I was nine. As soon as she closed the door, I shook Alaina awake, took her by the hand, grabbed our sneakers. Together, we ran out of
the motel.
We ran down toward the beach, sneakers in our hands, Alaina’s curls bouncing. When we got to the beach, there were hundreds of jellyfish washed up on the shore, translucent blue bubbles, tentacles coiled in the sand. I didn’t notice that Alaina had stopped running until I heard her cry out. She was holding her wrist with one hand, forehead scrunched up with pain, gasping. She’d reached down and picked up one of the blue bubbles.
Behind her, headed right for us from the direction of the motel, was Mami. She was barefoot, her blond hair tangled, black mascara smeared beneath her eyes. I measured the distance between her and us. If I just grabbed Alaina’s hand and ran, how long would it be before one of us tripped and fell face down in the sand? Would Mami keep running after us? Would she give up?
I remember when Mami and Papi were still together, how they’d scream at each other in their bedroom until Anthony, Alaina, and I burst in and made them stop fighting. Once, right before Papi left her for the last time, Mami grabbed me and Alaina, held us out in front of him. “Take a good look at them,” she told Papi, “because once you leave, you will never see them again.”
We’re supposed to love our mothers. We’re supposed to trust them and need them and miss them when they’re gone. But what if that same person, the one who’s supposed to love you more than anyone else in the world, the one who’s supposed to protect you, is also the one who hurts you the most?
That morning on the beach, when our eyes met, I knew that Mami would catch us. I saw it in her face. She knew it, too. And she would never let us go.
Years before they’d found the baby, before the drugs, when we still lived in Puerto Rico, Mami took us to Castillo San Felipe del Morro in el Viejo San Juan, and we spent the whole day at the fortress by the sea. Anthony had stayed home with Abuela, and Papi was at work in the liquor store. But the three of us spent the day together, Mami and Alaina and me. Mami held my hand and I held Alaina’s hand, and we walked along the stone walkway behind other families and tourists. Mami snapped Polaroid pictures with her instant camera, of Alaina and I feeding the sea gulls, of the stray cats by the seawall. She bought a red kite from a vendor and taught us how to fly it on the lawn. Alaina and I took turns unspooling it, tossing it up until it caught the rush of wind and took flight, getting higher and higher. How small it looked after a while.
