Ordinary Girls

by Jaquira Díaz

  Lolita’s interest in politics and activism deepened after the Ponce massacre, after she moved to New York in order to find work. There, she saw the way Boricua workers were marginalized and mistreated. She got sick of the racism, the insults, day in, day out. She joined the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. Eventually, she would rise through the ranks to become a leader of the movement, following in the footsteps of Blanca Canales, who’d helped found the women’s branch of the Nationalist Party, the Daughters of Freedom, and led the Jayuya Uprising. After the Nationalist Revolts of 1950, after Blanca Canales was already serving life in a federal prison, after the Utuado Massacre, after the Gag Law had been suppressing the rights of Puerto Ricans for years, Lolita Lebrón started corresponding with Pedro Albizu Campos. He wrote her from his prison cell in La Princesa. Together, seventeen years after La Masacre de Ponce, they organized the attack on Capitol Hill.

  In the photograph, Lolita is stoic, determined. A small woman restrained by armed police officers, she wears high heels, a long dress, jewelry, a hat. It was taken before she was sentenced, when she was thirty-five. Fifty years after the attack, in 2004, the Washington Post runs a story about Lolita Lebrón and uses that photo. They call it “When Terror Wore Lipstick.”

  I’m conflicted about Lolita. I tell myself I can’t make sense of the shooting, of the violence. But I still carry the picture. I want to believe that she’s not the sum of the worst things she did during her lifetime. I want to be the kind of person who believes in redemption, the kind of person who, in a few years, will write letters to Ana María Cardona while she’s on death row for her son’s murder and torture.

  But also, I never want to forget how the world sees us. How Lolita Lebrón, a controversial figure, a hero to some, a terrorist to others, a woman who led a revolt on Capitol Hill, was written about in the Washington Post, a publication that in 2004 has thirty-one Pulitzer Prizes. How even all these years later, the headline doesn’t mention her life, or her death, or her pistol, or the shooting, or the planning, or the wounded victims, or Puerto Rico, or the flag, or colonialism, or freedom, or liberation, or racism, or torture, or motherhood, or the loss of her children, or the years she spent in prison, or the voices she heard or the visions she saw while incarcerated, or what she yelled when she pulled out her gun in the visitor’s gallery of the US Capitol, ¡Viva Puerto Rico Libre!, or what she said when she was arrested, or what she said in any of her dozens of interviews, or what she said when she was protesting the occupation of Puerto Rican land and the oppression of Puerto Rican people, or anything related to who she was or what she did. Instead, the headline mentions her fucking red lipstick.

  Orlando, 2006

  On the morning of my college graduation, a Saturday in July, my family arrives from Miami. My tío David flies in from Puerto Rico, then drives up with Anthony, Papi, and Meira, my stepmom. Alaina brings Abuela.

  Cheito and I pull in to the parking lot outside the university arena, find them all waiting there, Alaina pushing Abuela’s wheelchair, Papi smiling and holding a camera, Anthony and Tío having a deep conversation about where we’ll be having lunch later.

  I bend to hug Abuela first, and she kisses me soft on the cheek. “Mírala,” she says to everyone. “Did you ever think this day would come?”

  My brother chuckles. “Nope.”

  Cheito hugs Abuela. “I always knew.”

  Papi wraps his arms around me, then pulls away, looking at me. “I’m proud of you,” he says in English, his eyes watery. Meira, my stepmom, takes a picture of us. They’ve only been together five years, but she feels like family.

  Alaina hugs me, smiling, her eyes watery, too. Alaina, who is also in college, will graduate next year, then she’ll be off to see the world. “I’m so proud of you,” she says.

  Once we’re inside the arena, as I’m lining up with all the other graduates, I will look for my family in the crowd. I will find them: Abuela sitting next to Alaina in a spot reserved for wheelchairs, and a few rows up, Papi, Meira, Anthony, Tío, and Cheito. As I sit there, in my cap and gown, all the other graduates in their caps and gowns, the arena loud with talking and laughter, flashes going off, people still finding their seats, I can’t stop smiling. I am overwhelmed with happiness, with love, with hope, with the certainty that I will be a writer someday. But also, more than anything else, I wish my mother was here.

  Miami, 2008

  It’s Halloween and my stepmom, Meira, and her daughter are throwing a party. It’s my stepsister’s house, three bedrooms, a pool, everybody out on the pool deck, evil fairies and werewolves, so many vampires, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, at least three different witches. I count four women in black sexy cat costumes from the party supply store, a sexy Cat in the Hat, a sexy leopard, a sexy pink kitty cat who is clearly wearing something from Frederick’s of Hollywood.

  China and Flaca come with their kids—Flaca with her four-year-old son, another one on the way, and China with her two girls, six and eight. Out of all my friends, I’m the only one who doesn’t have kids.

  When Flaca sees me, she takes a step back, laughing and laughing. “Girl, you look crazy as hell.” She grabs my hand, checks out my blue Ring Pop, then plucks one of the lollipops sticking out of the back pocket of my baggy jeans.

  When China sees me, she covers her mouth, her eyes wide, then circles me, checking over every single detail of my costume. “Where did you get those bamboo doorknockers?” she asks.

  I hand her a lollipop. “Aventura Mall.”

  China and her two girls are also wearing cat costumes, furry leopard-print ears, tails, furry cuffs around their wrists, black noses, whiskers painted on with black eyeliner. Flaca is a black cat, a kitten in her belly. Her son is Batman, running around the pool deck with the other kids, flapping his Batman cape.

  People I don’t even know come around, check me out, trying to figure out my costume, everybody asking, What are you supposed to be?

  My stepbrother, Quentin, spots us from across the way, shouts my name, “Jaquiiiiii!” It’s how he always greets me. He comes over, gives me a bear hug, and I introduce him to Flaca and China. He is Michael Jackson. He looks me up and down. “You supposed to be a rapper?”

  Flaca and China laugh. I laugh, too. He doesn’t get it. He didn’t know me as a teenager. But Flaca and China get it. They knew the moment they saw me.

  I’m wearing baggy jeans, a baggy white T-shirt, high-top Jordans, a gold chain around my neck, my hair in cornrows. I put in my seventeen piercings, fake gold doorknockers, tiny gold hoops. I’m wearing penciled-on dark brown lip liner, brown lipstick, thick black winged eyeliner, lord knows how many coats of mascara. I painted on a fake black eye, put fake blood under my nose, on my knuckles. I stuffed my pockets with Charms Blow Pops and Ring Pops.

  “I’m me,” I say. “Teenage me.”

  And then China and Flaca and I start telling stories, remembering when we were just girls. The time me and Kilo egged some guys that came back later with a gun. That time we all painted our faces white like in Dead Presidents, put on camo pants and went to Society Hill, danced until the place closed down, how we didn’t know that months later, it would all go up in flames. The year I bought my first car, a Mazda Millenia I got from a used car dealer, how we packed the car with people, me and Flaca and Cisco and Omar and China and Flaca’s little sister, how we all rode out to Orlando, and smoked two blunts before stumbling into Terror on Church Street, all of us so faded we screamed and laughed so hard we cried.

  Flaca and China go play with the kids, and I spend the rest of the party flirting with Quentin, and later that night, alone in my father’s bathroom, I’ll remember when Halloween was all about monsters, how one Halloween night eighteen years ago Ana María Cardona and Olivia González dumped Lázaro’s body outside the house on North Bay Road, how every Halloween since I’ve thought of him, all those lollipops in my pockets, how he’d be a man now. And when I’m standing in front of my father’s medicine cabinet, when I’m washing all
the makeup off, when I’m drying my face with a towel my stepmom has left for me on the sink, when I’m looking at myself in the mirror, my lips and my tongue blue from all that candy, how impossible it seems that we were ever those people, that I was ever that girl. How we will never be those people, those girls, again.

  Miami Beach, 2014

  In the summer, after being away for almost a decade—seven cities in under ten years—I move back home with Cheito. I wanted to be closer to Mami, close enough to walk to her place, to take her to the beach on Saturday mornings, to be a part of her life again, to have her in mine.

  I find an apartment in North Beach, two blocks from the ocean, a ten-minute walk to Normandy Isle. In the morning, I ride the bus to Downtown Miami for work. In the afternoon, I ride the bus back, get off by the North Beach Bandshell, which used to be the roller skating rink back in the day, before the modeling agencies and fancy restaurants, back when movie producers and music video crews steered clear of our neighborhood, unless they were looking to buy dope.

  I’ve been back in Miami Beach just a few weeks when I get a phone call from Titi Xiomara.

  “Your mother is dying,” she says, her voice breaking. “We have to do something.”

  After all these years of living with schizophrenia, addiction, and drug-induced Parkinsonism, my mother has also been diagnosed with emphysema, hoarding disorder, and several other illnesses. Most days, she can barely breathe. In a couple of years, they will remove a mass from her breast, and months after that, another one from her lung.

  I returned to Miami Beach for my mother, but on the day Titi Xiomara calls, I’ve yet to see her.

  I keep going to her apartment building, knocking and knocking until the neighbors open their doors to stare me down, ask who I’m looking for.

  “I didn’t know she had a daughter,” they sometimes say, but I can never tell if what they actually mean is “She never talks about you” or “How can you let your mother live like this?”

  It’s true. My mother is dying. Painfully. Of addiction and mental illness, of loneliness, despair. My mother has been dying for over twenty-five years.

  Miami Beach, 2015

  Ana María Cardona had spent twenty-two years on death row when I received her first letter. When she arrived at Florida’s Lowell Correctional Institution in 1992, she was thirty, a young mother.

  In her letters, she tells me she was sexually assaulted when she was a kid, that she attempted suicide several times as a teen, that by sixteen she was using drugs, drinking, having sex on the streets. She came to the US in 1980 during the Mariel boatlift, she says, alone and pregnant, and got into sex work out of desperation. She lived on the streets for some time, had two children and then met Fidel Figueroa, Lázaro’s father, a Miami drug trafficker. Soon, she started using cocaine. Before she knew it, she was addicted.

  Ten years after her first conviction, after several appeals and investigations, there was a discovery: in 2002, an appeals court found that the state of Florida withheld evidence from the defense it should’ve disclosed. During her interviews with police, Olivia González confessed that she’d lied to investigators, that she hit Lázaro on the head with a baseball bat. She reluctantly admitted that the blow was so hard there was a possibility it might’ve caused Lázaro’s death. And there was crucial evidence to support that González had killed him: the medical examiner himself had originally reported blunt force trauma had been the cause of death.

  One afternoon in May, I get another letter:

  My whole family died in Cuba, she writes. All I have left is God and my children. It’s hard. You find yourself on the streets with little children, like I did, and not a single person extends a hand.

  She denies torturing Lázaro, insists that she was on drugs while he was being abused. She believes he’d be alive if it wasn’t for Olivia González, admits that she let Olivia beat him while she was strung out on crack cocaine, that she failed to protect him. She did what she could do to put a roof over their heads, including, she claims, enduring a relationship with Olivia.

  I’ve read most of this before, in her letters, in trial transcripts. I’ve read account after account, minor details changing here and there. Sometimes, there are huge discrepancies: Some reports say Cardona has three children. Some say four. She tells me she has three surviving children. I don’t ask about them, their names, their ages. I don’t want to know—all those years ago, they were also victims. But she won’t stop talking about them. They are her life, she says. They’re all adults now, and she hopes to have a relationship with them if she gets out of prison.

  As I keep reading, she finally says one thing I haven’t heard before: when her second trial started, she was offered a plea deal. If she’d pled guilty to a lesser charge, she would’ve been sentenced to twenty years. With time served, she would be out by now.

  But I refused, she writes. I won’t sign a paper that says something I didn’t do. I am prepared to die . . . She wants her kids to know that she did not kill Lázaro, she says. She wants them to know the truth.

  Anthony moves Mami into an apartment just a few blocks from my building, a short walk to the beach. For a while, I stop by Mami’s place almost every day. I clean her bathroom, bring her dinner from her favorite Chinese restaurant on Collins Avenue, drop a few dollar bills on her kitchen counter. Sometimes I cook for her at home, walk over and drop off Tupperware containers of rice and beans, pork chops, beef stew, fried chicken and tostones. Sometimes I drop off sheets for her bed, towels, a dress, a pair of sneakers, toothpaste, soap.

  On Mother’s Day, I buy Mami a card, an arrangement of carnations from Walgreens, nothing fancy. I make a home-cooked meal and sit with her out on the patio. We drink café con leche while she chain-smokes, tosses pieces of bread at pigeons, works in her small garden. When the sun goes down, she opens a can of tuna and leaves it outside for a stray cat she calls Mishoo, a skinny tuxedo with only one ear.

  I live so close to the ocean, so close to my mother, a short walk from the park where so many of my memories live.

  I haven’t been sleeping well. Sometimes I slip on my chancletas and go for walks along the shore. Sometimes I run on the boardwalk. Sometimes I ride my bike all the way to Haulover and back. I think maybe this will help me sleep, but then I lie in bed, awake.

  And everywhere I go, as I’m riding my bike on the boardwalk, laying out on the beach, pushing my shopping cart inside the neighborhood bodega, waiting on the bus on my way to work, I think I see her, my grandmother, Mercy. She’s been dead at least four years, but it’s her. I’m sure of it. The same green eyes as my mother, the same swing in her hips. My grandmother, like a ghost, haunting.

  And I wonder if Mami sees her, too.

  Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night, pulled from a dream by Ana’s words, her letters. I did not kill my baby, she says.

  I get dressed, grab my car keys, take a drive to the house on North Bay Road. I know this is crazy as I’m driving south on Alton Road at 2:00 a.m., as I slow down, turn onto 54th Street, as I come to a complete stop in front of the circular driveway. But there’s something about that house.

  I did not kill my baby, she says in her letters, although I never asked if she did. At least not in those words. I don’t want to be the kind of person who asks that kind of question, the kind of person who combs through newspaper articles and watches footage of news coverage that aired more than twenty years ago, the kind of person who spends days poring over trial transcripts and leaving messages for defense attorneys and prosecutors.

  It’s after 2:00 a.m. and I’m sitting in my car, in front of the house on North Bay Road. In less than a year, her conviction will be overturned. In less than a year, she’ll be released from death row.

  Tomorrow, I will send another letter.

  I’ve been back in Miami Beach for about a year, after a summer in Puerto Rico, where I’d been to several demonstrations—underpaid teachers protesting the privatization of public schools, students p
rotesting the island’s colonial status under the United States government, activists calling for the release of Oscar López Rivera, the longest-incarcerated Puerto Rican political prisoner, who is serving a seventy-year sentence for “seditious conspiracy.”

  Since I’ve been back, both my parents have been chronically ill, one after the other. Both have been in and out of hospitals for months. Even though I’ve been writing, I find myself unable to write anything meaningful.

  It comes on without warning, a crippling, major depression. The suicidal kind. It keeps getting worse, and suddenly I am self-destructing. I walk out of my job one day and never go back. I have another reckless affair. I destroy my marriage, again, and destroy Cheito, a man who adores me.

  One night, after not sleeping for days, I find myself sitting on the kitchen floor with a knife, not remembering how I got there, but trying to build up enough courage to slit my wrists. For days, I’ve been thinking of Mercy. For days, the five bottles of pills, the suicide note. For days, I think it makes perfect sense, that it is the beginning of the end, that it has always been ending.

  Cheito finds me in the kitchen that night, takes the knife from me, takes me to bed. He lies down with me, holds me until I fall asleep. He doesn’t know it yet, and neither do I, but soon, I will pack my clothes, my books, all my things, and leave him for the last time.

  The next day, China and Boogie call from Boogie’s car. They’re outside my building.

  “Get dressed,” Boogie says. “We’re going to dinner.”

  I throw on a tank top, jeans, chancletas. We sit in Flanigan’s, talking shit for hours, eating ribs and fries and key lime pie.

  “How’s the writing going?” Boogie asks.