Vida

by Patricia Engel

  Diego had blown up and framed one photo that Elsa or Vlad must have taken of us without our knowing. It was during the drive down, when we pulled over in Key Largo to swim at Pennekamp. We were the only people there and the sea was flat as glass. Diego and I were up to our waists in water and he reached over to hold my hand, just as some dolphins started flipping in the distance. Like a fucking movie scene.

  I remember thinking I might be in love with him. But that evening he met some sorority girl in Mallory Square in Key West and sneaked off to be with her. I’d ended up crying on a bench while Elsa and Vlad were inside a bar. Then Elsa came out to hold my shoulders and told me that none of this was real.

  “You don’t really want him,” she said. “You just think you do because he’s always there.”

  Nacho was next to me, handing me a drink, some expensive beer, which was funny because I remembered that when I first met Diego the only beer he bought was Natural Ice, which gave us the worst headaches ever.

  Nacho came to South Beach for modeling. Apparently he was already pretty successful at it in Buenos Aires, thought he’d make it big here, but they said he was too old already, almost thirty. “I’m not like my cousin,” he kept telling me with distaste, which I thought was a pretty shitty thing to say since his cousin was the one putting him up and giving him dollars to spend. But Nacho thought Diego was from the dirt side of his family and that the fact that he was dealing was shameful, and what’s weirder is that I found myself defending him, saying Diego dealt pot with integrity.

  “I have a business degree,” Nacho told me from across Diego’s living room. “I’m an entrepreneur. I have so many ideas. I just need a little backing to start and I’ll make a killing. I’m brilliant, you know.”

  I thought of that old joke you always hear Colombians telling: How do you kill an Argentino? Make him stand on his ego and jump.

  I laughed to myself and Nacho looked offended, then shot point blank: “So what’s a girl like you doing hanging out with a guy like my cousin?”

  “You don’t know anything about me or what kind of girl I am.”

  “I know you’re a rich girl who likes to play poor.”

  It sucks when a perfect asshole manages to hurt your feelings. It was even harder to confront that Nacho was so good-looking and the art history major in me was a martyr for aesthetics, which is why I ended up letting Nacho kiss me on Diego’s couch.

  To this day I don’t know if Diego found out about me and Nacho getting busy like that while he was out. But just a few days later Diego kicked Nacho out, saying Nacho had stolen some cash from him. “I don’t care if our mothers are sisters,” he said. “Nobody is going to eat my food and then rob me.”

  The next summer, Elsa was pregnant. She met this Israeli guy in a Tel Aviv nightclub and they fell in instant love. She was living with him in Jerusalem and I thought she was bananas but part of me envied her. I was back in Miami for two weeks, on a date with some other son of a family friend, set up through the Colombian Diaspora dating network. He was a few years older than me, some kind of Brickell banker and he seemed potentially cool, not uptight like the other Colombian guys around. I was always getting set up with these superlame hijos de papi. I rejected all of them, earning me a rep as a failed Colombiana, or possibly a lesbian, and my mom pretended this didn’t worry her. After dinner I suggested we go to this club on Miami Avenue, where Diego told me he was going to be. He and I still spoke often, but he had a new girl, his first real novia. He even dared say he loved her a little bit.

  He had told me her name was Petra and he had met her at Churchill’s. He’d said she was a real rocker chick who rode a skateboard better than Tony Hawk. At the club, my date, Juan Carlos, went to get us drinks while I went looking for Diego. I spotted him shirtless and drunk in the back garden. But before I made it to him for a hug, some short girl with spiky orange hair jumped in front of me, saying, “Stay away from him, he gave me herpes.”

  Diego laughed it off, introducing his girl Petra and saying that was her trick for keeping other girls away. Later, Petra warmed up and even gave me a brief history of her tattoos, all five of them, from the evil clown on her calf that she got the first time she ran away from home at thirteen to the blue rose on her forearm, in honor of some boyfriend who caused her three abortions. Sure enough, Petra had her skateboard in hand. She also had enough facial pockmarks to play pinball, and Diego looked positively addicted, littering her shoulders with kisses while I introduced Juan Carlos.

  “Your friends are nice,” Juan Carlos told me when he dropped me off at home later. The guy couldn’t wait to get rid of me.

  I’m jobless again and came down to Miami for another break at the condo. Diego is right here next to me on the balcony. We’re smoking cigarettes and it’s been two years since we met, but to me, he’s the one who looks older. His formerly taut abs are hiding under just a little bit of mush but he’s still without a shirt all day, even when we went for lunch earlier, which would only fly in a place like Miami. Everywhere else, you’d get arrested. But here he’s blanco even if he’s Latin, which makes him slip under the radar. He’s got mad luck and fifty grand stuffed into that same tube sock.

  Diego’s been trying to break up with Petra for months now but the girl just won’t move out, so now he says he’s got to be the one to go. He say’s he’ll leave her with a few months’ paid rent so she doesn’t have to go back to stripping at the crappy place on Biscayne, put a lump of cash in the freezer for her, and hope she won’t spend it on a pair of boobs.

  Since I met him, Diego’s been threatening to bail on Miami, drive from here to Mexico, then down to the Nicoya Peninsula, and make it a five-year journey back to Argentina. His mom passed away last December and his father is really hurting for money since their pesos turned to paja.

  “Are you really leaving?”

  “Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next day. One day you’ll call me and I won’t be here.”

  He’s always said that when he goes, it will be without a good-bye because what are good-byes good for anyway?

  “I’d stay if you married me,” he says with the same smile he gave me that pizza night on Washington. The same night he ducked his head into the car and planted one on me.

  I can feel it coming and this time I’m ready for it.

  Diego disappears the way he said he would, without a word. He calls me from California. He drove that Isuzu all the way there and managed not to get pulled over once. After California it’s Mexico and somehow his crossing the border hurts because that’s his last step out of here, through the Venus flytrap.

  Elsa says she’s happy in Jerusalem with her husband, who lays bricks for a living, and her baby, who will speak Hebrew. She says I should come visit and I keep promising her that I will.

  “Remember that summer,” she says every time I get her on the phone, and then she asks me about Diego, if I’ve heard from him.

  “Not in months,” I tell her, but I’m sure he’s okay. Diego always gets by.

  And just when I’ve started to forget about him, Diego calls from Playa del Carmen. He’s been living in a cottage on the beach, making back plenty of money from a bar he invested part of his savings in. He ran into his cousin in el D.F. Nacho went out there to try to get on one of the Mexican soaps, since they love casting pretty Argentinos.

  I catch him up on Elsa and my life though there’s not much new to report on my end—only that I recently re-painted my bedroom. I’ve just started dating the Swedish bartender who works at the bar across the street, but I keep that to myself. Diego doesn’t say anything and for a second I think the connection has dropped but then I hear him sigh.

  “My father died, Sabina. Three months ago. I didn’t even know he was sick.”

  I’ve had enough people close to me die to know that it doesn’t mean anything when people tell you they’re sorry. But I say it anyway.

  “Now there’s really no reason to go back,” he tells me. And we both know there’s no way
for him to come back here unless he’s going to try it coyote-style.

  “I’m thinking of opening up a little hotel here,” he goes on and his voice lifts a little. Typical Diego, not letting anything get him down too long. “A simple place where people can stay by the beach and get high. The hotel that Miami weed built.”

  “Beautiful.” I laugh and then we both get quiet. I imagine him looking out at the sea, like we did that day in the Keys with the dolphins. I’m looking out my window at Fourteenth Street. I can hear that kid playing drums on his plastic bucket on the sidewalk under my window. And then Diego says my name, says it like it’s the first time.

  “Sabina. You there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “You broke my heart just like you said you would. Like the fucking wind. You broke it wide open.”

  And because my Diego is no fan of farewells, he just hangs up.

  PALOMA

  My father thought the aneurysm was going to kill him, and when it didn’t, a new era began for our family. He quit his two-packs-a-day Parliament smoking habit. Mami made him promise to cut back his hours at the factory, too—no more working through the weekend. And vacations—before the surgery we hardly took any. But after the doctors opened his skull and clipped out the bubble of trouble, Papi promised Mami that as soon as his hair grew back and the vertigo went away, he’d take her to the Bahamas, where they’d gone on their honeymoon a hundred years earlier.

  We had a maid, a Peruvian-Japonesa grouch named Nila who only ever cooked breaded chicken and yellow rice, chased me out of the kitchen with a broom, and said, “Yo no se nada,” every time you asked her anything. Lately she was stealing my stuff. A little porcelain unicorn my tío gave me for my first communion. A purple bathing suit I got for Christmas a few years back. Every time I told my mother this she dismissed me and said I was the one who had a habit of losing things. And why would Nila want a unicorn or a little girl’s swimsuit anyway? Nila had men calling her all the time, which made no sense because she lived with us, even on weekends, and only ever went out on her own to go to the Pentecostal church in Paterson. Nila couldn’t speak English or drive, and since Cristían and I were both still in elementary, there was no other remedy: Tía Paloma had to come and watch over us while our parents were away.

  “This is going to be interesting,” Cris said when Paloma arrived. She came on the bus that left her by the Grand Union and Papi went to pick her up at the station. She had a week’s worth of clothes packed into a small black nylon duffel with brown handles. When she said, “Hola, niños,” Cris and I dutifully went over to kiss her before Mami had a chance to tell us we were savages with no manners.

  Paloma had no kids and I always got the feeling she was nervous around us. I was nine and Cris was an angry twelve. He’d just decided he didn’t want to be a nerd anymore, taken up martial arts, had an arsenal of Chinese stars, butterfly knives, and nunchucks that he threatened me with every time I got too close to his room.

  The next day, when Mami and Papi were getting ready to leave for their trip, we stood at the top of the driveway to see them off. Paloma had a hand on each of our shoulders as our parents climbed into the taxi headed for the airport.

  “What if they die in the Bahamas, who will take care of us?” I asked Cris as my mother blew kisses from the taxi window. Papi was busy looking over the airline tickets. He never looked back after saying good-bye.

  “We’ll be orphans,” Cris said. “Maybe we can go live with the McAllisters.”

  The McAllisters were our neighbors. Former Hell’s Kitchen Irish folks who invited us over whenever they barbecued—even after my uncle went to the slammer—and the only people who never called animal control when our dog, Manchas, got loose. That’s why we liked them.

  “They’ll be fine. But if anything ever happens, I’ll take care of you,” Paloma said, reminding us she was our madrina, next in line to our parents.

  When the taxi disappeared down the street and we went back in the house, Cris told Paloma that he’d rather eat possums and sleep in the gas station bathroom than live with her. Paloma looked sad for a second then hissed, “Chino malcriado,” but Cris was already headed upstairs to his room. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t heard before.

  Paloma was my mother’s half sister, older by twelve years. Her father was a Cuban who died when his plane crashed in the Amazon when Paloma was seven. Her mother made a living buying clothes from factories in New York and bringing them back to sell to society ladies in Colombia, while Paloma went to boarding school in Jamaica and spent her school vacations in Pereira with her aunt Isabel, the family lunatic who used to lock her in the closet for hours while she went out to play cards with her friends.

  Paloma’s mother, also named Paloma, found a replacement husband quick. He was a Gregory Peck look-alike, a decorated army general, grandson of a president, and man of the people, though his biggest selling point was his blue eyes, so beautiful they made women cry, making it difficult for him to be faithful. The new marriage produced three more children—the first, my mother, whom the young Paloma hated upon conception.

  The Paloma I knew lived in a tiny studio apartment on East Forty-fourth street. The kitchen was the size of a broom closet and only one person could stand in it at a time. Same for the bathroom with its cracked claw-foot tub and missing floor tiles. She slept on a full-size bed pushed against the wall, and it also served as a sofa when she had the rare guest. There was an armchair, a wooden trunk that she used as a coffee table, and stacks of books covering every free inch of the apartment—a massive collection Paloma was saving for when she retired. Until then, she mostly did crossword puzzles and word finders, with her bifocals slipping off the tip of her nose. She spent hours at it. And you couldn’t turn on the TV when she was at work on one of her puzzles. Noise really bothered Paloma. Mami said Paloma spent so much time alone that she wasn’t used to it anymore.

  Paloma had enormous breasts, even after two surgical reductions, and wore pointy bras so that her breasts poked out under her loose blouses like they were looking to start a fight. She was heavy but in a way that tells you it came with old age. She still had a thin face, pale, always without makeup, and she kept her brown hair short like a schoolboy, parted on the side with wispy, innocent bangs. She always wore slacks and supportive shoes for walking the city streets, and had the glare of a real lonely New Yorker with a list of complaints about the taxes, the pollution, crime, and the mayor. Paloma had been in New York for thirty years but she spoke English as if she had arrived last week. She recklessly spliced her two languages, but she wrote perfectly in English and was skilled at dictation. Her voice, though, carried more than an accent, constantly cracking as if a thousand years of tears slept under every breath.

  Paloma was married once but her husband, a Long Island gringo named Martin, died the day I was born, from a thundering heart attack while smoking a cigarette on the corner of Second Avenue. The next day, my mother’s father died.

  “You see,” my brother would tell me, “you were a curse on our family.”

  “You’re the curse!” I’d snap before Mami would yell at us to stop fighting like gang members.

  The truth was that if there was a family curse it was my brother’s fault. He was born when our parents were newlyweds working in Puerto Rico, during a year when there was a severe shortage of baby boys born on the island. He was the only barón born in the hospital that week and a nurse tried to steal him—whether it was to keep him for herself or to sell him, we don’t know. Paloma spotted the nurse trying to leave the floor with him, ran after her, and snatched baby Cris out of her grasp just in time. A nearby security guard cuffed the nurse, who retaliated with maldicíon: “A curse on all your family” she screamed, “and never a boy to be born to you or yours again.” Three years and a miscarriage later, I was born.

  Paloma often reminded Cris that if it weren’t for her, he’d be living with some Puerto Rican family in Caguas and certainly not playing video games
in New Jersey. This pissed Cris off big-time and I can’t say that I blame him because nobody wants to be reminded of the favors they owe. But Cris is also the kind of person who will listen to your secrets with best-friend eyes and then throw them in your face when you least expect it. Like when I confessed to him that I had a thing for our neighbor, Tim McAllister, Cris swore he’d take it to the grave but the next time Tim came over to play Frogger, Cris spilled the beans, and Tim pretty much ignored me after that.

  There was a man Paloma considered to be her boyfriend, but my parents didn’t like him, so we didn’t see him often. He was a tall, white-haired Canadian named Gerald, who my dad said never made a move for the tab if you went out to dinner with him. He often slept over at Paloma’s place and they went on vacations together once a year to extremely boring places like Taos and Nova Scotia.

  When Paloma came to watch us the week that my parents were in the Bahamas, I thought I would use the opportunity to try to understand her better. We were sitting at the kitchen table. Nila had stepped up the cooking for Paloma’s visit, probably because she knew that Paloma wouldn’t hesitate to tell my mom if she was slacking. We were eating fish, a rarity in our house. My mother is from the mountains and doesn’t feel comfortable eating anything besides a cow. But Paloma said fish was healthier. She’d gone to the Grand Union earlier that day, driving Mami’s red Cadillac, and bought the fish herself. It was just the two of us having dinner. Cris stayed to eat at the house of his Taiwanese friend, Joe.

  “Why don’t you marry Gerald?” I asked Paloma because back then I thought everybody wanted to be married.

  “We’re happy as friends,” she told me, and then asked me if I’d finished my homework.

  That was a subject I wanted to avoid. I was only in fifth grade and already an established underachiever. I went to my room. But later, the rest of the story came out.