by Jon Michaud
Two days later, she was on the same flight as Dolores, Efran, and her father's body. It had cost her a fortune, but the encounter with her stepmother in the funeral home was a challenge she would not turn away from. On the plane, Dolores and Efran sat up front and Clara sat in back. The whole flight down, it seemed that there was someone standing over her waiting to use the toilet. She had not slept much since learning that her father had been killed. She'd fallen victim to a panicked second-guessing of everything in her life. Again and again, she wondered how things would have been different if she had gotten back in touch with her father. She could not help but think that if they had found a way to settle their differences, he might somehow still be alive. At the same time, she raged against those guilty feelings. It was only by escaping from him and Dolores that she had been able to make any kind of life for herself at all. Still, the fact remained that her father was dead and she had done nothing to prevent his murder.
The plane landed in the early afternoon. Clara was met at the airport by her tía Augustina, her mother's youngest sister, who was less than a decade older than she was. Augustina had once been married, though it turned out that the union was bogus—that her “husband” was still married to his first wife. She had a grown child by that man, worked in an office in the capital, and owned her own car. She was about as close to an independent woman as Clara knew among her family. She and Clara waited in Augustina's car near the cargo area. From a distance, they watched as Dolores harangued and badgered the customs officials. “Can't you see I'm in mourning? I want to bury my husband.” It took three hours for the body to be released, and as soon as the casket came through the door and the documents were signed (and, no doubt, a bribe paid, Clara thought), two relatives of Dolores's appeared, one in a station wagon and the other in a Jeep. They loaded the casket into the station wagon and then everyone else got in the Jeep.
It was a five-hour drive to Higüey. Augustina encouraged Clara to sleep while she drove, but she could not sleep. She was afraid they were going to lose sight of the station wagon in the traffic and never find their way to the funeral. The house was in the middle of farmland, off a small road. Cattle grazed in the fields. As Clara and Augustina pulled up, Dolores's people were unloading the casket from the back of the station wagon and taking it into the house. A small crowd had gathered to greet them and neither Augustina nor Clara knew any of those people. Clara had never met her father's relatives—he was the only one of his family who'd emigrated. She did not even know if the people they were looking at were related to her. She waited until everyone had gone inside and then she knocked on the door. Dolores opened it. “This is not your father's house,” she said. “This is my family's house. You can stay out there, but I will not let you inside my house, you shameless daughter.”
Clara went back to the car, where Augustina was flipping through an American magazine Clara had brought her, the radio on. Night was falling. It was six hours each way to La Isabela and the funeral was going to be held the next morning. Augustina offered to drive her home and back if Clara would pay for the gas.
“I want to stay,” said Clara.
“I know he was your father, but what did he ever do for you that you want to put yourself through this?” Augustina asked.
Clara did not want to explain. “You can leave me here,” she said. “Go spend the night at a hotel in Higüey. I'll pay for it.”
“No,” said Augustina. “I'll stay. We'll sleep in the car.”
“I'm going to sleep over there,” said Clara, pointing at the porch of Dolores's house.
“OK, loca. Go make yourself uncomfortable.” Augustina looked back at the pages of her magazine.
There was an old, wobbly chair on the porch on which Clara sat while her aunt slept in the car. Though none of them knew her, the people who came to the house to pay their respects that night all said hello as they went in. On the way out they didn't give her a second glance. As Clara sat there on the rickety chair, she could hear the sounds of eating and talking through the window. Eventually, all the mourners left and the lights in the house were turned off and Clara was still sitting on that chair in a kind of stupefied daze when the front door opened again. She expected it would be Dolores telling her to go away and she was ready to fight with her stepmother, but it wasn't Dolores. It was Efran. He had a cup of water, a piece of salchichón, and a heel of bread. “Here,” he said, and he stood there while she ate the food and drank the water so that he could take the cup back and wash it before his mother realized what he had done. It happened so quickly that Clara didn't even think to give some to Augustina, who had fallen asleep in the car. Before he left, Efran said, “I'm sorry for the way they treated you. I was young. I didn't know it was wrong.” Clara thanked him for that and for calling with the news about their father's death. She told him it was OK, that everything was OK between them as far as she was concerned. He nodded and went back into the house.
Days later, when she thought back on the night on the porch, she couldn't remember sleeping, but she did remember falling off the chair several times during the night, falling onto the cement floor of the porch, a rude awakening from unhappy dreams. Which was worse? The bad dreams or the world into which she emerged? After the third fall, Augustina appeared and tried to convince her to come into the car with her and sleep, but she didn't want to; she felt it was important to stay there on the porch. She was proving something to herself, proving that she wasn't the terrible daughter Dolores claimed. In her delirious state, she followed the same thoughts around and around her head. Clara kept wondering why her father had left the Dominican Republic in the first place, why he'd moved to New York with her mother. He had always said what everyone always said—that he had come for a better life and to make a better life for his children, but she, in that delirious state, didn't see how a life in which you were gunned down managing a shitty hardware store in Washington Heights was better than a life in which you got to stay alive into old age in Santo Domingo. She wasn't sure the first part of it worked out for him. She wasn't sure he had had a better life in New York than he would have if he had stayed. What she was sure of was that she was better off because he had brought her to New York. She had gone to college and found a good job, and no matter what had happened between her and her father, it was hard for Clara to deny the idea that he died in order to give her this life. He died so that I wouldn't grow up in one of these shacks, illiterate and a mother before I turned twenty, she thought as she drifted in and out of sleep on the wobbly chair. He died, but in order for me to have this life, I had to leave him behind, just like I had to leave Tito behind, just like my father had to leave Santo Domingo. Was she talking in her sleep? Could they hear her in the house? Her mind raced on. That was a huge part of it—leaving things behind, shedding the old life and the people in that life. She could not deny the truth of this and it was the first time she'd ever figured that out, and it finally made sense to her that her first reaction when she heard her father had been killed was to blame herself. And maybe Dolores was right. Maybe she didn't deserve to go into the house and mourn for her father beside his casket, like a good daughter. Maybe that was true for every child of immigrants—they always betrayed their parents. She didn't know. All she knew for sure was that she could not have done things differently.
At dawn, Augustina came out of the car and saw that Clara was crying, that she was nearly hysterical. “Tranquila,” she said, and dug in her pocket for a bottle of pills. “Take this,” she said, and popped one onto Clara's palm. “Come back to the car.” The pill made her woozy and she fell asleep, deep into sleep, not the fugue state she had been in most of the night.
When Clara woke up, people had started arriving for the funeral. The casket was brought out and loaded into the station wagon and everyone followed the station wagon on foot. The sun was climbing higher in the sky and the day was getting hotter. It was a mile or more to the graveyard, and Augustina held Clara's hand as they walked behind the rest of t
he funeral party.
The grave diggers were still working on the grave when the funeral party arrived. They stood uncomfortably in the heat in their mourning clothes for another half hour while the diggers finished. Clara and Augustina stood apart from the rest, among the headstones and mausoleums, watching the grave diggers work. It was getting hotter and Clara was dizzy, hungry, dehydrated. She thought she was going to faint. And then, she got her period. Right there in the graveyard, she felt the blood seeping into her panties two weeks ahead of schedule. There was nothing she could do. The funeral was starting. The blood continued its slow descent between her legs, and she couldn't concentrate on what was being said. The ceremony was short, and soon the casket was lowered into the ground and everyone tossed in their handfuls of dirt and started walking back to Dolores's house. Clara looked at her aunt. “I can't walk,” she said, sitting on a gravestone. “I got my period.”
“Stay here,” said Augustina. “I'll get the car.” And then Clara watched her as she walked away down the dirt road back to Dolores's house. The grave diggers had left, too. Clara was alone with her father for the first time since his death. She looked down into the hole, just trying to stay awake. She didn't feel any kind of epiphany. She didn't feel like her father was near at all, but that's the way she'd felt for years, she realized—that he wasn't nearby, even when she lived under his roof. She remembered a day at the beach a long time ago, before her parents had separated, her first memory. Her Tío Modesto tossed her off the end of a jetty thinking she knew how to swim. She went in, eyes open, and came up to the surface, thrashing around, trying to climb out of it, her mouth filling with salt. She thought she was going to drown. Then Clara saw her father jump off the end of the jetty. He was there, beside her in the water, taking hold of her, pulling her back to the beach. She was a doll in his arms, pressed tight against him as he pulled them through the water. It was the only time she could remember feeling that way about him—safe and grateful. After a while, Augustina's car came along the road, and Clara picked up a handful of dirt and tossed it into the grave and said, “Gracias, Papi. Gracias por todo.”
She slept in the car while Augustina drove them over the mountains and back toward La Isabela. When Clara woke they were just outside the capital and she was starving and realized that Augustina was probably starving, too. They stopped at a restaurant—the same restaurant that Clara was now parked in front of, with Guillermo, sleeping, in the back of the car. She and Augustina went in and ordered steak, and it was the most delicious food she had ever eaten. In each bite, she felt she could taste everything in the meat, from the grass the cow had eaten, to the iron in its blood, to the steel of the butcher's knife, to the wood sap in the coals that had cooked it on the grill, to the oregano the chef had used in his marinade. It was almost worth it—going through all she'd gone through in the previous twenty-four hours—just to be able to taste food like that.
NOW SHE GOT out of the car and pulled Guillermo out of his booster seat, carrying him toward the restaurant. They went in and sat down at a table, the boy asleep, his head on her shoulder. The place was empty and unchanged—a bare floor, wooden furniture, a bachata playing from unseen speakers. The proprietor came out from the kitchen. Clara asked if he was open. He said he was. Not waiting for the menu, she ordered two grilled steaks with plátanos and salad. Then she sat and waited for the food to come, thinking about her father, and Thomas, and Tito—the men who had been the cause of so much heartbreak in her life. Guillermo stirred, his head turning on her shoulder, and then fell back to sleep. She knew what she was going to do. When the food came, she was going to place money on the table and walk out of here; she was going to leave those steaks for her father and Tito, sacrifices to the dead. That was her plan, but when the food came, she found that she was still hungry. She woke her son and together they ate, cleaning their plates.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude to the following people:
To my wife, Zoraida, and her family—Grecia Solano, Jansel Botex, Eva Matos, Wilma Botex, Taina Hiraldo, Alexander Matos, and Phil Turneur—for sharing their lives and stories with me.
To my family—Grace, Michael, Cassandra, Joshua, Jason, Marcus, and Thomas Michaud—for years of love and encouragement.
To my friend Atar Hadari.
To my agent, Eric Simonoff.
To my editor, Jane Rosenman, and to Elisabeth Scharlatt, Brunson Hoole, Courtney Denney, and the rest of the team at Algonquin.
To my current and former colleagues at the New Yorker, especially Erin Overbey, Pamela McCarthy, David Remnick, Kilian Schalk, Deborah Treisman, Cressida Leyshon, Carin Besser, Field Maloney, Willing Davidson, Blake Eskin, Amy Davidson, Rollo Romig, Macy Halford, Richard Brody, Ben Greenman, David Grann, David Denby, Shawn Waldron, Yvette Siegert, and Ligaya Mishan.
To my teachers and the early readers of this book: Gene Wolfe, David Craig, Anne Spillard, Gordon Lish, Marian McCraith, Shelley Krause, and Monique Callender.
Thank you one and all.
