Malentendido (Misunderstood)

by Mara White

  I almost roll my eyes—at her question, at her butchered pronunciation of my name, at her clipboard with all of the mandatory questions listed on it. What all of this really comes down to is whether or not I’m crazy enough to take it out on myself or others. I try not to hurt people; it’s one of the few tenets I cling to in life.

  This is different, I want to say. It’s a penance that I’m cursed with. There are no drugs or therapy that can cure this kind of affliction. I’m the girl who fell too deeply in love and never got over it.

  “No, I just want to get discharged. I don’t want my son to worry. I fell, maybe I lost consciousness. I don’t know? I was scared. Maybe I heard some things that weren’t there.”

  “That’s fine, Miss Heredia. I think it’s safe to discharge you. I would just urge you to follow up with your doctor if any of these symptoms recur. And here’s a pamphlet on grief management provided by the hospital. There is a group that meets every Wednesday in the main cafeteria if you’d like someone to talk to.”

  “Thanks for your time,” I whisper. Now I’ve got to sneak out of the hospital without running into any of my coworkers.

  “I’m sorry I put you through that today. I’m sorry I put us through it,” I say to Adam later that night in bed.

  “God, love, don’t be sorry. We’re doing pretty great, considering. Luke had a blast at Nana’s, he ate pizza for lunch and dinner. I got to get out of work early and skip out on a boring team review meeting. You’ll never have to fetch supplies again because even if transport isn’t answering, not a soul in your lab will let you out for vials or any equipment—ever.”

  I smile in the dark. Adam is a good man.

  “I love you,” I whisper to him and snuggle into his chest.

  “We’ve got some darkness to deal with and sometimes we’re going to slip up. But we’ve got each other, we’ve got a beautiful boy, good jobs, a nice apartment—we’re doing pretty damn great considering the circumstances.”

  “I feel like you never lose it, like you have so much more control than I do.”

  “Are you kidding, B? You’re joking, right? Did I tell you about how last Wednesday I had to go sob in a bathroom stall because they started serving ice cream sandwiches in the cafeteria?”

  “No, tell me.” I hear his voice cracking, like an old record with the static. But it’s not retelling it that breaks him, it’s the old wound of losing his brother Luke splitting open again. Adam and his brother were as close as two siblings could ever be. Twins, best friends, two little peas in a pod from the get-go.

  “You know there was this sign by the dessert cooler that said, ‘Now offering ice cream sandwiches.’ Thought I hadn’t had one of those in ages. Sounded like a nice way to end the chicken breast and mesclun greens salad. So I walked over, bought one for a dollar, started walking toward the lobby and pulling the wax paper off.

  “Then this memory hit me with the taste and the smell, even the feeling of the sticky paper. How Luke and I would pool our allowance and bike to the gas station to buy a box of six of them. It was, I think, five bucks for the box, which was a lot back in the day. We had to save for a few weeks and start anticipating the day.

  “It’s fucking hot in Texas and we had to first bike off the base. We’d tell our mom where we were going and she’d just wave us on, happy to have us out of her hair. We’d get that box and tear into it, go sit on the curb by the dumpster. It was hot, there were flies, but we had our eye on nothing but the prize and devouring all six of them in one sitting.

  “I remember his face, his hair sticking to his forehead with sweat. The dark bits from the cookie around the edges of his lips. Looking at Luke was always like looking in the mirror. I’d wipe my own mouth if I saw he had crumbs on his.”

  I can hear his voice wavering and know instinctively that he’s shedding tears. I pull him to my chest and rub the back of his neck until he can speak again. He smells like booze, but I don’t judge him; some days we need a respite, we’re doing our best.

  “They were so cold, but we’d practically swallow them whole and we thought we were cool for being able to devour the entire box. So I stand there in the lobby with my mouthful of ice cream sandwich and I’ve got tears streaming down my face, totally fucking lost in this visceral memory, while doctors and patients and visitors are all walking by me going about with their lives. And the grief just hit me right in the gut like a bowling ball—no, like a truck. Unexpected, you know? I wasn’t prepared for it. So I go into the john and I cry in the stall and the damn sandwich is melting all over my wrist but I can’t bring myself to trash it—to flush it down the toilet. I’m holding onto Luke by not dropping the sandwich. I’m sobbing over ice cream like I just lost my best friend.”

  “You did lose your best friend, baby.”

  “I miss that sense of safety and calm I had whenever we were together—like all was right with the world and I could proceed without thinking or feeling. I’m jealous of how other people have that. And it kills me that it’s fucking gone. It’s gone forever, not coming back. Just like Luke.”

  “It’s okay to cry over ice cream or whatever makes you miss him,” I say, massaging his back and holding him to me with the other hand. “It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, there are triggers and there are always going to be triggers and we just have to navigate through them to the best of our ability.”

  “Sometimes just looking at little Luke is painful because I realize that my brother will never get to experience the feeling of a little person calling him ‘Dad.’ It kills me. He would have loved it. It breaks my heart. I want that for him and he’s gone.”

  “I know, baby. Believe me, I know,” I tell Adam as I smooth his hair from his temple and try to lull him to sleep. We’re both too emotionally exhausted to speak about this. I think about Lucky as a father and how amazing he would be. It cuts me up too, to imagine him holding a child. I try not to ever think about it.

  That night, when I’m finally able to fall asleep, in the depths of my dream, I’m walking on the beach. The ocean breeze whips around me; the salt spray touches my face. I reach out to Adam to hold his hand and have him follow behind me. His touch is so warm and familiar that I feel profoundly the sense of safety that he was talking about, where all is right with the world and the pain of loss is forgotten.

  I pull him to me and look down to see that I’m wearing my wedding dress. The wind has whipped it to pieces and it’s in ivory-colored satin shreds flapping all around me. I look up to stare into my husband’s kind blue eyes, but what greets me instead are Lucky’s smoky brown ones. Eyelashes, so black they look wet, curl and frame an expression I can feel to the bone. Eyes I’ve known my whole life, eyes that still haunt me as my strongest memory from childhood. I gasp and he grins and my hands find his chest. I can’t inhale or exhale; I can’t move at all. His presence so near that I feel his warmth rising off of his skin.

  I try to speak and the words get lost in the wind. Luciano presses a piece of transparent glass into the palm of my hand. I wrap my fingers around it and blink; when I open my eyes, Lucky is gone. The pressure in my lungs peaks and I realize I need air. I held my breath the whole time I could see his beautiful face, like a single breath could blow it away.

  Belén, don’t give up on me.

  His voice resounds clearly outside of my dream. It’s right next to my ear, so close that I can feel the tickle of his breath on my neck. I scream out his name and sit straight up in bed.

  Please be real.

  Please be here.

  The room is black. I’m slick with a feverish sweat. The window is open and the white curtains are whipping violently in the strong wind. I rush to close it just as thunder booms and the rain lets loose in a downpour. But not before a drop of rain flies through the screen and lands on my feet. My skin prickles and chills kiss the backs of my bare legs.

  Adam is lying beside me, oblivious to the weather or my distress. He takes pills to sleep and could slumber through a hurrica
ne. An unruly storm lurks on the horizon, moving over the Hudson. But there’s an even darker disturbance brewing in my subconscious.

  He rubs his hard length against my thigh and I immediately turn my body toward him, sliding my own thighs over his, letting his hands find my ass. I rock my body and press into him in a slow rhythm. We can erase some of the pain like this; Adam and I both find solace in physical touch, in reminding each other that we aren’t alone in this universe. A universe that can be dark and unforgiving, a place where you can feel profound loneliness even when surrounded by people. Where you can feel excruciatingly lonely missing only one single person. I don’t know how I would have survived my loss without Adam standing by my side.

  “B, I want you to come for me. Just let it all out.”

  Sex is demanding in that it won’t let you be somewhere else. Sure, you can fantasize different scenarios, but you must be present in your body. You must respond to touch, you must move; an orgasm cannot be achieved without some effort from both parties. It sounds harsh to describe sex as therapy, but with my body in Adam’s hands, I feel the burden of sadness ease. The pain rolls to the back of my mind as pleasure overtakes me. It’s not always easy, and I’m not completely cured. A lot has changed over these past few years. But some things won’t change no matter how much I’d like them to. I can separate him from my mind but he stays in my body. I can’t do it without him. I still imagine him every single time we touch.

  It’s Lucky. Inside me. His skin on my skin, his heart beating in time right over mine. His smile, his laugh, when he’d coyly tease and shamelessly flirt. I imagine Lucky’s hands on my hips. Or his hands holding my wrists above my head when his warm lips touched mine for the first time. His tongue pressing through, his love, his lust.

  Adam knows it. He accepts it. He has all along. I never say or do anything to remind him. But he’s known from the first date, our first sexual encounter, that Lucky is intricately woven into the fabric that makes up who I am. I’m unable to extract lust or desire without having him somehow, lingering, permanently connected to it. My sexuality isn’t a free agent, it’s a slave to its master. And he’s gone forever and not coming back to me. I thought it would change with new love, then marriage, and especially with time. But I’m stuck. A one-trick pony with an unbroken love spell that works its endless love magic on me.

  Sex hurts without him because it’s empty, it doesn’t feel right.

  I’m a grown woman, a wife and a mother and I can’t even climax without imagining my cousin.

  Después

  I was born in the city of New York and I can’t imagine growing up anywhere else. From the Boogie down to Spanish Harlem, West Harlem and the Heights. This city runs through my blood like the rain here washes through dirty gutters. Acid rain, toxic enough to eventually wear down concrete. Just water alone burns its path on what you thought was a solid foundation. Growing up in this city left its mark on me forever.

  I’m not saying I’m immune to dreaming about somewhere else—I do fantasize about going back to DR or moving somewhere more chill in the states. But still, this beast made me who I am and I wouldn’t give up those deep roots for anything.

  I’m ‘Spanish,’ I’m ‘black’ to some, I’m Caribbean, I’m ‘from the islands,’ but first and foremost, above it all, I’m a born and raised New Yorker. Some of my homies don’t want to stay a day longer than they have to. Get the fuck out of uptown and move out to Jersey or some shitty suburb. But I stake my claim on my neighborhood and the corner I stood on coming up. I’m a part of this place; these mean streets run deep in my blood.

  Belén is part of the Heights too, whether she likes it or not. Even though she was different from the rest of us, she can’t totally erase who this neighborhood made her. I never have to pretend around her because she knows exactly what I’m made of. Belén is such a huge part of me there ain’t no way to escape it. Send me halfway across the world and leave me to die in a desert, but Belén still talks to me, like she lives in my head. Through the stars in the sky and the grains of sand that ride up under my shirt and into my socks, she makes her way into me. Bey is in everything, in the glass, in the desert sky, in the goddamned way I cook a pot of rice.

  She taught me to cook rice so I wouldn’t “starve to death, when there wasn’t a woman ’round to cook for me.” I think of her hands in the pot under the stream of water from the tap. How she caressed the rice grains, showing me how to look for any bad ones and pull them out of the pan. I just watched Belén instead while she ran the rice water clear.

  “This one is bad, Lucky. See how it’s turning black? Sometimes there are tiny rocks in the beans and rice so you’ve got to watch out for those.”

  “That’s me, that rice,” I told her when she flicked it into the garbage.

  “Lucky, come on. Act serious.”

  “I am serious. I’m the bad seed. Ask any fool on this block.” She shook her head, poured in oil and added a teaspoon of salt.

  It kills me to remember times like those when I could have held her, let her know how much she meant to me. But I was too chicken-shit to act, going all out trying my best to suppress it. I fucked up so much, it’s almost easier to not look back.

  I thought I wanted to cut her completely out of my life. No Belén equals no problems, right? But doing that would be like cutting off my own limbs. You need them to function. You need them to live.

  But even this far away, I can’t get her out of me. She’s in my spilled blood that the sand went and drank up. Her smile is in my smile. The sound of her voice in my head is stronger than my own voice, even when I was half-dead in the hospital. I think about all the times I got so high I couldn’t hear her. I did it on purpose. I got fucked up in order to run her out of my system.

  I’m sorry, Bey. I’m so fucking sorry.

  I’ll take all of the pain that blazes through my body. I’ll take the murky, lost mind spin. I’ll even take the loneliness. I deserve it all and whatever else is coming. Ain’t no burden I can’t bear after all the shit I did to her.

  Why’d I fuck Yari? So that Belén would hate me. She didn’t. She loved me harder instead.

  She loved me through the worst I could possibly give her. Drugged up, angry, lost in stupid-ass street warfare. Belén loved me through the bullshit, through the façade. She saw the real Lucky. Sometimes I think she was the only person who ever got me.

  “Arghhhh!” I scream, launching into the football sled they’ve got me pushing across the gym. My body screams with aches I didn’t even know were possible. Sweat drips into my eyes and once I hit the end, my wrapped fists massage my eye sockets trying to erase the burn. Tears are falling too, but I deny their right to be there. I was the one who fucked up, I can handle whatever I got coming. The pain of not seeing Bey again is so raw that it rakes at my insides, makes my stomach turn and lurch in rebellion.

  But this is the perfect ending to our love story—the one where Belén escapes and doesn’t end up with the bad guy.

  I’m out-patient now and I have been for a year. Shit is still slow and grueling with my recovery and most of the time, I feel halfway fucked in the head. But I go to physical therapy three days a week. I work with a speech pathologist who barely speaks English. Got a job contract with one of those security agencies the US government leases out. Shit ain’t that much different than being in the Marines. Or for that matter, at the basketball courts in the Heights. Same game as the corners or even the schoolyard. Lay low, play dirty when you have to. Don’t take sides ’cause everybody is a potential enemy. I watch my back, I look out for my team. I carry a weapon and I do what I’m supposed to. My brain and my body don’t work like they should, but I could do this shit in my sleep; it’s what I was born for.

  I couldn’t let my ma keep thinking I was gone. I called her one year out when I’d gotten a real prognosis on the damage that was done during the explosion. No reason to get her hopes up if I’m just checking out at a later date instead of when she got notice. My ma
’s worked hard her entire life. Last thing I want to do is stress her, make her feel like she gotta drop everything and wait on my broken ass hand and foot, doing everything she can for me.

  “Lucky, you’re up. Give me twenty on the treadmill.”

  “Coming right up,” I say and give him a salute. My physical therapist is American. Some guy from Cleveland who dedicates his whole practice to helping soldiers recover from trauma. He throws me a small towel and tosses me a bottle of water; I chug it down in one gulp and wipe the sweat off my brow.

  At first Ma refused to let me keep it a secret. Bey would have been the first person she told if I’d let her have her way with it. But I convinced her by assuring her that there wasn’t no reason to get excited yet. The road to recovery is long and slow, my doctor likes to say. The only way to sprint to the finish line is by jumping out of the game. And believe me, some days I want to. But I keep moving for the sake of my ma. I fight for Lenny, too, even though she’ll never know it. Somewhere on the other side of the earth, my girl fights the same battle. I feel comfort in that, even though I know I’m a prick for doing so. I want her to be happy. I don’t really want her to hurt for me. But it comforts me sometimes that maybe she hurts, ’cause that’s how real love feels.

  If I’m being totally honest, my life lost its luster, it feels tinny and empty. I’m nothing without her—special to nobody.

  I push those thoughts as far back as possible as I jog. I won’t get through the day if I can’t let it go. A big part of me died in that explosion in the desert. I gave up the best part of myself when I gave up my cousin.

  Quads burn on the treadmill. I love the burn, love knowing that little by little the pain leads to a goal.

  My head isn’t right and I don’t know if it ever will be. I’m slower now and my confidence has taken a hit, maybe more so than my body. It took me so long just to learn how to control my limbs. Forget about the fine motor skills, those will never be the same. I’ve lost my shit and screamed at, then fired, three physical therapists who were just doing their jobs trying to help me.