by Aya De León
“It’s true I’m a journalist,” he said. “But you can tell me off the record.”
“Not a chance,” she said, smiling.
They were interrupted by an announcement that they needed to get ready for landing. Dulce put the boarding pass in her purse and stowed her tray table.
“You were out cold,” he said. “You been sleep deprived or something?”
She thought about the life she’d been living in Miami. “Something like that,” she said.
“Working a lot?” he asked.
She thought about how much work it was to keep herself up for the ex-boyfriend. Sort of being on call for him all the time. It wasn’t the worst work she’d ever done. Back in New York she’d had a pimp from the time she was fourteen to eighteen. That was the worst. By far. She’d ended up in the hospital and almost dead a couple of times.
“Let’s put it this way,” she said. “I’m looking forward to a nice quiet time with my family in the Dominican Republic.”
“Okay,” he said. “But I hope you’ll call me if you need some excitement.”
She looked at him. With his slender waist and open face. He couldn’t compare to any of the drama she’d already lived through at twenty. But there was something about him she liked.
“Maybe,” she said, for the second time that night. Of the two men she’d just met, she liked Zavier better. But that Rolex and the promise to spoil her beckoned. She knew who she was more likely to call.
Chapter 3
Dulce had also slept on the plane ride from New York to Cuba a year or so earlier.
Marisol Rivera had regarded Dulce in the seat on her left. Across the aisle to Marisol’s right were Tyesha, Kim and Jody. Those three women were Marisol’s closest friends and her partners in crime. Tyesha was the assistant director at the clinic she ran. But throughout the flight, Marisol kept her attention riveted on Dulce, who was like a twenty-year-younger version of herself. That was probably why Marisol worried incessantly about the girl and had never been able to maintain professional boundaries in their relationship. Transporting a client from her health clinic across international borders was inappropriate and possibly unethical. Maybe even illegal, but she had never let the law stop her.
Marisol took Dulce in when the girl was running from her pimp. Marisol had shot a thug who was trying to slit Dulce’s throat. And now, she’d bought Dulce a ticket to Cuba, when both the pimp and his brother were after her. In the line at JFK airport, Dulce had clung to Marisol’s arm, afraid that it was all too good to be real.
The way Marisol saw it, she had been meaning to visit her sister in Cuba, and Dulce had a grandmother in Cuba. And Cuba was a place where Dulce’s pimp and his associates wouldn’t be able to find her. A win for everyone, except Team Pimp.
Marisol had met the pimp Jerry Rios a few times, and he scared the shit out of her. She’d take Dulce to Siberia if it would get her away from a guy like him.
The first time she’d seen them together, he had towered over Dulce with his broad shoulders and thick frame, like a tyrannosaurus rex. Jerry had brought Dulce and a few of his other girls to Marisol’s annual gala. He stood around with an I’m watching you, bitch type stalker presence. He was angry that Marisol had sheltered Dulce after he’d beaten her up. Marisol was certain he had shown up to intimidate her.
He had stuffed himself into a shiny pinstripe suit and put on plenty of blingy jewelry. But when he got to the door of the fundraiser, he found out it was five hundred per person.
“Two thousand dollars?” he asked.
“For four people,” the girl said.
“I can do math,” Jerry said. “You fucking stuck up bitches think I can’t do math?”
Marisol heard his raised voice at the door and began walking toward him, her heart hammering. She had seen Dulce’s bruises and broken ribs and knew what he was capable of.
Marisol strutted up to them on stiletto heels, the emerald green dress clinging to her ample curves, except the bottom of the mermaid skirt, which swirled behind her.
“I’m not gonna pay two dollars to come up in this bitch,” Jerry said to the flustered girl at the registration table. “Let alone two thousand.”
“I’m sorry,” the girl said. “It’s five hundred per person. And I don’t have you on the pre-paid guest list.”
“You don’t think I got that kind of money?” Jerry dug into his pocket. “I got money. Enough to—”
“Jerry!” Marisol called over to him. “Jerry, I’m so glad you could make it!”
Graciousness was the last thing he would expect. He was here to intimidate her, or to pick a fight, but she wouldn’t indulge him. She advanced toward the table and picked up a clipboard. “Rivezzo . . . Riordan . . . Jerry Rios.” Marisol pulled a pencil from her upswept hairstyle.
“How you know my name?” he asked. “Why you all up in my fucking business?”
Marisol continued, as if he hadn’t even spoken. “You should be right here on the VIP list. Obviously, there’s been some mistake.” She turned to the staffer. “Honey, please make up VIP nametags for Jerry Rios and his friends.”
Dulce had on a bright red wig and a pair of shades, but Marisol had her attention trained on Jerry. He was the rattlesnake you needed to keep your eye on.
Jerry’s face held its usual scowl, but he stood, uncertain. Marisol made the tag herself. “Can I pin it on you, papi, or would you like to do the honors?”
He snatched it out of her hand and put it in his pocket.
“Jody!” Marisol called over to the tall blonde hostess from her crew. Jody stood nearly as tall as Jerry in her heels and glowered back at him.
Marisol smiled and took several flutes of champagne off Jody’s tray.
“Please,” Marisol said, giving them to Jerry and his entourage. “Be our guests.”
One of Jerry’s other girls picked up a pamphlet for the clinic and Jerry snatched it out of her hand.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Marisol said. “I need to go introduce our guest tonight, Delia Borbón.”
As Marisol walked away, she heard Dulce say: “Delia Borbón? I love her!”
“Shut up,” Jerry said. “We not staying that long.”
“There she is!” one of the other girls squealed. Beside the ballroom’s small stage, partially hidden behind a partition, Delia Borbón was waiting to go on.
She must have been at least fifty, but her shape was still an hourglass under the gold sequin dress.
She was there to talk about her memoir, From Red Light to Red Carpet, where she talked about her time as a stripper.
“Good evening everyone,” Marisol said into the microphone. “Buenas noches.”
Marisol saw Jerry and his entourage standing against the back wall. He glowered there, arms crossed over his massive chest.
“Thanks for coming out tonight,” she said. “Because, in these tough economic times, you’re showing that New York cares for its own. That the gorgeous, the fabulous, and the prosperous give a damn about the marginal, the vulnerable, and the so-called expendable. Everybody deserves health care. Delia Borbón knows how hard it is out there. That’s why she’s here tonight. Like me, she remembers the tightrope young brown women have to walk. And she remembers all the sisters who don’t ever write the book, attend the gala event, or even live to tell the tale.”
At the back of the room, Marisol saw Dulce reach her finger and thumb under the sunglasses and wipe her eyes.
“And that’s where our clinic comes in,” Marisol went on. “Every cent we collect tonight will go into our endowment, ensuring that our services can save lives for generations to come.”
The audience erupted in applause.
Jerry barked something at the girls, and they all stopped clapping.
But when Jerry went back to glowering silently, Dulce took off the shades, revealing her black eye, and looked straight at Marisol.
Marisol held Dulce’s gaze as she spoke.
“Everyone deserves choices,�
�� she said into the microphone. “Even sex workers.”
Jerry uncrossed his arms and said something to the three girls.
The two other women hustled to the door. But Dulce trailed behind, eyes locked with Marisol. Jerry gave Dulce a yank and she toppled off her heels, sprawling onto the floor. He swung his leg casually, kicking her.
As Dulce hurried to her feet and put her shades back on, Marisol was still speaking specifically to her.
“A woman who’s in a bad situation can always find help at our clinic,” Marisol said. “We’re not afraid to stand up to anyone who doesn’t like it.”
Dulce adjusted her skirt, and tottered after Jerry.
* * *
Marisol had cried when she delivered Dulce into the hands of her grandmother in Cuba. They all had cried. But for Marisol it was bittersweet: it was like the rescue she’d always dreamed of at that age, for a girl who reminded her so much of herself.
Chapter 4
Marisol was still in Cuba visiting her sister Cristina when they got a letter from their cousins in Puerto Rico.
The sisters lay on Cristina’s double bed under the fan in the humid Havana bedroom. They had similar faces, but Marisol was curvy and dark while Cristina was slender and fair. They had the do-they-or-don’t-they likeness of sisters with different fathers. Their mother had died of breast cancer when Marisol was in middle school, Cristina in elementary. After that, Marisol had fallen solidly into the mother’s role. They’d lost touch with these cousins in Puerto Rico after their mother, and then their grandmother, had died in quick succession.
Marisol crowded in closer to Cristina on the bed to see over her shoulder. “You’re back in touch with the cousins?” Marisol asked, as she watched her sister open the battered white envelope.
“I found them on social media,” Cristina said. “Mostly we just exchange holiday cards.”
Cristina smoothed the rumpled paper. “Querida Cristina,” the letter began in Spanish. “I am so sorry to trouble you, but as you must know, things are really bad here in Puerto Rico with the debt crisis. So bad that the cemetery where abuelita and your mother are buried went bankrupt.” According to the letter, they’d originally had an agreement to make additional payments to keep their family members buried there, but now the company wanted to use the land for tourism. Their dear departed would be cremated if they couldn’t find a new burial plot. No one in their family living on the island could afford to pay. Could Cristina help?
“They’re gonna dig Mami up?” Crisitna said. “And abuelita?”
The letter was dated a month earlier. There was a phone number. Cristina called, but it was disconnected.
“How come the letter took so long to get here?” Marisol asked.
Cristina sighed. “After decades of the US blockade against Cuba, they still don’t have a normal communications infrastructure.” Cristina began to pick at the skin around her fingernails, a habit from when she was a kid. “If we can’t get through on the phone,” she asked, “what should we do?”
“I think I should go see what’s up,” Marisol said. The return address was her grandmother’s old house in Las Palmas, a small town in Southern Puerto Rico.
“I hope you’re not too late,” Cristina said.
“I can’t fucking believe it,” Marisol said. “After all the women in our family have been through, at least they should be able to rest when they’re dead.”
* * *
Not only was there no communication infrastructure between Puerto Rico and Cuba, there was also no travel infrastructure. Marisol had a stopover in Miami. Thus, it took nearly five hours to travel the mere eight hundred miles between the two Caribbean capitals.
She had also been delayed on the way out of Florida. The TSA agent on the tall stool had stopped her.
“The age on your passport isn’t right,” he said. “You should be in your early forties.”
“I am,” she said.
“But you don’t look a day older than thirty,” he said.
She smiled at him. “Are you flirting with me, sir?”
She held the US passport next to her face: Marisol Rivera, 5’6” tall, 150 lbs, eyes brown, hair black. Her hair was dark brown actually—long and wavy. Her eyes slanted above the same high cheekbones and full lips in her passport photo.
He frowned, but he waved her through.
If you counted the wait time at the airport, she could have driven there in the same amount of time, if it weren’t for all the water.
* * *
When Marisol arrived in Puerto Rico, she wasn’t the only one who was pissed about the state of things. She drove through San Juan in a rental car, a green coupe. Marisol had spent most of her adult life in New York, so she didn’t drive much. It was her first time driving in Puerto Rico, and she took several wrong turns, then got caught up in a demonstration among public workers. According to their signs, they were demanding a living wage and a reliable pension. They had traffic snarled up throughout the capital.
A few hours later, Marisol had made it out of the city, and was listening to salsa on a highway headed into the mountains. God, could this be the same road she had traveled as a kid? So many corporate chains now: American fast food, drugstores, brand advertisements. From the moment they had landed in San Juan, she couldn’t believe how much Puerto Rico had changed. Had it been twenty years since she was last there? It looked somehow like a deflated balloon—the corporate chains had blown it up, stretched it til the skin was taut and shiny, but the debt crisis had sucked out all the air. Now it sagged and flapped in the breeze.
An old salsa song came on the radio, and Marisol suddenly found herself filled with nostalgia. But for what? For a Puerto Rico she barely knew anymore? She had been conceived in San Juan. Then her mother had fled to New York to escape her abusive father. She had lived in the Bronx until her mother moved back to Puerto Rico to get away from Cristina’s father. Puerto Rico was home for a few years until her mother and grandmother died in quick succession. Then they’d moved back to the states to live with the uncle. The bad men in their life had come in threes, like in a fairy tale. They got away from the first two, but instead of slaying the dragon on the third try, they got burned.
For most of Marisol’s life, it had been primarily those two matrilineal graves that had connected her to the island. Suddenly she recognized the twinge of nostalgia as grief. She had cried at her mother’s burial, sobbed in her grandmother’s arms. But when her grandmother died of a stroke six months later, she was dry-eyed at the funeral. I’ve gotta be strong for my sister—for Cristina.
Who was this uncle who would take them now? She didn’t like him and his shrinking wife who seemed scared and wore too much makeup. The wife left soon after the two girls moved to New York.
Suddenly, Marisol heard a thump as several potatoes fell off a truck in front of her and bounced along the highway toward her car. She slowed down and focused on the familiar road. This was the same highway they took every time they went to visit her grandmother in Las Palmas.
Marisol hadn’t been there since the funeral. Watching her mother, and then her grandmother, lowered into the Rivera family plot.
And now that plot had gone bankrupt? She had heard things were bad on the island, but this was surreal.
Back in New York, one of her clients at the clinic had started talking about the debt crisis long before it made the news in the US.
Maybe a year before, Clara had been complaining loudly in the clinic lobby. Clara was a transgender woman, tall, butterscotch-colored, and slender hipped, with bright red lips and a gold weave down to her ass.
“Marisol, you’re Puerto Rican, right?” Clara had said, but didn’t wait for a response. “You got people still there? My parents don’t speak to me, but I’m worried about their transphobic asses anyway. You know these motherfucking yanquis been bleeding our island dry and now the bill is coming due. Some shady-ass shit. And it’s these hedge fund motherfuckers. I have some of them as clients. Chea
p and no fucking manners. Just like the goddamn US colonizers. They got trade laws that keep Puerto Rican companies from being able to make money on the imports to our own island. I’m telling you the worst part is that they got some random fucking amendment that we can’t go bankrupt, even though the bottom is about to fall out. I don’t know how we gonna get out of this shit, girl.”
Clara’s prophesy had come to pass. Nobody knew how Puerto Rico could get out from under. There were lots of possible strategies, but they would all require that the US financial institutions loosen their stranglehold. It seemed unlikely that the same banks that didn’t mind choking the pension funds of white citizens on the continental US would balk at doing the same to brown people on a Caribbean island. Instead of any changes to stranglehold policies, the US president had appointed a fiscal control board that would enforce austerity measures that put debt repayment before human services. Trying to get blood from sand.
Now, as Marisol drove down the highway in Puerto Rico, she tried to get her bearings. The further she got from the capital, from San Juan, the more things looked the same as they had two decades ago. Rural Puerto Rico had changed much less. Narrow, winding roads with thick green foliage and bamboo blocking out the light. Small cafeterias and bodegas on the sides of the road, with little kids running past holding handfuls of bright candy like trophies. Roadside houses in loud colors, with people chatting on concrete porches in chairs. Dogs lolled in shady spots, and chickens wandered by, unperturbed by the cars.
She remembered the way to her grandmother’s old house by heart. The only new landmark was a shiny Walgreens, now closed.
Marisol preferred to take the coastal road to Las Palmas. It was a little longer, but she relished driving down a highway that gave her glimpses of the ocean. When she saw the small cluster of boats in the Las Palmas harbor, she knew to turn off onto the winding road that snaked up the hill to the town.
The road passed through the town center, with its pair of restaurants, local bar, small supermarket, and drugstore. There was a single store for clothing and shoes: men, women, and children’s.
