Side Chick Nation

by Aya De León

  “I borrowed my roommate’s,” he said.

  She laughed. “Then let’s go to your house,” she said. “So we can, you know,” she made air quotes. “Return the car.”

  Now Zavier laughed. “Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”

  “Are we going to your house or not?” she asked, grinning.

  “My roommates are all home tonight,” he said.

  “Then get them some fucking earplugs,” Dulce said with a laugh.

  Zavier started the car, and they sped off.

  * * *

  The next morning, Dulce was at the María de la Vega health clinic when it opened. She caught the stairwell door when a few staff entered, and crept up the stairs. She slipped the lock to go up to Marisol’s apartment at the top.

  Dulce knew that Nidia, Zara, and the baby had their own place now. It was just after nine AM, and she knocked boldly on the door.

  Marisol answered, wearing a faded robe. Her face went from curious to pissed off.

  “Hold up,” she said. “How did you even get in here?”

  “I need to talk to you,” Dulce said.

  “Maybe Eva was right about boundaries,” Marisol said. “You need to call first.”

  “I can’t talk about this on the phone,” Dulce said.

  Marisol’s expression changed from pissed to wary.

  “Can I come in?” Dulce asked.

  Marisol stepped back to let her enter.

  “Phillip Gerard got shot by the cops last night,” Dulce said.

  “Who?” Marisol asked.

  “My ex-sugar daddy,” Dulce said. “The guy you kept calling me to ask about. The guy whose number you wanted, but you didn’t want me to text it to you. The guy your crew robbed.”

  “What is this?” Marisol asked. “A shakedown?”

  Dulce shook her head. “He saw the photo of me and Kim and Jody in the Times, and thought I was in on it. He kidnapped me last night and . . . it was a bunch of crazy drama. Anyways, the cops came and shot him by mistake.”

  “So why did you come here first thing in the morning to tell me this?” Marisol asked.

  “It’s gonna be in the papers. I just want you to know that I didn’t snitch on you all.”

  “Seriously Dulce,” Marisol said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I didn’t tell him you were asking about him,” Dulce said. “So whatever you did. If you robbed that motherfucker, he deserved it.”

  “I never even met the man,” Marisol said.

  “I know why you don’t trust me,” Dulce said. “It used to be I didn’t know how to say no to men. But it’s not like that anymore. I’m not like that. Mostly thanks to you and Dr. Feldman.”

  Marisol nodded. “Eva’s good with the boundaries.”

  “I just didn’t want you to worry,” Dulce said. “If you read both our names in the papers later today or something. I didn’t say anything to him. And he didn’t tell anybody about the robbery. Said he wanted to get the money back before his people found out it was gone.”

  Marisol nodded. “You okay?” she asked. “I mean, since you got kidnapped and you witnessed a shooting?”

  “I was lucky,” Dulce said. “That bullet wasn’t meant for Gerard.”

  Marisol turned to the kitchenette. “You want some coffee?”

  “Sure,” Dulce said. She sat down on one of the tall stools next to the kitchenette island.

  Marisol put the water on to boil. “When I got back from Cuba, Jerry was waiting for me,” she said. “Pointing a gun at Serena and me.”

  “Oh shit,” Dulce said. “I’m so sorry, Marisol.” She shook her head. “He always blamed you. For giving me ‘ideas.’ Like I couldn’t possibly have decided on my own that I didn’t want to live with a man who beat my ass, made me fuck men for money, and kept all the cash. You didn’t give me the idea to leave him, you just gave me the idea that maybe I could leave without him killing me. Which is why I would never have told him it was you that took me to Cuba. Even though I was really drunk that night I called him, I never—”

  “I know you didn’t snitch,” Marisol reassured her. “He said you told him you were going to Cuba, and he put it together that I was the one who took you.”

  “I just had to fucking tell him,” Dulce said. “He told me over and over that I could never get away from him. I had to throw it in his face that he was wrong.” Dulce had even thought about repeating the Delia Borbón line adiós motherfucker, but couldn’t quite muster the courage.

  Marisol shrugged. “It turned out okay,” she said. “I finally got to visit my sister in Cuba. I stayed like two months. I never woulda taken the time to get away from New York if it wasn’t for you.”

  Dulce froze, trying to do the math of the timing in her head. “Two months?” she asked. “You didn’t come back for two months?” She recalled reading about Jerry’s death in the paper about two months after she had arrived in Cuba. “Then it was you!”

  “Me what?” Marisol asked. She poured two cups of Bustelo coffee.

  “You killed Jerry,” Dulce said. “The paper said he got into an armed altercation with someone but they didn’t say who.”

  “Once again,” Marisol said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Dulce laughed. “Coño,” she said. “That first night, you told me I’d get away from him eventually, one way or another. I guess you made a way.”

  “You made a way,” Marisol said. “You kept trying until you succeeded. Now drink your coffee before it gets cold. I’ve got a police shooting to read about in the paper.”

  * * *

  Dulce met Zavier for lunch that day. It was an upscale version of comida criolla with organic vegetables and hormone-free meats.

  On the walls were pictures of Caribbean farmers.

  “Hey baby,” he said. “I got you some carne guisada.” He gestured to a plate across from him. The meat looked familiar, but she was not used to seeing it paired with brown rice and a salad of baby spinach.

  “Thanks, mi amor,” she said. “What was so urgent?” She dug into the plate. She hadn’t had anything to eat since the coffee at Marisol’s.

  “The drama has begun,” he said. “A bunch of Gerard’s friends have been putting pressure on the cops to do an investigation. Some of the top brass have been calling for the resignation of the cop who shot him. Maybe even criminal charges.”

  “Excuse me?” Dulce said, her fork hovering in midair. “When that Dominican kid got shot in the Bronx, the cop didn’t even get taken off the street.”

  “Exactly,” Zavier said. “So Black Twitter is blowing up because this guy is getting totally different treatment than black and brown people who get shot by the cops.”

  “You should have seen him,” Dulce fumed. “He was like ‘I got the mayor on speed dial.’ If it wasn’t for that woman who saw us, I know I would be dead now, or at least in jail.”

  “What woman?” Zavier asked.

  “The witness,” Dulce said. She explained the situation to Zavier.

  “The cops are gonna make it hard to get her info,” Zavier said. “I’ll see if I can get my hands on the police report. Maybe get a name.”

  “I’ve got her number,” Dulce said.

  “You’re kidding,” Zavier said.

  “I got her card,” Dulce said, shrugging.

  “That’s my girl,” Zavier said. “Way to investigate.”

  “I don’t deserve any credit,” Dulce said. “When I went to get my metrocard, I found this business card in my pocket. It took me a moment to put it together. She musta came to talk to me while I was just sitting there in shock. The memory is hazy. I think she was like ‘I don’t trust these cops. If they try to blame anything on you, then call me.’”

  Dulce handed the card to Zavier. It identified her as a nurse at a local hospital.

  “There’s one other thing,” Zavier said. “Before I call her, can I interview you about Gerard? I won’t use your name.
Just for background.”

  Dulce stopped mid-bite. “Are you sure?” she asked. “I mean . . .” As she spoke, the urge to lie, to sugarcoat the truth was strong. But she remembered what Doña Inez had said. “I mean . . . he was my sugar daddy.”

  “You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to,” Zavier said.

  “I just mean—are you—are you sure you want to know?” she asked.

  “Whatever you had with him is in the past,” he said. “And it doesn’t hurt that he’s dead. I’m just being real with that one.”

  Dulce gave a dry chuckle and shook her head. “Okay, here goes.” And she told him.

  Zavier took notes at some times, and at others, he just made eye contact and nodded occasionally. He didn’t look at her with that piercing look that seared her. But he listened intently. Dulce told it all. From meeting him at the airport to wearing stains of his blood on a highway.

  Zavier blew out his breath when she was done. “Wow baby, I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

  “I think of myself as lucky,” she said.

  “Really, I’m just so grateful that you’re okay,” he said. “I don’t know what I would do if anything worse had happened to you.”

  And that was when he gave her that searing look.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said.

  “Why not?” he asked. “I can’t gaze adoringly at my girl?”

  “Not if you’re trying to turn in this story and don’t want your girl to drag you to your apartment in Brooklyn and have her way with you.”

  “Okay fine,” he agreed. “But maybe later tonight, though, right?”

  “Yeah, but what about your house rules,” she asked. “That would make three times this week.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “And it’s only Tuesday.”

  * * *

  Later that night, the news broke that Phillip Gerard, fifty-one, of Miami, who was shot and killed by a NYPD officer, had allegedly kidnapped a young woman and the police were pursuing him while Gerard was driving recklessly at the time. Also, the reporter, Zavier Mendoza, had received an anonymous tip to check out one of Gerard’s charities, CityCaresPuertoRico, and found that not only was it a sort of con job, but a quarter million of the money that was under Gerard’s direct control had gone missing. Only three thousand was left.

  * * *

  That same night, in Puerto Rico, Doña Inez stood on the back porch of her house. The moon was nearly full, and she sat beneath it, smoking the only cigar she had that had survived the storm.

  The green was coming back. She couldn’t see it in the dark, but she could feel it. In the daytime, she found tender vines and shoots, and the smallest of buds on some of the broken trees.

  The plants would be the first to return. But the people? That was going to be a much bigger fight. She took another puff on the cigar.

  She chanted in Yoruba, and blew smoke on an ebony figure. Candlelight flickered off the surfaces of honey, molasses, rum and water on the altar.

  She reached her fingers into a calabash on the floor at her feet. She sifted the rich, red soil through her fingers, soil she’d gathered from the spot where the hurricane made landfall on the island. The soil stuck beneath the rings on her fingers. It stuck under her nails and in the crescent moons of her cuticles. It stuck in the lines of her palms. It stuck in the crevices of her fingerprints.

  “Give me strength,” she prayed, holding the dirt tight in her fist. “Give us all strength to fight, and bless us to win.” * * *

  A few hours before dawn, Dulce woke up feeling restless. At first, she thought to wake Zavier to make love again. He lay on his side, arm splayed above his head. The streetlight filtered in through the window and traced a soft glow along the planes of his cheekbones, his eyelids, his jaw. In sleep, he was even more beautiful. Was it really possible that someone like this was her man? She felt a deep yearning, but it wasn’t exactly him she was hungry for. Not right now.

  She got out of bed and paced around the room. In the glow of New York’s never-dark, she could make out the shape of a low bookshelf beneath the windows. She picked up a glass journalism award. What did it feel like to win something like this? To have so many people reading your words? She didn’t know, but she wanted to.

  She set down the award and crossed to the desk, opening Zavier’s laptop. A bluish glow filled the room. She felt a twinge of guilt. She’d only done this before when she broke into her married boyfriend’s phone in Miami. She’d felt justified because she was totally dependent on him. If he was getting a new side chick, she needed a heads up.

  But now, she didn’t bother to open Zavier’s email or messages. She could have. Easily. In fact, he should really have better security. But she went straight to the word files and pulled up their draft of the New York Times article. At the end were sections they’d cut, six pages of scraps: sentences, paragraphs, outlines, notes. Maybe a third of it was his work, but mostly it was hers. Tangents that just didn’t fit in to the article. More of her own eyewitness accounts from the hurricane. A few whole scenes from her teen years.

  She had no idea how they fit together. Or if they ever would. But she felt like she was just beginning to tell both sets of stories.

  By the time it had gotten light, she had written several pages on each subject. Rough, stream of consciousness. But words. She used the word count feature to tally how many. Something Zavier had taught her.

  She heard a rumble from the bed, as Zavier turned over and blinked at her.

  “I have one request if you use my computer,” he said. “Please tell me you’ve decided to surprise me by writing my trend piece on men and eyebrow shaping that’s due today.”

  “Eyebrow shaping?” Dulce asked.

  “Lad mags keep the lights on,” Zavier said, sitting up and scrolling through his phone.

  Dulce shook her head. “I don’t think I mention the word eyebrow in the twenty-five hundred words I wrote,” she said. “I can do a word search.”

  “Twenty-five hundred words?” Zavier said, looking up from his phone. “How long have you been up?”

  “I don’t know,” Dulce said, suddenly shy. “A couple of hours.”

  “Well you’ve broken the first rule of writing,” he said. “You’re supposed to get coffee first.”

  “Is that what they taught you in graduate school?” Dulce asked.

  “It was pretty much the only thing I learned,” Zavier said. “Twenty-five hundred words? Shit. You need a computer of your own.”

  “With what money?”

  “This is Brooklyn, baby,” he said. “Give me a hundred bucks and I’ll come back in an hour with a hot latte in one hand and a hot laptop in the other.”

  “Each costing about fifty dollars,” Dulce said.

  “But maybe you don’t need to buy one yet,” Zavier said. “Maybe we could get an outlet to loan you one.”

  “Why would they loan me a computer?”

  “Because I pitched a follow-up investigative story about the hurricane,” he said. “And I have some interest from a couple of major outlets. I told them I needed an assistant.”

  “Are you sure?” Dulce asked. “Of course I want to go with you. But I don’t have as much experience as a lot of people you know.”

  “Now that the hurricane is no longer big news, a lot of my colleagues aren’t so interested anymore. They’ve moved on.”

  “That’s fucked up,” Dulce said. “So much of the island is still without power. From everyone I’ve talked to, it’s an ongoing disaster.”

  “Which is why you’re such an asset on the team,” he said. “You lived through the hurricane, and bring one helluva perspective. Besides, if it weren’t for you, I’d still be so deep in guilt that I couldn’t have gotten this assignment.”

  “You haven’t gotten it yet,” Dulce said.

  “But I will,” Zavier said. “All I need is a second laptop and some coffee.”

  “How about a good morning kiss?” she asked.


  She kissed him, and he pulled her down onto the bed.

  “What about that coffee?” she asked.

  “I seem to be waking up without it,” he said with a chuckle.

  As the two of them kissed and tangled on the bed, a message notification popped up on the open computer. From one of his editors:

  I’m greenlighting your Puerto Rico story. How soon can you leave?

  Author’s Note

  When Hurricane María hit Puerto Rico, I was developing a different storyline for my fourth Justice Hustlers book. However, as a member of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, I couldn’t think of anything more important to write about than the hurricane, and my editor and publisher supported me in changing course.

  In the process of developing this novel, there are a few small inconsistencies with the larger series. There may also be minor inaccuracies about the hurricane and its aftermath, despite my extensive research and consulting with a Puerto Rican sensitivity reader who lived through the disaster. For anyone looking for the town of Las Palmas in Southern Puerto Rico, it is completely fictional. While all other parts of the Justice Hustlers series have been set in real locations, I felt strongly that each actual small town in Puerto Rico had an intimate story to tell, and I didn’t want to misrepresent any of those truths. In contrast, the greater San Juan area has so many neighborhoods, and is the area of the Island that I know best. I felt confident that there was room for the emotional truth of Dulce’s fictional stories among the millions of urban stories in a Caribbean capital.

  And finally, the process of this book has been unlike any other I’ve ever written. If I had begun with a blank slate for a novel about Hurricane María, I don’t know whom I would have chosen to tell the story, or how I would have structured the book. But I didn’t begin with a blank slate. Instead, I was working within the confines of a feminist heist novel with a pre-determined set of characters to choose from, and a strong set of genre conventions that draw from suspense, women’s fiction, crime fiction, and romance. Like a haiku or a sonnet, genre and character have functioned as a constraint to shape the story—like a pre-determined syllable count or a rhyme scheme. Still, I have been moved and humbled at how the characters of both Dulce and Marisol have spoken to me about this tragedy. Ultimately, I stand by the whole of this book, and by the larger story I am hoping to tell about colonization, climate change, and the need for women of color to be leaders in transforming both. Surprisingly, I have found that heist fiction has proven a fitting genre for this story: as these characters have had to battle law and custom to find small pockets of justice and reparation. Similarly, the extended family of Puerto Rico will have to keep battling laws, customs, history, and entrenched power structures to get the justice and reparations that the island deserves.