I put my anger at Nilda away and face them, finally.
But something’s wrong.
Something’s always wrong.
They hug me, yes. They have to, it’s protocol. But there’s an iciness there that I can’t figure out or thaw.
And then they sit across from me in the den while Cassandra fusses with the coffee and hold hands and look like they’re anything but happy to see me.
Why did I come?
The question settles into me with a splash of panic. Enrique was right. I showed up at the door hoping for a hero’s welcome, or maybe just a sense of warmth, and instead I’ve endangered everyone.
I tried to tell myself, before I came, convinced myself even, that I was doing it for them: They must be worried, I told myself, and they deserve to at least know I’m alive.
But really, I did it for me. I just needed to take a breath. It’s only been a few months of life underground, but it’s exhausting and terrifying and men I’ve looked in the eye have been cut down in a flash of gunfire, and death just seems to close in on us with each passing day.
Maybe I came to say goodbye, one last time.
¿Qué tal … todo? my mother says, hesitating and then punctuating the word everything with a wave that sums up the sweeping impossibility of any word describing where we’re at.
I shake my head and shrug. Complicado, I say with a laugh that must sound absolutely ridiculous.
Why did I come?
Footsteps sound outside the door and I jump up, ready to bolt, but then Nilda pokes her head in and I sit, ashamed, heart still sprinting, and laugh that ridiculous laugh again.
I came because I’m still just a girl and the world is even more terrifying than I thought it would be.
Nilda looks sick; she barely smiles, blinks at me rapidly and then makes a direct line for the bathroom, where I hear her throwing up and that’s when I know.
Marisol, my father says, my name an urgent and hopeless prayer for help that will never come.
I’m sorry, I say, rising and stumbling toward the door.
Mi amor is the last thing my mom says and then I’m out in the streets, skittering behind the house just as two men in dark green round a corner across the street and yell.
I run until I’m numb and fire rages in my chest and then I slam against a wall panting, but the boots are still clattering somewhere nearby, so I run some more, until I’m somewhere brand-new, away, away, away from my memories and home.
And then: fast footsteps on pavement, a frantic run, the pursuit not far now. Yells in the distance, closing. An impossible clutter of crossroads, alleyways, storefronts. Some unfamiliar neighborhood, and the gnawing sense that one of those streets surely leads to another that leads to another that will bring me to some part of this haunted city by the sea that I do know, somewhere familiar, safe. But no: Instead, the approaching boots get louder and the yells to stop feel like they’re right in my ear and I know what’s coming, so instead of stopping I run harder and then and then and then
Hard hands on me, wrenching me up from the earth, pounding my ribs, my face, my
* * *
Ramón coughs himself awake from the nightmare of my life. The hospital hums around him as the echoes of my capture fade. He takes a sip of the cold coffee in his hand and catches his haunted reflection in the night window. I am a sliver, empty empty empty, but inside Ramón, something solidifies. There is knowing in the head: a grudging acceptance; and there is knowing in the heart: when a thing is simply true. Until now, it had all been an impossible kind of fantasy to him, even in the face of mounting evidence that each of these tiny loves and disasters playing out across the movie screen of his dreams really happened.
That I really happened.
The waiting room is empty; it’s four a.m. Aliceana is curled up in his lap, letting out quiet snores and breaking his heart a little bit with each one. The half of his face described in ghostly blurriness against the night looks tired but strangely young, peaceful even.
He will doubt again, but from here out, beneath it all, there will be an underlying certainty. I don’t know why, what it was that made it real, but as Ramón blinks out into the brisk New Jersey night, he knows; it’s almost like he can see me there in his reflection, blinking back at him.
And I know. Because yes, even I doubted myself, my very existence. I defy all laws of possibility; how could I not doubt?
This, then, is how I died: They line us up against the wall as the calls of Paredón ring out and everything is flickery and gray like on TV and then the night explodes all around us, bodies collapse. I’m flinching, praying I don’t get hit and knowing I will as I tumble forward amidst more flashes and impossible thunder.
I can taste the memory; the crackle of gunfire is real, not a far-off noise from the television. The collapse into oblivion like giving over to gravity and dispersing, dispersing into nothing.
* * *
The decision rises in Ramón, it supersedes the echoes of that panic, that shame. It becomes more clear with each breath.
Inhale.
There are so few things that make sense to do after a month like this, a night like this. I am with him, within him. Every piece of him is in turmoil, but a quiet surety gathers beneath all that mess.
Exhale.
Because nothing can ever really be the same. And acting like they are is just a lie. Something huge has happened inside of him, all around him. Pieces of it have been falling into place all along the way. But still, what exactly has changed feels like some wordless cloudy thing he could never clearly express.
Inhale.
He looks down at Aliceana. She knows. She understands without him having to explain. She showed him that with her eyes when he saw her at the club, her touch up in the greenhouse, her arms around him. She gets it, whatever it is.
Exhale.
Putting all the pieces together, turning them around; there’s only one thing to do that makes sense. Well, nothing makes sense, but in the crazy mathematics of club fires, long-lost tías, and family revelations, there’s one move to make.
Inhale.
The doctors had already come by earlier to let them know things were not good—very bad, in fact—in the cool, precise language of family notifications. Teresa had fallen asleep on the far side of the waiting room. Now the doctors are back, looking appropriately forlorn. Ramón holds his breath as they inform him that they did all they could possibly do and the passing was painless. Teresa stands, wipes her eyes, and nods. She seems to have already understood what was happening. The doctors scurry off. Teresa hugs Ramón and follows them.
Exhale.
Aliceana looks at him as they leave. “I’m so sorry, Ramón.” She says his name right, with the slightest roll of the r and the gently accented o. When they were first getting to know each other and found out the islands they each traced themselves back to, Aliceana had winked and said, “Hey, the 1898 Club!”—the year both nations threw off Spanish rule and got jangled up in American rule—and Ramón had fallen a tiny bit in love right then and there.
“Are you okay?” she asks now.
He nods then sighs and shakes his head. “I have to,” he starts, but can’t finish.
She adjusts herself, keeping her leg pressed up against his, her hand on his knee. “Talk to me, Ramón,” she says. Then, knowing it’ll make him smile, “Háblame.”
It does, and he says “abukado,” one of the six supremely random Tagalog words he’d looked up once to impress her, and she giggles, and it eases the heaviness just enough for him to turn to her and tell her everything.
She listens, eyes wide, and whatever last part of himself he’d been holding in reserve, trying to play it cool, crumbles in the telling. Aliceana nods, somehow taking in the impossible magic of a long-gone aunt invading his dreams, the way the past walks with us, the anomaly of my existence.
She’s showing him that he can trust her, a concerted effort, but she doesn’t even have to; he already knows.
And so the story comes out unencumbered by added boberías like You’ll never believe this but, or Don’t think I’m crazy. He just tells it as it has been, as it is, and I simmer in the background, reveling in the truth finally being told.
“I have to go to Cuba,” he says finally. “And find out what happened to her.”
“You’re damn right you do,” Aliceana says, her face lit up with the wonder of it, the trust he’s put in her, what’s growing between them. “And I’m coming too.”
INTERLUDE
ISLA DE PINOS
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Me.
Again.
Alone.
Empty-handed.
Once more. This time with these four dingy walls to keep me company. Forgotten. Maybe forever.
The never-ending ache every time I see that last glimpse of my parents: It’s subsiding now. Some. A distant thundering behind all this brand-new pain.
During the trial all I wanted was for it to end. Anything to make this incessant madness go away. It didn’t even last that long. Just a few short blurts of nonsensical bureaucracy, procedure, the theater of lies and propaganda. I almost prayed for death. Then I did. I wanted it to end even though it terrified me, the thought of standing at that wall, staring down those guns. I wondered how I would do up there, replayed all the possibilities over and over again, considering the different options as if it would really be up to me, as if my stomach wouldn’t clench and buckle my knees and betray all my resolve. I could imagine a hundred scenarios, from glorious escapes to Gómez’s stolid fearlessness, but in the end I figured I would die pathetic, screaming for my mami, a bleeding, heaving heap of flesh and then nothing at all.
I knew this, convinced myself of it deep down. The image of my groveling, self-pitying end brought a cloud over my every thought as I paced my cell, waited through hours of bullshit deliberations, listened to the indictments of my fellow rebels.
I almost shattered on the stand. It was day two and my parents showed up for the first time. Nilda stayed home, of course; why dare show your face? I heard later she was near comatose for months after betraying me, laid up in bed, an empty shell. Good, I thought. Let the bitch suffer. Meanwhile, the concerned stares from my parents were breaking me down. Here I was, every family’s worst nightmare, in the living flesh. And nothing to be done, no heroic rescue in the works, no witty defense lawyer to swoop in and save the day like in the yanqui films. The suicidal had already taken their despondent dives and the ones left over were about the business of living, not getting killed for some sixteen-year-old boba in the woods.
I should’ve never gone back. Regret chewed through me as the verdicts came down, guilty and guilty and guilty, a traitor to the revolution, an instigator, imperialist bitch. And just a child. A teenager really. They gave me indefinite detention because of my age and gunned down the rest of the rebels caught in the same roundup.
* * *
It’s the wall and the corner, the sink and the bench. There’s too much light and then none. The paint is too thick against the stones. There were moments of So this is what it’s like at first. I’d wondered. So many had come here, so many dead. I’d wondered. And then I knew. And now I know. Restlessness becomes acceptance becomes restlessness becomes rage. Rage becomes sorrow becomes regret.
Becomes rage.
Whenever a memory of my family tries to creep in, I banish it. This is the one thing I’ve gotten good at, sending unwanted thoughts far, far away. They always come back, relentless pilgrims, and I cast them out again. The sounds of tortured bodies around me, screams, flesh and bone tearing, shattering. It’s awful, but I can take it. The crushing sense that I’ll never, never leave—I can take that too.
But memories? Leave me alone. The first glimpse of an image in my mind from home, even after everything went to hell, and some never-ending pit of emptiness opens up beneath and I float in, despondent, unreachable: a ghost. No. I can’t think of them. Mami and Papi with their now-so-serious glares. Can’t think of their long-gone smiles or what havoc this sorrow must wreak on their fragile bodies.
They had aged ten years when I saw them at the trial. They sat there shattered and stunned, hollow, surely.
And Nilda? I can’t. There’s time for all that, surely. Endless hours and seconds stretch ahead of me, emptiness. Surely, all this wrath will trickle out along the way. Surely, I will one day be able to see my sister’s face without my skin catching fire, my hands clenching around her neck, my teeth gnashing.
I am a monster.
Hours then days pass, pause to find me despondent and emaciated in a drying pool of my own waste, gurgling, gangrening, lost, and then turn to months. I dream of killing Nilda, first slowly, then fast—a hundred different ways. Recount the moment of my capture and each millisecond leading up to it over and over until I’m digging my fingernails into my flesh so hard I draw blood. Then I start again. I dream of Mami and Papi. Padre Sebastián. Isabel. Lose track of which are dreams, which memories, which ghosts. Or are they all the same?
They shove food under the door. Sometimes I nibble at it, a feeble play at life, my eyes closed to ignore the shades of white and blue that bread should never be, throat clenched against whatever evil is squirming, still alive within its crunchy folds. Then I collapse back into my heap and wait. And burn. And wait. Close my eyes and wait.
* * *
I didn’t know what to expect. Didn’t know what time meant, nor pain. Didn’t know my own body. And now, though it’s all I have, this flesh is more like a corpse than anything I know as mine. Someone else’s corpse. I think they saw something in me, they saw a fire in me, something that wouldn’t break. I wasn’t fearless at the trial, but I cemented my face, made it defiant. I had already given over to death months earlier. It wasn’t so hard to keep the emotion stored away somewhere.
I didn’t lash out, didn’t cry. It frightened them. Their eyes were wary, their movements stilted and overly cautious as they shoved me down corridors and into one cell and then another.
Did they know something about this frail body that I didn’t? What powers did I hold? Whatever they saw, it landed me in this single cell. The day passes in the marching of feet in the morning, the clinks and clanks of the kitchen and the opening of gates and bodies shuffling through like cattle. And then silence and nothing and my own thoughts and the impossible emptiness of all that lies ahead. And then boredom, despair, heartbreak, regret. Afternoons sometimes bring a strange upliftment. Maybe I will escape. Maybe I will die. Maybe I will catch a guard sleeping and rain death on these useless excuses for humans.
Night falls, snuffs out that little gasp of hope. I pray for sleep, for death, for mercy. When I catch myself whimpering I deep breathe until the sobbing and heaving inside me slows. I won’t let them hear me break.
A guard comes in and maybe it’s morning, maybe it’s night. I’ve lost track. I don’t care. When he gets close enough I spit. I remember fear as the saliva leaves my mouth. I had slipped past caring and then it rushes back fast, the drive the urge the life to be lived. I want to live, but the little globule is already somersaulting through the air between me and the guard and then it’s a dark splotch on his uniform shirt. The white part drips down. We both watch it fall. He slaps me so hard it seems like it happened after I flew backwards across the room. His boot finds my stomach and I dry heave onto the floor. I am nothing, a wraith. Terror erupts into my brain, sends frantic messages through all my bones and synapses. An emergency. Suddenly I’m fighting for my life, forgetting that that means certain death. I’m on my feet, my fingernails cut across his face, his neck, his arms. I go in to bite him, thinking if I can get at that jugular vein in his neck it could be all over. Instead there’s a flash that starts between my eyes and bursts to the back of my skull and then nothing.
* * *
First it was the pain.
A slap across the face. The room resolves, my room, which has become my whole world. I’m tied to something, a chair. And the
guard that just slapped me is standing so close I can smell his sweat, see each of the chest hairs peering out from the collar of his dark green uniform shirt. My eyes meet his and they’re tight with the determination to look hard, but they’re not hard.
Nombres, he says again and I realize he’s been saying it for a while, even while I was out. Names. A demand.
Someone’s in the shadows, watching.
I want to fly up above myself. Want to render this moment into nothingness, anything to be outside my body, the wretchedness of being at these men’s mercy. I can’t though. I can’t fight and I can’t fly away. I imagine breaking free of the bonds, becoming something gigantic, superhuman, a monster, and smashing the chair to pieces across their faces and their faces to pieces across the walls and then growing even larger until the walls crumble around me and then the whole prison and—
¡Nombres! Another hit, this one harder, closed fist, and it brings a flash of light with it that makes me think my brainpan has become slightly unhinged for a moment.
I am not strong. I never have been, but now I’ve been wasting away for I don’t know how long, becoming skin and bones and even if I could smash the bastard, then what?
At some point, I just start babbling. Names pour out of me. Some of them are rebels, sure, others are just people I’ve heard of, famous actors, radio hosts, saints. Any name I can think of will do.
I stare as hard as I can into the soldier’s eyes while I talk, so hard that when he hits me again, this time out of frustration, it feels like a tiny victory.
The Book of Lost Saints Page 19
