I ABOVE ALL, SARA by Janelle Garcia a Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in P

ABOVE ALL, SARA

Janelle Garcia

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of Degree of

Master of Fine Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, FL

May 2012 i ABOVE ALL, SARA

Janelle Garcia

This thesis was prepared under the direction ofthe.candidate's thesis advisor, A. Papatya Bucak, M.F.A., Department of.English, .and has been approved. by the members of her supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty ofthe Dorothy F. 'Schmidt College of Arts and Letters and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree ofMaster ofFine Arts.

SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: A~~£t:(ti:~M.F~ Thesis Advisor ",.-;.

Andrew Furman, Ph.D. Interim Chair, Department ofEnglish

Heather Coltman, DMA. Interim Dean, The Dorothy F. Schmidt College ofArts and Letters B!'ii:ln:.~ l:?~h~t~/:z-

Dean, Graduate College

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to express her deepest gratitude to her husband and daughters for all of their love and encouragement; without her husband’s enduring patience and support, she would not have persevered in completing this novel. She would also like to thank her thesis committee members, Professor Kate Schmitt and Professor

Taylor Hagood, for their time and attention. Furthermore, she extends a special thanks to

Professor A. Papatya Bucak, her committee chair; her guidance and patience in reading and commenting on multiple drafts and incarnations of this novel were invaluable in helping the author come closer to writing the kind of story she set out to write.

iii ABSTRACT

Author: Janelle Garcia

Title: Above All, Sara

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: A. Papatya Bucak, M.F.A.

Degree: Master of Fine Arts

Year: 2012

The following manuscript charts the relationship between first cousins, Sara and

Marina, from the day they are both born, only minutes apart, to the day Marina and Sara, both seven years old, witness Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolutionaries’ victorious march to the capitol, to the present day, when an ailing Sara reaches out to her estranged cousin, asking Marina to return to the land she risked her life to leave. This multigenerational novel also explores the destructive effects of Sara’s political activism and gigantism on her parents, Elisa and Rolando, whose conflicted feelings towards their daughter have as much do with unrequited love and regret as they do with her

Communist loyalties. Finally, this manuscript pushes against the conventions of the novel by exploring variations in structure, perspective, and style.

iv ABOVE ALL, SARA

Book One: ...... 1 Cusp and Divergence ...... 1 On Billboards, In Dreams...... 8 History Written in Sand...... 18 A Demon, a Monster, a Saint ...... 22 Book Two: ...... 32 His Name in a Flower...... 32 In the Name of the Father ...... 54 The Hands of Men ...... 62 The Hearts of Women ...... 79 Book Three: ...... 88 A Stockingful of Bullets ...... 88 Love Letters...... 106 Splintered Senses...... 122 Book Four: ...... 130 They Wash Ashore ...... 130 Familiar Impositions ...... 141 How Things Might Have Gone and Other Wasted Thoughts ...... 157 Returning ...... 164 Writing Above All, Sara ...... 185 Works Cited ...... 203

BOOK ONE:

Cusp and Divergence

Santa Clara, Cuba, 1952.

Sara and Marina are born three minutes apart. Their mothers, sisters themselves, will one day come to call them jemelas del alma—soul twins—to help describe the curious bond the two share, but for now, they are simply cousins born at nearly the same time.

Her skin thin and translucent and her mouth pressed into a perpetual pucker, Sara weighs just under three pounds. Her too-tiny head fits into the palm of her mother’s hand like a strange piece of fruit. Her eyes, nose, and mouth all crowd together to form a face no larger than her mother’s gaping mouth. Her shoulders prove much smaller than her father’s thumbs (thumbs that are already slight and delicate and ill-suited for work as a police officer). And when it comes to her miniscule hands with fingers smaller still— each perfect digit tapering to fingernails and swirling, ever-so-minute fingerprints—her mother and father, Elisa and Rolando, stop breathing, stop blinking, keep absolutely still, whenever they glance at them, astounded as they are that the complexity of hands and fingers and fingertips could ever be replicated in miniature.

Elisa wraps newborn Sara in the diapers she sewed herself, and Sara appears smaller still. When Sara was in the womb, Elisa and Rolando had laughed at the smallness of the diapers, picturing the tiny bottom each diaper would cradle. But now,

with actual Sara inside, the diapers are monstrous—a gross miscalculation. Each square of cloth is a continent of fabric that no amount of bunching, folding, or pinning can disguise. Wrapping them around Sara’s thighs makes Elisa tremble. The sight of Sara’s jerking legs makes Rolando openly weep. Those thigh bones and knee bones are ludicrously small and yet so prominent inside their sheaths of loose skin.

Those legs remind them both of the rest of the bones swimming just underneath

Sara’s translucent skin—skin that reveals networks of arteries, veins, and capillaries, lending Sara an otherworldly hue. And though neither will speak of the association until years later, when Elisa will be surprised to learn that their minds traveled down similar paths during this tumultuous time, Sara reminds them of a trip they took to an aquarium years ago. She reminds them both of the run down aquarium that held just a handful of fish tanks, each flanked by large plywood cut-outs of hand-painted sea creatures—some real, some mythical. Specifically, they recall one of the smaller tanks, with a sign reading

“Ghost Fish” and displaying a crudely drawn figure of a ghost with fins and a fish tail propped up beside it. Inside the tank were dozens of tiny fish, their movements so synchronized they appeared to be a single unit rather than countless fractured bits. Sara’s mother and father, so timid they barely spoke to each other, pressed their faces to the glass and waited for the mass of fish to swim by. When the fish finally circled the tank and made their way towards them, Elisa and Rolando both gasped at the fish, each one clear as the glass itself. Each little fish bone—each skull and jaw bone and vertebra— could be seen as the fish swam about. At the time, Sara’s parents thought the see-through fish a novelty, but with little, prematurely-born Sara, the memory of the fish fills them with dread. Like the fish, perhaps Sara is an aberration. Sara, with her bones and blue

skin, is, herself, a ghost fish. And neither parent can stop thinking about the tiny skeleton barely concealed inside the slack suit of bluish flesh.

In the days following her birth, Sara refuses to nurse. A panicked Rolando trickles droplets of evaporated milk into her mouth from his pinkie finger whenever she parts her lips to yawn or cry. Elisa sobs as she watches them, her heavy breasts seeping milk down the front of her blouse. She’s failing at the most natural thing in the world, something blank-faced cows accomplish without effort. It is a sign of all the future failures she’ll endure as a mother, to be sure. Rolando, meanwhile, knows Sara’s denial of sustenance is a rejection not only of her mother’s milk, but of life itself, which means she is rejecting

God, the giver of that precious life.

And so Rolando begins leading the small family in prayer daily, nightly— whenever pinpricks of fear lance his heart, which is rather often. It is not long before

Rolando purges their home of all the fine rums he has been gifted throughout his years as an officer, making the sign of the cross as he pours the contents of each bottle down the kitchen sink. He quits smoking the fragrant cigars they both love, and urges Elisa to do the same, invoking God and Jesus and the saints whenever he catches her smoking in the bathroom, standing inside the bathtub and blowing columns of smoke through the high, open window. Soon, Elisa begins taking long walks under cover of night for fugitive smokes, often smoking more than enough tobacco for the both of them, and always pausing to douse herself with violet water before returning home.

Rolando also stops eating the decadent desserts Elisa insists on making daily. Egg yolk custards, rum-soaked cakes, and guava pastries are all passed over, leaving Elisa to devour them alone or feed them to the neighbor’s dog whenever she can’t stomach

another bite. (She hopes, however irrationally, that Sara will catch her unchecked appetite like a virus.)

Eventually, Rolando waves Elisa away if she sits too close to him on their couch while he’s reading the Bible. He averts his eyes if she slips out of one of her long skirts.

When they make love, a sleeping Sara nearby in her too-big bassinet, he insists they both keep their shirts on and the lights off. And when the sex is over, he hurries away to kneel before one of the many crucifixes hung throughout their home to pray once more, so they won’t languor in their pleasure, so at least one of them can look on the suffering image of

Jesus, and so they’ll both feel the sting of shame.

In the morning, Rolando and Elisa walk three miles to the Catholic Church for mass, shoulders rounded, rosary beads wound around Elisa’s fists, tiny Sara tucked into the crook of Rolando’s arm, he and the baby walking far ahead, and Elisa trailing behind.

Sara is baptized in the church, though the priest inspires little confidence in Elisa. Despite his advanced years, Father Lopez’s reedy voice belies his authority in all things holy, almost always making the congregation titter mid-service. And during the baptism, when

Sara’s legs become pinned inside what seems like acres of lace and tulle and satin, and she begins squirming and then crying, he nearly drops her.

Although Elisa has never before considered herself religious or spiritual in any sense, and wholly unbeknownst to Rolando, she repeats the sacred rite twice more: once in their kitchen sink amid the morning’s breakfast dishes, congealed eggs still intact, and once more in the small creek that runs alongside the edge of town, making the sign of the cross on little Sara’s forehead with dripping fingers while trying her best to shoo away the neighbor’s dog that follows her there and barks throughout the improvised ceremony.

After blessing little Sara in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,

Elisa curses the neighbor’s dog to hell.

When God seems too slow to answer their prayers, and the weekly visit from the town physician yields deeper frowns and fewer words until the only things the doctor says are strange sub-words like feh, mirm, and yai, Elisa resorts to what she thinks of as

Desperate Measures. First, she visits the woman who reads fortunes in coffee dregs, offering her sacks of unripe mangoes in exchange for a coffee grain of hope. Several times, the woman leads Elisa into a small kitchen with a single backless chair, and unceremoniously pours her a lukewarm cup of coffee before exiting to feed a flock of scrawny chickens chattering in her backyard. Once Elisa finishes her coffee, the woman returns to the kitchen, still dangling the sack of chicken feed from her left hand and trailing a pair of hens, and studies the bottom of Elisa’s cup for a few brief seconds.

Invariably, the bottoms of Elisa’s cups reveal “changes of enormous proportions.” Elisa presses her for more details, but the woman only shrugs and says, “one cup, one fortune.”

Elisa soon swears off coffee and begins bathing Sara in a small washtub filled with majagua leaves and honey, anointing Sara in bruised leaves and sticky gold each day, just as the neighborhood Santerian priest advises. During the baths, Elisa must forgive her eyes for skirting Sara’s prominent ribs and blade-like clavicles, settling, instead, on Sara’s gray eyes because those eyes are watchful eyes and not to be avoided.

That the Santero, a pale, hairless man cloaked in white linens and glass beads, is technically a Palero who worships the dead spirits and not a Santero Santero who worships the Yoruban saint-gods of light, does not dissuade Elisa. For him, she takes the long way home from the market. Pushing Sara, whose small body sinks into the quilting

and lace of her carriage so that only her face and hands are visible, Elisa meanders through the edge of town, trudging past abandoned farmlands and boarded shacks, before eventually coming to the Santero’s narrow, white home. Each time they approach the house, Sara shrieks and cries—a welcomed disturbance for Elisa since each day, Sara seems to cry less and less. Once there, Elisa pauses long enough for the man to bless Sara from his open window after satisfying his need for a long look at Elisa’s caramel shoulders and her delicate ankles, just barely revealed beneath the hems of her unerringly long skirts.

Elisa’s ties to the Santero, her visits to the caffeinated fortune teller, and her impromptu baptisms are all things she keeps from Rolando, a newly devout Catholic. He prays constantly for Sara, who, he knows, is shrinking. He is trying his best to pry their lives from the Dark Shadow of Sin. All he wants, all they both want, though each is driven to different means, is for their little Sarita to grow up big and strong.

In six months, Sara begins to put on weight, though she still does not resemble her cousin Marina, who at the same age—her legs plump and her arms bulging and dimpled—weighs twice as much. At one year old, Sara still has not taken on the chubbiness of most children her age, yielding unsolicited advice from friends and strangers alike: “Give her mamey milkshakes. Allow her to drink only sweetened, condensed milk. Douse everything in lard!” Yet by the age of six, Sara is nearly five feet tall. By nine, Sara stretches beyond the heads of both her parents, all of her cousins, boys and girls alike, and all but one of her uncles (Tío Jofre is the family’s stature anomaly and within two inches of six-foot-tall Sara, give or take). By thirteen, she towers over the island at just over seven feet tall, and must stoop to cross the thresholds of most places

she visits. Her parents consider renaming her Milagros because she is their miracle.

Although Elisa secretly credits the Santero, all of the glory for Sara’s miraculous recovery is given to the Lord and Jesus Christ, amen.

She was a tiny thing, people always say with raised eyebrows, nodding their heads emphatically to convince anyone who asks, perhaps the smallest ever to be born

(and survive) on the island. Those who remember her as a baby are always compelled to recount those details. Those who remember, who claim they were there, are fond of recounting Sara’s beginnings if only to reveal the irony.

As for Marina, she weighed nearly eight pounds at birth. Average-sized by most accounts. She cried little, nursed regularly. Unremarkable, most would say, her mother,

Teresa, included.

On Billboards, In Dreams

Sara says she felt the moment Marina was born. Yes, they were born minutes and miles apart, but Sara came first, and she knew the moment Marina took her first breath; she felt it. It’s as if in the minutes before Marina was born, someone had stuffed one of her ears with cotton and pressed one of her eyes shut. And once Marina was born, all at once, she could see and hear everything. She tells Ella this now, although it’s not the first time.

“Why the moment my mother was born?” Ella asks. “Why not before, in utero, when you both truly began existing? And I won’t even pretend to understand your analogy. So one eye and one ear is tuned into your body and the other to hers? How could your newborn mind even understand what you were seeing or hearing, much less recall, now, over fifty years later, what that felt like?”

Sara agrees that perhaps her analogy is a poor or confusing one. Maybe it was more like someone pushing a window open so that she suddenly became aware of not only what was happening in the room, but also outside, on the street below. But without a doubt, she remembers. She remembers everything since the day she was born.

Ella sighs and fumbles with her purse then begins combing Sara’s hair. Sara lies on her side, her back to Ella, and she can feel Ella combing her hair straight out and away from her head in a gray fan that must cover her entire hospital pillow. She wonders if it makes her look as if she’s running or flying or maybe just resting at the bottom of the sea. 8

“So this window,” Ella says, “are you hanging out of it, looking out? Or are you clear across the room and only guessing that the sounds you’re hearing are the sounds of traffic or someone getting mugged? Is it a tiny window with frosted glass or one of those that go from the floor to the ceiling?”

Sara says forget it, just forget it. She’s too sick and too old to play this game. Call the nurse; she’s ready for sleep.

***

These are the things Marina remembers about her daughter, Ella: what her fingernails looked like—bitten to the quick, the tips of her fingers extending round and meaty beyond the truncated nails. The heat that rose from her head and the sweat that soaked through her hair almost immediately whenever she fell asleep. Toes that always smelled slightly vinegary even when they were clean. How her widow’s peak, stark and black, cleaved her pale forehead in perfect symmetry. Eyebrows that furrowed together, nearly meeting in the middle, like two fingers stretching for each other, just out of reach.

But as a whole, Ella’s face is impossible to recall. Her face only comes to Marina in dreams.

During the day, Marina looks for that face everywhere, and sometimes she finds faces that are close enough. Baby faces and toddler faces and five and six year old faces seem to outnumber the faces of older children and young women and adults. Today

Marina spots a little girl at the grocery store with a face shaped just like Ella’s—the broad forehead, the pointed chin. The little girl must be four or five years old. She smiles, and her tiny teeth, spaced far apart so that no two teeth touch, are just like Ella’s. But it isn’t just the teeth and the face. The little girl has Ella’s ears, too. And while the nose is not

quite right, the possibility of Ella’s widow’s peak, hidden underneath the girl’s heavy bangs, remains. The little girl does not just resemble Ella, she could be Ella.

The cantaloupe Marina is smelling slips out of her hands falls to her feet with a dull thud, cracking open and spilling its stringy seeds all over the linoleum. The girl’s mother turns and stares at Marina, and Marina immediately feels guilty. She’s sure the woman has read her thoughts. She’s aware of Marina’s momentary certainty that this woman purchased Marina’s own daughter illegally and smuggled her over to Miami from

Cuba. She knows Marina’s plans to follow her to the grocery store parking lot, where

Marina will steal her daughter back while the woman loads her groceries into the trunk of her car, distracted and unaware.

Almost daily, Marina has to remind herself that Ella is no longer a five-year-old or seven- or twelve-year-old—she’s a grown woman and a complete stranger. She no longer needs Marina to push her through the aisles of a grocery store, pointing out all of the fruits and vegetables they could never have in Cuba. She no longer needs Marina to reclaim her, to fold her in her arms and tell her, it’s okay, we’re together now, I’ll take care of you. It’s something Marina has trouble believing—how the Ella she left no longer exists as Marina knew her. If Ella were to pass her on the street today, Marina wouldn’t recognize her because she’s too busy searching the faces of little girls.

***

All of her life, Sara has dreamed her cousin’s dreams. She discovered this when they were just four years old. Marina regularly slept over at Sara’s house because her mother worked nights at a hotel in La Habana. On one of those nights, they both awoke at the same moment. In the dark, they cried and told each other about the teeth they had

seen in the wall. Terrified, they waited until morning, when they began searching behind

Sara’s father’s crucifixes for the teeth that had gnashed at them in their dream, each one yellow and filed to a point. After that night, both girls shared the same dream. Marina would describe one of her dreams and Sara would agree she had dreamed the exact same thing. This continued until they were about seven years old, when Marina refused to tell

Sara any more of her dreams.

“You don’t really dream my dreams,” she told Sara. “You just wait for me to tell you what I dreamed and then you just agree with me. You’re lying.”

To prove her wrong, Sara began calling Marina first thing in the morning each day, detailing whatever she remembered dreaming about the night before.

“I was you, and you were at the beach, and you lost your favorite pair of red shoes in a big wave. You were flying over my grandmother’s house, but you didn’t know how to land, and you crashed into her roof, and she was mad and called you a devil, and you told her devils can’t fly, only angels can. You were trying to scream because you were lost in the dark, but no sounds came out, and you tried to run, but your legs didn’t work, and then you said wake up, wake up, wake up, and you did, and so did I.”

Marina would deny she had dreamed those dreams, or simply say she didn’t have a dream at all, until the night they both dreamed that Marina’s mother died. Her skin was blue and purple and her body bloated, and a terrible smell came from her mouth, which hung open. Marina leaned in close, crying and begging her to wake up, telling her she hadn’t meant it when she wished she would die, when large red ants began crawling out of her mouth and nose. Sara called Marina triumphantly in the morning, describing each dreamy detail down to how Marina’s mother had smelled just like the dead dog they had

passed on the side of the road two weeks before on their way to school. Marina began to cry and refused to walk to school with Sara that day. Afterwards, Marina’s mother contacted Rolando, who forced Sara to memorize several biblical verses that condemned the sin false prophecy. Afterwards, the daily calls stopped.

***

Marina doesn’t have any pictures; she didn’t take any with her the day she left.

She was traveling by sea on a homemade raft, after all; she had to travel light. The raft could capsize at any moment; she knew that—plenty of people told her that. Everyone had a story about a brother-in-law who angled his body the wrong way when a small wave approached and upended his raft, sending him and all of his carefully rationed supplies into the night sea, or a distant cousin who sent everyone tumbling into murky waters after trying to snatch a fish out of the ocean barehanded, or a former neighbor who fell out of her raft while urinating off the edge, going in ass-first with her panties tangled around her ankles. Pictures were just impractical. Losing them to the roiling Caribbean was another disappointment Marina chose to avoid. And more than that, she didn’t need pictures of Ella if they were to be reunited very soon—just picking out her favorite picture was too final a gesture.

It’s why Marina doesn’t have a single picture of her. She sometimes wonders which picture she’d choose now if she had to choose only one: a picture of Ella as a cherubic infant, all soft and fleshy, toothless and wide-eyed in her bassinet, her plump right leg kicked over the side and flashing the pink sole of her juicy, unlined foot, or one of Ella as a girl of six in her school uniform, her arms and legs grown thin and knobby, and her grin revealing too-large, serrated incisors that her small, still-practically-a-baby

face hadn’t yet grown into. There was also that picture of a toddler-sized Ella biting into a lime wedge, her mouth twisted into a half-frown and one eye squeezed shut. It was one of the pictures Marina had kept taped to the edge of her dresser mirror—a picture she glanced at once a day, at least. She remembers the picture, but she doesn’t remember the moment itself, when she let Ella bite into the wedge of lime and snapped the photo, leaving a blurry slice of Marina’s arm and hand floating along the left edge of the photograph—proof she’d been there. She regrets the loss of the memory more than the loss of the photograph.

She doesn’t have any pictures of Sara, either, which is why coming across a picture of one of Sara’s billboards quite by accident, while flipping through a Cuban travel guide at a bookstore, causes her to react the way she does. A small caption describes how many Cubans “revere Sara Sobretodos, a well-known revolutionary activist and popular symbol of the Communist movement.” The billboard is one that

Marina has never seen herself—one of Sara chopping sugar cane in the countryside, a machete resting on her shoulder and her face upraised to the sky while in the background, others chop on, heads down, backs bent, several of their machetes caught mid-swing.

Marina tells herself it is just a picture of a picture of an idiotic, staged scene, but her heart still races and her ears begin to ring, and soon she is fumbling through her purse, her hand groping blindly for a pen she is sure is in there. She scratches out a curled, handlebar mustache onto Sara’s unsmiling face, but it just makes Sara look comical, and

Marina realizes she isn’t going for funny at all, so she begins slashing away at the pocket- sized book with her pen, shredding not only the page with Sara on it, but dozens of the pages behind it.

Marina can feel the cashier watching her, and it’s not long before an officious looking woman, clearly the store manager, rushes over, cordless phone in hand, shouting,

“Now that is vandalism, and I will call the police.”

Marina pays for the book, but she refuses to take the bag the cashier holds out to her. She yells instead, “You keep it. You keep it and put it in the bathroom so all your customers can wipe their asses with it.”

In her car, Marina sits with the engine running for over twenty minutes, waiting for the shaking in her hands to subside. She doesn’t know what seeing Sara in the flesh would do to her. And Marina’s afraid of seeing Ella too, of reuniting with a woman that will not meet a single of her expectations, particularly the illogical ones that insist Ella did not grow into a woman at all but remained suspended as a six-year-old somehow, her hair woven into pigtail braids, one of her elbows scabby from a slip in the schoolyard, just as Marina left her.

Still, the fact that she hasn’t yet burned Sara’s letter is a good sign.

***

Sara asks the nurse for sleeping pills. Her head hurts, she says, and she hasn’t slept in days. In truth, she doesn’t want to sleep without the pills because without them, she dreams, and in her dreams, she dies. Sometimes her dead body is on the front page of a Miami newspaper. Sometimes her death is broadcast on every television station—the day’s top story. Sometimes, she can see herself on the ground nearby, a crowd of onlookers gathering around the large mound that is her body. Each time she doesn’t mourn or cry, but instead dances and shrieks and hugs herself, her body small and compact, her hands unmistakably Marina’s.

The nurse frowns at Sara. “Another headache?” she asks. “Better order more tests.

That is a bad sign, Señora Sobretodos.”

Sara’s tired of telling the nurses her last name is not really Sobretodos. They refuse to call her Sara Torrez. They say Sobretodos meaningfully whenever they see her, determined that no one within earshot forget who she is.

The nurse walks off and Sara is left without sleeping pills. She can’t tell if she is more tired of fighting sleep or of dreaming the dreams. She struggles to pull herself out of bed and slides into the chair at the corner of her room. At this time of day, the sun shines directly through the window across from the chair. Through the glass, the heat from the sun is magnified. The heat makes Sara uncomfortable, which in turn keeps her awake, so she extends her arms and legs as far as the narrow room will allow, exposing as much skin as possible to the light. Last week, she managed to get a sun burn this way, and the peeling skin kept her occupied for several days. She wants the heat to burn her, to keep her awake, to keep the world around her so bright, it will never be dark again. And just when she thinks it’s working, just when she’s sure she’ll never dream again, she falls asleep.

***

The letter arrives in a thin envelope marked international post. Even the quality of the paper feels foreign, not white enough, slightly too brittle, as if the tree bark resisted its transformation to stationary. Inside are the words “return home” and nothing more.

The paper and the envelope both smell of sun-burnt skin and aloe, and Marina knows the letter is from her cousin, Sara.

Sometimes she regrets not having any pictures of the real Sara, the one who always wanted to hide behind the camera because she hated the way she looked—the way she made everyone look so small and how that, in turn, made her look so much bigger. It was why Sara only liked the pictures of herself where she was photographed up close and alone, without any person or object to act as a point of reference for scale or proportion.

Pictures of Sara in front of the sea or sprawled in the grass were the best. Pictures of her sitting in a chair, any chair, or standing next to her father, who, for whatever reason, always hunched whenever Sara stood near him, were the worst. And yet, Sara agreed to all those ridiculous state pictures of her marching alongside children, many of them scaling her legs with Cuban flags in their fists, ready, it seemed, to stab their flags into the top of her head, not to mention the series of billboards in which Sara defeats an imperialistic Uncle Sam by squeezing him between her thumb and forefinger or sits poised, ready to blow him into outer space with her gigantic, pursed lips. The Sara of

Marina’s youth, the one who walked with a pronounced hunch, shoulders rounded, arms crossed around her collapsed chest, so obviously trying to make herself smaller, is swallowed by the hungry Sara of the billboards and posters.

Now her memories of Sara are much like her memories of Ella: just fractured bits.

That is, until this dream. Marina sees Sara’s face, not just in pieces, but in its entirety, with all of its subtleties and severities. She is whole, within reach. Her body a solid thing, casting shadows. And her face, with all of its curves and angles, smiles down at her, talks to her, looks at her, all of the rancor from their last parting erased. Marina can even smell her breath, a mixture of chamomile and peppermint. But then the dream is over before

Marina can ask to see Ella—Ella, who was supposed to stay with Sara, who was never

supposed to leave her side until it was time for her to rejoin Marina. She cries just as

Sara’s face fades with the dark, leaving in its place a dull ache in her head and in her chest, as if she’s been holding her breath for too long.

Sara always said she could feel the moment Marina was born because she was born first, and shortly after taking her first breaths, juts minutes later, she felt Marina enter the world and take hers. As if someone opened a window, she told Marina. She could hear her, see through her eyes, feel her. If only, she often lamented, you could feel it too.

Now Marina wonders what Sara could hear through that gaping window in her mind. If she was quiet and without distraction, everything, Sara would say. Except that when Marina left, when it became clear that she would always be here and Sara and Ella would always be there, each of Marina’s efforts to get Ella to come to America denied by the government, by her inability to navigate the legalities, by Sara herself, she imagined political boundaries and geographical distance sealing the one way path from Sara’s mind into hers. No passport, no passage.

And yet the letter arrives: a single thread, the finest silk from a spider’s web, imperceptible until you have unknowingly walked into it and your skin’s countless nerve endings register its ghostly presence. A thread cast across worlds, to be severed and forgotten or to be rewound, bit by bit, to its origins. Marina feels the thread brush against her cheeks. Its pull is gentle and persistent and bits of her begin to submit even as others resist, even as others persist it is another trick, it is a trap, she still begins to consider tracing the letter back to its origins.

History Written in Sand

Ella’s mother left the island when she was six years old. She can’t remember all of the details of that day, so it is a story Sara has often retold, as if by telling Ella the story of her mother’s leaving, Ella will be able to pick up right where she and Marina left off were her mother to someday return. Decades of estrangement can be erased as long as they collapse time, or fold it flat like a map, drawing the points of departure and return together, corner to corner, and forget all of the years in between.

Some of the lesser details remain consistent each time Sara revisits that day. It always happened on a Tuesday. The air always smelled the same, redolent of low tide and sawdust. There was always a cheering crowd and the two women and the small girl.

Ella was always the small girl with the knobby fingers and the thin hair of a baby, hair that was wispy and black and exposed her scalp to the sun, making it prone to sunburn and peeling and crying and sleepless nights. The small girl always makes adult Ella sad and lonely. She holds sympathy for her, as Sara describes her tear-filled eyes and heaving, concave chest, her favorite baby doll with the missing right eye pressed to her with both arms, the long scar on her right leg tracing the length from ankle to knee. Ella feels sad for the small girl before reminding herself she is that girl, and then sympathy sours to self-pity with a hint of loathing. She was the girl that was left, but she’s a woman now, and she can’t go on feeling sorry for herself.

Other details of the scene shift and change with each of Sara’s retellings.

Sometimes Marina wore a paisley dress. Weeping, she boarded a bus to the sea, a small brown suitcase hanging from her left arm as she dabbed at streaming tears with her right—a version that always makes Ella rolls her eyes almost involuntarily because she is sure Sara must have pilfered this version of her mother from an old movie or telenovela.

She had a red flower in her hair, which she slipped into Ella’s before turning her back and running into a crowd, so as not to upset Ella with her tears. Sometimes a man in uniform pushed Marina into the sea, who called out Ella’s name over his shoulder. Sometimes she struggled with the man and lost a shoe and when she fell to her knees, her head going under the surf for a split second, Ella cried out and dropped her doll, and the man backed off. Sometimes the man didn’t move, but only nodded at Marina, and she returned the nod before kissing the top of Ella’s nose and the top of the doll’s nose, which Ella thrust out to her, before turning and folding herself into the backseat of a taxi cab. Sometimes the hem of her orange silk scarf was caught in the door, and after the cab drove away,

Ella cried for a long time because the scarf would be soiled by the time her mother arrived at her destination and that made her too, too sad. Sometimes Sara bought Ella shaved ice in a paper cone afterwards. Sometimes she held the flower that Marina put into Ella’s hair, but later tumbled out when she began skipping along the sidewalk, singing and dancing with her one-eyed doll. Other times Marina wore black pants and a black shirt and melted into the night—a version that, because of its scant details, Ella has begun to believe. The only constant is that the story moves and changes like the mushrooming thunderheads of summer afternoons, growing and blooming vertical and horizontal, the sunlight casting shadows that are transformed minute by minute. Despite

the shifting shapes, the result is always the same: window rattling thunder and buckets of rain.

As a child, Ella enjoyed picturing the day her mother left in the various ways Sara described. Sara’s inconsistencies were natural; they suited Ella, whose moods could quickly shift from happy and carefree to angry and brooding. Her mood dictated which version of Sara’s story she would accept. She allowed her mother’s memory to remain fluid, so that sometimes Marina was smiling sadly, sometimes gentle but stoic, other times desperate and filled with abandon—each one tragic and each one final. Ella clutched at inconsistencies because when she pictured the moment her mother left, one thing remained: Sara stood over Ella, her arms encircling her; Ella’s hand in hers, Sara held onto Ella—she never left her side, and with Sara by her side, everyone on the street took notice, everyone around them seemed to smile. Sara anchored Ella even as her mother edged away. Sara held her on the island while her mother drifted into the sea, always churning and treacherous, even when, on the surface, it was still.

But nothing remains static in Sara’s mind, it seems—nothing at all. Ella sometimes wonders if it’s her mind’s way of keeping up with her still growing body. Or if, perhaps, as her body continues to grow and her cells multiply, perhaps the surface of her brain is expanding too, and each sudden spurt of growth remakes her memories, revising old ones, and creating new ones.

Still, Ella has a hard time entertaining Sara’s various versions of her mother’s departure. It happened one way and she can’t help feeling that Sara’s inability to relay that information can only mean she does not trust that Ella will understand the truth— truth that does not end with Marina’s departure, but begins with it. Sometimes Ella is

convinced Sara is the ocean, churning, tossing Ella’s small body, and Ella can only hope the tide will one day drop her on the shore.

A Demon, a Monster, a Saint

It’s Saturday night when the old man sees her for the first time. Or rather, it’s the first time that he sees her up close, in the flesh. He’s seen her on the billboards, of course, and he’s seen her at countless marches, her head bobbing high above everyone else’s, her strides slow and liquid and incongruous to the accelerated way she passes everyone by.

But this is the first time he comes upon her up close, away from the crowds and the officers and the slogans chanted over and over in the way he imagines Satan forces the poor wretches in Hell to march and chant day in and day out among flames hot as the

Caribbean sun. Except at this moment, it is past midnight. The sidewalk-cracking heat of the sun is giving some other fool on the opposite end of the earth a migraine. It is just they two walking along the deserted street, walking towards each other but headed in opposite directions, the person walking towards him unmistakably Sara Sobretodos.

Before panic sets in, the old man smiles at the comical scene they must make, he stooped and old, his body shrunken with age and osteoporosis, his hands the hands of a wrinkled, weathered child, hugging his stiff cargo to his chest, shuffling up the street as fast as his short, bowed legs allow; and she nearly as tall as the lampposts, carrying a small, sleeping child whose head rests on one of her broad shoulders, causing her to tilt her head slightly to one side. She’s probably tall enough, the old man muses, to peer inside all of the windows and balconies of the second and third story apartments she passes so she can make sure they’re all behaving as faithful Communists should. Perhaps 22

he is lucky, he thinks, to live on the first floor after all. It would be much harder for her to stoop down so low to the ground and peer inside one of his small windows to catch him in the act of dressing his black market, suckling pig. And that’s when he remembers the pig.

The cursed, dripping, rigid pig. The pig that’s wrapped in several layers of old newspaper and potato sacks and more newspaper and clutched tight to his breast. The small, malnourished pig he took three buses, the train, and nearly nineteen hours to get.

The pig that, if rationed right, should last him and his wife at least a month.

He thinks he should not make eye contact; he should pretend not to see her at all as he passes within inches of her, but then he realizes, no, that would be too obviously suspect. He’s seen others fall under police scrutiny for the same exaggerated nonchalance. He might as well start whistling and looking at the sky or just run right up to her and begin stammering and crying, telling her over and over that he’s doing nothing wrong. No, he must behave as any person without something to hide would in these circumstances—passing a beloved political figure on a dark, quiet street in the dead of night. But, for the life of him, he can’t imagine what that would possibly look like. He doesn’t remember what it’s like to act natural. Every interaction with someone not related to him by blood or marriage forces him to put on an act, to be jovial and upbeat but also tight-lipped and noncommittal. It’s a strange cocktail that usually results in every conversation ending on an awkward, uncertain note. Then he realizes he’s still walking as fast as he was when he left the bus several blocks away. At this rate, they’ll be on top of each other in seconds, and as he hurries by, surely the smell of illicit pork will waft past her, will likely send her spinning, so that as he attempts to pass her, she will pounce on

him, sending his pig and her child somersaulting into the air, all in the name of the

Revolution.

He resolves to slow down, but his deceleration has to be gradual. He considers just crossing the street, but he can’t bring his body to change direction. He feels as if he is racing down a dark tunnel and heading straight for a speeding train that is sure to crush his body into the rails.

The old man can feel his chest tightening. He can hear himself panting and tries to slow his breathing, but when he does, his vision blurs and he realizes he is just holding his breath.

He slows his too-fast pace so that his quick scramble relaxes to a steady stride that soon slows to an uncertain shuffle. He breathes in and out through his nose, his mouth clamped shut. It’s now that he really begins to feel the weight of the pig. Now, as he finds himself limping along slowly, his arms strain against the package. And what’s worse, he notes a steady drip with each step. It’s as if he’s leaving a trail of bread crumbs for the police to follow to his apartment, only instead of breadcrumbs, it’s pig’s blood, and no birds are likely to come along and clean up that mess for him. His only hope is that the

Gigantress won’t spot the trail in the dark, that the cloudless night will somehow produce a small deluge before the sun rises.

Within seconds, the devil’s emissary is upon him. Before he can stop himself, he stands at attention and salutes Sara.

He salutes her with his left hand because his right arm clutches the pig, but he soon realizes the salute is unnatural. No one salutes with their left. He jostles the pig, trying to turn it around so his left arm can get under the pig’s back rather than around the

legs that are tied together and form an unwieldy peak. But as he tries turning it, his arms begin to tremble, and after several fumbles, the thing falls to the ground. It makes a wet sound. Worse still, the night air on his arms and chest reminds him that some of the pig’s blood has soaked through the newspaper and potato sack and made its way onto his shirt.

All the old man can do is stand up straight and complete his gesture, bringing his right hand up in a salute and calling out, “What a fine night it is, Comrade Sobretodos,” breaking the stillness of the dark street with his too-loud, too-eager greeting.

Still, he looks up at Sara and smiles wide, but the smile on his face, he knows, is a sneer. He can feel the corners of his mouth pulling down, his lips curling. She is so tall, the streetlights form a halo around her sky-scraping head. And her arms are strong and as thick as his thighs. The child she cradles across her chest looks like a doll in those arms.

Her hips are as high as his head and are wide, full—the hips of some man’s dreams and another’s nightmares. A woman that size is well fed, he thinks. She doesn’t have to sell stolen goods for an animal that was itself starving. She doesn’t have to cook her meals in fear, praying that the smell of charred meat won’t seep through the windows or the rag- stuffed cracks around the doors and betray her to the neighbors. She eats well. Everyone can see how well, and everyone thinks that’s okay.

He glares and thinks, well if I am caught, so be it. Let her take me, but I’ll at least get one good shot in.

His hand still held at salute, he thinks how he’ll crouch down and attack her legs right at the place where her large calves taper to skinny little ankles that, logically speaking, should not be able to support her weight. Then he’ll search the ground for a rock and aim straight for that big head of hers. He continues plotting and only stops when

he realizes Sara does not even slow as she passes him. Her eyes do not meet his nor do they dart down to his soggy package on the ground. Instead, she sidesteps him and his pig and walks on, murmuring softly to the sleeping child that has stirred awake and is now crying softly.

She wants her mother, the little girl cries. The old man can hear her clearly. She wants to sleep in her home, in her bed, with her mother. Sara shushes the child and walks faster, away from the man. The old man calls out his greeting once more, and the gluttonous giant speeds to a trot, provoking the child to cry louder and grow frantic.

“Make her come back,” the child cries out, “let me go with her.” She fights Sara, who holds tight to the child. Soon Sara runs across the street, disappearing down an alleyway and into the dark with three long strides.

At his apartment, where his sleepy wife shuffles into the kitchen to help him divide the small pig so they can cook some of the meat and freeze what is left, both of them expertly cutting away at the carcass and wasting nothing, he tells her about his brush with that demon, Sobretodos. He tells her how he discovered the government’s secret plot to kidnap children for the cause, no doubt taking them to labor camps where they brainwash them and probably even conduct scientific experiments on them. His theory is they are starving the people so they can breed more giants. Why else would food be in such short supply? He should have chased Satanic Sara and that poor, godforsaken child, he knows. Had it not been for their meager pig, he would have. But now that he knows this is going on, he tells his wife, he will start keeping watch at night.

He’ll begin keeping a log of all unusual late night activity; he’ll set up surveillance at a different street each night. If only he weren’t so old, he tells her, he would dedicate

himself to exposing this dirty thing. Too bad he hasn’t got the energy. It’s part of the government’s plan, he’s sure, to keep everyone anemic so they’ll lack the energy to resist. Which is why they shouldn’t feel bad, he tells her, about doing everything they’ve done to get their hands on some meat.

That night, as the old man and his wife cut up the pig, his hand still trembling from his encounter with Sara, Sara slips into her apartment, worried the child will wake the neighbors. She promises her cousin’s daughter, Ella, that she will be reunited with her mother soon. Her mother has just gone fishing on that raft, and she’ll return in a few days with bags of shrimp and lobster and crab for Ella to eat. When Ella cries that her mother would never make her eat such terrible things, Sara backpedals. “Okay, you’re too smart for me,” she tells the hyperventilating girl, “she doesn’t know how to catch those things, anyway. What she is really doing is trying to find treasure. You see, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of Spanish galleons sunken near our shores. And they are filled with gold and treasure just waiting to be found. And when she finds that treasure, she’ll come back for you.”

But the child will not settle for such promises. She does not want to wait there, with Sara, for her mother even if Sara has prepared a room for her with a small bed of her own, with all of her clothes stored neatly away in what used to be her mother’s dresser.

She wants to rejoin her mother now. She wants to help her find the treasure. Maybe she’s really not so afraid of the water, after all. Maybe she can learn to swim, to breathe underwater.

“But it’s not safe,” Sara tells her, “it’s just not safe. And there’s no guarantee she’ll find it.”

Telling her this, Sara finds, turns out to be much worse. Ella, for a child of six, is much too smart for such arguments. If the voyage is unsafe, why did they let her mother go? Why did they stand there on the shore, in the dark, and wave cheerfully as she disappeared into the black, flat sea? Why did she hear Sara telling her mom tonight was the only night she could make it happen? Why did Sara tell her mother, if she was going to do it, it had to be now? If there’s no guarantee her mother will find the treasure, then there’s no guarantee she’ll come back for her. She grows frantic and hides from Sara, who she accuses of tricking her and of tricking her mother, too. “You said she’d be right back,” she wails over and over from inside the bathroom where she locks herself in. An hour later, when she finally falls silent, Sara picks the lock and scoops Ella up from the bathroom floor, where her head rests on the toilet lid. Carefully, she lays Ella down on her bed and begins inventing the story she’ll tell the little girl in the morning. Every good story needs a villain, Sara knows, and somehow, she has to make sure that villain is not her.

Throughout the remainder of the night, people all over dream of Sara. A young man dreams of her, just as he does every night. A billboard of Sara’s face, large as the sun, and smiling brightly at the words, “Sobretodos Vamos Bien,” fills his bedroom window. He hates that he dreams of her, hates that he has to see her face alongside the absurd slogan each day, but each night, he dreams the dream, and the dream is always the same. In the dream, Sara is a tree. She towers over him, filling the space around him, and

he feels he must climb her—there is nothing else he would rather do. But he soon finds he is not satisfied with just climbing her, so he takes to pulling off all of her leaves one by one. When there are no leaves left, he snaps off her limbs and gathers them in a pile around her trunk, but this, too, fails to satisfy him. Finally, he takes to peeling away her bark in long, brittle strips, and only when he finds that underneath the bark, Sara the Tree bleeds and bleeds, does he begin to feel pleased.

In the capitol, a man dreams Sara has grown larger and larger. She has grown so large, she sits atop his home as if it were a chair, forcing the roof to sag and cave. She bends over to peer inside the house, and her hands grope around the inside of each room in search of him. He runs into the bathroom, where he latches the small window above the toilet, but she shatters it with a flick of her fingernail. He squeezes against the wall, hoping to avoid detection, but her eye fills the window, and narrows upon seeing him crouched behind the shower curtain, the cold bathroom tile making him shiver. Soon she has him squeezed between her thumb and forefinger, and pulls him outside, where she lifts him to her face, no doubt so that she can eat him. He closes his eyes and braces himself, ready for her large molars to crush him to bits. But when the pain doesn’t come, he opens his eyes and sees she is clad in dark green fatigues, and she has grown a beard, and her face is no longer her face at all, but his own as he finds he is being dropped into the tunnel of his own throat to be swallowed whole.

Ninety plus miles away, an aging father dreams that he holds Sara once more. She is just an infant, smaller than his hand—so small, in fact, she fits snugly inside his breast pocket. He is so relieved he can keep her there, hide her. There, in his pocket, no one will see she is a curse, a judgment on him for his sins, for loving his wife’s sister and not his

wife. He can go on living his life; he doesn’t have to worry about confessing all his wrongs and all of the ways he made a mess of things. But just as he’s relishing in relief, he feels his shirt pulling him forward. His pocket bulges larger as the seams holding it together begin to tear. Sara is growing larger by the minute, and he knows exactly where this is headed. She will grow large, too large; his daughter will defy him, she will disgrace him, she will banish him. And he doesn’t think he can survive that again. No, this time, he has to stop it. Quickly, frantically, his hands shaking, his body hitching, the aging father pummels the growing mound in his pocket with his fists until it stops moving, and all that is left is a damp heaviness in his pocket, a dull throbbing in his chest.

Adrift on a small raft that takes her further and further away from her daughter, a young mother dreams that Sara lives under the sea. Sara swallows the ocean’s water in large, desperate gulps each day, hoping to deplete the ocean’s water so that she can reach the surface and breathe the air. Except when she’s swallowed as much as she possibly can, the ocean still crests at the top of her head, and no lower. The young mother, paddling north, can see Sara’s face underneath the shallow waves. It is a sad, desperate face, and she wants badly to save her, to pull her up from the depths of the sea, but she can’t. Though she reaches for Sara, Sara doesn’t reach back because her arms are anchored to the sea floor. She calls out to Sara and urges her to let go of the bottom, to reach up to the surface so that she can pull her to safety, but Sara only shakes her head and frowns, resuming her desperate slurping of the salt water. When Sara begins gulping once more, taking deeper and longer pulls at the water, the surface where the young mother floats grows more and more disturbed. The water around her begins sloshing and swirling, and soon she finds her raft is spinning around, caught in a whirlpool that leads

to the bottom of the sea, where Sara sits smiling alongside the young mother’s daughter, who is pale and still and tethered to Sara’s side.

An angel, a goddess, a monster. A monster, a devil, a giant. A giant miraculous curse. Sometimes she can hear them dreaming these dreams, thinking these thoughts, feeding their frenzied feelings for her day and night. Sometimes their voices crowd out her dreams. They are so loud, she can’t tell if she’s still breathing, or if her heart’s still beating. She is certain they are plotting her death just as they’ve hijacked her life. Her death will be celebrated while it is memorialized, it will command moments of silence along with hysterical fits of laughter. A fallen hero, the devil is conquered; they’ll cry as they dance. To stop herself from hearing them all, to pick out her own thoughts from the din, she brings her hands close to her face. She studies the diagonal lines that segment her palms—the delicate, haphazard contours that appear crude, grotesque even, when she notices how much finer her fingerprints are: the loops and swirls are so perfect, so breathtaking, they compel her to look closer, to see the individual cells that hang together on her skin, each one bent on splitting, on reproducing even as she’s sure other parts of her have given up on that feverish project. It’s only when she is sure she can see her hyperactive cells, intent on making her larger still, that she no longer hears the dreams, the prayers, or the indictments, and remembers, if only for a moment, what it feels like to forget them all.

BOOK TWO:

His Name in a Flower

The majagua tree belongs to the hibiscus family. Flowering year-round, it bears five-petaled blossoms which surround a pink stamen bristling with bright yellow, pollen- producing anthers—pollen that can easily brush onto curious fingertips or dust the glossy curls of a girl’s hair as a flower is slipped behind her ear.

Each morning the petals emerge pale, but as the day wears on, they brighten then darken. By dusk, the formerly pale flower burns in varying degrees of pink, orange, and red. With the night, the funnel-shaped corolla collapses and deflates. Once heavy with evening dew, the entire flower snaps away from its stem and drops to the ground.

Withered, the petals continue to darken until the fallen flower is indistinguishable from the earth.

These flowers produce no fruit or fragrance. Their beauty is ephemeral. Once picked, they almost immediately begin to droop. A majagua tree produces dozens of blooms daily, and nightly they fall almost simultaneously to the ground. Left untended, the foot of the tree amasses a growing carpet of fallen flowers, which, odorless in bloom, reek decay as they decompose.

The majagua tree has a remarkably fast rate of growth and can stretch upwards of sixty feet. The particular majagua tree that dominated the front yard of Rolando’s childhood home had, by some estimates, surpassed eighty feet. While many who came to 32

visit the Torrez home admired the tree and its countless blooms, the tree had become a nuisance for Rolando.

Each morning Rolando’s mother, Amparo, settled into her wrought iron rocker on the front porch, within arm’s reach of a small, shaded window after her morning prayers.

From her place on the porch, she could see a majority of the lower branches of the majagua tree. There, she’d wait for the budding flowers to unfurl and then she’d scan for the palest, most symmetrical blooms. Of those, still from her rocker several feet away, she’d choose the largest by closing her left eye and comparing each flower to the size of her upraised thumb. Once she spotted the ideal flower, she called for Rolando, who slept in his room just beyond and underneath the small window next to her. She’d call

Rolandito once, then rap on his window with her cane three times. This she did repeatedly so that her calls to Rolando grew rhythmic and musical, almost. Rolando was a police officer then. He often worked late nights and therefore craved quiet mornings, but there was no subduing Amparo. Rolandito, tap, tap, tap, Rolandito, tap, tap, tap would pervade Rolando’s dreams until he finally awoke, angry and annoyed and calling out,

“For God’s sake, Amparito, stop, stop, stop.”

Rolando would then stumble out to the majagua tree, metal bucket in hand. As his mother watched on, he’d collect the dozens of wilted flowers that dotted their small lawn and drop them into the bucket. Sometimes he muttered angrily under his voice; sometimes he hissed through clenched teeth; other times he remained silent, his eyes fixed into narrow slits. On the morning when the girl with the glossy curls passed his house and paused for a look at the extraordinary tree, Rolando was breathing expletives and spitting into the low bushes that circled the tree each time he bent over. He still had

not noticed the young woman when he turned to his mother so she could wordlessly point at her chosen flower on one of the tree’s lowest branches.

Almost invariably, his mother chose a flower well within her reach. And despite her cane, she was able to walk without trouble. Rolando often caught her tending to the majagua tree herself during the long hours of the day after she’d already visited his father’s grave and gone to morning mass. Yet each morning she called to Rolando. The daily ritual concluded with Amparo taking the flower inside and boiling all five petals.

Afterwards, she set the water aside to cool so she could drink it that evening with an added bit of honey and cinnamon. The boiled petals she’d then grind into a paste, which she spread onto her lustrous, golden hair, perpetually hidden away underneath a silk scarf. That single, carefully chosen flower was credited with keeping her arthritis at bay, alleviating her aching kidneys, controlling her occasional bouts of asthma, and preventing her glossy mane from graying and falling out in small, disquieting bits.

Except, on the morning the curly-haired girl approached the Torrez home,

Amparo would not be boiling her chosen flower. Because just as Rolando turned to reach for the flower Amparo had pointed out, he heard her voice from the sidewalk.

“Sir, what kind of tree is that? The flowers are so beautiful,” she said, just loud enough so that Rolando, but not his mother, could hear.

As he turned, Amparo’s flower in hand, he saw Teresa. Slowly, he brought the flower near enough to her so she could see it up close. She studied the flower, letting the tips of her fingers brush first the petals and then the curiously bright pollen, and Rolando studied her: the shape of her lips, the creases of her eyelids, the smooth hollows of her cheeks. She smiled and said the flower was lovely, and he slipped the flower behind her

ear, dismayed that the pollen dusted her dark hair a yellow almost the color of his mother’s hair.

Amparo called to Rolando in alarm, watching, and for a moment disbelieving, as her only son gave her flower away.

“Rolandito,” she cried repeatedly, slamming her cane against the tile floor of the porch, so that he quickly turned away from the girl without having said any actual words to her. She didn’t know his name, and he didn’t know hers or where she came from or where she might be going. He only knew that he couldn’t bear Amparo for much longer.

She, after all, had lived her life. He saw the girl and began, in an instant, making plans for his own.

Teresa, meanwhile, was embarrassed by this stranger’s gift. His smeared, dirty hands together with the look on his face left her uneasy for reasons she could not readily identify. Once she was a safe distance from the house, although the old woman could still be heard slapping her cane against the ground, she removed the flower from behind her ear and let it fall to the ground where it would later leave a brown stain on the sidewalk.

***

The Hidálgo house was three stories high, yet it appeared deceptively small when seen from the street. It was narrow—just as narrow as the houses that neighbored it—but the Hidálgo house was the only house on their street, or in their town for that matter, that stretched back into the lot directly behind it, leaving no room for another house to back up to it from the south side of the block. Their house, which sat in the middle of the block, breached the alleyway, blocking it off completely from either end. Those

unfamiliar with the Hidálgo house and looking for a shortcut to the center of town were always surprised by the dead alleyway, running unsuspectingly into its stuccoed walls.

Teresa rode the train to the city where the Hidálgos lived each day except Sundays. One of her distant aunts worked for the Hidálgos, who owned a chain of bookstores scattered throughout the island. The aunt told Teresa’s father that the affluent family needed a girl to clean and cook, and after the death of her mother, Teresa, the eldest daughter, couldn’t say no—not to her insistent aunt and not to her sheepish father. For Teresa, the Hidálgo house was a dark, humid labyrinth of corridors and rooms and landings and locked doors.

She spent the entirety of each morning making her way through the house, lugging a mop and bucket along with several monogrammed dust rags (were they once napkins? handkerchiefs? She wasn’t sure), which she hung from the waist of her apron and used whenever she came across an empty vase in a dark corner or a wall crowded with picture frames of unsmiling children and corseted mothers or a piece of furniture—a curio cabinet empty save for a broken comb—that did not appear to have any immediate use.

As Señora Hidálgo put it when Teresa first arrived, “Just work systematically to keep the dust and grime at bay,” and that is what Teresa did.

Much of the house was windowless, and the top floor suffered the most from the midday heat, causing Teresa’s blouse to cling to her back and the tops of her upper arms like a second skin. It was also during this midday heat that Teresa retreated outside, to the open air courtyard in the center of the house where the stove sat, fully exposed to the midday sun. “Because a decent house,” she had heard Señora Hidálgo say on several occasions, “should never smell like food.”

During this time, Señor Hidálgo came home for lunch, at the precise time when his wife, Señora Hidálgo, retreated to her ground floor bedroom for a nap. Because of this, Teresa never actually saw the husband and wife together, despite the long hours she spent in their home. After removing his shoes and coat and tie, all of which he left in a neat pile next to the front door, Señor Hidálgo took a seat in the courtyard, pressed against the north wall where there was a sliver of shade, and watched Teresa, his hand occasionally going to his forehead to wipe away the sweat that formed despite his efforts to sit very still.

He always said hello to Teresa after he took his seat. He always asked her how she was doing. He then took the time to comment on her hairstyle that day and how much more that day’s hairstyle complemented her features when compared to the previous day’s hairstyle. He lauded the way she turned square chunks of pork and triangles of beef with a quick turn of her wrist that causes the bones and tendons of her forearms to roll just beneath her sweaty skin. He delivered a short monologue on the day’s weather and added how much he wished she did not have to toil and sweat so under the heat of the merciless midday sun. When he said the word “heat,” his voice lowered and became something of a hiss and a whisper. He rolled his R’s in a slow, languid way she had never heard before. Sometimes, when she served him his lunch, he tried to touch her hand, but she always moved it away before his fingertips could make contact with her skin. Each day he took his lunch out there in the courtyard, his plate of food balanced awkwardly on his knees, chewing slowly as Teresa went about cleaning the stove and setting aside her lunch for later, when she could eat without being watched.

At the end of each day, her work at the Hidálgo house imprinted on her palms and the aching balls of her feet, she walked past the house with the majagua tree on her way to the train station. Each time, she was certain she felt the eyes of the young man watching her from the small window on the front porch. She knew his name was Rolando because the old woman shouted his name repeatedly when he placed the flower in her hair the day she arrived at the city only three weeks ago, though it felt like months, maybe years. Now a flower greeted her from the edge of the sidewalk in front of the darkened house each evening, suspended by its petals over a small, water-filled tea cup.

Each time, she took the flower from the tea cup and held it in her hands, studying the petals, the stem, the delicate pollen that dusted its center, as she made her way to the station.

Except this time, a white slip of paper, folded over and rolled into a tiny cylinder, sat inside the hollow of the flower he left for her. The stamen had been cut out of the flower, leaving a clean well where the small piece of paper fit perfectly. When Teresa unrolled the piece of paper, unfolding it several times, she found the name Rolando

Torrez written inside in careful black letters. The capital R was embellished with a series of flourishes and curlicues, and the second letter O, the last letter in his first name, ended with a delicate, upturned line that just touched the sharp line that began the capital T of his last name like two fingertips, reaching towards each other, touching lightly, if at all.

The slip of paper with his name—it both pleased and repelled her. First, the handwriting was not only meticulous and neat, it was graceful, lovely even. Her own script was labored and clumsy—a deficiency she blamed on her father, who insisted she ignore her natural inclination to write with her left hand as a child, forcing her to use her

right hand instead—a hand altogether uncooperative. Also, the name Rolando Torrez reminded her that he was a person and not just some shadowy figure lurking behind a darkened window, placing clandestine flowers along the sidewalk for her pleasure. A first and last name meant a person with motives, desires. The name recalled the ugly scene with the disapproving mother raging against her son’s simple gesture; it recalled the imposition of family, both his and hers. (Why did it make her think of her mother and the baby, and the way her father placed them together in a single coffin? Perhaps her mind is damaged, she thinks, incapable of normal thoughts). This name of his, she suspected, demanded that she give her name as well, and with her name came a series of attachments and responsibilities she managed to somehow subdue during her protracted, sweaty days cleaning away someone else’s filth. With a name, she ceased to be a nameless girl passing a darkened house on her way to anywhere.

Teresa ignored the slip of paper for days. The flower with the name inside was followed by one empty, stamen-less flower the following day, then another, then a third, until the flowers disappeared altogether, and were replaced by a small, empty tea cup left there daily. No flower, no water. Now she realized just how much each flower softened the edges of her long days. And she realized each empty cup was the silence that followed a question—upturned hands awaiting her response—and she felt the impatience lurking behind that waiting. The barren, impatient teacups were each admonitions.

She became distracted at work, serving Señor Hidálgo undercooked pieces of pork, or forgetting the bed linens outside on the clothesline for several days and through two rainstorms, so that Senora Hidálgo berated her for an entire afternoon and garnished some of her pay. The following day, during Señor Hidálgo’s regular lunch visit, he edged

close to Teresa as she prepared his lunch, and somehow managed to slip money into her apron pocket—enough to exceed the amount of money she earned in three days. She realized this when she felt the back of his hand brush against her lower abdomen as he slid his hand out of her pocket. By the time she fished the gift out of her pocket and turned to give the money back, Señor Hidálgo had slipped into the dark house.

The money was some sinister sign. She must choose between these two men, and so if she must choose, she’d choose Rolando and his innocent ways. She practiced writing her name on the train as it shuddered and rocked her all the way home to

Batabanó, disturbing her handwriting even more, so that her name appeared to have been written by an ink-trailing house fly. When she finally arrived at home, Senor Hidálgo’s money folded away inside her grease-stained apron just as he placed it—the apron itself rolled into a compact ball so as to hold tight to the secret of the married man’s offering—

Teresa reluctantly asked her sister, Elisa, to write her name for her on the other side of the slip of paper, its edges worn and softened by Teresa’s hands.

Elisa quickly wrote Teresa’s name in cursive letters, the words slanting forward as if the interlocking letters were in a hurry to be somewhere. She did it quickly and carelessly, but the script was still something Teresa could never duplicate, rocking train or not. Elisa, eyebrows raised, turned the scrap of paper over.

“Who is Rolando Torrez?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why is his name written here, then?”

“I found it on the street.”

Elisa was Teresa’s only sister. If asked, Teresa would say that of course she loved her sister, but in reality, they rarely spoke. Teresa saw Elisa not as an ally, not as someone she could confide in or relate to, which is what she thought a sister should be.

Instead, her sister was as distant and peculiar to her as her baby brothers. At fourteen

Elisa was thin, frail; she still had the body of a child. She tired easily and spent her days reading books about who knew what, saying very little that Teresa cared about. Elisa, in

Teresa’s eyes, was more of an absence than a presence in their house. Her body occupied space, but she said nothing, did nothing, contributed nothing. And she wasn’t exactly a burden, either, because she ate little, demanded surprisingly little. In contrast, Teresa, at that age, was treated as a woman of the house. She already had the curves of a woman, and she had long been responsible for diapering and bathing the youngest of her brothers, laundering mounds of her siblings’ indistinguishable clothes by hand, preparing stews, and sweeping and mopping floors. With their mother’s death and Teresa working away from home, Elisa was initially expected to help with the household chores, but her weak constitution left many unfinished duties for Teresa to complete on Sundays. It wasn’t long before their father suggested Elisa forego doing any of the work around the house and urged her to focus on developing her secretarial instead so that she could one day work for a lawyer or banker because he had little hopes she would ever marry.

“This is so romantic, Tere. You have an admirer.”

“Thank you, Elisa, for your help.”

“Fine, don’t tell me who he is. I don’t care. You’re going to need me to write the replies to your love letters, so I’ll find it all out anyway.”

“There won’t be letters,” Teresa said, alarmed at the thought of some drawn out correspondence she’d have to share with Elisa, of all people.

She left Elisa where she found her, on the back porch, leafing through the pages of a yellowed math book. But her sister’s enthusiasm also managed to infect her. This is romantic, she thought, forgetting for a moment that romance led to places she’d always sworn never to go: to marriage and babies and more babies and death.

The next day, Teresa kept the small piece of paper with her and Rolando’s names on it inside the front pocket of her blouse. Her hand went to the piece of paper unconsciously throughout the day. She burned Señor Hidálgo’s lunch, who insisted on eating the charred meat. When Hidálgo approached her for his usual round of pleasantries, Teresa turned her back to him, ashamed that she forgot to bring back his money, which she had left inside her other, still soiled apron. He also seemed more anxious than usual. He wanted to discuss the money. She was sure. He was expecting some sort of favor from Teresa, some show of gratitude. She wanted to tell him she’d bring back that money tomorrow, without fail, but if she mentioned it, then he would begin saying whatever it was that was making him tenser, more awkward, and she didn’t want him to say anything. She’d rather he just left as he did every day after lunch, slowly and uncertainly, muttering how much he looked forward to seeing her the next day.

Instead, he touched her shoulder, lightly, just barely, with fingertips still glistening with grease, and said, “The money I have given you is what was justly owed to you.

Understand, nothing more is expected of you.” He then shook her hand and left, and

Teresa, for the rest of the day, turned the idea around in her head: justly owed. To her. All of the money she made went to her father. What did she have that was hers?

That evening, Teresa placed the piece of paper, folded along the original creases and rolled just as she found it, inside the empty cup, which had fallen over on its side and rolled off the edge of the sidewalk. She dropped the piece of paper quickly and carefully so that she did not interrupt her stride as she made her way down the street.

When she reached the end of the block, she stopped. Maybe this was some terrible mistake. What did she know of Rolando Torrez anyway? Perhaps this strange ritual he began with the flowers was encoded with some meaning unknown to her that might bind her somehow. The idea of love was always tied to her mother, her hollow cheeks, her consecutive pregnancies. She tried to imagine the handsome, young Rolando beaten by age, indifferent, watching on as she nursed baby after screaming baby. She needed to retrieve her name. This was a mistake, but before she could make a move, Rolando exited the house, trotted over to the sidewalk, and stooped down. Then, small sliver of paper in hand, Rolando turned his head directly towards Teresa, still standing at the corner, several yards away. For a moment, they watched each other, and Teresa hoped the failing sunlight was able, somehow, to disguise her matted hair, her sweaty face.

Rolando then turned his attention back to the piece of paper and unfolded it slowly, and that’s when Teresa turned and ran, her square-heeled shoes knocking against the sidewalk. She felt her throat expanding, swelling. It filled the length of her neck and pressed into her lungs, the top of her stomach. The paper was stained with grease and soiled fingertips and the smells of sweat and burnt meat. It was an ugly little relic she couldn’t take back.

***

Rolando rose before the light of day, before Amparo began stirring in her bedroom and shuffled to the bathroom, the slow babble of her urine echoing throughout the halls of their house like some tuneless, underwater chime. He awakened well before she began coughing and spitting into the sink repeatedly before finally settling down at the edge of her bed where Rolando wondered if the floor and her knees would one day fuse happily together and save her the trouble of ever having to tear herself away from her constant praying again.

He dressed in his stiff uniform although it was his day off and slipped out of the house under cover of darkness, his pistol heavy at his side.

Inside his left pant pocket was the slip of paper with Teresa’s name on it, the scrap soft as cloth, the graceful interlocking letters that were almost worn away already embossed in his mind. By the time he reached the next avenue, her name was incomprehensible. It replayed itself in an infinite mental loop, the consonants and vowels dissolving into one another like ocean waves, his mind unable to demarcate where one instance of her name ended before another wave of Teresas began.

Teresa had only spoken twelve words to Rolando. The moments he had seen her were brief and insignificant, often times unknown to her; this he knew. And yet his thoughts circled her illogically. This consuming preoccupation had less to do with this

Teresa, whoever she truly was, and more to do with his own inchoate, romantic notions of her. He knew this. More than anything, he tried to dispel the ever present idea that she followed him somehow, throughout the day—that she watched him as some omniscient being, laughing at his clever jokes, hovering over him sympathetically as he lay sleepless with thoughts of her. He told himself this was deluded even as he imagined her watching

him now, admiring his romantic gesture from her perch in some unknown, mystical place.

As he passed the dark church and the small cemetery where his father’s body lay, the unseen narrow plot marked by an elaborately sculpted crucifix, he was convinced the only way out of his unfounded obsession with Teresa was a direct, albeit unsolicited, confrontation.

He must quell his obsession. She was just a woman like any other, possibly an insipid one, and certainly one that ate and shit and slept and sweated and sometimes smelled. But he couldn’t help recalling the only words she ever said to him: “Sir, what kind of tree is that? The flowers are so beautiful.”

He couldn’t remember the sound of her voice or summon a clear picture of her face most of the time. Still, he rearranged her words, omitting her stagnant verbs and reversing her nouns, extracting her bland adjectives, replacing them all with words he formed anew using the letters that came from her lips. This was his pastime; he spent an increasing number of hours this way, inventing language from her unremarkable sentences. It wasn’t dishonest. After all, they were the very words, letters, she used herself. So if he was convinced she said things like fill this heart, it beats for us, there was some truth in that.

He reached the small train depot and settled onto a wooden bench near the sun- bleached platform, his hands cupped around his knees. He breathed deeply, as he had been trained to do in the military, commanding calm over his tensed body, and imagined the series of events that would take place once Teresa’s train arrived, sure of his ability to find her among the other passengers, her silhouette unmistakable in the crowd. Her body

would glow, emitting its own light as she exited the passenger car, as if the sun’s radiance began in the hollows of her collar bones or the back of her neck. Next to her, everyone else would appear shadowy and gray.

As he waited for the train, he resented having wasted so many days just waiting for the brief minutes when Teresa crossed his path. He’d convinced himself he must not approach her, thinking himself gallant for observing some archaic rules of propriety he had absorbed as a child, leaving his tacit pleas cupped inside a flower day after day. Now his entire approach repulsed him. Today, she’d see him as a man.

The ground began trembling with the approaching train, still miles away. Rolando wondered about the order of the universe, how some divine fate should command that

Teresa pass his house at just the right moment on that morning when he first saw her (it must have been fate because after that morning, she walked past their quiet house at least an hour earlier, which suggested some sort of an unexpected, unplanned delay that forced her to pass his house just at the moment when he was summoned by Amparo to pick her flower). Why would this fate put Teresa in his path only to have her ignore him for so long then run away, and all without reason or justification? Surely this was not the design fate had in mind, and if so, it must be some punishment, a direct result of his own misstep, his own lack. Yes, he was sure taking this measure and meeting Teresa here was the only answer.

The train rumbled within sight, its engine sighing gray smoke into a lightening, already gray sky. Rolando left the bench and positioned himself behind a nearby

Poinciana tree. This felt like a trespass of sorts; he was forcing their paths to cross outside of the confines of his street, but if his passive approach had failed him, then this

aggression must be the answer. Only, outside of that familiar setting, he worried if he’d recognize her at all. Maybe she’d appear ugly to him somehow or plain without the spell of the quiet street and the suffocating walls of his mother’s house upon him. The idea that he’d been wrong about her, more than anything, sent his heart racing.

The train lurched closer and closer to the platform, still yards away, moving inch by inch, for what felt like a weeklong effort before stalling at the platform. Rolando forgot the words he’d planned on saying to Teresa, words that he’d rehearsed the night before, over and over in his mind as his mother watched from across the dinner table, slicing her steak into precise bite-sized triangles while muttering how she was convinced her son was the victim of some Santerian spell or demonic possession.

He tried remembering his carefully crafted phrases, recalling snatches of things like “divinely fated” and “interlaced destinies,” but something about being out there in the humid air of early dawn, his scratchy uniform pressed against the damp bark of a dripping tree, made it all sound absurd and presumptuous.

Teresa climbed out onto the platform, the last of the passengers to exit the train.

She yawned, her head tossed back, her arms limp at her sides, then quickly straightened and smoothed her skirt—it was a full, black skirt that Rolando had seen her wear several times before. Down the gravelly path that led to a paved road, her ankles wobbled over the small stones—thin, sharp little ankles that should not be expected to navigate such perilous terrain.

She looked so tired, so worn out. Her face was pale, and her pony tail had slipped off to one side as if she’d slept on the ride there. Hidden from her sight, Rolando closed his eyes and felt his own exhaustion. She’d probably been awake for hours already,

preparing herself for a day that likely began well before the sun rose and would end well after it set. She was tired—something he did not fathom when he saw her in his mind, always smiling, eager for his lips and his hands, always bending to his will, always responsive and available, her occasional sadness only for him, her sole reason for existence just Rolando. He felt sick. It was as if he’d been abusing her with his thoughts, as if his warped conception of her had contributed to her tired state.

She approached the tree where Rolando stood, and he stepped into her path. She didn’t look up, but watched the gravel below, carefully avoiding the larger stones that would likely cause the square heel of her shoe to slip and one of her skinny ankles to buckle.

“Teresa?”

She stopped.

“May I walk you to wherever it is that you are going? We don’t have to speak, only walk. And if you choose, this will be our last encounter ever. I promise to leave you alone.”

It did not approximate what he’d planned on saying. His words were stilted, his voice so high and nasal. He realized what a terrible impression he had made on her all along, first with his ridiculous flower antics and now in his officer’s uniform, a loaded gun holstered at his side. If she said yes to him now, it was surely out of intimidation, and not any remote regard for him. When he said he would leave her alone, he was convinced he meant it.

She nodded, and he slowly closed the gap between them, then took her arm before leading her down to the road.

They spoke only of impersonal things and only at intervals. She pointed out the multitudes of avocado blooms, and he a small flock of flamingoes heading westward.

Each time either one spoke, it seemed distasteful to Rolando, a violation of the early morning, of the silence that surrounded them, of all the things they were not saying. If they should speak at all, it should be meaningful, but he didn’t have the nerve to say anything meaningful. He forced himself to resist talking about the weather. Mostly they walked in silence, and her arm eventually slipped out of his.

As they approached his street, she asked that they part ways at his home.

“Can we do this again tomorrow?” he asked.

“Yes, I don’t see the harm in that.”

For Rolando, this was promising. This, he thought, was a rehearsal. Tomorrow would be the true test.

***

Eugenia, the neighbor, was the first to spot Rolando and Teresa, and she alerted everyone else. Rolando would later recall seeing her unmistakable figure in the distance, her short legs carrying her into the street in her housecoat and then quickly back into his mother’s yard, her arms pumping much faster than her legs.

But now he just thought it odd and wondered dimly who she might be expecting at such an early hour, wondering what else could prompt her to patrol the street indecently dressed. He squinted and tried to gauge whether she retreated into her own yard or his mother’s, but he was more preoccupied with Teresa and confirming where they would meet the next morning, imagining the Poinciana where he waited for her would be their tree. It was only when he saw the crowd emerge onto the street that he

understood it was for him, that the mass of people, which included several uniformed officers, could only be coming from his house.

He’d experienced this before, the scene almost exactly the same save for Teresa, whose body quickly shifted away when it became clear the throng of people was surging towards them. He had been walking home from the library just two years ago when this happened the first time. Then, he’d stood very still and held onto a small stack of books with both arms (of the several volumes he had carried that day, he remembers only that one of them was a collection of Ruben Dario’s poetry) as several neighbors and uniformed officers surrounded him and ushered him down the street and into his front yard, his mother’s wailing carrying well past the neighbors’ houses. Except this time

Amparo wasn’t crying out for his dead father, she was simply crying out, her shrieks reaching a crescendo well beyond language.

The crowd encircled Rolando before he could say anything else to Teresa. Again, they ushered him down the street and towards his mother’s home, only this time, the hands around him held him tightly, brusquely. Every now and then he felt a distinct shove, and at some point, someone relieved him of his pistol.

He knew all who are present, of course. The four officers were all coworkers, two of them close acquaintances he’d known since childhood—Juan since the second grade and Manuel, who everyone called Cuco. The neighbors had all known him since he was a child. And yet, in those frenzied moments, they all took to calling him Señor Torrez. It felt as if somehow, in the course of the morning, he’d lost his identity. He was not only a stranger to them, but a stranger who was suspect, guilty.

***

“We have found your son, my sky,” Eugenia cooed, bending over Amparo.

Rolando could see very little past the heads of everyone who surrounded his mother on the porch. He only knew Amparo lay supine on the floor, her legs elevated on her rocker, as several women from the neighborhood, led by the midwife who lived several streets over, attended to her, one of them holding a clear bottle under her nose so that the smell of mentholated rubbing alcohol filled the air.

“Bring him to me, let me see him once more,” his mother cried. He was certain, now, that his poor mother was in the throes of death. These were her last moments on this earth. This was why everyone treated him thus. He’d been negligent, his egoistic escapade the direct cause of his mother’s impending death.

He pushed past the crowd towards his mother, shaking free of the officers that still held him.

The women made way for him as he kneeled down next to his mother, noting the small bandage around her hand and the raised bruise just above her eyebrow.

They had never been a demonstrative family. He brushed her hair away from her face and held back tears, uncertain of what to say or how to embrace her.

“My son,” she sobbed, “I forgive you even if the law does not.” She pulled him close, and he let his head rest on her shoulder, relieved she forgave him while disregarding her mention of the law—she was likely growing incoherent, he thought. She was fading.

“I’m so sorry, just tell me what happened, tell me how I can fix it,” he said into her collar, the familiar smell of her rose perfume finally eliciting tears, not only for his

mother’s present state, but for all of the times he’d kissed her cheek and thought how repulsive that scent was—a perfume fit only for old women. Old widowed women.

“Know this,” she whispered, “What I am doing is for your benefit, not just in this life, but the next.”

Before he could turn his head and face her and ask what she could possibly mean, she released him and pushed him away, crying out, “Take him, take him, just take him,” her cries astoundingly louder than before.

And so the men rushed forward and plucked Rolando from his mother. Officer

Collazo, the one everyone called Cuco, spit as he squeezed a pair of handcuffs around

Rolando’s wrists then pretended not to see when one of the neighbors jabbed Rolando twice in the ribs.

Rolando did not resist as he was led back out to the street, led tripping through the deepest puddles, led falling to his knees and then his face, before being shoved into the back of a police wagon. He cooperated fully while absorbing every scrap of information he could from his final moments on his mother’s porch until he was finally left alone in a windowless cell hours later, beaten and unconscious.

He was a rascal of the very worst kind. He stole money from his very own mother and then pushed her into a window and wrought iron rails when she confronted him about his thievery. But it didn’t end there. Then he attacked the very woman who gave him life with her very own cane before fleeing to meet a prostitute, the obvious beneficiary of his mother’s pilfered cash. He was lucky, everyone agreed, that his mother was such a saint, for she begged the authorities to pursue the least of all charges just as long as her son had

access to some type of religious reform. Just as long as he was locked away somewhere safe, where he could do no harm to her or to himself.

In the Name of the Father

Amparo is a religious woman.

On the morning of her son’s arrest, just as she does every morning, while her bedroom is still dark in the muted dawn, she kneels by her bed, her rosary beads held tightly between her hands, their solid roundness pressing dimples into her palms, as she asks for the blessing, salvation, and eternal peace of each soul she knows, living or otherwise. Each bead on her rosary represents a soul, and often several beads, because of the number of souls she prays for, moonlight as two or three souls.

She begins with her neighbors Lazaro and Eugenia and their sons Ofelio and

Tomás because her bedroom window faces their home, and so she always thinks of them first—they’re a nice family, but they don’t attend church with any regularity, and she has seen the woman sweeping out her porch on Sundays.

She prays for the butcher, Juan Carlos, and his quiet son, Robertico, who may or may not have a case of intestinal worms because despite a steady diet of pork and beef and blood sausage, he is lethargic and thin as a rail.

She prays for her long ago deceased great-grandmother, Azucena, who had a passion for beating her daughter (Amaparo’s grandmother, Eva) with leather belts, shoes, wooden broomsticks, and on one occasion a desiccated femur (witnesses speculated it could have only belonged to a calf or a large goat, and definitely not a person), but who

rarely raised her voice to her five sons who swore the woman was a saint and vehemently denied Eva’s claims of abuse.

She prays for those five great uncles that turned a blind eye to their sister’s regular beatings (their names Pedro, Luis, Juan, Ramón, and Jorge).

She prays for her grandmother, Eva, who took to beating her own son (Amparo’s father, Ignacio), with leather belts, shoes, wooden broomsticks, and on one occasion their startled cat, Mamita.

She prays for a second cousin (his name escapes her) that set himself aflame after an unfortunate fishing accident left him paralyzed from the waist down—she prays for him twice, once for his suicide, and once for his lascivious, pre-fishing-accident ways.

She prays for her father, Ignacio, who managed to break the abusive cycle by never saying a word, good or bad, to his children from the day they were born until the day they left the house or died.

She prays for her mother, who demanded all the children return their father’s silence, enforcing absolute quiet with leather belts and shoes and wooden broomsticks and on one occasion the smoldering tip of a cigar held to the pink arch of Amaparo’s foot.

She prays for her ugly sister, Hortensia.

She prays for her husband’s soul, may God rest it, though she’s sure he roams the gray corridors of purgatory.

She prays for her long ago miscarried baby and its tiny soul lost in the folds of a blood clot.

And each morning she prays for Rolando. On him she lingers longest. She asks the Lord to grant her son the strength to resist temptation on that day, and she asks the

Lord to forgive his trespasses while enumerating his sins of the previous day (sins she already enumerated the night before during her pre-bed prayers—she worries God doesn’t want to hear about them twice, but she can’t resist safeguarding her son’s absolution with twice the appeals).

On this particular morning, his sins from the previous day included muttering hell under his breath after knocking over a glass of water, taking the Lord’s name in vain nine times, coveting a stranger that passed their house twice daily, and masturbating. And idolatry. If he knelt for anyone, it was the young woman he watched from his darkened bedroom each morning and each night. And he dishonored her, his own mother, and he lied about work, and he took money from the bureau where she saved his wages for him, and he was angry—when he took unnecessarily long baths and she tapped on the door, if only to prevent or interrupt yet another sin as he sat alone in the tub, nude and vulnerable to the devil’s temptations, he became angry with her, and his anger bordered on hate, she knew, which was just another sin. Sin begot sin.

She follows the litany of Rolando’s sins with a string of Avemarias on his behalf because her son, her only son, refused to step foot in the church. And as his mother (she hoped God, in his infinite mercy and wisdom, understood, and she was almost certain he agreed with her), she held the burden of saving his soul, just as she’d been charged with his nourishment as an infant, and his education and discipline as a child. Now that he is a man, she must save him from damnation, if not for this life, then for the afterlife.

***

Amparo’s religious zeal is not a learned behavior. Her parents were agnostics, if not atheists. They were farmers who understood the laws of nature. They observed the cycle of life and death dramatized daily among their crops, their animals, their children.

Just as a fallen tree would decompose and soon melt back into the earth, so would a dead chicken or a horse or a set of stillborn twins. If anything lived beyond death, it was in the land’s fertility gained from rot, or in the teeming mound of ants that dispersed bits of the dead in ordered lines, or in the belly of a vulture as it circled down and later soared away, replete. Amparo’s zeal, rather, stemmed from a genetic predisposition tracing back several generations to the days of Spanish conquest.

The powerful gene, lurking in spirals of DNA, often skipped generations, lying dormant for five or six decades of spiritually indifferent progeny, just to spring forth once again inside a young boy inexplicably given to flaying himself and unsuspecting stray dogs and his infant siblings, or within the body of an aging spinster determined to baptize all of a plantation’s slave children in the healing waters of the Atlantic during a tropical storm. And while long denied and later forgotten, his link to the family obliterated by negation and time, this particular gene could be traced on Amparo’s father’s side all the way back to the dubious Franciscan friar left nameless throughout history, his notoriety stemming from his confrontation with the legendary Taíno chief, Hatuey.

The friar, a faithful servant to the one and only living God, had reveled in capturing the rebellious savage, in subduing him with that ever present symbol of religious fervor: the boiling flame reserved not only for the recesses of Hell, but for guaranteed delivery to its depths. While Hatuey was secured to the stake, his bruised arms and blistered legs bound to the sturdy trunk of a looming majagua tree—the blues of

the wood-grain quickly darkening to black, the smell of cooked flowers and flesh sticking to the clothing and hair and skin of onlookers for days, sometimes weeks, refusing to wash out no matter how vigorously they scrubbed—the friar demonstrated his Christian magnanimity in his last request to Hatuey:

“Accept the Lord as your savior, my son. Your heathen soul can still be saved so that you may enter the kingdom of heaven and avoid the eternal torments of the Inferno.”

In response, Hatuey asked the friar if all Christians went to heaven, to which the friar replied with an unequivocal yes.

Hatuey’s next response went something like this: “If Christian bastards like you make heaven their eternal playground, I’d rather burn in the smelly pits of hell.”

While Amparo doesn’t make a habit of hunting down Godless natives (which would prove fruitless at this point in time anyway because a great majority of Cuban natives were wiped out by the mid-sixteenth century), she does, somehow, unwittingly channel the Franciscan’s passion for saving souls, with the bulk of her passions poured into the saving of one soul in particular.

***

That morning, after Amaparo’s prayers for everyone are concluded, she dresses and goes to the porch, genuflecting at each crucifix hanging over each threshold throughout the house.

When they married, her husband, Mauricio, forbid her from hanging any of her cherished crucifixes in the house. He couldn’t stand the sight of multiple Jesuses tacked onto multiple crosses, the emaciated savior dying multiple deaths on their walls while they all went about their day, having breakfast, watering the houseplants, farting, napping

on the couch, all of it happening while Jesus hung and bled, his holy head tilted in perpetual supplication. Morbid, Mauricio called it. He never understood the crosses were a reminder of the Lord’s greatest sacrifice for His children, or maybe, Amparo thought, he did understand, and the guilt was too much for him to bear.

Maybe his guilt, that small fruit of his sins, grew larger, bulging rounder and heavier, its colors blooming brighter with each minute he spent with another woman, or each time his fingers caressed the lock of another’s hair or traced the length of another’s thigh. Or each time he brushed away the thought of his wife, not with contempt or disgust

(she knew he had never felt any of those things towards her despite everything), but with a sad indifference. Maybe his guilt made it unbearable for him to look upon the Messiah.

Maybe that monstrous, guilty fruit eventually burst, stopping his heart once and for all.

The thought of it saddens her. She still loves Mauricio. She still wishes she didn’t hate him.

She settles into her rocking chair on the porch and calls to her son just as she does every morning, rapping on his bedroom window, which overlooks the front porch, with her cane.

The day is gray. It rained all throughout the previous night, and it looks like it will soon rain again. It’s a blessing. The puddles in the road and the impending shower are both strong arguments for Rolando to accompany her to church. Once inside the church, perhaps the Holy Spirit will do the rest and move Rolando to worship on his own.

She calls out his name again, tapping on the window, excited and convinced that

Rolando will join her for mass. He’s a devoted son. She knows he always wanted to move to the capitol. Those were his plans before Mauricio died: to attend the university

and study first literature and then law. He took the necessary exams, but Mauricio had his heart attack, and so Rolando agreed to become an officer of the state so he could stay and support them both. That sort of devotion only needs slight translation, a small push, towards a greater obligation to God.

She calls for him a third time, this time much louder, unconcerned about the neighbors, convinced everyone should rise at that early hour.

She taps at the window harder, rattling the glass with the metal handle of her cane. She taps and taps until the trembling pane shatters. A thin shard of glass bites into the back of her hand just as she recoils from the crash. While the wound itself is small, it is located at an unfortunate (or fortunate) spot on her hand, precisely where several bulging veins surmount the delicate bones of her fingers.

Blood surges forth from the nick in a steady stream that can’t be contained by her shaky left hand or the hem of her dress. It spills onto the Spanish tiles of the porch, glossy tiles already precarious and wet with the night’s rain. She bends forward out of her rocker and fumbles for the cane she let fall after the shatter, but her feet skate in the small amount of blood and rainwater at her feet. This sends her sprawling to the floor, but not before her head knocks into the wrought iron rails of the porch.

Through it all, Rolando does not emerge from his room. He didn’t stir when she called, which is not uncommon, except that lately he’s usually already awake when she calls, watching and waiting at his window for that woman to walk past their house on her way to who knows where (probably a brothel, Amparo mused). He didn’t startle awake when the glass crashed inches from where his sleeping head would normally rest.

Falling towards the floor, her body curling away from the approaching rail but unable to create enough distance between her head and the ornate metal posts, Amparo is sure there can only be one reason Rolando doesn’t now scramble to his window and shout ¿Que paso? or ¿Que fue? or ¡Carajo! ¡Mamá! ¡Auxilio! as his very own mother screams her way down from the chair to the floor. He must be dead in his bed. She can see Rolando’s colorless face, his eyes wide and fixed, his bed sheets twisted around stiffened legs, just as she found Mauricio. In that moment, she knows she has not done nearly enough to save his soul. If her son is to meet his father’s end, it’s her fault. Just before her head hits first metal then porcelain, fractions of seconds before blacking out, Amparo resolves to save her son, who, part of her is certain, is actually alive and sinning his soul away somewhere. Together, she and Rolando will walk the narrow path of the righteous, and she will get him to the kingdom of heaven for eternal life even if it kills them.

The Hands of Men

The officers took a strange pleasure in arresting Rolando.

As they stood on Señora Torrez’s front porch and listened to her wail, the tallest of the three stooping over her and trying his best to pick out words and phrases from an endless string of yelps and chest-hitching sobs, they all felt a delicate glee begin to stir inside of them, unfurling and swelling with each passing moment. Soon they too panted like Señora Torrez. Their hands began to shake, and their eyes watered. The old woman was sprawled across the floor just as they had seen her on at least three separate occasions (one of the officers silently mused that was perhaps how she spent all of her days, collapsed and scooting around her house on her belly or on her ass), only this time, she was bleeding, clearly injured, and her alleged attacker was none other than her own son and their fellow officer: dear, sweet Rolando.

It’s not that they disliked Rolando. They just did not especially like him.

He was so quiet. Except when he laughed, and then his cawing laughter was too loud. The men had discussed this peculiarity on several occasions, and they all agreed that the stark contrast between the two postures could only mean one was counterfeit, and so they distrusted both.

And while he was not one of those that was too smart—spouting off knowledge on everything from the dwindling population of nightingales to the state of Cuba’s economy—when he did have an opinion, it was always in line with the majority, always 62

appropriately moderate. It was this middling way about him that unnerved them. He never invited dissension, and being able to defend one’s ideas proved a man’s worth, they all agreed, though none of them could recall ever having defended his ideas or challenged another’s at any time.

He was not extremely handsome, but parts of him were too delicate and pretty, almost. His hands were not too small or dainty, but they were unlined and unscarred and utterly without the black crescents that permanently tipped each of Officer Collazo’s convex nails, or the gray and cracked calluses that formed a husk around Officer

Rebollo’s meaty palms, or the thick tufts of black hair that extended from the cuffs of

Officer Pietra’s sleeves and onto the tops of his square fingers like a second set of hands creeping forth to consume the first. No, Rolando’s hands were not the hands of a real man.

Yes, he had the strong, wide shoulders of a respectable officer, but that waist of his was absurdly small. A waist, they had often joked, they could grip one-handed, as each of them pictured their dirty, calloused, hairy fingers closing in and around

Rolando’s slender waist and holding on tight.

And there was the matter of his mustache. While it was a decent size, it did not curl away from his face like it was trying to get away, or obediently settle into a heaping mound one or more inches thick in order to successfully obscure any signs of an upper lip. Instead, Rolando’s mustache lay flat and smooth against his skin; its black hair so silky, the three men often wondered to themselves what it would feel like if they were to perhaps run a fingertip or two across it, smoothing it downwards from the bottom of his nose to the top of his lips.

And after several police calls to his home, calls initiated by neighbors complaining of Sra. Torrez’s loud hysterics that were invariably the result of nightmares and, on one occasion, the death of a beloved cat, the officers had begun to suspect nearly everything Rolando said and did. The place was a practically a palace, one of them had declared on their first visit, and soon they all believed it, even if each subsequent visit revealed a house only slightly larger than average. Sra. Torrez wore gold rings on all of her fingers, another pointed out, and each room in the house flaunted furniture that could only be of the highest quality, they all agreed, as each of them willfully overlooked dusty armchairs and scarred tables clearly unfit for royalty. As a result, whenever Rolando expressed the customary anticipation for their next payday, they could feel their lips begin to curl. If he declined to go out for drinks after work, mumbling that he just didn’t have the money to spare, they had to struggle to keep their hands from folding into tight fists.

So, naturally, when they arrested him, when they took Officer Collazo’s cuffs and hooked them around Rolando’s hairless hands, each officer taking his turn at squeezing them tighter so the hands would twitch, so the skin of those pale wrists would pinch and purple, they struggled to hold back smiles—big toothy, jaw-clenching grins.

When they jostled him along the uneven road and tripped him up so that his face slid into a puddle of mud and his exquisite mustache dripped with what might have been dog shit, they each felt an earthquake of suppressed laughter trembling in their round bellies and puffed-up chests.

And when they shoved him into the back of the car and watched him tumble onto the vinyl seat face first, his body bending into sharp and critically acute angles, they hoped that tiny waist of his would violently snap.

They pulled the car over twice during the six-minute drive to the police station.

They wanted to teach Rolando a lesson or two about stealing from his own widowed, elderly, possibly demented, crazy bitch of a mother. Their hearts were set on punishment of such heft that whatever doubts they had about the old woman’s rambling accusations were recklessly forgotten. And so they punished Rolando for being too quiet and then for not fighting back, for falling over, and for retching when it became too much. They punished him for not losing a tooth or two, and, in the end, for staying down. By the time they arrived at the station, the men had to carry him into his cell, and when they at last locked him away, they each took jubilant turns clapping each other on the back.

They had been right not to trust him, they all told one another. He had it coming to him, they agreed, and of course, there was no doubt he deserved it.

The youngest of the three, Officer Pietra, was the first to go home that night. He lived with an elderly uncle in a cramped house that smelled perpetually of boiled malanga and what he could only define as unwashed hair, though the layered smell often carried hints of other, often unpleasant smells. His room was at the very back of the house and ran up against a narrow alleyway that bordered the backs of countless other houses identical to his uncle’s, all of them squat and narrow and, no doubt, just as redolent of boiled malanga, the poor Cuban’s staple.

That evening as he tried to sleep, his left hand numb from all the shots he’d taken at Rolando’s face and his stomach roiling with an excess of beer that served as his only dinner, a group of men from around the neighborhood gathered near his window where a streetlight shone on the damp alley. By the sounds of it, Pietra knew they were playing dominoes. He also recognized their voices as the four teased one another throughout the game; one man from across the street called another who lived two houses down a dick- eater for holding onto his double nines; a third (the brother of the first man) accused the fourth, a man who lived in the house directly behind Pietra’s uncle, of adding the score incorrectly and of still suckling his mother’s sagging, desiccated tits. Normally, Pietra would have laughed at this sort of thing, but on this night the jeers repulsed and infuriated him.

This particular group of neighbors gathered regularly for seemingly endless games of dominoes and poker. Pietra had tried joining them several times, but they always treated him suspiciously and insisted on calling him Officer Pietra—this even after he urged them on several occasions, and with a measure of characteristic, self- deprecating good humor, to just call him Hector. Now he berated himself for ever having humbled himself for their sake. They knew he was not one of them, and he only regretted that he had not immediately known that too.

Pietra sat up slowly, his eyes still closed. In the familiar dark of his room, he reached for his pants, which he had draped across the back of the single chair at the foot of his bed. His left hand would hurt in the morning, he knew, but now it felt large and solid, as if the flesh itself had ossified and ballooned into a giant glove of bone. He slipped into his pants and felt around the floor for his shoes with his bare feet. In his

mind, his left hand grew larger still, all of the dimples and wrinkles vanishing into a hand that was dense and glossy and smooth. He would take his left hand and slam it down on the back-alley dominoes game, sending all of the dotted tiles cart-wheeling into the lamplight. He’d rake it across the faces of the startled men, and hammer it against their skulls, and the best part of all was that he wouldn’t feel a thing.

Pietra didn’t bother with his shirt and tie. He was wearing an undershirt, and removing his uniform minutes before had taught him that while his left hand may be indestructible, it was incapable of the fine motor skills small buttons required, and his right hand, while normally cooperative and nearly as capable as his left, was less so when under the rebellious influences of a dozen or so beers. He tucked his undershirt into his pants stiffly with his left hand and reached for the pistol on his nightstand with his right, its metal and polished wood feeling oddly foreign. He wondered absently if he’d even be able to shoot with his right if it became necessary, before finally opening his eyes, satisfied that he could see nearly everything in the dark. He’d be able to crouch in the narrow space between his uncle’s house and the house next door and creep closer and closer to the men while remaining undetected.

When he stood, he swayed forward and back slowly before finally straightening.

He smiled and thought how nice it would be if he could see his own grin gleaming in the dark.

He turned to leave his room, treading softly on his toes, but stopped short when he saw the soft glow of the kitchen light casting a thin, diffused sliver beneath his door.

There’d be no stealth now, no perfect vengeance. Just his old uncle intercepting him at the front door, his old, knotted fingers prying Hector’s hairy hands from the pistol, his bent body quivering in his path.

The knowledge that his uncle was still awake, banging around in the kitchen, just reminded him of how eagerly he’d gone to the old man directly after his shift had ended that evening. He’d parceled out the story of their big arrest bit by bit, pausing several times for added suspense because he knew how the old man appreciated a good story. He took care to characterize Rolando in a certain light, making a strong case for everything that unfolded that afternoon, leaving out some of the more brutal parts. In the end, he held up his battering ram of a hand for effect.

Still, his uncle had not reacted as Pietra had anticipated. Where Pietra paused for a nod or a guffaw or just a satisfied sneer, the old man only shook his head and stared at his feet, which shuffled whenever Pietra’s story escalated. When it was clear Pietra’s story had come to its uncertain end, the old man simply stood and staggered away, mumbling

“bueno, hijo, bueno” and nothing more. That was when Pietra had taken off for the cafeteria, squandering two thirds of his paycheck on beer for himself and a few regulars who were sure to appreciate his story. He soon learned, however, that their approving nods were too easily won. Before he came to the end of his story, he excused himself for a trip to the bathroom, but returned home instead, slipping back into the house unseen.

Even in his drunken state, he knew he couldn’t let his uncle see him this way, half- dressed and gun drawn, swaying and squinting. He sat back on the chair at the foot of his bed and figured he’d wait the old man out, but as he watched the dim light beneath his door, he could only picture the old man sitting at the table. He was still up, and it could

only mean he was waiting on Hector to eat dinner. The old man cooked for him every night, bringing his meager meal to the table and doing all of the dishes afterwards. And on Fridays, he and the old man shared a can of papaya chunks in heavy syrup topped with a slice of cheese. For this special treat, the old man dispensed with the tin plates they normally ate from and brought out the cracked porcelain that had belonged to his wife.

Except tonight, the old man would take his once-a-week dessert alone or not at all. He couldn’t stand it—the thought of his old uncle hunched at the table, watching the front door, waiting for the nephew he didn’t know was already home, drunk and vengeful.

How long would he wait like that?

No, he wouldn’t allow the old man to stay up, waiting for him. He’d call to his uncle from his room, tell him to just go to bed because he wasn’t eating tonight, but not yet. He’d have to wait for his voice to steady and for the hoarseness to disappear. He’d wait for that, and then he’d go back to bed.

Shortly after Pietra, Officer Collazo went home to his wife and greeted her with a kiss that left pink marks around her lips and near her chin, where his prickly beard, unshaven since the day before, chafed her skin. He pulled her into their bedroom and shut the door behind them even though they lived alone in their small apartment, still childless after eight years of marriage. After he kicked the door closed, he pushed her onto their bed, but not before spinning her around because he could not look at her face. It had grown redder around the mouth in the short time it took to stumble into the bedroom, and her eyes, which always managed to avoid his, almost always settling somewhere near his

shoulders no matter how grave or lighthearted their exchange, now bore a tunnel straight to his, making it hard for him to blink or swallow.

Minutes later, his thighs trembling and slick and sticky, Manuel Collazo retreated to the small bathroom adjacent to their bedroom and ran the shower. He sat on the lidded toilet and listened for the sounds of his wife in the next room. She cleared her throat several times, and, despite the steady drumming of the shower, he was sure he could hear the soft whispers of her bare feet across the tiled floor. He knew she was busy remaking their bed and folding his pants, which he could not recall unbuckling and slipping out of once they had reached the bedroom.

Behind him, on the toilet tank, sat a neatly folded set of clothes along with a fresh towel. The clean clothes and towel were always there, restored and gracefully arranged on the toilet tank each day—a constant fixture just awaiting his arrival no matter what time he came home. He knew this because he had often stopped by the apartment several times throughout the day, unannounced, during the early years of their marriage. Back then, he had made his numerous surprise visits under the guise that he could not keep away from her, that his passion for her compelled him to leave work and rush home unexpectedly and involuntarily, despite the threat of being discovered and possibly losing his job. In truth, he had never trusted her, and each day, he expected to find her half- naked and frozen in any one of a series of obscene poses, eyes wide and arms outstretched, with another man’s dick down her throat. Instead, he always found her in her housedress and slippers, occupied by varying stages of cooking or cleaning, as predictable as the clothes and towel in the bathroom.

Whether he dropped in fifteen minutes after leaving for work or three hours after the end of his shift, the cleaning and cooking wife and the clothes and towel were always there—the tired eyes and faded flower-print dress and sharp collar bones alongside the white socks, the cotton briefs, the frayed undershirt, the creased pants, the collared shirt, and the coiled belt all stacked beneath the meticulous folds of threadbare terrycloth. He guessed Elena put them there the minute he left for work in the morning, very likely before she even brushed her teeth or used the toilet—her first act in an endless and monotonous series of tasks all designed to maintain the perfect home.

The woman was a saint, and he could not fathom what had just taken hold of him—what had possessed him to use her as he had, pulling her and shoving her and restraining her and, in the end, humiliating her. All he could think of was how his hands looked entangled in her frizzy, thinning hair and his overwhelming desire to dig his dirty nails deeper into her skin, and the way her body looked afterwards, simply there, motionless, her face buried in a baby blue pillow—her favorite color because it was the color of the shirt he wore on the day they met at the bus stop so many years ago—and her ugly housedress hiked up so high, it forced her arms straight out so that, from behind, she looked as if she were flying or drowning; he had heard the dress rip when he yanked it up, forcing it past her dimpled hips with one forceful tug, and pulling it hard by the hem to avoid brushing his hands against her flabby skin, and when he’d heard the sound of fabric and thread tearing, it had made him want to tear and break more things, to hear the sounds of everything he touched falling apart.

The woman was a fucking saint, and he was just a fucking animal. He tried to induce a crying jag, frowning and squinting his eyes and taking in sharp breaths, because

he should cry, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had. He even forced out a loud sob, but no tears came. Instead, the loud, fake sob called his wife to the door.

“Cucito?” Only she called him Cucito. He often thought it sounded ridiculous, but hearing her call him that now, after everything, made him wish harder for genuine tears.

“Are you okay, Cucito? Do you want something to eat or a glass of warm milk, maybe?”

She always offered him a glass of warm milk, sweetened with a teaspoon of honey, on nights when he could not sleep. Not a shot of rum, or a quick fuck, never that.

Not even, at the very least, a half-hearted back rub. Always it was the warm milk. He’d long ago convinced himself it must be some sort of crazy, misplaced maternal impulse.

And, as of late, he’d considered that maybe it wasn’t so mindless and innocent a thing as some irrepressible instinct. He’d thought maybe it was her nasty little way of punishing him, of reminding him that they were childless, and it could only be because of him; he was the defective one (after all, she had gotten pregnant before though not by him—no, it had happened just before they’d met and she’d been sure to disclose that piece of her history because she was not one of those that would feign virginity, though he often wished she had). But now he quickly pushed that notion away. She was incapable of any meanness; the woman was a saint.

“Yes,” he called to her, “please, and make it extra sweet.”

After he was sure she was in the kitchen and a safe distance away, he tried once more to summon tears. He replayed the scene in the bedroom in his mind, but no tears came. Only later, when he slept, did he finally cry out in ragged sobs and startle Elena awake, who, in turn, woke Collazo. Half-awake and still crying, Collazo held his wife

and apologized over and over, whispering a string of I’m sorries even as the dream of

Rolando Torrez remained so fresh, he could still feel the soft sweep of Rolando’s mustache against the back of his hand.

Officer Rebollo was the last to leave the station. He apprised the night shift officers of their new prisoner, betraying none of his waning delight that the one under lock and key was Officer Torrez and expressing the requisite amount of shock at the strange development: “Yes, it’s shocking. Hard to believe, one of our own.” Afterwards, as he headed for the rear exit, he heard voices rising in the next room. One of the voices belonged to a night shift officer, an older man they knew only as Tino; the other voice was clearly feminine and vaguely familiar. He edged closer to the doorway leading to the small front room and listened unseen.

“My son is being falsely imprisoned in your jail,” the woman said.

“Ma’am, I assure you, all of our criminals are justly imprisoned in our jails under all circumstances,” Tino replied.

The woman protested, and as she did, her speech took on several curiosities, vacillating between a familiar Cuban drawl and a poorly imitated Spanish accent, so that she soon began lisping and slurring haphazardly until her speech devolved further still into a series of yelps and sobs that were unmistakably Señora Torrez’s.

Officer Rebollo entered the room and stood over Señora Torrez, trying, for the second time that day, to decode her hysterics.

She was wrong, she cried. It was all false. She was getting older now, though not an old woman per se, or at least she did not think of herself in those exact terms. Still,

since her husband had died, her mind was not at all what it used to be, and sometimes she wasn’t sure if the things that happened to her were real or dreamed, and after all, the theft she reported was perhaps not a theft at all, technically speaking. She’d depended on her son’s income ever since her husband died, God rest his soul, and she kept the money in a safe place for him—for the both of them—so if he took that money, it was, after all, rightfully his, was it not? And when she fell down, she certainly thought she had been pushed, but the floors were wet, and she bumped her head on her way down, so surely it was within the realm of possibility that she had become confused, and maybe even angry in some ways, that her only son and blood of her blood had not been there to catch her, especially since she had not seen him at all that morning. And the officers themselves knew he had not been there; they had witnessed him returning from somewhere else. No, she could not go through with the charges against her son.

But Officer Rebollo, the tallest of the three, the very man that had struggled to project patience and understanding when they had arrived at her home earlier that day, curtly disagreed.

“Señora Torrez,” he enunciated slowly, lisping his way through the final z because he thought it would add an authoritative air to his already condescending tone,

“you cannot wage serious charges and later recant them because the criminal in question just so happens to be your son. We have reviewed all of the evidence, your initial testimony included, and we are convinced of Rolando Torrez’s guilt. Now, good night.”

He left the room and hurried down the hall to avoid yet another blubbering scene with the old woman. Tino’s bemused voice echoed faintly in the hallway as he offered

Rolando’s mother two options: stick around for an extended stay or dry the river of tears

and leave at once. Rebollo hurried away faster to avoid hearing any more while also forcing himself to smile, recalling just how capable Tino was when it came to dispensing with manic old women. Still, he knew that under normal circumstances, he would have stuck around for one of Tino’s performances and that the smile on his face should not feel as if it were being held in place by several straight pins. Stumbling down the hall,

Rebollo also found that he could not exactly bring himself to go home, either.

Two hours later, Rebollo had passed Rolando’s cell at least six times. Mentally, he mapped the various positions in which Rolando’s body moved, forming a counter- clockwise pattern that seemed destined to end in the corner furthest from the door, precisely where a soiled urinal leaned.

He found he was incapable of considering the complexities of the case, of the events that had led to his current position—to their little situation. He tried summoning his hatred for Rolando by going through the litany of reasons his beating and incarceration were not only justified, but deserved, but the sharp edges of his hatred had dulled. The mustache, the hands, the dainty waist, the airless house, the cawing laugh— which one of these angered him the most if at all? He couldn’t tell. All he knew was that he should be going home, but, instead, he felt as if the center of the earth had momentarily shifted to where Rolando slept; Rolando’s entire body, from his bare feet to the very ends of his hair, all covered in a crackled patina of blood and mud, had somehow annexed the earth’s core. No matter how many times Rebollo headed purposefully for the door of the station, even going so far as crossing the street and making it past several blocks, he found that he eventually circled back and wound up, once again, at the metal bars before an unconscious Rolando.

He eventually called his wife.

“I will be late,” he told her. How late, he wasn’t sure. Before she replied, she began scolding their youngest boy, Camilo, for wandering around the house barefoot.

“Barefoot again,” she shouted, “You’re going to have the feet of a country boy, and nobody wants that. See if I catch you barefoot again; see if I don’t set matches to toes.”

His wife’s comment was also intended for him. He’d grown up a shoeless country boy, and he regularly spent his time at home barefoot because shoes inevitably pinched and squeezed his broad feet. By the end of the day, the bottoms of his feet were black with dirt and dust, which repulsed his wife and sent her into a rage, demanding he scrub his nasty feet before putting them anywhere near their bed.

Normally, he would have taken up for the boy and accused his wife of going too far, always threatening violence for the most benign offences. And poor Camilo often had nightmares stemming from his mother’s threats—his feet crackling in big, orange flames; his mouth stuffed with big, square bars of soap; his body hanging from the highest limb of the mango tree by his too-long, too-dirty fingernails. And it was always Rebollo who struggled, half-asleep, to coax the hysterical child back to bed. After all, the last person

Camilo wanted to see in the dead of night was the very person that had menaced him with the stuff of his nightmares. Rebollo wanted to tell his wife that if anyone deserved scorched feet, it was her, but the thought of the confrontation made him realize just how tired he was. Although he wasn’t sure his wife could hear him above the din of Camilo’s crying, Rebollo told his wife not to wait up for him before he hung up the phone.

He knew there was really no good reason for him to stay at the station any longer, but now that he’d called home, he was free to stay as long as he liked. An hour later,

Rebollo let himself into Rolando’s cell. At first he only sat on the empty cot and waited for Rolando to awaken, certain he would sit up at any moment and start accusing Rebollo of countless brutalities so that Rebollo could once again grow angry and indignant and self-assured. He was ready for that. He needed to revive his hatred for Rolando, to give it food and drink and make it grow big and fat, insatiable and immovable as a whale.

Instead, Rolando continued to sleep, his breathing labored and no doubt aggravated by the dried pebbles of mud and blood that obstructed his nostrils. He slept on his side, his lips parted, his eyes slightly open. Rebollo slid to the floor and crept closer on his hands and knees. He wanted to be sure Rolando was truly asleep and not just faking it, secretly watching through lidded eyes for one of his attackers to leave his side so he could get up and begin planning his retaliation. But up close, Rebollo could see that Rolando’s eyes were rolling and darting, his eyelids fluttering and his face twitching. His hands were curled into loose fists and sometimes his fingers twitched, too; sometimes his whole arm.

It reminded him of Camilo—the fitful sleep of a terrified boy.

Rebollo brought over a basin of water and set it next to Rolando. Soon he’d wake and want to clean himself up and the water basin would be there for him so he wouldn’t have to call out.

Twenty minutes later, with Rolando still asleep—not necessarily unconscious, just asleep, Rebollo told himself, just very, deeply asleep—Rebollo began the task himself by gingerly rubbing away the mud and blood on Rolando’s face with his fingertips, hoping his calloused fingers wouldn’t cause more injury. He spent an

indefinite amount of time this way, on his knees, dipping his hands into the water and bringing them to Rolando’s face, at once relieved and disturbed that his patient did not stir.

That night, on his way home, and later in bed with his sleeping wife, he could still feel phantom bits of dried blood and mud scratching against his fingers.

The next day, the three officers greeted each other stiffly. No one spoke of

Rolando. Each officer became aware of Sra. Torrez’s visit, of her allegedly false claims, but each man knew there was nothing to be done, and so no one spoke about that either.

In the coming days and weeks, seeing Rolando daily in his cell became less and less disconcerting. Soon one officer brought Rolando a decent comb after watching how he struggled just trying to run his ringers through his matted hair. On another day, a different officer held up a mirror so that Rolando could shave. Another officer brought him coffee each morning and watched as Rolando sipped it slowly, his eyes closed whenever he swallowed. Each officer, at some point, volunteered to mail letters to a certain young lady, taking care not to bend or smudge the envelope.

Rolando served six months for theft because he would not denounce his mother, though in his letters, some of the officers read about how angry he was, how he would never forgive her for lying as long as he lived. The officers thought his decision was admirable, and one or two of them might have told him so, though later they would all call his decision foolish, each one forgetting, with time, that they had played any part in his arrest at all.

The Hearts of Women

Ever since the first day Teresa arrived at his home, Rafael Hidálgo has dreamed he is a nectar bat—the smallest of its kind. Blindly, he searches the dark by sound and scent; the rounded discs of his ears rotate and flex as the echoes of the emptiness surrounding him reverberate back to him. The flapping of his wings engulfs him—a whirring cloud of sound and movement. Some nights the world around him is a dark abyss, and as he takes flight, he can’t tell whether he is hurtling himself towards the sky or down, down to the ground, so he swoops and dives endlessly, estimating in his mind the sizes of the various ellipses and circles his body traces in the dark.

He circles and swoops until he can smell her, until he finds her. She is a gaping flower in the dark. Her scent is a trail of breadcrumbs he must follow. He crashes his body from limb to limb, thirsty and hungry, his heart keeping pace with his frenetic wings, desperate to hurl himself into the place where all of her velvety petals meet, where the scent becomes a solid thing, a sweetness he can see, a brightness he can taste. He swallows the nectar, but it always tastes the same: like charred meat and ash.

Each morning, when he wakes from his bat dreams, Rafael comes to the realization, in small increments, that he is wingless, that his face is without fur, that his ears are incapable of rotation, that his feet cannot grasp the delicate branches of a gardenia bush. He is lying supine on his bed, and his sightlessness is not the blindness of bats. It is the darkness of his room—a narrow, windowless room that his wife insists they 79

sleep in. A room that smells not of flowers or burnt meat or ashes, but of a woman who has decided she will die before the year is out.

The Hidálgos have asked that Teresa stay at their home each week, going home only on Sundays. Señora Hidálgo is not well. They need her help. They realize Teresa is not a nurse, but a nurse is not what La Señora needs. A nurse cannot help her. What it is that they need her from exactly, they can’t say—perhaps just the knowledge that she’ll be there. Of course, she’s doing a fine job of cleaning throughout the day; that’s not what they’re implying at all. They just need her there, and they’re willing to pay. Triple what she is making now.

And so Teresa’s father agrees. He does not like the idea of his daughter living with these strangers, but if they are willing to compensate her so generously, if they have been kind to her thus far, there is no reason why she should refuse. And so it is decided.

At night, in the small room that is designated hers, a room on the second floor of the narrow house and at the end of a long corridor lined alternately with crowded bookcases and oxidized mirrors, Teresa hears things. They are scratching sounds coming from the ceilings and inside the walls. They are the sounds of mice and bats, of the things that find refuge in dim places, in hidden darknesses; the things that shun the light, that can’t bear it. Señora Hidálgo has told her so.

For Teresa, the sounds keep her awake. They make her wonder if people are dying everywhere she goes. If death is following her around, trailing her like a shadow, pantomiming her every move, and growing larger as each day wears on. First her mother,

and now this woman, this stranger. And that young man, Rolando, beaten nearly to death, jailed, all because she crossed his path, taking a flower he had plucked from a tree for his mother, setting off a string of events that are still unclear to her.

Lately, she can’t look at her father or at her sister or her brothers. When she does, they appear pale to her, blue. When they blink, she is certain their eyes will remain closed, their breaths held, their hearts slowing and then stopping. They don’t like it when she stares at them that way, Elisa especially. Teresa stares at her sister the longest; she is sure Elisa is sick, growing thinner daily. Elisa and the others tell her to stop staring at them; they hurry away. Maybe it’s just as well that she is living away from them, entombed in the Hildálgos’ dark, airless house.

Teresa is the age their daughter would have been. They don’t speak of this to each other, but they both know it. It is why Fermina insisted on hiring her and why Rafael refused. But in the end, she got her way, and now he lives with this: a woman the exact age his daughter would have been, in his house, preparing his meals, tending to his wife, and violating his dreams, his best intentions.

“Is it worth it to you,” he asks her, “to see me like this? I am torn apart.”

“Let this be about me and not you,” she tells him, her hand in his, her breaths coming in fast little gasps. “I won’t ask you to make any promises after I’m gone.”

Rolando sends her letters, which she reads in her room, her own little cell. They are both ensconced in hopeless places, she and Rolando. She thinks this before she opens

his first letter. Perhaps their meeting truly was fated somehow; perhaps it will change them both.

Except Rolando doesn’t write to her about the stains on the jail walls or the smell of the damp concrete or the way the thin mattress and sheets make his bones ache. He writes about love and passion, about virtue and truth, about a beautiful dream set somewhere in the future.

Elisa is captivated. She memorizes each letter after one reading. Whenever Teresa asks her to write her replies, dictating descriptions of her time with the Hidálgos or the unusual weather of the previous week, Elisa begs her to reply with something else.

“This man is a poet, Tere, a dreamer. You want to tell him about how the old lady has trouble walking in the morning? You have to write about love, too!”

But for Teresa, every word of Rolando’s, every phrase is an abstraction. Though she wishes she could, she simply cannot think in these terms. Perhaps if he were there, saying those things to her, his hands or the look in his eyes could convince her, or at least hold her interest. But without his physical presence, his words stand empty and unanchored. She reads them and forgets them. In the place of his ideas are the pressing details of her life. Yellowing fingernails. Vertebrae ridging a curled back. The surprising smell of mildew in a chest filled with hats and shoes. Half-empty train cars. Collarbones sharp as scythes. And behind an old dresser, the skeleton of a cat. She lives with these things. The idea of love for a man she has seen face to face only twice is no response.

Fate, she thinks, cannot be this vague.

Fermina is dying. She tells him so every day. She has said so for years, but it is now that he believes her. It’s not only the change in her body or the way she can stare at a spot on the floor for hours without saying a word. It’s the way her interests have slowly evolved, or devolved. For so long, she asked him for literature. Each day, when he returned home from managing the bookstores, he’d bring her several volumes from Ovid to Marlow to Chekov. She read tomes within days, murmuring lines in her sleep, resting only when he failed to supply something she had not yet read. And when the time came, she read aloud so the baby could hear these great works of literature too.

“She’s listening,” she’d tell him. “Here, feel how she moves when I recite this line.” She’d press his hand to her abdomen and begin to read, and he could feel a hard, little knob roll underneath her skin, tracing an arc from rib to rib. What was it? An elbow? A heel? He tried picturing the person inside, the baby Fermina was so convinced was a girl, but his imagination was too limited; for him, the baby remained theoretical.

Later, after the accident and the mournful confirmation that, yes, the baby had been a girl, it was religion and spirituality she asked for. She wanted all the versions of the Bible he could find. She collected translations of the Torah and the Qur’an. She had him hunt down copies of the Mahabharata and the Dhammapada. She read these slowly, often in spurts, and only to herself. She read nothing else for a long time.

But now, she only asks that he read to her from old cookbooks. She wants to hear about poached meats and cream sauces and soufflés. Though when it is time for an actual meal, she will only drink vegetable broth. He brings her elegant seafood dishes, pastries from the most well-known bakeries, and even tins filled with imported chocolates, but she refuses them all. If not broth, then nothing.

All these years he didn’t believe her, but now he is convinced.

The look in Hidálgo’s eyes is familiar. It is the look Teresa first saw in her father’s the afternoon they realized her mother would not survive the birth of that last child. They both knew it, and the look in his eyes was at once desperate and unbelieving—enraged, but also incredulous and defeated. Except the look in Hidálgo’s eyes does not sustain the urgency in her father’s. The look fades. It grows impatient.

He forgets Fermina whenever he is around Teresa. He forgets her almost completely. It is something he can’t help, something he can’t prevent or plan for. There is no strategy for avoiding it. He tells himself to remember her when he meets the girl in the courtyard, to speak of his wife, to say her name often, but when he sees Teresa his thoughts are all conquered by something brusque and determined. He has no control over it, and it thrills him, and it repels him. It is the best and worst part of him.

“You should spend more time with her,” his wife tells him. “It does you good.

I’ve seen the effect she has on you.”

These are the times when he is convinced his wife has deteriorated into something perverse, something poisoned and black.

“Don’t look at me that way,” she says, and turns away, her body lost in a barricade of pillows and blankets.

Teresa knows there is no disease that is killing Señora Hidálgo. She is choosing to die. She is choosing it, and maybe there is no reason for her not to. There are no children

crying out for their dinner, no babies needing to nurse, no grown daughters needing to know how to knit or cook, no sons asking for her advice about the weather and how it might impact the crops. No one and nothing. Just a big house without a garden and a husband who obliges.

As far as Teresa can tell, here are some of the things Señora Hidálgo will leave behind: a gold-plated hairbrush found at the bottom of an umbrella stand, the deed to a house in Pinar Del Rio folded unevenly inside of a crumbling book Teresa is almost sure is written in French, brass keys that unlock doors to rooms piled high with brocade curtains and various termite-eaten instruments, and a chest of drawers, all empty save for two hairpins and a moth-eaten shawl.

It is an outrage. The waste, the indifference. She can’t bear it. And then the forlorn looks from the husband, the way his voice trembles when he speaks to her, when he admits that no, medically speaking, there is really nothing wrong. She feels an injustice she doesn’t have words for—a repulsion towards this couple that can have so much and let it waste away while others have so little.

One Sunday, she takes the golden hair brush. She tosses it in her burlap sack along with her dirty laundry from the previous week and takes it home. Only, once home, she finds she can’t touch it because of the single strand of black hair that is wound around the nylon bristles—a thick, black hair she knows belongs to La Señora. And so she wraps a rag around the hairbrush and buries it in the backyard where it won’t do anyone any good.

Wait for me, he pleads in each letter. Wait for me as I wait for you, and before long we will be together. However educated, however well-bred, Teresa cannot help thinking how stupid this Rolando is—how truly stupid.

Wait for me, wait for him, wait for pay, wait for life, wait for death. She cannot hold it much longer; she cannot bear it. She decides she cannot stay and wait for the woman to die or for her husband to find her once more as she sleeps or for Rolando to be free or for her father to decide when she’s given enough. She feels the weight of them all when she waits in the dark, planning her escape. She can feel the weight of her brothers and her sister and the Hidálgos and Rolando pressing against her chest, making it hard for her to breathe. She feels it swelling inside her, this revolt.

She tells no one. Only Elisa asks about the letters. What will she say to him? She can’t keep him waiting like this.

“Tell him to forget me. Tell him I’ve died. Better yet, tell him nothing,” Teresa tells Elisa. But she doesn’t know Elisa well enough to know if Elisa will do as she asks.

And if Elisa doesn’t do ask she asks, she doesn’t know what Elisa will do. Her lack of imagination prevents her from knowing what Elisa might tell Rolando, just as it prevents her from imagining that whatever Elisa writes to Rolando will matter very much. At least to her.

He is not himself, he tells himself. He is an animal hurtling through the dark. He bumps around blindly searching for her door, forgetting the name of the baby girl, of the dying woman, of the thing he is about to do, forgetting words altogether and moving only on instinct, tasting his way through the dark, finding that he does not know where his

arms, his feet, his fingers end and the darkness begins, at once hoping and fearing that he’ll go on like this forever, feeling and searching and finding nothing, not yet knowing he will soon find an empty room, a barren bed, the place where his body ends and empty spaces begin.

BOOK THREE:

A Stockingful of Bullets

The average seven year old girl is approximately three and a half feet tall. When the revolutionaries finally crawled past us on the Carretera Central—men, women, and children flocking to cheer them on—I was two feet taller than that; I was taller, by a couple of inches, than the average adult woman.

When my cousin, Marina, and I witnessed the young men’s slow procession to the capitol it was January, 1959; we were both seven years old.

I wore a dress that used to be my mother’s—a woman’s dress that she altered to fit a child whose body defied all the dimensions of childhood. The dress was bright yellow. When my mother first slid it out of her closet (a closet brimming with clothes that no longer, and never again would, fit her) to tell me I would wear it to the parade, the yellow reminded me of vibrant sunflowers and spring and canaries. Later, when the parade was over, I associated that color with discomfort, fear, deception. I wonder what would make Marina re-feel the emotions of that day. The smell of diesel? The rapid-fire reports of a conga drum? Her hand inside mine?

The dress had a sweetheart neckline and the hem was meant to hang just below the knees. The bodice was fitted and cinched at the waist with a glossy, red satin sash.

While the bodice was solid yellow, the full skirt was splashed with large, red roses. A woman wearing such a dress, along with the right shoes—perhaps red peep-toes that 88

strapped around the ankle, and hair done in big, loose waves—would command the attention of most men. But a child in such a dress, a child taller than most women, yet without the proportions of a woman, would command attention of a different sort.

My mother had me try it on, and we both realized I lacked the full, rounded breasts required to fill the molded cups of the dress, yet my back and chest were wider than my mother’s had been when she had worn it. And where the dress narrowed to flaunt my mother’s once slim waist, my body did not narrow, but ran straight up and down, shoulder to hip, so that when up against the hourglass dress, my body resembled a large box—no curves, only right angles.

“You have no shape,” were the words my mother used. She would have never said something like that to Marina, of course. I knew this just as I knew how her eyes traced Marina’s small figure against mine; Marina and I together in the same room incited an ugly battle in her mind that played itself out on her face.

Of course, I knew I had a shape. Scientifically speaking, every solid thing has a shape. What she meant was that I did not have the right shape. But the look on her face as she examined me from the floor, her dimpled legs folded beneath her, straight pins hanging loose between her lips like her long cigars often did whenever her hands were occupied, told me not to say anything. If she asked me a question, I should simply nod or shake my head. Declarative statements required no response. So I stood still, dress sleeves squeezing the tops of my arms, my back exposed to the January breeze because the zipper would not close, and imagined myself not growing taller and into a woman like

I knew Marina did whenever she tried on her mother’s dresses. No, I imagined shrinking instead, my arms thinning slim and tubular, my back compacting vertically like an

accordion, my waist gathering like the twisted end of a paper bag, and my legs collapsing in sections telescopically. And while I pictured myself growing smaller, I took deep breaths and willed myself not to cry.

***

Two days later, my mother had taken in the seams that created the molded cups suited for a woman’s bust. She altered the neckline by adding white lace with cotton backing and taking it straight across from shoulder to shoulder so none of the pink flesh of my broad, flat chest would be exposed. The red sash around the waist was removed and shortened for use as a head band, which let out the waist by a few inches. The zipper on the back of the dress was also removed and replaced by a panel of white cotton fabric.

The hem was then lengthened by several inches with a strip of the same plain, white fabric.

With all of the changes my mother made, the dress fit. It hugged my chest and back then flared out just below the waist, where the altered hem hung just below my knees. The dress sleeves still squeezed my arms, but dress sleeves are tricky and can’t be fixed with a simple piece of cloth. I’d suffer the sleeves. For once, I wasn’t wearing a loose pair of men’s slacks or large culottes or a shapeless skirt that resembled a belted bed sheet while Marina wore frilly dress after frilly dress whether she was accompanying my parents and I to church or just coming over for breakfast and lunch and dinner and hours of playing outside in between while her mother went off to work. I was wearing something pretty. I looked at myself in my mother’s dresser mirror and squinted my eyes.

The flared skirt gave the illusion of a small waist and the brightness of the yellow along with the red flowers made the white panels nearly invisible. In the blurry silhouette, I was

a woman sauntering down the street. I pictured white gloves and a red clutch with a metal clasp. I was making my way somewhere in heels that made that distinct musical clicking sound on the pavement, a sound that always made me think of glamour and love and sunsets and beauty, and I was a part of that beauty.

My mother smiled at me. She said we had to complete my look and offered me a pair of her old nylon stockings. I had never worn stockings before, so she showed me how to put them on, gathering one long leg neatly between my fingers and stretching the leg opening wide with my thumbs, until I reached the toe of the stocking and slipped my foot in, slowly releasing the stocking while sliding it up my leg. As she helped me, she spoke softly about how I should be extra careful to keep my fingernails from snagging on the nylon, how I must avoid kneeling on the ground while I wore them. She told me the secrets to discreetly pulling my stockings up if they started to creep down my legs.

Once the stockings were on, my mother brought over a pair of patent leather pumps, holding one shoe in each hand, palms up. The heels were low and square, but they were heels—Mary Janes, to be exact, with thin straps across the tops and tiny gold buckles.

“These used to be mine,” she said. “The stockings should help your feet slip into them.”

My feet were already slightly larger than hers, and they were wide. And while I often begged for the pretty women’s shoes I saw in store windows, my mother pointed out how unsuitable they were for running around outdoors, climbing trees, or riding my bicycle—for being a child. So I had been wearing men’s loafers for a long time when my mother offered me her patent leather shoes that day. Marina took these things for granted.

When her mother asked her to wear dress shoes for a special occasion, she groaned, rolled her eyes. But on that day, when my mother held out her shoes like jewels, the earth shifted; I was a lady.

My feet slid into the shoes, no prying or shimmying or shoe-horning required, but they were tight. My feet forced the sides of the shoes to spread wider than they were meant to. My toes crowded together, squeezed into the narrow tips. The pretty straps with the gold buckles pressed into the tops of my feet, creating fleshy half-moon mounds of skin that jutted from the space between the strap and the front edge of the shoe.

“How do they fit?” she asked.

I nodded and stared at the shoes then stood and took several steps around her bedroom. My toes crushed against each other, and my heels scraped against the stiff backs with each small movement; the tops of my feet throbbed.

The heels clicked against the ceramic tile of the floor.

“Good,” I said. “They fit good.”

***

The young men had been filtering their way down the central highway for days.

Each day someone would shout, “Here he comes. He is with this group.” And onlookers would search the faces of the young men, most of them bearded, all of them wearing green fatigues that sometimes hung loosely from their thin shoulders, and sometimes, stiff with sweat, seemed to resist the body shape of the young man wearing them.

The crowds searched their faces for his distinct down-turned eyes, tired and intelligent, for the way his beard seemed to hover around the softness of his face like a misplaced halo, for the gentle slope of his forehead as it fell in line with his nose. Marina

wished she could see him first, before anyone else in Santa Clara. She’d give him a flower, and he’d salute her. But his face was absent from the crowds of revolutionaries until the day my mother threw her yellow dress over my head for the last time, standing on her bed, the bottom of the dress held open like an umbrella, as I pushed my arms into the air, stiff and straight, pointing at the sky in surrender.

My grandmother Amparo watched as my mother helped me buckle the straps of her white shoes onto my stockinged feet. Abuela Amparo was against us going to see the revolutionaries. She had witnessed her own revolution when Machado was deposed in the thirties and did not miss an opportunity to remind us how celebration and revelry can quickly turn to carnage, just as it had when the masses began their witch hunts for

Machado’s former henchmen. Each night at dinner, once my father retired to his room after silently devouring his meal and leaving his dishes on the table for someone else to clear, she told the same story: she was celebrating at the Plaza Central, Cuban flag in hand, friends and strangers alike dancing and singing together, when shots rang out from a nearby hotel. She turned just in time to see a young man drop from a third story window, his body perfectly erect, arms held at his sides, as if he were waiting at a bus stop, or in line at a grocery store, when the floor just disappeared from beneath his feet.

He was still moving after he hit the ground, cradling one arm as he struggled to his knees, when the very men and women she danced with scrambled to reach him just so they could resume their dancing upon his head. On the evenings when Marina stayed for dinner, she refrained from telling the story because she thought Marina was too young to hear such a violent tale. Like most adults, she forgot that I was too young, too.

As my mother tied the red sash around my hair, my grandmother frowned. “If you hear a gunshot, don’t turn around; don’t look for where it came from. Just cover your eyes and run home.”

I had never heard gunshots before. I was afraid I couldn’t run in my mother’s shoes, especially not with my eyes closed. Yet for all of my fears, my grandmother’s story began losing force with each consecutive retelling. While I nodded gravely in my yellow dress, I caressed the red satin in my hair. She began retelling us her story of blood and dancing, and I walked around the room, punctuating each of her sentences with the clicking of my heels.

***

I waited for Marina and her mother to come to the house so that, together, we could walk to the town’s center three blocks away, where the central highway intersected with our main street. I did not ask my mother why she was not coming with us. She rarely left the house anymore. She was a heavy woman then, prone to spending the day in her housedress and slippers. By the end of each day, her feet swelled so that her ankles disappeared and her toes pressed together. Walking to the central highway to stand around for several hours was out of the question. She had once been stunning, she occasionally reminded me when she was feeling nostalgic, and almost invariably within earshot of my father; overnight she’d grown from a bony, flat-chested girl into a woman more beautiful, she was careful to add, than her sister, Teresa. But beauty always fades, she’d tell me. Don’t forget.

Teresa, her older sister by several years, appeared younger to most eyes. Beauty still intact, she’d take us to the parade where we would all feel different afterwards—

irrevocably changed. My mother told me we were now free and liberated each night before bed, away from the ears of my grandmother and father, and despite my fear of gunshots and dead men falling from the sky, I believed her. Our lives would never be the same.

I waited for them on our front porch, and before I could see Marina and Tía

Teresa, I could hear them. Marina sang an Elena Burke song about a love that made her delirious with passion while Tía Teresa asked Marina to lower her voice repeatedly.

Then, just as they approached our front yard, their faces obscured by my grandmother’s towering majagua tree and the looming, untended hibiscus bushes that surrounded it, I heard a quick slap, which put an end to Marina’s loud crooning.

They reached the stone path that led to the front porch, and Tía urged a limp, red- faced Marina forward with a persistent, go, go, go.

Already, I was a different person. In the yellow dress and heels, I was no longer just Sara.

Tía saw me first, and the harried look on her face quickly changed.

“Look at you, Sara. You look absolutely stunning. Fidel himself will stop traffic just to kiss your hand,” she said, as she bent forward and touched her lips to my right hand.

Whenever I squinted my eyes and pictured myself as a woman, I did not picture the bent photographs of my mother, posing stiffly for the camera, her dark lips pouting seductively. I pictured the easy grace of my Tía Teresa.

Marina lagged behind her, staring at her feet, and said nothing until her mother disappeared inside our house. She stared at me for a long time. In her eyes, I could

decipher all her thoughts emerging and dissolving, overlapping and contradicting. Where she had often envied my size, my ability to see past the heads of our classmates as they crowded around two boys in a fist fight and catch an unobstructed glimpse of a fist making contact with a nose, my legs carrying me much faster to the water fountain after recess, my arms reaching unreachable heights in a game of take the ball if you can, she now saw a clear disadvantage. She admired my mother’s shoes, but noted how the tops of my clustered toes marked the patent leather with ugly peaks. Unblinking, she studied the red circles around my arms where my carefully tailored sleeves had been squeezing my skin since earlier that morning, forcing me to shift the sleeves slightly higher for temporary relief, which exposed the injury. Her dark eyes took in the clumsy stitching at the hem of my dress which forced the beautiful yellow sateen of the dress into an ill- suited marriage with the dull cotton my mother attached.

The squinty-eyed, blurry vision of myself disappeared with Marina’s single, guileless look.

For her part, Marina wore a simple black and white gingham dress. She was all knees and elbows, and her shoes seemed absurdly small, as did her hands, her shoulders, her pinched little face, all of her impossibly small. She and I were born on the same day. I tried to remind myself that there was a moment in time when we were the same size.

“Let’s catch lizards,” was the first thing she said to me, and I agreed.

At play, I was her complement. On days when she arrived at my house with baby dolls so we could play mommies, I had already fashioned a crib and baby carriage. When she met me after school with her jacks in tow, I waited underneath a stairwell, seated cross-legged in the shade, my own set of jacks arranged neatly at my feet. Our mothers

often remarked on the wordless harmony that seemed to exist between us. Uncanny, they called it. They’d never gotten along very well as sisters, my mother often told me; I was lucky to have a sister in my first cousin—a special bond she and Teresa had never shared.

No one knew that I submitted to Marina’s unspoken desires because I wanted her to think that she and I were the same—that aside from our sizes, we were not so different at all.

Because, as our mothers often reminded us, our souls were practically the same.

Marina disappeared into a dense hibiscus bush, and I followed, wincing; each step

I took made my mother’s shoes feel smaller, narrower, my feet bigger, rounder. She thrashed through the spaces that separated one bush from the other, resuming the song her mother had cut short minutes before: “Always you,” she sang, “are with me in my sadness.”

I slowly inched my way towards the majagua tree that rose at the center of the bushes. The smell of dead flowers filled the still air. It filled the back of my throat, and, in that moment, I told myself how much I loved that smell because it did not lie. No living thing, not even the prettiest thing, was untouched by filth and the undesirable. The loveliest of song birds shit, and it probably shit rather often. The most brilliant reef fish with the most radiant scales that displayed colors not seen elsewhere on the planet would still smell as putrid as every other fish once it died. The most stunning of women would eventually grow fat or wrinkled; if she didn’t bathe, she’d stink; with age, her once stunning beauty would be, without the aid of photographic proof, undetectable.

The brittle branches of the surrounding bushes raked against my dress. I kneeled close to the ground, and as I lowered myself, one sharp branch slid up my leg and lifted my dress on my left side. On my right, part of my hem became trapped underneath my

knees. I ignored the unmistakable sound of threads tearing. Alone, under the cover of bushes and the looming tree, I sifted through layers of brown leaves and fallen flowers, my hands gentle, my body completely still. Near the tree trunk, poised just under several dry leaves, I found a single lizard, the color of its skin perfectly matched to the dead leaves. I cupped the lizard in both hands, trapping it easily. I could feel it thrashing around for a few moments before it relaxed and became perfectly still.

“Have you found one?” Marina called to me.

I always caught all of her lizards for her. I don’t think she ever caught a single one. She had only ever been capable of capturing lizards’ tails. Lizards’ tails were meant to break away, I tried explaining to her more than once, leaving predators with a still twitching, non-vital body part that confused them into thinking they still had their prey and gave lizards the opportunity to scurry to safety. Still, she always went for the tail, pinched between her thumb and forefinger, spinning and squirming and disembodied, while I went for the whole lizard, head, abdomen, legs, and tail all intact. Each lizard I found I gave to Marina who squeezed their bellies, forcing them to open their mouths.

Sometimes she stuffed cigarette butts into their gaping mouths and danced them across the ground on two legs, engaging them in ridiculous dialogues about love and betrayal, which she delivered in a cracking falsetto. Other times, she forced them to latch on to her earlobes and wore them as earrings, the terrified lizards dangling helplessly from her ears until, exhausted, they let themselves fall into her waiting hands only to be subjected to some other parlor trick. And sometimes they fell to the ground, several feet below, with an audible splat.

My lizard sat in my open hand, tranquil, its abdomen expanding and retracting with each tiny breath.

“No,” I said, “I haven’t found a lizard.”

It was the first time I ever lied to her.

As I replaced the lizard beneath its matching set of leaves, Tía Teresa called for us. I hurried to get out of the bushes, but I was held fast. My stockings were caught, a single, leafless branch poking a grape-sized hole into the nylon. By the time I pulled myself free, the hole expanded, creating a run that spanned from my thigh to just below my knee. The white hem of my dress had also become stained with dirt where my knee had pressed it into the damp earth. When I finally caught up with Marina and her mother, neither one noticed the damage to my dress or my stockings. Hand-in-hand, the two of them walked quickly, and I followed behind.

***

The central highway spanned the entire island from east to west. On the short stretch nearest our house, storefronts and restaurants flanked the road on the ground floors with residences taking up the upper floors of the multi-storied buildings. On that day, each window and balcony facing the road was filled with people. Young boys stooped to pinch dirt between their fingertips and rubbed it onto each other’s faces, creating first mustaches, then full beards. Music played from open windows. At the corner of Avenue C, a small quartet had gathered and played a fast rumba. Men and women danced at the edges of the street, and all along the sidewalks, men spun their laughing partners faster and faster, the women’s full skirts rising up and out and revealing

their blurred legs, all while keeping step with the infectious beats pounded out with slapping hands and excited fists.

Tía Teresa led us through the crowds, her footsteps in time with the music, walking much too fast for Marina, who clung to me, confident that even if her mother disappeared, I would stay by her side. We held hands, I on tippy-toes, bewildered by the absence of cars and buses on the road and by the gyrating masses, never once considering how dancing feet would feel on a fallen man’s skull.

It is hard to tell how long we waited for the revolutionaries to arrive. While I knew how to tell time, my perception of time was skewed. At school the minutes between our math lesson and recess protracted into entire seasons of rain and drought, heat and cold. Yet the hours between school dismissal and dinner were unfairly condensed, unaccounted for like the hours of a restful night’s sleep. That day, I remember waiting for a very long time. At some point, my feet stopped hurting and went numb. Yet the squeezing at my arms never relented. The seams and fabric irritated the undersides of my arms so that I constantly shifted the fabric back and forth, irritating new sections of my arms each time. The red sash my mother had tied around my hair made my scalp itch.

Marina’s ceaseless shifting and talking and singing and dancing unnerved me. She constantly asked me what I could see, constantly begged me to lift her and carry her— something I hated, but always felt obligated to do. With each passing moment, I began to feel more anxious and less dazzled by the spectacle, until, before long, I was at the brink of tearing away from the crowd or laughing hysterically or biting down hard on the back of my hand or crying in unrestrained, open-mouthed sobs.

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Then, at some unexpected moment indecipherable from the rest, we heard shouts—the shouts of men rising above the clamor of song and talk and the occasional, scattered cries of babies.

“Here they come,” they shouted. “Here comes Fidel.”

Before the chanting began, I could feel their approach. It was almost imperceptible, like a roll of thunder so far away, it could be mistaken for someone sliding a chair across the floor in another room. I don’t know if anyone else felt it, but I could feel a slight tremble in the ground as military vehicles and tanks and cars crawled towards us. I felt it because for one brief moment everyone stood still after having danced and squirmed and resisted for so long. The earth was moving and my abdomen expanded and shrank with each slight breath.

“Esta es tu casa, Fidel,” someone shouted. That first shout came from a woman, a faceless voice in the crowd. It was loud and clear like the first birdsong heard at the earliest hour.

After she called out, the chanting began, rhythmic and precise, “Esta es tu casa,

Fidel.” Not an invitation, but an uncontested fact. We all agreed; Marina, Tía Teresa, they shouted it, too.

As the first group of men approached, some perched on the roofs of their trucks while others draped their bodies across the crowded hoods, the mass of onlookers surged forward and the music resumed, louder than before. Everyone danced. Even those who resisted dancing, whose bodies could not move in time with any beat, danced. Bodies were pressed so close to each other, the laws of motion dictated cadenced movement must travel through the crowd in waves.

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Trucks and military jeeps streamed towards us uninterrupted. Men perched on wheel wells like army-green birds. Waving and grinning, they plucked flowers flung at them by anonymous well-wishers from the air. Some vehicles held so many men (and the occasional woman), they rocked from left to right as they lurched forward. The crowd moved and swayed, alive and synchronized. I could feel my stockings slipping. I forgot the pain in my arms, but the pain in my feet returned, particularly where someone stepped on my left toe. I tried to shuffle away from the people pulling and pushing, but someone stepped on the heel of my right shoe, causing it to slip off completely. I tried to bend down to search for my shoe, fighting the press of bodies that wedged me in vertically, and felt the seams at the back of my dress give away. When I searched the ground, my shoe was gone.

A tank approached. Men clung to the vehicle, sinewy arms and legs taking up every possible space, so that the top of the machine appeared alive, built not of metal, but of bearded men, grinning, shouting, waving, breathing. I pushed forward, trying to extract myself from the crowd, and, at the same time, I was pushed forward with a forceful shove, which caused me to lose my left shoe as well. My stockings continued to slip until

I could feel sweat-dampened nylon pooling at my ankles.

I was at the front of the crowd, no one in front of me, no one pressing against me to my right or left, when the men began to shower the crowd with souvenirs. Shell casings poured forth from their hats and pockets, and as I bent to pull one of my stockings off, fat tears dropping onto the asphalt and my bare feet, a young revolutionary sprang from the top of the tank. He trotted over in worn boots, his green jumpsuit hanging from his thin shoulders, and a cloth belt cinching the stiff fabric around his

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concave waist. Smiling, he poured a handful of bullet casings into my empty stocking. He was not Fidel, but he wiped my tears and kissed my cheek.

He shouted, “No llores, bella, hoy somos libre,” before slipping the sash from my hair and twisting it around his wrist. He told me I was beautiful; together we were free.

Then he melted back into the tank, an indistinguishable set of arms and legs jutting from the living machine.

Bullet casings continued to fall around me, and I gathered them into my stocking.

I gathered them like a child might gather seashells or pennies or smooth rocks. They were shiny and different shapes and sizes, and, together in my stocking, made a beautiful, dissonant music, not unlike a handful of seashells or a pocketful of coins.

That day, when the revolutionaries marched into the streets victorious, tatters of white clouds lined the sky. They were the sorts of clouds that are so far off in the distance, they remind those on the ground, even the tallest, of exactly how small they are.

The brightness of that day made each object solar, with colors so vivid, a yellow dress, green fatigues, the wooden hilt of a pistol all glowed as if producing their own light from within.

The caravan of trucks, jeeps, steel tanks and armored cars moved with the speed of a parade, a speed that was liquid. Those cheering from the sidewalks and spilling onto the road laughed and cried, cheered and prayed. The men waved their hats in the air and pumped their rifles to the sky. Their beards shimmered with beads of sweat that slid from their temples to the tips of their chins. They were beautiful. And so were the bullet casings that were divorced from bullets, from shots fired with the unfriendliest of intentions.

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***

When Marina and Tía finally found me, Marina was crying uncontrollably and

Tía Teresa’s eyes were round, her lips pressed to paleness. I had never seen Marina cry that way— not when her pet parakeet flew away, not when she slipped in a puddle of mud and ruined her favorite pink dress with the tulle skirt, not when one of her mother’s boyfriends slammed his car door on her thumb, forcing her to lose that nail. It was desperate and terrified—an emotion outside the range of emotions I thought her capable of. All of her thoughts hinged on my disappearance and reappearance, and during the moments when we became separated, I had not given a thought to her or my aunt at all.

I showed both of them three of my seventeen casings so that each of us could have one souvenir. The rest I had already wrapped and rewrapped tightly in my stockings to keep them from making noise, and hidden them in the folds of my skirt. Marina hugged my waist repeatedly. Unselfconsciously, she dried her eyes on the large red roses of my skirt.

We did not wait for the crowds to disperse before we left the march. We did not get to see Fidel so he could hear us tell him he was at home, so Marina could throw him a flower, so he could kiss my hand. Alarmed that my dress was torn and that I was shoeless and that Marina’s chest still hitched with silent sobs, her mother took us home.

Several times on the short walk home, Marina reached for my right hand—the hand that held my secret stash of bullet casings. Each time, I shrugged her hand away.

“I don’t want to hold your hand,” I finally told her.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because I’m not your mother.”

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I don’t know if she ever again tried to hold my hand.

***

During a game of dress up two weeks later, Marina found my casings where I’d hidden them in the back of my mother’s closet, inside the pockets of an old fur coat. She didn’t tell me about her discovery. I learned it for myself when I came across her giving the last two away to a couple of boys playing baseball in the street.

“This one here’s extra special,” she told one of the boys.

“Why that one?” he asked.

“Because,” she said, tossing the casing up in the air and letting it fall to the ground, “it just happened to kill an imperialist pig with a shot to the brain.”

Until that moment, I had not associated the casings with bullets, or war, or death, just the sudden ecstasy in the crowd and the brief moment with the young man who called me beautiful.

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Love Letters

Dear Fidel,

Dearest Fidel,

My Dear Fidel,

My Heart, My Dearest Heart,

Awake, I dream of you. Each face I pass is yours. The smallest things recall you to me. You reside in the brown tip of a leaf, the steel smell of rain, a cat yawning and stretching, its back arching and twitching, its tail outstretched along the ground.

Sara is a stranger to him, Rolando concludes. An ugly, repulsive stranger. He thinks this as he sits on the edge of his bed. His mother, Amparo, sits next to him and edges closer, leaning in just as he stops reading his daughter’s letter to Castro. Amparo was once his adversary. She went to great lengths to control him in ways she could not control his father, going so far as to have him incarcerated on false charges, but now they are necessary allies.

“Keep reading. You haven’t gotten to the worst of them.”

She holds a stack of letters in her lap, smoothing the bent pages with her dry hands. Her skin hisses against the paper, which smells of violet water. The scent and his mother’s constant movement make Rolando’s head hurt. She’s too close to him, breathing in his ear, shuffling and smoothing the perfumed letters. He can feel the blood vessels in his head and face and around his eyes contracting. His heartbeat at once slows 106

and pounds harder, and he tries to breathe more deeply to carry oxygen to the places in his body that suddenly feel deprived. Clearly, she is waiting for him to finish reading the letter in his hands so that she can pass him the next one, but he doesn’t want to read anymore.

These, after all, are lines he wrote himself.

“I’ve read enough.”

“No, you haven’t. She denounces you in several of these. She tells him how you pray that he’ll be assassinated. If the police aren’t listening at the door right now, they will be soon. They’ll come in the night and take you away. Take us all away.”

“Mother, she hasn’t mailed these. Can’t you see that? The letters are here, months and months’ worth.”

“What if these are just copies she made for herself? She’s going to get us all killed. In one of these letters, she tells him how all I do is complain about our small apartment. That I don’t appreciate the sacrifices everyone has to make.”

Amparo resumes smoothing the letters, though now she works more vigorously, pressing the pages into her lap, her body rocking with the motion and causing the bed to creak, as if the letters are a child she is trying to silence and lull into unwanted sleep.

“Relax. They’re all dated. Just read the dates. They would’ve locked you up by now if she’d sent them.”

He crumples the letter in his hand. Amparo snatches it away before he can do any more damage.

“Are you crazy? You can’t just ball it up. Then she’ll know we’ve found them.”

“You’ve found them,” Rolando says.

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She replaces the crumpled letter in the center of the stack and continues smoothing the sheets, breathing hard as she works out the creases where they have all been folded together several times into a bundle compact enough to squeeze into her porcelain carafe, where she found them the previous morning.

She was cleaning, she told him, making her way through the small apartment they share, cleaning as much as any human can in her efforts towards Godliness, he imagines, dusting the precious porcelain she managed to bring with her from the house they were forced to give up to a family of five. Just one more family member, according to the government, meant strangers got the house he grew up in, the house his father bought with the money he’d earned and saved working at the Coca-Cola plant. And rather than fight for the couch or the dining table, Amparo chose to fight for the porcelain. The china he can’t remember ever having eaten from in his entire life. Teapots and sugar bowls and gravy boats that never, as far as he can remember, served a useful purpose. Had it been some sort of ideological stance on her part, some effort towards resisting the utilitarianism taking hold across the island, he might’ve respected her for it, but it was sentimentality at its worst. Mauricio, his dead father, gave her the set one Christmas.

She’d always complained how much she hated the pattern. How her husband should’ve known red roses repulsed her. Part of him wonders if keeping the set was a way for her to keep her hatred for his father at a steady burn.

“Don’t you think she’ll notice if you iron her letters flat? You’ve gotten rid of the creases. Keep at it, and there’ll be no ink left.”

He goes for the letters, intent on taking the entire stack from his mother and balling them up or tearing them into bits, releasing them confetti-like into his wife’s

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oscillating fan that circulates the stifling air in their narrow room, but she snatches them back quicker than he thought her capable, which forces her to tip backwards onto the bed with the letters clutched to her chest, her legs flying up defensively and bumping against the close wall.

“I won’t let you have them,” she grunts.

“Why not? Let her know we’ve seen them. I’m not afraid of some child. Let them take me away. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen the inside of a prison.”

“Yes, that’s true,” she says. “Only this time you won’t have your friends mailing letters for you and daily visits from priests and your mother. This time, they’ll likely kill you in there.”

Rolando walks slowly out of the room, but slams the bedroom door forcefully behind him. A few more steps, and he exits the apartment, forcing a second door to slam between them. The gesture makes his head pound more, but he does it anyway, satisfied that each door slam causes the jalousie windows to clatter.

When Amparo first came to him with the letters, he felt an illogical sense of relief. It was as if he had been kept inside a crowded, noisy room for a long time and suddenly stepped outside where it was quiet, where he could finally breathe.

“You are not going to like what I’ve found, Rolandito,” she said, showing him the stack of paper. It was something about her tone. It made him think the letters were not only a betrayal, but a betrayal on the part of his wife.

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He realized at that moment, for years he’d held onto some unnamed hope that would change things, and there it was. His wife was not blameless. She had failed just as he had.

“I don’t know if you can handle this right now, but I have to show it to you.” She always treated him that way, with a certain amount of delicacy. He had been getting headaches as of late, and this, like everything, alarmed his mother. He should see a doctor, but not a Cuban doctor. They could not be trusted. He needed to see a doctor that used to be a doctor but was no longer practicing since the revolution. She knew people who knew people. This could be arranged. But Rolando refused. If he was dying of anything, it was boredom and discontent.

He wanted to tell her yes, I can handle this. Of all things, this. He was ready for these letters he was sure were Elisa’s letters, letters that proved she was in love with someone else, letters perhaps from an admirer or to an admirer. Letters that he could brandish and say, now there’s no need for us to go on this way, letters he could use to provoke her into leaving or as validation for his own exit. But he couldn’t let on like that with Amparo. His mother would suspect his eagerness, especially since she and Elisa had grown so close. He had to play the part of the jilted husband. So he said nothing and raised his eyebrows as his mother carefully peeled away one of the letters from the stack and placed it in his hands. But as he unfolded that first letter, he did not see not Elisa’s florid handwriting; he saw the small, squared off letters of his daughter’s hand.

Sara’s letters to Fidel are his letters to his wife’s sister. They are the same.

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His wife’s sister—it’s the only way he allows himself to refer to her now. She no longer has a name because saying her name and thinking her name allows him to forget how they are related. How they are irrevocably tied.

Sara’s letters mean that, at some point, she read the letters he wrote to his wife’s sister.

Sara knows his secret thoughts and perverted them. She took his own words, his professions of love, and aimed those sentiments at Fidel, the very person intent on destroying them all.

Or maybe not. Maybe that’s not what it was at all.

Maybe she knows Rolando’s secret and found a way to tell him so. She wrote the letters as a way of telling him how much she knows. As a subtle way of extorting something out of him—compliance, allegiance, silence. She must have known, after all, that Amparo would find those letters in the porcelain. And she is so quiet, that child. She never says anything to him, only watches him whenever he isn’t looking her way. He can always feel her eyes on him, heavy as he knows her hands must be, hands that are already larger than his, her body dominating the small spaces of their apartment. He hates that about her—the way she takes up so much room, filling up the empty spaces, absorbing too much light, displacing too much air. The way he can’t avoid her bulk, her physical presence. And now she knows he prays for Castro’s death just as he prays for his wife’s infidelity, his wife’s sister’s love. He has no secrets from her, and he shouldn’t be surprised. She is a judgment on him, after all.

But there’s also the possibility that his wife’s sister gave Sara the letters. She handed them to Sara, with a smile so slight, Sara might mistake it for the natural curve of

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her lips, saying, “Here, these were sent to me by your father. I think you should have them. And if you look at the dates carefully, you’ll find that many of these were sent after my sister and your father were married. Yes, these last few were sent well after you were born.” Why wouldn’t she? He’d always been a joke to her. This last betrayal would not surprise him. But this act would wound Sara as well as him, and so he discounts it. His wife’s sister would not intentionally hurt Sara. This, he knows.

He calls his wife’s sister. He’ll simply ask her if she still has the letters, if anyone has ever seen them. It’s the only thing he can think of doing. He has no other choice.

A man answers. This doesn’t surprise Rolando. He’s never kept track of her boyfriends. He refuses to utter their names—they are merely his wife’s sister’s friends.

But he is always aware of their existence. Vaguely, he knows whether any given boyfriend is serious or fleeting, whether or not he spends his nights at his wife’s sister’s house.

“Hello, I need to speak to my wife’s sister.”

“Who is this?”

“This is Rolando.”

“Okay. So who’s your wife?”

“My wife is Elisa.”

The man pauses, and Rolando knows what question will follow. Yet saying her name ignites a physical reaction in him. He spent too many hours whispering that name to himself. He’s not sure he can bring himself to say it now.

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“So, Rolando. Your wife is Elisa. And now you want to speak to your sister’s wife?”

“No, not my sister’s wife, my wife’s sister.” Rolando can hear a voice in the background. He isn’t sure whether the voice is his wife’s sister’s, and he strains to hear it over the man’s laughter. Then he hears his niece, Marina, call out, “Tío. That’s my Tío

Rolando. I need to talk to him; he’s coming to get me.”

It sounds as if the phone is dropped on the other end, and Rolando calls out,

“Hello, hello.” There is swishing and rattling and the low sounds of the man speaking.

His words are indecipherable, and Rolando is sure he’s pressing the mouthpiece into the palm of his hand or against his stomach to muffle his speech. In a moment, Marina is on the phone.

“Hi, Tío.” Her voice sounds strange, as if her nose is clogged, as if she’s stuffed her nostrils with cotton, or is pinching them closed.

“Hello, Marina, is your mother—“

“Oh yes, I’m ready for you to pick me up.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Yes, I’ll be at the corner in front of the cafeteria.”

“The cafeteria?”

“Oh, you’re there now? Okay, I’ll be right down.”

Before he can reply, Marina hangs up.

Marina has run away to his house before. She has arrived at their home in the middle of the night, overnight bag in hand, claiming her mother dropped her off for a sleepover. Other times, she has arrived unannounced, early in the morning, hours before

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school, saying that her mother walked her over and left because she was late for work.

Elisa’s phone calls to her sister have sometimes revealed that Marina wasn’t dropped off, and other times, they’ve simply gone unanswered. But mostly, when Marina manages to make her way to their house, it is because her mother, Rolando’s wife’s sister, is away working somewhere, and Marina was left in the care of one of his wife’s sister’s boyfriends.

Rolando knows Marina will just find her way to his house or go somewhere else.

This has been going on for years now. But he also noted the desperation in her voice, the clear evidence of tears. Reluctantly, he heads to the cafeteria nearest his wife’s sister’s apartment.

His daughter and his wife’s sister’s daughter were born on the same day at nearly the same time. Everyone has always thought it was meaningful, their nearly simultaneous births. Eventually, he came to ascribe meaning to it as well. People always mistake

Marina for his daughter. They have the same dark eyes, the same slight build. Sara, on the other hand, is never seen as anyone’s daughter. She exists, somehow, outside of nature—not a child, not a woman. She is simply an anomaly, a strange being sent from heaven, hell or outer space, depending on who you ask.

Marina is similar to Rolando in other ways. She reads, she sings songs, she recites poetry; she is clever and graceful—all of the things he would have imagined his daughter to be. Except he can’t express this affinity he feels towards her. It is enough that strangers on the street confuse her as his own. He keeps his distance so that the people closest to him won’t begin to suspect the same. And so he loves Marina in his way, by praying for her and asking about her and happily sharing all of his books and records with her, and he

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suffers the unfortunate circumstances she has to endure at home. He resists judging his wife’s sister because his judgment on her will always be unfair, tinged, as he is, by his own complicated feelings towards her. Still, as much as he wants to avoid getting involved now, he feels obligated to meet Marina.

As he approaches the intersection where his wife’s sister’s apartment overlooks an alleyway where the cafeteria sits, he can see Marina hurrying towards him, her skinny legs scissoring frantically, her hands up near her chest in tight fists. Before she gets to him, she turns around and waves at a man standing at the cafeteria entrance. From where

Rolando stands, he can see the bearded man’s stained white undershirt, his beltless, sagging pants, and his thinning hair framing his face in greasy wisps. The man raises a hand and Rolando raises his in response as he turns around, willing himself not to wonder what his wife’s sister would see in such a man, but thinking it anyway, involuntarily comparing himself to the stranger.

Marina catches up to him and stands in front of him, forcing him to stop.

“I didn’t think he would wait to see if you showed up, and I didn’t think you would show up. So thank you for showing up, Tío.” She kisses him on the cheek and hugs him. She is dirty, too. Her hair smells oily and her skin smells sour. She does not smell of an afternoon of work or a day spent in the sun. No, these are the smells of days spent without washing—an accumulation of sweat that has dried several times, of a scalp that has grown flaky with layers of grease. When she kisses him, he detects traces of beer on her breath.

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“Hello, Marina. How are you?” he asks in the most nonchalant way he can. It is the same tone he uses with the neighbors he doesn’t know by name, with bus drivers and cashiers.

Marina takes a step back and watches him. She sways back and forth almost imperceptibly. Is he imagining that she’s swaying? He’s not sure. She smiles, and although her face is not the face of her mother, her smile is. Something about the teeth— the proportion of her incisors to the rest of her teeth. He prefers it if Marina doesn’t smile.

“You know, I always wished you were my father and not just my tio” she says before blinking slowly, too slowly, which causes her to lose her balance and sends her stumbling into Rolando. “Because what are tios good for?”

He realizes how little language has served him in his life. He has used it only to write letters to a woman that has rebuffed him again and again, letters that now serve to feed his disdain for his daughter. And now, with his niece before him, clearly desperate for something, he has no words for her. He won’t question whether or not she is drunk or what it is she might have endured this afternoon, and he doesn’t dare respond to her admission.

“Why don’t we take a walk?”

“I always wished you were my father and Elisa was my mother. And Sara, she could be my mother’s daughter.”

“Maybe we can have a seat at the plaza over there. Relax on one of the benches.”

He walks and Marina follows, looping her arm through Rolando’s, whose hands are stuffed into his pockets. This forces him to walk much slower than he’d like to.

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“Sara could be my mother’s because no man wants to mess with her.” Marina’s voice grows louder and people on the street seem to avoid looking at them. Rolando remembers Marina being loud, talkative, always entering their house with a song or a

Pepito joke, but in the past few years, she has grown quiet, withdrawn. Except for today, that is.

“Sara’s not home today. She went to the country with her mother. She’ll be back next week. They are on a literacy campaign.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t end up with my mother, Tío. She doesn’t deserve you.”

“Here, let’s sit under that Poinciana tree over there, and I’ll get you some coffee.”

He tries walking faster towards the park bench where there are fewer people, unlike the street, where a crowd waits for a bus. But Marina continues dragging on his arm, pulling him back. She is a skinny girl, nearly his height now, but so much smaller compared to

Sara. He is surprised by her strength and his inability to pull her along.

“You do know what I’m talking about, Tío. You love my mother.” She stresses the word love teasingly and leans her head on his arm. She smiles broadly, the shameless smile of his sister’s wife, and he has to resist the urge to pull free from her.

“Ok, Marina. That’s fine; that’s really the reason why I called your house anyway.

Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here at all. So let’s talk about this, then. Why do you think I love your mother?”

“Because I just know.” The smile remains, but her eyes no longer squint; they watch him—they broach sobriety.

“No, that won’t do. Why would you say that? You can tell me the truth or I can take you back home,” he says, regretting the last part but saying it just the same.

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“I’ve read your letters, okay? I’ve memorized your letters,” she shouts, her eyes wide and rolling, “I have never before considered the charm of a wrist until yesterday.”

This last sentence, Marina says in a deeper voice, her eyebrow furrowed. Her way of saying those words, which Rolando only wrote and never said out loud, makes them sound silly, contrived, yet he feels tempted to correct her, to say, no, it’s I have never before considered the charm of a wrist bone until today.

“Did you know a single lock of your hair redefines the color brown?” she goes on, her voice low now, the smile gone.

“Nonsense.” He tries to walk faster as the park bench appears to move further and further away, as if he and Marina are walking backwards somehow, or as if the earth is spinning away from them much faster than they can keep up with.

“Awake, I dream of you,” she whispers, her face close to his.

“You are drunk. Who gave you those letters, anyway? Is this some joke to you?

You read my letters and then you gave them to Sara, too? All of this is your fault.” Her arm still in his, Rolando pulls her closer and presses his hand against her mouth. He can’t stand the sound of her voice. He just needs to her to shut up. He pulls her along, her feet tripping over each other in her effort to keep up, causing one of her ankles to scrape along the ground for a moment, her sagging ankle sock doing nothing to protect her skin from the concrete, and thrusts her into the bench, his hand still forced against her face. He wants to press his hand harder and harder into her skin, to force all of her bones to collapse into themselves so that he can crumple her into a ball, squeezing until she is so small, she disappears altogether. But it’s her eyes that stop him. They’re not eyes filled with rage or hate or empty like an animal’s, afraid and ready to flee or fight if it comes to

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that. They’re the scared eyes of a child who’s sorry, a child who has been caught doing something wrong and immediately regrets her mistake. It’s not the look he expects.

He pulls his hand away slowly, his entire arm trembling. He feels sick. He can’t catch his breath. It’s as if he’s been kicked in the stomach. He wants to flee the scene, to never see this plaza or this child or this country again, but the bones in his legs and back tremble; they dissolve. His only option seems to be to sink into the bench beside her and stare at his hand, wet with her saliva.

“Now you hate me too. I’m a piece of shit. I should just die.” Marina’s body curls away from him, and she belches into her elbow. Each of her joints jut out, wider than her limbs. She is all knees and elbows, wrists and ankles. And through her thin, linen shirt, he can see clearly the string of beads that are her vertebrae. He tries to remember the last time her saw her eat. Each time she stays for dinner, she stirs the food around her plate, creating a well in the middle, a valley inside the hills of uneaten food. Perhaps she is trying to disappear, he thinks, as he notes the looseness of her shirt, her skirt, the way her socks sag around her ankles.

He should tell her he doesn’t hate her, but he doesn’t trust himself to speak. It feels as if every nerve ending in his body is misfiring. Each report sends him gasping for air. Having a stroke right now would be ideal. He’d welcome a jolt of pain followed by a quick surge of blackness.

“Sara never saw your letters, you know. I found them hidden, and no one knows about them but me. She really doesn’t know everything I know. I have my secrets.”

He’s so tired. He just wants the sea to wash over the island and clear it of everything standing, all the neglected buildings, and royal palm trees, and even the

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wrought iron park benches bolted down into the concrete. Just wash it clean and leave only the soil, leveled and fertile, and ready to teem once more with whatever forgotten seeds hide inside its folds, but not with what’s there now, living, fighting, hating.

“She’s seen them. She reproduced them word for word. I know you’re lying.” His voice trembles. It’s the feeble voice of a disillusioned old man.

“No, you’re wrong.”

“You are lying, Marina. I saw her letters to Castro. They’re my words.”

“That was me. I told her what to write. She asked me to help her, and I told her what to write.” She turns to face him, one eyebrow cocked. It’s a familiar expression; one

Rolando has seen her make countless times when facing off against her mother. It’s a look of indignation he’s seen her use when she was clearly lying—an expression she probably used today when her mother’s boyfriend questioned whether her Tío Rolando was really coming to get her. Rolando angles his body away from her, facing the notched trunk of the Poinciana tree. The ground is covered with its fingernail-sized leaves. When the wind blows, the leaves seem to chase each other in small circles, but they otherwise don’t go anywhere.

“If that’s true, then you betrayed me anyway, Marina.” These last words to

Marina satisfy him. He wishes they didn’t. He wishes he was a better person, the kind that didn’t kick a wounded dog, but he isn’t. He feels indignant and entitled, and so he feels justified when Marina begins crying once more, louder than before.

She stops sobbing in the unselfconscious way only children are capable of, but continues crying quietly, all the while facing him, sitting as close as his mother did hours

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before. She’s waiting for him to turn and look at her, but he remains still, staring at the tree.

Moments later, she wipes at her cheek with the palms of her hands, dries them on her skirt, and walks away. He doesn’t look her way when leaves. He doesn’t trust himself to see her stained skirt, her dirty legs, her slack socks, and still retain his sense of triumph, his small measure of certainty that his daughter does not know his secrets, that she did not leave her letters where she did so that they’d be found by him or Elisa or

Amparo, that his wife’s sister did not display his letters. These, more than anything else, are the things he wants to hold onto.

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Splintered Senses

Sara was always eavesdropping.

She once told me how she’d close her eyes and become very still, slowing down each breath, exhaling twice as long as each inhale, so that soon even her heart slowed, relaxing one by one all of her muscles beginning with her hands, then her arms, her shoulders, her legs, her feet, and last of all, her face and scalp. Once every muscle in her body was still, she could begin to feel the blood coursing through her heart, passing through her lungs and growing fat with oxygen, gliding through her arteries and capillaries, feeding oxygen to each fiber, and slipping into her veins to begin the tour once more. It was only then that she could begin to hear and see a moment, a full moment, in my life. And not only could Sara hear and see and feel, she’d whisper to me, she could smell, too.

It was how she knew when my mother burnt a pot full of rice one evening. The smell filled Sara’s nose even though she was nowhere near our house. That smell, she laughed, stayed with her for days; she said she’d found traces of it in her hair, on the collars of her school uniform, and even in the fur of her grandmother Amparo’s cat,

Bella.

“Why are you so crazy?” I asked Sara straight-faced, “I can’t even remember the last time my mother cooked rice at all,” not knowing how to feel about it all, sometimes feeling like I wanted her company, I wanted a witness to experience what I’d experience 122

and see what I’d seen, and other times feeling like my darkest moments were exposed, open to scrutiny like a crime caught on film.

She said she knew I had washed out the scorched pot myself, because she had felt, with her own nails, the clumps of charred rice pulling free from the soaking pot. When she said this, I involuntarily looked down at my own nails, recalling how the bits of rice had pressed into the tender spaces where nail meets skin.

But that day, the day that I would learn to close my eyes and walk away whenever something that Sara might want to see and use against me was happening, there was no smell of burnt rice. The only things she’d smell would be cigar smoke and alcohol.

The first woman to arrive kissed me on the cheek, and Sara would smell her hair spray and the gin on her breath. The smell reminded me of Sara’s grandmother who’d taken to pouring capfuls of rum into her coffee whenever she was sure Sara’s father wasn’t around, and I knew it must remind Sara of the same thing, too, though at that moment I wasn’t yet sure whether Sara was listening, watching, and smelling from her house half a mile away. At that moment, I hadn’t yet given much thought to Sara at all even though she was always in my thoughts, even though, on some level, I always felt like she was watching, and I was performing.

Still, the illicit party had begun at my mother’s house. All Sara had to do was steady her breath and keep her body loose, avoiding clenching her fists or pursing her lips so as not to break the spell, so that she could be at the party, too. And throughout the night, parts of me were hoping she was present, still, watching.

***

There were other times when unsought snatches of my life came to her.

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We were both nine years old when Sara came to me with a scrap of paper she had torn from her grandmother’s bible. It was one of the pages that mapped Abraham’s trek around Arabia. On it, Sara had drawn a foot with an L shaped gash beneath an ankle bone. The drawing was clumsy, but we could both tell it was a foot. Sara had seen the foot clearly as well as the rocky shore along the Malecón and a bright orange bearded face with yellow, yellow teeth. She had never seen such yellow teeth before, she told me, eyes wide, fingers at her mouth, caressing her own teeth as I worked on my best incredulous face—a face I hoped would make her feel the absurdity in what she claimed; a look I hoped would dissuade her from repeating her story, from approaching me or anyone else with new stories again even as I grew eager to hear what she’d seen next.

All she could see the night before as she sat at the dinner table, she explained to me, were those teeth, that beard, inching so close to her face, she couldn’t escape them even as she stared at the bowl of chicken soup her mother had placed before her. And then, just as her father began to say grace, she heard my voice as if I were standing right next to her at the dinner table. All I said over and over, like a scratched record, was my red shoe, my red shoe, my red shoe, my red shoe.

Before that day, whenever Sara said she could hear my thoughts or see what I was doing, I’d say things like, you’re not the Holy Spirit, you know. Or I’d play along and claim I too could hear what she was thinking, and that I also knew what she was doing even though we both knew that was not the case. Sara, for her part, was always very magnanimous about it, which always made me angrier, more determined to prove her wrong. She’d tell me she understood how I felt, her eyes patient and sad. She’d tell me she knew her size bothered me. I would always be smaller, and I would always think she

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was trying to be the adult, trying to be my mother. But all she wanted, she’d tell me, her hand on my arm or my shoulder, her face close to mine, was to be less, to know less, to be, more than anything, like me. Each time she said this to me, I disliked her just a little bit more.

Except this time, I couldn’t help behaving like a believer. The gash was there on my own ankle for both of us to see, and when Sara mentioned the yellow teeth, I could feel my eyes open too wide before I managed to squeeze them shut. I was speechless and motionless for what seemed like a very long time.

When I finally opened my eyes, I told Sara a very composed story about a slip from the sea wall that sent me tumbling into the rock pilings below, my favorite red shoe lost to the sucking tide.

“What about the man?” Sara asked. “What about the teeth and the beard?”

I didn’t tell Sara about the smell of his teeth, the feel of his beard, the press of his leg on my back, my shoulder blades. She thought she’d seen him as she drank her soup, as her father said grace, but she had no idea how far her visions were from reality. I felt insulted, somehow, that she thought, for a moment, that she’d seen what I’d seen.

I said I had never seen teeth like that or an orange beard. That was the only part that made no sense to me, I laughed. Maybe the nasty man with the yellow teeth was her future husband—a man made entirely of cheddar cheese. And so that I wouldn’t get too upset with her for pressing me, Sara laughed along too.

***

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When my mother had her party, we were fourteen. By that time, Sara did not entrust her visions to me—she trusted what she saw herself. My confirmations or denials were superfluous. I knew this.

She could see for herself as, one by one, and with a judicious amount of time in between, guests entered my mother’s apartment. Some arrived barefoot so their footsteps would not be heard as they made their way along the narrow hallway that dead-ended at our door, fearful as everyone was of being accused of assembling for political purposes.

Once inside, no one spoke. The atmosphere would have been funereal were it not for the men’s brightly lit eyes, the women’s sly smiles. Sara could see some of the men gathered at our small dinner table, playing silent games of poker, American dollars amassing at the center of the table, faces stony, hands doing all of the talking for them.

She could feel the dew on the glasses I set before the men, their hands sometimes resting on my legs instead of their drinks.

She would note the way my mother and other women took turns slipping in and out of the bedroom my mother and I shared.

She would see my mother shake her head, her curly hair frizzed and disheveled, her red lipstick smeared, whenever one of the men pointed at me or held me at the small of my back or pulled me onto their laps, sending the watered down glasses of rum I held spilling onto the cocktail dress my mother made me wear—a dress that had once been hers when she worked the casinos in another world.

Sara, still in her bedroom, her mother and father asleep across the hall, her grandmother snoring loudly on a bed pushed into a dim corner of their living room, would smell their breaths, their sour desire, from a safe distance.

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And then, at last, Sara saw what she’d been waiting for. She at last perceived my mother’s smoke-filled bedroom and a tight bundle of U.S. dollars cupped in my mother hands and my mother’s long, long legs straddled our bed and the top of her mahogany dresser, her hand reaching behind the tall, oblong mirror, where, eerily, Sara could peer into the glass and see my reflection as if it were her own; my face splotchy, our eyes puffy and wet, Sara deciphered the scene for herself.

She never mentioned her vision to me. She never bothered to ask if any of it was real, if it had happened that way. Instead, my mother and I were awakened by pounding at our door the next morning. Plain-clothed officers forced their way inside as soon as my mother unlatched the locks. She told me to stay in the bedroom, where I sat on the bed, a flat sheet draped around me, one of its corners in my mouth as I chewed nervously at the seam, uncertain if they were there for the reasons I suspected, doubting that Sara had seen, that she still cared to keep vigil, at once hoping that she had and hoping that she hadn’t. Seconds later, the men were inside the bedroom. One of them was two or three years older than me. I had seen him often at the Malecón during high tide, jumping into the water from the rock pilings. He was skinny and hairless and his voice cracked whenever he laughed. Now he stood in my mother’s apartment, his bony fingers squeezing my mother’s arm, his sunburnt face at once stern and impassive.

Another man, his thick legs squeezed into a tight pair of pants, grunted as he stepped onto the edge of our bed and heaved his other leg onto the top of the dresser. He paused for a moment, suspended between the bed and the dresser, before grabbing hold of the leaning mirror and pulling his other leg onto the dresser. The dresser and mirror shook and swayed and the young man laughed. It was the same high, cracking laughter of

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the sea wall. The third man, his body wedged between the door to the bedroom and the young man and my mother, pushed them out of the room, which sent my mother stumbling into the young man, who then pushed back at my mother, his grin transformed into a sneer.

I sat motionless, sucking at the bed sheet. I realized at that moment how desperately I needed to use the bathroom, but I dared not move. I just watched as the thick-legged man balanced on my mother’s dresser, kicking aside the bottles of perfume and jewelry boxes arranged on top, and pulled the wad of money from behind the mirror.

At that moment, it was only the man and I in the bedroom. My mother and the young man and the other man were arguing in the living room. She was no longer talking softly as she had when the men first entered the apartment, calling them terms of endearment like Mi Cielo and Amor. She raged and cursed and sobbed and I could hear the distinct sound of a slap, which quieted her for the rest of the time they remained in the apartment.

The man on the dresser stepped back onto the bed then hopped onto the floor, money in hand. His shoes left dirt smears on our sheets and the glossy top of the dresser.

The men never looked at me; they never said a word to me. They simply showed my mother the money, and she pushed her way back into our bedroom.

“You told them. They’re taking me to jail, and it’s because of you. This is your fault. You have to live with this.”

I didn’t deny that I had told them. I could only stare at the dirt on the bed and on the dresser and wonder at how strangely it transformed our bedroom as they led her away as quietly as the partygoers had entered our apartment the night before.

***

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Sara could occupy my senses, but she couldn’t read my thoughts. She couldn’t know my last minute plans to take the money, to execute a somewhat inchoate plan to leave the island. She couldn’t know how many times I had wished for my mother to disappear one day to another country or to be carried off by a rogue gust of wind or to be crushed by a bus or a train or a crackling bolt of lightning. She couldn’t know how satisfied I felt when I heard the men slap her, but how disgusted I felt that it had been one of them, possibly the ridiculous boy with the screeching laugh. She couldn’t know how much the angry look in my mother’s eyes wounded me, her arrows flying deeper than I ever thought capable, eliciting fresh tears whenever I thought about it, each time prompting me to conclude that now she loved me even less, and there was nothing I could do to change it, to reverse it. All Sara could know, I thought, is what it felt like to scrub away the dirty print from the sheets and sweep up the perfumed splinters of glass that rolled under the bed, some of them skidding as far as the closet, and smelling of violets and roses and gardenias, all of them smashed together on the terrazzo.

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BOOK FOUR:

They Wash Ashore

On very windy days, their bodies can be seen somersaulting to the shore on the tops of waves. Sometimes their tentacles splay around them in all directions, carving venomous streaks in the sand. Sometimes the tendrils gather beneath them the way a lady might tuck her legs primly beneath her skirts, forming scalloped poison shadows underneath their iridescent sails.

The wind takes them because they are incapable of taking themselves. They are sails without oars or rudders, without direction, the name Man-of-War wholly misleading because it suggests pointed intent of the most calculated sort.

On this day, some of them have blown forty feet from the shore and tumbled as far away as the sea wall, their bodies almost unrecognizable, covered as they are in gray sand. Along the shoreline, Elisa has already gathered twenty-nine. She chooses only the ones that are still wet. When the bucket is full, she tosses them back into the ocean. Once dry, they die. Their stingers remain venomous for days, perhaps even weeks, but they are dead.

***

Elisa had not wanted to see the ocean ever again until, one day, she did, and, in an instant, her desire to see the ocean became a solid thing, bright and loud and sharp-edged.

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Her husband’s face—the first thing she saw in the morning and the last thing at night, the face she could paint in brilliant detail from memory—faded into shadow.

When he asked for his breakfast, his voice sounded faraway, like the hum of traffic on nearby I-95, so that she could barely make out the words coffee, toast, a soft boiled egg.

The kitchen, where she had spent so much time throughout the last seventeen years, lost all of its familiar dimensions, so that as she prepared Rolando’s meal, she bumped into the sharp edges of the countertop several times and searched the wrong cabinets and drawers for a butter knife and a pot and his favorite coffee mug, the words

Miami Herald faded and the white porcelain stained a pale yellow.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked her as she stared into the coffee pot, held by the slow ripples of coffee that reminded her of the inky night sea. He scraped the kitchen chair along the floor as he inched closer to the table, eager for his breakfast.

“I’m fine,” she said, alarmed by the underwater sound of her own voice. “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.”

***

She collects their bodies in a small yellow bucket that she filled with seawater—a bucket that belonged to a blond little boy.

He left it behind along with a red shovel when his mother called. Cameron, the woman had called, hurry now. And the boy had jumped up from the ditch he had been working on all morning, a ditch well-shored on all sides and half-filled with water, to catch up to his mother that had already begun making her way towards the parking lot,

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her back to the ocean as the small boy charged through the loose sand, displacing it with his small feet and sending it flying through the air behind him.

Elisa remembers the name clearly in her mind in the precise way the woman said it: Cam-rin. But when she says the name out loud, her tongue, her throat, her lips, they all conspire to mangle it up as if, on principle, they will not abide by two consonants strung together or by an r unrolled. She continues scooping the beached siphonophores into her stinging hands and dropping them into the bucket while calling out her own versions of the boy’s name into the wind. The wind sweeps her mangled versions of the boy’s name westward, away from the shore, and Elisa imagines her voice reaching the man sitting on the sea wall, his back the color of burnt sugar, or perhaps the woman rinsing her legs at the public shower.

***

Their sunken couch, the bathroom sink, her clothes all pressed to one side of the closet, the screened back porch with the spring-shut door, the little gray house—they all skirted the edges of this need as it bulldozed its way through the neat life she had built around herself—a life stacked high with things that held no semblance of that other life beyond the Florida Straits, what she called That Other Life. Shag carpeting and scrub pine trees and their armored cones and wool socks and Betty Crocker cookbooks had all piled together to form a wall that safely obscured her neighbors’ obscenely fecund mango trees and the too close, too blue sky and the saltwater breeze that regularly blew in from the south and east. And now it all began to topple over as she stumbled through the morning, trying her best to appear normal, reining it all in until her husband left the house. And once he finally left for the day, his brakes chirping as he backed out of their

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concrete driveway and into the street in a wide arc that had sent the rear bumper into the neighbor’s mailbox more than once, so did she.

***

A man-of-war is not one living thing. Their daughter, Sara, taught her that. It was the year that she and Rolando left Cuba and Sara chose to stay behind.

Sara had invited them to dinner at her apartment in the city that night and cooked a simple potage of calabaza squash and potato, of which Rolando only took three sips.

When Sara retreated to the kitchen to wash the dishes, her eyes on her father’s still full bowl, he’d complained to Elisa, his voice low, that potage was nothing without chicken bones or pork fatback. If there’s no meat to be had, he’d said, better to just starve. When

Sara returned from the kitchen, her hands still wet with dishwater, she offered Rolando coffee, bread pudding, a can of guava chunks with some condensed milk, but he refused them all. Sara murmured that he appeared to be losing weight, that his arms had grown so thin, to which he replied that everyone must look small to her as he stood from the table and leaned against the window, his back to her and Elisa.

Afterwards, they three had walked along the Malecón. Dozens of the man-of-wars were washed up on the rocks, many of their sails deflated and smeared across the jagged edges. Sara stopped to look at them, and Rolando, who walked several paces ahead of them, eventually came to a stop, too. It was something he had begun doing years before, well before the whole business of the revolution—his walking ahead or behind or off to the side, always apart, whenever the three of them went anywhere together. Something he had begun doing around the time Sara had grown to his height. After he had already stopped holding her hand and calling her his little Sarita, he began holding himself apart

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and treating her as if she were a grown woman, some distant acquaintance, despite her mere seven years when she could stand next to him, shoulder to shoulder. It was then that he stopped calling her astounding growth-rate miraculous.

“Each one of these is not one, really, Mamá. Each single one is more like a community of tiny beings living together, only each tiny organism can’t survive on its own. They are inextricably linked, and each has his job, and together they thrive as one.”

“That’s something, Sara,” Elisa had said because she did not understand how it could be so, and she could not think of anything else to say, “what a thing.”

What had Rolando said to her then? Elisa has trouble remembering. What she remembers is the ugliness on his face and the funny way he stalked over to them with his limbs resisting each bend that a footstep requires, his chest puffed up and his neck stretched and stiff; the stance making him look thinner still, much too thin. His face looked only at Elisa, never at Sara, and Sara’s face—it turned into a face Elisa had never seen before. Then Sara’s hand came down on Rolando’s head where his hair had started to thin and his pale scalp shone through, and his small body looked smaller still sprawled across the concrete, and Sara, bending over him, looked larger and more like the Sara from the billboards than ever before.

***

Elisa’s mother told her that once. It was a few months before she died, her belly extended and solid as if the child inside were a smooth, round stone. She had found Elisa sitting in the crook of an avocado tree’s split trunk, her eyes closed, when she should have been helping the boys wash for dinner. You have no direction. You just go where the wind takes you, blowing along in the breeze like a discarded piece of paper. Now

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Elisa thinks, no, not a piece of paper. But if she has been wind-tossed, she is not a man- of-war, either. She has no venom, no means of attack or defense.

***

At first, she thought maybe those men, maybe the ugly things they said, compelled her to go to the sea. Maybe it was that day outside of the grocery store when she heard the man with the pockmarked face tell another man, an older man with a thin sash of hair that wrapped around the back of his head from ear to ear, that he wished he could fuck that monster. That dirty, eight-foot-tall beast, Sara Sobretodos. But not just fuck her, he went on, he wanted to crawl inside that giant’s pussy. He wanted to live inside of it. And he bet he probably wasn’t the only one. He bet even Castro dreamed of crawling up in there, fatigues and all. Why else would he parade that freak around, put her face on all his propaganda? And then the other man, the older man, he just rolled his eyes and rubbed his elbows and said don’t you think that freak is dead by now, anyway?

That first morning, as she climbed into the bus that would take her to Miami

Beach, she thought, that’s what must have set her off like this. Hearing something like that, it must have jarred something loose inside of her, split something into small pieces with little, sharp edges. But that happened months before, and, besides, she’s heard men say things like that before.

***

She wades into the water, bucket aloft. It is so windy. The waves, even on the shore, the water only knee-deep, crash into her so that the foam reaches her chest. Some of the foam splits away from the waves and flies off in the air, free from water and sea and sand for a small moment before dropping back down. A droplet of water makes its

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way into her eye, and it stings. She stops and blinks and blinks, waiting for the stinging to stop and for her vision to return.

***

After Rolando fell, he bled from his forehead for several hours, but he refused to go to the hospital. Elisa tried to treat the wound once they were home and away from the small crowd that had formed on the Malecón and followed them all the way to the bus stop, with the most enthusiastic of them jogging alongside the bus for several blocks, calling out Yanqui pigs and Yanqui swine and Yanqui loving sons of bitches because they surmised if Sara was going to beat a man down, he could only be a traitor to the revolution, but Rolando would not let Elisa touch him. He had suffered her to hold his hand on the bus, but once home, Rolando maintained a distance from Elisa of at least eight feet. If she came too close to Rolando, he stumbled into another room, or tripped into a piece of furniture just to avoid her, just to maintain that eight foot span.

That night, those eight feet prevented him from sleeping on their bed, but they did not prevent him from speaking to her. From shrieking over and over, whenever she came close to him, or whenever she left the room, or whenever too much time had elapsed since he’d last said it, compelling him to call out, “Isn’t it something, Elisa? Even the fucking fish are Communists, what a thing, Elisa, what a thing!”

***

Her hands burn. They throb, and each finger-bend seems to ignite a new, tiny, robust fire just underneath her skin. If she squeezes her eyes shut, the tiny fires grow larger, burning past her fingers and palms, crawling past her wrists and up her arms, taking her over completely. Her heart races and goose bumps erupt up and down her arms

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and legs and prickle her scalp. At intervals, she pauses to wiggle her fingers and close her eyes and tears spring forth salty as the sea.

***

It wasn’t long before she stopped waiting for Rolando to leave in the morning.

She’d set his breakfast on the table, sometimes forgetting to set the sugar bowl and teaspoon next to his coffee mug, and leave the house before he was done eating.

He never asked her where she was going or where she had been once she returned in the evening, often sunburnt and exhausted. Not once. At first, Elisa was surprised and later, for a long time, angry. For seventeen years, she had spent her days in the house, going only to the grocery store and the doctor’s office, never learning to drive a car, never wandering anywhere not within walking distance. Now she left daily, often arriving later than him, and he did not even muster a single question. As long as she prepared his breakfasts and dinners, she thought bitterly, he didn’t care how she spent her days.

But as of late, she has begun to see it as a concession of sorts, on his part. Perhaps it is his way of accepting blame, and for this, she does not know how to feel.

***

There have been days when she has expected to see Sara there, though not today.

Today she thinks only of her task and of her stinging hands and of breathing and not gasping or hyperventilating like she did after her first good sting. But other times, yes.

Other times she has waited to see her daughter rising up out of the water. In a country known for its miniatures, alongside hummingbirds the size of houseflies and frogs able to fit snugly inside children’s nostrils, Sara’s body expanded upwards and outwards, her cells multiplying feverishly, illogically, with bone cells racing to keep up

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with skin cells that strove, many were certain, to blanket the entire island. So, surely she must be capable of traversing the narrow puddle that divides island and peninsula. One of

Sara’s long-legged strides must exceed a mile, and if she has not yet stopped growing since the day Elisa last saw her, her head could very likely clear the surface of the ocean were she to hazard the trip across.

When Elisa allows herself to think like this, she laughs, but that doesn’t mean she stops looking and waiting.

***

When Rolando first bought the house, he explained to Elisa that it was on a street that formed a straight line to Miami Beach. If she stayed on 79th Street long enough, she would hit the beach, he told her over and over. And it wouldn’t take long either, he added. She could go every day, if she liked.

He never asked her how she felt about this, about living on a direct route back to the sea. He never asked her if she thought they should buy a house at all or if she liked the look of it. He never asked her if she wanted to leave Cuba. And if he didn’t ask those things, it was no surprise he’d never asked how she felt about the revolution or about the things Sara had done or the way she felt when she saw Sara, their own daughter, on the television, her hulking figure smiling and waving flags and looming over the crowd of marchers, their faces upturned and radiant as Sara ambled by.

***

He said it to her after dinner. At first, she wasn’t sure if it really happened on the night before the morning when her strange desire surfaced, but now she remembers it that

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way. Now the two events are linked in her mind, and there’s no other way for her to remember them.

They had just eaten elbow macaroni from a box, mixed with powdered cheese from a silver envelope. He sat back in his chair and stretched his legs underneath the table. Using his fork, he began tracing small circles in the film of yellow cheese that remained on his plate. One of his socked feet touched her on the ankle and moved away—a move both slight and deliberate.

“Our daughter is a curse from the devil himself,” he told her with a shrug, his lips pressed together, “a pure abomination that never should have been.” Then he drank a sip of water and complained that the dishwasher left spots on the glass, and how that made him feel like he was drinking from an unwashed glass.

For Elisa, the funny part was that she was not the religious one. The devil was nothing to her. It was the shrug—the shrug and the drink of water. The way he could say that and just shrug.

***

She wades in the ocean with her eyes open, knowing it is always that first drop of salty water that stings most. She moves in deeper, angling her body sideways so that the waves are sliced by her hips, her jutting elbows. In deeper, the waves lose their force, but the swell of water remains, reaching her neck and sometimes the tops of her lips. Slowly she lowers the bucket into the water and watches the ocean breach its edges, rushing in quickly until bucket-water and ocean-water are the same water and the air-filled sails that crowded together inside the bucket, forming a tight mound of shimmering blue, cease to press together and begin bobbing further and further apart.

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Their tentacles reach out and around and down and Elisa waits for them to encircle her and embrace her or maybe just snag her, entrap her.

She waits for the caress that will turn to a sting that will, in turn, leave bright red welts that everyone, if they look at her, even if they only glance at her, will see.

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Familiar Impositions

The letter arrives, handwritten, the smudged envelope undersized, and Marina can see, with the shape of each letter, that her past and present have finally intersected, if only in blue/black ink. Without opening the envelope, she can see the script is unmistakably

Sara’s. The letter r, the capital h, the lowercase m—each one loops into another in a way both clumsy and graceful.

When she studies the words on the envelope and in the note, she can almost see

Sara walking towards her, lifting each foot slowly and carefully as she always did, as if she were afraid of missing the ground, thereby setting off a strange reversal in the earth’s gravitational pull that would send her flying off into the sky. Her shoulders are tensed in her concerted effort to keep her arms at her sides, her back stiff but slightly stooped to mask her height. And yet despite all her efforts to walk with near military precision, her movements still come off as heavy and clumsy—heavy and clumsy, but beautiful somehow in their bewildering scale. Watching Sara move always reminded Marina of a galloping giraffe: in spite of its urgency to flee, its movements seem to happen in slow motion, allowing an onlooker to plot the whole of each canter from beginning to end.

Still, more than anything, when Marina imagines Sara walking towards her, Ella is at Sara’s side, her skinny six-year old legs scissoring rapidly to keep pace with Sara’s long strides—walking so fast, she almost leaves the ground—her outstretched left hand swallowed by Sara’s, and her right never rising high enough for a wave good-bye. 141

Written inside the letter are just the words “return home.”

First, Marina considers the word “return.” In it, the story of Marina’s turning away and heading north is embedded; whether temporarily or permanently, it was a decisive turn. Now Sara instructs her to turn again, turn back, a request remarkable in itself. And then there is the word home, loaded as it is with all of its sentimental connotations designed to conceal any complexity or contradiction.

Maybe Marina would have argued, when she was much younger and not a woman of fifty-eight, that she is already home. Maybe, she thinks, she could have made this her home if all would have gone as planned. If Ella were here with her, no longer a six-year- old but a woman of twenty-one, everything would be different. But as it stands, her life for the past fifteen years has felt transient at all times, beginning with the race to the shore at Lauderdale Lakes, where she and the others on the raft could see the bouncing lights of the coast guard tapping, in turn, each of their heads, in a dangerous game of duck, duck, goose.

She swam, feeling her sandals first drag and then slip away, wishing she had worn shorts without pockets, cursing the waterlogged denim that made her feel as if someone were pulling at her waist, pulling her down and back into cooler, lightless water, forgetting for those frantic minutes that she had been on that boat with anyone else at all, that she was the mother of a little, skinny girl still on Cuban soil—a spindly daughter that would have never managed to swim the several yards between raft and shore; forgetting completely that her skin cracked as if the thread holding all of her seams together had melted away, feeling only so desperate and so thirsty and so, so tired. She scrambled to sink her toes into the sand so that she could claim dry feet and evade deportation for toes

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steeped in seawater, but she refused to stop there, running fast through the loose sand that the soles of her feet could detect was not the sand of a Cuban beach, stumbling past a tall stack of beach chairs chained together alongside the shadowy sentinel of a lifeguard shack boarded up and windowless, until she reached the sidewalk and the street, and she looked into the lit up windows of apartments and hotel rooms and saw no one leaning out, curious to know what was going on outside, seeing only still silhouettes and flickering television screens and an orderly arrangement of drapes and shadowy pieces of furniture that, even from her vantage point on the sidewalk, felt foreign.

Then, later, came the cot in Tío Rolando and Tía Elisa’s house, which she pried open each evening in the center of the living room and refolded each morning before rolling it behind their couch, the sound of the metal squealing and snapping together causing her to wince each time. The cot made her back ache. It never yielded sleep sound enough to fool her that she was home again. She never awoke confused, thinking Ella was in the next room or sleeping next to her, her body curled into Marina’s side, her head damp with sweat and pressing into Marina’s ribs or the side of her breast. Instead, even in her sleep, she remembered where she was—she knew every second that her daughter was nowhere near. The cot and her thrift store clothes squeezed into a duffle bag along with her paper towel-wrapped toothbrush slipped into the front pocket all hummed with impermanence.

Rolando often asked her why it took her so long to leave, why she hadn’t come when they had, “when the Cubans with sense left” because if she had, Ella would not be stuck there, Marina’s only daughter, motherless. When he went on like this, he always managed to overlook that if Marina had left when they left, Ella would not be at all.

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Marina would have never come across her mother’s old American “friend,” who promised marriage and a big American house with televisions in every room and a refrigerator filled with food, with milk and cheeses and meats and fruits she had never heard of, and her own car painted her favorite color (green, maybe? she’d mused, no red), and so many clothes and shoes, she’d be giving some of them away, who gave her none of those things, but a daughter instead. When Rolando asked her why she’d insisted on sticking around, she didn’t offer a reply. She just avoided his sour gaze and imagined not having met that man; she imagined not having had Ella; and she felt the dizzying pull of that guilty, impossible relief.

Elisa, for her part, always managed to walk into the room whenever Marina was just ending her daily phone call with Ella. At first, the phone calls always ended with

Ella’s inconsolable sobs, her irrational demands for Marina to come get her and take her home right now. And afterwards, Marina only felt angry because her daughter needed her and didn’t understand the legalities surrounding her immigration, and Marina didn’t fully understand them either. But it wasn’t long before Sara had to coax Ella to get on the phone with Marina. Although Sara pressed the mouthpiece into her hand or chest (Marina couldn’t tell which, only that the mouthpiece was muffled), Marina could hear Sara pleading with Ella, “Come now, it’s your mother on the phone. She loves you so much and just wants to hear your voice.” On most nights, this appeal to Ella’s sympathy worked. Ella would come to the phone and dutifully tell Marina she loved her then blow her a kiss before handing the phone back to Sara, who reassured Marina that Ella still asked about her, but she was a kid and kids adapt and Marina shouldn’t want anything less. Afterwards, it was Marina who grew inconsolable, and it was her Tía Elisa who

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would murmur, “My greatest regret is leaving Sara. She doesn’t care now if I live or die.”

She’d shake her head and watch as Marina blew her nose and wiped her eyes and lit one

American cigarette after another, and sometimes she’d busy herself opening several windows and aiming an oscillating fan at Marina to blow the cigarette smoke and ashes outside.

The jobs in the eyeglass factory, the fish packing plant, the grocery store, the flower warehouse, the street corner where she first sold flowers, then oranges, then the pens she had stolen from the dark little hotel where she had worked exactly three hours.

The job now, in the food by the pound store, where part of her pay includes trays of caramelized plantains too browned or too undercooked for their picky customers—most of them exiles themselves determined to forget or at least deny the former penury that would have sent them to their knees with gratitude for a tray of such riches. The efficiency apartment without a long-term lease and the bare walls and the undersized refrigerator that trilled throughout the night and the wobbly round table with the chipped

Formica and the metal folding chair, the cloth seat frayed, the yellow foam exposed.

Nothing was meant to last.

She gave up on a home fit for a child, a place where tall trees and undulating slides and a brightly painted school and children on bicycles zigzagging after ice cream trucks could all be found within walking distance. Sara policed every phone call, every letter, every one of Marina’s efforts to get someone to smuggle Ella over, to force her onto a speeding boat despite her terror of the ocean and her wild shrieks that Marina imagined would be heard throughout Cuba and the Caribbean, reaching even the blind creatures near the ocean floor, but not the streets of Miami where the sounds of traffic

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and airplanes and sirens can drown out any sound, no matter how desperate. It only took two years and thousands of dollars for Marina to realize that her efforts to get Ella back would always be crushed by Sara’s enormous hand—a hand that no longer pushed an indifferent Ella towards the telephone whenever Marina called until Marina eventually gave up on calling. Because if she stopped calling, Ella would feel it. What child does not need their mother, she reasoned, forgetting how often she’d wished herself orphaned as a child, killing her mother multiple times in a single afternoon whenever Teresa dressed for work, her feet sliding into her high-heeled shoes even as Marina begged her to stay, or whenever Teresa brought home yet another new friend. Then Marina would pray to God and all the saints that Teresa would simply not come home one day, until she began dreaming of Teresa’s various deaths in such brilliant detail, Sara had no problem recounting them for her, calling Marina first thing in the morning to describe just how bad Teresa’s bloated body had smelled the night before in the dream they’d both shared.

But no, Ella would regret her indifference towards Marina; she would wish she could take back every time she answered Marina’s questions impatiently, barking out sí or no in her hurry to end the conversation and get off the phone. Ella would be the one to call and to write and to demand that she be reunited with her mother.

Except she didn’t. And when Marina’s petitions for Ella’s U.S. immigrant visa were finally answered after a three year waiting period, Ella’s Cuban exit visa was quickly denied. Weeks later, a letter from Sara: Ella hadn’t heard from her mother in over a year. The last line simply: “Who can blame her for not wanting to go?”

But Marina blamed her. She blamed eleven-year-old Ella and she blamed Sara and she dreamed of the day when first Sara, then Castro, then his brother would all die,

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killing them multiple times in a single afternoon just as she once had her mother. Marina dreamed of gunfire so silent and sudden, bewildered recognition would only come with the sting of each bullet, with each weeping wound, each of them compelled to ask, “Can this be? Have I been shot?”; she dreamed of an odorless, tasteless poison that would make each essential organ shutdown in a gradual blackout of the body; of a relentless, mildew-like cancer blooming on every bone, every tissue, every muscle, mottling every pink surface black; of cardiac arrest and stilled hearts; of a morsel of food lodged in the airway, leaving Sara and the Castros blinking and gray-faced and reaching for their necks. And Ella, she dreamed of in the best way Marina knew how, as a six-year-old crying on the telephone, begging Marina to come get her and take her home; or as a four- year-old, refusing to go anywhere near the ocean because she wanted to build sand castles right by Marina’s side; or a giggling infant, forever without anger or resentment, or, worst of all, indifference.

***

Marina arrives at Rolando’s home unannounced and without the usual offering of meals and desserts she delivers to him weekly, all of them courtesy of the small catering company she works for. It is summer and the sun is still bright, the sky still a brilliant blue at 7:00 PM. Two children loop their bicycles in and out of Rolando’s driveway and the driveways across the street. Marina taps her car keys against the aluminum of the screen door and follows the choreographed route of the children, feeling exposed, out of place, without an armload of Cuban food.

She began bringing Rolando meals when she first realized he wasn’t taking care of himself, his only meals coming directly from cans, just a month after Elisa’s accident.

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He’d always insisted it was an accident. Rolando had explained to the police officers and

Marina and all of the stunned neighbors that Elisa had been feeling sick. She was feverish, and so she had soaked her arms and legs in rubbing alcohol, but he couldn’t quite explain why she’d held onto a box of kitchen matches as she sat on the front porch without cigarettes or cigars or anything else that might need lighting.

Marina’s mother later told her, “That was no accident. My sister simply chose self-immolation over divorce.” She’d said this, her eyes narrow, and Marina had thought she’d been close to smiling. The way she’d told Marina this, the way it seemed to amuse

Teresa, left Marina restless for days afterwards. Later, she realized that her mother’s attitude wasn’t one of amusement, but satisfaction, and then she realized she sometimes understood her mother in ways she wished she didn’t.

But Marina also knew her mother’s explanation was too simple. Elisa had been troubled for years. Marina could remember the weeks when Rolando had first complained Elisa was gone all day, only to return home with red welts covering her arms and legs, and that last time, even her neck and face, the swollen lobes of her ears. Marina was there the day policemen brought her home after a postal worker had witnessed her taking off her sneakers and lining them up neatly on the sidewalk, then sliding first one leg and then the other over a safety rail. She seemed so calm, so in control, they’d said, as she stepped off the small 57th Avenue bridge and dropped into the canal ten feet below.

The strange bruises and the purples scars, the palmfuls of dirt she sometimes pressed into her mouth—all of it began years before Rolando suggested they live apart. That she finally succeeded in destroying herself after Rolando had decided he no longer wanted to be responsible did not indicate causality, Marina told herself. In fact, on bad days, Marina

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sometimes blamed herself. She became convinced Elisa’s erratic behavior began at the height of Marina’s struggle to bring Ella over. She was sure Elisa had caught her bitterness and despair like a virus, and whenever Marina saddled herself with this, another regret, she was pleased by the way it pinned her to her full-sized mattress, guaranteeing there’d be not getting out of bed that day, no seeing the sun.

Now all that is left is a faint scorch mark Marina once thought indelible—once a blackest of black stain extending across three concrete steps leading to her uncle’s front porch that cast a shadow of windblown flames but revealed nothing of the still and silent body cupped inside, much less how her Tía Elisa’s small hands were folded in her lap, or how her legs crossed at the ankle as if she sat waiting for a bus. Now the stain is so sun- bleached and faded, it is barely discernible.

She goes to Rolando now because she can’t think of what else to do, because she feels a dim obligation to share this scrap of communication from his only daughter.

Because she has always felt a special kinship towards Rolando, even after she met her father, and his flared nostrils and narrow eyes, crowded together at the top of his nose— nearly all of his face an identical reproduction of her own—made her stop believing

Rolando was her father. Even after she was too old to wish Rolando had married her mother and not her mother’s sister.

She expects that he will say all of the usual terrible things that he says about Sara.

She knows that he will tell her not to go back there, not to give it a single thought, to just forget the past, and she’s not sure if that’s what she wants to hear, but she is prepared to hear it.

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What Marina does not expect is for her uncle to answer the door still wearing the same pants he wore on her last visit (four or five days ago, she guesses; she’s lost track).

The khaki pants are now stained in various spots and paired with a threadbare white undershirt (the fabric at the underarms has worn away so that his pale, papery skin peeps through) in place of the pressed, collared shirt and tie she last saw him in. When he opens the door, he mumbles, again and again, that he was not expecting her, stumbling through his words uncharacteristically, and at one point calling her Teresa.

Inside, the house smells faintly of burnt coffee and urine. He apologizes several times before disappearing into his bedroom to change into something “presentable.”

When he remerges fifteen minutes later, he appears to be wearing the same pants, now topped with a nylon windbreaker much too large for his thin frame so that the collar is slung over his left shoulder, revealing a scrap of what Marina knows is the same undershirt.

He sits next to Marina on the couch, nearly panting.

“What a pleasure this is,” he says. He reaches for one of her hands to pat it. It’s really not a good time for this, she thinks to herself. Maybe he doesn’t need to know about the letter. He’s old, and he doesn’t need to get angry about anything. Still, she pulls

Sara’s letter from where it is, wedged in her purse between her wallet and car keys. She feels as if she were about to kick a sick dog just as it has slunk over to nuzzle her hand.

Still, she hands Rolando the letter.

“What’s this?” he asks.

He reads the two words printed on the small slip of paper and turns it and the envelope over once, twice.

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“What’s this?”

His mouth remains open after he asks the question. Marina can see he is not wearing his teeth, a first in her presence. It surprises her even though, logically, she should have known that at his age, his teeth were likely false. But because she has never seen him without his teeth, her proud uncle’s appearance always impeccable (until now), the thought never occurred to her. Now, she can see his gums, slick and wet and pale, receding into the dark when he finally closes his mouth, like some cave dwelling thing, unfit for the light of day. Her tongue goes to the empty space in the back of her mouth where she had a cracked molar extracted several months ago. She is sure she would have rather walked in on him perched on the toilet than this, she thinks.

Marina reaches for the letter, but Rolando backs away, the letter and envelope rustling together as if they too urge him to settle down, to hush. He stumbles off of the couch, his reflexes too slow, windmilling his arms several times to keep from falling down.

She is a monster for having ambushed a frail old man this way. And not just any old man, but the uncle that saved her and her mother from destitution and homelessness time and time again.

“Tío Rolando, remember,” she says, her voice steady and authoritative. It is the even monotone of her mother. “El aller ya no existe.”

She says it and repeats it, invoking his own maxim. Soon after Elisa died, he’d resolved to forget, and never again speak of, any day that had come before the day he was living in—a vow which collapsed all topics, from yesterday’s thunderstorm to his boyhood in Cuba to speculations about his estranged (and, to the circle of Cuban exiles

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Rolando was friendly with, infamous almost to the degree of Cienfuegos or Guevara) daughter, into a category deemed Subjects Forgotten and Never to be Spoken of Again.

In all cases, he would put an end to inquiries and conversations unrelated to the present by muttering “El aller ya no existe.” Marina often teased him whenever she dropped in for her weekly visits, expressing amazement that he knew her name at all, that he had the power of speech, that he was willing to don clothing that had existed in his closet and dresser drawers the day before. But mostly Marina envied him. If he managed to kill each day with a sunset, then maybe he awoke each morning fresh and unmarred. For Marina, yesterday was often the only thing that existed—a patched fabric of yesterdays and moments and memories that, on most days, caught wind and ballooned past the concrete lawns and power lines and squat apartment buildings of East Hialeah, eventually eclipsing the sky and everything else below. The sharp shoulder blades of a child on the street recalled Ella, always refusing to eat the stews Marina prepared, always begging

Marina for condensed milk instead, even when there was nothing left of their ration; the heaviness in the air before an afternoon thunderstorm brought back Sara—the two of them as children, walking home slowly after school so the rain could catch them, the two of them shrieking whenever it did, thrilled by how cold it was; a simple trip to the grocery store reminded Marina of all the promises she’d made to Ella, of all the things she told her she would buy her once they both became Americanas, of the frenzied days before she left, when telling Ella about their future riches filled their days and nights together, leaving no time, no pauses in between, for Marina to find out how Ella felt about it all.

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“It’s my daughter, she’s written me a letter,” he says, leaning heavily against a wall dotted with several decorative plates from Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas—all places his well-meaning neighbors, and not he and Elisa, visited. If they couldn’t go back to their homeland, why should they attempt to see the rest of the world, he’d often said.

“Yes, it’s from your daughter,” Marina says, saying nothing else, at once worried that he’ll see the envelope is addressed to her or that he won’t see it at all, that he’ll continue thinking the letter is his.

“She’s still alive.”

“Did you think she wasn’t?”

“Yes. There were rumors.”

“And you believed them?”

“And I had dreams.”

“And you believed those, too?” Marina can’t help chuckling when she asks this.

How many times has she dreamed Sara was dead? For a time, she dreamed her dead every night.

“Did you ever dream your daughter died?”

Marina has dreamed Ella died. More than once. Each time she has, it was

Marina’s fault. She left a newborn Ella in a duffle bag, zipped closed and stuffed into a closet; she went shopping, searching the racks of a large department store for hours for a new pair of shoes, and forgot that Ella was strapped into the backseat of her car in a treeless Miami parking lot on a day so hot, the asphalt secreted rippling plumes of heat.

In one recent dream, she watched as Ella plummeted from the top of a thick-trunked royal palm, where Marina had placed her—a place so tall, even the tallest person couldn’t

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reach her. When Ella hit the ground, she broke apart into a hundred stone pieces, and

Marina gathered the jagged and crumbling pieces into her skirt, already resigned that there’d be no putting her back together.

“Everyone has dreams like that,” she says.

“I never had dreams like that before.”

“What I’m saying is I just don’t think dreams like that mean anything.”

“Not even when I hated her most. Not even when I wished she was dead.”

“Dreams like that just express some anxiety.”

He had that dream, he tells Marina, and he was sure he would never see his daughter alive again. “Now I know there’s still a chance. As long as she and I are both alive, there is a chance.”

“So you’ll go, then?”

“Go? To Cuba? No, I’ll never go back. Not without Elisa.”

He sinks back into the couch, his windbreaker filling with air and sighing as he leans back, closing his eyes, his body angled slightly away from hers. Marina remembers the day, as a child, when she told Rolando she’d always wished he was her father. He ignored her profession, and then he rebuked her for having read his letters to Teresa, but she still wished it. It’s only now that she wonders how good of a father he would have made.

“But you should go,” he says.

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Yes, you can. You are a citizen. You have a daughter over there. You can go.”

“Yes, legally.”

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“What else would keep you?”

He replaces the letter in Marina’s lap, his eyes still closed. They sit on the couch like this for several minutes. Marina is not sure how to answer his question. Fear. She is afraid of what returning would mean. She is afraid of seeing Ella and not recognizing the six-year-old in the face and body of the woman. She is afraid of being disappointed that

Ella does not resemble the woman she has often tried to picture—that her hair will be too thin, her eyes too small, her hips too broad. She is afraid something in Ella’s eyes, in the way she smiles or doesn’t smile at Marina, will cause something inside of her to bend or crack. She’s afraid all of her anger and resentment will come off of her body in dank waves, and Ella won’t want to come near her. She is afraid that Ella will come back with her and see the apartment and Marina’s used car and her job at the catering company and think that Marina’s life is no better than the life she left. She’s afraid of letting go of the idea that their separation is permanent. There is some measure of freedom in permanence—in knowing you’ve done everything you can.

Rolando turns to her.

“May God forgive me, I wished she was dead.” Rolando crosses himself and begins pulling at his lower eyelids with the tips of his fingers, pressing them into the insides of his eyes and sliding his fingers outwards repeatedly. It’s the same thing Sara did seconds before she began to cry. Marina wonders if Rolando ever observed this similarity—an unconscious gesture passed on to his daughter.

“I wished her dead so many times. What kind of father does that make me?”

“Tío, no one can blame you for the complicated feelings you may have.”

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“Hating someone is not so complicated. You have to make them into a monster.

You have to strip away their humanity. That’s how you hate.”

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How Things Might Have Gone and Other Wasted Thoughts

Ella:

My mother could have stayed, her feet hugging gravel and earth instead of slicing through sand and water in her rush to escape.

She could have stayed, our fingers curled around each other’s, the edges of our wrists bumping together, as her raft drifted away, growing smaller than a fingernail, neither of us caring if the people aboard lingered forever at sea, their salty bodies hardening as they took one last look back.

We could have walked back to our home, my legs wrapped around her waist, feet hooked around each other, happily ignoring the painful rub of ankle bone on ankle bone each time she hoisted me up with a swing of her hips to keep me from sliding down.

We could have tumbled inside of our apartment, her feet, her ankles, the insides of her thighs all perfectly dry, and my body limp, asleep, not at all tensed with nightmares of drowning on land, of twenty foot waves sending every woman, every child, every bearded man out to sea.

We could have fallen asleep, my head resting on her arm, and not dreamt about the ocean swirling around our heads before sucking us down to the ocean floor, her raft shattered into pieces that drifted further and further apart before sinking, each piece

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zigzagging and somersaulting down to the ocean floor like so many jagged and soggy bits of ash.

We could have slept soundly then, her desire to float to another world just a false rumor, a fading dream.

Sara:

Sometimes I think about the ways I could have done things differently.

Marina:

I could have left a day sooner, letting lies spill from between my teeth, knowing and really believing no god would punish such a lie.

I could have told them all tomorrow was the day as I hoisted her onto my back, her legs wrapped around my waist and hooked at the ankle as I made for the place where our raft sat underneath a mound of palm fronds.

I could have told no one. I could have had she not been so afraid of the sea.

Rolando:

Elisa could have been less of a wife and more of a mother.

She could have pried her eyes away from my curled back, my resentful shoulders.

She could have taken all of the things I said in her hands and pressed them down into her palms, collapsing my scorn like old newsprint, rubbing it down until the words blended together, mashed it all into a damp pulp, and tossed it into the sea for a fish to swallow instead of swallowing it all herself in large, desperate mouthfuls until it pushed

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at her seams, splitting her small body and letting enough air in for that ball of fire to erupt.

She could have stayed behind and let me leave.

I was not fit to stay there with them. She could have seen that.

Sara:

I could have pulled some strings.

Marina:

I could have told her she would be safe with me, that I would never let the sea take her as I wrangled her onto the raft, her nails leaving red half-moons on my shoulders and the tops of my arms.

I could have tied her to me and to the metal barrels that kept us aloft and sent us bobbing away from the island, from our home, from Sara, from her terrible, terrible hands, so hungry to hold us there together.

I could have lied and left and fled with her terror in my arms and released it into the sky for the seagulls to swallow.

Ella:

I could have been the kind of child a mother can’t leave before I had to become the kind of child that didn’t care about being left.

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I could have been a swimmer, fearless, confident in my body’s buoyancy, in the strength of my arms to propel me forward, my legs rudder-like, as the shore inched further and further away.

I could have forgotten the day the undertow sucked me under, upended me, sent me somersaulting, and spit me out, but not before taking my swimsuit and filling my mouth with sand.

I could have listened when my mother told me to stay at the shoreline as she turned onto her stomach, her brown back to the sky, her toes burrowing into the sand.

Instead of wading in, I could have sat at her side, knowing waves that large are pulled towards the earth by a force greater than that of a five-year-old’s legs.

Sara:

I could have said less. Said little, said nothing.

Marina:

I could have called her every day.

I could have never stopped calling.

I could have persuaded her that without me, she would never survive.

I could have told her Sara was a demon, intent on keeping us apart. I could have planted an acid seed and fed it each night.

Sara:

I could have let both of them go. I could have sent them on their way.

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I could have ignored her fear, even if her small body shook with it.

I don’t know if she would have forgiven either of us, but I could have not cared.

Rolando:

So many men could have snuck into the place where those young men slept, resting, dreaming of the next morning when they would take the train and then the island, this world. Given the chance, I would have taken the knife that I knew so well, its blade sharp from the whetting stone, its handle sculpted to the curves of my palms. I could have let it slip into the hollow of his throat, into the place where men love to kiss their women, where a pulse can be seen beating steadily, supplying sleeping eyes, parted lips, sprawled legs, limp hands with oxygen, letting the knife slip deeper into that delicate place, interrupting the flow of blood, his eager dreams, his cruel intentions.

They would have shot me for it, but I could have let his blood spill onto the backs of my hands, warm with promise.

Marina:

My mother, she could have loved me more. She could have kept the men away from us, digging a motherly moat with her bare hands, letting her long red fingernails splinter and bounce away as she clawed at the faces of anyone who stared too long at her little daughter, her precious baby, never, never calling me her shameless little flirt. With her teeth, she could have severed the numerous strings wound about her wrists, compelling her to let first this man then that one into our lives, our home, our darkest little rooms and airless corridors.

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She could have.

Ella:

She could have been satisfied with staying.

Sara:

I could have told her the cruelest of truths.

I could have made her grateful she was left behind.

Marina:

My mother, she could have married Rolando. She could have kept him from marrying her sister. She could have loved Rolando back.

She could have stayed away from my father, whoever he was.

She could have kept Sara and me from being born.

Sara:

I could have spared them some pain, but more pain would have taken its place. I could have sent Ella off in a speedboat, the man with the bouncing Adam’s apple already paid, the letter from Marina in his manicured hands, his polished nails offset by the lines of grease underneath, but I never would have.

Rolando:

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They could have fought back, those harassed Tainos, instead of meeting the boats wide-eyed and smiling, instead of welcoming the Spaniards with bared necks and opened hands. They could have fought, crawling along the ground in the night, sinking their fingertips into the dirt, their feet splayed and soft to disperse any sounds as those

Spaniards slept, their sick, pale legs glowing in the moonlight like fleshy beacons, leading the way to their guns, to their rising and falling backs, to their soft bellies.

Those brave Tainos, they could have set fire to their feet, to their blankets, to their dark, creaking ships, lurching offshore like drunken demons.

They could have stopped it all from happening.

They could have changed the world.

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Returning

It is the first time I am on an airplane.

It is nothing at all like floating on a raft with two strangers and one friend who verges on being just an acquaintance, but whose proximity on the small vessel and the stream of day, night, day, night, day, day, day renders us all friends, family, even; once drinking water runs low, and it is unclear which way land might be, and the sun, the midday sun, suspended just overhead, seems intent on making our skin peel away to reveal the whitest of bones, bleached as they are by the inescapable light, then we are all clinging to each other, convinced that if one succumbs, we all do.

Flying is nothing at all like that.

The woman seated next to me, her arms thick and unbending with several layers of blouses and sweaters she has no doubt piled on to save on luggage fees, and so that she can fill the luggage meant for her clothes with rolls of toilet paper and underwear and several pairs of shoes nested one into the other like leather and canvas Matryoshka dolls, all for relatives in Cuba—she avoids making eye contact with me, only clearing her throat when our elbows bump on our shared armrest.

No, flying is nothing at all like that. Me and these people, we are not in it together.

***

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Marina sent a letter addressed to me and Ella to say she was coming. She didn’t call us, she wrote, because we moved years ago. She only just got our new address because of my letter. And though she tried, she was unable to track down any phone number. Besides the date and time of her expected arrival, the letter says little else and is closed “affectionately yours.”

Inside the trifold of the lined paper, three evenly spaced holes on the left, is a photograph. In it, Marina stands before the concrete porch of a sea green house with large windows and rusty aluminum awnings. Behind her, on the porch itself, is my father. He is a skinny old man with oily white hair. His mustache is curiously black.

“Do you think he dyes it?” Ella asks me. My body is curled away from Ella, facing the shuttered window next to my hospital bed.

“Maybe. He was always very meticulous about his appearance. It’s why he hated me. I took the spotlight away from him. He became just the father of the giant.”

“He didn’t hate you.”

“Maybe that’s not fair. But he did. Things were just mixed up in his mind. I forgive him.”

“That’s big of you, Sara. Very big.”

That Ella, she’s always joking. But I can’t laugh today. My body prickles; it feels as if each tendon, each muscle, is turning to bone. The connective tissues in my ribs, my chest, my back, stiffen; they solidify and squeeze my lungs inside a space I am sure is narrowing. I breathe in short, little gasps—it makes me feel like I am spinning, like I am falling.

***

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I will arrive today, two days before the date I indicated in the letter. To be smart, I tell myself; for my own safety. To make sure there’ll be no one at the runway, waiting for me, handcuffs at the ready, the steel flashing in the sun. Still, I know if those are Sara’s intentions, I’ll be apprehended anyway once they see my passport, but why make it easy for them?

And if I am not taken away, if I am not followed through the airport and into an empty street, well away from the tourists with expensive cameras, where they will restrain me, where they will force me to the ground and pinch my wrists in steel grown warm not just with the sun, but the heat leached from their eager fists, I will simply arrive. I will step onto a different land, and it will be familiar and different, at once. It’s the place where I was born, but not the place I belong anymore, and I will fill my lungs with that unsteady air.

If they do not take me, I will take my time.

I will take time to allow that ambivalent oxygen to infuse each muscle, squeeze through each capillary, press up to the surface of my skin, course into the whites of my eyes.

I need time. I need to count the number of years, days, minutes, since I last walked those streets. I need to revise my memory, re-measure the distance between streets, the angles of sagging balconies, the feel of the humid air, heavy as cloth. I need to drink a glass of water and note the absence of chemicals, the presence of minerals, the way it spills down my throat at near body temperature as if I were sweating on the inside.

I need to hear the people talking on the streets, on the buses, in the alleyways, the

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collision between English and Spanish absent, the blurring of that linguistic borderline obsolete.

I need to.

I need to breathe. I need to stop panting, stop holding my breath, stop gasping as if my lungs were held tight in large, too large hands.

And afterwards, I won’t need to do these things. I don’t think so. I will be able to see Ella and Sara as they are, not eclipsed by the world around them, not in relief of the too blue sky, the burning sun. I need to do these things first, and I won’t stop to wonder what kind of mother that makes me because I’ve done enough of that.

***

“Look at my mother, Sara. She’s so different from the pictures you’ve shown me,” Ella says to me.

Marina stands at the bottom of the porch, one leg on the first step leading up to the house, her right hand on her knee, holding onto a glinting ball of keys. She’s smiling, but just barely—no teeth, no squint in the eyes. On the right edge of the photograph, the bulk of it out of the frame, is half of a blue car with the driver’s side door hanging open.

It’s as if Marina raced into the driveway and jumped out of the car, barely at a complete stop, just to have her picture taken. But it’s not the awkwardness of the pose that strikes me; it’s the lidded eyes, the frizzy hair, the rounded shoulders. She’s put on a few pounds and years. She looks tired, hardened. She is not the same Marina that was always so small, always in frilly dresses, always eager to catch lizards in my grandmother’s garden.

She’s not the fourteen-year-old that later preferred the clothes of men, who kept her hair unwashed and shorn short to deflect their eyes. She’s not the desperate woman that stole

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planks of wood and plastic from darkened buildings while her daughter slept, before falling into a fitful sleep herself, dreaming not of her mother dying, but of grocery store aisles and daughters with dimpled knees and full bellies. Now it’s her with the rounded shoulders, the wide waist. I want to tell her to stop eating so many hamburgers and

French fries.

***

“Did they tell you why they shuttered my window?” Sara asks.

“Yes. And they told you, too.”

“No, they didn’t. They never tell me anything,” she says, which is a lie. They told her. I was there.

“I don’t think I would recognize her if I saw her on the street,” I say, my mother’s picture in my hand, my thumbprint smudging the lower right corner.

“Why would they shutter me up like this? I can’t see anything outside. I can’t tell if it’s day or night.”

“And she probably wouldn’t recognize me, either,” I go on. I am trying to divert

Sara’s attention, but I also really want to talk about my mother, about the photograph, about the visit. I want to know why now—what has changed. I don’t know the whole story and what I remember is clouded by what I’ve been told. With Sara, I have known several versions of the story, each one different in sometimes minute and in sometimes obvious ways, so that each time she’s told me why my mother left and why she didn’t come back, I’ve had to listen closely, looking for the single artifact, the one immutable fossil that bobs to the surface each time: An unsafe passage by sea, visas denied, an indifferent daughter, a rebellious me.

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“They won’t let me leave, and now they won’t even let me see the outside,” she says.

“They’re treating you, Sara. They’re trying to make you well. Your blood pressure, your kidneys, the migraines. All of that takes time.” I leave out the other conditions they’ve told me about just outside of her hospital room door, their voices low,

Sara’s labored snoring filling the hallway, trembling through the air. Her too large heart, her ailing lungs, the unreachable tumor in her brain that just won’t quit, nestled someplace behind her eyes and the bridge of her nose, squeezing growth hormones into her body in a steady stream, compelling her cells to divide and subdivide, to fill the empty spaces of the earth.

“They only give me pills to make me sleep. And it is in my sleep that I will die.”

“Don’t start with that again,” I say when she begins banging on the jalousie window suddenly, without warning, her body rocking with the movement. She splits the screen and the panes of glass rattle against each other—they clatter together and drown me out, but not Sara, whose voice booms over the high clinking of the glass.

“I need the sunlight to stay awake. Tell them that. Tell them they’re killing me.”

She continues banging on the window, leaning forward now, her legs kicking back and pushing me off of the edge of the bed and onto the floor. One of the panes of glass finally cracks and slides out of its metal brace, shattering on the floor alongside her bed. She reaches through the newly formed gap and shoves one of the plantation shutters open.

In a moment, two nurses rush in.

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“Now what’s all the fuss, Sra. Sobretodos? Another revolution?” The first nurse, her hair done in glossy curls, rests her hands on her hips and shakes her head. The curls sway and bounce. Her askew hips, her dancing curls—she’s not to be taken seriously. I expect her to say tsk, tsk, tsk and wag her finger at Sara any moment, and I can’t help that her flippant, playful attitude irritates me.

“Oh, Dianora, you know I wouldn’t revolt without cause,” Sara says, leaning back onto her pillow, her eyes nearly closed, her brow furrowed, smiling a small, barely suppressed smile.

The second nurse squeezes past the first nurse to inspect the damage, picking up the larger shards on the ground and taking them away, but not before also shaking her head and smiling at Sara.

“I see you are just as strong as ever. Now let me just look at you to make sure there is not a scratch on you.”

Sara lifts her arms and turns her hands, her wrists, still smiling as the nurse,

Dianora, rubs her arms. The nurse smiles too, pleased her patient is without a scratch as I stand and edge out of the other nurse’s way, who returns with a metal dustpan and short handle broom.

***

Ella is annoyed by the display, the playful exchange, between me and the nurses.

The nurse asks me how I am feeling, and I tell her I feel wonderful, of course, in the care of my beloved nurses. It is a direct contradiction to everything I tell Ella each day, not only during her visits, but in phone calls and letters, as well, and I know this.

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“Why don’t you tell your beloved nurses how the shuttered window is killing you?” she asks as she rubs her hip on the place where she fell.

“Is this true, Sobretodos?”

“I only miss the sunlight, dear. That’s all.”

“Well, I will permit you to have a bit. See how nice I am? I should punish your bad behavior, but I’ll reward it.”

“Thank you, amór.”

Nurse Dianora grabs a broomstick from the small closet in my room and slides it into the hole in the screen, the gap in the glass, pushing both shutters open. “But the first sign of a sunburn, the first blister I see on that beautiful skin, and shutters it is.”

Ella says they infantilize me, demean me, but it is rare for someone to caress my skin the way they do. I don’t trust them, but I can’t help lapping up the saccharine cocktails of pet names and compliments they feed me daily. I grow fat with it.

***

I carry with me a bit of Elisa’s ashes. Rolando insisted that I take all of her ashes back, but I only agreed to take some, thinking that this would dissuade him, that he’d think it wrong to divide her ashes, but, instead, he brightened at the idea. So now, apart from my fear of being arrested at Sara’s behest, I am also terrified of customs agents, of being detained for carrying human remains across international boundaries illegally. It is why the ashes are divided into small portions, Sara’s mother scattered throughout my luggage in snack-sized Ziploc bags wrapped in notebook paper. One portion is tucked inside the toe of a sneaker, another inside the leg of a pair of pajama pants. I try to remember if there is a third portion of Elisa. If I put some of her in an empty compact or

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wrapped in a pair of balled up socks, but I can’t remember. I can only watch one of the customs agents, his eyes a watery blue, his hair and eyebrows nearly black. He must be about twenty-one, about Ella’s age. He has the authority to empty my luggage, to have me arrested. I wonder if he has a mother, if he is happy with his life, if he wishes his were different. I wonder if he will see the guilt on my face, if the conspiring muscles that keep my lips pursed, my teeth pressed together, will give me away.

The customs agent waves me along after glancing at my passport, my proof of health insurance. No one asks that I shake out each article of clothing, no one follows me, no one stares at my name. No one, I don’t think, really looks at me at all.

***

“How is it that all you do is complain to me about how they are mistreating you here but turn on the charm when one of those nurses walks through the door?”

“If I can’t complain to you, then to whom can I complain?” Sara eases herself off of her bed and into a chair. I try to remember the last time I saw her walk. When was the last time I saw her walk to the kitchen? The bathroom? A month ago? Two months?

But no, she walked on the day they took her to the hospital. Just a few weeks ago.

I hadn’t told her about the letter I’d sent to the capitol, asking for medical assistance for

Sara, who I listed as my mother to simplify matters, to hide the obvious lack of a simple, mother-daughter straight line relationship. Because I suspected that saying she is my mother’s cousin might render my petition to the government somehow less urgent. And I worried because she no longer sat at our small dinette for breakfast, dipping thick slices of toasted Cuban bread into her black coffee, and she no longer stood at our balcony on rainy days, complaining that the rain stirred up all the dirty smells of the street below, but

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standing there just the same. And I knew no local doctor would treat her. She is Super

Sara, Sara Above All, Sara the Omnipotent, Sara the God. If a doctor says she is sick or weak or pale or mortal, he is saying the revolution is sick and pale and at death’s door.

I’d witnessed this phenomenon myself when a doctor refused to prescribe antibiotics for a kidney infection Sara knew she had and the doctor knew she had until we convinced him that it was me who had the infection, and me who needed the medicine. But since I never received a reply to my letter, I was surprised when the uniformed soldiers arrived sometime around two in the morning, tapping lightly on the door—a sound I first mistook for pipes rattling. When I finally opened the door, the men shuffled in quietly and explained that they were there to transport La Señora Sobretodos, once the face of the revolution and always the spirit of the revolution from its inception and forever to a hospital where she would receive the best medical care. Their reverential speech made me laugh.

“You do know Sobretodos is not her actual name, right?” I asked them.

“I beg your pardon. Señorita Sobretodos, is it? Have we got the wrong address?”

“No. It’s just that Sobretodos is just part of a slogan. She is an actual person with a real name: Sara Torres.”

That’s when one of the men, taller than the rest, pushed to the front of the group.

“And your name, companion? What is it if not Sobretodos?” he asked me, standing so close, I had to look up to meet his eyes. I could smell his breath; it smelled of onions, and

I tried to remember if I had lied about my last name in my letter so that my surname would match. He watched me without blinking, and I realized I was wearing very little.

My t-shirt was sheer and at some point in the night, I had slipped out of my bra. The

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breeze blowing in through our open window made me shiver, and I crossed my arms over my chest. It was at that moment that Sara called out from her room.

“Let them in,” she shouted, “I’ve been dreaming about them for days. I could smell their cigars and hair oils and onions before they entered the building.”

In her bedroom, two of the larger men approached Sara’s bed and tried to raise her by the elbows, but when she sat erect, they seemed to shrink in size, seeming more like children at their mother’s bedside than state soldiers. The two men gasped and motioned for the others to come closer as Sara struggled to get to her feet. The other men squeezed in with the first two in the small space between the wall and the bed. Some of the men pushed against Sara’s legs while others tried to buttress her upper arms. She told them she was okay, that she could do it herself as the men shouted directions at each other. Hold her by the waist, push this way, support her back. Watch it, watch out, let go, hold on.

Her housedress slipped off of her left shoulder at one point, and I caught a glimpse of one large, pale breast as she swung her arm away from one man who was tossed backwards onto her bed. After several minutes of this, she began to shout, “Leave me. I can do this. All of you leave this room right now, and wait for me at the door.” Her voice resounded within the close walls of our apartment—a deep rumble that sent two of the men backing away from her reluctantly. I stood watching from the doorway to her bedroom, and as one of them passed me—the one she’d sent rolling onto her bed—he whispered the word monster, the right side of his face bright red, his hair mussed on the left side.

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The struggle between Sara and the officers should have disgusted and enraged me, but instead, it thrilled me. She stretched to her full height, and the top of her head grazed the ceiling. Her house dress sprung up above her knees as she groped her brightly lit room for a wall or a piece of furniture with which to brace herself. Instead, her hand fell on the shoulder of one of the remaining soldiers, the tall one with the strange eyes and the onion breath, and he crumpled beneath her weight, his legs splayed comically on the ground. That’s when I began laughing. It was a hysterical sound that erupted from between my hands, which I pressed against my mouth and nostrils. I watched her dress billow up through stinging, mirthful tears. I watched, my stomach contracting with relentless laughter, as Sara stomped forward, her cotton underwear exposed and stretching taut along her hips and thighs. I had never seen her like that before. Sara always locked her room whenever she dressed and undressed, and despite her inability to move about like she used to, she was still extremely modest. And now there she was, exposed, at her most vulnerable, and I was doubled over laughing.

Once all of the men exited her room, she stomped to the bedroom door. I stood still before the door, trembling, my stomach aching with suppressed laughter. Just before she closed the door, she stopped to look at me, right at me. She shot me an ugly, pained look—a look I’d never seen before. The force of the door slamming blew my hair from my face and splintered the wood of the door around the edges where it had collided with the frame. She had seen me laughing, and still I could not stop.

But Sara never mentioned the incident again. They took her to the hospital, refusing to let me come along. I was finally allowed to visit the next day, and she acted as if nothing had happened. She didn’t ask why men had come to get her in the night. And

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she didn’t once remind me of the scene the night before. She simply began by telling me about her morning, her dreams from the night before. And, at intervals, I stopped feeling guilty.

The chair she sits in now is wide—a bench almost, accommodating her hips pretty well. The chair doesn’t have wheels, but it does have cloth rags one of the nurses wound around the ends of each leg to make sliding along the linoleum easier. She scoots the chair towards the window while pushing her bed away, towards the far wall, groaning as she goes.

“Sara, have you walked since they brought you here?” I ask.

“I don’t walk.” She continues scooting until the chair reaches the place where a rectangle of sunlight cuts into the floor. Then she rolls up her hospital gown, exposing her legs.

“You’ll just get sunburned again. They’ll be shuttering your window up tomorrow, only this time with nails.”

“I need to feel the burn. It keeps me awake. If I sleep now, I won’t get to see her.”

***

The way that the sun burns my legs, it’s just the way Marina felt on the raft so many years ago. Even when the sun set, even when she splashed sea water on her face and neck, the tops of her arms, the tender spaces between her toes, it burned. It burned nonstop, and it kept me and her awake for five days, until she made it, until my parents took her to their home, until my mother rubbed her body all over with aloe cut from her backyard, and Marina and I finally slipped into a fitful sleep.

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***

I’m charged with too much. This place. Me. Sara’s mother. My daughter.

I carry a small wooden cigar box under my arm. It is fragrant, the smell of it intermingling with the smell of my own skin, heated by the sun and humidity, the steamy, sagging air. The box’s small hinges and metal latch clink together, making a very small, almost musical sound. Soon the spicy tobacco smell makes me dizzy. I wish for cold, sterile, mechanically regulated air.

It was Rolando’s idea, of course. Once I arrived safely, I could reunite all of

Elisa’s ashes in a cigar box, redolent of the cigars she loved so much—the cigars he forced her to give up when Sara was born, though he admitted it didn’t quite take and eventually Elisa smoked several cigars a day, filling his mother’s old house with smoke.

Later, when they left Cuba, she truly gave up the cigars for good, always lamenting the cigars made in America did not compare to those from Cuba.

Now I must put my aunt’s ashes in this box and find some inconspicuous place to bury it.

I asked Rolando, when he first mentioned Elisa’s ashes, if she’d wanted to be buried in Cuba.

“Of course,” he said, reaching into the linen closet where he kept her ashes, still in the white cardboard box in which he’d received them, murmuring this was the one last good thing he could do for his wife.

“So you two spoke about this.”

“No. She never spoke about it, and I never asked. But this is what she wanted.”

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In the hotel lobby, I ask the young man at the front desk about the address on

Sara’s letter—the address where I’ll be expected the day after tomorrow. The street is unfamiliar, and I think perhaps I have grown too accustomed to the Miami grid, the numbers ascending and descending predictably in every direction. It startles me, how easy it is to become defamiliarized. It makes me wonder about Rolando and Elisa’s old house in Santa Clara, the house that was originally his mother’s—the place where I spent so much time whenever my mother was away for days, the place where Sara and I often shared a bed, and, she claimed, the same dreams. I start to wonder if I should plan to visit the town tomorrow and try to find the house with the looming Majagua tree, but the thought of it, of making a new plan, of going elsewhere, of forgetting, for a moment, why

I am here, gives me a strange feeling, as if the earth has begun spinning just a bit faster or slower.

“That is the hospital, ma’am.” The young man at the desk smiles. He tells me which buses to take. “I know someone who can drive you there directly.” He winks, and I realize he is flirting with me even though it seems as if he is not quite looking directly at me.

“Not necessary, but thank you,” I say, spilling the contents of the cigar box onto the front desk. “You can keep these.” Twenty five cigars sit atop the wooden desk in a pile and begin to roll slowly away from each other.

***

“Why is she coming back now, Sara?” Ella asks. “Why couldn’t she have come back sooner? What changed?”

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I may be the only person in this hospital with a room all to herself. When Ella is not here and the nurses are between rounds, it is very quiet. It is so quiet; I suspect the rooms next to mine must be empty as well. They don’t want anyone to know I am sick; it’s why they brought me here in the middle of the night, why I am so isolated. As a child,

I never felt alone. If I was still enough, if it was quiet, I always had Marina’s thoughts,

Marina’s dreams. It was always a comfort. Before she began hating me, it was a great comfort. But now, when I am alone, I start to feel as if I’ve been forgotten, as if I will die here and no one will know it until the smell of me reaches the ends of the hospital where the people are, far away from me.

“I asked her to,” I say.

“Why would she need you to ask her to come back?” she asks. She asks more questions now than she ever did as a child. After the initial shock of Marina’s absence wore off, Ella forgot her mother quickly. Or rather, she forgot to miss her mother. It startled me, but more than anything, I was pleased, satisfied, guiltily, but satisfied just the same. I walked her to school and walked her home. I sat by her bed until she fell asleep each night, and until she asked me not to. I cooked her breakfasts and lunches and fed her can after can of sweetened condensed milk for dinner. I mothered her. Still, I knew that whenever we walked along the streets together, and people smiled at us, at her, and they waved, Ella relished it. At school, the teachers began favoring Ella, and she came home, and she bragged about it. I told myself there was something wrong with it; if this was why she stopped caring if her mother came back or sent for her, there was something distorted about it, warped and crooked, but this knowledge, regrettably, did not make me less happy. Instead, my biggest worry was that the novelty would wear off and regret

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would set in. I still wonder if that’s happened to her now, but I don’t ask because I don’t really want to know.

“Please, if you are going to stay here, I need you to be quiet,” I tell her. She does not reply.

I close my eyes and I can see Marina. In her room, she pours my mother’s ashes into the cigar box, quickly at first, and then much more slowly, alarmed that so much of the ashes disperse into the air, dusting the hotel bedspread, the backs of her hands.

Halfway through, she realizes the cigar box is not properly sealed, and some of the ashes are spilling out from one of the box’s lower corners, so she has to pour everything first into one of the plastic bags she brought with her, remembering that’s how the ashes were originally contained in the white cardboard box.

It’s my mother. That’s all that’s left of her. I don’t know what she felt, burning, the air around her aflame. It can’t be anything at all like a burn from the sun. No, it must be like being inside the sun, like becoming the sun.

I want to tell Ella that Marina is whole, her body within reach. I’ve brought her back intact and not divided, not stowed away in plastic bags.

***

So it’s a hospital. Except I don’t know who is staying at the hospital. Is Ella the patient, or is it Sara? Either way, it explains the sudden urgency in the letter, ordering me to return home without any more information, any reasons why I should now.

I lick my teeth. I am certain they are covered in ash. I wash my hands in the bathroom, then my face, convinced the very air is filled with bits of Elisa. She is my family, I tell myself, but I can’t help feeling unsettled, unclean.

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It must be Sara. How many times did I visit libraries, scour the internet, searching for information on gigantism, relishing in the poor prognosis, the shortened life expectancy? If Ella’s legal guardian became ill, died, no one could deny our reunion.

There’d be no one else.

But the thought of Sara ill weighs on me. We were born on the same day. We were born just minutes apart. As a child, I always thought that meant our lives were destined to follow the same path, presumably to the end.

Still, if one of them must be ill, let it be Sara, I tell myself, uncertain if I am praying or not.

***

“Ella,” she told me, “you have a choice.”

She listed all of the things I would lose, all of the uncertainties I would face if I left. If I chose to go, she would not be angry. If I stayed, she would talk to my mother for me. I wouldn’t have to refuse. I wouldn’t have to face her disappointment, her outrage.

“And believe me,” she repeated, “if you go, I won’t be angry.”

We stood on the Malecón , facing north. No boats, she reassured me, you will fly.

But I stayed, of course.

It’s now that I think a child shouldn’t have to choose. Making a child choose, it’s just a way for adults, for responsible parties, to absolve themselves from guilt, from future blame.

I can still blame them, but I also have to blame myself, my childhood self, and I resent that.

***

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She’s coming. She’s coming today. I thought she might not. She’d planned to put it off for one day, two. That could have turned into three days, a week, time for her to go back, no choice. It was still a possibility that she’d lose her courage, the chance that her daughter would blame her, hate her, that she’d hate her back; it was too much for Marina.

All her life, she has worried that she would be like her mother, repeat her sins. She was raising Ella without a father, after all. And she’d left her behind—something her mother had done every time she disappeared for one or two days or five days, leaving her in the care of others. But Marina was never capable of her mother’s negligence. Only when she grew desperate to get Ella back, paying off those smugglers, did she come close, unwittingly.

***

This is not at all how I planned things. Nothing in my life, it seems, has gone according to plan. This is not how it was supposed to play out. I was supposed to spend two days here before I set off to see them, so that I could have time, so that I could feel ready. Each year Ella turned a year older was supposed to be the year she and I would reunite in Miami, every time a news report said Castro was ailing, said poverty was on the rise, when her visa was approved, when I made it to dry land, each time was a promise. I was supposed to teach her about the ways of boys and men, how to sit when she wore a skirt, how to cut her own fingernails, how to fry an egg over easy, what to do when she got her period for the first time, how to wash out blood from cotton. I was not supposed to meet her now, fifteen years later, a woman, all those lessons needless now, all my wisdom wasted.

***

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I remember her phone calls. I remember her asking me if I missed her. I remember her saying she didn’t believe me, and if I didn’t mean it, I really shouldn’t say it at all. I remember that I stopped saying it.

***

I can feel her holding tight to the cigar box, breathing deeply to stave off the car sickness that overtakes her whenever she rides too close to the back of the bus, where centrifugal forces are multiplied. She realizes that no matter which of us is hospitalized, she must see us, both of us. She remembers my father’s joy in knowing that I was still living, his revelation that if we were both alive, there’s still a chance, and this thought drives her. It keeps her from thinking too much about what we will say to each other, how Ella will look at her, whether or not their first embrace will be stiff and awkward.

***

In her picture, her face is grim. I want to tell her not to be angry. I want to tell her

I’m not angry, either.

***

The whir of the bus’s engine and the sigh of its brakes and the baby behind me giggling whenever the bus bounces make it difficult for me to think. More than anything, it’s the sound of the baby’s laughter. The sound is pure and delightful, and it makes me smile and sad at the same time. I wonder if I still hate Sara, if I can still blame her. I stagger to the front of the bus, ready to get off at the next exit, pausing for one last look at the baby that, of course, reminds me of Ella—the dark hair, the widow’s peak, the toothless grin. The person I will meet today is another person, I tell myself. How will I

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explain how much I regret not knowing her? Maybe it’s inexplicable. Maybe I’m better off just saying hello, just saying I am so happy to see her.

***

I want to tell her it will all work out. I want to tell her that I did no permanent damage that I know of. I want to tell her that I only ever wanted what was best for everyone, but she can’t hear me. I want to tell her all of these things, but I am not sure what I will say. I only know that I must stay awake and feel the sun warm my skin and think only of that and not of what will happen later when Marina leaves and Ella leaves and the sun sets and the nurses turn out the lights and I am left alone, unable to stay awake much longer.

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WRITING ABOVE ALL, SARA I began writing what would later become my thesis in May of 2009. When I began, these are the things I knew: Sara and Marina, cousins born on the same day and only minutes apart, would be the central figures; Sara would be a giant; Marina would be a Cuban exile, living in the United States; and a sense of longing and regret would dominate each character and their stories. I did not know, at the time, that what I thought was a short story would balloon as it did, growing past the shifting borders of short story- dom and into something large enough, I was sure, to be a novel. But by August of that year, I was certain Sara and Marina’s parents would also play their roles in the narrative, and time would stretch, as a result, into their pasts as well as into the present, with the

Cuban revolution happening somewhere in between. The growing number of characters and spreading time span demanded more than I could navigate in a short story. And so, with a bit of unfounded confidence and bravado providing the courage needed to embark upon this project, I decided to live with the characters I only had foggy notions about and work on imagining them and inhabiting their lives, giving them their own histories and complexities, fears and neuroses. I decided, despite my inexperience and inchoate ideas, to write a novel.

My choice to write about Cubans and Cuban exiles was made reluctantly. I have never been to Cuba, and while I readily identify myself as Cuban-American, I am often convinced my “Cubanness” is eclipsed by my “Americanness.” And yet, as a writer, I

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have always felt a duty and an obligation to express the Cuban side of my ethnicity

(bifurcating my ethnicity and cultural identity for the sake of this discussion seems reductive, but I don’t believe it is entirely contrived since there is societal pressure, I believe, to categorize people in tidy and unrealistic ways—I have often been told by

Cubans from Cuba that I must teach my children Spanish so they can be as Cuban as I am and by American friends that I do not “look Cuban,” with one neighbor going so far as to say that I was “too quiet”). I have yet to pinpoint whether this sense of obligation is self- imposed or the result of some external pressure—some expectation faceless others have that a Cuban, however far removed generationally, will inevitably write about Cuba.

Still, there’s no denying that all of my life, I have heard stories about Cuba.

Longing and regret for my grandparents’ and parents’ homeland seemed to line the floors and walls of my childhood home—a sticky film multiple applications of Mr. Clean and

Comet could not remove. This longing and regret often prompted my grandmother to exclaim that she hated the house to which she was a slave whenever she was busy cooking or cleaning, which was almost always. Our house was the place where she spent all of her time, limited by her inability to drive, because in Cuba, there’d been no need to learn how to drive, and by the time they came to Miami aboard a freedom flight in 1969, she was too old, by her own standards, to learn (she was only fifty years old). Everything she’d needed in La Habana was within walking distance, and for anyplace further, buses were always available, lining up bumper-to-bumper to whisk passengers in any direction they chose. In Cuba, ironically, she had freedom. In our suburban Miami house, she was a prisoner and a slave.

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As for my grandfather, everything was better in Cuba. The mamey was sweeter, the pork was juicier, the electricity was cheaper, and the sky was bluer. While my grandmother’s longing withered into bitterness, my grandfather’s regret produced a wellspring of story after story, many of them favorites repeated almost daily, along with jokes, poems, and songs he still credits to some famous poet, some wandering spirit, who we all know is him. His stories and jokes almost always begin with a familiar character stumbling through a comedy of errors. His poems and songs are always barbs aimed at

Castro or “El Caballo,” as he is fond of calling him. But despite his love of story, his clear lust for nostalgia, stories about his difficult childhood growing up as an impoverished, country “guajiro,” or stories about his life with my grandmother and toddler mother just after the revolution, or stories about the ten years it took for them to finally gain passage to the states, are closely guarded, teased out only through a long line of questions that yields precious fragments of memories, evasive responses, and quick segues into yet another joke or another décima about Castro meeting a violent and hilarious end.

I don’t think my grandparents’ feelings about Cuba and their reluctant U.S. citizenship are that different from other exiles, Cuban or otherwise. Beyond their sense of displacement and foreignness is a desire to go back in time, to change history— prompting them to constantly wonder what could have been. How different would their lives be had they stayed? How different would their lives be had Castro never been? I’ve often wondered the same things. What kind of person would I be had I been raised in

Cuba? Then I remember that had my mother and grandparents and father stayed in Cuba,

I would not exist at all. My parents met here, in America, after all. I, very likely, would

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not exist had the revolution failed or had my parents and grandparents opted to endure on

Communist Cuban soil. I think it is this certainty that inspires me to write about Marina and Sara and their family. They are outside of my generation, living a life in a place I have always heard about and always tried to picture. Despite my reservations about my own authority, I am driven to invent their lives in a place that is almost mythical in my imagination, and the result is a story that shifts tonally, and is often fragmented, and is sometimes humorous and sometimes tragic, and not that different the stories of Cuba I have been hearing throughout my life.

I. In a Darkened House: Feeling My Way around a Novel

Sara and Marina’s story began, as stories often do for me, with a line and a voice.

In Zadie Smith’s essay, “That Crafty Feeling,” she describes two types of novelists.

According to Smith, a Micro Manager starts at the beginning and moves forward, having

“no grand plan” (100). Without a clear plot, “their novels exist only in the present moment, in a sensibility, in the novel’s tonal frequency line by line…in a compulsive fixation on perspective and voice” (Smith 100). My story would begin, I was convinced, with the line, “Sara and I were born on the same day, same hour, approximately three minutes apart.” Told in first person from Marina’s perspective, I envisioned and tried to evoke a tone and voice at once melancholic and mildly sardonic—a bittersweet balance of regret and humor my grandfather and some of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s stories have perfected. In this seminal piece that would later become “Cusp and Divergence,” I aimed to emphasize how these two lives began at nearly the same time, destined, in various ways, to remain inextricably linked even as they would be forced to diverge. Still, as

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Smith puts it, I had “no grand plan.” I also worked towards conveying an authority and urgency in the opening piece that is common to Márquez’s work, in which the reader is thrust into the fabric of characters’ lives. Márquez’s Of Love and Other Demons, a story I was adapting into a script for a graduate course at the time I began writing “Cusp and

Divergence,” was admittedly embedded in my consciousness. The novel’s opening paragraph, relatively short as it is, manages to pack in quite a bit of information and set a distinct tone:

An ash-gray god with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough

terrain of the market on the first Sunday in December, knocked down

tables of fried food, overturned Indians’ stalls and lottery kiosks, and bit

four people who happened to cross its path. Three of them were black

slaves. The fourth, Sierva María de Todos Los Ángeles, the only child of

the Marquis De Casalduero, had come there with a mulatta servant to buy

a string of bells for the celebration of her twelfth birthday. (Márquez 7)

Here, details seem to tumble out of the three sentences. Readers are given immediate insight into the setting, the potential for racial and economic tensions, the central characters (Sierva María and her father, the marquis), and the action that sets the plot in motion (the dog is later found to be rabid, which eventually leads to Sierva María’s demise).

While I don’t claim Márquez’s success in so artfully kick-starting a narrative, my goal was to match the energy of his writing while also maintaining a distinct voice. In the chapter’s second paragraph, I revealed the details of Sara’s diminutive appearance while also folding in Rolando’s occupation: “Her shoulders prove much smaller than her

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father’s thumbs (thumbs that are already slight and delicate and ill-suited for work as a police officer).” Just as Márquez weaves in slaves and Sierva’s age and birthday, I worked to implant a detail about Rolando that would later have significance in the narrative while also allowing Marina, the narrator, to remain a presence, injecting her judgment of Rolando’s hands.

As I began writing the subsequent chapter, however, I found that Marina’s perspective was limiting. Marina, in the present, was a newly widowed exile living somewhere in the northern United States. She was hearing from Sara for the first time in decades and considering Sara’s request that she return to Cuba. Still, if she had left Cuba and Sara behind, her ideas about Sara and Cuba would be heavily biased and unreliable. I wanted a narrator more removed from the source of the cousins’ fractured relationship— one also capable of a limited omniscience, privy to the thoughts and pasts of other characters, specifically Sara and Marina’s parents. While I remained uncertain of how

Rolando, Teresa, and Elisa would influence Marina and Sara’s narrative, I began writing

“Talipariti Elatum” (a story that would later become “His Name in a Flower”), knowing only that a love triangle would be the result of Rolando’s spontaneous infatuation with

Marina’s future mother, Teresa.

In Zadie Smith’s effort to categorize two distinct novel-writing approaches, she also identifies the “Macro Planner” as someone who “organizes material, configures a plot and creates a structure—all before he gets to the title page,” and, as a result, may

“start writing their novel in the middle” (99). Macro Planners, she observes, “obsessively exchange possible endings for one another…take characters out and put them back in, reverse the order of chapters and perform frequent…radical surgery on their novels:

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moving the setting…or changing the title” (ellipses added, Smith 100). As I began writing “Talipariti Elatum,” I realized that I was not writing this novel in the order in which I expected events would be revealed to the reader, and I was not writing the events in the order in which they would occur. In this story, Marina’s mother, Teresa, and Sara’s father, Rolando, meet for the first time. Narratively speaking, I was taking a relatively large leap into the past from the present in which Marina speaks, exiled and in her mid- fifties; I had begun writing a section of the novel that was somewhere in the nebulous middle, though closer to the beginning than to the end. I was not writing from the first sentence and moving forward, as Smith’s Micro Manager might do. At the same time, while I was writing the middle prematurely, I did not have a clear plot or structure in mind—the keystones, it seems, to a successful Macro Planner. I was still feeling out the story according to voice and perspective as a Micro Manager might, but I could not begin at the beginning and discover the story as I went along, feeling it all trail behind me as I moved ahead, in a neat line of pages as the future of the story revealed itself to me bit by painstaking bit.

Instead, I renamed characters and removed others altogether while inserting a few in their stead. Marina, as I mentioned before, was recently widowed, with an estranged,

American-born son living in America and across several state lines with his wife.

However, these biographical details, I suspected, left Marina with a stronger impetus to stay in America—to feel as if America were a home rather than Cuba. As a result, subsequent rewrites left Marina without an American husband or son, but instead a single exile living in Miami. In the place of her estranged son came Ella, an adult daughter still in Cuba and caring for an ailing Sara, who had become Ella’s guardian fifteen years

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prior. This situation created a discord more urgent and immediate to Marina and Sara, carving a fracture that could justify Marina’s conflicted feelings towards Sara.

Furthermore, Teresa, Marina’s mother, was initially Sandra, a very devoted but exacting mother. But the names Sara and Sandra were too similar, phonetically speaking, and after writing “The Hearts of Women,” I found that Sandra’s struggles to help her father support her siblings following her mother’s death set the stage for a woman disposed to rebellion against the conventions of motherhood and marriage. Several revisions later, she became negligent Teresa, subjecting Marina to various childhood horrors I had never thought her capable of in my initial sketches of her. I was behaving as a Macro Planner might only without the security of a well-configured plot or secure structure. I was writing my story piecemeal and learning who my characters were and why they might make certain choices as I went along.

Smith likens novel writing to building a house. Macro Planners “have their houses largely built from day one, and so their obsession is internal—they’re forever moving the furniture” (Smith 100). Micro Managers, on the other hand, “build a house floor by floor…fully decorated [and] with all the furniture in place before the next is built on top of it” (Smith 100). During this first year of my novel writing, I likened the experience not to building a house myself, picking out the location and materials, deciding on the paint colors and the layout. Instead it felt like being inside an unfamiliar house in complete darkness. The house was already built and fully furnished. I could bump around and guess that I was in a living room by the feel of a couch, a coffee table, but I had no idea what color the couch might be or whether or not the drinking glass set on the coffee table

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was filled with water or poison, much less where the windows or the exits might be in case the place caught fire.

II. Finding Shafts of Light Room by Room: A Novel in Parts

Each fragment I wrote after the initial story that began in 2009 was a story within the larger narrative as it came to me. The nature of this fragmentation in my writing led me to abandon any attempt at writing what I could call a traditional novel in which each chapter or section is largely dependent on the preceding chapters or sections. I felt tempted, at times, to approach the project as a closely related collection of short stories.

The manner in which I went about writing the project contributed to this fragmentation, I believe.

During my most productive writing periods, I was enrolled in creative writing workshops. As a result, I always felt compelled to write excerpts that were relatively self-contained, focusing on specific events and scenes. This often led to my peers wondering how these scenes would fit into the narrative as a whole, as these installments left gaps both in time and in narrative plot, disposed as I was to writing excerpts without attention to order. Because writing also spanned several semesters’ worth of workshops, fellow work-shoppers were also often unfamiliar with installments that had come before.

To them, the stories I submitted seemed jumbled and confused. Too many characters made their way into scenes without proper introductions, prompting one fellow student to comment, “there may be just too many characters here and too many family connections to keep straight.” These sorts of critiques were voiced both by peers who were familiar with the narrative and those who were not. The concerns raised in workshop made me

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wonder if my narrative was too crowded, as they suggested, or if the workshop setting was perhaps less than ideal for work-shopping a novel, however loosely organized it may be. Admittedly, I hoped the passing of a whole semester followed by a winter or summer break meant that my peers had forgotten where the story had led previously and not that the narrative was too crowded to make sense of.

In order to avoid the confusion I had found was inherent in work-shopping my novel installments, I chose to treat each of my submissions as independent stories during my most recent workshop in the spring of 2011. It was during this semester that I wrote

“The Hands of Men” as well as “They Wash Ashore,” arguably two of my favorite pieces from the project. I realize now the reason these pieces are among my favorites is because

I was able to break away from the pressure of writing a novel in a strict sense while still writing for the novel. With these pieces, I was also able bring to them a level of polish that I neglected in other installments perhaps because I was always concerned with how the installments fit in with the larger narrative, always striving toward some form of continuity and consistency even as I worked towards self-containment. With these two pieces, I could approach each one independently, which granted me freedom in voice and style, both options I had neglected to consider each time I wrote an excerpt, struggling, instead, to find the one mode I would employ throughout the novel. What resulted was one story about characters previously tertiary to or absent from the central narrative, “The

Hands of Men,” and one story perhaps closest to the short story form, “They Wash

Ashore.”

At the time that I wrote “The Hands of Men,” I was also reading Clarice

Lispector’s Family Ties. A recurring theme throughout the collection is how a common

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event or benign observation can quickly turn to a deep psychological disturbance. In

“Love” the main character, Anna, is married; she has children, yet she has decided that

“life could be lived without happiness” (Lispector 38). This certainty leads her to cling to domestic chores and keep herself otherwise occupied in order to suppress her discontent.

Yet one afternoon, while riding the tram, she witnesses a blind man chewing gum, a seemingly innocuous observation. Yet the blind man sparks “what she called a crisis…and its sign was the intense pleasure with which she now looked at things, suffering and alarmed” (Lispector 41). This single moment jars Anna from her neat, ordered existence. Her perception of everything around her, from a stray cat in a garden to a summer beetle, is radically changed.

While Anna’s changes and struggles are largely internal and, though urgent, still relatively subtle, Officers Pietra, Collazo, and Rebollo take part in an act of violence that also shifts each of their perspectives in significant ways. The officers brutally beat

Rolando; however, I chose to place the focus of the story not on the beating itself, and not on how Rolando would be affected, but on how this event weighs on each of the officers once they have left the police station and Rolando’s battered body (with the exception of

Officer Rebollo, who stays behind and tends to Rolando). My intent was to explore the unexpected psychological impacts such an experience would have; I wondered not only why the officers might resort to such an act, but how it would make them feel afterwards, when they went home and back to life as usual. Like Lispector’s Anna, I imagined the men would have trouble returning to the routines that dominate their daily lives.

Psychologically, they are different, which has varying effects on their behavior. Still, by the end of “Love,” Anna’s crisis diminishes, and while the officers in “The Hands of

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Men” have not forgotten their violent act overnight, they too, at intervals, come to forget their role in Rolando’s arrest.

“They Wash Ashore,” written shortly after “The Hands of Men,” was a chance for me to revisit a story idea I’d had around the same time I began working on Sara and

Marina’s story. My daughters and I had visited the beach on an afternoon when dozens of man-of-wars were washing up along the shoreline. My daughters quickly put themselves to work collecting three or four inside a pail they’d filled with seawater, taking special care to avoid the poisonous tentacles that were often surprisingly long and surprisingly fragile. Still, it wasn’t long before they forgot the man-of-wars and busied themselves digging holes in the sand and feeding pretzels to sea gulls. The man-of-wars were left in my care, and I wondered if anyone else felt compelled to save a creature largely considered a nuisance.

In some ways, the situation reminded me of Anthony Doerr’s, “The Caretaker.” In it, the main character, Joseph, comes across several beached sperm whales and feels compelled to bury their hearts, one of them “the size of a riding mower” (Doerr 141). The stranded whales remind Joseph, a Liberian refugee, of many of the horrors he witnessed in Liberia during a brutal civil war. There, the war claimed his mother and forced him into a situation where he had to shoot another man or risk being shot. Later, in Oregon,

Joseph shirks his duties as the caretaker of a large estate home and takes to carving out the enormous hearts of the dead whales so that he can bury them. After he has buried the hearts, Joseph “tortures himself with questions: Why doesn’t he feel any better, any more healed?” (Doerr 144). Joseph’s impetus to bury the whales’ hearts, then, is personal and

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symbolic. He hoped this act would somehow atone for the sins and brutalities he witnessed and committed in Liberia, and is startled to find it does not.

If a character were to feel compelled to collect man-of-wars strewn along the shore, I knew this act would have to be largely symbolic, just as it is for Doerr’s Joseph.

With this in mind, I wrote “They Wash Ashore,” in which Sara’s mother, Elisa, sets herself to collecting dozens of man-of-wars that have washed up on Miami Beach.

Doerr’s whales evoke the violence Joseph has witnessed, as the whales are hacked to pieces so they can be studied and burned. At one point, Joseph observes “the heads of two whales are missing; all the teeth from the remaining heads have been taken away”

(Doerr 143). These images recall “the things he sees—decapitated children…a man hung over a balcony with his severed hands in his mouth” (Doerr 133). The man-of-wars in

“They Wash Ashore” may not conjure these imagistic echoes, but the creatures are meant to suggest conceptual resemblances. The creatures are poisonous and a nuisance, and they are also described as not a single creature, but a colony that work together to survive as one. This serves, then, to correspond with Elisa’s estranged daughter Sara, who is largely reviled by the Miami Cuban exiles, as well as her own father, because of her political activism in Cuba. Like Doerr’s “The Caretaker,” I hoped Elisa’s uncommon mission would serve to dramatize her emotional struggle to come to terms with her separation from her daughter, who herself is the source of much controversy.

While I had previously considered adopting a somewhat unconventional approach to narrative and structure when I began writing this novel, the production of these two chapters and the way they deviated from what I imagined to be a more conventional approach to this story convinced me to explore other options. I was sure I did not want to

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write a collection of short stories, but I also knew I wanted to maintain some level of fragmentation. I wondered at what point my approach would tip the scales one way or the other, and the idea that I did have to decide how to categorize what I was writing was frustrating to some degree. The pressure to categorize and consider classifications is, I believe, largely market driven. And my own reservations about writing a novel and not a short story collection is, if I am to be honest, part artistic vision and part publishing anxiety. Despite the critical and commercial success of many short story collections, there is a general notion (justified or not, I am not sure) that novels fare better.

With that in mind, I searched for other published novels that have found success with similarly fragmented narratives. One analog to this approach is Marylin Chin’s

Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen. When I initially read Chin’s piece, I wondered how these connected stories truly constituted a novel. Clearly the stories were related and circled the same characters and family, and often explored the same themes. On the other hand, the narrative modes, voices, and styles were vastly different. As Chin herself points out, “Weaving the forty-one tales into a coherent ‘novel’ presented a daunting challenge…given shifts in style, tone, landscapes, voices and diction” (Reading Group

Guide). What I learned as a reader, however, was that these stories had a cumulative effect, albeit a fragmented one—an effect that mimics and reinforces the effect of a culture’s oral tradition, which itself is a bold theme in Chin’s novel.

In the summer of 2011, two years after beginning to write about Sara and Marina, cousins born on the same day, I began to give serious consideration to my novel’s structure. At that point, I took inventory of all of the various chapters and installments I had written throughout the previous two years. What I found, at that point, was that the

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episodic approach I had employed throughout my novel-writing did suit the novel the structure I aimed to adopt. Stories could be moved around without having any serious impacts on other segments of the story. I had the freedom, at that point, to choose where certain scenes would go, when certain characters would be introduced, and how the ordering of these stories would affect the sections that would follow. Furthermore, because “The Hands of Men” is centered on three characters that do not factor into the central Sara/Marina, I was also inspired to include a few more stories that would break away from Sara and Marina and their parents, both in stylistic and narrative terms. These departures permitted me to examine characters and events from new angles, revealing insights that I, perhaps, would not have exposed had I written the novel without these shifts and digressions. “The Hands of Men” reveals a very different Rolando and

Amparo, as it questions masculinity. “A Demon, A Monster, A Saint,” written primarily from the perspective of an unnamed old man, also reveals a very different Sara and Ella on the night of Marina’s departure, providing a contrast to the stories Sara tells Ella about the very-same night all of her life.

What resulted, then, is a novel broken up into four books. With the exception of

Book One, each book represents an important period of time in the narrative. Book Two explores how Rolando and Teresa and, subsequently, Elisa, cross paths in the years prior to the revolution and Sara’s and Marina’s births. Book Three contains stories that take place just after the revolution, when Sara and Marina are still children. Book Four reveals

Elisa, Rolando, and Marina as exiles with Sara and Ella remaining in Cuba, and, in the end, brings Marina back to Cuba for a reunion with Sara and Ella. As for the Book One, the first story begins with Sara and Marina’s birth in “Cusp and Divergence.” In “On

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Billboards, In Dreams,” however, time leaps forward fifty-eight years to reveal Marina in

Miami and Ella and Sara in Cuba. In placing these stories side by side, my goal was to introduce the story’s central conflict and raise questions concerning how and why Marina and Sara, “soul twins,” wound up separated not only geographically but emotionally and ideologically as well. “History Written in Sand” and “A Demon, a Monster, a Saint” straddle the time between the first two stories and reveal the day Marina leaves Cuba—an act that triggers the animosity and resentment that will come to define the cousins’ relationship. It is my hope, then, that Book One succeeds not only in revealing the key characters and conflict that will propel the story forward (and backwards), but also the possibility that the stories will be told in varying and possibly unexpected ways.

In the end, I chose to write Sara as a giant in order for her to be, literally, a larger than life icon representative of all of the broken promises and faded dreams of the revolution—a revolution that began with lofty goals, and if you believe the optimistic and un-cynical, good intentions. At the same time, I did not want to allegorize Sara. I wanted her to be very real, very human, and as much a victim of the propaganda machine as

Cuba’s exiles, reviled as worms and traitors just as its heroes are sanctified—and both equally dehumanized. And yet the fictional characters on both sides of Cuba’s political divide do allegorize Sara. Her own father deems her a curse and a judgment on him.

Because she is such an anomaly physically, my feeling was that it would be easier for the novel’s characters to dehumanize her, to blame her for all of their troubles. This tendency, to reduce politics and history, to pat “good vs. evil” categories, is not unique to

Cuba’s situation, but it is apparent, particularly amid Miami’s vociferous exiles. In writing Sara, then, I hoped to dramatize this tendency while also revealing its limits—the

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idea that situations can rarely be reduced to such simple terms even when, on the surface, definitions seem clear: Sara is substantial and strong and enduring, like communism; Sara is monstrous and dictatorial and relentless, like communism; Sara is alienated and remorseful and mortal, like anyone.

Now that the project is nearly complete, I like to think that my lack of authority on the Cuban experience of the revolution, consequent social tensions, and, for some, exile, has produced a narrative with a uniquely distanced perspective. Cristina Garcia, author of Dreaming in Cuban, among other novels about Cuba, retains a similarly hyphenated Cuba status, having come to the United States when she was two years old.

In an interview, she was asked if it was difficult “to write about and evoke a place that is so tied to your identity, yet that is relatively unfamiliar?” (The Atlantic). She goes on to explain it is part of the reason why she created a fictional town for the novel, primarily because her impetus for writing was not to get the details of the locale right, but rather to evoke accurately the “emotional details in terms of being Cuban” (The Atlantic).

Through this project, I hope that I have managed to express not just the emotional experience of being Cuban (I’m not sure this is something that can be defined, anyway, since being Cuban is not a static and definable state, in my opinion), but some small part of the emotional experience of being human and enduring all of the things these fictional characters have endured. I can’t claim authority over the experiences of exiles or Cuban patriots just as I can’t claim authority over the experiences of someone suffering from gigantism or a man suffering from the sting of unrequited love. The joy and the challenge, then, have been to imagine what it must feel like to live those lives. While I

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don’t think I have yet found a way to best express those ideas and experiences, I have made a concerted effort and, with that effort, managed to reveal promising fragments.

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WORKS CITED "The Atlantic: The Nature of Inheritance.” Cristina García: Official Author Website.

N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Jan. 2012.

interviews/the-atlantic-the-nature-of-inheritance>.

Chin, Marilyn. "Reading Group Guide." Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen: a Manifesto in

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