by Jaquira Díaz
When I was a kid, my mother often showed up unannounced wherever I was, sometimes with Mercy in tow. They’d walk all over Miami Beach looking for me. They’d show up at my friends’ houses demanding to see me and drag me outside because I hadn’t asked permission to be there. They’d show up at the movies, open the door to the packed theater, and call my name in the darkness. They’d show up at the skating rink, the public pool, the basketball courts of three different parks. Sometimes, if I was staying at my father’s house, my mother would get there early in the morning and insist on walking me to school. I’d be terrified that the other kids might see us together and find out she was my mother. Eventually they did. They called her “homeless lady” and “crazy lady” and, as I got older, “crackhead” and “scutterhead” and “junkie.”
My mother is nearly unrecognizable. I remember a while back she called to tell me that she’d had most of her teeth removed and needed money to fix the few she had left. Anthony called the next day. “She didn’t have them ‘removed,’” he said, “they fell out.”
She has meth mouth. I’ve known this for years, but the knowledge did not prepare me for the sight of it. Cheito squeezes my hand, but it makes me feel worse, maybe because he has a mother who’s not an addict, two grandmothers who adore him, even a doting stepmom who considers him like her own son.
Mami hugs me again, says, “She didn’t look dead. She looked like she was just sleeping.”
I wrap my arms around her, but not too tight. I’m afraid I might crush her, that her collarbone will fracture, that her ribs will crack, that I will break her with my need to put her back together again.
As she pulls away, asks my aunt for a cigarette, I take a couple of steps back. Unable to steady myself, I sit on the curb, lean forward with my face in my hands. I’m relieved that my mother is alive, but I can’t believe that I’ve let this happen. I shouldn’t have left it up to my brother and Mercy to take care of her.
I wipe the sweat from my upper lip with the back of my hand. Junito sits next to me. He looks so much older than the last time I saw him, just a few months ago. I ask, just loud enough for him to hear, if he read the note. He says they all did, even my little cousin Lia.
“Lia? Oh, my God. Why would Tanisha let her read that?”
He says it was Lia who found the note. It was Lia who found the body.
Lia and her brother Jayden are still playing with the dogs. Junito calls her over, and she sits on the curb with us. She’s small, with dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes. I wonder how Mercy felt about that.
Lia tells us how she likes to read, how she reads to her little brother at night, how she wants to be a marine biologist.
“Wow,” I say. “What do marine biologists do?”
“They study sharks.” She tells me all about the great white shark and the hammerhead and the tiger shark. She tells me how she’ll be graduating from the fourth grade this week, and how Mimi won’t be there.
“Who’s Mimi?” I ask.
“My grandmother,” she says. “She died today.”
I listen as my ten-year-old cousin tells me about the woman she called Mimi, who lived with her and her little brother and her mom, a woman who went to church every day, who made her breakfast in the mornings and walked her to school afterward. Mimi taught her passages from the Bible, brushed her hair, sang songs to her about Jesus, told her she loved her.
This is the way I want to remember my grandmother, tender and gentle and loving, a woman who cherished her grandchildren and took care of them, who made them feel safe. But these are not my memories. This Mimi is not the woman I know.
Lia shows me the angel pendant she wears on a silver chain around her neck. She says Mimi left it for her when she died.
Junito takes her hand. He has tears in his eyes, and suddenly he looks like the boy he used to be.
“She was my grandmother, too,” I say.
Lia looks at me curiously, crinkling her brow. “Really?”
I explain that Jeannette, her aunt, is my mom, so that makes us cousins.
“But you’re old,” she says.
Junito and I both laugh, and then I tell her I know Mimi loved her.
“I miss her,” Lia says, caressing the angel pendant with her fingertips.
“I miss her, too,” I say.
“I know,” she says, as if no other possibility could ever occur to her.
Three weeks before she died, my grandmother called me. She told me she was living with Tanisha and the kids, that she was in a wheelchair now because she’d slipped in the bathroom and broken both her legs. She’d sued her landlord over the fall, a leaky pipe the landlord had neglected to fix. I was skeptical about the details, but I figured the less I knew, the better. She told me a nurse came to care for her once in a while. She talked about her favorite granddaughter, Lia, how big she was, and how smart, and how Lia’s little brother, Jayden, was three years old and had a foul mouth, just like his mother. We both laughed at this.
She told me about some of her friends who had died recently, said she was getting old, that most of the people she loved were dying off. Cancer, overdoses, heart attacks.
“I’m the last one left,” she said. “The last one.”
I reminded her that she still had her family. She said she missed my sister and me, that she wanted to see us. It had been so long.
We talked for almost two hours, like we hadn’t done in years, probably in my whole life.
A week later, as we’re preparing for the funeral, my aunts Xiomara and Iris bicker and yell over every arrangement, insults escalating like guerilla warfare. Each calls the other selfish, crazy, a gossip, mala, maldita hija de puta.
Xiomara walks around the apartment looking through Mercy’s things, trying to find answers, her amber hair pinned up in a doobie, her eyes red and puffy. Once in a while, she breaks down, in tears, wailing, asking, “¿Porque? Dios mío. ¿Porque?”
Iris tries to be levelheaded, calm. She makes phone calls. She calls my other aunts in Virginia to let them know what’s happening, every single step of the arrangements. She calls her job, her husband, my cousin Amir. She calls my titi Jenesis, her twin sister, asks about the kids, my cousins Nasir and Halimah. She’s okay as long as she’s busy. I never see her cry.
My mother chain-smokes outside on the steps, talking to herself.
Lia and Jayden sit in their room, refusing to eat the sandwiches I brought them from Sergio’s Latin Cafe. Who can blame them? Their grandmother has just died.
Tanisha and her man hurl insults at each other, coming to blows, then fling shoes and hairbrushes and perfume bottles across the bedroom where my grandmother’s body was found, each blaming the other for Mercy’s suicide.
Iris singlehandedly breaks up the fight, picks up Tanisha’s man in a headlock, and deposits him outside the back door while we all watch.
“Not today, honey,” she says. “Not in this house.” She slams the door behind him.
I exchange looks with my cousins Junito and Angel. Welcome to our family.
I wish Alaina was here. Two years ago, when Abuela was dying of cancer, Alaina made the trip back to Miami to be with Abuela during her last days. Papi, his wife Meira, and I had slept at the hospital for weeks, taking turns between sleeping on a chair next to Abuela’s bed, or in the waiting room. Anthony and I had spent those last few weeks fighting, but when Alaina arrived, I felt like everything would be okay. Later, in the funeral home, after Anthony had left, after most people had fallen asleep in their chairs, Papi and Tío David talking late into the night, Alaina and I lay down together, sharing one couch, our feet pointing in opposite directions. It was like we were kids again, except we were orphans now. Losing Abuela was like losing everything I thought I knew about myself, losing everything that had once tethered me to the world, to Puerto Rico, to my family.
Growing up, Junito and Angel, Alaina and I, we had an unspoken pact: as fucked up as our family was, we would not fight each other. We were the norma
l ones, the four of us against the world.
When Junito and Angel start arguing, I storm out, grabbing my keys, my purse, heading to my car.
Cheito and the dogs have been back home for two days, so I make the four-hour drive alone from Miami Beach to Winter Haven, barreling north on US Highway 27 with the radio blasting. I’m somewhere outside South Bay when Iris calls to ask where I went.
“If you think I’m going to stay for that,” I say, “you’re crazy.” I remind her that this is why I left Miami in the first place, that our family can’t be civil, even for a funeral.
Angel calls just to tell me he loves me. Junito calls to tell me not to feel guilty—he’s not going either. When Xiomara calls, she just cries on the line. After a while, I turn off my phone.
Every time I leave Miami, I tell myself I’m never coming back, only to end up right back where I started. I leave and come back again and again. Miami, like my family, is a place you learn to love and hate simultaneously. You can find yourself leaving it your whole life but never manage to leave, spend the rest of your life going back to it and never really get there.
When I reach Lake Okeechobee, less than halfway home, I pull into John Stretch Memorial Park, drive around aimlessly for a while, then park. All around me there is water—the park’s smaller lake, the waterway that runs parallel to US-27, and then Lake Okeechobee. In the sky, a flock of turkey vultures, bodies tilting at slight angles, wings upturned like V’s. I sit on the shore of the smaller lake, watching the vultures for a long time, the pendulum swing of their bodies in the air, and wonder if they’ve spotted their prey, if they’re waiting for something to die out here. Later, I will read that a group of vultures in flight is called a kettle, and a flock of feeding vultures, a wake.
All my life my grandmother threatened to kill herself. I visited her at the hospital when I was a kid, after she swallowed two bottles of pills and then asked Tanisha to call 911. I watched my uncle Junior wrestle a steak knife from her hands when she swore she would stab herself in the heart. Until she finally made good on her threats, my grandmother had been killing herself for over twenty-five years. And in some ways, she had taken me with her: the first time I attempted suicide I was eleven. The second time, thirteen. And there would be a third, a fourth.
On the shore, vultures circling overhead, I realize that maybe I always knew I wouldn’t go to the funeral. Maybe this is where I need to be: somewhere that is not Miami, somewhere that is not Winter Haven, somewhere that is not home.
Sometimes I can’t believe she did it. Sometimes I think I always knew she would, that I’ve been like a bird, waiting, circling, waiting.
After I get back from Miami Beach, I will watch almost every hour of the Casey Anthony murder trial. When the jury comes back with a not-guilty verdict, I will have the overwhelming urge to call Mercy, to tell her.
I will keep thinking about that last phone call, return to it again and again. I will wonder if she’d already thought of doing it, if she was reaching out to me. I will lie awake at night thinking about what it means to want to die so badly, and remember all the times I’d held my mother’s pills in my own hands. I will wonder if she felt alone, if she was scared or tired or bitter. Was it an act of revenge, or was it despair? Did she think about me, about my mother, about any of us? How hard it must have been for her to see my mother deteriorate over the years, to enable her, to try to rescue her but fail again and again. I wonder if my grandmother, in her wheelchair, both legs broken, could no longer live with that.
I’d like to imagine that on her last day, Mercy got up, dressed, read her Bible. That she was walking again, both her casts removed the week before. That she went outside on the balcony, felt the sun on her face, the ocean breeze blowing back her hair. That she fed the neighborhood’s feral cats, as Miami Beach residents have been known to do, left an open can of tuna in the alley behind her building. That after dropping off Lia in front of her classroom at Ida M. Fisher Elementary, she stopped by a friend’s house, talked about last night’s novela, maybe the Casey Anthony trial on TV. I imagine that later that afternoon, she went to my mother’s apartment for one last visit. She would’ve given her a few cigarettes, pressed a couple crumpled dollar bills into the palm of her hand, for Cuban toast and café con leche from Puerto Sagua. She would’ve checked the refrigerator to make sure my mother had eggs, milk, cheese. She would’ve made sure my mother had her Metro pass, that she took her pills that morning.
I tell myself that at the moment of her death, she thought of my mother, that she was transformed into that girl she’d been all those years ago: Mercy at fifteen, a mother for the first time, her baby girl in her arms. I imagine my mother, tiny and innocent and smiling, looking up at her with those green eyes. And Mercy, when she looks at her baby, she suddenly feels like she’s looking into the center of the universe, the whole world in her arms, the whole world terrifying.
PART Four
Regresando
Returning
Miami, 1999
The first time Cheito and I split, after I’ve been out of the navy for a few weeks and he is living with another woman, I go back to Miami and land a job ringing up cough syrup and cigarettes for six bucks an hour. I take the Metrobus to and from work every day, sometimes running into people I knew in high school. I avoid them, stare out the window, pretend I’m lost in neon lights and Art Deco hotels, reluctant to give them the sordid details of my latest disappointments. Failed marriage, dropped out of college, left the military, living with parents. Yes, again.
One Friday, I get off work early, cash my paycheck at the bodega around the corner, take the L headed to the Beach. I sit in the back, keeping an eye on both exits as we approach the 79th Street Bridge. All this cash is making me paranoid.
A man sits across from me, bald, with a goatee, insists that he knows me from el barrio. He sips from a quart of malt liquor wrapped in a paper bag. I clutch my purse. When I tell him, No, I never lived in Spanish Harlem, he says, You sure?
Positive.
I get up, move to the front of the bus, sit right behind the driver. Across the street, the regulars are lining up for the early show at The Fat Black Pussy Cat. Two seats away, another stranger. He takes his eyes off his copy of Vibe, looks me up and down. You got beautiful feet, he says, for a fat girl. He goes back to his magazine. This dude is sober.
Then she gets on, dirty-faced and scrawny, matted hair in a messy black ponytail, her lighter roots growing out. She doesn’t pay her fare. She stumbles all the way to the back, asking if anyone can spare change so she can make it home to her kids. She was mugged, she says, they took everything. Most people ignore her. They’ve heard this line a hundred times, probably on this same bus. Probably from this same woman. A few hand over their change just to get rid of her.
When she makes her way back to me, just as I’m about to deliver my line, Sorry, I don’t have any cash, I realize I know her. We went to school together. I ate lunch at her house a few times and we watched Dirty Dancing over cold slices of Domino’s pizza, and we both swore one day, when one of us married Patrick Swayze, the other would be a bridesmaid. Then we fought over a sixth-grade boyfriend, and because I was a closeted queer girl in a homophobic place, I started a rumor that she was a lesbian, and because she knew exactly what would hurt me, she said my mom was a crackhead bitch.
I know her.
Except she’s not like I remember. She looks twice her age, skinny, battered, her nails ragged, the whites of her eyes a mix of bloodshot and yellow, her face covered in lesions. She’s lost some of her teeth—probably meth mouth. And she doesn’t seem to know me.
Years later I will hear that she was attacked by a john, or a pimp, that he took a knife to her throat, slit from left to right, and left her to bleed out. But she will live, and after she gets out of the hospital, she will go right back to the streets, get arrested at least four more times, the scar on her throat visible in every single one of those mugshots.
But that is years
away. Right now, on this bus, she holds out her hand, says, Excuse me, miss, can you spare a quarter? Says it not like it’s a question, but like an apology. And what is a quarter, a dollar, a twenty? Wouldn’t I give the $192 in my purse just to be back in her living room, eating cardboard pizza, dreaming of a future in which we were both movie stars and happy? And isn’t it possible that in another life, under different circumstances, there but for the grace of God, this could’ve been me?
I rifle through my pockets as she waits. The other passengers sit still, their faces all turned toward us. The bus stops at a red light. And then I remember: all my cash, my entire paycheck, down to the last dollar, is in an envelope they handed me at the bodega and I can’t pull it out right here, on this bus, where anyone can see it, probably rob me before I even make it home from the bus stop.
I take a deep breath. Exhale.
“I’m sorry. I don’t have any cash.”
In my head, I say her name.
Orlando, 2004
In college, along with pages and pages of notes about La Masacre de Ponce, the Jayuya Uprising, el Grito de Lares, and the Cerro Maravilla murders, I carry a portrait of a young Lolita Lebrón, who’d always been a controversial figure, even for Puerto Ricans, because of her role in the March 1954 shooting inside the house of representatives.