Find Me in Havana

by Serena Burdick

  I pull my head in from the window, glancing at my father as he gazes out the opposite one.

  “Roll it up. The air-conditioning is on,” he says, not looking at me.

  I crank the window closed and feel a leaky bit of cool air coming from the front. Not enough to warrant shutting us in.

  “Where are we going for lunch?” I bounce a little in my springy seat.

  Chu Chu removes his hat to his knees, his eyes fixed out the window. “What are you in the mood for?”

  “A hamburger.”

  “I know just the place.” His voice is cold, and I think I’ve displeased him.

  “Or whatever you want,” I say quickly.

  “No.” He shakes his head. “A hamburger is perfect.”

  After that we are silent as the car weaves through the city streets. We pass numerous restaurants but don’t stop at any of them. By the time we are headed south on 101, I think Chu Chu must know of a special hamburger place near Santa Monica. I like the idea of eating with a view of the ocean, maybe even out on a pier.

  Traffic is slow, and we drive for an hour before getting off on Sepulveda Boulevard. The car is stuffy, and I am grateful when it pulls to a stop. The driver lets us out onto a crowded curb, handing Chu Chu a leather traveling bag. I look around at the people unloading suitcases and trunks, confused as I realize that we are at the airport. I have only been here once before, when you took me to New York City for winter break.

  “Where are we going?” I ask, following Chu Chu through a set of double glass doors.

  The airport lobby is crowded, and Chu Chu pushes past a man with a plaid suitbag thrown over one shoulder. “Excuse me,” the man says rudely, but my father doesn’t give him a backward glance as he makes his way to the front of the line and slaps a large, folded bill on the counter. I miss what he says to the brightly smiling woman behind the counter, because a woman at the front of the line says loudly, “Who do you think you are?” as she cuts her eyes at me and ticks a finger at Chu Chu’s back.

  My father shoots her a hard look that makes her snap her pink mouth shut and look away.

  Behind the counter, the woman’s smile changes to a sly, disapproving one. “Next time, wait your turn,” she says with a flirty wink, taking my father’s money and handing him two strips of white paper with black lettering.

  At this point, Chu Chu circles his hand around my upper arm, firmly, and I am pulled alongside him as we make our way deeper into the airport. I glance back at the line of people blocking my view of the doors, feeling claustrophobic and panicky.

  “I need to make a phone call,” I say quickly, and my father releases my arm as suddenly as he took hold of it.

  “Certainly, let’s just have a bite to eat first. I’m starving.”

  My breath settles as I see that we are in front of a restaurant with square tables abutting large windows that look out onto the tarmac.

  Chu Chu smiles. “Not the most glamorous dining, but since you wanted a hamburger and I need to make an early flight, thought this would serve us both.”

  Feeling foolish, I follow him to a table and sit down. For a moment, I thought he meant to drag me onto an airplane with him. Out the huge windows, brilliant flashes of light glint off the metal wings of a plane with a massive red W painted on the side. A line of people in clean-cut suits and tailored dresses make their way cautiously down the steps, holding the side rails as if maneuvering down a mountainside.

  I’m starving, and the restaurant smells temptingly of baked cookies. A hefty waitress in a starched yellow apron pours my father a cup of coffee and scratches my order on a pad of paper. My father doesn’t eat, just drinks his coffee while watching me consume a hamburger and french fries and suck down a watery chocolate milk, which is not as good as the ones I usually get. He says nothing, and I wonder why he’s bothered to take me out at all. Maybe he’s counting this as next summer’s obligatory visit, getting it over with early. I think of the long drive back to school and wonder if I can trick the driver into taking me home instead. If Alfonso is really gone, it will be like the year after Grant died, when it was just you, me and Grandmother Maria.

  Thinking of Alfonso suddenly makes me wonder if my father’s visit has anything to do with what happened. I drop my straw into my glass, my stomach somersaulting at the idea. There’s no way you told him. Why would you? Chu Chu has never had anything to do with what goes on in our lives.

  Chu Chu glances at his wristwatch. “Don’t want to miss my flight.” He tosses money on the table, swigs the rest of his coffee and rises, pulling out my chair for me. “My lady,” he smiles, and we leave the restaurant and head through another set of glass doors into a blast of heat that sucks the breath out of me, the air full of fumes.

  “Walk me to my seat,” he says. It is not a question.

  “Is your driver still waiting for me?”

  “Of course.”

  I walk hesitantly in his shadow, across the sweltering tarmac and up the narrow stairs, the metal railing hot under my palm. Through the clamshell door, the cabin is warm and dimly lit. Each seat has a curtained window that’s been drawn shut and gives the cabin a reddish glow.

  “Try it out.” Chu Chu nods at a cushy window seat, and I plop down, pulling the curtain aside as a high-pitched whirring sound fills the air, and I see a plane hurtle down the runway and lift into the air.

  My father drops into the seat next to me as a stewardess in a blue skirt suit with a matching pillbox hat asks if he’d like something to drink.

  “Tequila,” he orders. “On the rocks.”

  “And you, my dear?” She turns her head toward me.

  “Nothing, thank you. I’m not staying.”

  She laughs as if I’ve said something charming, and my father says, “She’ll have a pineapple juice.”

  I don’t want pineapple juice. The plane is filling with people, and I begin to feel uneasy. “I’m in someone’s seat.” I move to get up, but my father clamps his hand on my thigh, his fingers hard as steel. I immediately think of Alfonso’s hand, softer, but just as frightening.

  “You are not going anywhere,” he says under his breath, his hard, dark eyes on mine.

  Panic leaps inside me, and I claw the back of his hand.

  “Jesus!” my father hisses, pulling his hand away. I have scratched a line of blood into his skin.

  “I am not going anywhere with you,” I say, loudly. “I’ll scream. I’ll tell them you’re kidnapping me.”

  He scoots forward, angling his body to block my view of the aisle. “Nina.” There is quiet terror in the way he says my name. “I am your father. There is nothing anyone can do about that.”

  “Well, you don’t own me. You’ve never even cared about me.” At that moment, there is a grinding and rumbling so loud I can hardly hear myself speak. “Why are you doing this? I don’t want to go with you.” My heart thunders against my ribs, and my breath comes so fast I feel light-headed. I can’t go up in this plane, I think madly.

  Over the commotion of the engine, my father leans closer and says, “It’s what your mother wants. She asked me to take you.”

  I jerk back against the seat as if he’s slapped me, this blow of betrayal vibrating through my whole body as the plane moves slowly forward. We pick up speed, and the pressure flattens me to the seat as if the air has weight to it. The airplane lifts, and my stomach drops, the engine roar deafening. I grip the armrests and close my eyes, wanting to be furious at you for sending me away but feeling only terrified that I will never see you again. I don’t want to go to Mexico. I have never been my father’s daughter. I have only ever been yours. I don’t know how to be anyone else’s.

  Chapter Ten

  * * *

  Mexico City

  Daughter,

  It is still dark when I step out the front door, easing the latch down so it doesn’t make a soun
d. I run my tongue along the roof of my mouth as I lug my suitcase down the steps and drag it half a block to where a cab waits with the engine running. A sick taste lingers in my mouth, a taste that has accompanied everything since you disappeared. The cab pulls away from the curb, and despite the darkness, I slide sunglasses out of my purse and over my eyes, dimming the streetlights to faded orbs and buildings into amorphous shadows.

  My whole life I’ve woken most mornings with a sense of anticipation, forward motion, momentum. With each success, I’ve imagined there is a bigger one waiting for me, the lure of possibility driving me determinedly from one undertaking to the next. I feel that now. Even though I’ve hardly slept or eaten in the one month, three days and nine hours since the police told me Chu Chu Martinez took you on an airplane to Mexico, your kidnapping has filled me with the same sense of determination and fight.

  The police gave me no choice but to take matters into my own hands. From the outset they were uncooperative. In maddeningly efficient, businesslike tones, they informed me that, because Mr. Martinez was legally your father and you were now out of their jurisdiction, there was nothing they could do.

  I spent weeks dialing Chu Chu’s number, standing in our Los Angeles kitchen with the telephone pressed to my ear, picturing the rooms where the endless ringing was echoing on the other end of the line, rooms I once lived in, though it feels like a lifetime ago. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t picture you there, and no one ever picked up.

  Then, three days ago, the call went through to an operator. “Sorry, ma’am. The number has been disconnected.” I screamed at the poor girl and slammed the phone down.

  My taxi pulls to a stop, and the driver helps me out, leaving my bag on the curb as I pay him. Waving over a skycap, I have him carry my luggage into the busy lobby, my eyes still secured behind my sunglasses. I do not remove them at the counter, or at the restaurant overlooking the runway while I drink a black coffee, or even after I’ve settled into my airplane seat where the stewardess serves me a Bloody Mary from a silver tray, the olive and celery stick stabbed through with a toothpick sharp enough to draw blood.

  Not until I step from the cabin into the fierce sunlight at Central Aeropuerto do my sunglasses serve their intended purpose. I am tipsy from the cocktail, and I lean against the top rail of the stairway wishing I’d eaten more than a tin of peanuts. The last time I walked across this tarmac you were eighteen months old, balanced on my hip, the smell of sour milk and baby powder coming from your soft toddler head, your tiny hands and feet latched to my side. You reminded me of the Cuban tree frogs that Danita and I used to watch suction their way up palm fronds in our backyard. I always wondered at babies who sat limp and trusting on their mothers’ hips. Not you. From the start you put your whole, small body into the act of being hoisted into the air, tensing every muscle, latching on for dear life. An unexpected sob rises in my throat. Why did you do that? I would never have dropped you.

  I stand paralyzed as people maneuver around me and down the stairs. My plan feels ridiculous now that I’ve arrived. The only person who knows I’m in Mexico City is Edward Adelman, my short, bald, fiercely Jewish manager. He was the one who taught me, at nineteen, that his job was to be as tough as a pit bull, while mine was to be sweet as cream pie, and that no matter what happened on the set, in his office or anywhere else, my job was to smile while his was to bite.

  Marching into his office two days ago, my hair a mess and not a stitch of makeup on my face, I told him—not smiling—that this cream pie had had enough. “There’s no way in goddamn blazing hell I’m going off to shoot Rio Bravo with my daughter kidnapped!” I was certain he wasn’t going to help me, like everyone else. Friends kept saying how sorry they are, with no urgency behind their concern. Underneath their empathy I could see they all thought I was being histrionic. He is your daughter’s father, they would emphasize, as if this somehow gave Chu Chu a right to take you from me when the man has never played a serious role in your life until now.

  As I expected, Ed felt the same, remaining infuriatingly calm while he told me not to get so worked up. “Look at it from all sides,” he’d said, “Mr. Martinez taking Nina for a while might be to our benefit. He is her father, so it’s not exactly kidnapping,” at which point I turned into the pit bull, calling him presumptive and arrogant and inhuman, knuckling my hands into his desk, ready to swat his sweaty, bald head if he said one more word. I told him I was going after you and that he was to wait for my call and send help the moment it came or there’d be no picture contract. I also said that when my mother called, which she would, he was to tell her that I was sorry, but I wasn’t going to have her talking me out of this, either. Ed sighed deeply and shook his head at me but agreed to do what he could to help.

  I feel badly I didn’t tell your abuela my plan, but we both know how she can talk me in, or out, of anything. She loves you as I do, but she’s too rational for this. While I wasted the past month calling a number no one ever intended picking up, she was on the phone with lawyers. She said it might take longer than we wanted, but the legal route would get you back. I didn’t have the nerve to tell her it wouldn’t, that I’d royally screwed up eleven years ago when I signed the divorce papers and agreed to fifty-fifty custody. How was I to know Chu Chu would suddenly want you at twelve years old? When I signed those papers, your father was in Mexico, single again and happy not to be raising a child. He’d gotten over my running off on him as soon as the first new woman walked into his life. His yearly visits suited all of us, until now.

  “Señorita?” I jump as an older gentleman takes my elbow. He is lean and tan with a stylish panama hat pulled low over his forehead. “May I? These steps are tricky.” The other passengers have left the plane, and I let him guide me down the steep, narrow stairs and across the paved tarmac, his firm hold making me suddenly miss my father, a prideful, controlling man, but one who protected us at all costs.

  Inside the terminal the air is stale and smells of damp rugs. The man lets go of my arm, and I thank him, watching him move into the crowd where a woman in a wide, purple skirt greets him with a hug. I feel hopelessly lost here, on my own. I’m not used to being without a man. As I watch passengers swept into arms, kissed on the cheek and ushered by loved ones down the corridor where the skycaps place luggage on a long counter, I think of Alfonso, how stupidly I loved him, how quickly and shockingly he disappeared from my life. Guilt churns my stomach as I think how much I miss him.

  Retrieving my suitcase, I tip the skycap and climb into a white-topped, orange-colored taxi, urging the driver to the Gran Hotel Ciudad de Mexico, the only hotel I can remember from living here so long ago.

  There is little traffic, and my driver is in no hurry, waiting patiently behind slow-moving buses, amiably letting pedestrians cross while he leans out the window to shout at a fellow taxi driver. His Spanish dialect is hard to understand, and I only catch fragments of what he says.

  I haven’t slept much in days, but I am alert with fear and anticipation running electric-hot under my skin as I watch the low-slung buildings and open-air markets give way to pillared civic buildings and baroque-style cathedrals, the city grittier but still more beautiful than Los Angeles. Not until we drive lazily past the Metropolitan Cathedral—stretched out like a dragon showing off its scales, its stone facade and intricate portals glinting in the sunlight—do memories burst to the surface.

  I am eighteen years old, riding in a cab just like this one with Chu Chu’s arm around my shoulder. At six weeks old, you are curled like a snail against my chest. I cup a hand over your head, your fuzz of black hair soft as kitten fur, and I’m struck with awe at my love for you, for my husband and for this vibrant, alive city. It’s the same awe I felt entering the Copacabana at fifteen as a headlining singer with a bizarre sense that all of it was natural, expected, anticipated and yet totally surreal.

  As a young mother and bride, I arrive at a wide street lined with ja
caranda and enter a three-story building with high windows and glass doors opening onto large balconies. The house is pleasantly cool, filled with breeze and light and color, the smell of chili and cinnamon drifting from an unseen kitchen. There is a maid, Rosa, who wears a frilly-topped apron and takes you gently from my arms. She leads us upstairs to a nursery decorated in yellow, where a rocking horse and dollhouse wait under their respective windows. You are so tiny and immobile it is hard for me to imagine that you will ever play with these toys. Rosa places you in a cradle, and Chu Chu draws me into the adjoining room with pastel walls and a honey-colored bed.

  Holding me with one arm, he shuts and locks the door, then peels my clothes off, slow and deliberate, as if introducing himself to me for the first time, his eyes taking in the full measure of my new vulnerability. We make love as evening sunlight melts around us, and I melt with it, into your father, into this life of his.

  I loved your father. That is the truth of it. I first set eyes on him at the Copacabana. He was on stage crooning “Solamente una vez” into the microphone with puckered lips, his eyelids at a sultry droop. I’d been singing at the Copa for five months and had never heard anything so beautiful. Sometimes I wonder which I fell in love with: the song or the man? That night, he pulled the crowd into a standing ovation and two encores. When I spotted him in the lobby later, surrounded with admirers, I gave him an audacious wink. In an instant he’d crossed the room, drawn me around the side of a fake palm and was kissing me, urgently, my back pressed up against the scales of the cardboard tree trunk. Every inch of me tightened and quivered. Heat pulsed in my chest, part terror, part aching desire. I was sixteen and had never been kissed.

  After that, I’d wait for Chu Chu backstage, slipping past the Copacabana girls with their plumed hats and slit, satin gowns, their pedestal legs visible all the way to their thighs. Chu Chu would sing his last number, throw a kiss to the crowd and come find me in the dressing room, where I’d pretend to be checking my costume for the next night or looking for a missing lipstick. He’d come up from behind with a rose he’d plucked from another singer’s vase and press it against my chest, the flower tickling my chin, his hand between my breasts. When he first locked the door and pulled me onto the dressing room sofa, the sensation of his body pressed against mine sucked every thought from my head. Sex was like being devoured, swallowed whole and then brought back gasping for air and tingling with new life.