Find Me in Havana

by Serena Burdick

  Daughter,

  My sister’s pain is too big, her daughter’s even bigger. No words of apology from me will make any difference. What they need is someone to blame. My sisters have always needed someone to blame. They have each other and their anger and do not need me.

  I separated myself long ago. I can do it again.

  * * *

  Home greets us with the rot of garbage under the sink, a dark living room snaked with street light, a coat fallen off its hook onto the floor. It’s freezing cold. Mamá flicks on the light, simultaneously picking up the coat and ordering you to take her bag to her room.

  We move forward through our days, reorienting ourselves. We do not speak of what happened in Cuba. My own mother’s ability to avoid the most tragic events for our family is impressive. I haven’t spoken of it to you, either; but then, you are only twelve. I can’t imagine you understand what sex is, much less rape.

  The only thing to do is jump back into life, I tell myself, pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, as Uncle Duke would say. Onward and upward.

  You return to boarding school, and I return to work. Shooting for Rio Bravo has been pushed to summer, but there are costume screen tests and television auditions and music gigs. Ed tells me they were going to recast the role of Consuela, but Duke promised I’d be here.

  “She’s a gal you can count on,” he’d said.

  No one asks about Cuba. The brief, sensational news story of kidnapping you out of Mexico City overshadows any questions about a revolution in a country they don’t understand. At dinner parties, I retell how I dressed up as an old woman and stole you away in a cab. It gets a good laugh. Rebel soldiers attacking and violating my sisters and niece doesn’t go well with duck and red wine.

  But it lives in us. Mamá distances herself from my career. Instead of needling Ed about what scripts have come through his office and insisting we get another studio contract now that Republic Pictures has gone under, she joins a bridge club and volunteers at a children’s home in Pasadena. Her contact with my siblings is spotty, but she spoke to Oneila and reported they all made it to Miami except for Danita and Josepha, who have gone to New York City with Bebo and his wife.

  “How is Josepha?” I ask.

  Mamá is at the front door putting on her hat. It is April, three months since we returned from Cuba, and the weather is pleasantly warm. Mamá fiddles with her hat in front of the mirror and doesn’t look at me. “According to Oneila, Josepha doesn’t speak. Do you know, Oneila told me it was my fault? Said it in just those words over the wire. ‘It’s your fault, Mamá. You should have stayed out of it. He wasn’t really going to do anything to Nina. He was just scaring her.’ My fault? In that case you could say it was my fault for marrying your father who worked for Batista who brought the rebels to our house in the first place.” Done with her hat, she secures her purse over her arm and opens the front door. “My heart breaks for my granddaughter. If Danita would let me help, I would, but I am wise enough to know that it was no one’s fault. Not yours or Nina’s or mine. Someone was getting hurt that day. Che was out for a kill. I saw it in his eyes when he walked up the porch steps. If it wasn’t Josepha, it would have been Nina, or you. How were any of us to know?” She says this with her back to me, walking out and shutting the door behind her.

  This is the last time either of us ever speak of it.

  The nuns tell me you have settled back into school without a fuss, resuming your B-student status and unmotivated attitude toward extracurriculars. I picture you in your dorm room with your roommate, back-to-back at your desks, warm lamplight and turned-down beds. This is exactly what you need, a controlled, orderly environment. You are better off without me and my dizzying LA lifestyle.

  When you come home for spring break, I am in Las Vegas headlining a show. By the time summer arrives, I am shooting Rio Bravo in Arizona and miss your thirteenth birthday. I am in the dressing room with Angie Dickinson wriggling out of my long skirt when I realize what day it is. Slapping a palm to my head I cry, “Oh, I am so sorry, Angie. I can’t go out for drinks with you tonight. It’s my daughter’s birthday.”

  “Your daughter?” Angie rubs the thick lipstick off her mouth with a cotton swab dipped in Vaseline. “You didn’t tell me you had a daughter.”

  “No? I must have.” I prop my hands on my hips, still a little in character. Directors always want me to thicken my accent and lay on the humor. I am about to make a sarcastic joke at your expense, Nina, but I stop myself.

  “What?” Angie wipes a fresh cotton swab over her darkened brows, leaning into the mirror. The glowing light bulbs circle her face like crowned beads. “You didn’t.” She winks at me. “But I try not to talk about my husband around here, either. They don’t like us to be too domestic. You sure you aren’t up for drinks? Dean is buying. You can call your daughter from the restaurant.”

  I throw up my hands revealing two, large sweat marks under the sleeves of my white blouse. “That’s an idea. Will a cold drink stop this? Between the desert heat and those camera lights, it’s a miracle I don’t melt into a puddle.”

  “I hear you.” Angie has already discarded her costume and sits in her bra and underwear. “You just have to wear something skimpy.”

  “How skimpy?” I strip off my blouse and let it fall to the floor.

  “Skimpy as you want.” Angie stretches out her smooth, bare arms. “I’m going sleeveless and short.”

  I put on a cocktail dress, pull my hair into a ponytail and dab lipstick on my mouth, but when I make it upstairs to the studio bar, I am in no mood for a drink. Making the rounds, I kiss Duke’s cheek and wave at Dean and Angie, who stand suspiciously close together, then I excuse myself and head back to the hotel.

  In the past, when I have missed your birthday, our phone calls consist of you crying and telling me you refuse to celebrate it if I’m not there, while I say I’m sorrier than anything, but it can’t be helped, and I promise to make it up to you. “We’ll spend a whole week together, just the two of us,” I always say. “We’ll sleep in late, eat breakfast in bed and go out to dinner every night.”

  But the night you become a teenager, I sit on my bed in a hotel room in Tucson and listen to you tell me you had a nice birthday. “Sandy Plummer gave me a charm bracelet and came over for cake and ice cream, and we listened to Gunsmoke on the radio.”

  I twist the phone cord around my finger and ask if you and Sandy are friends now.

  “Best friends.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Her mom is a dear. We’ll have the Plummers over for dinner when I come home.”

  “Sure.” You sound bored.

  “Tell your grandmother I said you could pick out whatever you like from the Sears catalog for your birthday.”

  “She already took me shopping. I got a rain slicker. It’s really nice. It has a fur collar.”

  “Well, then, we’ll do dinner to celebrate when I come home.”

  “Sure. I’m going to go to bed now,” you say and hang up without even asking when I am coming home.

  I drop the receiver in its cradle. On the opposite wall from the bed is a painting of a single cactus against a backdrop of burned desert. It feels depressingly symbolic. I get up to turn on the television, but it’s coin-operated, and I don’t have change. Working hard to ignore the overwhelming loneliness consuming me, I pick up my script on the bed and go over my lines for the next day. It doesn’t help. I consider ringing Alfonso. The divorce papers went through last month, but I know he’d answer my call. He might even come stay for a week.

  Disgusted with myself, I dismiss the idea. I don’t need a man. I am happy enough.

  I abandon the script and search the bottom of my purse for change but only come up with a button, a crumpled twenty-dollar bill and a book of matches. The room doesn’t have a radio, and it is unnervingly quiet.

  Stepping out the hotel front door doe
sn’t help much, either. My hotel is outside the city, down the road from the Old Tucson Studios where we’re shooting, and it feels like the middle of nowhere. The parking lot is empty save for a few cars, and the yellow light eking out from curtained windows makes me feel even more isolated. I am rarely lonely, I realize with a stab of self-pity. At home there is always Mamá or you, and for great chunks of time, husbands. In Las Vegas my hotel room fills with people drinking after hours or else I’m at cocktail or dinner parties that leave just enough time for me to tumble into bed afterward. I should have stayed out and had a drink with Angie, I think.

  I walk around the parked cars to the edge of shrubbery bordering the pavement. Nothing but desert stretches before me, black space, the tops of the distant hills like pencil marks drawn against the night sky. It reminds me of Mexico. The air blows cool against my arms, the moonless sky filled with stars. The silence is astounding. Not a cricket chirps or a mosquito buzzes or a lizard slithers. There is not a rustle of a leaf or the beat of a bird’s wing. I wonder if this is what death is like, terrifying in its immense beauty and peace and silence.

  From somewhere deep inside me, a song unwinds into the night, a lullaby Farah used to sing. I am astounded I still remember it. I never sang it to you. I haven’t heard it since I was five years old, and yet it returns as if my soft-footed, hip-swinging nanny is standing in the desert silence, guiding the words to me.

  For just this one night, I let in the dizzying loss of my home in Cuba and my sisters and all I thought we would have again. The sadness feels indulgent, gratifying, like leaning into an ache I know will never heal. I am not a person who dwells in the past but anticipates the future. And yet I feel the profound realization in this moment that there is only here and now. This night. This dark. This silence. This unimaginable sorrow. This beauty.

  I want to share it with you, my one and only, precious daughter, but I know I never will. From the same source where the song came forth, I understand that there will be many things we won’t share together and that moments like these are mine alone.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  * * *

  Psych Ward

  Mother,

  I don’t blame you for Cuba. Our time there stays hot in my memory, the sweet sucking of sugarcane, saliva and spit and stringy fibers held behind puckered lips. The smell of humid earth after the rain. Mud, leaves and sticks pooling in the yard under brilliant sunshine. The sound of the wind through the palm fronds, their sharp edges clacking together, the rustle of the heavy leaves so loud it sounded like entire roofs were caving in. And then there was the laughter of so many sisters gathered together, a mother and her daughters, their children, cousins and aunts, the house as rich in family as the land was in sugarcane.

  And you gave me Josepha.

  When we arrived home from Cuba, you came into my room holding a gold-leaf barrette in your hand with a perplexed look on your face. “Is this yours? It was in the bottom of my purse, but I’ve never seen it before.”

  I took it from you and laid it in the palm of my hand. It was a small, fern-shaped leaf with a little clasp on the back, flat and cool and perfectly formed. “Josepha gave it to me,” I said, quietly.

  “Oh?” You sounded unsure but didn’t push for an explanation.

  When you left I climbed onto my bed and traced my fingers over the bumped edges of the gold wondering when she could have put it in your purse. We left too quickly for her to do it that last day. She must have put it there after I gave her my spoon. An apology for an apology.

  Now, I keep the barrette propped against the lamp on my nightstand. It is the first thing I see when I wake up and the last thing I see when I go to sleep. Even with the guilt of what I did, after the blood and screams and silence, seeing that small gold apology allows me to hold on to a version of Josepha where she smiles and wraps her fingers around mine and whispers secrets to me in the dark.

  A darkness I am trying not to fall into.

  * * *

  On my thirteenth birthday, when I pick up the phone and hear your voice, I want to cry. Only, the anger I feel chokes it down. All of your promises of being together I now know are lies. So I lie about the charm bracelet. Sandy didn’t get me anything, and she’s not my best friend, just someone I occasionally spend time with. She’s better than nobody.

  When we ride bikes together and I can’t see her face, or we sit in the grass back-to-back eating ice cream cones, I pretend she is Josepha. I’ll think it so hard that when I turn around and see her dull blue eyes looking at me, I am startled and then mad. It’s not Sandy’s fault, but I blame her for not being Josepha.

  Sometimes, this makes me mean.

  After you and I hang up, I feel badly that I hurt you, and I wish we’d talked about all the things we’d do together for my birthday when you get back from shooting Rio Bravo. But I wanted to hurt you. I want you to think I don’t care. I’m still mad at you for making me finish up the school year at Villa Cabrini Academy.

  Some things did change when we got back home. For one, Alfonso was gone. I took that in as soon as we stepped through the front door—there was no smell or sound of him, just an empty house. I thought what happened would bring us together, all of us, Grandmother, you and me. You would see that what we needed was to be a family, like your sisters, that what we had been missing all along was this unity.

  You do not see this. Instead, you and Grandmother ignored what happened as if shuttering windows to a storm. You both act as if we were all just temporarily derailed, stepping right back into old LA without missing a beat. Which means I get to spend the last three months of seventh grade being teased by girls who have a million versions of my story to tell, none of which are true. They can’t imagine the truth, and I’d never betray my family or you or Josepha by confessing it to them. Silence, you are teaching me, is the best way forward. So silent I am. The nuns, who can guess at a more brutal truth than my pampered Hollywood classmates, let me have my solitude. But teenage girls don’t like to be ignored by their own, so by the time I leave on the first of June, they openly call me freak.

  I don’t want to be a freak. I want to be normal.

  Normal is charm bracelets and birthday cakes and best friends.

  Therefore, on my thirteenth birthday I eat a pink-frosted cake and strawberry ice cream with Sandy and Grandmother Maria. This, after Sandy and I smoke our first joint with Johnny Freeman in his parents’ toolshed. I can barely pull the smoke into my lungs and cough so hard my eyes water, but by the time I am eating cake, I feel smoothed out and light as air. You don’t know the Freemans because you haven’t been around long enough to meet our new neighbors. They moved into the house across the street where old Mrs. Fitzpatrick used to live. Johnny is the youngest of three brothers, has black hair and can already grow a beard even though he’s only thirteen. When he kisses me, he tastes like mint mouthwash. Sandy says her older sister told her that falling in love feels hot and tingly and that your mind goes wild with it and you can’t think of anything else. I feel none of this. When Johnny comes near me, my stomach churns, and I think I might throw up. I kiss him back only because I am hoping that this will make me normal, too.

  It is not until the next summer, at fourteen, when I have sex with him. This is the summer I come home from school to find that Grandmother Maria has moved out and a man named Ricardo Pego has moved in. He is handsome, in that older-man way. A doctor, you tell me proudly.

  All I want to know is why Grandmother Maria moved out, sadness bubbling up as I stand at the kitchen counter. It could have just been the two of us with her gone. Why do you never want it to be just the two of us?

  “Your abuela thought her own place would be a good idea.” You stand in the morning sun, shadowed and backlit, your face tired. “She’s only a ten-minute drive away.”

  “Okay.” I shrug, confused that after all these years of wishing my grandmother would move out, I fe
el sorry not to hear her pattering feet coming from the bedroom. I miss her brisk morning hug and the smell of the verbena oil she rubs on the ends of her hair.

  This missing does not last long. Within an hour she has arrived to envelop me, kissing each cheek, smelling familiar and spicy and insisting that we have Sunday dinners all together and that I come to her place at least three times a week for lunch.

  I do, reluctantly. She lives in a small one-story with a postage-stamp front yard. The living room is decorated with large-flowered furniture and pink curtains. The kitchen has bright blue countertops and the bathroom sea-green tiles. I have nothing more to talk about with my grandmother than I ever did, so I eat quickly and hurry off to meet Johnny and Sandy at Sandy’s boyfriend’s house. His name is Casper, and he has a swimming pool and a liquor cabinet and absent parents.

  It is in Casper’s room on a blue-striped bedcover, surrounded by blue-striped wallpaper, that Johnny and I have sex for the first time. I am slightly drunk on gin and tonic, and it feels good when Johnny slides his tongue over my nipples, but when his penis touches the inside of my thigh, cool and wet, I feel Alfonso’s hand. And when I look into Johnny’s eyes, the empty black holes of Che’s stare back at me, and I feel as if my head has just smacked the floor. I do not expect these men to show up here. I have spent the last year and a half erasing their faces, their names, their very existence. It is startling to have this one natural act bring them back so vividly; even Johnny’s mint-flavored mouth turns to whiskey and cigar smoke.

  “Are you okay?” he whispers, still Johnny’s voice, at least. I look at his pink mouth and scrunched up eyes and try to reorient myself, but my boyfriend’s face has twisted into an expression I don’t understand: concern and pleasure and confusion. For the moment, I am as confused as he is.

  “I’m okay.” I squeeze my eyes shut, fighting the pain and throbbing and tears as I force myself into a place of cool numbness.