“You miss something?” he said.
“I’m okay,” she lied.
He smiled. “I see all the time. The guests get sad. They miss their home.”
“I just thought it would be different from this.”
“Panama?”
“No. Panama is very nice.”
Diego nodded.
“The trip,” June said. “I thought the trip would be different.”
“What it was you wanted?”
“I wanted it to be romantic.” June knew she shouldn’t have said that. She knew it sounded too much like an invitation. But wasn’t that what she was doing here, in his room?
Diego leaned down and kissed her. June could smell his cologne. When they pulled apart, she wondered, briefly, if this happened to him often. If he danced with all the tourists in the hallway and kissed them in his room at night. But then he said, “I’m sorry. Has been a very long time for me.” And she felt a hazy sense of relief
They stared at each other for a while. June was amazed at how much she wanted Diego to kiss her again. But he didn’t. He said once more, “I’m sorry.”
June stood. “Will I see you tomorrow?” she asked.
“Tomorrow? No. I go home then.” He told her that he lived in a place called El Rompio and that he had an aunt there and two dogs. He took a bus on the weekends to see them. He explained that a weekend staff person would come and would need his hotel room.
When he said it, when she realized that she would not be able to sneak to his room again tomorrow night to see him as she surely would have, something caught in her throat. “What time?” she asked.
“The bus come at three o’clock,” he told her.
It had taken everything June had to walk back to her room, but she had done it. She replayed the encounter in her head all the way back to her room. Harvey was snoring lightly when she opened the door and climbed into her bed. The rain pattered on the metal roof, though she hardly heard it.
The guide was leading them to Pipeline Road. This was the exact place, supposedly, where a world record number of birds had been spotted. Every so often Raul Sanchez de Arenas would stop and point to something in a tree. Harvey would look quickly through his binoculars and then murmur, nod. The first few times, he offered the binoculars to June, too, but she always shook her head and by now Harvey had stopped offering. The humidity was oppressive. It was still raining but under the umbrella of tree leaves only sprinkles spit through. June hung back, staring at the footprints she made in the mud with her galoshes. She had come out today because she felt guilty about last night. It was the only reason. She never saw what Harvey saw. A blur of color darting through the air. A speck of something unknowable in a tree. It was a mystery to her. But on the trail, all she could think of was Diego, when she would see him again, how she could possibly see him before he got on the bus today.
June suctioned her galoshes out of the mud when she heard Harvey calling her name. She walked toward him. When she caught up, she learned that Raul had arranged for them to take a small boat across the river, toward the canal. She wanted to tell them that her socks were soaked or claim again that she wasn’t feeling well so that she could leave and go back to the hotel.
But Harvey kept repeating “The Panama Canal! It’s the eighth wonder of the world, June!” and it was clear that he wasn’t going to let her miss it.
She followed Harvey and Raul through the dense thicket of trunks and fronds, everything rich with greens and browns. Small, colorful frogs clung to twigs. The tinny sounds of the rain forest echoed around her.
There was only one life vest when they got to the boat. Raul handed it to June even though Harvey tried to grab it first.
“Only a precaution,” Raul assured him.
June’s bright orange poncho stuck out like wings under the bulky vest. The boat, a small, wooden, canoe-type contraption, pulled away from the shore. June was quiet, seated on a wooden plank, cupping her kneecaps with her hands, squeezing them as if she were trying to break through the skin with her fingertips. She could feel the rain now that they were out on the open water. It screamed down, stung her skin. The river was choppy and rough. The front of the boat skated up waves and slapped down against the surface. Again and again. Raul steered the boat into them head—on.
June said, “I’ve never seen waves like this on a river.”
“Not waves, just the water moving,” Raul said, and clapped his hands to imitate their motion.
But whatever they were, they were more than glorified ripples, the spine of each cresting with foam. June felt a little sick but she wasn’t sure it was because of the motion. The boat struggled farther from the shore.
Raul looked back from his post and shouted, “This is fun, no!”
The boat rolled to the side and Raul turned back quickly to straighten it. Harvey gripped the plank where he sat. June wondered if, in his life, Harvey had ever had this little control over anything, if he knew what it was to be tossed and rocked by something out of your hands, if he had ever experienced smallness.
A patchwork of lightning flared in the sky.
“Can I have your life vest?” Harvey asked. His face was pale.
“What?”
“June! You know I can’t swim. Please!”
A bird swooped overhead.
Harvey loosened his hands from the plank and raised his binoculars. “What was that?” he asked.
June looked off to her side, feeling the churning of the water under her. She saw, through a lilac haze, enormous ships lined up to pass through the canal.
“A swift,” June heard Raul reply.
“A white-collared swift?” Harvey asked.
June sighed. She took off her life vest and laid it on the damp floor of the boat by Harvey’s feet. Harvey would see it when he stopped peering at the bird for long enough. How many times had she wanted to tell him: Stop looking up. Look at me! He still had his head tilted back at the sky when she jumped. The water, disarmingly warm, smacked against her. She started swimming instantly. The waves jerked her back a little each time she moved forward.
She didn’t look back but she heard Raul shouting and she assumed he had jumped in after her by now. She pulled hard with her arms, digging through the water, swimming toward the shore, toward the hotel. She felt the best she ever had, a feeling she would never be able to explain to anyone, not to Harvey who, tomorrow on the airplane, would keep asking her over and over why she had done it; not to Diego who would smile warmly when he saw her drenched. She swam without knowing what would come next, the rain shooting down, her poncho floating like silk under the water, her body fighting to get her to the shore. And while she fought, she finally understood something about Harvey—what it meant to him to chase something like a bird, something graspable but beyond your grasp, something fluttering in the distance, something surprising and new and rare.
THE WIDE, PALE OCEAN
It was after church on a Sunday in February that the priest asked my mother if she would like to be Mary in the Easter procession that year.
“Virgin or Magdalene?” she said.
“La virgen,” Father Castillo replied, and a fierce smile lit up my mother’s face. She looked down at me and raised her eyebrows and nodded as if to say, See, Ysabel? See what your mother can do?
“There is a rehearsal the week before,” Father Castillo continued, “and you will be required to make your own costume.” Father Castillo used to preside over a church in Panama City. He was new to this area, so I don’t think he knew what he was getting into by extending this invitation to my mother. He was dressed in white robes and clutched a black binder to his chest like armor.
“Excellent,” my mother said. She was trying to remain composed, but I could tell she was ready to burst from happiness.
“Yes, it is God’s work.” Father Castillo clasped both of his hands around one of my mother’s and gave it a firm shake to signal that the conversation was over. He patted my shoulder as we walked out, and asked us to k
eep Jesus in our hearts.
My mother pointed her index finger at her chest. “He’s right here, Father!” she shouted, smiling like her face was going to split in two.
We lived on a small island called Taboga, where the handful of streets that existed were little more than winding stone paths and the only motorized vehicles were the boats from the city that docked at our pier on the weekends. Sherbet-colored houses with red roofs rose like steep mountain faces along the sides of the streets, built on wooden support beams that held them up and away from the water that ruffled in when the beach flooded, as it sometimes did during the rainy season. Some of the houses had been converted into tiny stores that sold groceries and bath products and hardware, and two with balconies had been turned into small restaurants. A white church stood in the middle of the town, with a clearing in front for community gatherings or for street vendors to sell their wares. Wispy palm trees towered over everything, and dark green tropical plants as well as vibrant flowers crowded the ground. Through it all, animals—mostly dogs but also frogs, iguanas, and a few peacocks—roamed lethargically, as if we humans were visitors in their space.
It was all I could do to stop my mother from skipping the whole way home. She kept bouncing ahead and turning around, walking backward in front of me while she shook my arms.
“Imagine! Me! In a parade.”
I smiled. “I know, Mami.”
“Everyone will see me.”
I said, “I bet the real Virgin Mary wasn’t even this excited when she found out she was having the baby Jesus.”
My mother frowned. “The real Virgin Mary?” she said, as if she had forgotten that the real Virgin Mary was not her. But the frown slid away in an instant, and her eyes flashed once again as she said, “Ay Dios! What will I wear?”
I was born underwater in a bathtub at our local hotel. My mother had never liked doctors and chose instead to have a midwife. That’s what she told me. The midwife insisted the birthing process would be easier in a tub. There was nothing more than a standing shower at our house, just a pipe coming through a wall, so my mother reserved a room at the only hotel on the island—the most money she ever spent at one time in her life, she said—and checked in as soon as she went into labor. She walked to the hotel from our house when she first started feeling the contractions course through her. Her water broke and splashed down her legs and soaked her shoes on the way there. The midwife met her in room 221. Seven hours later, I came out, under the water, and the midwife pulled me up into the air.
My father was back in the city, unaware that he was my father at all. He was simply a man my mother slept with once when he came to the island with his friends for the afternoon. His name was Ronaldo and he was better at the merengue than the tango, but that was all I knew. I used to press my mother for more, but she always maintained it was not important. When we took the ferry to the city to do our shopping, sometimes I had the urge to tap every man I saw on the shoulder and ask whether his name was Ronaldo, whether he had gone to Taboga with his friends for an afternoon fifteen years ago, whether he had slept with a girl named Gabriella, who had a lone freckle under her right eye. Sometimes I thought I could find him that way.
My mother and I lived in a faded green house perched one story above ground level. It was a big, open space, like a dance hall with a few rooms at either end. Linoleum tiles covered the floor except where there was a single navy bath rug my mother had placed by the door to welcome visitors, which in reality meant clients, coming to pick up their clothes and linens from my mother, who was the seamstress on the island. A brown chenille couch that my mother had reupholstered herself was pushed against one wall and across from it stood an undersized television set on a table with gilded S-shaped legs. The kitchen was small, the cabinets browned with steam and grease from so many years of cooking. Then there was the bedroom, which my mother and I shared. Once in a while, when it was too hot to be so near each other, one of us would sleep on the couch, but otherwise we slept side by side every night, the fan blowing over us, the milk-and-rose scent of my mother’s night cream settled into the sheets. A line of windows stretched all the way around our house and we kept them open even when it was raining because my mother was adamant about being able to hear the gentle brushing of the ocean any time of day.
I was on summer break so my mother asked me to help her with her costume. We hadn’t been home ten minutes and already she was pulling out paper, a pen, her sewing machine, pins, a measuring tape, a white marking pencil, a thimble, two spools of thread, the kitchen chair, and a pair of scissors.
“Why did you bring the chair?” I asked, pointing to its rusted metal frame and padded orange seat covers.
“So I can stand on it and you can measure me.”
“Why can’t I measure you on the box?” My mother had a wooden box her clients usually stood on to get measured.
“It’s more professional this way.”
She seemed to have her mind made up about this since she was climbing onto the chair already and offering me the measuring tape, as if she were holding onto the tail of a snake.
She told me to measure her hips, her bust, her waist, her head. She smiled when I reported the numbers.
“Those women at the beach, they try to be too thin. You should want to be like this, Ysabel. Full.” She swayed her hips a little and winked at me.
“Okay, Mami.”
I was getting anxious to leave. I should have gone straight from Mass but I knew my mother wouldn’t let me get away that fast. She needed someone to share her excitement with, at least for a little while. I was supposed to be at the soccer field to meet Lucho Morales, a boy from my school. I had seen him a few days earlier and he said he needed to talk to me. I tried to ask him, About what? But he wouldn’t say. He just told me to meet him Sunday by the field.
“Okay, help me down,” my mother said. She reached her hands to me.
I took them and delivered her safely to the floor.
“What did the Virgin Mary wear?” I asked.
“Robes. Blue robes, I think. But that doesn’t sound very flattering, does it?” my mother said, and I could see then where this was headed.
“But if that’s what she wore, then you have to wear it, too. You have to dress like she did.”
“You think?”
“You’re supposed to be her.”
“But I could still be her in nicer clothes, no?”
“Why don’t you ask Father Castillo?”
“Bah,” she said. “You’ll see. I’m going to look radiant.”
My mother was always my true love. Since the beginning, it’s been just the two of us. Her parents died in a plane crash when she was sixteen. They were on their way to Venezuela to visit her father’s cousin. It was why she could get on a boat to go to Panama City when the need arose, but she refused to entertain thoughts of going anywhere that required flying. A few women from the island went to Miami once and told everyone about it when they got back. My mother said she didn’t want to hear their stories, and when someone asked her why, she said because she would never go and that was a fact. She didn’t say anything about not flying, but I knew that was the reason. Panama is all I need, she told the women.
When I was little, my mother and I were almost inseparable. At parties, when other kids would run off and play among themselves, I stayed attached to my mother like a growth, hugging my arms around her thigh like I would die if I let go. She never tried to shoo me off. I remember for about a year she wore these lavender velvet pants, which I loved because they were the softest against my face as she dragged me along everywhere. For a long time, I never even thought it was strange that I didn’t have a father to speak of. My mother was simply everything. I was hardly aware that something was missing. And I knew that she needed me, too.
When I got a little older, we would go to the beach together. Sometimes, when my mother was feeling ambitious, we would sneak onto the hotel beach, which normally was only for guests. The hotel be
ach was a cordoned—off boomerang of sand that swung around the corner of the island. To keep the sand fine and smooth, men went out every day and swept it with wide brooms that looked like giant mustaches. My mother always rented a standing umbrella from the countless men hawking them to all the pale tourists who might truly need one. We lay under it, our bodies directly on the sand because my mother saw no need for towels. Why put anything between herself and God’s earth? she would say.
When she got hot enough, she went to the edge of the water and sat with her legs outstretched, letting the foam glide over her ankles and up her thighs, her body sinking in the wet sand. I watched her from under the umbrella, the U-shaped back of her red bathing suit bright in the sun, her hair pulled up off her neck.
She taught me how to float. Like a dead man, she said. Without cares. She walked me into the water and we would draw a deep breath and duck under, casting limply on the current until we had to come up for air. She used to hold my hand when we went under because she knew I was scared. After the first few times, though, she let go and we floated side by side.
I was out of breath by the time I reached the soccer field. On the scorched and matted grass, two boys used an empty milk jug as a ball, kicking it with their bare feet. I still had on my church clothes—a white eyelet skirt and an orange blouse—because I hadn’t had time to change. I saw Lucho sitting on a bench. In the sunlight, his skin was smooth like a caramel candy. I had prayed so hard at church that morning that he wanted to talk to me to tell me he liked me and I was nervous now thinking about it.
“Hi,” I said when I got to the bench.
He looked up, squinting against the sun, and then stood. “This is so stupid,” he said.
“It’s okay.” I held my tongue between my teeth.
He sighed. “Javi wants to know if you would kiss him.”
Javier was Lucho’s best friend. I felt something enormous shift in my chest like a landslide.
Come Together, Fall Apart Page 11