All night, the father replied, and the daughter did as she was told.
The mother had trouble sleeping that first night. She kept dreaming she was wet. She kept feeling water edging under her skin, under her nails, into her ears. She would wake and touch her skin until she was sure it was dry, and then fall asleep, fitfully, again. She dreamed she was stuck underwater. She was submerged in a tank, floating in pale gray water. She was holding her breath but her lungs were losing air. She dreamed she was in the mouth of a volcano, buoyed by lava. She could feel the volcano rumbling beneath her. She could feel the vibrations traveling through her toes to her knees to her hips to her shoulders. And then the volcano exploded. She was thrown out. But what it spewed wasn’t lava and ash. It was snow. And the mother landed facedown on the ground, snow raining over her. She tried to get up but she couldn’t. The snow pushed her down like hundreds of tiny hands. She tried to open her mouth to scream but it was filled with the flakes. She dreamed she was choking on snow.
By the morning of the second day, the news team had grown bored even with the story of the girl. They packed up and left. The father learned this when he went out to bid them good morning. He was disappointed to see they had gone, but turned his attention again to the house. Conditions were better than yesterday. The sun was out and the father had managed to push the snow away from the house in a ring. The problem now was the rivulet of water surrounding the house. It would creep in at the baseboards, he knew. He would tell the mother where to concentrate her efforts today.
The daughter had been holding up the ceiling all night. Once, she bent her elbows the tiniest bit to see what would happen and she felt it: the ceiling began to give way. She re-straightened her arms. She knew then that the father was right: If she got down, the ceiling would fall. The house would be ruined. Her shoulders popped. Her wrists creaked under the weight, warning her in a language of aching—please, we won’t be able to take it much longer. But the daughter had no choice.
When the father came back inside, the daughter asked for breakfast. The father sped past her, spoke to the mother, and sped back out again, into town.
Hey, the daughter yelled after him, but the father seemed not to hear.
In certain parts of town, the snow was melting fast, trickling along the edges of itself, running into sewers and soil and lower land. One woman’s sandals, which she had left on her stoop the night before the storm, were washed away by the runoff, gliding down the street into an open manhole. Armed with a flashlight, her husband was underground for hours, searching for her shoes.
By nightfall tomorrow, the townspeople guessed, the snow would be gone. When the earth had had enough, there would be flooding, but it had flooded before and they would handle it as they always had.
After the father left, the mother went out, too. The father had warned her repeatedly that one of them needed to stay at the house at all times to keep an eye on the daughter. And besides, the mother was supposed to be swabbing away. But the mother was restless and lonely in the house and when the father left, she wanted to go out, too.
I’ll be gone for a little while, she told the daughter.
Can I come? the daughter asked.
The mother shook her head. I’ll get you something if you’d like, she said.
I’m tired.
I know. It can’t be much longer now.
I’m so tired.
The mother patted the top of the daughter’s foot. Just hold on a little longer. I’ll bring you a bag of marzipan.
The daughter was too exhausted to argue. Satisfied, the mother walked out the door, her feet crunching against the packed powder.
There was no telling how long the mother and father had been gone. But the daughter started to come undone. By now, the ceiling had lost almost all the snow, but the wood—saturated with water, soaked through by the unexpected winter—was nearly blackened and heavy with melting. The weight climbed into the daughter’s bones. Her eyelids fluttered. She could no longer feel her hands. Her stockinged toes curled over the edge of the chair and her heels throbbed. Blood swelled in her neck and pooled in her shoulders. Her hips were cast forward, locked under the weight. It was as if the roof were fighting her, intent on crashing to the ground. She was beyond the point of crying out. She thought she couldn’t do it. She thought it was too much. But she told herself: One more second now, one more second now, now it’s just one more second. Fighting to keep herself going. And then, somewhere near the end of the day, the daughter started crying. Tears poured from her eyes the way the snow had gushed from the sky days earlier. Her entire body wept, sobbing with anguish.
When the father came back from town, he was relieved to see the house still intact. But he was unrelieved when he walked into the house. The daughter was still on the chair, her head lolling forward. The father hardly saw her. What he noticed instead was the water around his ankles. All over the floor. A calm layer, almost ten centimeters deep, filled the house from wall to wall. The father waded through it silently, the soft swish of water the only sound.
The mother came home then, too, and stood in the open door, water sliding out over her feet.
It’s ruined, the father said softly. The water got through somehow. She let it through.
It could have come from anywhere, the mother said.
No. Everything around the house is dry. It came from the ceiling. I knew if it bowed enough, it would splinter. The water would come through.
The ceiling is still perfectly flat, the mother said, glancing up at it.
You could never see it, the father said. He knelt and lapped his hands through the water. It’s ruined, he said again.
It will dry, the mother said.
The father shook his head. The ceiling will have to be rebuilt. The whole house.
If the father had raised his hands to his mouth, he would have tasted the salt of the daughter’s tears, but he didn’t. He simply scooped the water over and over with his hands, his back rounded, his head sinking farther into his chest.
Some books are damaged, the mother said. Only things on the floor!
It’s the wood, the father said. It’s too wet now. The walls are too soft. They’ll fall in soon. She let it through, he whispered.
The daughter, her slender arms strained under the weight of the house, her tears long since dry was too exhausted to speak. She simply stared at the father and held up the ceiling.
COME TOGETHER, FALL APART
Belief is believing in God;
faith is believing that God believes in you.
—Andre Dubus, “A Father’s Story”
OCTOBER 23, 1989
We were all scared in those days. Noriega was on his way to collapse and already the chaos had started.
Near the beginning of it all a homemade bomb exploded near my Tia Reina’s car while she was stopped at a red light. It landed on the sedan next to her and spit out like a firecracker, tearing through the passenger side of her Toyota, crumbs of the fiery metal burning tiny holes through her skirt. She pushed herself out of the car and rolled on the pavement until the fire was smothered, leaving her with a band of burns across her thighs like garter belts.
“Thank God it didn’t get her face,” her husband, Tito, said to the nurse at the hospital, as though there would be no use for a woman with a damaged face.
“She’s very lucky,” the nurse agreed, and left it at that.
I was fifteen then. Old enough to understand that the nurse meant lucky that it hadn’t been worse, but young enough to be mystified by the idea that someone who had come so close to death could be thought of as lucky.
Reina wept for hours each day. The nurses finally asked if we could bring our own pillowcases because she soaked hers so quickly that the laundry room in the hospital was having trouble keeping up. Reina described the incident in painstaking detail to whoever would listen, whoever happened into her room, whether she knew the person or not. She explained how she had been turning the radio dial when she hea
rd a shrieking sound, which she thought meant she was caught between stations. How there was heat and light—before there was anything else, there were those—and how something hit her thighs like a flick of someone’s fingers. How it stung. And then how there was a shower of scraps popping across her lap. How she frantically tamped her legs as they were exploding into flames before her eyes. How she fell out of the car and she’s not even sure whether she opened the car door herself or whether someone passing by opened it for her. How the street smelled like tar when she rolled on the ground. How her elbows stung from the gritty pavement. On and on. The nurses said that from their monitors, they could see her lips moving even at night, probably telling the whole story from the start, over and over again.
My father, my uncle, and I visited Reina the morning after her first night in the hospital. When we arrived, Reina claimed that the man in the bed next to hers taunted her all night, telling her repeatedly that she would never walk again. When my father, my uncle, and I peered down at him, he smiled to reveal a missing front tooth. He had casts on both his arms. My father looked back to Reina and, as he did with most everything, deferred the outcome to God.
“God will take care. Leave it in His hands.”
He was not a traditionally religious man—no church on Sundays, no cross around his neck—but he had an uncompromising faith. This was not good enough for Reina.
“Look what His hands have done already!” she said.
Tito offered to get the doctor to set her straight.
“The doctors don’t know anything,” she replied.
“Why don’t you just try to stand up?” I suggested, and everyone looked at me, first, like I was crazy and then, like I was a genius.
Tito clapped his hand on my shoulder. “I always knew you were a smart one, Ramón.”
“Try it,” my father said to Reina. “Stand up.”
Then, “Stand up!” my father and my uncle started clamoring together.
The man in the bed next to her shouted, “No se puede! No se puede!” and laughed. It was a play on a popular soccer chant at the time, and it was meant to discourage.
Reina huffed and gingerly moved her legs to the side of the bed. Rings of gauze protected her wounds but she grimaced as her skin slid over the sheets. Finally, she had perched herself on the edge of the mattress. My father stretched his hand out to her but she refused it. She sat for a minute longer, her eyes wide, staring at the floor as if she believed it was waiting to swallow her whole.
“Come on!” Tito said, clapping his hands once, like cymbals.
“No se puede!” the man in the bed chanted.
Reina pursed her lips and then pushed off, like someone slipping from the edge of a pool into the water, and stood. She took a step forward as we watched.
“They feel very tight,” she said, pointing to her thighs.
We all waited for more.
“But I can walk,” she said defiantly, and then proceeded to do just that all the way to the bathroom in the corner of the room.
When she returned to her bed, the doctor, who had just come in, told her she needed to rest. Just because she could walk, didn’t mean she should. At least not right away. Her body needed time to heal.
“God will make her new,” my father promised.
“That would be very nice,” Tito said. “A new woman would be very nice.”
When my father shot Tito a glare, Tito raised his hands. “What, Francisco? I’m only joking!”
Reina said, “Why joke? A new woman would be nice. Then it wouldn’t be me having to put up with you all the time.” She raised her eyebrows at Tito.
My father laughed, though he tried to stifle it. “Come on, Ramón,” he said, cupping his hand around the back of my neck and guiding me out of the room. “Let’s leave the lovebirds alone.”
My father, the story goes, entertained thoughts of priesthood until he met my mother. “Isn’t that always the way?” he said to me once. “Who doesn’t become a priest for any other reason? The Church has lost many a good man to the love of a good woman.”
They were at a restaurant, a little cabana on the causeway. They were both alone, at separate tables. My mother spilled rice water all over her skirt and my father saw her, he said, waiting for a server so that she could ask for a napkin. She sat very still, something he found curious since he assumed she must have been very uncomfortable. Finally, he went over to her himself and offered her a handkerchief, which she accepted and kept. My father returned immediately to his table without another word. Later that night, at home, with the hemstitched handkerchief washed and pressed, my mother noticed a small monogram embroidered in the corner. For the next week, she spent hours a day calling every listing under V in the telephone book and saying, “Hello, I’m looking for a man there who recently gave away his handkerchief.” After hundreds of wrong numbers and hang-ups, she found him. She was lucky. My father wasn’t even the one who answered the phone; his mother was. But he had told his mother that night when he came home from the cabana about a young woman he had met briefly and how she had taken not only his handkerchief but also his heart.
Who knows why? Love between people is not something to be understood by onlookers. No one might have guessed that my father, a genial and charming man from the city, could have loved this whisper of a girl. But a transformation took place in him, and he saw something in her either that no one else could or that they refused to recognize. He saw a light, he would often say. Your mother is a light.
To almost everyone else, though, my mother was stark. A strong but quiet woman. My earliest memory of her is her slapping my back to expel water from my lungs after I nearly drowned in six centimeters of bath water she had run in the washbasin outside. I remember her face, frozen and dispassionate, no sounds issuing from her mouth—no screams, no prayers, no pleading—and the firm smack of her hand against my wet skin, the burning in my throat as the water shot forth.
Ubi, my best friend, doubts I could remember all that. The first time I told him, he explained: “You weren’t even three yet, Ramón. It’s been well documented that no human being is capable of remembering anything before the age of three.” Ubi had discovered a volume on child development in the garbage dump along with some medical encyclopedias and, for fun, had actually been reading them. I saw him on his patio when I went over. Because of the stench left from the trash, he wore rubber gloves to turn the pages and a nose clip like the kind the leisure swimmers at the Intercontinental Miramar Hotel wore—nude—colored molded plastic pinching his nostrils together.
“I remember,” I insisted. “Maybe I’m superhuman. The first person to have a memory before three years old. You should send a letter to those editors and tell them about me.”
“They would never believe me,” Ubi said, grinning.
“I swear. I remember,” I said, and I did.
My Tía Reina had run out in her bathrobe when she heard me coughing. She snatched me from my mother and sat with me, locked in her bedroom, until my father came home that night. The whole thing sent a scare rippling through the house and deepened the sense of resentment toward my mother, whom no one in my father’s family had liked very much from the beginning anyway. It was worse, I suppose, because I was the only child my parents ever bore. I never saw my mother as the woman who let me come so close to death, though. I saw her as the woman who had given me life twice in as many years. And for that, I have always known, I would give her all that I could.
NOVEMBER 12, 1989
My father was in the bathtub, humming “Popeye the Sailor Man.” I could hear him through the door. That and “The Impossible Dream” were his favorite songs. “Popeye” was reserved exclusively for the bathroom; “The Impossible Dream” carried him everywhere else. He walked around the house and sang it loudly in a mock falsetto: To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe, his voice growing louder and more earnest the longer he went on, his fist pumping in the air. To him, Don Quixote’s was the ultimate
tale. A man on his horse charging into windmills wasn’t foolish; he was brave. My father could hardly contain himself when he’d found out I had to read the whole novel in school last year. I wanted to skim through it. I was pretty sure I already knew most of the story anyway. But my father had other ideas. He wanted to sit on my bed with me at night and read it out loud. He wanted to act out the scenes with makeshift sets and household props, wearing a mesh strainer on his head as a helmet and straddling the arms of the couch as if they were his horse. He even called my mother Dulcinea for a while until she told him enough.
“Papi,” I yelled through the door. “Lunch is ready.”
“Spinach!” he cheered, and I could imagine him, filmy water to his chin, smiling at me.
“Arroz con pollo and patacones,” I told him.
He asked me to give him one minute. I went back to the kitchen and sat down.
“I forgot limes,” my mother announced. She had an apron with small pink flowers tied around her waist. Her hair was pulled back, away from her face, though a few strands were matted down at her temples and in front of her ears. “Ramón, I need you to get limes.”
My father had to have a lime in everything he drank and Tabasco on everything he ate. Usually we had a bunch of limes for him, in a netted bag, somewhere in the kitchen. My mother would go so far as to cut them into wedges and put them in a plastic baggie in her pocketbook when we ate out, in case certain restaurants didn’t have their own limes on hand.
“Mamá, no,” I whined. I was trying to get through lunch as quickly as possible so that I could meet up with Ubi.
“Perhaps you know magic?” my mother said. “Maybe you could grow a lime tree here in the house and then we wouldn’t have to buy them?”
I sighed.
“No? Okay, then. You’ll go get some limes.” She pointed toward the front door, like I was a puppy she was shooing along.
There was no arguing with her. Growing up, if there was something I wanted or some leeway I was begging for, it was better to go to my father. My father was strong in his own way and he could be very stubborn, but my mother was the person who, with one stern look, could prove that she was not to be tested.
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