Come Together, Fall Apart

by Cristina Henriquez

  “And who was the one I almost had to carry out of the house because she was afraid to go outside?” Tito asked her.

  “Oye, I walked out on my own two feet!”

  Tito grinned. “And it’s a good thing, too, mami, because I’m a strong man but I might not have been able to carry you.”

  I laughed under my breath. My father looked at both of us, scolding us with his eyes. My mother, undisturbed, ignored us all and continued her prayers.

  When the priest came out, he didn’t walk up the aisle to the altar. He simply emerged from the sacristy while the pianist played “O Holy Night” until the priest put up his hand for him to stop. We went through the Mass like normal. The night seemed quieter than it had in days. Before the homily, the priest paced back and forth in front of the altar. He introduced himself as Father Castillo and thanked us for coming. Then he paced a bit more and said, “We have endured days of great stress. I know, for most of you, it was a trial simply to be able to come here, to come to church to observe our Lord. How wonderful it is to be able to hope that perhaps by next week, there will be no obstacles standing in your path. How wonderful to dream that soon this misery will be over. With General Noriega turning himself in to the Vatican Embassy today, there can be little doubt that the Lord our Savior is indeed watching over us.”

  The priest paused and looked up, clasping his hands. I turned to my father.

  “What happened?” I whispered.

  But my father looked as confused and surprised as the rest of my family did. No one else in the church had even flinched.

  The priest had started again, about Mary and Joseph and their travels to the manger, but I needed to find out. I raised my hand. My mother looked at me and grabbed my wrist, pulling my arm down. I raised my other hand. She leaned across me to get hold of that one, too, but I wiggled it higher.

  The priest furrowed his brow at us. He stopped in mid-sentence. “Yes?”

  I stood up. “Noriega turned himself in?” I asked.

  “Earlier today. He’s seeking refuge in the Vatican Embassy.”

  “Does that mean it’s over?” I could feel everyone staring at me. I gripped the top of the pew in front of me.

  “Not yet. But God willing, it will be soon.”

  My mother yanked me down from behind, tugging on my shirt.

  “Didn’t you want to know?” I asked her as I fell back into the pew.

  “You’ve interrupted Mass, Ramón,” she said. But I could tell: relief and hope flickered in all their faces.

  After Mass, my father wanted to stay and go to confession.

  “What do you have to confess, Francisco?” Flor asked.

  “I need to go,” he said.

  He looked uneasy walking into the confessional and my mother said to me, “You see, Ramón. That’s how you get when you don’t go to church as often as you should.” She laughed—I swear the first time I had heard her laugh in weeks—and my heart soared at the sound of it. All of a sudden I felt as if everything in the world was going to be okay. Hearing her laughter cut through the gaping space of that church, I thought it was the end of grief in our lives.

  JANUARY 3, 1990

  Over the next week, things continued to calm. In the beginning, it seemed we were never able to relax completely. Every time we stopped thinking about the invasion for half a second, something happened to put us on edge again. But now that Noriega had holed himself up in one place, there was only the matter of getting him to come out. The embassy was sovereign territory. Soldiers weren’t allowed to simply storm it.

  The television was broadcasting again and my mother, after our outing to church, had shed her old fears, letting them slide off her body like snakeskin. She no longer took refuge in the shower stall, no longer knelt on the couch while watching out the windows, and no longer put up a fight every time we wanted to turn on the TV By contrast, my father grew increasingly somber. It was like the two of them had seeped into each other, displacing what used to be theirs with qualities from the other person. My father went to work and when he came home, he went to the bedroom. I would walk by the doorway and watch him through the long opening. He was back to reading Don Quixote, but he read it with tears welling along the rims of his eyes now, like a brimming trough ready to overflow. I hadn’t heard him sing “The Impossible Dream” in what felt like ages. There was also a photograph, a small, square browned one, of his parents standing in front of our old house, that he would hold in his hands while sitting on the edge of the bed, hunched over, fingering the soft corners absently as he gazed at it. He was in mourning, my mother said. First, there was denial and then, with everything that was going on, he had hardly had time to think about the fact that we had moved. But now it had crept up on him and, as if he had lost a loved one, he would need time to pull himself back together. My mother told me not to bother him too much.

  On the morning of January third, we started hearing rumors that Noriega was caving in, that it would only be a matter of days now before he walked out and the Americans took him into their custody. Thousands of Panamanians were demonstrating in front of the Vatican Embassy, demanding that he surrender. It was starting to seem like he might. Reina had gone back to work and called from her office to give us updates.

  “Is it the music?” I asked her on the phone. The Americans had been blaring their rock music in the general direction of the embassy for days now, thinking that maybe it would be annoying enough that Noriega would have to come out. I still hadn’t been downtown, but Reina said that you could feel the bass vibrations through the pavement. Everyone in the city was making jokes about it.

  “The music was an idiot’s idea,” she said. “He’s probably dancing in there.”

  In light of what Reina reported, my mother suggested we make something nice for dinner together. I didn’t really want to. Just hearing that it might be over soon made me feel like it already was, and I had the urge to go out somewhere, to see people and be back in the city.

  “Okay, you can go somewhere,” my mother said. “Now where should that be?” She tapped her front teeth with her fingernail. I could tell she had something in mind. “I know. You can go to the supermarket. They must be open by now. I’ll give you a list.” She turned to grab a pencil and a napkin to write on. “And, Ramón,” she said, “these are not things that can be plucked off a tree in a neighbor’s yard.”

  She had known all along about the limes. But instead of feeling found out, I was happy to be reminded of something from a time when everything had been better for us. It seemed like we were headed back to that.

  I returned from the Supermarket Rey with beef roast, tomato paste, limes, lettuce, tomatoes, a small burlap sack of rice, and Baturro salsa—the ingredients for lomo, my father’s favorite meal. I also bought Tabasco, even though my mother forgot to include it on the list, because I knew my father had been missing it. It felt good to have food in the house again and my mother and I started a countdown to time ourselves against when everyone would come home.

  “How was it out there?” she asked.

  “It seemed okay. I mean, there was trash everywhere and some of the windows were broken at the shops. And the whole supermarket smelled like fish. But it was okay.”

  “The fish has probably been rotting in there for days. The smell will go away eventually, though.” She wiped down the counter with circular strokes, readying a surface for us to work on.

  We started making the food in the late afternoon. By the time both Tito and Reina arrived home, my mother was scraping the burnt rice—her favorite part—from the bottom of the paila and it seemed we had timed everything perfectly. I was instructed to set the table and Reina cooed over the prospect of having our first real meal in weeks. We all sat down to wait for my father. After a while, Tito asked me to fill his glass and my mother said I might as well fill all of them. The glasses had been overturned to keep out flies but I gathered them now and poured everyone some water. I put a plastic coaster over my father’s.
/>
  Reina was squirming in her seat, anxious to eat, and finally Tito said that they should go ahead. “Probably more mayhem at the hospital,” he said. “Who knows when he’ll be home.”

  The meat was tender and juicy as I pulled it apart with my fork and swirled it into my rice. I swear my stomach almost hurt eating it. I could only finish a little.

  Reina was telling Tito again what she had already told us that morning.

  He shook his head. “It’s going to be the beginning of a lot of things soon,” he said, pointing his fork at Reina. “I can almost guarantee you we’re going to be making more money from now on. For a long time, mami. There’s so much construction to be done now. Here in San Miguelito, whole roads need to be rebuilt. I’m going to have a lot of jobs coming at me.”

  Suddenly, my mother pushed herself from the table. The metal legs of her chair squeaked against the floor. “Oh my God,” she said.

  “You left something in the oven?” Reina asked, grinning.

  “Francisco,” my mother murmured. She was staring across the room with wide eyes as if she were watching a ghost dancing on the wall. Her hands gripped the lip of the table. I looked to where she stared, but saw nothing.

  “What’s wrong?” Tito asked.

  My mother stood and ran to her bedroom.

  “Ramón, what’s wrong with her?” Tito asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She came back a few seconds later with a piece of white cloth clasped in her hand.

  “Where are your keys?” she demanded of Tito.

  He patted his pants pocket. “Right here.”

  My mother was hardly blinking. “We have to go, ” she said.

  “Now, Mariella—” Reina started.

  “We have to go,” she said again.

  Tito stood and put his hands on her shoulders but she shuddered away.

  “Please,” she said, and even from where I was sitting, I could see an animal desperation in her eyes, gleaming and bright.

  “Okay,” he said. My mother claimed she could drive herself but Tito reminded her she hadn’t driven in almost five years and it was his car so he would drive.

  Reina insisted on going, too. “I want to see what’s gotten into her now,” she said.

  Tito said, “Everyone goes,” and my mother had the most excruciated look on her face, as if that was the last thing she wanted but all she said was, “Hurry, we have to hurry.”

  In the car, Tito asked where we were going, but my mother wouldn’t say. She simply gave directions from the front seat, shaking and telling Tito to speed up at nearly every turn. It became clear, after a while, that we were headed to our old house. And then I remembered what I couldn’t believe I hadn’t earlier: Today was the day it was scheduled to be torn down. I knew then what my mother had realized only an hour before: My father was there, watching it happen.

  We were stopped by American guards at two road-blocks along the way and then waved through. As we neared our old street, I had the sudden fear that maybe our house had already been destroyed during the invasion. I half-expected to see an empty lot, razed to nothing but rubble. But as we turned the corner, there it was—the terra-cotta-colored shutters straight alongside the windows, the wavy clay-tiled roof, the small front patio with turquoise twisting columns reaching from an outer ledge to the ceiling, the cracked cement driveway with tufts of grass poking through. One bulldozer faced it from the street, ready to go to work, and one crane with a wrecking ball hummed in the yard. The land was scattered with hundreds of fluorescent marker flags and spray-paint ticks, but otherwise, it looked the same. It was good to see it again.

  Before Tito had even turned off the car, my mother jumped out. “Where is he?” she asked to the air. She started walking toward the back of the house, calling my father’s name.

  “Your mother’s gone crazy, Ramón,” Reina said.

  My mother was swallowed behind the house, probably still yelling, when a foreman came over and told us we needed to distance ourselves from the property.

  “It’s not safe here,” he warned. They would be starting the demolition in about ten minutes and only the crew was allowed on the premises.

  Tito said a few things to the foreman about how of course we understood and he himself was in construction and was quite familiar with the rules of operation and he assured the foreman we would get my mother back in the car shortly and then leave.

  A few minutes later, when a loud horn bleated into the twilight air, Tito said he was going to get her. “This is stupid,” he said. “Francisco’s probably at home, eating all our lomo.”

  Reina sighed and sat down in the car, leaving the door open and her legs dangling out. “It’s incredible that you turned out so well, Ramón, with a mother like that. She’s always been crazy, you know.”

  I looked at Reina in the shadows of the car. Her hair was piled atop her head like cotton candy, dried out and sprayed stiff. Her face would have been more attractive without the green eye shadow she layered on each morning and the scarlet lipstick. She and Tito had lived with my parents since before I was born but I had never been that close to them. Physical nearness does not necessarily breed intimacy. I thought about what Tito had said at dinner, about making lots of money soon, and I wondered if they would get their own house at last. Reina accused everyone else of being weak but she was the one still clinging on, still using her brother as a crutch. There was weakness there, though she would be the last to admit it.

  Finally, I said, “Crazy is better than cruel.” I felt the tension that comes from willful disregard course through me, as if I were tightening myself against a blow that I knew was coming.

  Reina looked at me evenly. I thought she was coming up with what to say in return, something that would level me, but she only blinked quickly a few times and turned away.

  Tito came back around, shouting, “Is Mariella out here? Did she come back this way?”

  Reina and I both shook our heads.

  “I can’t find her,” Tito said.

  “She has to be in there somewhere,” Reina said. “This is ridiculous.”

  “I’m going to find the foreman. They can’t start until we find her.” Tito walked off

  Reina leaned her head back, closing her eyes. I wandered to the side of the house and was headed to the rear, to where our clothesline used to hang above the roosters that strutted through the dirt, when, like a flash through the window, I saw them. My father was seated on the floor in my parents’ old bedroom. It used to be his parents’ room and his grandparents’ before that. He was dressed in his work clothes—white pants and a royal blue polo shirt with the name of the hospital embroidered on the breast. His ID badge hung around his neck. He had taken off his shoes. My mother knelt beside him, holding his hand. I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but it looked like they were praying. After another minute, a horn again bleated into the darkness. My mother was crying now. My father took her and kissed her and brushed her hair back with his hand. Then she stood up and ran out. I stayed long enough to watch my father lay down on the floor and then ran out into the front yard, too. When she saw me, she said, “What did you see?”

  I stared at her blankly.

  “You know, don’t you?” she said.

  I thought maybe I did but I said, “What?” because I wanted to believe that I was wrong, I wanted her to say something that would prove me wrong.

  Instead, she started crying again. She wiped her cheeks with the white cloth she had been clenching in her hand since we left Cerro Viento. It was the handkerchief my father had given her the first time they met.

  “Where have you been?” Tito walked up to us. “They need to start.” He pulled us down the driveway and out to the street.

  “Mariella,” he said. “Don’t be so upset. You have a perfectly good new house now. This is only one part of your life, right?”

  It was something that used to be true but wouldn’t be soon. The house was only one part of
her life once, a house she moved into after she got married, a house she loved in its own way, but a house she brought herself to leave. When my father died in there, though, it would no longer simply be part of her life, or mine. Most of our lives—the best part—would be gone with it. For my father, though, it had always been different. That house was everything. He had the history of lifetimes behind him there. He had never spent a night sleeping anywhere else. Every single thing that ever truly mattered to him in some way had to do with being there. There wasn’t a world for him outside of it. And so—though this was a level of acceptance I was able to come to only years later—it made sense that he would want to die in that house. Little by little, he was already dying outside of it. He hadn’t let on. At first, he had seemed depressed but still he had been able to go to work, to eat with us, to love us. But every day, every second since leaving, something vital inside him must have been wilting away, small and drooping, folding into itself and withering. I thought, and sometimes still think, that it was unforgivably selfish to leave us like that. But sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t have been equally selfish to ask him to exist in a world that for him held no color, no sound, no taste, no life, for no other reason than to be with us.

  My mother was stony-faced when she turned to look at the house. The rumble of the bulldozer started and Tito put an arm around my mother’s shoulder. “It’s probably better that Francisco’s not here to see this,” he said.

  I looked to my mother, but her face gave away nothing. I couldn’t believe she was going to let this happen. We stood and watched as the wrecking ball swung out slowly, almost gracefully, and then hurtled into the house, where the office used to be. Pieces of the roof caved in and cracked like thunder. Puffs of dirt rose up and dispersed in the twilight sky. I was breathing fast, the air getting caught in my throat, and I felt a tremendous electric twitch all through my body. I had the thought, I don’t know why, that I could run to the laundromat and buy a gun from the guys who had set up their table in the alley. I could run back and hold it up to the construction workers’ heads and tell them to stop. I could tell them my father was in there.