The ball swung again, like a bird swooping through the sky, and then crashed through another corner and fell back.
“I can’t believe it. Finally,” Reina said from behind us.
My mother stood absolutely still.
I looked over my shoulder to Reina and almost said it. I could feel the words collecting in my mouth. I heard the wrecking ball machine repositioning behind me and turned to watch it creep backward, shift to the right a little, and then stop again, ready for the next hit.
“Mamá!” I yelled above the growl of the machines. I was pleading with her to stop this, because I thought she was the only one who could. But she swallowed hard and grabbed my hand, squeezing my fingers together until I could feel the bones touching.
“Do you want to leave?” Tito shouted at me.
My mother kneaded her fingertips into my palm as if warning me to stay quiet, telling me to trust her. But my chest felt constricted and tired and as if it was breaking like brittle straw. Tears were worming in my eyes. And, finally, I couldn’t help it.
“He’s in there!” I screamed. As soon as I said it, something shattered in me. I started sobbing. It rushed up from my belly and from my toes, from all the quiet pools in me, and gushed out.
“What?” Tito asked, leaning toward me and squinting.
My mother said, “Nothing.”
“He’s inside!” I said again.
Tito dropped his arm from Mariella’s shoulder and turned to her. “What do you mean, he’s inside?”
My mother was silent. I fell onto the pavement, pebbles pressing against my legs, and wept. I felt so weak, like my legs had turned to string, totally collapsible. I heard Tito call my father’s name and when I looked up, he was sprinting across the street, waving his arms. He was frantically shouting but as he got closer to the house, I could no longer hear him, and I knew the workers wouldn’t either.
Reina stood and was wailing. She grabbed my mother’s arms and dug her nails into them, leaving little half-moons up and down my mother’s flesh. “How could you do this?” she screamed. “What are you doing?” Bits of spit flew into my mother’s face and she shook my mother’s thin body, as if she were trying to loosen something from a box, as if there were answers inside my mother that would come out if she shook hard enough. But my mother just looked ahead, her eyes like marbles, watching the bulldozer push in now, watching, as I did through tear-soaked eyes, chunks of the cement walls tumble in and fall unto themselves in piles amid a haze of dust that wafted in the air like fog.
JANUARY 4, 1990
Noriega surrendered that day but we didn’t know it until the middle of the night, when a symphony of honking horns erupted in the streets and we learned, from a neighbor, that he was probably being loaded onto an American plane at that very moment, and that he would be taken to the United States for a trial. It hardly seemed to matter. We were outside the exhilaration that everyone else reveled in, lost in the morass of our own private mourning.
Flor called in the middle of the night, eager to share her jubilation at Noriega’s surrender. Tito answered the phone. He told her my father was dead. She wanted to talk to my mother, but my mother wasn’t talking. When she got home, she had fallen in a heap on the floor beside her bed. She had walked all the way to Cerro Viento, by herself, and hadn’t spoken to anyone since. Reina had pleaded with her to stop it, had cursed her for letting it happen. My mother screamed out once—a high and piercing scream that vibrated to the pit of my stomach—saying, “He wants to stay in the house! He wants this!” She shrieked it as if she was trying to make sure the sound got all the way to heaven, all the way to God, so that He would know. Then she fell silent again.
Ubi called in the morning. Everything in the newspaper was about Noriega, but buried in the back was a small obituary for my father. Reina had been able to get it in right away, through a friend at her office.
“Where was he?” Ubi asked.
“In La Chorrera,” I lied. I didn’t want to tell him the truth: that my father had willed himself to die.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “My mother and I will come to the funeral.”
I didn’t know whether there would be a funeral, but I told him thanks. “Your mother’s okay? I talked to her the other day.”
“I know, she told me. She’s going to be fine.” He was quiet.
“And Sofia?” I asked.
“Ramón, I’m so—”
“I sent her a postcard telling her how I felt. It was before I knew.” I almost started crying again right then. “You have to get it for me. It will go to her family’s box but you have to get it. Please.”
“Sure.”
“Throw it away.”
He was quiet.
“Ubi?”
“Okay.”
As it turned out, there wasn’t a proper funeral. Reina wanted to go back to the house and find what was left of his body and bury it. My mother was still on the floor, balled up like a blanket that had fallen off the bed in the middle of the night, unable or else unwilling to speak. I spoke for her.
“He wanted to stay in the house,” I told Reina, standing up to her like a man, acting like I had seen my father act so many times—solemn and assured.
She looked shocked. “Don’t you want to bury him?”
Tito came up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. He looked awful—we all did—his face puffy and pale, his wavy dark hair uncombed and out of place.
“No,” I said. Reina’s face sunk. “He’s already been cremated. Most of the time, when people are cremated, you throw their ashes out into the sea or onto some piece of land that they had a connection with. His ashes are already in their place.” I had been thinking about this a lot. It made me feel better for some reason to think of it that way.
Reina shook her head. “That’s bullshit,” she said. “He should have been buried.”
JANUARY 8, 1990
We had a memorial service for my father at our old church later that week. We tacked photographs of him onto a piece of foam and put it on an easel in the front of the church. People I had never seen in my life streamed in and out for hours, stopping to kiss my cheeks and say they were sorry. I wondered how many of these people knew how he had died, as if that mattered. The priest spoke once, but I was hardly listening. Reina, Flor, and Tito stood at a different door than my mother and I, only the beginning of the ways they would distance themselves from my mother in the years to come and shut her out. To them, what my mother had allowed was indefensible. I was furious at her, too, and confused, furious at every single thing about it. But even then I think I was able to recognize something of love in what she had done.
Ubi came with his mother. We hugged, something I don’t think we had ever done. Sofia came later, by herself I felt a tremendous apprehension at seeing her again.
“Ubaldo told me,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Ramón.”
She kissed both my cheeks. I breathed in the smell of her skin and didn’t let it out until my chest burned. I told her thank you and watched her walk out, her skirt hitting at her knobby knees, her sandals clapping as she moved. I felt the most indescribable loss then. The weight of everything—the past weeks, my father, Sofia—dropped through my body like a crashing elevator. I felt hollowed and dulled, hazy around the edges and empty inside. For the rest of the day, I shook everyone’s hands and nodded my head absently.
And then, at one point, I looked up and everything was radiant. In Panama, at funerals, everyone wears white. I had learned that at my grandfather’s funeral when I was a little boy. Everyone who filed in that day had on white pants, white shirts, white skirts and dresses, white shoes, white silk scarves, white hats, white ties, white polyester, white nylon, white cotton. The church was filled with people reverently moving through the pews, a sea of white. Sunlight streamed through the tall, thin windows and fell over everyone like a halo. In the midst of it all I had the thought that it was like being in heaven, among angels. And that surely my father was
there. I knew he was one of them.
APRIL 24, 2000
Our lives fell apart after that, crumbling in on us like the house, like buildings all over Panama in the after-math of the invasion. Tito and Reina moved out as soon as they were able to find an apartment. I never heard another word that either of them uttered, except that night after the memorial, when I lay in my bed, and Reina walked in and knelt beside me and, in a fierce whisper, said, “This was your fault, too, Ramón. You knew!” and I could feel her hot breath against my face. I kept my eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. “You killed your father, Ramón,” she said. She stayed there, staring at me for a few minutes in the dark.
When they moved to their new apartment, my mother lost our house in Cerro Viento. There was no way to make the payments on her own. At least that’s what she told me. But one night, before we left, as we sat at the table eating cheese on bread and fried yucca, she produced a slip of green paper from under the phone book in a kitchen drawer.
“I have something for you,” she said. Her skin had grown wrinkled. She washed her face at night with milk of magnesia, but she never wore makeup anymore, even though she had never worn a lot. Her hair was limp and oily. Her eyes were tired and interminably sad. She carried my father’s handkerchief with her everywhere, sometimes using it to dab her tearing eyes or sometimes just holding it to her nose, as though the scent of my father was mingled in the fibers.
She passed the green paper across the table. It was a check. A check from the Zona Construction Company for twenty thousand dollars.
“I didn’t tell your father. He would have torn it up, you know. But I want you to have it. I want you to go to the United States and go to college.”
“I can go to college here.”
She shook her head. “This isn’t a life for you.”
“Yes it is. This is my life. There isn’t another one. Mama, you could use the money here. We could use it. You could keep this house.”
“No,” she said. “It wouldn’t be right. To build a new life here without your father. With that money. In this house.”
Then I understood. “You want to lose it,” I said.
“I can’t stay here.” She pulled her hands back over her hair, matting it down.
“We could both go to the United States,” I said, though I knew she would refuse.
She looked straight at me. The yellow light hummed above us. “I saved your life once,” she said. “I know nobody thinks of it that way.”
“I do,” I said.
She smiled. “I just want to do it again.”
I was too young for college yet, but my mother found a boarding school in Pennsylvania that would take me, and then I would go to college when I had my high school diploma. What seemed like a lot of money in Panama didn’t go very far in the United States and by the time I enrolled at Lehigh University, I had to find a part-time job to support myself I worked as a box crusher and a stock boy at the local supermarket for four years, coming home with tiny cuts on my hands where the razor blade had slipped, my back aching from standing up for hours at a time. There were days when I thought my life here wasn’t much different than it would have been if I had stayed in Panama. But then I met my future wife in college, a nursing student from New Jersey who almost made me stop breathing the moment I saw her. Her name was Margaret, and when I told my mother about her, she was pleased because Margaret was the name of a saint.
Ubi married Sofia. I heard that from my mother, even though every once in a while, Ubi or I would telephone each other. I sent them a card, wishing them every happiness, and a gift—a set of encyclopedias for the children I knew they would have. I put a note in the inside cover of the first volume: “So your kids don’t have to fish their knowledge from trash cans, like someone I used to know.”
My mother spent the years moving from apartment to apartment. Twice, during the construction of the new high-rise on our old lot, she went and slept on the newly laid cement, amid the giant machines at rest for the night.
“I thought it would make me feel closer to him,” she explained. “But it didn’t. I feel him all the time, anyway.”
I called her every Sunday and wired her money once a month, though I didn’t know what she did with it. She talked in the past, never about where she had gone that day or whom she had seen or what she would do tomorrow, but always about the two weeks during the invasion, always about my father.
The last time I spoke to her, she told me she had heard him. “I was buying bananas,” she said, “and I heard his voice behind me, singing. You know his song. To dream the impossible dream. Ramón,” she told me, “I know I didn’t hear it. I’m not going crazy. But I can’t tell you how badly I wanted to hear it.”
It was only three days later when Ubi called me to tell me she had died. His mother was the one who told him. It was in her sleep. It was peaceful.
I hadn’t been back to Panama in ten years. I thought I was carrying it all with me but as soon as Margaret and I landed at the airport, I felt a shock run through me. The swampy air, the unrelenting sun, the smell of exhaust clinging to everything. The pockmarked faces of the men at the car rental counter. The constant surge of traffic. The glint of the lights from city buildings against the water in the evening. The rumbling buses airbrushed with images of celebrities or landscapes. Panaderías, lavanderias, carnecerías on almost every corner. The Supermarket Rey the Casa de la Carne, a new place called Mattito’s. Cars honking, jackhammers hammering. Broken pavement. Swarms of schoolchildren, all in uniform, huddled in front of Wendy’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken. People hobbling through stopped traffic, selling dish towels, newspapers, roses. Men returning crates of glass bottles for a refund. Neon lights turned on even during the day. The graceful lean and sway of palm trees hovering over it all. My blood rushed in a kind of nervous excitement at being in the place to which my soul was connected, at being home.
The funeral was in the same church my father’s had been. When we walked in almost no one was there. It reminded me of walking into Christmas Eve Mass that year. My mother had left a will in which she asked to be cremated and for her ashes to be scattered by her husband’s. Later, I would return for the first time to where our house used to be and, with only Margaret looking on, I would pour the ashes into the first sign of dirt at the edge of the concrete parking garage attached to the high-rise there, turning over the soil with my hands.
Ubi and Sofia came to the church, along with Ubi’s mother. Ubi had a mustache now and I teased him, saying it was about time. Sofia was still thin, and taller now, but what had once been an unusual loveliness had transformed into unqualified radiance. Even so, I could tell she was the kind of woman who didn’t comprehend her own beauty. I introduced them all to Margaret. Her hair had curled from the humidity and in a fit of frustration that morning at the hotel she had pulled it back. She didn’t like how she looked, I knew, but even next to Sofia, she was the most gorgeous woman I had ever seen. After a few more minutes, our former priest, who had retired, arrived to say Mass as a favor to my mother. We waited for half an hour after the funeral was supposed to begin but neither Flor nor Tito nor Reina ever showed up.
The priest was going to say a few words and then I was supposed to get up to deliver the eulogy. Margaret held my hand as I waited. Life had killed my father, and then my mother, in heartbreak, had died because of him. Or maybe it was like Reina once said: Maybe my mother and I killed my father, but in return he killed a little bit of both of us. I kept thinking about it, but I suppose it didn’t matter what exactly had happened and who was to blame. “God will take care,” my father always said. Whether in this life or the next. And I believed him.
The priest called my name. Margaret squeezed my hand. For days, I hadn’t been sure what I would say. But I would talk about heaven, I thought then, and how I saw it in this church once, so I know it exists. I would talk about God’s arms growing infinitely longer so as to be able to hold all of us in His embrace. And I would tell my
story—about my mother and my father and me—and how in that story was all that I knew about love.
Acknowledgments
With enormous thanks to Kate Lee, agent
extraordinaire, for being the best ally any writer
could hope for; my brilliant editor, Megan
Lynch, for believing in me from the start; Chris
Offutt, for making me believe in myself; Frank
Conroy, Marilynne Robinson, Lan Samantha
Chang, and Elizabeth McCracken; Ted Genoways,
for giving me my first big break and being
a generous advocate ever since; Susan Hahn
and Ian Morris; Susan Burmeister-Brown and
Linda Swanson-Davies; Deborah Treisman,
Cressida Leyshon, and Mike Peed; Celina Barkema
Vargas, for sharing her story; Kate Sullivan
and Diana Spechler, for being incredible
readers and even better friends; Stefan Grudza,
for getting me started; Erin Hogan, for guiding
me; my parents, for patiently answering all my
millions of questions and for their love; and
Ryan Kowalczyk, for everything always.
About the Author
CRISTINA HENRÍQUEZ is a graduate of the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of the Alfredo
Cisneros del Moral Foundation Award, and was
featured in The Virginia Quarterly Review as one of
Fiction’s New Luminaries. Her stories have been
published in The New Yorker, Glimmer Train,
TriQuarterly, and AGNI. She lives with her husband
in Chicago.
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