Stay with Me
Page 1
Stay with Me
A Novel
Sandra Rodriguez Barron
Dedication
In loving memory of my father
Juan A. Rodriguez
And for my cherished friend
George H. Wilson
Contents
Dedication
Prologue
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part II
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Part III
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Sandra Rodriguez Barron
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
1979
Nine days after the hurricane, a boat departed from the southern shore of the Dominican Republic, in the early morning hours of September 8. As its twin diesel engines muscled over treacherous, shark-infested waters, the path was illuminated by a resplendent full moon. By the time the For Tuna reached the halfway mark of its journey, the sky had become as blue as the American’s eyes, which were fixed, under the shade of a captain’s visor, toward U.S. territory.
The boat approached the uninhabited island of Mona, where three-foot iguanas, with their sagging jowls and horned snouts, sauntered out from the caves to sun themselves upon the rocks. A graveyard of crudely made wooden rowboats lay mangled and strewn about on an empty beach, evidence of previous failed attempts of boatpeople to traverse the Mona Passage and make it to Puerto Rico’s western shore. The American slowed down and eyed the wrecked boats. She circled Mona Island, searching the beaches, the mouths of the high cliff caves, and the site of the abandoned guano mine. She eyed the rusted, decommissioned lighthouse on the north side and passed around a pair of binoculars. The men surveyed the wild, desolate island from the surrounding waters. Finding no sign of life at all, save a few wild goats roaming a plain, they departed. The For Tuna bucked its way across the choppy surface waters of an abyss that drops down to the deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean. The American’s eyes stung from the salt in the spray that whipped at her face. It was a violent, gut-twisting ride, and when the men grew seasick and began to vomit, her self-doubt threatened to swell into a full panic attack. But she clung to the wheel and reminded herself over and over that land was just fifty miles away. She was deeply comforted by the sound of children’s voices drifting up from inside the cabin, singing Spanish lullabies.
Three hours later, a beautiful sight: Puerto Rico’s western shore appeared as a long strip of green along the horizon. Twenty minutes later, the For Tuna’s hull cut through a floating carpet of seaweed and hurricane trash—palm fronds, dead fish, empty soda cans, and plastic junk. The American pulled into a docking area a mile south of the city of Mayagüez. She tied the For Tuna up to a pier and secured a yellow balloon to the rail of the boat before she left. No one saw her as she hurried down the dock, arms folded over her chest, pressing a tissue to her eyes, sobbing. And no one saw the two dark-skinned men who followed her either. They stepped out of the boat with their heads low, their eyes concealed beneath the brims of their straw hats. One of them wore a black suit; the other was more plainly dressed. The American looked back at the boat several times before she traversed the length of the pier. The men didn’t look back at all. Twenty-seven minutes later, two Mayagüez police officers arrived at the site of a waterfront condominium and yacht club complex that was still under construction. It had been abandoned for months, after the developer went bankrupt. An anonymous call had tipped off the police to the docking of a “suspicious-looking” vessel. The identifying balloon was hardly necessary—the For Tuna was the only boat in sight. The officers boarded it with weapons drawn. They found the hatch closed, but not locked. Officer Flores pulled it back and peered into the boat’s cabin. Without saying a word, he stepped aside, shook his head and let his partner get a look at what was below.
Officer Castillo peered into the dim interior. Curiously, he smelled something that made him think of his infant twins: milky vomit, talcum powder, and soiled diapers. Inside were four toddlers lying across the boat’s cushioned surfaces, with their eyes closed. They were dressed in outfits befitting a family who could own such a handsome boat—two of the little boys had button-down shirts and dark dress pants, while another was dressed in a princely sailor suit. The girl was wearing a fancy pink, puffy flowered dress.
“Where the hell are the parents?” Flores said, and the two men scanned the cabin from above. The little boy in the sailor suit lifted his head to look at them. He put his hands over the chests of the two children lying next to him. His eyes lingered on each officer’s face. Then he lifted one hand and tried to snap his fingers, or perhaps pinch something, but he didn’t say anything. His eyes rolled up to one side. He waited. He did it again. They looked at them expectantly, as if he had asked them a direct question and was waiting for a response. Officer Flores looked at his partner. “Is that sign language?”
Officer Castillo shrugged. He went below, into the spacious cabin and searched the whole boat. He found a fifth child, a little girl hiding under the overhang of an open storage compartment, this one in a white-and-yellow dress. There were no adults anywhere in the vicinity. There weren’t even any witnesses to question. Officer Flores shouted into his radio, “We need medical personnel! I have a boatful of unaccompanied minors! Yes, minors! Children! Nenes!” After the ambulance left with the children, the Coast Guard cutter Borinquen arrived, and the officials all wrote up their reports, taking photographs and securing the vessel. Everyone was expecting the parents to appear at any minute, shouting and looking relieved and explaining the details of some mishap that had separated them from their children. But none appeared, so they followed protocol and prepared for an investigation that they doubted they or anyone else would have time to pursue anytime soon. The items that made it into the evidence file that day were two empty plastic gallon-sized bottles of water, three plastic baby bottles, cloth diapers, some folded children’s play clothes, and a small blanket. One of the little girls clutched an unfinished rag doll without any stitching on the face, which the officers wanted to put in the file, but the little girl threw such a tantrum that they let her keep it. Officer Flores also added that all five of the children had a faded starfish drawn on the tops of their left hands. The drawings, he noted, were sketched with the competence of an adult hand, with a fine-tipped green marker.
There was one item aboard the boat that didn’t make it i
nto the evidence file or the notes. Officer Castillo found a can of a Dominican brand of powdered milk on the floor of the boat, stuck behind a cushion. He popped open the lid, and saw that it was still half-full and had a measuring cup inserted into the yellowish-white powder. He sniffed it, took a pinch and rubbed it between his fingers, squinting as he scrutinized the texture of the powder. He turned the can around and around for a moment. Recalling the dark olive skin of at least two of the children, Officer Castillo, whose mother was Dominican born, waited until his partner was not looking, then went up on deck and tossed the can overboard, where it landed among all the other hurricane trash floating around the boat. In the meantime, the American watched him from the roof deck of the defunct condominium building next to the dock, through binoculars.
The discovery of five unaccompanied minors aboard a boat didn’t make the news in Puerto Rico that night or in the week that followed. The media coverage was still focused on the death toll and homelessness in the Dominican Republic, and on the virtual obliteration of the Windward Island of Dominica. During the last two days of August, Hurricane David had reached category five strength, with winds that rose to a nightmarish one hundred and seventy-five miles per hour. On August 30, Puerto Rico was spared a direct hit, but it suffered massive property damage and had more than a dozen casualties. President Carter declared it a disaster zone. The next day, David collided with the Dominican Republic’s capital city, where it took approximately two thousand lives, both on impact and in the subsequent floods. But it grew weak as it crawled across the high mountain range of Hispaniola’s interior, so neighboring Haiti had no deaths and very little property damage. On September 4, the Washington Post quoted the Dominican Civil Defense Director as saying, “The situation is catastrophic. Hunger is starting to be felt by thousands of country people isolated by blocked roads.” While Dominicans got to work digging out mud-caked cadavers, word spread that yet another storm, Frederic, was thundering its way over from Africa. But mercifully, Frederic didn’t live up to its potential—at least not in the Caribbean. Frederic staked out its own territory in Alabama and Mississippi, where it took five lives and went on to become the costliest hurricane in U.S. history up until that date.
After Frederic passed, news media began a slow and gradual softening of its post-hurricane fixation. A week after the children were found on the boat, a hospital spokesperson informed a junior reporter from the San Juan daily newspaper that the children found in Mayagüez were doing well but were still under observation. The next day, Puerto Ricans heard about the incident for the first time, in a small article in the San Juan Star, on page twenty-two of section C.
The children of the For Tuna were estimated to range from two to four years old, and had limited vocabulary. One of them communicated his needs through some kind of sign language, but one little girl managed to clearly identify herself as Rosita. They didn’t know what country, city, or town they were from. Not a single one could name a parent. None of the children resembled each other enough to support the presumption of a genetic relationship, and the forensic methods available at the time were useless in settling the question of family relations between the children. One of the children appeared to have some African ancestry, another had white skin and gray-blue eyes, while yet another had a slightly reddish tint more typical of the Caribbean indigenous people. The other two were dark-eyed and dark-haired but ethnically nondescript. It was clear that Spanish was their primary language and it was noted that they had distinctive Dominican accents, discernible even in the pronunciation of their monosyllabic baby talk. In a televised interview, a hospital spokesperson told a reporter that the children “look Puerto Rican, but sound Dominican.” It was this careless, off-the cuff remark that finally ignited an interest from the public, not for the children’s welfare—at least, not initially—but rather, because it reopened old wounds on the subject of immigration and race. “They are members of our Caribbean community,” wrote a graduate student at the University at Ponce in a letter to the editor. “Why would anyone bother to wonder if they’re ‘legal’ or ‘illegal,’ from this island nation or that? They’re in Puerto Rico now and it is our duty to protect them.”
A week later, U.S. federal authorities had upgraded the case to urgent and assigned personnel with experience in solving crimes involving missing children. Authorities on every Caribbean island were in collaboration with the FBI in a campaign to find anyone who might be able to identify the children and locate their families. It was determined that the anonymous female caller who had alerted the local police probably had something to do with the children’s abandonment. The police were still actively searching for her. The call had come through the non-emergency line, so it hadn’t been recorded. The dispatcher who took the call said that the woman had spoken in Spanish, “but with a heavy gringa accent.”
The For Tuna (named simply after its owner’s fish of choice), had been lost sometime during Hurricane David. It belonged to retired Army officer Stuart Norwin, who normally kept it at a marina in San Juan. When Norwin heard news of the impending hurricane, he had been fishing off the northwest coast of Puerto Rico. He was forced to tie up in Aguadilla, a city eighteen miles north of Mayagüez. The storm had passed just one hundred miles to the south of Puerto Rico, and the For Tuna had been swept away. Norwin was in the process of filing an insurance claim when the police contacted him. He told them that he had never seen the children before and had no idea how they ended up in his boat. Officer Castillo asked him to take meticulous inventory of his boat and its equipment. Norwin concluded that the only items missing were a set of binoculars and his captain’s hat. But a month later, he made another discovery. He called Officer Castillo to tell him that he kept a book of nautical maps aboard his boat, and that when he had opened the book he saw that one of the charts had been marked up with a green marker. It charted a short course, beginning on the eastern shore of the Dominican Republic and ended at Mayagüez. Norwin was sure that neither he nor his wife had marked up the map. An area called the Hourglass Shoals was circled, and a little exclamation point was drawn next to the circle. “Whoever marked up the map knew what they were doing,” Norwin concluded, tapping at the exclamation point. “That’s the danger zone, where the shoals clash with the currents barreling over from the Puerto Rico Trench.” Officer Castillo thanked him and took the map into evidence. The Feds would take it from there, officer Castillo told him. But Norwin never heard anything more in regard to the maps.
The airwaves crackled with speculation: had a group of Dominicans found the deep sea fishing vessel and used it to get into Puerto Rico illegally? But how to explain the children’s elegant clothes? The girls, it was noted, were accessorized with headbands and rubber bloomers that matched the pattern on their dresses. What kind of illegal immigrants arrived in one hundred percent cotton linen? It made more sense that they were well-to-do Puerto Rican children, transferred to the For Tuna from a boat that had been taking part in some kind of a celebration. But where were the missing parents? And who was the mysterious gringa?
“If they were elegantly dressed, then they are probably of Cuban origin,” offered the President of the Cuban–Puerto Rican Society in a televised interview. He was astounded when his comment elicited hostility from the local community. “The arrogance!” shot back the Director of the Dominican Social Club, as he scooped up his baby and held her up for the TV cameras. “To imply that their fine clothes could only make them Cuban!” His small daughter was presented in clouds of pink crinolines, with a matching headband and a huge silk daisy pasted to her bald head. In the meantime, the police decided to release news of the starfish drawings on the kids’ hands. This strange detail whipped imaginations into a frenzy. With the world still reeling from the murders and mass suicides in Guyana the year before, everyone wondered: could the children be Jonestown escapees, finally coming out of hiding? Could the starfish drawings indicate membership in a newly formed cult? But the absence of adults didn’t make sense in
any scenario. As each day passed, the realm of possibilities expanded in the community’s imagination. An AM radio talk show suggested a double suicide at sea by the children’s parents. Soon, armchair detectives throughout the Caribbean were debating their theories on the marine radio waves and over rumrunners at dockside bars. Mothers gathered outside of schools to debate the circumstances under which they could imagine their own kids ending up on a boat, alone. There were theories involving aliens and phantom cruise ships, the lost city of Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle, modern-day pirates, drug smugglers, and child traffickers. An international controversy was already brewing in regard to the U.S. Navy test bombings off the coast of the Puerto Rican island-municipality of Vieques. In May of that year, twenty-one activists were arrested for civil disobedience in a restricted bombing area. The Viequenses’ theory was that the five children belonged to a group of separatists from the big island who had been secretly murdered by the U.S. Navy. This theory was extremely popular and incendiary, despite the fact that no one was missing. In the end, every theory was easily dismissed. There were no weapons on board. No blood, no signs of a struggle, no note, no clues. And six months later, still no answers.
A black market adoption agency and several known pedophiles plotted to gain custody of the children. Within the year, two people went to jail for their scheming. When the San Juan newspaper tried to run a five-year update, the children’s records were closed. All five had been adopted and were living in Arizona, New York, Connecticut, and Florida. One remained in Puerto Rico.
The only peek the public got into the children’s new lives was due to a slip on the part of a Child Services spokesperson. She had told a Newsweek reporter (a Californian who bore a striking resemblance to Robert Redford), over rum cocktails and lunch, that two of the children had been given names that made reference to their strange story. One little boy had been named David, after the hurricane. The adoptive mother had said that the name paid homage to his astounding resilience, for he had once been either traumatized or speech-delayed but was now “talking up a storm.” The New York intellectuals who adopted the precocious Rosita—the tipsy woman confessed—had renamed the girl “Taina,” after the indigenous people of the Greater Antilles. The bit about their names made it into an article. Her speculations did not: “They were poor kids. In Spanish we say jíbaros, or campesinos—hillbillies. Anyway, they were clearly staged to look like affluent children,” she said. “You know how I know?” She reached for the reporter’s stack of photos and newspaper clippings and rotated one of the photographs so that he was looking at it straight on. “Look at the kids’ outfits. What’s missing?”