Stay with Me

by Sandra Rodriguez Barron

  Kathy began with a simple fact: they were all from the Dominican Republic, and they had each been orphaned. The wondrous part, she told them, was that despite what they may think, they were very much loved. Sister Juana de Arce, and two other nuns, had cared for them at La Casa Azul, a small, Catholic Church–sponsored orphanage. Then Kathy looked down and sighed. “I hope it’s not too shocking for you to know that you were all born to prostitutes.” She gritted her teeth and her forehead wrinkled up with worry. Adrian’s hand had lingered on his rib cage, as if he was protecting an injury, but he nodded for her to continue.

  “La Casa Azul is in the southern part of the island, and about half of the children came from the northern coast, from the Aguas Negras slums outside of Puerto Plata. Puerto Plata, as you may know, is known for its beautiful resorts. But tourists from around the world wander to the outskirts of the town to find prostitutes. These girls are often underage and uneducated about birth control. Your fathers were probably tourists; guys just passing by. One of the things that struck me the very first time I went to La Casa Azul was that many of kids had foreign features,” she pointed at her own blue eyes and smiled. “Caucasian, black, Asian, mixed with Dominican blood, which is already a mix of ethnicities. The combinations are so striking. You have this international community stuck in the middle of nowhere.” She smiled at both of them. “Tiny citizens of the world.”

  “Tsk. Citizens of the world of prostitution,” Adrian said, turning to Taina. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  “Ah, but there’s a lot more to it,” Kathy continued. The nun who cared for them, she said, had raised hundreds of children before them and since, but she had chosen the five for a unique journey because she had considered them each to be special in some way. “She made enormous personal sacrifices for you because of your musical inclinations,” she told Adrian. “Because of your beauty and fierce will to survive,” She turned to Taina. It was then that Kathy noticed the green starfish tattoos on their hands, making a mental note to ask about their significance. She was well into her second glass of wine when she learned the enduring significance of the markings that she herself had drawn on their hands almost thirty years earlier.

  Just before she began to tell the story, Kathy asked if it could remain confidential. Taina said she could speak for the others, and confirmed that no one was interested in publicizing the story. “I certainly don’t want the publicity,” Adrian said, putting a hand on his chest. “It wasn’t my idea to blow this open in the first place. David has been pushing for it.”

  “And ironically,” Taina pointed out, “those two aren’t speaking to one another. Since the fire.”

  Adrian looked at Kathy out of the corner of his eyes. “I haven’t done anything wrong, Kathy, but I upset him, and he’s struggling with a health challenge that I can’t even fathom. So you’re my olive branch.”

  “That fire,” Kathy said. “Thank God you guys are all okay.”

  “It was bad,” Taina said, pulling back her sleeve to reveal a large scab on her arm. “Adrian still has a bandage on one leg.”

  Kathy pressed her hands together. “It sounds like the whole incident was just a lot of old energy expending itself. Listen to me carefully, Adrian and Taina, because I’m going to tell you something about yourselves that will explain a lot of what’s happened in your adult lives. As traumatized children, you became master survivors at a very young age. Once you hear the whole story, you’ll understand that it’s no coincidence that you escaped through a window, across a rooftop, and down a tree,” she told Adrian. “Or that you, Rosita—I mean, Taina—risked your life by going up to the third story to alert Adrian and Julia about the blaze.” Adrian and Taina each looked down and to the side, shifting away from each other in their chairs, and Kathy got the impression that it was a sore subject. She leaned forward and said in a very serious voice, “This wasn’t the first time that you’ve been in grave danger. We’re here right now,” she tapped the table with her index finger, “because of something that happened almost thirty years ago. It all started when Hurricane David ripped its way through Santo Domingo. But it wasn’t the hurricane . . . ” Her eyes grew distant, and a shiver ran through her at the memory. “The entire southwest and western parts of the country were badly battered. Our orphanage was on the outskirts of a small village, an agricultural area about thirty miles west of the capital city; close enough so that it broke windows and put holes in the roof. But when it was over, it looked like we were going to be just fine.” Their lunches arrived and Kathy took a good long swig of her chardonnay before she sat back, crossed her arms, and said, “It wasn’t until the hurricane had passed, after the rivers had swollen and flooded the villages to our north, that the real trouble started.”

  Part III

  Chapter 42

  Dominican Republic

  September 1979

  When the eye wall of Hurricane David passed over the village, it dawned on Kathy Copper that there was a good chance that they were all going to die. She considered the silver lining of this kind of end—huddled with three nuns and twenty-five orphaned children. If there was such a thing as heaven, she just might be able to sneak past the pearly gates by saying, “I’m with them.”

  As the storm raged outside, Sister Juana, who was defiant of every kind of authority, even nature, stubbornly played Brahms on the upright piano as she did every night. One could barely hear anything through the whistling of the wind and the drumming of the rain outside, but the nun knew that children are comforted by routines, and so she played by candlelight. Her fingers hovered delicately over the keys while she waited for the cold blue lightning to spend itself and the thunder to dull before continuing on to Mozart’s “Lullaby” and then to “Los Pollitos Dicen.” The children sang along with her, but soon the thunder became so loud and came so frequently that they could only see the nun’s fingers dancing across the keys. At eight o’clock, Sister Juana’s small brown hands glided over the last note of “Arroz con Leche.” When she was done, everyone clapped, but nervously, and Sister Juana nodded and joined the children and the other nuns clustered in the center of the room. The circle parted for her, and then closed again. A tiny girl reached for her, one-armed as she sucked the thumb on her other hand, eyes clamped shut. The older children looked at Sister Juana with wide, frightened eyes, as if to ask, what now? Without singing, there was only the sound of the storm and its freakish peculiarities: the rattling of the front door in its frame, the whistling noise coming up from inside the sink, and a persistent and malevolent pounding on the wall behind the framed photo of the pope. A rumor spread among the older children that it was the devil knocking on their door. Sisters Juana, Antonia, and Teresa were busy holding, stroking, and comforting frightened children.

  While the nuns moved the group of children under a tent of mattresses that they had set up in the windowless corner of the hallway, Kathy was too restless to stay put. She paced the orphanage, policing the situation. She found an unobstructed window and tried to see out, but the window was just below a rain gutter, and the glass was opaqued and marbled with cascading water. Good God, she thought, was the wind actually bending the glass? She scurried away, in case it blew. Almost immediately, from down the hall came the sound of glass shattering, startling her so badly that she bit her tongue. A small, round object tumbled down the hall and landed halfway into the room. Sister Teresa illuminated it with a candle and it turned out to be a green coconut. Kathy half-walked, half-crouched down the hall to inspect the damage to the house. In the boys’ room, the glass jalousies were in shards across the children’s beds and cribs. The double set of curtains had been sucked out the window. The roar of the wind was so loud that she couldn’t hear the clanging of metal as the curtain rod bashed itself against the widely spaced iron bars on the window. She tried to grab the curtain rod, but the wind turned it first, and it slipped cleanly between the bars and disappeared into the gloaming. The mosquito nets suspended from the ceiling over the chi
ldren’s beds were wet and had gathered themselves into thick lassos that whipped around in frenzied circles. The air was wet and thick with the smell of sulfur and gasoline, most likely from some kind of spill in town. Outside, power lines were swinging and crackling across the rooftops and spitting sparks into the flooded streets. As Kathy stepped into the safety of the hall, closing the bedroom door behind her, her frayed nerves snapped and she began to sob.

  Javier had followed her. He was holding the coconut like a grenade, and Kathy led him back to the main room. Kathy realized with a start that the little man was trying to protect her. A laugh burst out of her and she wiped her tears with her sleeve. Suddenly, the nauseating fear that had been bashing itself against the inside of her rib cage stopped. The boy’s valiant gesture calmed her panic and brought her back to center. They weren’t going to die, she told herself. The building was made of reinforced concrete block, and the sea was a mile away—a decent margin anyway. Once she calmed down, Kathy was able to process the curious wonders of hurricane phenomena, like horizontal rain. She had seen several chickens, cats, and even a small goat tumble by in a scene straight out of The Wizard of Oz.

  An hour later, the howling outside downgraded from murderous to mournful. It slowed, petered out, then nothing. “¡Se fué!” the children cheered.

  A few moments later, Sister Juana called Kathy into the bathroom, and Kathy found the nun standing over the toilet bowl, which was gurgling. Do you know what that means?” she said, massaging the area behind her eardrums.

  Noticing the dull ache in her own ears, Kathy said, “Low atmospheric pressure.” When she realized what that meant, she exclaimed to herself, in English, “Shit!”

  Sister Juana raised an eyebrow and said, “Exactly. We’re in the eye.”

  They could hear the voices of their neighbors outside. Sister Teresa opened the front door and shouted, as she ran out, that she was going to see if anyone needed help. Sister Juana stood at the gate shouting, “It’s not over! If anything happens to you, I’m not rescuing you, Teresa! I’m not!” But it wasn’t long before people started calling for everyone to go back inside. Despite her threats, Sister Juana ran out and grabbed a fistful of the younger nun’s habit and practically dragged her along the front path and slammed the door behind her.

  “Tranquilo,” Sister Teresa said in a trance-like voice, pointing up. “You can see the stars up in the sky. It’s beautiful.” With this break in the tension, Sisters Antonia and Teresa began to praise the power of God.

  “You mean His fury,” Sister Juana corrected them. “His destructive, maniacal moods.” The other two nuns exchanged a look, but there was no time for one of their epic religious debates. The mist outside quickly thickened into rain. They could hear the sound of the wind rising in pitch. Not one to candy coat anything, Sister Juana informed the children that it would be worse this time. Some of the children began to cry as she gathered them back under the mattresses. Kathy suddenly remembered that she had several large packs of Juicy Fruit gum in her day bag, which she gave to the kids and the nuns to relieve the pressure on their eardrums. In the minutes that followed, the tears and wails ceased entirely. Chewing gum was a rare, delicious, and comforting treat, even for nuns. Next, Kathy told the story of “The Three Little Pigs,” pointing out that they too lived in a house made of concrete block, and no matter how much the wolf blew and blew, he could never blow down the walls (indeed she had confidence in the walls, it was the roof she was worried about). The kids grew more confident each time they chanted “and he huffed and he puffed.” The nuns always howled with delight at Kathy’s occasional mispronunciations, so she threw in a few extra mistakes for their entertainment.

  After the all-too-brief respite, the roar of the wind started up again. During another round of guard duty, Kathy and Sister Juana discovered that water had begun to seep under the kitchen door. They gathered towels and rags and were piling them against the door when there was a loud crash against the opposite wall. They stood paralyzed, expecting the wall in front of them to split open and crush them. But the wall held. From a window in the hall, they saw that their neighbor’s whole sun porch—roof, jalousie windows, and wood siding—had been ripped off by the wind. It remained suspended against the wall of the orphanage for a few minutes, then, suddenly, the wind lifted it up and it tumbled down the street. It jumped over the six-foot iron fence of a nearby farm and rolled end-to-end until it disappeared into the darkness.

  Once the storm died down a bit, Kathy was able to entertain the kids with her guitar. She took Miguel onto her lap and let him play with the strings. She sang, “How many years must a man . . .” she nodded, prompting them. Javier used his hands to sign, “I am afraid.”

  She put an arm around him. “When you can’t talk,” she said, “you can always sing. What’s the matter with you guys? You want to sing en Español?” She made a funny face. “Aren’t you sick of ‘de colores’?”

  When the storm was over, nobody at the orphanage suffered a scratch, and save for a few broken windows, two holes in the roof, and a big mess outside, the orphanage was relatively unharmed. In the early morning hours, Sister Juana told Kathy that she had inspected the building herself before the archdiocese purchased it. “Miracles are 99 percent planning, and one percent luck,” she said.

  “Luck? Not prayer?”

  Sister Juana swatted at a mosquito. “Same thing.”

  Outside the sky was still cloudy. The whole town looked trashed. There were dangling power lines, broken windows, shredded foliage, and decapitated palm trees that looked like giant eels sticking out of the ground. Just about everything was coated in mud and sand. Kathy couldn’t believe what she found lying in the middle of the yard—a starfish, alive and still writhing. The creature was something that you would expect to see depicted in a storybook, an exaggeration of nature, big as a bear’s paw. Either the wind had lifted and carried it, or a wave must have come dangerously close during the storm. The thought sent a shiver down her spine. She tossed the creature into a puddle.

  The news from the outside was not good. Down the street, a man had been killed just after the eye passed over, while trying to secure the propane gas tank his family used for cooking. Two houses down, a twenty-foot tree trunk had gone through someone’s roof. By transistor radio they heard about the floods and landslides in the mountainous interior of the island. In the village of Padre las Casas, an entire church and a school were washed away during the storm, killing several hundred people who were inside. There was no power, and yet there were dozens of electrocutions. There was no running water. A chemical spill had contaminated a reservoir in the capital. For Kathy, there was no way to call home. She would have to rely on the Peace Corps to send word to her parents. She headed to the boardinghouse where she rented a room, wondering if it was still standing.

  The walk that should have taken five minutes took almost an hour because of downed trees, storm debris, and potentially deadly pools of water. But the boardinghouse was in working order. In her room on the second floor, a rat had made himself at home during her absence. He was so full that he barely moved when she opened the door. He had knocked over, opened, and gorged himself on a box of Lucky Charms cereal she had left on the nightstand. This was her comfort food, a treat sent from home by a thoughtful friend. Kathy opened the glass jalousies and the rat sauntered out reluctantly, looking back a few times at the box. She pulled the blanket off her bed, took it to the balcony, and shook out the cereal and rat droppings. She desperately wanted to wash it, but she couldn’t afford to use up her meager water supply to wash a whole blanket.

  Kathy had had the foresight to fill a large plastic tub with water the day before, which would have to last the duration of the crisis. She washed her body and some panties, careful not to use up more than two quarts of water. Despite the rodents, she relished the privacy and silence of her room. She sprayed her armpits with deodorant, holding down the trigger a full six seconds. It was going to be a long, hot, miserable
day. She replaced the cap and, on second thought, misted her entire body with deodorant and spread some aloe on her arms. She dabbed anti-itch cream on a dozen swollen mosquito bites and changed into a fresh sundress. She ate two cereal bars and drank from her supply of bottled water.

  The small mirror that hung above Kathy’s dresser was lined with photographs of her life in Boston. Among her favorites was the one of her father teaching her to clean the engine of their motorboat, and the one of them sailing with the whole family off the coast of Nantucket. The moment that she had recognized that doing these things was not in the least bit ordinary, that most people in this world couldn’t even imagine such a lifestyle, was the day that Kathy knew that she wouldn’t live the life her parents had prepared her for. In the months since she had arrived in the DR, she had become exasperated at her inability to communicate to her parents the level of poverty that she had witnessed. After one such earnest attempt, her mother wrote back bemoaning the tragic state of the family dog, who was “so sick that he won’t even touch a pile of freshly carved roast beef.”

  Not all her photographs were on display. She kept the photos of Jared in a suitcase. She had to sit down on the bed to be able to look at them. The first one in the stack was taken on a family outing to Niagara Falls when she was a kid. Kathy and her childhood friend were both wearing moccasins and yellow rubber raincoats. Jared was grinning, his two front teeth far too big for his head, Kathy awkward in her prairie braids and too-big feet. The second photo was of Jared in high school, picking at the strings of a guitar. The third showed Jared in cap and gown at Princeton, heading off to medical school. The fourth was a photo taken a year later, the night they got engaged; the stress and exhaustion of medical school showed in his face. He had his arms around Kathy’s shoulders and they were standing in front of the fireplace at his parents’ house. His eyes were on Kathy, or rather, fixed on her profile. Kathy was looking at the man behind the camera, Dr. Joe Patterson, Jared’s dad, who by then had begun making secret visits to Kathy’s college dorm room on weekends.