Back on the road, I’m surprised at the generally festive vibe I get, even in poor towns. Maybe because of the reggaeton blasting from cars, or the merenge coming from the houses, or maybe it’s that someone’s always trying to sell you something—pirated DVDs, designer knock-offs, lottery tickets. Every time we come to a stoplight, dudes with baseball hats on backward try to wash our van. We scramble to pay them, while our driver waves a fist at them and says “joder” about five times. We pass the city limits and travel through a series of small towns with crowded plazas bursting with brightly colored plastic junk for sale. These towns are not easy on the van. There are potholes where it is paved, but plenty of streets that are just dirt. There are naked kids roaming alone. All the buildings have iron bars over the windows and some of the dwellings are made of cardboard with tin plate. Prostitutes blow kisses and tap the windows of our van in broad daylight. “Hey, Adrian. That’s your mom,” Ray says, pointing.
“Ray. That’s sick,” Holly says, and folds her arms in disapproval.
Adrian is normally sensitive about that stuff, but he loves that it offended Holly, so he high-fives Ray, and Ray giggles like the Pillsbury Doughboy.
When we get out of the car and look around, Holly says, “This is where we might have grown up.”
“But we didn’t,” Taina says.
“We’ve never had to endure any of this, even thought it was our lot in life to live here,” she says, looking skyward.
There are plumes of Saharan dust floating across the atmosphere. It gives the illusion that the sky is dirty. Thin, horizontal bands of darkness are blemishes against the fluffy while clouds, as if someone has dragged a sharp stick of charcoal across a clean piece of paper. By afternoon, the rain comes down in sheets; it pounds on the tin roofs in the shanty towns and the streets grow flooded and quiet. We pull over to the side of the road to wait it out. Our driver sticks a hand out the narrow crack in his window. He lets the raindrops run down his hand, as if he were playing with a living thing. “See this? This is the rain that our ancestral deserts of Africa thirst for, but can never have.” Adrian got his pen out and wrote it down.
Four young nuns run Casa Azul now, and there is time for a tour before Sister Juana arrives from the capital. There are thirty kids. Kathy was right, this little crowd belongs on a UNICEF poster. There are sixteen black kids, nine brown, and at least three of them have gringo genes like me. One little girl, who everyone agrees looks like Vanessa Williams, is a stunning combination of dark skin and muted green eyes that look like beach glass. Another has a halo of flaming red hair encircling a bronze, freckled face with big, dark-chocolate eyes. I can’t help but wonder what the carrot-top who sired her would think if he knew he left this daughter in a Dominican orphanage. Like her, my father would have no knowledge of me; I was brought into the world through a transaction between strangers. I wonder, is he a CEO, a machinist, an actor, a dentist, a stay-at-home dad? Do I have other siblings out there? Our fathers don’t even know we exist. It strikes me that my arrival in the world contained a kind of randomness that is echoed in the appearance of cancer at such a young age. At last my life has become purposeful and defiant of such disorder.
How can I begin to describe what it feels like to meet someone who has saved your life? Sister Juana has known me longer than I’ve known myself. She holds my hand constantly and commands the other nuns to put their hands on my scarred head. They pile them up, warm against my scalp. They shut their eyes tight and pray like crazy. I’m not disappointed that Sister Juana isn’t a healer or a saint. In fact, Kathy told us that Sister Juana has struggled with faith all her life. We’re taken aback when she looks us all in the eye and asks for our forgiveness. No, no, we assure her, we are grateful. We beg Adrian to be very clear: she did the right thing. We love our adoptive families. We know Kathy has told her all this but she’s only at peace when she hears it from us that we weren’t harmed, and that we harbor no resentment toward her. Taina says, “The greatest threat to our happiness and well-being has been fear and uncertainty about our origins. Coming here has shut down the source of its power over us. We are healed by our return to you.”
Still, we’ve come a long way and this is our big chance to get some specifics, of course, and so Raymond is the first to inquire about his mother. Sister Juana doesn’t mince words: “You will find her, if you want, by going to the old red light district in Santo Domingo. If she’s still alive, and I believe she is, she will have boils on her arms; she will be filthy with disease and vices of every kind, because that’s how she was thirty years ago. You also have to be prepared for the likelihood that she won’t remember you.” She floats an upturned palm across the scene of children playing in the sunny yard of Casa Azul. “This was your real home. You were loved here.” She cups his broad cheek with her hand. “And you still are, mijo.”
Our stories are all similar, but only Raymond has had two other siblings pass through the orphanage over the years. He’s utterly stunned by this news, and one of the nuns is assigned to arrange a reunion with his half-sisters before we leave. Sister Juana remembers nothing of Taina’s mother, but if we ever want names, there are records, of course, back at the archdiocese. But knowing that she’s a prostitute’s daughter is more than enough information for Taina. She decides to leave it at that. Holly asks for just one detail about her mother. Sister Juana taps at her temple, as if to dislodge something. Julia leans over and whispers that she doubts that the nun could possibly distinguish one particular prostitute over the dozens of others, especially after so many years. “Sí, sí,” Sister Juana says, and Adrian translates. “She came from moneyed people who lost everything in the era of Trujillo. She stuttered. Yes, I remember that clearly.”
“Stuttered,” Holly echoes, looking stricken. Her hands slide over her abdomen. I suppose that it is there that she bears the mark of having become a mother; and before that, a daughter. Taina puts a hand on Holly’s back and says, “Can I tell them, Hol?” Holly nods, and Taina tells us about Holly’s experience with hypnosis; that when she played back a recording of the session, she heard herself speaking with a stutter. “You must have been imitating your mom, Hol,” says Taina.
Taina also learns something about her childhood. While we tour the sleep hall, we pass rows and rows of railed bunk beds. Taina gasps and cries out, “My doll!” She picks up a small, faceless rag doll. “There are dozens of them!” she says, pointing to other beds.
Sister Juana explains that the ladies’ auxiliary from the local church makes them, and that they are modeled after the famous faceless Dominican ceramic dolls. “If you go to the craft market you will see them everywhere. They represent the mix of cultures and races here in the Dominican Republic, that are the result of centuries of international commerce, colonization, conquest, and the slave trade. The facelessness means that there is no ‘typical’ Dominican woman.”
Taina collapses on one of the children’s beds and clutches the doll to her heart. “There’s so much history,” she whispers, putting a hand over her heart, “in my blood.”
And finally, we meet some of the ones who were part of our original group but who weren’t chosen for the voyage. The nuns are able to summon a half-dozen former “starfish” children from town. One brings an armful of dazzling, colorful helconia—lobster claws and false birds of paradise. He is a flower vendor. He is my age but looks fifty. Next comes a woman with clothes in tatters, who supports herself by peddling fly-covered candied fruit from a falling-apart wicker basket in the local market. There is a civil servant, a hairdresser, a bookkeeper, and an out-of-work handyman. We’re told that the eldest, Mauricio, has died in prison. We learn that not all the girls escaped the grasp of prostitution. Curiously, none of them remember anything about the starfish drawings. They forgot its significance long ago, lost that memory somewhere in their daily struggle for survival. I overhear Taina mumble to Julia, “They haven’t had the luxury of fixating on their traumas, like me.”
We get to hea
r a bit about Kathy, and how much Sister Juana appreciated her. “Kathy managed you children with stories and clever, imaginative little psychological tricks,” Sister Juana said. “I remember when she first came. She told all of you that she could control the air temperature by snapping her fingers. The older children didn’t believe it, so she snapped her fingers and said, ‘Do you feel the cool air?’ and again, ‘Feel it get warm again?’ One of the children, Mauricio, I think, said, ‘Yes, yes, I felt it!’ and then everyone was convinced they had felt the change in the air too.” The nun laughed at the memory of the gullible kids. “They believed she was magic, and Javier, you followed her like a shadow. Ever since then, the snapping of the fingers was sign language for the name ‘Kathy.’ ”
“So that’s what it means!” Ray gives me a little slap on the shoulder.
Sister Juana says, “We worried that the emotional damage of that abandonment would be irreparable. Both of us were in pure agony for weeks on end until my brother began to telegram updates of what he heard on the news in Puerto Rico.” She puts a hand to her heart and kind of swoons and sits down.
Chapter 44
Julia moved apart from the five, and observed them as they sat on the tile floor surrounded by thirty orphans. While Sister Juana played songs on her old piano, Julia alone saw the expression on Adrian’s, David’s, Ray’s, Taina’s, and Holly’s faces as they realized that they remembered every word of one of the songs. She saw Holly embrace a little girl who sucked her thumb and clutched a tiny, faceless rag doll. The girl looked up at Holly with enormous, bright, wet eyes. Julia saw the look of admiration on the faces of those kids with dirty feet and torn clothes who sat in their laps—how they imitated their every gesture, and talked gibberish, mimicking the English language, which they were hearing for the first time. To the children, the visitors were rock stars—celestial beings who owned cars and houses and traveled by airplane to distant places.
Adrian had a little girl on his lap, and was making her laugh by telling her a story in Spanish. David was teaching a little boy how to play “Rock Paper Scissors.” Ray came back from the van with a bag of cookies and a nun almost got run down in the stampede. Taina and Holly were led by tiny hands to the corner of the room, where they were put to work rocking, feeding, and burping faceless dolls that slept in cardboard boxes.
That night, long after everyone had gone to bed, Taina decided to go down to the hotel bar for a glass of wine. At 3 a.m. there were still a few couples drinking and dancing to merenge music. The backside of the bar was encircled with rails that led to a garden. The previous morning, they had all noticed a very large cactus plant just beyond the bar. It was studded with ugly, asparaguslike stems. Sitting at the bar, Taina realized that the plant had literally bloomed overnight. As she got closer, she saw that the flowers had a fierce, desert quality to them. They had a base of spiked leaves, but inside each flower was a nest of delicate petals that were luminous and moist. She dipped her nose in and smelled its lovely, strange perfume.
“That cactus is called ‘lady of the night,’ ” said the barman, in English.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Taina replied, as she signed for the wine.
“They close up all day to conserve moisture and only blossom at night. I’ve been watching that plant for a year now.” He looked up toward the sparkling sky. “I think they open up to see the stars.”
Taina smiled. “Ah, a poet.” She winked and slid a five-dollar bill across the bar. As she walked across the stone path back to her room, she looked up at the diffusion of light across the heavens. She wondered about the woman who had brought her into this world. Long ago, Taina had made up the story about the trauma of foster care, about the girl with the burning eyes so people wouldn’t think she was crazy. She had been stunned to learn that the girl who haunted her dreams was real—a troubled older cousin who had set herself on fire. Neither Kathy nor Sister Juana had any knowledge of what had become of the girl, or why she had done such a thing, but the scene had obviously branded itself into the deepest folds of her memory. Taina crawled into bed and prepared herself for hours of insomnia. Lying in bed, she suddenly made a connection between her life-long insomnia and the ugly, rugged cactus plant that only revealed its lovely, vulnerable places to the gentle darkness of night. Outside, it began to rain. She heard the frogs rejoice and the rainwater dripping down the length of palm fronds, scattering across emerald leaves and slipping quietly into the opened hearts of the cacti flowers. She remembered that she had fallen in love with Doug at night, out on Block Island, surrounded by inky, star-lit darkness. Now she understood that their marriage had been damaged by their nightly separation. Doug had been right, it was the insomnia, and their inability to be together at night, that created the distance and distrust between them. Taina recognized herself to be very much like the mysterious plant that could only unclothe its heart after dusk.
That night, a dark-skinned woman dressed in a nightgown stamped with her “Caribbean Lagoon” theme came into her dream. The woman went to the closet and opened the doors, where Taina’s cousin was screaming that her eyes were burning. But the girl’s trunk was just a cactus plant, with its arms reaching up toward the light of the morning sun. Only when the woman carried the cactus-girl out of the room and quietly closed the door behind her did Taina realize that the woman was her birth mother. When Taina woke up, she felt as if she had slept for weeks on end, when in fact, it had been only four hours.
Holly banged on the door at eight. It was time to check out of the hotel and move on to the final leg of their trip. The weather was beautiful. The transcontinental Saharan dust had been washed clean away by the rain, and the sky was a flawless blue. As she made her way along the breakfast buffet, Taina observed that the flowers were gone, and the ugly green fists of the plant were tightly clenched again. She asked the waitress for a pencil, and in a half-hour she had sketched Holly and the plant on the back of the resort’s breakfast menu. From that day on, she sketched frequently and compulsively.
Chapter 45
David
In Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, we watch Coast Guard officials fingerprint a group of men whose boat had been interdicted just off the coast. Homeland Security has this new biometrics program to track wanted criminals and immigration violators. “Otherwise,” the Coast Guard officer explains, “we’re just a taxi service for people to get back home after they fail to sneak in.”
We didn’t have time to make the arrangements to go to Mona Island like I had hoped. Mona is an ecological preserve, considered to be the Galapagos of the Caribbean, with dazzling coral reefs, unspoiled lime caves, a one-of-a-kind species of giant iguana, and a rusted lighthouse that was built by the architects of the Eiffel Tower. But it turns out you need permits from the municipal government to disembark and we didn’t have enough time to apply. So we charter a boat with a captain to take us and we’ll just have to be satisfied with seeing it from the water. The truth is that our curiosity about the island is secondary; we are most interested in the sea all around it. Adrian and I have come hoping to connect with our biological mother. Kathy and Sister Juana told us about her fate after she took to the sea, and that the day before she left, she had begged Sister Juana to release us to her. We are haunted by this: this idea that we might have died here.
We follow our mother’s trail, and it leads us across a glimmering field of silver and blue. It isn’t long before we spot the fin of a nurse shark, following alongside our boat.
We imagine the nauseating roller-coaster ride of the high seas, people throwing up, the cold spray of seawater, the boat beginning to fill with water, possessions thrown overboard to stay afloat. After all the screaming and arm flailing and cries for God’s mercy, none comes. The stern slowly sinks below the surface as the sharks begin to circle. Then hope dies in an explosion of pink bubbles. Maybe she watched it all go down around her; the water is so clear out here. And right before they came for her, before the water rushed into her lungs and she f
elt herself being pulled apart, I’d like to believe that her last thoughts were for us—for Adrian and me. Maybe she became a real mother in the moment the creature sunk its teeth into her flesh. Maybe the last emotion she felt wasn’t panic, or fear, but rather, a sense of relief. Thank God I didn’t bring them. My boys are safe, up there.
After visiting the Passage, we head to the opposite side of Puerto Rico, to the eastern coast. Our melancholy burns off like fog with every mile. We’re all impressed and amused by Adrian’s celebrity status everywhere we go. Even a pair of sunburned tourists from Ohio sniff out his star quality. At the bar of a place where we stop for lunch, a woman calls out, “Hey, aren’t you that singer? The one who dated what’s her name? She was on the TV the other day. Oh God, my son loves her.”
He’s not in the mood to entertain drunk, lobster-skinned, middle-aged women, so he just makes a face. “Me? Nah. I’m just a local salt,” he says, and takes a swig from his beer. And then the woman’s eyes drop to his muscled arms, his thin waist, his lean hard legs. “Yeah,” she says, licking her lips. “Like the salt on my margarita.” Her friend howls with laughter. We pay for the beers and move on.
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