Erick adjusted his flight schedule so he could see Holly and the boys in the Dominican Republic several times during their stay. The three boys learned to converse in Spanish with the nuns and the other children in a matter of weeks, and to recite the Lord’s Prayer before bed in a single, mumbled streak of Spanish. They spent most of their energy playing beisbol every day with the local kids in an empty lot. They played to the sound of reggaeton blasting from a falling-apart boombox, with a ninety-year-old neighbor serving as umpire. This made Holly recognize all the isolating cultural and economic barriers that kept them from enjoying the same kind of rich, meaningful exchanges with people outside of their socioeconomic circles back home. Of course, the boys also picked up more dubious behaviors, such as referring to each other as pendejo, and keeping a stash of rubber bands around their wrists to shoot rocks at lizards and baby birds.
Holly’s boys were exited about their new little sister, a two-year-old whom they would call Emely, Holly’s original baby name. One rainy afternoon, when little Emely was cranky, Holly found Bobby soothing his new little sister by rocking her in a hammock and chanting “rum, rum,” until the little girl grew quiet and fell asleep in his arms.
Adrian kept his promise to David, and immediately became devoted to raising funds for Casa Azul. He and Kathy formed a strong bond, and she remained in contact with the five ever since her first meeting with Adrian and Taina in Boston. The siblings made a new pact. Every time they got together, they would leave a fifth chair empty, in “Missing Man” formation. One of David’s favorite hats would be left on the chair, as if he might arrive at any moment, put on the hat, and sit down. It was a way to give their loss a shape; an invitation for David’s spirit to be as alive as he wishes to be, or as real as they needed him to be, or both.
Paul O’Farrell was having a hard time with Marcia’s belief that the human spirit can visit loved ones. He believed in a distant heaven and completely rejected Marcia’s suggestion that David was behind the unusual number of wildlife appearances in their lives in the months after his death. Deer and wild turkeys routinely wandered into their yard, and given David’s love of nature, she couldn’t help but draw a connection. Julia reported that she had found a barn owl nesting in her mother’s garage. Holly and the boys had seen a manatee in a Florida canal. Ray had seen a coyote in the desert. “Not only do I not believe it,” Paul confided to Adrian’s father, Reinaldo, in a phone conversation, “but I can’t understand why anyone would take comfort in it. As much as I appreciate animals, I would hate to think of our David, with his stubborn independence and fierce intelligence, reduced to sending mute signals by way of tick-infested animals.”
Unintentionally, and by way of their terrible loss, the O’Farrells began to draw the other parents into their lives. Julia’s mother, Diane, began to have breakfast with Marcia once a month. Taina’s parents invited Paul and Marcia to join them for a weekend in New York City. Ray’s mother flew in from Arizona, to meet the O’Farrells for the first time.
Taina became the keeper of David’s now-sacred bonsai forest. Terrified that it would die under her watch, she read three books and consulted with experts on how to keep it alive and well. By spending hours obsessively staring at the minuscule trees, Taina began to experience stillness for the first time in her life. She had left her insomnia in the Dominican Republic. Immediately after David’s death, she did almost nothing but work and sleep, and she refused to see or talk to Doug for four months. Finally he agreed to sign the divorce papers. They met at a coffee shop, started talking, and by the time they stopped, three hours later, Taina said that she wasn’t sure about wanting a divorce anymore. Doug slipped the papers back into his satchel and asked if she’d like to go see an art exhibit with him. She agreed and the papers ended up getting tossed into the fireplace a week later. She enrolled in art classes by night.
David had sensed that Griswold Island, with its placid gray waters, was a parallel universe to Casa Azul, that there was a passage between those unlikely places. Because of him, Casa Azul underwent many improvements. New rooms were added, a school house, and a playground, a new cistern, and private bathrooms for the nuns. The Griswold house, on the other hand, was razed, and the island lay empty for many months. Once the insurance money was collected, a new house was designed and scheduled to be completed by the spring of 2011. The family decided to make it a simpler structure, but it would be safer, stronger, more cleverly designed, a blank canvas for future generations to paint their days in the sun.
When Adrian and Julia passed the three-month mark, Adrian asked her to move to Miami. When she finished the school year, Julia packed up and moved in with him. She soon got the idea to write an innovative textbook about Connecticut inventions, both the successes and the failures, along with colorful stories of fortunes and blunders. The project got a jump-start by a grant from a private foundation that promotes entrepreneurship, and a magnet business program in public schools. The book included stories about the invention of the Wiffle Ball, the topsider shoe, the Sunfish, the Pez dispenser, the first combat submarine, the gun silencer, and of course, the amphibious water unicycle. “I had to leave my home to truly see it,” she told Adrian the day she began to tap away at the computer. “Living in Miami, with its pink newness and transient character, is like a blank canvas to my mind. I had no idea how stimulating gaining distance can be.”
At cocktail parties, Adrian joked that he “couldn’t wait to get off the sex roller coaster of bachelorhood and settle down.” At first, Julia thought the joke was hilarious, but after he told the joke a half-dozen times, she didn’t think it was so funny anymore. So he stopped telling it. In truth, they thrilled each other in every way and he was as ardent about their life together as he had been passionate about bachelorhood. Adrian asked Julia to marry him one evening, over a bowl of the charred sancocho that he had attempted to prepare with Ray coaching him on the phone.
Julia and Adrian planned a small wedding at Casa Azul with a honeymoon at one of the luxury resorts on the Dominican coast. They agreed to adopt at least one child from Casa Azul, probably more. But sharing genes with a child was important to both of them, and replenishing the Griswold bloodline never stopped being a sacred mission for Julia. Their family, they decided, would be bound by love, history, and biology, an homage to the tragic but serendipitous way that they came to become a family in the first place.
David’s hiking watch was the first to be put in the family’s new bowl of watches. Both David and Adrian would be listed in the next volume of The Griswolds of New Haven County as spouses of Julia Abigail Griswold. In the meantime, the story of the fire at the Griswold house appeared in five major magazines. The media’s interest in the Griswold family, by extension, was stimulated by footage of the dramatic fire rescue, and of course, the connection to Adrian Vega. Julia began to write the Vega family history in her own hand, with a fountain pen, the way the first Griswolds of New Haven County volume was written in 1789. Shortly thereafter, the historian who was working on volume nine informed the Griswolds that instead of receiving the usual leather-bound tome for their library, they should expect to get an “eco-friendly” paperless version—an e-mailed link to the central archive. The Griswold story would exist, henceforth, only in cyberspace. Surprisingly, this was universally appealing to all members of the clan. The younger generation was comfortable with technology, but the elders loved it because the electronic world is a place that’s far more permanent than the paper world; an infinite space that’s invulnerable to fire, water, or light. In the end, the exotic tale of the starfish children merged into the Griswold family’s long and convoluted history, like fiery birds of paradise thriving amid New England’s oldest forests of pine. Memory, after all, is a place both the living and the dead can inhabit. Days overlap, laughter commingles, a bottle of scotch is passed around for a century. Memory is a trick whereby a sip of tea can be tasted by seven generations of women sitting in the same chair and drinking from the same cup at the
same moment. And when each person’s light is released, it is witnessed, registered, learned from, honored. Individuals become families and families become clans who welcome more souls with whom they will share their lives.
On Griswold Island, the barren windows and freshly painted walls are bathed in an orange juice–colored light that no one had ever seen before. A few of the family members have a new way of thinking. If they keep the island, it’s because they choose to do so, not because they are obligated by tradition. If they are bound to one another, it’s not because they share common blood; but rather, because life has given them the chance to be essential to one another, and they have each chosen to accept that invitation. They are kindred by the power of the mind, rather than by the mindlessness of chance: a family because they choose to be.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Jeanette Perez for her patience and guidance and Julie Castiglia, for her enthusiasm and support of my work. For enabling and celebrating my debut novel, I would like to thank Rene Alegria, Melinda Moore, Cecilia Molinari, Isabel Allende, Pernod Ricard, the Miami Book Fair International, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the International Latino Book Awards, Las Comadres Para Las Americas, and Marcela Landres.
Love and gratitude to my husband, Robert O. Barron, whose support has brought forth two novels. As always, thank you to my mother, Yolanda Rodriguez, and to my family and friends for years of inspiration and encouragement. Special thanks to Suzanne Donahue and Judith Cooper Haden.
I couldn’t have written about the beauty and magic of bioluminescence without financial support from the Ford Foundation, JPMorgan Chase, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Southwest Airlines, through a grant from the NALAC Fund for the Arts. Muchísimas gracias.
About the Author
SANDRA RODRIGUEZ BARRON is the author of The Heiress of Water, winner of the International Latino Book Award for debut fiction. She was born in Puerto Rico and has lived in Connecticut, Florida, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador. She holds an MFA from Florida International University’s creative writing program and is the recipient of a Bread Loaf Fellowship and grants from the NALAC Fund for the Arts and the Greater Hartford Arts Council. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and son.
Also by Sandra Rodriguez Barron
The Heiress of Water
Credits
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph by David Sacks/Getty Images
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
STAY WITH ME. Copyright © 2010 by Sandra Rodriguez Barron. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition December 2010 ISBN: 9780062030580
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
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
Stay with Me Page 32