I am at lunch, sitting in the corner with Andrea—
or Dre, although I’m the only person who calls her that.
She is telling me about the climate-change protest
while I flip through a magazine.
Dre is outlining where she’ll be meeting the organizers
& the demands they’ll be making at city hall
when Ms. Santos’s crackling voice
pushes through the loudspeaker:
Yahaira Rios. Yahaira Rios.
Please report to the main office.
I feel every eye in the cafeteria turn to me.
I hand the magazine to Dre, reminding her
not to dog-ear any of the pages
since it belongs to the library.
I grab a pass from the teacher on lunch duty,
but Mr. Henry, the security guard,
smiles when I flash it his way,
“I heard them call you, girl.
Not like you would be cutting nohow.”
I hold back a sigh. On the chessboard
I used to be known for my risk taking.
But in real life? I’m predictable:
I follow directions when they are given
& rarely break the rules.
I hang out every Saturday with Dre,
watching Netflix or reading fashion blogs
or if she’s in charge of our entertainment,
watching gardening tutorials on YouTube
(which I pretend to understand
simply because anything she loves
I love to watch her watch).
Teachers’ progress reports
always have the same comments:
Quiet in class, shows potential,
needs to apply more effort.
I am a rule follower. A person whose
report card always says Meets Expectations.
I do not exceed them. I do not do poorly.
I arrive & mind my business.
So I have no idea what anyone in the main office
could possibly want with me.
How could I have guessed the truth of it?
Even as teachers in the halls gasped as the news spread,
even as the main office was surrounded by parents
& guidance counselors. How could I have known then
there are no rules, no expectations, no rising to the occasion.
When you learn news like this, there is only
falling.
I replay that moment again & again,
circle it like a plane in a holding pattern.
How that morning, on the fifth day of June,
the worst thing I could imagine
was being lectured for my progress report
or getting another nudge to return to the chess club.
I didn’t know then that three hours before,
as I’d arrived at school,
before lunch or Dre or the long walk down the school hallway,
the door to my old life slammed shut.
When I walk into the office, Mami is here.
Wearing chancletas, her hair in rollers.
& that’s the move that telegraphs the play:
Mami manages a nice spa uptown
& says her polished appearance is advertisement.
She never leaves the house anything less
than Ms. Universe–perfect.
The principal’s assistant, Ms. Santos,
comes from around her desk,
puts an arm around my shoulders.
She looks like she’s been weeping.
I want to shake her arm off.
Want to shove her back to her desk.
That arm is trying to tell me
something I don’t have the stomach to hear.
I don’t want her comfort. Don’t want
Mami here, or anything about what’s to come.
I take a breath, the way I used to
before I walked into a room
where every single person
wanted to see me lose. “Ma?”
When she looks at me, I notice her eyes
are red & puffy, her bottom lip quivers,
& she presses the tips of her fingers there
as if to create a wall against the sob that threatens.
She answers, “Tu papi.”
The flight
Papi was on departs
without incident on most days, I’m told.
Leaves from JFK International Airport & lands
in Puerto Plata in exactly three hours & thirty-six minutes.
Routine, I’m told, a routine flight, with the same kind of plane that flies in
daily & gets a mechanical check & had a veteran pilot & should have
landed fine.
Mami says the panic hit most of the waiting families at the same time.
Here, in New York, with the Atlantic refereeing between us,
we knew much earlier. Thirty minutes after the plane
departed, it was reported that the tail had snapped,
that like some fishing, hunting creature
the jet plunged into the water
completely vertical, hungry
for only God knows
what—prey.
Sank.
I sign myself out of school.
Ignore Ms. Santos’s condolences.
Mami is still crying.
We walk to my locker.
I leave my books in the cafeteria.
Mami is still crying.
I leave school without saying goodbye to Dre.
Mami can’t stop crying.
Mr. Henry waves. I wave back.
Outside the day is beautiful.
Mami cries.
The sun is shining.
The breeze a soft touch along my face.
Mami is still crying.
It’s almost as if the day has forgotten
it’s stolen my father or maybe it’s rejoicing at its gain.
Mami is still crying,
but my eyes? They remain dry.
I learn via text I am one of four students at school
who had been called to the office because of the flight.
In the neighborhood, las vecinas are on their stoops
in their batas & chancletas,
everyone trying to learn
what the TV may not know:
Who was on the flight? Is it true everyone is dead?
Was it terrorists? A conspiracy de por allá? The government?
When the women call out to Mami
she does not turn her head their way.
We walk from the school to our apartment
as if we are the ones who have been made ghosts.
The bodegueros & Danilo the tailor
& the other store owners
stand outside their shops
making phone calls as viejitos
wring their hands in front of their bellies
& shake their heads.
Here in Morningside Heights,
we are a mix of people: Dominicans
& Puerto Ricans & Haitians,
Black Americans & Riverside Drive white folk,
& of course, the Columbia students
who disrupt everything: clueless to our joys & pains.
But those of us from the island
will all know someone who died on that flight.
When we get to our building,
Doña Gonzalez from the fifth floor
calls out from her window,
pero Mami does not look up,
does not look sideways, does not stop
until we walk through our apartment door,
& then, as if pierced, she deflates,
slides down to the floor
with her head in her hands, & I watch
as the rollers slip free one by one, as her body shakes
& she unravels. I do not slide down to join her.
Instead, I put my arms underneath hers,
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help her up to her feet & into her bedroom.
When the phone begins ringing
I answer & murmur to family.
I take charge where no one else can.
Last summer, when I learned my father’s secret,
it was like bank-style gates descended on my tongue:
no words could escape. Those words I learned
must be protected at all cost. Even from my family.
Papi thought my silence was because of chess.
Because I was angry at his disapproval.
He never once imagined that my silence
was my disappointment in him. At what I’d found.
But although I felt he’d become a stranger,
I never stopped being my parents’ steady daughter.
Who did her chores & bothered no one.
Even now, that is not a habit I know how to break.
I take down the trash. I microwave the leftovers.
I wrap myself tight around the feelings I cannot share,
an unopened present, a gift no one wants.
Camino Yahaira
One Day After
The day after the crash,
but with still no deaths confirmed,
my friend Carline comes by before work,
hugs me tightly, her swollen belly between us,
but I quickly pull away.
I am afraid that I would break her.
Am afraid that I would break.
She is quiet. Holds my hand in hers. Says God
will see me through. Carline has lost aunts & uncles
& cousins & knows about mourning,
but she still has both parents at home. & so,
I take her comfort without yelling
that she Does. Not. Understand.
When her phone buzzes, she quickly releases
my hand on a curse. I know without her telling me
it’s her manager at the resort, wondering where she is.
When she leaves, Tía sits in front of the TV
& Don Mateo comes over, hat in his hands, & the phone rings, &
even Vira Lata, usually mellow, howls at our gate.
Everyone in these streets knew Papi:
The hustlers he gave money to keep an eye on me,
the colmado owners & fruit-cart guys who held our tab,
the folks Tía has been a curandera to, healing their babies.
The neighbor women send pastelones & papayas,
& men stop by to offer care in the form of labor & prayer.
Papi was gone three-fourths of each year but kept his ear
pressed to the ground all three hundred sixty-five days.
& so, like grains of rice in boiling water,
the crowd outside our little teal house expands.
People stand there in shorts & caps,
in thong sandals, the viejos held up by their bastones,
they shuffle onto the balcón,
they wrap their fingers around the barred fence,
they watch & wait & watch & wait an unrehearsed vigil.
& they pray& I try not to suffocate
under all the eyes that seem to be expecting
me to tear myself out of my skin.
We have the nicest house in the barrio
because Papi spent money to make it so.
He wanted to move us, but Tía refused
to leave the neighborhood she knows & serves.
So instead, Papi got us fat iron locks,
running water, & a working bathroom we don’t have to share.
We have humming air conditioners,
a large refrigerator, & a small microwave.
A generator para cuando se va la luz,
the latter setting us apart;
when the daily power outages happen
& the whole hood goes dark,
we are one of the few homes with our lights still on.
But it feels like for the first time,
our house is the one that’s gone dim.
Our house is squat, with two bedrooms,
a kitchen & comedor.
A small patio in the backyard where we hold
prayer circles & parties.
Our floors are not dirt. But tiled recently,
& always mopped clean.
We have a TV in the living room,
& Wi-Fi, & so many small luxuries
Papi’s US sweat provided.
But the best thing about our house
is that it’s a three-minute walk from the beach.
Which isn’t always lucky when the water rises,
but it has saved my life on the many days
when I need a reminder the world is bigger
than the one I know, & its currents are always moving;
when I need a reminder
there is a life for me beyond the water
& that one day I will not be left behind.
My bathing suit is a red-hot color,
like the one from that old North American show Baywatch?
Not as low cut. Unfortunately.
I sneak out of the house through the back
& avoid the well-meaning people out front,
whose questions & condolences I want to swat.
From the back road, it’s a straight shot to the water’s edge.
Even though I snuck out from the back, Vira Lata is soon
dogging my feet.
I pass a couple of houses & two bar fronts
where men play dominoes & sip lukewarm beer.
This is the edge of our neighborhood.
El Cero sits outside one bar in his blue shorts,
his eyes following me as I approach. He is a man
somewhere older than me but younger than Papi,
& I’ve known that from the moment I turned thirteen
Papi paid El Cero a yearly fee to leave me alone.
But the last few months, I’ve felt his eyes on my back.
Little things, like him now hanging outside my bus stop.
Or strolling more often on the beach. Carline even told me
she saw him at the resort once & he asked about me.
I keep my eyes on the road as I walk past.
I hunch myself invisible. & then my favorite sight:
the thicket of trees, & small path through them,
then the embankment of well-worn dirt
that gives way to sun-bleached sand.
This nook is bookended by jagged cliffs on one side—
that’s where the chamaquitos dive—& on the other is the
stone wall that separates the neighborhood from the resort
where Carline works.
I avoid the cliff; I am not here to leap & flip.
I am here because I need the current, moving & steady
& never the same twice. Rolling clear & blue right where I left it.
My small oasis. Papi used to call it Camino’s Playa.
The water-babble rushes my worst thoughts quiet.
& I peel my denim shorts off, wade in, slicing through
as if by doing this I could cut to strips my breaking heart.
Swimming might be the closest to flying
a human being can get. There is something
about your body displacing water
in order to propel through space that makes you feel
Godtouched. That makes me understand evolution,
that we really must have crawled up from the sea.
My life’s passions
are all about water breaking, new life making,
taking breath in wrinkled flesh.
Tía tells me I am probably the daughter
of a water saint. All I know is I am most sure
of my place in the world
with the water combing my kinks,
the cold biting into my skin, & my arms
creating an arc over my head as I barrel through,
& battle too these elements.
Papi learned to swim in this cut of the Caribbean Sea.
Used to jump off the cliffs into the waiting blue.
When I was younger, he gave me lessons,
scoffing at the placidness of the nearby resort pool.
“Buenooo, the best way to learn to swim,
is to jump into a body of water that wants to kill you.”
It used to be funny when he said that.
Most days, he would watch from the sand
as I tried to become a thing with fins.
Some days, he’d strip off his shirt,
show off his hairy chest & jiggly belly,
& make me want to disown him on the spot.
The other barrio kids watched as “el Papi de Camino,”
the one who brought her cool shirts from the States,
would slide off his old-man sandals & hat, walk to a little peak,
& execute a dive, entering the water so smoothly
it would make el Michael Phelps jealous.
In those moments, Papi became a lago creature,
a human knife, a merman
from some ocean mythology—
so smooth I would search his neck for gills.
There was no current strong enough
that could pull against his push.
I am convinced Papi was made up of more water than most.
The little kids would cheer & try to climb his back,
so he would become a human surfboard too, & I would
say, “Ese es mi papi; he is mine all mine.”
Papi learned to swim in water that wanted to kill him.
That ocean can’t be so different; shouldn’t be any different.
If any man could take a hard dive & come up breathing,
it should be one who had practiced for just that his entire life.
My arms are tired, my joints screaming. I want to swim
until I become this water. The world fades when you are
under, & the ocean murmurs stay stay stay.
I swim out & come back, out & come back.
My lungs on fire. My arms shaking from the strain.
I could stop moving. I could just go.
I turn my head to breathe; a sharp whistle cuts me off midstroke.
Floating on my back, eyes opening to the darkening sky,
I do not have to look to know the figure at the shore.
“It’s getting late, Camino. The beach is dangerous at night.”
El Cero. In some ways it seems like I always knew
that Papi’s absence would bring baggage.
I tread upright in the water, trying to map out
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