in two weeks, & last night
the spa owner called the house phone
& left a voice mail.
Today, I wake Ma up,
brush her hair into a ponytail.
I clear the chipped polish
off her nails & swipe on a pretty pink color.
I force her into a black dress
that fits much looser than it used to.
I hand her her purse
& order her a Lyft.
“Go, Ma. You have to
do something to take
your mind off of it all.
No one does your job better than you.”
She gets in the car
but shakes her head sadly.
My mother, always so organized
& ready, the general
of the small spa she manages,
looks lost & tense.
I watch the car until
it turns the corner
& hold back the impulse
to chase after it,
to call Ma & ask her
to come back. To not leave.
To never leave.
I’m used to clocks. To using time to succeed.
To slapping my palm hard across a timer
as if it were running its smart mouth.
You don’t have to be God to control time.
To learn speed. They say the plane
went down too fast. For life vests. Or safety plans.
Too perpendicular to readjust in time.
For a rescue to be mounted. By the time the Coast
Guard reached the sinking tail, they’d been under water
for hours. The impact alone would have killed them.
No one ever emerged. The doors never opened.
The air masks never even dropped down.
Without fail, most days I’m in school,
I get sent to the guidance counselor.
But I don’t have anything to tell her.
She asks me how I’m doing. Stupid fucking question.
I want to tell her some days I wake up
to find dents on the inside of my palms
from where I’ve fisted my hands while sleeping,
my nails biting into the skin & leaving angry marks.
On the days I wake up with smooth palms I’m angry at myself.
There should be no breaks from this grief. Not even in sleep.
I don’t tell her that. I don’t tell her anything.
I chew on the little green mints she offers & wait for the bell.
On the days like today that I don’t go to school,
I still go over to Dre’s house.
Even when she’s not there.
Dr. Johnson puts her arm around my shoulders
& tells me to take my time. Her semester ended
a few weeks ago, & she won’t teach
a summer session for a few weeks more.
I decide to organize the books in their living room library
while I wait for Dre to come home.
Clear steps: organize the books by genre,
then alphabetize them on the dining room table.
Since they moved here, Dr. Johnson has let me borrow
lots of books. Let me borrow games,
& Wi-Fi, & a cup of sugar if Mami was baking.
& I wish I could borrow time,
or space, or answers. I tell Dr. Johnson this,
& she pat-pats my hand.
“Just let yourself mourn, sweetie.
You can’t run from what hurts you,
or like a dog smelling fear,
that grief will just keep chasing with ever-sharp teeth.”
I go back to stacking books.
Orderly. Logical. Safe.
Later that day, when Ma gets home
I search her face for signs of how she feels.
She is as polished as when she left this morning.
But her face is pale, & her hands tremble
when she hands me her purse. She does not say
how much it must have cost her to smile today.
At six o’clock, Mami & I go to a grief counseling session.
It’s the third time the neighborhood association’s invited us.
There’s a Spanish-speaking counselor & a priest.
Mami grips my hand, her pale cheeks paler.
The room is full. & even before anyone speaks,
there are several people silently weeping.
Pain hums in the room, like a TV on mute,
& there is no knob to turn it off.
The counselor asks us about loss.
I do not know how to say in Spanish:
I am a graceful loser.
Many times. Many things. I’ve made mistakes
that lost the match.
Who were Mami & I playing against? Did God win?
Did Papi lose? I know we did.
How could the stakes have been so high?
We are sitting in a circle.
One man says both his parents were on the flight;
they were returning to Santo Domingo to retire.
A young woman with straight hair that hangs to her waist
says her husband had just got back from fighting overseas;
he was going to visit his sister
& the place where he was born for the first time in twenty years.
We hear about a little girl going to visit her grandmother,
about a young couple flying to their honeymoon.
The stories hang in the room like twinkling lights
that I could touch. Over 80 percent of the people on the flight
had connections to the island. Returning.
& when it’s Mami’s turn to talk, in a soft voice she simply says,
“My husband travels back every year.
I feel as if I lose him again every morning I wake up.”
Anger swirls up my chest, gets tangled with the words
I had meant to say. Mami’s pain seems hungry.
& for the first time I wonder if now that Papi’s dead,
will she learn what I knew? What I haven’t been able
to talk to her about for over a year, because I didn’t want
her hurt? Because I was afraid of the kind of change
these secrets would rain on our lives.
& if she doesn’t find out, does that mean the only person
in my family who knows Papi’s secret is me?
When it’s my turn to speak, I bite the insides of my cheek.
The only thing I give the circle is a tight smile & shrug.
On silent accord, Mami & I agree, we will not go back.
The emotions at the group session
took up every vacancy in our body
& we have no room no room no room left.
My old chess coach calls when we get home
after the grief session. I’m doing dishes,
cleaning plates Mami & I filled with food but never ate from.
My hands are soapy when Mami hands me the phone.
Coach Lublin’s voice is gentle, soothing;
it’s the voice he uses when a newbie
loses a tournament to a kid half their age.
“Yahaira, we are all thinking of you.”
Coach & I worked together for two years.
He seemed unsurprised when I quit the chess team,
as if he’d always known I was not truly interested.
He always smiles at me in the hallway
& invites me to drop by training sessions
but has never pressured me to rejoin the team.
When I hear his voice
my heart squeezes, a wrung-out sponge,
& I wonder what will happen to the phone
if I drop it into the filled sink. Will it float on suds
or be weighed down to the bottom?
How does the water learn to readjust around the new object?
Could we nestle the phone in rice, re
vive it into ringing again?
Mami looks up sharply from the table
& gives me her look.
“Thank you, Coach,” I say to his kind remarks.
Who knew death must be so damn polite?
Our apartment has plastic-covered leather sofas,
windows with frilly curtains;
my mother decorates with wide sashes,
color-coded to match the season.
There’s a small courtyard out back
where we held summer barbecues for the family
& neighbors. Unlike most of my friends’ families,
Papi & Ma owned our apartment in the co-op.
Bought it when they found out
Mami was pregnant with a girl.
Papi said his queens needed a castle
& Morningside Heights would provide.
More & more, I sit on the fire escape
just to get a chance to breathe.
Our house these days is a choked-up throat.
I cannot exhale myself out the front door.
This is no castle. It’s an altar to a man,
a National Geographic shrine;
the house is a living sadness, & as Mami walks
its halls at night, even the floorboards weep.
Fifteen Days After
It’s Saturday.
After three p.m.
I lie in bed.
The doorbell rings.
Maybe Mami will get it.
Footsteps coming down the hall.
Soft padding
that doesn’t belong
to Tío Jorge or Mami.
Soft murmurs outside my door.
More than one person
came inside.
Mami’s quivering voice
& another tone more sure.
My door’s pushed open.
I keep my eyes closed.
If they are intruders
I hope they steal everything,
especially the weight on my chest.
I hear sneakers
thump on the ground.
Then a body settles on my bed.
“Move over,” Dre says.
She must have come over
with Dr. Johnson,
otherwise she would have ducked
through the window.
I am right; I hear Dr. Johnson’s
measured murmur cutting through
my mother’s choked voice.
Dre puts her arms around me.
& it’s the first time I’ve let myself be held
since Papi died.
When Dre grabs the bottle of acetone
from on top my dresser I’m surprised.
If it weren’t for me, the only decoration
on her nails would be specks of soil.
But it’s not her nails she’s concerned with.
She takes a little ball of cotton
& begins removing the polish from mine.
Despite having done the same for Mami’s nails
yesterday, it’s only then I notice,
I’ve bitten the color off my own.
When both my hands
are clean & she’s filed the nails down for me,
I grab her face. Her eyes are calm.
My old-soul girlfriend. Always watching.
Always watching out for me.
We share a breath before I kiss her,
before I bite back the hitch of tears.
Positive identifications have been made,
& Papi’s gold-tooth smile was among them.
Tío Jorge & his wife,
Tía Mabel, show up at 4:05 p.m.
My mother’s sister, Tía Lidia,
& my cousin Wilson show up at 4:32.
My father’s cousins, who work at the billiards,
show up at 5:12.
The family comes with food, with Bibles,
with worry sewn into the creases of their foreheads.
There is no music playing.
The men talk quietly in the living room
& sip Johnnie Walker.
When Tía Lidia & Mami go to her room to pray,
Tía Mabel appoints herself the general of logistics,
doing the things that Ma has been unable
or unwilling to do.
She calls a cousin about flowers,
a childhood neighbor about casket costs.
She calls a church a few blocks away
to have his name read at morning mass for a week.
She calls a relative in the Dominican Republic,
is quiet a long time while someone on the other end speaks.
There is a call made to El Diario newspaper
about publishing an obituary.
My cousin Wilson sits on hold with the airline,
trying to see when we can claim what is left.
The other women come back from the bedroom.
Mami’s eyes are dry & hard.
Discussion turns to burial plots
& whether or not the remains should be taken to DR.
My father was the one who always threw the get-togethers
& even in death, he brings us all home.
Tío Jorge breaks away from the men
when he sees me standing
in the living room doorway,
swaying on my feet.
He leads me to my father’s favorite chair,
awkwardly pats back my hair. I curl into his hand.
Tío Jorge & Tía Mabel do not have children
but they would have made great parents.
Tío Jorge knows how to listen.
Even if all he hears is silence.
We sit like that a long while.
Him patting my hair, me breathing in
his familiar cologne.
I trust he hurts
how I hurt. I trust he knows I hurt
without my having to say so.
Halfway through the discussion
of funeral arrangements
I heave up from Papi’s chair.
Walk to his old-school record player,
grab one of his favorite artists,
& queue the music.
My uncles go quiet,
my aunt shushes someone on the phone,
I lean back in his chair
& close my eyes.
One of Papi’s favorite bachata songs
lifts itself into the room. It’s about lost love,
& although it’s a breakup song,
the lament to not think, to not cry,
to not hurt for another man the singer
feels like it could be speaking to this moment.
Before the song is over
Mami slams her hand on the disc.
The music stops midnote.
It seems fitting, I think.
To end right in the middle.
She doesn’t have to tell me
music is inappropriate for mourning.
I only needed it for a second
to remember a time before this one.
Tía Mabel
asks Mami
where Papi
will be buried
as we’re seated
around the kitchen table
picking out
a picture
to laminate
for mourners.
(I have begun making lists in my head.
Of all the things I don’t want to forget about Papi.
If someone asked my biggest fear,
it would be that. Forgetting his calloused hand
with a fingertip he chopped off in DR.
His gold tooth that blinked in the light.
His big laugh that used to make me smile,
even if I was mad at him.
I try to find a picture that captures all of this,
Papi in motion. Papi in space. Papi gilded.
Papi, the big hot boiling sun
we all looked to for light.
I want to forget this wh
ole past year
& remember only the good things.
Not a single photo captures exactly what I need,
& I shove away picture after picture after picture—)
At Tía’s words
Something flashes in Mami’s eyes that isn’t really sadness;
her hands tighten against her snatched waist.
She hugs herself hard. Neither of them looks at me when she says:
“His real family is here. What’s left of him will be buried here.”
I look at my mother, as if seeing her for the first time.
She sounds angry. I try to see if she knows what I know.
But Tía Mabel makes a sharp sound,
& I swing my eyes in her direction.
Tía Mabel’s mouth looks like a cliff words want to tumble over,
but she clamps her lips tight & pulls the sentences off the edge.
Tío Jorge shakes his head.
“Yano always wanted to be buried back home, Zoila.”
Mami doesn’t even look in his direction.
“He will not be buried there. I am his wife.”
My heart feels like it’s pounding in my chest.
Does she know? Does she know? Do they all know?
Tío shakes his head & takes a folder out from his briefcase.
“His wife you might be, Zoila, but you are not his will.”
He sets a document on the kitchen table.
My mother picks up the papers
as if they will origami themselves into fangs.
Then she laughs, “So this he planned for?”
“& . . .” Tío shoots a glance at me.
“The other matter, too, Zoila. You agreed.”
Mami puts the papers down without reading,
straightens & smooths them as if fixing a boyfriend’s tie.
Mami turns her back to us, stands by the window.
“He was ours first. & he will be ours last.
Pero if this is what he wanted, then take him back.
But we won’t be the ones there to see him buried.”
I want to agree with Mami, but I can’t.
The part of me that is my father’s daughter,
that sat on his lap & laughed. That had her hand
patiently guided by his, that girl knows it isn’t so simple.
“If Papi is buried in DR, I want to be there.
He died alone & afraid, without family around.
Without anyone who knew him. He was probably thinking of us.
How can we put him in the dirt alone
& not even go to say a prayer over his grave?”
Although she still has her back to me, Mami straightens.
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