by Iris Gomez
Grief, like a hurricane, struck me. Where was that father now? I cried mutely, doubled over to keep from splitting into a million pieces.
“Ay Lara,” I heard Mami mourn behind the wall between us. “I went along with everything.” Her voice, full of her own grief and sorrows, righted me—keeping me, as always, a safe distance from my own. “Look what I’m left with now,” she added sadly, “no illusions, no hope.”
“Hope lives in our children, Evi,” Lara told her softly. She complimented Mami over Manolo’s industriousness and over her success at getting Pablo into St. Stephen’s—and then for the wonderful daughter she’d raised. Slowly, Lara steered the conversation toward my contest victory and the Ambassador trip. Lara asked things like, “You’ve been to New York, yes?” and got Mami to agree often enough to loosen her fierce grip on “no.” Then, somehow, Lara was offering to come over and keep her company on the days I was gone, so that she wouldn’t feel so alone.
I couldn’t believe it. Waves of gratitude flooded me with more tears, and I stumbled toward my room. I had to stop and lean against the doorway. As I glanced into the room, the planes of elusive light shimmered across my floor, and I felt the first uncertainty. How could I be without my family?
A line strayed out of one of those Leonard Cohen laments from the past and flew around as if lost in my soul—something about the angels who forget to pray for us.
But angels did pray for me: Fátima, Octavio, Lara… and Claudio too.
And my grandfather, the Angel of my Childhood.
So much sentimental feeling inspired me to track down the autobiografía which had earned me the Bellísimo in junior high Spanish. I’d never written to my grandfather, but now as I reread the autobiography, I knew it was the closest thing to a good-bye letter I could compose. Gently, I slipped it into an envelope to send to him.
That evening, long after Lara had gone, I found my permission papers signed on the kitchen counter. But when Mami shuffled in, wearing her reading glasses and carrying the day’s bills, she only said, “Ay, mi’ja, make me a tinto, will you?”
I filled the espresso pot and left it brewing to go tuck the forms safely away in my room. When I could smell the Bustelo, I returned and poured my mother her cup of coffee. I hesitated a moment before leaving her. “Thanks, Mami, for letting me go on the trip,” I said shyly, kissing her cheek.
She nodded distantly and returned to her bills.
In my room, I hummed the Leonard Cohen tune to myself while I changed my clothes and tried to remember all the verses. But when I lay in the dark with my eyes open, only the words of a question—one of Mami’s familiar expressions—floated toward me in a great halo of light. ¿Quién te crees?
Who did I dare to be?
[ TWENTY-FIVE ]
NO HURRICANE HAD HIT FLORIDA in more than four years, but one was on its way now. That September, during the gray days of anticipation before the storm, people in my neighborhood came out of their houses to talk about it. Old Mr. Krantz, the only American left on our street, told me that we were lucky to have moved to Miami during the lull. He had lived through the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, he said, though he was a kid then, of course. Still, he could remember the hollowed-out windows of office buildings and piles of debris that floated down Flagler Street afterward. “That storm left the downtown bank building leaning sideways,” he said. “And we heard tell of a piano lifted out of a Miami Beach hotel. Scary stuff,” he concluded, shaking his head. “Of course, that was before they gave hurricanes names like they do now.”
This one was called Estrella, Star. My science teacher, Mr. Fernández, explained that the Weather Bureau retired the names afterward, so that each hurricane remained unique in history, however mighty or small.
That week, as we waited for our star to fall directly into South Florida, somewhere between Palm Beach and the Keys, Mr. Fernández gave us handouts about the Great Miami Hurricane. We were to track Estrella’s progress across the Atlantic and compare the two storms’ post-landfall features. Whereas the 1926 hurricane was a Category 4, Estrella was expected to be a Category 2—not the most dangerous but bad enough to splinter buildings apart and flood the southern coast.
Hurricane frenzy overtook the high school. In English, Mrs. Foster assigned us the Florida chapters of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, up to when the hurricane reaches Janie and Tea Cake. Since I didn’t know whether the storm in the book was real or not, I went to ask Mr. Lanham. “Probably the Okeechobee hurricane of 1928,” he said, surmising it was named for the enormous Lake Hurston described as a “monster” that woke and grumbled out of its bed. I decided to write my essay on the Seminoles; though they passed so briefly through the novel, they were the only characters with sense enough to head for higher ground before the hurricane hit.
School was canceled the day Estrella was due.
Mami spent most of the day waiting with my brothers and me in front of the TV. Not much else was televised besides weather coverage. Periodically, she got up and went to summarize for my father in the bedroom, though he seemed to have as little interest in this aspect of reality as in any other. Still, she couldn’t give up trying to share her anxiety. Each time she left, Pablo unlocked the Florida room door and threw it open. My brothers and I stared at the sky, which was no more gray than when rain is expected. But watching it so intently through the screen made our world feel eerily quiet.
It was 4:17 p.m. when the storm hit the state. Outside, our neighborhood became windy as the newscaster announced Estrella’s landfall on Marathon Key. Neighbors who’d stood in doorways went inside. The wind began choking trees and jump-roping through phone lines.
On the TV screen, an anemometer danced in a 90 mile- per-hour gale.
“Lock that door instantly!” my mother ordered.
“The lock doesn’t make any difference,” I pronounced without looking up. On my worksheet, I recorded the time and wind velocity.
Outside, our street had been deserted.
“The candles!” she exclaimed.
My brothers followed, urging her to find flashlights too.
“There’s hours of daylight left,” I called, but no one listened. It was more fun to run around in a panic than to sit and wait for Kingdom Come.
The wind increased to 110 mph. Between the Estrella updates, newscasters interviewed people weathered by past hurricanes from Key West to Pensacola. I wished they’d found old Mr. Krantz, with his bushy eyebrows, to talk about the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. He had such a good memory.
My father finally came out in his mad scientist hairdo and stood tapping a bunch of signature envelopes against his leg. “¿Tienes tarea?” he asked.
Nodding, I pointed at the TV and explained that my homework was related to the hurricane. My father started to unlock the door.
I could hear the fury of the wind outside. “You can’t go out there, Papi,” I cautioned. Luckily, Mami had double-locked the door.
My father went to get the spare keys.
On TV, they were showing the storm surge at Crandon Park, less than an hour away from us. Waves were nine feet above normal. Now they were labeling the storm Category 3.
My father returned and unlocked the door, but when he opened it the wind came in hot, really hot. I scribbled Estrella notes while repeating the warning that he shouldn’t go outside, though my crazy father stepped onto the terrace anyway.
The crazier wind pushed him back.
“Look at the waves,” I emphasized, pointing to the screen. “It’s a hurricane. Un huracán,” I repeated, as if constant repetition might make a dent in his hard head. “You’re not supposed to go out in it. It’s dangerous. Es peligroso,” I repeated loudly, trying to out shout the flapping door.
Mami came running. “Who opened that door?” When she saw him there, she scolded my father. “Roberto!”
My father smiled blithely and stepped out, continuing down our walkway.
“Come back here!” she yelled
. As she started to follow him, I rose to help.
“No. You stay here.” She pushed me inside and turned, shoving her shoulders forward into the fierce wind.
I braced myself against the door frame and watched her hair and clothes blow every which way. Maybe my father would lose his envelopes and come right back, I thought. Mami should probably leave him be. But she was fussing along behind him, trying to coax him while holding on to her candles for dear life. “Don’t you know that everything will be closed?” she screamed.
Our next-door neighbor yelled out through his X-taped window in feeble support, telling my father to be reasonable, hombre, didn’t he see that this was no weather to go out in?
When Mami stumbled, my father helped her up. As they struggled to get her upright, and she managed to plant her slippered feet apart for balance, he took off. Aghast, she watched him for a moment, then turned and ran back home. The door swung violently shut behind her.
“¡Pura locura!” she hissed.
Pure craziness was right!
She hesitated over the lock, then decided to leave it alone. “I’m calling Victor,” she said.
“He can’t do anything, Mami,” I told her. “You’re not supposed to drive in a hurricane either.”
The storm outside was trying to keep up with the one on TV. In the Keys, people who had refused to evacuate were pictured in front of their roofless houses. The announcer interviewed the governor for his grim I-told-you-so. Biscayne Bay was a mess of torn up marina sections and broken boats. There was one report that a stupid University of Miami student had gotten injured while trying to surf “killer” waves.
“Man, he is really crazy,” Manolo said when I went to tell him and Pablo about my father’s excursion to the post office. “Look at it out there.” He and Pablo were standing on Pablo’s bed staring out the window as the world went nuts. I was glad my brothers had called a truce after their fight—and the apology letter the probation officer had assigned Pablo to write Manolo.
I climbed up with them, and we watched the wind tear up the neighborhood. I became more nervous about my father—what if he fell? What if the hurricane swept him into the street and a truck hit him? Even if I did hate him, I didn’t want him to die. Guiltily, I remembered my furious diary pages and a voodoo horror overcame me. Oh God, if there is one, I whispered, I didn’t mean what I wrote. Please don’t kill my father.
“Whoa!” Pablo pointed as a 2-by-4 shot through the heart of Mr. Krantz’s royal palm. The limbs of other trees tumbled maniacally through the street. Branches slammed against cars and houses. In awe, we watched an aluminum awning fly, chariot-like, across the sky. Judgment Day had arrived.
“Maybe the old man went inside the 7-Eleven,” Manolo said, when he saw my face.
“Or the cops could’ve picked him up,” Pablo added reassuringly.
“We should have stopped him,” I said. “We should have stopped him.”
I went to go find my mother. “What can we do, Mami?” Glued to the kitchen window, she ordered me to telephone my uncle. But Tío Victor insisted that someone had surely invited my father in to wait out the storm.
The torrential rains began, and still my father wasn’t back. I stayed with Mami at the window, but soon the machine-gun bullets of rain obliterated any view.
After two hours of waiting, my uncle declared that it was time to call the police.
An ambulance picked up my father on Eighth Street after the Santarpio’s Sandwich Shop sign went flying and knocked him down. All he got was a broken arm, the uncles told us on the phone later, but the hospital was going to do tests to make sure his head was okay.
When it was safe to drive again, Tío Lucho took Mami to Jackson Memorial.
While we awaited her return, my brothers and I joined people outside inspecting the hurricane damage. A muted sunlight fell through the clouds that hung weakly in the sky. Shaken by Estrella, even the clouds lacked the strength to do their job. Windowpanes had been blown out of our house, and the broken glass shone among chunks of black roofing, garbage, and tree limbs on our lawn. The wind had uprooted our poor tilted street sign. Bent and tangled in phone lines, it lay on the wet gravel, its white “5” and “4” gazing vacantly up.
A felled tree was smashed into the Cabreras’ navy blue Chrysler and the car’s rear end had been kicked into the air. Down the street, a Venezuelan family who’d been building an improbable two-story in our flat community found their would-be hacienda chopped into a pygmy forest of shattered beams. Red tiles that construction workers had covered with plastic were strewn everywhere, the clay fragments transforming our neighborhood into a Spanish ruin.
When she returned from the hospital, Mami told us that my father would remain for a while longer. “He’ll be very rested,” she said, slumping into a chair. She stared at the empty air as if she were shell-shocked.
Later, she got up and began to inventory the damage. With school and work canceled indefinitely, post-hurricane fix-it jobs like removing junk from our yard and taping up windows went to Manolo and his reluctant assistant, Pablo. Mami also decided that this was a good time to assign major cleaning jobs inside the house to herself and me. But all the fixing and cleaning made me realize what a dump our home had become, and not just because of Estrella. Stationed in the green bathroom one morning, I surveyed the dilapidation: rusted faucets, chipped toilet bowl, a bath curtain that hung unevenly where grommet holes had torn. We’d long ago papered the walls with green trellises, but now the trellises were the paper itself, climbing off the wall as if in a surreal painting.
With a sigh, I finished cleaning and left the pitiful green bathroom for my room. There, on my bed, I found a large box. “Mami!” I yelled. “What’s this for?”
Padding over in her chancletas, she held her hands out to one side, her yellow gloves wet. “That’s from your father’s desk.” She frowned at the loaded box. “Why don’t you go through it? Save anything important.” As she left, she added, “Tú eres la que entiende eso.”
I was the one who understood it all?
Warily, I eyed my father’s junk, oozing out mental cancer. Had typing for him really made me understand his craziness? I picked up a sheet of petroleum scribblings and scowled. Crushing the page, I shot it straight into the wastebasket. Then I crumpled another wad, and then another, and on and on until I’d hooped in enough for the wastebasket to overflow and I had to go get shopping bag reinforcements. Then I continued my aggressive crushing of paper until I came upon the beat-up Rickenbacker textbook, The World We Live In, decorated with my father’s many illogical comments. The world he lived in. Plainly, we wouldn’t be returning that book, so I threw it into the shopping bag too. When I got to the Home Mechanics magazines, though, I stopped. What if my father discovered that it was me who’d thrown out all his stuff? Even on Dalmane, as I knew well, he could get upset.
I jumped up to go find Mami and confer.
In her bathroom, everything gleamed in excess. Tiles, sink, toilet—all were dripping and sparkled, the room redolent of pine cleaner. Hours would be required for all those surfaces to dry.
My mother, at rest in the yard, wore her yellow gloves as she sipped her tinto.
I blocked the sun from my eyes. “Mami. We can’t throw out all his stuff.”
She gazed vaguely into her coffee. “He isn’t going to remember.”
“He remembers lots of things.”
“Don’t worry, it won’t matter.” She swirled the tinto in her cup and sipped.
Too much Pine-Sol, I thought. Maybe she thinks it will clean out her life so she can start over, but everything is the same, clean or not.
I returned to my appointed chore. If my father freaked out about his missing stuff, I would lie, pretend I had no idea what happened to it. Maybe the hurricane blew it away, Papi. Or blame the uncles. Maybe they brought it to the hospital for you, Papi. By then, a squad of garbage collectors would have taken away the loose-leaf sheets of mad writing with its excess of majusc
ules and dark, inky exclamation points.
Something fluttered suddenly in my chest. My father had pummeled me with both fists, tried to strangle his own wife, gone blithely strolling in a hurricane. What was next? If only his madness could be manifested peacefully, I wished forlornly, like that of harmless Teddy who thought he was President Roosevelt in the Cary Grant movie, Arsenic and Old Lace. But my father wasn’t like harmless Teddy, not at all.
When I reached my old retyped entries from the World Book Encyclopedia, the weight of all my sadness made it hard for me to pick up the pages. My father had never even noticed the sea of typos I’d left behind after I quit correcting. A pathetic way in which I’d cheated him.
Why? Why had his life and mine been reduced to paper lies?
More than anything else, at that moment, I wished for the courage to ask him to stop. Stop acting crazy, Papi. Please, please just stop.
My father’s recovery lasted as long as Miami’s from the hurricane. Weeks passed, and to my surprise, he remained in the hospital. Then one day, Mami starched and ironed my brothers’ shirts and told me to put on the ivory dress I’d worn to the bar mitzvah. She was taking us for a visit.
The dress was much tighter in the shoulders and chest, as if my heart had grown from having too many difficult people to care about. If only my heart were a sponge, I thought, and I could squeeze out the unbearable feelings to make room for the good ones—like my pleasure in the dress’s gold sparkles or in the world illuminated by the azabache tear of Claudio’s eye.
Tío Victor drove us to Jackson Memorial and Mami led us around the L-shaped nurses’ station on my father’s floor. There he was, propped in a metal bed with his arm in a cast. His hair was pushed back, 1950s movie-star style. Ricardo Montalbán in My Man and I.
“Hola, Papi,” I said, and in front of Tío Victor and the nurse, I felt obliged to kiss his cheek for the first time since the knuckle-pounding. His skin was cold, and his shoulder bones looked thin. I had the sense of his heart having shrunk just as mine expanded.