Try to Remember

by Iris Gomez

  “Hola, mi’jita,” he replied hoarsely, as if he hadn’t talked in a while.

  Pablo and Manolo dumped packages onto his bed.

  “Not all at once,” said Tío Victor, removing the treats to a nearby rolling table. “Even Roberto can’t eat everything immediately, eh Roberto?”

  My father nodded and smiled.

  Mami leaned over, adjusting the strands of his graying hair. “Are you better, mi’jo?”

  “Sí, sí,” he said, smiling and nodding repeatedly. Fine and dandy. But the ticking hand was shut tight now, as if something—a butterfly maybe—might slip out.

  “You want us to sign your cast?” Pablo asked amicably.

  “¿Ah?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother told Pablo.

  “Oh, what’s the harm?” said Tío Victor.

  My father said sí to that as he did to everything else.

  “All right,” my mother relented. “Be gentle.”

  While Pablo went to borrow a nurse’s marker, I glanced around at the clashing shades of green throughout the room, from the Christmassy green of the counters to the faded lime curtains that partially divided my father’s half of the room from the other side where an elderly patient slept. There was no chair by the man’s bed, but someone had left cookies on his table. I leaned closer and noticed that they were Anisarios. That was strange.

  “Is that man Colombian too?” I asked my mother.

  “No, gringo,” Tío Victor replied. “Evangelina,” he told Mami, “I’m going for a smoke, all right?”

  “I’ll go with you, Tío,” Manolo offered.

  Nodding, Mami hovered over my father as Pablo elaborated Gothic letters in black marker on my father’s cast and filled in the letters with a yellow highlighter. My father smiled away. Despite the agreeable mood, something was off. He wasn’t the familiar peppy-happy of an arroz con pollo and sweet plantains dinner. And why was his ticking hand scrunched so tightly?

  I glanced at the other bed, my eyes landing on the Anisarios. Now I remembered. Those were my father’s cookies. I’d placed them in a bag for Mami’s last visit. Tía Consuelo had sent them when her trip got postponed because of the hurricane. With determination, I marched over and picked up the box. The old man didn’t stir.

  “Whatcha doin’, hon?” asked a nurse who came in to take his blood pressure.

  “These aren’t his,” I explained.

  “Sure they are, sweetie. Can you please put them back?”

  “They’re not his. Look.” As she wrapped a black strap around the man’s arm and pumped, I showed her the place on the box where it said Hecho en Colombia.

  The old man’s eyes fluttered open and shut, open and shut.

  “Sorry, I don’t know Spanish,” said the nurse, scribbling numbers on a clipboard. She smiled at me. “I should.”

  “It says ‘Made in Colombia.’ ” I pointed to her patient. “He’s not Colombian.”

  “Huh?” She peered at the package. “Oh. I see what you mean. Hmm. Maybe one of the candy stripers moved it over. You go ahead, dear, give it back to your grandfather.”

  I didn’t correct her but brought the cookies triumphantly to my father’s side of the room.

  My father looked up from examining the tackily decorated cast.

  “Papi,” I asked, “do you want a cookie?” I held up the box.

  “O sí, mi’jita.” He reached forward with the broken arm.

  “I can do it for you.”

  He waited patiently as I tore off the plastic, emptied a few cookies on his tray, and moved the tray in front of him. As he tried to pick up an Anisario with the unbroken arm, he had difficulty opening his clenched hand, so I lifted the cookie to his mouth for him to bite into. Through a mouthful of cookie, he mumbled, “Delicioso, mi’jita,” and reached for another. Carefully, I pried apart his clenched fingers. No butterfly.

  Something squeezed my swollen heart while I watched him chew.

  Long ago, when I was little, I’d contracted scarlet fever and my parents had had to leave me in a hospital in New York. Every morning after my father had finished his night shift, he’d come to see me. One time he brought me cookies, but after he left, the nurses opened my box and divided the contents between me and another young girl in the room. I didn’t speak English yet, so I couldn’t tell the nurses that I didn’t want to share. Not the cookies that my father had given me.

  On the drive home, I asked my mother and uncle what the doctors had found wrong. Mami extracted a hankie from the venerated leather bag Tía Consuelo had once given her. Tío Victor waited another second before turning toward us. “Schizophrenia, mi’ja. They gave your father medicine.”

  “That’s different personalities, right?” asked Pablo. “Like that movie. First she’s a slut, then she’s a mother, and then—”

  “ The Three Faces of Eve,” Manolo remembered.

  Pablo nodded. “Yeah. Papi switches from being an old man to a little kid.”

  I edged forward. “Is that true, Tío? Does Papi have different personalities?”

  “I don’t think so, mi’ja. This isn’t a movie, it’s an illness.” My uncle lit a cigarette and smoked deeply. “Incurable.”

  Schizophrenia. I slid back in my seat. So that meant we couldn’t pretend he was normal anymore.

  “Then what’s the medicine for?” Pablo demanded.

  “To keep your father tranquil.”

  “Right,” Manolo muttered in English. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “But then he’ll stay sick… forever,” I blurted, as the gravity of my father’s illness dawned on me. “How did Papi get it, Tío? Why?”

  “Who knows, mi’ja ? Who knows?” My uncle finished his cigarette and rolled down the window to let out the stale air.

  Incurable. We’d called it nervios. Phantom sickness, voodoo. We’d even given my father fake medicine: sleeping pills! But his sickness was real. Sunlight pierced through the car windows, and my face felt flushed. “Is it hereditary?” I asked suddenly.

  My uncle gave me a wry smile in the mirror. “No te veo cara de loquita,” no crazy little girl’s face there, he teased as he turned the corner toward our house. “Here we go.”

  After he’d dropped us off, my mother retreated to the yard with a drink and a fotonovela.

  I changed into my worn Cartagena de Indias T-shirt and heard Pablo practicing his new guitar from St. Stephen’s. It was amazing how well Pablo was adapting to Catholic school, I had to admit, as I walked into his room and stood by the window to listen. Though Miami’s undaunted sunlight blazed through the sky, the afternoon felt oddly finished. Maybe the end of the world was in broad daylight, I reflected, not in the tempest-tossed darkness I’d always imagined.

  Pablo strummed the E minor chord. “It’s the sad chord,” he said, his bright eyes belying the words.

  But I believed in the sadness, in everything that broke your heart. Like the things you couldn’t fix, like torn photographs and ruined family mementos scattered across Miami by the hurricane… or like my father’s crippled hand, forever clenched around the handle of an invisible suitcase as he fled a storm that wouldn’t end.

  For the next few days Pablo’s persistent references to The Three Faces of Eve forced me to dwell on the disappearance of my father’s previous personality. Were our problems really and truly cured? Or could the madman personality return? I broke down in front of the dreaded World Book Encyclopedia one morning and dragged the S volume into Pablo’s room to read the schizophrenia entry aloud with him.

  “You see?” I concluded, closing the book. “It doesn’t say you get multiple personalities.”

  “It doesn’t say you don’t,” he replied.

  I decided I’d better talk things over with Lara.

  When I went over there later that day, she sent the girls out to play and we sat down in her living room. “I had no idea it was schizophrenia, Gabi. I’m so sorry. How tragic.”

  “I didn’t either,” I b
lurted. “We just thought he was kind of crazy.”

  “You poor girl.” She folded me into her arms. “Can Walter and I help?”

  I shook my head. “But Lara, do you think it gives people split personalities? Like—personalities that come back sometimes?”

  “I think what actually splits is the mind. I suppose it’s more like a confusion, between what a person believes and what is real, objectively.”

  “Isn’t that true for everyone’s mind?”

  “Not exactly. You and I know that the difference is there. We filter reality through our perceptions. Your father’s mind doesn’t see the difference.”

  “But how clear is the difference?” I asked ruefully. After all, I believed in lots of unreal things, such as leaving home, becoming a mightier person. Were there degrees of schizophrenia? Did I have some? I was so obsessed with thinking.

  Lara brushed the hair back from my forehead. “You must be saddened by this, Gabi, no?”

  “I’m kind of used to it,” I admitted. “It’s like I’ve been sad and worried my whole life.”

  “Oh no! You have so much to look forward to!” She hugged me. “You’ll have your trip soon. And a good university education ahead of you. You’ll be more than fine, Gabi, I promise.”

  On my way back home, I noticed the extent to which the hurricane had become an excuse for bigger changes. All the old Florida-style aluminum crank-up windows were getting replaced by those wide, modern panes so clear you could see into the houses. No more secrets.

  The next day, Tío Victor walked my father into the house as if he were ninety-two years old. The cast was off and his arm was in a sling. Mami propped him on the couch with pillows as my brothers and I stood back. He was skinny, the hair strands combed arbitrarily across his scalp. His clenched hand ticked on the couch, but mostly his eyes were peaceful, as if he’d forgotten all the bad things he’d ever done.

  Unfortunately, at dinner he brought up an old favorite: “Many barrels of crude are produced,” he began, smiling as he prepared to lecture us across his plátanos.

  Pablo threw me a triumphant glance: See? The return of another personality.

  “In Barrancabermeja…,” my father continued, but the words trickled off in mid-sentence.

  “Tell your father about your progress with Sister Vincent,” my mother ordered Pablo abruptly, though school hadn’t yet reopened.

  My father blinked twice at Pablo. He asked how old Pablo was.

  Pablo grinned and started to tell him, but Mami put her hand over my brother’s. “Roberto,” she chided, “you know how old your son is.”

  When my father smiled blankly, she changed the subject to planning for Tía Consuelo’s rescheduled trip.

  After that, days followed in which my father meandered through the house just listening to the radio. Once, when I sat polishing the dining room table legs, he shuffled into the room and started to whisper-sing a Piero ballad the radio was playing while he peered out through the blinds: “Es un buen tipo mi viejo”—He’s a good guy, my old man. The words hurt, and I had to put down my rag to brace myself against the haunting ones that followed: “Anda solo y esperando”—he wanders alone and waiting. Would my father remember that pitiful line? But only his faint “Anda” drifted across the room.

  He began to forget. Neighbors’ names. Our schools. Trips to his beloved post office. He forgot to go out for fresh air, and we had to remind him.

  Mami told my brothers and me that it was because of the Mellaril. Once a month, my father was to return to Jackson Memorial for the psychiatrist to refill a prescription.

  “I wonder what those pills do?” Pablo asked the day Mami gave us the lowdown on the medication before going off to clean some more.

  “The directions say it’s an antipsychotic,” I explained. “But Tío Victor told me those drugs are kind of crude, and they make peoples’ bodies’ stiff and stuff like that.”

  “At least he doesn’t hit,” Manolo acknowledged. “That’s good.”

  “Yeah.” We nodded in unison.

  No more police, no more arrests, no more disappearing green cards, or El Chinos to the rescue. Only my father’s ghostly persona. Now my brothers could yell to their hearts’ content if they so chose, but they so chose only when too lazy to walk to another room to ask Mami something in person. Occasionally, she yelled at them for dirtying the house; sometimes I yelled along to support her. My father was the only one who didn’t yell.

  When Mami stopped yelling altogether, I started to worry. Except for fotonovelas, nothing much distracted her anymore. I wished Tía Consuelo would hurry up and get here. I wished my mother’s pal Camila, who knew the whole story now, visited more frequently. I wished the hurricane recovery would end so that Mami could return to her crummy but hustle-bustle job. She’d gotten so moribund—her spirit fading loyally with my father’s.

  The mailman finally brought a letter that shook her from that anomie. “Léete esto, mi’jita,” she said curiously, handing me an official-looking envelope. I opened it, skimmed the letter, and extracted a check for my father. The letter promised more disability checks each month.

  At last—the Government was sending my father his money.

  Donning her reading glasses, Mami marveled. “It might cover our mortgage,” she mused hopefully. “Maybe I can go part-time and keep watch on everybody.”

  She began to plan. Repairs and layaway purchases, long deferred, restored her sense of purpose. I should keep all my earnings now, she insisted to me. “As long as you save. Put some in the bank like your brother. For your college,” she added, looking away as she uttered that dreaded word.

  What I tried to save were memories. I wanted to remember the father I’d had as a kid, when I loved him the way you were supposed to, whatever that was. Honor thy father and thy mother. And though I’d tried to be loyal, in the end loyalty hadn’t saved us. Now I had this shadow of a father who was hardly a person. If I could still love him, where was he? The Land of Father, patria, had disappeared into a horizon I would be squinting at long after I’d flown away with my own heavy suitcase of memories.

  The day the government check arrived, I left Mami to her planning while I went canvassing the neighborhood one last time for vestiges of hurricane damage—in anticipation of the inevitable catastrophe tale comparisons that would flourish when school reopened the following week. Purposefully, I crossed over toward the recently paved sidewalk on the Cabreras’ side of our street, but something compelled me back to our side, the lone holdout with its white gravel pebbles and random reeds poking through. Then I traversed the blocks toward Flagler and soon found myself continuing on to where all the streets yielded to weeds and grass.

  Here was the old Miami, with brush fenced back to keep children away from Tamiami Canal. Snakes or a wandering alligator could still surprise you along the rough trail that began where the fence had been torn away by Hurricane Estrella. Slowing my pace, I followed the overgrown path between shoulder-high clumps of cattails and saw grass. A white heron was fishing on one leg on the opposite bank, and I stopped to watch him, though the wild reeds partially hid him from view. The broad marsh reminded me of a field from one of the poems in my Solitude book—a field you couldn’t kill, even if its flowers were cut down year after year to sell in towns.

  I tore off a blade of grass and thoughtfully skimmed my finger along its edge. Maybe the Miccosukee had made their own paper from these reeds. Maybe the ancient Chibcha, too, had woven paper out of the long fibers of the cartageno trees along the Magdalena. As I gathered more reeds and the heron went on poking the water, my thoughts became as transitory as the fantasy of someone to marry me and take me away from my family. A canoe—my grandfather’s—would glide forever across my distant childhood.

  I’d told Mr. Lanham that I wanted to study the history of great indigenous civilizations. Lara believed in the greatness of literature, the saints of paper. Across the quiet marsh, the heron’s wings flapped and stirred the cattails where
he’d stood. I watched him fly up, disappearing into the endless southern sky. Turning, I began to braid the reeds I collected into a long, green recuerdo de Miami—a remembrance and a memento that I could carry away.

  [ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ]

  I am humbled by all the love, enthusiasm, encouragement, and assistance I’ve received from so many others on this journey to bring my novel into the world. Among those to whom I owe my gratitude are my editor extraordinaire Selina McLemore, treasure of Grand Central Publishing, and her wonderful team there; Stéphanie Abou, my simpatiquísima agent, whose literary and intellectual gifts, cultural sensitivity, and multilingual talents I have been lucky to have guiding me; the incomparable Jenna Blum—special friend, mentor, teacher, and writer who shall live immortal in my heart as the wise and wonderful fairy godmother of Try to Remember; my many terrific writer friends who so generously provided their time reading and giving me the best of comments—including Emily Hammond and Steven Schwartz, Sarah Ignatius, Liza Nelson, Randy Susan Meyers, Cecile Cor coran, and my writer-colleagues in the Grub Street, Inc., Master Novelist Council; my daughter and very capable first reader Gabriela Kassel Gomez, my husband, Phil Kassel, who read painstakingly on multiple occasions, and my son Victor Kassel Gomez, who helped me write better because of his kindness to me; Sarah Vázquez, my bilingual editor par excellence; Pauline Adams, who believed in the truth within my story when it was just a speck gleaming from the darkness in my eyes; Hilda Hernández- Gravelle, who believed in the truth within me; Allan Rodgers, whose idealism and flexibility have empowered me and my colleagues at Massachusetts Law Reform Institute to realize and diversify our dreams; my family of birth, my family by marriage, and my family of wonderful friends; and the immigrants who keep on teaching me the virtues of Faith, Courage, and Perseverance.

  Grateful acknowledgment is also made to all those, both living and deceased, whose inspiring words, lyrics, and/or music work are briefly referenced, excerpted, and/or adapted here, including: Padraic Colum’s poem “Young Girl: Annam” reproduced in full; two lines from e.e. cummings’s poem “Tumbling Hair”; a line from the lyrics of Carlos Vives’s “19 de noviembre”; a line from the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s “So Long, Marianne”; two lines from the lyrics of Piero’s “Mi viejo”; a line from the lyrics of Francisco Gabilondo Soler’s “La negrita cucurumbé”; and adaptation of a quote attributed to Wole Soyinka by Derrick Z. Jackson in a Boston Globe article; and adaptations of parts of poems written to me personally and to other members of my family by my grandfather, Ricardo Madrid del Risco.