Life, After

by Sarah Darer Littman

But that didn’t stop me from having nightmares for weeks afterward. Nightmares of monsters with jagged claws like the broken beams of the destroyed building. Nightmares of being trapped alive beneath mountains of rubble, calling out for help and not being heard. I would wake up struggling beneath my blankets, sweaty and crying.

  I wasn’t the only one. Papá barely slept at all, he was so tormented by visions of what he’d seen during his vigil at Pasteur Street. He was pale and gaunt, and he never smiled. The change in him frightened me almost as much as the monsters in my dreams.

  Then, about five months later, Mamá got pregnant and gradually, as her belly swelled, Papá’s fog began to lift. He still wasn’t the same Papá as Before—life would never be the same as before July 18, 1994—but when Sarita was born and named in memory of my aunt, right from the beginning she was so noisy and vibrant that she forced everyone to focus on the living. It was as if she were saying, I’m here! Look at ME!

  And things were better, for a while. Until the Crisis happened and life as I knew it changed forever.

  “Dani, what kind of cake is your favorite?”

  I was half-asleep when Sarita asked the question—there was light coming in from behind the curtains, but I was sure it wasn’t yet time to get up for school.

  “Chocolate, of course. What time is it?”

  “Five thirty. Why ‘of course’? I like chocolate, but I also like Mamá’s lemon cake with the poppy seeds.”

  “Sari, it’s five thirty in the morning,” I said, rolling over to look at her. “Why on earth are you waking me up to talk about cake? Go back to sleep!”

  I could barely make out her face in the faint dawn light, but I heard the tremor in her voice.

  “I can’t sleep, Dani. I’m hungry. My tummy keeps making growly noises like a bear.”

  A stabbing sensation in my heart joined the perpetual pang of hunger in my stomach. I lifted up my blanket.

  “Oh, Sarita,” I said. “Come here and have a cuddle.”

  Sari climbed into my bed and I curled myself around her small, warm body. I rubbed her tummy, as if that could make the hunger go away.

  “Things will get better soon, Sari. I know they will.”

  I knew nothing of the sort. Our country was in free fall, like when the roller coaster suddenly goes down a steep incline, leaving your stomach at the top of the slope.

  Shivering, even though it wasn’t cold, I curled closer to Sarita, drawing comfort from her warmth as I crooned one of her favorite nursery rhymes:

  “Arroz con leche, me quiero casar, con una señorita de San Nicolás, que sepa bordar, que sepa tejer, que sepa abrir la puerta para ir a jugar. Con ésta sí, con ésta no, con ésta señorita me caso yo… Rice pudding, I want to marry, a lady from San Nicholas, who knows how to embroider, who knows how to knit, who knows how to open the door to go play. With this one yes, with this one no, with this one I’ll be wed.”

  Sari’s breathing slowed as she fell back to sleep, but I lay awake until it was time to get up for school, thinking about chocolate cake.

  Time passes more slowly in school when you’re hungry. The second hand on the clock seemed to move in slow motion. Sometimes I could have sworn it moved backward. I wish. If only I could have turned back time, I would have moved it backward to Before. Papá would be happy and Tía Sara would still be alive. There wouldn’t be an economic crisis and Gaby would still be in Buenos Aires. We’d meet every day after school and walk home together, stopping for ice cream because we could afford it.

  “Daniela, I asked you a question,” Señora Owen said, breaking into my fantasies of Life, Before.

  “I’m sorry, what was that?”

  “You were obviously miles away,” she said in English. “It’s an expression that means you were daydreaming.”

  Years away would be more accurate.

  “Please, can you use the word probably in a sentence?”

  I had to think for a moment about what the word meant.

  “Um…Probably the Crisis will end soon, but most of the time it doesn’t feel that way.”

  Señora Owen gave me a pitying look.

  “Very good, Daniela. And I’m sure we all know how you feel.”

  Did everyone really know? I wondered. Sofia Mendoza told me that her aunt and uncle lost their home and had to move in with them and they had ten people living in a two-bedroom apartment. We didn’t have that, but was her father too ashamed to take a charity box from a synagogue? Ricardo Levi’s family decided to immigrate to Israel—but did his father lose a business that had been in his family for three generations? I knew that Mili Varela and I both ate the free lunches provided by the Joint Distribution Committee, but did she too go to sleep dreaming of food, and have nightmares of waking up to find her family living in a villa mísera?

  I knew I wasn’t the only one suffering from the Crisis, but why did I still feel so incredibly alone?

  Roberto was waiting for me at the school gate. I got the usual tingles in my stomach when I saw him. Although he smiled when he saw me, he looked uncharacteristically tense, his face pale and drawn. I worried, suddenly, that he was angry with me for running off yesterday without saying good-bye.

  “Buenas tardes, Señor Velázquez,” I called out to the security guard, who sat reading the Página/12 in the hut beside the gate, his antiquated electric fan ruffling the edges of the paper with its faint, asthmatic current of air.

  “Buenas tardes, Señorita Daniela,” he mumbled back without taking his eyes off the page.

  “Do you have to go straight home?” Roberto asked. “Or can you stop at the park for a while?”

  “Sarita is going home with a friend, so I don’t have to be home for at least an hour.”

  “Good. Let’s go to the park.”

  I didn’t tell Roberto that Mamá asked me to come straight home after school to keep an eye on Papá. I didn’t want him to know that Papá was…the way he was. That ever since he lost the business in March, he had gradually withdrawn into himself, as if someone had turned off a light with a dimmer switch. That he spent a lot of the day sleeping, instead of going out and looking for a job.

  I needed my time in the park. Those stolen moments with Roberto were precious to me. At the time, they felt like all I had.

  Once we’d turned the corner and the school building was out of sight, Roberto took my hand in his. It was cold and clammy, despite the warmth of the late November spring sun. Beto was always such a good listener, but as I chatted to him nervously about my day at school, it was clear he was distracted.

  When we reached our bench, I slung my book bag on the grass and sat, expecting Roberto to sit beside me. He put his backpack down, but he remained standing.

  “Dani, I have to tell you something…something important.”

  A knot formed in my stomach. He’s going to break up with me…

  Even before he opened his mouth to tell me the news, I felt the tears coming. Ever since Gaby and her family had made aliyah earlier that year, Beto had been more than my novio; he’d been my closest friend.

  “My father…well, you know how hard things are right now…and well…my family—we’re moving to America. To Miami. My tío Tico…”

  Strangely, my initial reaction was relief—relief that he wasn’t breaking up with me. But then it hit me that he was leaving…

  “No,” I whispered. “Not you, too.”

  Roberto sat and put his arm around me. I turned my face into his shirt and sobbed.

  “But it was only a month ago you said your papá didn’t want to leave…Please don’t go. Don’t leave me.”

  I felt his lips against my hair as he hugged me.

  “Dani, I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want to leave Argentina. It’s my country—my home. My friends are here, you’re here.”

  He grinned. “And River Plate, my favorite football team, is here. How am I supposed to leave? Americans don’t take football nearly as seriously as we do. They don’t even call it football!
Soccer…what is that?”

  I managed to giggle through my tears.

  “Then stay…”

  “I can’t, mi amor,” Beto said, the grin wiped off his face. “You know that. I have to go with my family. My father can’t make a living here anymore.”

  “I hate the Crisis! It’s taking everyone away from me! First Gaby, now you…”

  “I hate it, too, Dani.”

  I lifted my head and met his eyes, and was surprised to see they were glistening with unshed tears. My own tears had left a round, wet patch on his shirt.

  “Sometimes I wonder if there will be anyone left here besides me,” I sniffed. “It feels like everyone I love is leaving.”

  Roberto reached into his backpack and handed me a tissue. We sat under the tree where we held hands for the first time, where he kissed me for the first time. So many firsts. And soon…lasts.

  “When…when will you go?” I asked.

  “In December…when school ends.”

  So soon…

  “I’ll miss you, Dani. So much it hurts.”

  “What day do you leave?”

  “The twenty-sixth.”

  I counted the days in my head. Thirty-six more days together and then…loneliness. Not even those moments in the park with Roberto to look forward to, those small oases of happiness in my desert of grim reality.

  “I bet the girls in Miami are really pretty…blond and thin like in all the TV shows.”

  He hugged me closer.

  “I’ll be too busy missing you to notice.”

  I wanted so much to believe him.

  We sat there holding each other for a little while longer before I looked at my watch and realized I had to get home.

  Hand in hand, we walked in the warm sun down the noisy sidewalks of Avenida Corrientes. On the corner of Serrano, a cartonero was rummaging through the garbage, stirring up the sickly sweet smell of rot as he looked for recyclables to sell, the trailer attached to his bicycle halffilled with cardboard and white computer paper.

  “It’s strange to see a cartonero out in the daytime,” I said. “Usually it’s nighttime before all the garbage pickers come out.”

  “Maybe he’s trying to get ahead,” Beto said as we turned to walk in the leafy shade of a quieter side street. “There are more cartoneros than ever because of the Crisis. I don’t know how any of them can make a living.”

  At least they’re trying, I thought.

  “That’s one thing about Buenos Aires I won’t miss,” Roberto said. “Seeing people picking through the rubbish every day.”

  “What, you don’t think there are poor people in America? You think that everyone there is rich and happy?”

  I knew I sounded bitter and angry, but I couldn’t stop the words from leaving my mouth.

  Beto looked at me reproachfully.

  “Of course not, Dani. You know me better than that.”

  I did. I just didn’t want him to escape and leave me behind.

  “I’m sorry, Beto. I just…”

  “It’s okay, Dani. I know.”

  We walked together down the cobbled street, holding hands, until we got to my building.

  “See you tomorrow, Dani,” Roberto said, giving my palm a gentle squeeze. I wouldn’t let him kiss me in front of our building since Papá started spending his days moping at home, in case my father happened to look out the window. But Beto’s brown eyes gave my face a final caress before he turned away.

  I watched him walk down the street until he turned the corner, postponing the moment when I had to open the door to our apartment. But then he was gone and I had no more excuses not to go inside. There were letters in the mailbox downstairs—my first clue about Papá’s mood. He obviously hadn’t made it out of the apartment. It looked like a Morose Papá Day.

  When I looked through the letters, I felt pretty morose myself. Bills. All bills. Well, except for another letter from America, from Tío Jacobo. I was tempted to rip it open and read it, but I was afraid that could be tinder to ignite my father’s temper. We never knew what would set him off. So I tucked it back in among the bills and slowly climbed the stairs to our apartment.

  All was quiet when I opened the door. I assumed Papá was asleep, either in the chair in the living room or in his bedroom, so I tiptoed into the kitchen and tried not to make too much noise as I took out my books and started my homework.

  I wrote my history essay and started on my algebra homework, but I found the word problems really confusing, even when my stomach wasn’t growling from hunger and my calculations of the speed traveled by buses A and B weren’t constantly being interrupted by the thought that Beto was leaving. Before, I could have asked Papá to help me, but not now…

  Halfway through I became completely stuck, so I gave up and started to peel potatoes for dinner. My mother was always so tired after work. It was so unfair that when Papá worked, Mamá always had dinner ready for him when he got home, but now that Mamá was working and Papá wasn’t, he didn’t do the same thing for her.

  Mamá and Sarita came home just as I was finishing the potatoes. As usual, my seven-year-old sister bounced through the door, babbling away as if there weren’t a sleeping ogre of a father nearby that I’d been tiptoeing around, trying not to wake.

  “Dani, guess what! That mean boy in my class I’ve been telling you about is moving to Israel, so he won’t be here anymore to pull my hair!”

  “Shhh! You’ll wake Papá!”

  Mamá frowned. “He’s still asleep?”

  I nodded. “He’s been asleep since I got home.”

  Mamá sighed.

  “So, Dani, aren’t you glad that Franco is moving? I am, because he’s such a big meany and nobody likes him. Well, I mean, some people do but not me or Alicia or Rachel or Rafaela.”

  When Mamá was pregnant with my little sister, she used to complain how the baby was never still, and nothing has changed since. As Sari spoke, she hopped from one foot to the other, rattling the clean breakfast dishes that I left drying on the rack that morning before I went to school. I couldn’t believe my father could sleep through all the noise.

  Unfortunately, he couldn’t.

  “Sarita!” he bellowed from the bedroom. “Will you never be quiet? Stop that infernal chattering.”

  My sister jumped, her blue eyes huge and wide, as she realized she’d woken the sleeping monster. I glanced over at Mamá; she looked pained and tired.

  “Come, Sari,” I said. “Let’s go read a story in our room.”

  Mamá mouthed a silent “thank you” and headed toward the bedroom to try to placate Papá.

  Sarita cuddled up to me as we sat on her bed. She clutched her Baba, a ragged scrap of the blanket she was given as an infant, and stroked the edge of it between her thumb and forefinger.

  “I wish Papá would move to Israel with the mean boy,” she said.

  “Shh! You shouldn’t say that!”

  “Why not? He’s mean, too. He always yells at us. And he never smiles.”

  I realized that being so much younger, Sarita didn’t have the treasure chest of memories I had of the way Papá was Before. She didn’t remember how he used to throw me up in the air and catch me, laughing and smiling; when he used to take us to the clothing store and show us off to the people who worked and shopped there; how he’d let me sit in the big leather chair behind his desk and pretend that I was the one in charge. As far as Sarita was concerned, Papá had always been the way he was: angry, unpredictable, and bitter. My heart twisted in my chest to think that this was the only father she remembered.

  “He wasn’t always like this,” I told her. “Don’t you remember four years ago, before everything got terrible, how we went on vacation to Mar del Plata for a week, and they had a sand castle building competition for kids, and Papá helped us build the biggest and best sand castle ever?”

  Sarita wrinkled her nose and I saw a flicker of memory in her eyes. “You mean the one that looked like a fairy princess lived there? And
I helped get the shells and the seaweed to decorate it?”

  “That’s the one. And remember how Papá always got us an ice cream, even though Mamá said it would spoil our appetite for dinner, because he said that ice cream belonged with the beach like he belonged with Mamá?”

  Sarita giggled. “And then we’d have to close our eyes because they’d make kissy-face and it was yucky.”

  I smiled. “That’s right. So you see, Sari, Papá wasn’t always the way he is now. It’s just…the Crisis. It changed him.”

  “I hate the Crisis,” Sarita said, serious suddenly. “And I hate our Now Papá. I wish I could live here with just you and Mamá.”

  I can’t deny that there were times I wished for the same thing, but the only way that would happen was if my parents got divorced, which I would have hated, or if Papá died, which I would have hated even more.

  “Hush, Sari. Remember, it says in the Ten Commandments that you should honor your father and mother.”

  “Even if your father is mean and shouts at you all the time?”

  “Yes, Sari…even then.”

  “Why? Why do I have to honor him if he’s mean to me? It’s not fair!”

  I didn’t know how to answer her—I hadn’t had any expectation of fairness ever since that birthday morning in 1994 when everything changed because of a terrorist’s bomb.

  Because it wasn’t fair that Tía Sara and my baby cousin died, or any of the other people. It wasn’t fair that my best friend Gaby and her family moved to Israel, or that my boyfriend Roberto was moving to America. It wasn’t fair that I was going to be stuck in Argentina with my moody father and my worried mother. It wasn’t fair that my little sister was looking up at me expectantly with her huge blue eyes, waiting for me to reassure her that everything would be okay and that life was always fair in the end. Because even though she was just a little kid, I couldn’t lie to her about something that important.

  “I guess…some things aren’t fair. They just…are.”

  Sarita’s lower lip trembled and she hid her face in my shoulder.

  “I don’t like it, Dani.”