The Coconut Latitudes: Secrets, Storms, and Survival in the Caribbean

by Rita M. Gardner

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Nightmare on King Street

  Denise and Tom are waiting to pick me up at the Orlando airport after my Christmas visit to Miches, my first time home in a year and a half. As I’d suspected, Daddy had waved away the American military helicopters that landed at Cocoloco to rescue them. Mama says he told them to go to hell. I close my eyes and hear Daddy again: “Dammit, we made it through the Trujillo years, and what is an old American farmer anyway to all these crazy people who want to take over the country? Let them fight. I make do; I always do.” Even now, back in Florida, I want to scream at Mama, whose hair is now entirely white, What about you? What do you think or feel? Look at you—you’re half-dead. But of course I’d never say that to her. When I’m in Miches it’s like an old lock gets clamped over my mouth, making it impossible to speak.

  “Guess what?” Denise yells, jumping up and down and thrusting her left hand in my face. I will myself to come back to the present. I’m in Florida again, back to life with the Henrys, with Denise. I pull my baggage off the carousel.

  “C’mon, guess!” She doesn’t wait for an answer and does a little pirouette that almost knocks my suitcase to the ground. “We got married on Christmas and moved to Rockridge yesterday! We just got an apartment—and the best news of all is, you’re moving in with us!” She shoves her finger at me so I can see the wedding band. Tom grins too and displays a matching flash of gold.

  “What?” I stutter. I can’t believe my ears, my eyes. I swallow the lump that is stuck in my throat.

  Tom picks up my suitcases. “As a matter of fact”—he pauses like an actor who’s been rehearsing his speech for dramatic effect—“that’s where we’re headed tonight. We already moved most of our things, plus your stuff too. You’ll get to spend your first night back in our new apartment. It’s not far from the college.”

  They both rattle on and I move my feet slowly, like a zombie. I want to run back onto the tarmac and get on a plane, as if it’s that easy; as if I have somewhere else to go. Denise has obviously been planning this for months, but has saved the surprise for now. I expect she’s calculated that what I pay her parents will just as easily take care of a portion of the rent for their new apartment. Now she has everything she’s wanted—her own place, Tom, and me.

  “HONEY, WE’RE HOME!” Tom cackles and lifts Denise up in the air. She laughs in the cold light of the fluorescent sign that indicates we have arrived at the King Street Apartments—Affordable Living on the Space Coast. No Leases Required. Pets OK. It’s 1:30 a.m. The two-bedroom apartment is on the second floor in a complex of barrack-like structures painted gray with black trim. Cigarette butts litter the stairwell, where a swarm of insects flutter around a light. The screen door has holes in it big enough to let a bat fly through. Denise says the landlord will replace it this week. My room has barely enough space for a twin bed and the old dresser I used at the Henrys. A small window looks across a narrow alley to an identical building beyond. I try to open it but the mildewed metal frame is stuck. It’s larger than my room in Miches but feels like a jail cell.

  As the days pass, Denise takes control of everything. Tom goes to work and then sprawls on the couch watching television until dinnertime. Denise and I go to school together, get groceries together, do our laundry together. The couple doesn’t act like any newlyweds I’ve read about or seen in the movies. They don’t laugh much and hardly talk to each other. I imagine they are more like some old couples I see in the Sears coffee shop at break time, staring into their cups as if there’s nothing left to say.

  It wouldn’t have been like that with Luís, not that strange dead space between two people. I write him a farewell letter. I don’t know his address so I mail it to Zuleica, who has promised to give it to him the next time he’s in Miches. I hope this finds you well, I start, then cross it out and just say, I hope this finds you. I tell him I’ll never forget him, ever, but that my fate is sealed. That sounds too dramatic so I cross that line out then scratch it in again. It’s true. I write down my new address and say if this ever gets to you, write me one last time?

  A letter from Luís arrives a month later, the handwriting filling up all the edges of the paper with a fierce slant forward, like he’s leaning into a storm. It turns out he traveled to Miches the day after I flew back to Florida. He’s heartbroken, angry at himself for not getting to Miches sooner. I had a premonition, he writes. And now you’re gone.

  And that’s the end. Luís is only an idea now, not real. Just a fading photo and some letters. Even if I were living back at home, I couldn’t date him without Daddy kicking me out of the house. And if I was a grownup, living in the capital, Daddy would still disown me if I married a Dominican. So there’s no point in even thinking about Luís anymore. Instead, I lie in bed at night and think about escaping this prison, but I can’t conjure up any kind of a plan. I’m just stuck here. I’m like one of those crabs we used to hunt—a flashlight is blinding me, and I’m waving my pincers but there’s no place to hide from the cleaver that will crack me open.

  Denise cooks the meals and doesn’t want anyone in the kitchen with her, which makes sense because two people don’t fit in the L-shaped cubbyhole. After meals I clean up. After dinner I take the bus to my Sears job, and Tom picks me up. I say I’ll ride the bus home, but he says, no, that’s dangerous, I’ll get you. He smokes Marlboro cigarettes and turns up the country music for the fifteen-minute ride back to the apartment.

  One morning I wake up early and panic rips through me like a lightning bolt. I don’t know why, maybe a bad dream that I can’t remember. I feel like the walls are pressing in, suffocating me. I brush my teeth and grab my books. I can smell coffee brewing and it makes me want to throw up. Denise is at the stove. I announce I don’t want breakfast and that I’ll take the bus to school. I tell her I’m going to have a snack with a girl who is also in my first class of the day, Business 101. I have no such plans. The morning class is one of the few I don’t share with Denise, so I invent my new friend. Denise looks at me with a frown and then, without warning, throws the frying pan, eggs and all, right at me. The pan falls short of its mark, clanging to the floor, my shirt dripping runny scrambled eggs.

  Tom opens the bathroom door, wiping off shaving cream. “What the hell, Dee?” I just stand there, as if I’ve done something terrible to cause her outburst.

  “It was an accident.” Denise’s eyes dare me with a flash of green. Tom drops to the floor with his towel to help clean up the mess. He hasn’t noticed my soggy clothing. I retreat to my room and shut the door. I rinse out my soiled blouse when Tom finishes shaving, then aim for the door, my mouth dry. Denise is back in the kitchen, cooking up another batch of eggs. She doesn’t look up. Tom gives me a puzzled glance and wonders out loud why I’m not eating.

  “She’s meeting a friend at school.” Denise drags out the word friend as if it’s something dirty.

  The bus drops me off near campus and I can’t shake the knot in my stomach. Why don’t I speak up for myself? Why am I so afraid of Denise? What’s the worst she can do—kick me out? I can’t think about that right now. I wouldn’t know where to go or what to do. But she won’t do that anyway. She needs my rent money. Besides, I’m supposed to be grateful for the roof over my head. She’s doing me a big favor. My thoughts fuzz up and turn gray and mushy and I stop trying to sort it all out.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Resurrection

  On a rainy afternoon I’m sprawled across my bed, studying, when I hear the telephone in the living room. It won’t be for me, so I ignore it, but it doesn’t stop ringing. In the bathroom, the shower shudders to full blast and I realize Denise can’t hear the phone either, so I grab a piece of paper to take down a message. An operator is asking for me, and then I hear a woman’s voice, faint and far away. It sounds almost like Mama but I’m not sure it is her because we’ve never spoken on a telephone. My heart skids and I feel the blood rush from my face. I can only imagine something terrible
has happened to Daddy; any other news would arrive by letter.

  “Mama?” I squawk, forcing myself to speak.

  “Rita, Rita, is that you?”

  “Yes, I’m here. Is it Daddy—what’s the matter?”

  Her voice fades in and out, and I miss some words. I make out something like Daddy’s all right, that’s not why she’s calling. Then the phone spits static and I shout, “I can’t hear you, what did you say?”

  The static evaporates and her voice is clear but breathless and shaky. It’s about Berta. They got a letter from Berta. She’s alive. I’m too numb to make sense of the words. I hear sounds entering my ear, spinning through my head, and Mama’s saying, “Can you hear me? Rita?”

  I nod as if she can see me.

  “Darling, did you hear what I said?” I choke out a strangled yes. I don’t know what to say; I’m not capable of forming a complete sentence. Berta?

  “Is she—is she okay?”

  Mama’s voice falters and I can hear now that she’s crying. “She’s—she’s fine.” Mama’s voice is still wobbly but maybe it’s the phone line. I try to concentrate on the crackling phone line. Mama’s saying she’s written me a letter so I’ll get more details soon. Berta?

  “Where is she?” I ask, as if that’s important to know instead of why Berta has hidden from us for so many years. All of a sudden I’m hot, boiling angry when I know I should be happy, ecstatic, thrilled.

  “Arizona, she’s someplace in Arizona.” Mama says Berta’s letter doesn’t give a lot of details. We’ll all know more soon, and we should just be thankful. It’s a miracle.

  “Yes,” I say, as my voice quivers. “I just can’t believe it.”

  “I know. It’s been quite a shock.”

  “How’s Daddy?”

  “He—it’s been quite a shock,” Mama repeats. The phone line crackles again and Mama says, “Well, I just wanted to call you before you got my letter—” The line is dead and I’m paralyzed, holding the phone, until the automated voice tells me to hang up and I do.

  Denise emerges with a towel wrapped around her head. “Was that for me?” I shake my head no, and she says what’s wrong, and I say I have wonderful news, then I burst out crying and stumble to my room and fling myself across the bed. I hear her ask Tom what’s that all about, and he says he has no idea. The winter light fades and dulls the room into gray inside and out. The rain has slowed to a drizzle and droplets course slowly down the dirty window glass. I watch one drop fill up like a tick gorged on blood, getting fatter until it can’t hold itself together and spills into a trail. Thoughts pour through my head. Confusion and anger wrestle with something like relief. I’m supposed to be happy. Why don’t I feel happy? I lie there, unable to move, and let the battle rage in my head as my body shivers. Berta is alive. I mouth the word, so strange on my tongue. Alive. Not dead, not a body plucked out of the surf. Alive. How many years? Does it matter how many when it’s a lifetime, when everything has changed forever?

  I stare at the raindrops. It is anticlimactic, really, this news. She is already dead, has been dead to Daddy, to Mama, to me for weeks, months, and years, so long that it’s all we know. Her being alive after all is stranger than believing she is dead. I close my burning eyes and can see the thin airmail envelope, the kind that weighs almost nothing except for the words inside. It wings out over the Arizona desert and flies east and south, dipping over the Caribbean. I imagine Mama’s face when the letter drifts into our village mailbox thousands of miles away, arriving as suddenly as Berta vanished. I see Mama’s trembling fingers pressing on that familiar handwriting, so much like Mama’s own writing style, each letter rounded and small, yet easy to read. I can imagine her crying out, how maybe she fell to the ground or just stood stock still as if a single movement could make the letter disappear back into thin air.

  And Daddy, what about him? After all, he disowned Berta when she was alive, called her those horrible names, erased her from his whole being like she’d never been born. If he didn’t want her to exist when she was alive, what is he thinking now? A timid knock on the door interrupts my thoughts. Dinner’s ready. I don’t answer. Minutes pass, then Denise rattles the doorknob.

  “You eating?” She actually sounds concerned. I sit up and the room spins. I squint my swollen eyes, not sure what I’m going to say or do. “It’s my sister. She’s alive.”

  “Sister? What sister?”

  I forgot—I never told Denise. When we were first roommates, she assumed I was an only child, so I never told her anything different—much easier that way. The room is silent except for the pot of chili bubbling on the stove. Tom sits at the dinette table fiddling with the glass salt and pepper shakers. Click, click. Click, click.

  Finally I explain what I know and don’t know in between spoonfuls of chili. Denise has real tears in her eyes, and I feel the anger seep out of me until I’m just dead tired and can’t think or talk anymore. Mama’s letter arrives the next week. I was hoping she’d enclose Berta’s letter but she doesn’t. I expect she couldn’t let it go, had to keep it, her only evidence that the long nightmare is really over. Berta is in a small town in Arizona, working at a roadside diner. A family she met at the restaurant has taken her in. From what, I don’t know. There is an address; I can write her. She didn’t provide a telephone number. Mama says that it might be best if we don’t press her. Just be thankful she’s reaching out, once again, to her family.

  Dear Berta, I start, then stare at the blank page. How are you? It’s all wrong, I can’t find the words. I want to know everything—all the missing parts of her life, so I can fill up the gaping holes in my own. As if getting all the facts is critically important to my survival. A week passes before I manage to write something sanitary, safe, superficial. I don’t know this stranger; I don’t know that she even wants to hear from me. If she did, she would have written a long time ago.

  My words are careful, light. Don’t want to scare her away again. My words are timid, whispering over a canyon of missing years. I don’t dare look down in the depths below, where emotion cuts its way through cliffs and drowns everything in its path. I want my pen to dig so hard it tears the paper with the real questions: Why did you leave your baby, your helpless baby? Why did you abandon us too? But I don’t even say, not yet, how much I’ve missed her. Those words don’t even sound true to me. I long ago buried that sentiment in the quicksand inside. I write it would be nice to see her sometime, if she’d like that.

  She writes back. She lives with a family who rescued her (she still doesn’t say from what), and she’s waitressing at a Bob’s Big Boy. She encloses a postcard of a roadside diner that sprouts from the desert highway with a towering sculpture of a fat child in red-and-white-checkered apron and pompadour hairstyle. The sculpture is smiling but he looks sinister to me. The landscape surrounding the diner is brown and dusty except for the cactus growing under the statue. Berta sends me her telephone number. When I hear her voice the first time we just weep together until she says I love you and I say I love you, and that’s almost too much emotion to handle so we hang up.

  Slowly I learn little bits about her life. She’s taking classes at night so she can finish high school. But we can only talk about today, not yesterday. It feels like I’m in Daddy’s boat on one of our trips to the finca when my job was to watch the surface of the water ahead. A slight change in color can be the difference between deep water and a hidden reef that can rip the bottom out of a skiff. Berta’s past is like a reef, something to avoid. Sometimes I can’t see the danger until I hear her voice turning sharp, then I steer off into safer territory or else she’ll hang up. She wants to see me and Mama, but not Daddy, not yet. After a flurry of letters and telephone calls, a reunion is set up in Miami for April. Mama will fly in from Santo Domingo, I’ll take the Greyhound. Aunt Betty is coming down from New York too, and the four of us will stay in a hotel near the airport.

  THE BUS RUMBLES INTO the Miami station and I hail a cab like a grownup and give th
e driver the hotel address. Aunt Betty and Mama are already there. Mama has gotten a perm and her white hair is all fluffy. She trembles when we hug. Neither one of us can cry; we’re too nervous. By the time Berta’s plane lands, we’re jittery with adrenaline. Mama wipes her eyes and holds on to her sister’s arm so hard I can see the red indents on my aunt’s pale wrist. We crowd against the huge glass windows as passengers make their procession across the tarmac and into the terminal. Is that her? Is that her?

  I don’t know if I’m asking it out loud or not but all of a sudden there she is, unmistakably Berta, tall and blonde, walking gingerly. Mama starts moaning and Aunt Betty dispenses Kleenex like a nurse, murmuring, “It’s all right, Emily, it’s all right.”

  Mama is shaking so hard I hold on to her and I’m trembling too. Then Berta is right here, close enough to touch. She’s wearing a blue shirtwaist dress, her hair curled up at the ends in a wide flip. It’s the first time I’ve seen her in makeup, eyebrows plucked and penciled and black eyeliner making her blue eyes even brighter. She looks pretty, but hard and wary at the same time. Her mouth twitches as if she’s trying to speak but can’t find words.

  We all hug and then Aunt Betty pulls me back so Mama can have her to herself for a minute. She touches Berta’s face, learning it again like a blind person using Braille, exploring to be sure everything is still where it needs to be. Berta’s eyes are red now. I don’t know what to say or do, so we just stare at each other until I look away or she does. Berta doesn’t seem real, even though I can smell her hair and her perspiration. I reach out to hold her hand, which is warm and sweaty but I don’t care. We spend two strange days full of awkward silences. I’m so hungry to attach again to the sister who left us all behind, to find something I can hold on to. But this is a new person, all prickly and protective like one of the cacti in the Arizona postcards. There isn’t enough time to learn where to find the soft places that must still be there behind the armor.