Side Chick Nation

by Aya De León

  But then the elevator dinged, and a trio of middle aged white women tourists stepped out. She recognized them from the lunch talk.

  “Oh Mr. Evanston,” they cooed.

  Marisol shrugged. “I really should get to bed,” she said. “I’m gonna take that raincheck.”

  And then she walked away from him, and slipped into the elevator. One minute he had his hand on her back. The next minute, his hand hovered alone in space.

  She smiled and waved at him from the elevator as she stabbed the door close button. He stood helplessly in the knot of tourists, his rage shimmering beneath the surface of his jovial hotel owner’s smile.

  Up on her floor, she practically ran to her room and locked the door. She put the security latch on, grateful that an owner with a key card couldn’t gain access.

  Marisol dug in the bottom of her suitcase for the bag of cash and bonds. Not that it would have gone anywhere, but she had to check. She lay down on the bed, curling her body around the bag, as if she needed it for comfort.

  I really am too old for this, Marisol thought. Between the safecracking and getting caught in the grate, and then the anxiety of her encounter with Evanston, her adrenaline had spiked several times and was now crashing. One moment she was breathing a sigh of relief, and the next she was out cold asleep with all the lights on.

  * * *

  In the dream, it was Davis Evanston who crept into the hotel room. The security latch did nothing to keep him out.

  He reached for the bag of cash and bonds, and the two of them tussled on the bed. Then the dream morphed into a version of a recurring nightmare she’d had for many years. Her uncle’s cramped Lower East Side apartment. A teenage Marisol in one twin bed, and her sister in another twin across the room. Marisol not asleep anymore. Never asleep after she heard her uncle come home. The beige wallpaper and suffocating brown marble carpet. Dank. Despite her scrubbing with the ninety-nine cent store’s all-purpose cleaner, she could never remove the smell of mildew and bad plumbing.

  Eventually at night, her exhaustion would eclipse her will to stay awake. Then the terror at the sound of the front door opening. She felt an overwhelming desperation to run, to hide under the bed, to climb out onto the fire escape before he came into the room. But then he’d find Cristina and she was too little. Her sister couldn’t handle it. In the dream, there was always the smell and the feeling of her body crushed under a familiar, hated heaviness. She had never screamed in all the years she’d lived in that apartment, but somehow now, she was able to find her voice.

  She screamed herself awake, only to find the heaviness was real. Pressure on her chest. Someone was on top of her. Through her panic, she managed to recognize her surroundings as the bright hotel room. Was it Evanston? How had he gotten in?

  She reached to claw at him and felt only the sharp edges of cash and bond bricks through the cloth of a sack.

  Marisol gasped and shook the bag of loot off her chest.

  She sat up, her heart banging hard against her ribs.

  Scrambling for her phone, she called her boyfriend Raul in New York. She shuddered at the memories of the dream as his phone rang and rang. It was four AM, and he was undoubtedly asleep, his ringer probably off. She called Eva, her colleague and sometimes therapist. No luck there, either.

  So Marisol sat up, watching television, numb with fear and vigilant. Nobody tried to break in, but Marisol kept all the lights on and didn’t even try to sleep.

  Later that morning, Marisol checked out. She didn’t see Evanston as she wheeled her luggage out of his hotel, full of his cash and bonds.

  When she got back to her cousin’s house, Zara said that Nidia was at work.

  Marisol meant to wait up for her, but she fell asleep on the couch.

  * * *

  She woke up that afternoon to hear Nidia walking in the door.

  “Qué pasó?” her cousin asked.

  Marisol sat up and stretched. “We need to get to a bank,” she said.

  Nidia grinned, and the two of them headed to the nearest one. They set up an account, got a cell plan for Nidia, and tossed the burner phones.

  It would raise red flags if they deposited the money all at once. So Marisol transferred enough money from her personal account to cover the initial payment to get the house out of foreclosure. She would transfer enough each month to cover the mortgage payments. And she’d take the cash to New York to launder it.

  Back at the house, Nidia and Zara cried. They’d get to keep their home, the house their grandparents had so painstakingly saved to purchase. And if Marisol helped Julio get a job in New York, they’d be okay.

  * * *

  Later, Nidia walked Marisol to the rented green coupe. “Is there a safe somewhere in San Juan with seventy-five billion in it? Maybe your friend could crack that next? Solve the rest of the problems in Puerto Rico?”

  Marisol sighed. “Ay, nena. That money isn’t in Puerto Rico. It’s all in the States. I see it walk by every day in New York.”

  “On Wall Street?”

  “All over Manhattan.”

  “Goddamn colonization,” Nidia said. “That’s our money. We fucking worked for that money. For over a hundred years.”

  “They want us to pay back what they stole from us,” Marisol said. “Keep us working to put money in their pocket for another hundred years.”

  “I just knew we were gonna lose the house,” Nidia said, shaking her head. “Tell your friend I don’t know how to thank her.”

  Marisol put her arm around Nidia. “I’ll make sure she gets the message.”

  “My mom always said she regretted not putting her foot down about you girls staying in Puerto Rico,” Nidia said.

  “What do you mean?” Marisol asked.

  “When our uncle came for the funeral and sort of claimed the two of you,” Nidia said. “He and his wife apparently couldn’t have children. He said they were the obvious ones to take you. My mom objected, but he boasted about what a good life you would have in the US. That maybe if we lived in the capital—in San Juan—he wouldn’t insist, because your English was so good. You spoke without an accent. In San Juan you could find opportunities. But my mother would be ruining your prospects if she kept you in a small jibaro town like Las Palmas when he could offer you Manhattan.”

  Marisol was too stunned to speak. She might have stayed in Puerto Rico? With Nidia’s mom? Everything might have been different?

  “And he was right, no?” Nidia said. “You’ve made a big success of yourself. You run a clinic. Your sister is a doctor. We read about your clinic’s big event. You’re hanging out with movie stars like Delia Borbón.”

  Marisol had faltered then. Unable to find words for the loss that she hadn’t even imagined before. A different path. A different life. Even though her aunt hadn’t been able to rescue her, it choked her up to know that she had tried.

  Marisol bit back the tears and waved away Nidia’s words. “It’s really not that glamorous,” she said. “You’ll have to come visit one of these days and see.”

  * * *

  Before Marisol left Puerto Rico, she made one last stop.

  In spite of the fact that the cemetery’s business had gone bankrupt, the actual graveyard hadn’t changed much. The building was still whitewashed wood to match the white marble statue of La Virgen María, arms open in welcome.

  As Marisol pulled up to the parking lot, she recalled the funeral, imagined her stoic little eleven-year-old self, staying strong for her sister. Her feet knew the way back to the graveyard.

  She followed the narrow stone path, past the banyan, a huge, green-leafed tree with a thick trunk and roots that cascaded down from the branches. Rust peeked through the cracking black paint on the cemetery’s wrought iron fence. Marisol opened the gate and let her feet guide her to the northeast edge. She had to pick her way carefully, afraid of stepping on other graves in the overgrowth. The small cemetery was empty of people, except for marble and stone figures of angels and Jesus and
Mary, among the crosses and other saints on the headstones and tombs.

  Finally, she arrived at her family gravesite. Grass, fallen leaves, moss, and dirt covered many of the headstones; some were so old or dirty, she couldn’t read the names, the dates, the amada esposa, querida madre.

  Yet two headstones she knew by heart. “I miss you, Mami,” she said to the stone. “I love you. You, too, Abuelita.”

  She ran her fingers along the indented letters in her mother’s name, dislodging some of the dirt. “You know, things got really bad after you guys died.” She let out a sudden whoop and chuckle. Always that inappropriate laughter. “It was a lousy thing to do, you know, die? Leave us with your crazy-ass brother.” She still couldn’t bring herself to say his name. “Well, he has a grave of his own, now,” she said.

  “Then things got a little better,” she said. “A little better for me. A lot better for Cristina.”

  Marisol had talked to her mother before, believed her mother was watching over her. But now, sitting at the graveside, she wanted to tell it all again. And she found herself whispering this next part, somehow feeling a need to be discreet in the empty graveyard, with faces of Jesus and angels and Marías and Santos watching her: “I started doing sex work, tú sabes? I had to do something to support Cristina,” she said, as if to justify herself in the eyes of the icons. “You’d be proud of her. She graduated college, and now she’s studying to be a doctor in Cuba. I miss her a lot,” Marisol said. “I miss all of you.”

  She picked up a leaf and twirled it in her fingers. “You might be proud of me, too. I started a clinic. Named it after you, Mami. The María de le Vega clinic. We’re doing big things in the old neighborhood. Cristina’s gonna work for us when she gets back. And remember that hotel in Manhattan, La Fleur? I had a benefit there. I was the one in charge, Mami.” Marisol became even more animated when she recalled the presence of the movie star. “Even Delia Borbón came to my fundraiser. She was wearing this wild—”

  And then she stopped suddenly. Mami wouldn’t even know who Delia Borbón was. Her mother was dead before the Diva became famous. Mami’s death had ruined even this. Her mother had missed everything.

  Utterly devastated by this seemingly insignificant piece of chronology, Marisol’s entire body was suddenly siezed with grief. It pressed the breath out of her, sucked the strength from the muscles in her thighs and core. She collapsed onto the ground and sobbed.

  At first only wails, then finally she managed to exhale words. “How could you leave me?” she cried in Spanish, the staccato sobs in counterpoint to the leaden weight of the grief in her limbs. Her breath came in ragged spasms, her face pressed against red dirt, leaves tangling in her hair.

  With a surge of rage, she beat on the ground with a fist. “Noooo!” she shrieked into the earth. “Don’t leave me with him! How could you?” Somehow in her mind, it was as if her uncle had dragged them away, her and Cristina, as if her mother and grandmother had permitted it by dying. Had cosigned it, sentenced them to a Lower East Side bedroom cell for two girls.

  Marisol screamed into dirt, into earth, into the past. Her body thrashed among the fallen leaves. Lizards scurried past her feet, and birds cawed overhead. Finally, her face against the warm red clay dirt, she cried herself to sleep.

  * * *

  The sun was almost setting when she awoke an hour later. Completely disoriented, her neck and shoulder stiff, her body damp on the side that had been on the ground. She sat up, dazed, breathing the moist air; she expected to be in her grandmother’s house, under a mosquito net with Cristina, but no. Memory returned. The graveyard. Just a visit. She was grown now.

  A mosquito buzzed by her ear. Must have been what woke her. She scratched a spot on her earlobe that itched and burned. She sat up and blinked at the headstones in the fading light.

  Suddenly, Marisol laughed bitterly. “It was really shitty of both of you to go and die, you know?” She stood up and pulled a few leaves out of her hair. “But I just might forgive you.”

  She kissed her finger and placed it on her mother’s headstone, then picked her way back out through the bankrupt cemetery.

  * * *

  After Marisol had returned to New York, she sent an attorney to sue for an injunction against Puerto Cyclo from digging up the graves, and furthermore, challenged the legality of paying with stock options instead of cash, particularly since the contract promised that it would be a cash equivalent, and it hadn’t been. The court case was going to take several years, but until it was decided, the graves would be safe.

  Chapter 7

  Zavier invited Dulce to come with him to the capital. She was excited to go, as she hadn’t been there since she was a kid. But on the way, they couldn’t agree about temperature controls: she liked A/C and he liked fresh air, so they rode down the highway with the windows open and the air conditioning running full blast. With the blowing air, it was hard to talk, so he played the radio. Mostly merengue, salsa, and the occasional Latin rap.

  When they finally parked the car, she asked out of nowhere: “Are you married?”

  He busted out laughing. “Excuse me?”

  “I had to ask,” she said. “I mean it’s our second date, and I didn’t want to find myself in some kind of don’t ask don’t tell situation.”

  “Not married,” he said. “Not cohabitating with anyone. No girlfriend. Haven’t been on a date in a while. Big crush on Delia Borbón. I do have a picture of her on the inside of my closet door. The one from that action movie she did back in the day where she played the journalist. That’s about all I got.”

  Dulce laughed. Everybody knew that iconic pose.

  The two of them stepped out of the car.

  “How about you?” he asked. “No boyfriend?”

  “I was seeing someone in Miami,” she said. “But that’s over. It’s part of why I left.”

  She didn’t say, the other part was that he was trying to kill me.

  “Okay,” he said. “Looks like we’re just two single people out here on a date.”

  She hooked her hand through his arm. “Two single people.”

  * * *

  They went sightseeing around the capital like tourists. They held hands and ate ice cream. A woman came by selling flowers and he gave Dulce a bright bouquet. He was handsome, and so sweet. It was obvious that he really liked her. But it felt like something was missing. Not exactly sex. When he stood pressed close to her in a crowd, she could tell that he was turned on.

  “When are you coming back to New York?” he asked. “Today can’t be our last time seeing each other.”

  What could she tell him? New York still wasn’t safe? Her pimp was dead, but his brother might still be looking for her?

  “I don’t really know,” she said. “When are you coming back to Santo Domingo?”

  “If you’re not coming back to New York,” he said. “I’ll find a reason.”

  On the one hand, she was excited to see him again. But at some point he’d ask her more about her past, and what would she tell him? In Miami she’d been a mistress? In New York she’d had a pimp?

  “So tell me about yourself,” she said. “You’re what? Twenty-two, but already a serious journalist?”

  “I was in college, and I wrote a piece that got in the NYT ‘Lives’ column. Then they sort of recruited me. You know, ‘we got all these old white guys. Let’s have this young brown guy.’ So they gave me an internship. Unpaid, of course. So I did that, plus school full time, and worked graveyard at a printing company.”

  “When did you sleep?”

  “On the train,” he said. “Besides, sleep is overrated.”

  “No,” Dulce said. “Sleep is wonderful. It’s good for you, too.”

  “I’d like to sleep with you,” he said.

  Dulce raised her eyebrows.

  Zavier shook his head. “That came out wrong,” he said. “I don’t mean sex. I mean sleep. There’s something about you that makes me feel . . . I don’t know. Peacef
ul? Connected?”

  “You trying to say I’m putting you to sleep?” Dulce asked.

  “Not at all,” Zavier said. “Being with you makes me feel calm inside. And I guess it shows me that maybe I need more sleep than I thought. Like how I just knocked out in the water. I coulda drowned, but I don’t know. I just trusted you. My body was like . . . ahhh . . . I’m safe . . .”

  “You make me sound like somebody’s grandma,” Dulce said. “Putting them down for a nap or something.”

  “No, Dulce,” he said, leaning toward her. “You’re not like anybody’s grandma. More like somebody to come home to.”

  He was holding her hand now, leaning toward her. His eyes were locked on hers, like he was trying to see into her.

  Dulce felt suddenly sick to her stomach. He didn’t know her. Did he think she was some sweet little hick from the boonies in the Dominican Republic? This girlfriend thing couldn’t work. Maybe it was safe to go back to New York. But even then, she might run into one of the many men she’d fucked. For money. Or even one of the boys she’d fucked in high school. Just because they asked and she was that desperate for somebody to notice her. She couldn’t play house with him in Santo Domingo, when they had no real future. She was stuck here at her aunt’s house. Maybe they could have some fun, but this “come home to” shit was not even on the table.

  She couldn’t let him in, because one day it’d come crashing down. The light he had for her in those eyes would go out. And that would fucking crush her.

  She gave him a sudden smile. “I need a drink,” she said. She ordered one, downed it, and ordered another.

  He suggested that they go to a discoteca and dance. She was just about to say yes when her phone rang. Dulce glanced at it quickly and then paused.

  It was the businessman from Miami. She had put his name in her phone. Phillip Gerard.

  “Excuse me,” she said to Zavier. “I should take this.”

  She stood on the sidewalk in the front of the restaurant. There was a band playing merengue half a block down. She put her finger in her ear and asked the businessman to speak up.