Side Chick Nation

by Aya De León

  In New York, Marisol became frantic. She had to get Nidia, Zara, and the baby out of Puerto Rico.

  She called her travel agent.

  “What do you mean there aren’t any flights?” she demanded. “They can fly any day, any airline, to any city, any time in the next forty-eight hours. And I’m willing to pay any fucking price.”

  Marisol took a breath. Her travel agent didn’t deserve to bear the brunt of her upset. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just really worried about my family.”

  “I understand,” the agent said. “But everyone’s trying to get out. There literally isn’t a single flight. I can put in an alert if anything becomes available.”

  “Yes, please,” Marisol said. “And thank you. I know you’re doing your best.”

  But it wasn’t good enough. She had to find a way. In 2005, she’d had clients who just barely managed to get out from New Orleans, but they could drive. No way to drive off an island. Unless you could drive on water . . . She sat up straight with a sudden thought, and dialed another number.

  Why hadn’t she thought of Lily earlier? She wasn’t only good at deploying spike strips on desolate roads in Puerto Rico, but she also had a Trinidadian cousin with a charter boat.

  An hour later, Marisol had him on the phone.

  “Clive, I’m wondering if there’s any way you could pick up my family in Puerto Rico. There’s this other hurricane coming and I can’t get them on a flight out.”

  “Hurricane María,” he said. “I hear it’s gonna be bad. I won’t be able to get there beforehand. It’s just not safe to go out on the sea right now. But keep me posted. I can come after the storm dies down. Are they near the coast?”

  “Yes,” Marisol said. “Las Palmas. It’s just up from the harbor.”

  “I’ll look it up, and see if they allow international vessels there.”

  “Whatever you have to do,” Marisol said. “I can pay for you to take them to Miami or whatever port is open. Or even all the way to New York.”

  “Sure thing,” Clive said. “Let’s be in touch after the hurricane, and we can make a plan. How’s their English?”

  “Not that great,” Marisol said. “But I think it’s about to get better.”

  Tuesday, September 19— One day before landfall

  Dulce stayed glued to the tiny screen of her phone. “It now appears likely that María will be at Category 5 intensity when it moves over the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico,” said a spokesman with the National Weather Service. “Preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion.”

  All her property fit in a suitcase. The storage space was to protect her life. She’d gotten as much food as she could from the grocery store. A can opener. Bottles of water.

  The Puerto Rican government had opened five hundred schools and other buildings as shelters. But that was a hard pass. She had everything she needed to wait out the storm.

  Later that afternoon, she watched the reporting of Hurricane María’s devastation on the island of Dominica. Only then did her anxiety rise. She stayed in the unit throughout the day, listening in headphones, trying not to gasp audibly. Every noise she heard outside, she held her breath, afraid she’d be discovered. But the footsteps always passed. She kept her phone plugged in, as she stayed glued to predictions for when, where, and how hard the storm would hit Puerto Rico.

  Dulce drank the bottles of RampUp! and stayed on her phone through the night.

  * * *

  The rain had begun, and the power was out. Dulce’s anxiety became overlaid with boredom. She needed to save her phone battery for after the hurricane.

  Sitting still made her feel nuts, so she pulled out the pedicure stuff. The stone to scrub off the rough skin. The lotion to make her feet soft. The foam to keep her toes apart.

  She did the exfoliation by feel. She wet the stone a bit with the drinking water, then scrubbed at her feet in the dark.

  She only used the flashlight for nail polish. A base coat of blue, topped in a clear coat with glitter. They sparkled in the beam of the flashlight.

  She was usually too impatient to do more than one coat of nail polish. Always too impatient to wait for each coat to dry. She would put on the next one too soon and mess her nails up. But now, she had nothing but time.

  Chapter 13

  Wednesday, September 20—Landfall

  By the wee hours of the morning, Dulce’s anxiety had risen again. Outside, the wind clawed at the island. She couldn’t see through the windowless room, but the sounds had her panicked. With shaking hands, she rolled most of the marijuana Ellis had left her into a joint and smoked it. She tied up the plastic bag with the last few weed crumbs and tucked it under the corner of the mattress. She just wanted to sleep.

  The screaming of the winds made that nearly impossible. And from time to time, she would hear thudding and crashing. Branches torn from trees and siding ripped off of houses turned to projectiles that reverberated when they hit against the concrete and metal of her building.

  She needed rum.

  Dulce drank half the bottle. As she waited for the alcohol to take effect, she kept her eyes on the tiny screen of her phone and watched the progress of the hurricane toward Puerto Rico. The Technicolor swirl of the storm had moved onto the map outline of the island. Yet her eyes kept straying to two nearby islands, Santo Domingo and Cuba, and both appeared to be safely out of the storm’s path. If only she were in either place, she’d be safe and dry and in a house, not a fucking storage space waiting out a dangerous storm. Especially Cuba, where they had successfully evacuated a million people and didn’t have a single death during Hurricane Katrina.

  Why the fuck hadn’t she stayed there? She had Cuba on her mind as the combination of alcohol and weed overpowered the anxiety, and she lay back on the mattress, settling into an uneasy chemical doze.

  Chapter 14

  Over a year earlier, when Dulce had first arrived in Cuba, she was sure Jerry would come after her. She had a vague memory of drunk dialing him to say goodbye before she left New York. Maybe she had mentioned Cuba? Maybe she had said her grandmother’s last name? At some level she knew it was farfetched.

  Just because he had stalked her from The Bronx to Manhattan didn’t mean he would stalk her all the way to her grandmother’s small town outside Havana. But she felt the clench in her chest every time she saw the back of a tall, heavy man. Every time she caught sight of a thickset guy with straight dark hair, buzzed short at the nape of his neck. There was a tourist from Madrid and a businessman from Bogota, and plenty of locals who fit the description.

  Her first couple of months in Cuba, her body was on high alert. Every time she and her family went out somewhere, her eyes scanned for him. Mostly she stayed in the house. Her grandmother was recovering from a stroke, and Dulce was there to take care of her while her uncle worked during the day. They had previously had a caretaker, but now that would be Dulce’s job. Everybody in Cuba had a job. But even staying in the house all day, Dulce couldn’t relax. Men’s voices on the street made her jumpy. Her eyes flew to the door each time it opened. She was certain Jerry would come charging in, furious.

  As it turned out, Jerry never stormed into the house. Instead, news of his death slipped in quietly by way of the New York paper her uncle read. “Bronx Man Fatally Shot” was the headline of a story without warning or preamble. “Jerry Rios, 46 . . . pronounced dead . . . .44 caliber bullet . . . shot twice.”

  And it was as if a switch had been flipped. No longer was Dulce oriented toward terrifying visions of Jerry coming after her in the future. It was as if the news had spun her around several times, turning her in an about face toward the past. After receiving the news of his death, she began recalling every dimension of his brutality, all the times he had come after her when he was alive.

  The flashbacks started. Each time she closed her eyes at night, she was reliving the worst of it. The rough sex with him, with clients. The times she’d said yes, but hadn’t
meant it. The times she’d said no and it hadn’t mattered.

  The memories descended on her at night like an avalanche. She started hanging out with a party set in Havana, staying out til the wee hours, coming home on the camello buses in the morning, exhausted. She started drinking heavily. She woke from a nightmare in the mid-day and drank half a bottle of rum to quell it. Soon, she’d finished all the liquor in the house.

  Her grandmother didn’t complain or scold her. But a few days later, a cousin named Josefina appeared from Santiago to stay with them. In her white clothes and colorful beads, Dulce knew she was a practitioner of Santería, the syn-cretized African tradition that was so strong in the Latin Caribbean. Josefina called it Lucumí.

  She gave Dulce a ritual bath, herbs and flower petals and Florida water filling their grandmother’s claw-foot tub. She cleansed her with a live chicken, the bird squawking and flailing as Josefina held it by its feet, its wings beating against Dulce’s naked skin. She said prayers in Yoruba over her. And through it all, Dulce sobbed and sobbed.

  When the nightmares woke her, Josefina was there with a cool palm for Dulce’s forehead and a soothing song, her contralto voice flowing with melodies in the liturgical language of Ifá, singing stories of the Orisha and calming the twist in Dulce’s chest.

  “I feel like he’s haunting me,” Dulce confessed one day. “I know he’s dead, but he just won’t leave me in peace.”

  Josefina lit candles that night. Spit rum onto a stick covered with dusty feathers and bright ribbons. She read broken pieces of coconut.

  “He’s not here,” she said. “He’s not at peace, but he’s not here. New York, I think.”

  “Then how come he’s got such a hold on me since he got killed?”

  “He had a hold on you when he was alive,” Josefina said. “But sometimes it not til you’re finally safe that you can see just how much danger you’ve been in.”

  “What can I do?” Dulce asked. “Can you give me another ritual to cleanse him off me?”

  “There’s nothing more to do,” Josefina said. “Now you just need to allow yourself to feel what it was you weren’t able to feel before.”

  She gave Dulce a couple of prayers to say. And at Dulce’s insistence, she gave her a spell: write his name on a piece of paper and put it in the freezer.

  Dulce continued to have nightmares. She would lay on the couch next to her grandmother and watch telenovelas and cry.

  This was when she began to watch A Woman’s Dark Past.

  Teenage Xoana, in a school uniform, walks down the hallway of a boarding school to the main office. A woman in a neat suit sits behind a desk.

  “You wanted to see me, headmistress?”

  “You have a visitor,” she says.

  Tío Juan steps forward from the sidelines. He isn’t really her uncle, but a trusted friend of the family.

  Xoana gasps when she sees him. “Is it my mother?”

  “She’s alive,” Tío Juan says. “But she’s in a coma. You must come see her.”

  “Your teachers have prepared homework for you,” the headmistress says, handing her a packet. “You need to keep up with your classes to maintain your scholarship.”

  “Of course, headmistress,” Xoana takes the packet and exits with Tío Juan.

  * * *

  The next day, Xoana is at the hospital with her mother, a beautiful woman in her mid-thirties. Xoana sits on the side of the bed. A monitor beeps in the background as her mother lies still.

  “You would be so proud of me,” Xoana says. “My grades have been good. I’m learning to play tennis.” She laughs and shakes her head. “Tennis. Who am I turning into? I was hoping it would be easier to make friends playing tennis, but most of the girls have been there for years. It’s hard to get close to anyone.” Xoana begins to cry. “And I just miss you so much. I had this dream that if I just came home, just held your hand, kissed your cheek, you’d wake up. Please, Mamá, wake up.” She sobs into her mother’s chest. “How am I supposed to go back to school? I just want to stay here with you.” She wipes her eyes. “But I know that school is what you wanted for me. What you still want. I’ll go, Mamá. I’ll stay strong for you. But you have to stay strong for me. Don’t give up on this life. Stay strong.”

  Tío Juan walks into the room. “Xoana,” he says. We have to go.”

  “Adios, Mamá,” she says, and leaves with Tío Juan, holding back tears.

  Later, at dusk, they are driving in the car. Xoana is wiping her eyes. She takes several deep breaths and looks around.

  “This isn’t the way to school,” Xoana says.

  “We just have to make a brief stop,” Tío Juan says.

  Later, Xoana sits in a dim room with a single window.

  Outside, it’s completely dark.

  The door opens, and Xoana stands up.

  “Tío Juan,” she says. “Where have you been? I thought—you’re not Tío Juan.”

  “No, sweet thing,” the strange man says.

  “Where’s my Tío Juan?” Xoana asks.

  “A girl can have more than one uncle,” the man says, advancing toward her.

  “Get away from me,” Xoana says, as the camera zooms in on the stack of homework on the dresser. In the background, Xoana screams, and the camera fades out.

  Each day Dulce lay on the couch, crying beside her grandmother and watching soap operas. And slowly, Jerry began to take breaks from haunting Dulce’s dreams. Sometimes she’d dream of her tía’s house in Santo Domingo. Or that she was back in middle school and hadn’t done her homework for English, the one class she loved, the only subject she excelled in. Or she dreamed that she was flying. Dulce loved those dreams. When she woke up, she didn’t feel leaden and could tell that her life still held plenty of possibilities.

  Yet even after the flashbacks slowed down, the tears continued.

  Her grandmother sat on one end of the recliner sofa, and Dulce lay with her head in her lap. They watched afternoons of television, until Dulce got up and made dinner. Each night, her uncle would come home and eat with them, bringing groceries and stories from his job as a pharmacist in Havana, and newspapers that talked about the rest of the world, one that Dulce hardly bothered to go out and see.

  * * *

  Yet a couple of months later, Dulce began to take short trips to the local market. Soon, in addition to cooking and keeping house and taking care of her grandmother, Dulce was shopping and even taking directions from her grandmother on keeping the garden.

  Eventually, even the crying stopped. And then there was nothing to connect her to her old life in New York, not even the grief.

  Until six weeks later, when her grandmother had another stroke. She needed more care than Dulce could give her at home, and the family moved her into a nursing facility. The house was lonely all day. Dulce sat and watched A Woman’s Dark Past by herself, but it wasn’t the same.

  Teenage Xoana is in a favela, a poor neighborhood in the city. She sits on a ragged couch with three other girls.

  They hear an altercation outside, and a pair of women run in. They’re dressed like respectable suburban ladies, one blonde, germanic looking, the other dark.

  “Quick, girls, come with us,” they say. “We can get help for you.”

  Xoana jumps up, but the three other girls move more slowly.

  “Did Juan send you?” one of the girls asks.

  “No,” the blonde woman says. “We’re here to rescue you.”

  The girls begin to follow them towards the door.

  “The police are right outside,” the other woman says.

  The girls recoil as if they have discovered that the door is on fire.

  “No police,” Xoana says.

  “We’re not officials,” the blonde woman says. “I’m from the university, and she’s a journalist. We don’t have any authority.”

  “The police are men who can’t be trusted with young girls,” Xoana says. “You wouldn’t bring a wolf to rescue chickens, would you?�
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  The two women look at each other.

  “Where else can we take you?” the blonde woman asks.

  “Not to any of the authorities,” Xoana says. “But somewhere Tío Juan can’t find us.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” the blonde woman says to the other. “I’ll go tell the police the house was empty. You bring the car around to pick up the girls.”

  In Cuba, Dulce’s uncle decided to move his daughter and her two kids into the house. Dulce was welcome to stay, and he could probably get her a job at the pharmacy. Everybody in Cuba worked. Now that she was no longer her grandmother’s caretaker, she’d need to find something. Dulce was in the process of cleaning the house for the arrival of her cousins, when Josefina invited her to come live in Santiago. She liked her uncle, and she enjoyed their visits to her grandmother, but she truly loved Josefina. She finished cleaning the house and her uncle took her to catch the bus.

  On the long trip across the island, she met a young Cuban-American man who was visiting from Miami. He was every part of the US that she missed. They flirted the whole ride down, and by the end of the trip, he promised to come by and see her.

  Josefina welcomed Dulce with open arms. She had two teenage daughters of her own, but there was a small back room where they put a twin mattress. The next night, the four women of the house were sitting on the couch after dinner watching A Woman’s Dark Past.

  Xoana sits with the blonde woman in the woman’s study.

  “Why did you pick me to bring to your home?” Xoana asks. “Out of the four girls that you rescued. Why me?”

  “I couldn’t take four girls to come live with me,” the woman says. “I had to choose.”

  “Yes, but why me?”

  There’s a knock at the door.

  The woman looks up sharply.

  “Who is it?” she asks.

  In the hallway, we see a blonde, teenage Izabel, standing outside the study door.