by Aya De León
“The storm ripped the walls off the house,” the child’s voice said from just outside the flashlight beam.
“Tell me more, baby,” the father’s voice said.
“Unfortunately, your papi can’t hear more right now,” the voice behind the flashlight said firmly. The light bobbed as the woman headed toward them. “He has to leave.”
“I’ll be back in the morning,” Pedro said, standing up. The beam rose and stayed on him.
“No, you won’t,” the wife said.
“This is a public shelter, bitch. I’ll be back.”
The child had begun to cry in the dark, and Dulce could hear the mother whispering words of comfort.
Meanwhile, the flashlight followed Pedro until he had walked out the door. His face pale and features sharp in the wash of the bluish light. The moment the door closed behind him, the wife began to gather her things.
“Where are you going?” the voice from the flashlight asked. The beam was still shining on the door. “You can’t go out. It’s curfew.”
“We can’t stay here,” the woman said.
“I’ll put security on the door during the night so he doesn’t come back.”
“That’s not good enough. He always finds a way.”
“In the morning, we’ll transfer you to a safe house. I know some women who can help. Besides, if you leave now, he might be waiting out there for you.”
The woman didn’t answer. And soon there was only the sound of the child crying and the mother cooing soothing words of comfort.
Dulce thought of Jerry again. How terrified would she be if there was any chance of him rearing up in the aftermath of the storm and coming after her? God forbid.
It was a long time after the child stopped crying and the mother stopped cooing that Dulce finally fell asleep.
* * *
In the morning, Dulce woke early. The sun wasn’t fully up yet, but there was enough predawn light that they could see their surroundings. The young woman sat up staring at the door, like a sentry. Beside her, three small children slept, twin babies and a girl of maybe three.
“You okay?” Dulce asked in a whisper. “I couldn’t help but hear what went on last night.”
“These women better be for real,” the young mother said. “Better be able to get me someplace safe.”
“I’m sure they will.”
“I don’t know. Going through the shit I been through, I learned not to trust nobody.”
“I know how it is,” Dulce said. “I was—I had an abusive guy in my life. And I found a group of women to help me.”
“It’s not that people don’t mean well,” the woman said. “It’s just that they don’t realize what kind of shit they’re up against. I mean, we’ll go wherever they say. I obviously can’t stay here. And I can’t go back to a house with no walls or no roof. But I’m not getting my hopes up that they can keep us safe for any period of time.”
“I understand,” Dulce said. “I had to take it step by step.”
They fell into silence. The woman continued to stare at the door.
“Fucking hurricane,” she finally said. “Like the storm wasn’t bad enough. But like any heavy rain, it got all kinds of slimy motherfuckers creeping out from under rocks. Take advantage of the situation to try to take shit that they think should belong to them. I’ll bet he’s just one of many.”
Chapter 19
Zara and the baby both still had horrible diarrhea the next morning when Nidia went back to the neighbor with the landline. She tried for hours to get through to Marisol but couldn’t.
* * *
By the time Nidia got home, the vomiting had stopped, but they both still had diarrhea. The chicken broth was gone. Her daughter was weak. The baby was listless. The nurse, Mrs. Talamantez, came over later that night.
“She needs to get to a hospital,” the nurse said. “They both need intravenous fluids.”
“Should we try to get to the shelter?” Nidia asked.
“The shelter flooded, and they had to evacuate,” she said. “But even many of the hospitals don’t have power.” She slumped down in her chair. “The few that are still open, that is. I don’t understand. One of the doctors said the US military has a huge medical ship stationed off the coast of Virginia. Why haven’t they deployed it? Those things are literally like giant hospitals that float on water.”
Nidia shook her head. “It looks like we’re on our own.”
“Puerto Ricans pay billions in US taxes,” Mrs. Talamantez said. “We’re citizens. They should be helping us.”
“My cousin has a friend with a fishing boat,” Nidia said. “She said he could come get us. But I don’t know if Zara is strong enough to get down to the harbor.”
“I’ll help you get her there,” the nurse said. “We can get folks to carry her if she can’t walk.”
“I’ll tell my cousin to have him bring water,” Nidia said.
“He needs to bring an IV drip for these two,” the nurse said. “And if he can, we’re desperate for a few other medical items.”
Nidia nodded and wrote down the list.
“I’ll go now and call,” she said.
“It’s not safe,” Mrs. Talamantez said. “With the heavy rain, there was another flash flood earlier. In fact, I should stay here tonight.”
* * *
At dawn, the rain had let up a bit, but the road was nearly waist-deep again. Nidia made her way down to the house on the corner with the landline. She tried repeatedly for several hours, and kept hearing that all circuits were busy. Finally, she got through.
“Is everything okay?” Marisol asked.
Nidia explained the situation and gave her the list.
“I’ll call Clive as soon as we hang up,” Marisol said, after she took down the list. “I can give him money for the supplies. Can I call you back at this number to let you know when he’s coming?”
“You can try,” Nidia said. “But there’s no guarantee. Because of the rain there’s a lot of flooding. But I can see the harbor from our house. I’ll check as often as I can. At least once a day. Tell him to wait and we’ll come down to the boat.
“What else can I do?” Marisol asked.
“Pray for us,” Nidia said.
* * *
Marisol hung up with Nidia and dialed the number she had for Clive. No answer. She sent him an urgent text to call her. But how was Clive going to find medical supplies in Jamaica?
She needed to ask her sister, who was a doctor. She called Cristina in Havana, but got no answer. She sent Cristina a text and an email.
Cristina called back first.
“He should come here to Cuba,” Cristina said. “If he’s in Ocho Rios, he’s right by Santiago. I have a friend down there who can put together a rescue kit. Cuba’s been trying to send relief supplies, but the US won’t let them through.”
“That fucking Jones Act,” Marisol said.
“Don’t get me started about the US and their blockades,” Cristina said. “Let me call my friend. I’ll call you back.”
Clive called back first. Marisol explained the situation.
“I’ll leave tonight,” he said.
“But what about your charter client?” Marisol asked. “I don’t want to mess with your money.”
“They prepaid,” Clive said. “I’ll only have to refund one day worth of fees.”
“I can cover that,” Marisol said. “But won’t you lose this customer’s future business if you leave early?”
“Bunch of drunk white boys,” Clive said. “I’ll let them know I’ve been asked to join the hurricane relief effort. If they don’t understand, then they don’t deserve to travel in the Caribbean.”
Cristina called back a couple hours later. Her friend could come through with the medical supplies. A few of the doctors would even ride along on the boat if they could fit.
Marisol put Cristina in touch with Clive, but she couldn’t get through to Nidia’s neighbor to leave a message. She called do
zens of times, but all the circuits were busy.
Chapter 20
When she awoke that next morning, Dulce was able to sit up. Her body felt stiff, achy. She had a bump on the back of her head.
The woman who had given her water helped her to her feet and pointed her to the bathroom. She probably could have found it from the smell. The water wasn’t running. They had set up buckets. She relieved herself, but noticed that her own shorts were damp with urine. There wasn’t anywhere to wash them.
Feeling self-conscious, she walked back to where she had been lying. Sure enough, the blanket she’d been sleeping on had the dank smell of urine, as well.
She sat back down on the blanket and felt totally lost. She didn’t know anyone. Not to mention that she felt like a little girl who had just wet the bed. Was she supposed to tell someone? She had no idea what to do next.
She lay on the floor in the large school auditorium. The walls still bore back to school announcements and scores from soccer and basketball games.
The cafeteria tables had all been pulled toward the far end of the room, near the kitchen.
On the other end, there was a row of tables with medical personnel and other staff attending to people as they came in.
Dulce lay on her back and looked up through a skylight, watching a sliver of clouds passing overhead.
When she got up to walk around the room a bit, she saw that someone had put out a bin full of paperback books. There were some young adult novels in Spanish, translations of US teen angst stories that focused on white girls in high school.
As a younger teen, she had read those books from her school library before she dropped out. But then, during her years with Jerry, white girl drama about friends and boys seemed so far from her life. She regarded those stories like kiddie books that began with “once upon a time,” or something. In the Jerry years, she had preferred to read gritty urban stories for adults: sex, violence, betrayal, chasing money—they felt like real life. But she only read those books on the rare occasions when she was able to get her hands on them. Mostly, the girls watched TV when they weren’t working or keeping house.
But now, in the hurricane, she hungered for something light and innocent. She took a trio of teen books back to her pallet on the floor. She had just started the second book, when a nurse came over to check her out. She was a white woman from the US.
“Head injury, huh?” she asked, handing her a tiny bottle of water.
The nurse made Dulce walk a line, then close her eyes and touch her nose with each of her pinkie fingers. She asked her questions in English: her name, where she was from, the date and time. When the nurse asked who was president, Dulce’s face puckered into a scowl.
Before she could even say anything, the nurse laughed. “You’re gonna be fine,” she said. “You might be sleepy for a few days, but the concussion is healing, and there’s no neurological damage.”
As the nurse went to move on, Dulce grabbed her arm.
“Is there anywhere for me to wash my shorts?” she asked. “I smell like piss from when I was knocked out.”
The nurse put a hand on Dulce’s arm. “Sweetheart,” she said, her voice gentle, “nobody’s worried about that right now. We’re rationing the water again. What little clean water we have is for drinking. If it’s not quite drinkable, it can be used for washing dishes or hands. I don’t recommend bathing in any of the flooded areas. That water could be contaminated, even though it doesn’t smell.”
“Contaminated with what?”
“Sewage, bacteria, toxins,” the nurse said. “Take your pick.”
“I seriously need to go around like this?” Dulce asked.
“Tell you what,” the nurse said. “If you’re feeling better, you can join one of the crews outside clearing the roads. If it rains this afternoon, you’ll get the shower you’ve been wanting. Now I gotta go. Lot of people need medical attention.”
“Of course,” Dulce said. She thought of the mother and baby. How could she be worrying about how she smelled? She got up to put on her shoes so she could help clear the road and realized she didn’t have any shoes.
What now? Was she just supposed to wait? Everyone here was eager to get back to their homes. If their homes were still standing. To salvage what they could. But what did she have to return to? A pile of ruined designer outfits? A Cartier chain tangled in a mass of branches, clothes, and trash? This had never been home. She needed to get off this island.
A couple hours later, a man called for volunteers to do some road clearing, and Dulce raised her hand. They distributed machetes, axes, and even a saw. There weren’t enough to go around, so they would take turns. Armed with their various weapons, the ragtag brigade marched outside.
* * *
There was too much sky.
The tropics were usually landscapes of trees, bushes, and vines, rising thick up out of the land, towering, blocking out the horizon. But not now. Tall palms had been snapped like toothpicks. Leaves scraped away by wind. The sky stretched out, uninterrupted by greenery, as clusters of naked trunks reached up from the land like claws.
That was the strangest part. How much the sight of the land reminded her of New York winter. The hillsides covered with leafless trees had her recalling the trip they’d taken one Christmas to visit the parents of her sister’s boyfriend upstate. The hurricane had made its own winter, like after snow melted in the city and the lumps of trash that had been underneath became visible again, perfectly preserved. Suddenly, Puerto Rico became much more like New York in March, with its barren trees, sodden trash, and people huddled indoors. It had everything but the cold.
* * *
They gave her a machete to hack up the brush. One of the men showed her how to swing it safely, so that it came down on the fallen tree branches with maximum chop.
“Watch your eyes,” he said, and left her to work.
It took a long time to even hack off a single branch. Some of the other people were much quicker.
After about an hour, she’d managed to clear away a few branches, and had a small sense of accomplishment. From time to time, she’d feel a little lightheaded and would stop to rest.
“You need water?” the head of the crew asked.
“Sí, por favor,” she said.
He had her tilt her head back and poured some in from a gallon jug, carefully so as not to spill any.
She licked the drops off the side of her mouth and thanked him.
A little later they took a break for lunch.
“Courtesy of FEMA,” the crew chief said.
Several members of the crew groaned as the chief handed out small packets of beef jerky and Cheez-Its.
“Shit,” one of the young women said. “We’re lucky to have food, tú sabes?”
Dulce agreed. “You from New York?” she asked the girl as she tore open the beef jerky packet.
“Upstate,” she said. “I just moved back last year. I came for college.”
“La Yupi?” Dulce asked, using the nickname she’d heard for the University of Puerto Rico.
The girl nodded. “It’s been fucked up though, with the debt crisis and everything,” she said through a mouthful of Cheez-Its. “Now with all this, I’ll probably end up back in the Bronx.”
Dulce tried the jerky. It was nearly as hard as the wood they were chopping. “Are you sorry you came?” she asked.
The girl gave a sudden bark of laughter that also seemed to be partly a sob. “I don’t fucking know,” she said. “I’ll tell you one thing. This shit solved my little identity crisis. I certainly feel like a real fucking Puerto Rican right about now.”
* * *
After lunch, the sky began to darken. Half an hour later, there was a heavy rain. Dulce heeded the nurse’s words. She put her head back and drank. She undid her ponytail and let the rain soak her hair, wash the sweat from her forehead. She raised her arms and scrubbed under her armpits with her bare hands. The hair was growing in under her arms, scratchy against her pal
ms.
She pulled out the front waistband of her shorts and let the water fill them, soaking her underwear, washing away the old urine. Then she pulled out the back waistband and did the same.
After a moment, she went back to clearing, even in the rain, using the machete to hack at the branches.
* * *
When the crew came back inside, she asked the nurse to give her a band-aid for a cut on her foot.
“You shouldn’t be working barefoot,” the nurse said, offering her one, along with an antiseptic wipe. “Why didn’t you take your shoes?”
Dulce looked down at a pair of gray athletic sandals with a closed toe. She had never owned shoes like these. Her shoes had always been either sneakers, flip flops, or sexy shoes.
“Those aren’t mine,” Dulce said. “They belonged to the lady in the bed beside me, the one with the baby.”
“The one who died?” the nurse asked.
Dulce nodded somberly.
The nurse sighed. “They’re yours now.”
The shoes proved to be a size too large, but Dulce stuffed a couple of rags into the toes and then they fit okay.
* * *
That evening, everyone lined up for dinner, which was a small portion of beans and rice, and a few swallows of water. They sat on the floor and ate. Dulce sat beside some of the people she met while clearing. It turned out that her friend from La Yupi was there with some of her neighbors, including a pair of middle-aged women who lived in the apartments above her.
“I’m not saying there’s much good coming out of this hurricane,” she said. “But my aunt is eighty. Her husband is eighty-three. She’s bedridden, but strong, you know, her mind is sharp. So before the hurricane, her husband used to boast that he never even set foot in the kitchen of their house. His wife did all the cooking and cleaning. Then my niece here took over.” She put her arm around the thirtyish woman next to her. “His granddaughter. You did it all, right? Cooking. Cleaning. Todo.” She turned to the niece. “You tell it.”
“Well,” the niece began, holding back laughter. “During the hurricane the kitchen flooded. And I was dealing with my grandmother, tú sabes. And he was saying ‘water is flooding in from the kitchen!’ You know? Like ‘the British are coming! ’ or some shit. Like he needed to inform us about it. I was like coño, tío, get the escoba and fucking sweep the water out. I’m taking care of abuelita over here.”