Maritza and Carmen

Late on a May night, with no more customers in the café, Juancho and Maritza sat in the marquesina, the carport which they used as a patio, soaking their feet in plastic basins filled with cool water. In the light, the leaves of the hibiscus shrubs behind the latticed wall made shadows that waved like little hands. The latticed concrete wall divided the carport from the house and yard next door. During the day the humidity in the carport was stifling, but Juancho loved being out here at night, when the air was sweet with the fragrance of tuberoses and the breeze cleansed his throat of the heavy oil smell of the kitchen. In their lawn chairs, with a little table between them, they faced the café’s yard and its four trees: mango, avocado, jobo, and sweet lemon. When Maritza first showed up at the café, a year ago, she was unable to sit without jiggling her knee and vaping. She no longer did either. He knew that she too found herself soothed by the place: the chirping coquís and mole crickets, the tree branches rustling as if talking to each other. Now and then they heard the click-tap-click of fruit bats in the mango tree. Maritza had started growing tomatoes, okra, basil, anamú, and flowers on the far side of the yard. She could see them now from where she sat. In a few minutes, when her feet no longer pulsed from exhaustion, she would get up and water her plants. 

Juancho was reading El Nuevo Día. Sometimes he read it on his laptop, but today he had a paper copy. He enjoyed its ink smell and how the paper crackled in his hands. It was like opening a present. He read an article about draft prospects for Matthew Lugo. Done with the sports section, he leafed back-to-front, his mind veering to what he wanted to cook tomorrow: plantains baked with a ground beef stuffing, called Pio Nono and named for Pope Pius IX, his mother told him when she first made it for him. With its rich sauce and candy-sweet plantains, the dish conveyed family comfort and criollo identity for Juancho, and he was excited for Maritza to taste it. He was still thinking of where to get yellow but not overripe plantains when an image caught his eye in the paper. 

The woman in the photographs was dressed in a midnight-blue police uniform, had hair dyed reddish orange like a clown’s and a pillowy body cinched tight by her belt. Like her body, her face was much heavier than Maritza’s. Carmen . . . ?? Not the same name, no, and her face was half-obscured by a police hat. But he recognized the smile that lit up those hazel eyes. It was Maritza, undoubtedly. 

“¡Que rayos!” Juancho kicked the basin. Water splashed out on the concrete floor.

“¿Qué fue?” Maritza tilted her head.

Juancho’s throat felt thick. He plucked his feet from the basin and squatted next to Maritza’s lawn chair, pointing at the two pictures. She examined first the one of the policewoman being given a plaque by a police captain. The caption said that the woman’s name was Officer Carmen Sandín de O’Farrell. She was being commended for rescuing victims of Hurricane Irma. In the second picture, she was dressed in the same uniform, with the same bizarre hair and body like a large pillow squeezed tight by a belt. Her arm was around a teenaged girl’s waist: Taína O’Farrell. This was her daughter, the caption said, whom she had saved by sacrificing herself heroically in Hurricane Maria.

_____

She had been fucked over by Hurricane Maria. Everybody had been, of course—many had lost whole houses and some had lost people they loved. But Maritza had lost herself.

Her self—her previous self. It was as distressing, in some ways, to realize she had been in the police as it was to realize she had worn her hair like that. The turning point in her life had been her arrival in San Juan. She had told Juancho about her memory problem as soon as she applied for the cashier position, revealing that she called herself “Maritza” after her favorite rescuer, a young Nuyorican woman who had spotted her body under a door on the side of the road in Arecibo. 

Her past life, while unyielding of so many details, pressed close, in a way that often made her feel breathless. It held shapes in dim light that revealed themselves stintingly: a colonial-style church with two red cupolas; a fountain in a Spanish-style plaza; uphill streets lined with empty buildings and almond trees clustered with pods like open mouths. 

However, these were features of many northern and eastern island towns. Which was her town? 

Still other shapes were obscured, moving in the darkness of waking dreams in which she would watch them, darker than the darkness around them. Those shapes moved stickily, as if a velvet sheet had been thrown over them and they were struggling to free themselves. Sometimes things slipped out from under the sticky sheet: a horse so skinny its ribs shone through its skin, an eyeless stone frog, a yellow ruler with the numbers and lines erased. These objects left her with a feeling of irritation; she understood that they symbolized her deprivation, yet they brought her no closer to recalling names and places.

She had been freed (at least her body had been taken out from under that door). But when she lay in bed and saw some of the shapes that slid from under the velvet sheet, she was afraid that she would again be covered by that sticky darkness.

Since she had met Juancho, however, she had built a nice life, managing the café and loving him, the veteran of one war and two failed marriages, with an adult son he had not a lot to say to. Juancho was gentle and laid back, his hair was silvery, his skin the color of light amber honey. He smelled like mint and sweet lemon and had a deep belly laugh. He was a good cook and a hard worker and they had fun in bed.

The shapes that struggled under the sticky velvet gave her the feeling that her previous life was nowhere near as good as this one.

_____

Maritza had forgotten names, including her own, but so many news stories about how Hurricane Maria made landfall allowed her to access her own impression of the moment of impact, different from what others described. For example, some reporters had compared the sound of the wind to a woman’s endless screams. Maritza, on the other hand, remembered that, rather than blowing wind, Maria had endless inbreath, sucking up the sky’s blue and the land’s many greens until the entire world darkened to shades of charcoal, graphite, and ash. In the tomb-like darkness filled with the endless insuck of the wind and of tree branches breaking against the car she was driving, Maritza lost control of the wheel. The car moved under her, rolling in floodwater like a boat but enclosing her in tunnel-like darkness like a coffin. 

There was the crackling noise of power lines pelting the coffin-boat-car. 

The wind chewed up the glass of the windows and water exploded into the car. Still pitching forward, the car started to sink.

The car was never found. When asked by her rescuers in Arecibo, she couldn’t recall the names of family members, although she did remember that her father had been a teacher and that he was dead. But she did not remember the name of the town where she grew up or where she had been living. She could not remember what her job was or whether she was married and had children or even what make of car she had been driving.

_____

When it rained, Maritza tried Juancho’s patience by opening all the louvered screened windows in his—now their—second-floor apartment, which overlooked the café. He didn’t understand why someone who was so afraid of storms would open all the windows when it rained. It had to be the opposite; he tried getting her to internalize that. 

“Yo sé, yo sé.” She would look away, half-smiling, the fingers of one hand encircling her other wrist.

But the next time it rained, she’d do it again: open all the windows. With the rain hitting the stone-tiled floors like javelins, she would stand in the hallway as still as a statue. The hallway was dark and narrow and gave onto the bedrooms, the bathroom, and the living room. She would close the doors to all the rooms so that the hallway was the only space that stayed dry. As if they were playing a game, Juancho would close the windows. But once he did that, she’d glide away from the hallway and open the windows again. He’d have to mop up the floors and wipe down the walls after every storm. Otherwise, mold would creep along the walls almost instantly, like shadows. 

He never saw Maritza so quiet as when she stood in the dark, closed-off hallway, with the rain spitting through the windows in the rest of the apartment, messing up his floors. She wasn’t just petrified with fear. When it rained, she was just not there. He had touched her once when she stood behind the hall door. She looked through him. He looked behind him, and of course there was only the opposite wall of the hallway. The way that the strong rains made her disappear like that was why he stopped complaining about all the mopping he had to do.

_____

“Does it make you remember what happened?” he asked one time when she was hiding out in the hallway during a rainstorm.

Standing still, her only movement was the swiveling of her eyes. “Juancho, the blue light! It filled the car.” She held her hands out. “It hurt!” she said. When he put his hands on her forearms to steady her, she snatched them back. 

He asked if it was lightning she remembered.

She didn’t know. She couldn’t remember whether the blue light appeared just before the car started its yawing movement in the floodwater or right after the world was drained of color.

She said her hands were burned and she let them fall into the water where they flopped around like fish. Burned fish. 

_____

She looked up from the newspaper. “Sandín.” Her hand flew to her mouth. There seemed to be more yellow flecks than usual in her hazel eyes. “Ay, I remember. My uncle was mayor . . . of Vega Baja: Ángel Sandín. My father was Alejandro Sandín. I am of the Sandíns of Vega Baja.” 

“And your name is Carmen?”

She had a flash of a woman kissing her. The woman had called her “Carmencita.” A woman with brown-purple eyes; silver-streaked black hair tied in a bun at the nape of the neck; yellowish sallow skin; and a dazzling smile, which she herself had inherited. Her mother was Carmen. 

“Yes, Carmen. That was my name, I was named for Mami.” 

But beyond her mother’s face with its surprising eyes, objects receded and additional details about her mother did not come to her.

“And ‘O’Farrell’? The article says that was your ex-husband’s name,” Juancho said. “He lives in the States. Do you remember him?”

“I don’t remember him.”

“He’s a gringo, it seems.”

She laughed.

“Why do you laugh?”

“Why take up time trying to remember a man I divorced? I have you.”

“So, then I should call you Carmen?”

She looked at the picture of the woman with the unfortunate hair. “I like being Maritza with you. I feel more like Maritza.”

Juancho was relieved, not because she did not remember the other man and did not seem to want to remember him, but because he also felt that the name Maritza suited her better than Carmen. The name Maritza seemed lighter, laid back, vivacious, not to mention sexy. There was something jagged and blunt about the woman in the photo. 

“Then I will keep on calling you Maritza.”

_____

“My uniform is so tight in these pictures and I’m so chubby. And that dyed hair—like iodine! I don’t remember ever wearing a uniform. Why would I join the police? I don’t like the police, their questions and procedures. I don’t remember having hair that ugly color. But this man in the hat . . .”

She put her finger on the picture of the man.

The captain’s dress hat worn by the man was almost black, with gold-embroidered oak leaves on it. Flashy but so stiff it looked like an embalmed bird. He was a big-shouldered, bearded man, rather handsome.

“The man in the hat is Eduardo,” Maritza said. “We were novios in high school. But I don’t remember when he gave me this . . . prize . . . whatever it is. I don’t remember working with him or for him. I remember when we were teenagers. I remember he married young.” 

Carmen (her former self) had loved Eduardo when he was a boy, but he married Alicia. Alicia had naturally red hair, unusual on the island. Was Carmen’s hair so bleedingly red because she had tried to imitate Alicia? In the photograph, she couldn’t help noticing, and hoped Juancho had not noticed, that Carmen was staring at Eduardo as if he was, as the island truism would have it, the last Coca-Cola in the desert.

Yes, she remembered, even as a teenager, she had been in a triangle with Eduardo and Alicia. She would wait for Eduardo to meet her in an abandoned shack near the Cibuco River. There was a mattress and an old oil lamp inside but no glass on the windows. At night there could be caculos, those large beetles that flew around in fast zigzags. They made a rattling noise before landing on your head. 

Was the lust with which she gazed at Eduardo unrequited? 

It was pretty obvious. While she stared at him, Eduardo was staring at the camera.

“What about this girl?” Juancho pointed at the picture of the policewoman with her arm around a teenaged girl. “Your daughter. Don’t you remember your daughter?” Juancho sounded scandalized. 

The teenager was lovely, with a heart-shaped face and a vampy widow’s peak, large, heavy-lashed brown eyes, and plump lips. Unlike Carmen’s, the girl’s body was sensuous yet lithe in a sleeveless blue dress that accentuated her curves but did not cling to them. 

“I don’t remember her. But her smile is like mine, really it’s better. ¡Que linda es!”

The article said that Carmen had resided with her daughter, first in the States, where the girl grew up, and later, for a year, in Vega Baja. While she could not place the girl in the context of Vega Baja, just reading that they’d lived in the States allowed her to half-remember: a house that smelled of firewood; a winter sky that went gray at four pm; the wonder of snow warming up the atmosphere and turning the sky pink and powdery; and the man with yellow hair and a lumpy, veined nose. The more he drank, the duller his eyes got. David was his name. She shuddered. 

For some reason, it was her mother’s face that came to her clearly now: the warmth of her mother’s beautiful eyes, a curious shade like the center of oncidium orchids. Her mother was long dead, she now knew. Why did she not recall this stunning girl in the picture, who was very much alive, who was now applying to colleges? The girl was looking for the mother who had saved her, the article said. Her daughter. It seemed she had given life to the girl not once but twice.

_____

“I remember Vega Baja now,” Maritza said. “My town has beaches, rivers, and lagoons. The way some lakes are replete with fish, our lagoon and rivers are filled with caimans. People eat them. Their meat is dense but also flaky and buttery. Like a tarpon ate a chicken.”

“Okay, I could make . . . uh, caiman, if you miss it. But the girl,” he said. He looked worried, poor Juancho. He probably was thinking, What else don’t I know? “The girl is named Taína. You named her that.”

“So many people name their daughters that,” Maritza said. “I can’t understand why I didn’t give her a more unique name. Why didn’t I name her after a flower: ‘Azucena’ or ‘Lirio’ or even ‘Amaryllis’? I don’t remember much about her,” she said.

He was puzzled that she seemed so placid. “Don’t you remember giving birth to her?”

His cue helped her see a woman lying on a hospital bed, a doctor and a nurse next to the bed. The woman’s eyes were closed, her face gray and slick with sweat.

“I think I had a fever and was sick when I had her,” Maritza said. 

But then she remembered that it was her own mother, Carmen, who’d had puerperal fever and that her mother had not been able to nurse baby Carmen because her milk was infected. 

She decided not to tell him that she wasn’t sure whether she’d had the fever or not, whether or not she was remembering her daughter’s birth or just imposing the circumstance of her own. Eyes narrowed, arms crossed, Juancho seemed to be judging her. She blinked a few times, scratched her neck and started reading aloud: 

Carmen Sandín de O’Farrell distinguished herself as a heroine of the hurricanes of 2017. In Hurricane Irma, she rescued townspeople whose homes had been flooded when the Cibuco River in Vega Baja overran its banks. Two weeks later, in Hurricane Maria she saved her daughter, Taína O’Farrell, and another adolescent named Pito Ávila, rescuing them from a shack near the Cibuco. Her daughter has been haunted by her mother’s last moments when Sandín de O’Farrell opened the door to her police cruiser and tried to pull her daughter into it. The vermin-filled floodwater rose suddenly and took the car with Sandín de O’Farrell in it. Her body was one of hundreds never recovered. In a testament to a daughter’s love, Taína O’Farrell has persisted in searching for her mother.

The words “haunted,” “tried to pull her daughter into it,” and “vermin-filled floodwater,” helped her see herself as Carmen, sitting in the car seat, braced against the rising water, heavy as cement yet also roiling with centipedes and squirmy things and swaying over the sill into the car. 

Ah now, yes: the girl screamed at her—eyes narrow, mouth taking up her whole face—that she was a “¡bruta!”—a stupid woman.

What came to her then was not Why did she call me that? What struck her was that she had screamed the same thing to her own mother when she was a girl.

Her mother had turned away, frowning, brown-purple eyes lidded. Yes, she also had called her mother a “¡bruta!”—a stupid woman who had allowed a bad man into their home. 

Her mother had slapped her hard, so hard her teeth cut into the inside of her cheek. 

“Muchachita de mierda!” her mother, Carmen, screamed. They were outside in a patio, the sun like an exploding chandelier. When the man she was afraid of walked out of the house, she couldn’t see his face. 

And then she knew that she had slapped her daughter too the day Maria came. Was that why her daughter called her a “bruta”?

Her mother had never understood her—that much came to her. Perhaps, similarly, she had not really understood her daughter?

Her head hurt suddenly as if all at once she felt the impact of the slap she had given and the slap she had been given. 

She got up from her chair and leaned against Juancho’s shoulder and he held her. Something shone in the mango tree like an emerald shattering in the air. A colibrí—a hummingbird? She thought she should cry, and she tried to, but she couldn’t get any tears out. Were there any in there?

He smiled at her, this nice fifty-one-year-old with silver hair and a tanned, surprisingly young and muscular face. He wore a white tee shirt that said i’m not yelling, i’m puerto rican. 

“Do you want to meet her . . . your daughter?” he asked.

Instead of responding, she left the marquesina and opened the screen door to the café. An old chalkboard held the menu scribbled in both Spanish and English. The white walls were lined with potted plants and laminated, wood-backed copies of silkscreens by the painter Luis Cajiga. The small square café tables were covered in plastic tablecloths patterned with fruit and flowers and topped with empty rum bottles. These held Maritza’s own arrangements of azucenas—island tuberoses—and frangipanis. She pulled an azucena out of a bottle and held it to her nose. It smelled creamy and sweet, but its hollow stalk was already limp, its petals starting to brown on the edges.

She heard him come in behind her.

“The azucenas faded,” she said. She went from table to table, removing the azucenas from the rum bottles.

“We should contact your daughter, Taína. She must miss you so much.”

She didn’t answer him. The word “daughter” floored her. Why did she not feel more motherly? She went to the last table. The half-length Cajiga reproduction hanging over it was the Mujer con Sombrero Negro, a portrait of a beautiful woman with clay-brown skin wearing a large-brimmed black hat that was indistinguishable from the color of her hair. She wore a strapless dress. Her arms were held over her head just below the hat brim. One hand clasped her other upper arm so that her elbows framed her face. It looked like there was a big shadow floating over her head and the woman was holding the shadow aloft. 

“We should tell her you are alive,” Juancho said.

The shadow in the picture pressed down on the woman who nonetheless was preventing the shadow from crushing her. But also she was caressing the shadow.

“Yo sé,” she said. Like she said when he told her that the windows must be shut, not opened, against the rain.

“When you see her, you will remember her completely,” he said. “Everything will be fine.” He tried to take her in his arms again, but she moved away. “You will remember.”

She said nothing. She was not afraid that she would not remember more details. She was afraid that remembering would not make her feel anything different from what she felt now when she looked at the girl in the newspaper. She felt curiosity and she admired the girl’s beauty. Maritza herself was not beautiful. To go by the pictures in the paper, her former self, Carmen, was close to ugly. 

She was surprised that this lovely girl had come from her body but was outside in the world, feeling and doing things Maritza, such a different person clearly from this luminous young woman, could never feel or do. But Maritza did not feel love, and that was troubling. Even if you forgot so many other things, wasn’t love something you remembered? 

_____

Juancho had been right that seeing the girl would make her remember more. The problem was that in the end it didn’t help her remember as much as she would have liked. She wondered if that might be true, too, for the girl.

The girl stood in the marquesina and gave Maritza a hard-elbowed embrace that made Maritza’s heart quicken. This was not some unknown girl but her daughter, Taína, Maritza reminded herself. Her hija. Hijita. Why couldn’t she remember ever calling tenderly for her hijita? But she couldn’t say, even think, that word “hija” much just now. “Taína” would have to do. Taína’s dark eyes, small perfect nose, thick eyebrows, and wide mouth in a heart-shaped face were different from Maritza’s river-colored eyes, thin brows, flat nose, and thin lips. Taína had long, wavy, fine dark brown hair. Maritza’s hair was thick and short and gray-streaked. But the wide, full-cheeked smile that lit up Taína’s face mirrored the way Maritza smiled when she was happy. 

She was not smiling like that now. Maritza’s smile was quite perfunctory. 

Taína was voluptuous in her white eyelet blouse, ivory linen pants, and lavender high heels. Maritza, on the other hand, was thin and dressed in blue jeans and a retro green cotton blouse that accented her hazel eyes. 

Juancho wore a guayabera, pressed pants, and oyster-colored wingtip oxfords, his best shoes, which he only wore on holidays. He introduced himself. 

Right away, Taína asked how her mother and Juancho had met. 

“There was a sign on the café door advertising a cashier position,” Juancho said.

“How did you get to San Juan?” Taína asked Maritza.

“The clinic in Arecibo found a shelter for me,” Maritza said. There was a pause. “It’s hot,” Maritza said. “We could go inside with the air-conditioning, although there are people in the café just now.”

“I like it here with the trees,” Taína said. “It’s different from my apartment. Our apartment, I mean.” 

Maritza and Taína sat in the lawn chairs facing the trees in the yard. The mango tree was tall and queenly. It was in fruit, the fruit shaded in red, orange, and green, almost globular and ready to be picked. The sweet lemons were mottled green and yellow. The avocado and jobo trees were not in fruit. The leaves of the avocado tree were thick and shiny like patent leather. 

Maritza was fascinated by how pretty Taína was. It was hard to recognize herself in these features except for the sudden smile that, like her own, had an effect like the sun sliding out from behind clouds. 

“You are a beauty. You must have a boyfriend,” Maritza said.

“There were two boys I’d been going out with when the storm hit, Mami.” The girl smiled with Maritza’s smile. “You loved one and kind of hated the other.”

“Did you like the one I hated and hate the one I loved?”

“Ay, Mami, I liked them both, but I preferred kissing the one you hated.” Taína laughed.

Mami this, Mami that—she was this strong-willed seventeen-year-old girl’s mother! When she was seventeen, Maritza remembered, her own parents would sit behind the latticed balcony wall and watch her drive away with her friends. When she returned, at the time her parents had prescribed, they’d still be sitting behind the latticed wall, as if they’d never moved, watching as she got out of the car. 

“Did I give you a curfew?” Maritza asked.

“You drove Felo and me everywhere. Felo was the one you liked. You hated Pito, but you didn’t know I was seeing him too. Pito was the one I was with when you went looking for me . . .”

Maritza didn’t remember these boys, the one she hated or the one she loved. It sounded like she’d been a little tedious as a mother. Maybe all this crushing of nuance was why her former self had liked police work. Although, it seemed to her now that her obsession with Eduardo must have made her follow him into the police force. She wondered if she’d had an affair with him.

Taína talked about how the apartment that they had lived in together had black mold after Maria. FEMA had taken six months to clean it up. 

“Now, I’m back there, in my room, but I have a different bed. My old dresser with its mirror is gone. You were always telling me I shouldn’t check myself out in the mirror so much. ¿Te acuerdas?”

Maritza shook her head, no. Carmen sounded so uptight.

“My new dresser doesn’t have a mirror. I’m glad . . . I think you were right that I was vain.” 

Maritza, recalling that her own mother had told her the very same thing, suspected that she’d been jealous of her gorgeous daughter. Just as her own mother had been jealous of Carmen.

Juancho brought mango shakes in tall, thick glasses with straws and then left them. 

Maritza and the girl sipped their mango shakes, which were as thick and cold and fragrant as ice cream. 

“Que rico.” The girl sipped her shake through the straw like a slurpy. She had beautiful teeth. Maritza herself was missing her top back molars—something that a dentist she now saw said was an old situation. She wanted to ask the girl if she knew how she had lost her teeth but realized that might be too trivial a question. She found that most of the things she wanted to know were trivial. What had been her favorite dessert? Did she like dogs or cats better? Did she have a vibrator? Did she go to church every Sunday? Had she ever mentioned her obsession with Eduardo? Was the hideous red wig due to some envy of Eduardo’s red-haired wife that she’d carried for decades? A downside to meeting her daughter was discovering that she had probably been a very boring person.

“Juancho is a wonderful cook,” Maritza said absently.

Maritza noticed that the light pink hibiscuses behind the concrete lattice wall were now half-unfurled. Their pistils, just starting to show, looked like bottle brushes. The shadows the hibiscuses cast on the concrete floor looked like the faces of elves.

Taína herself looked like an elf, dark-haired, glowy-skinned, otherworldly.

Taína finished her shake and put her empty glass on the patio table. “Mami,” Taína said, leaning forward, her eyes staring into Maritza’s. Maritza blinked and looked away.

“Mami, I never knew . . . ” Taína looked down. “What it was to really miss someone until you disappeared. I never felt so lonely. It wasn’t like when you divorced Dad. It was like I lost a hand or a foot.”

Maritza understood that Taína had rehearsed these words many times, probably too many times. Not because she didn’t feel the right thing. Taína scratched her nose until it was red and Maritza then remembered the gesture. She understood that the girl was overwhelmed with sadness and Maritza felt a flicker of envy.

“I’m sorry,” Taína said. “I was always trying to get away from you. And when you were gone, all I wanted was to get back to you, to . . . ”

Maritza put a hand straight up. “Mira—”

“I missed you so much, Mami.” Oh no, tears. How to respond? Should Maritza take her in her arms? Take her, take her, hold her, soothe her. But Maritza couldn’t move.

Maritza tried again for tears that would at least express her own frustration. As so many times before, the tears would not come. Not because the feeling wasn’t there. The feeling was there, but it was submerged.

Maritza nodded and moved her hand toward Taína and the girl reached out to touch her. Taína’s hand was as warm as bread.

“I need to tell you, there is little that I remember . . .” Maritza had been about to say little that I remember about you. But that might devastate the girl.

Taína leaned forward in her lawn chair and touched Maritza’s hand. “I thought maybe that’s what happened. Because you didn’t look for me. Either that or . . .”

“I died,” Maritza said. 

The girl nodded.

Carmen died, Maritza thought.

_____

Her mother looked so different! She had been chubby and tired-looking, bossy and easily angered, evasive, always so on top of Taína and yet always disappearing, going on endless shift after shift or visiting homeless people in the town center. Secretive but explosive, her mother had liked to wear her police uniform even when she wasn’t working. Her well-pressed uniform with its belt, holstered gun, taser, and tactical waterproof boots comprised her mother’s only impressive outfit. 

When she wasn’t in uniform, however, her fashion choices had been regrettable. Her mother had worn cut-off shorts that showed her thick cellulite-ridden thighs or flowered housedresses that made her look like a bedridden woman who watched soap operas all day. She had liked carrying elaborate raffia and crocheted purses and would put messy food in them, like the tomatoes she liked to eat whole as if they were apples, and which frequently got smashed, ruining the purses. Because her mother’s hair was getting prematurely gray and not growing much, when she knew she’d be receiving the commendation for heroism, her mother had bought some wigs. She had become partial to wearing the wigs under her police hat. The wigs were annatto-red and curly. Taína wondered if she wore them because the police chief’s wife had red hair. Unlike her police uniform, her mother’s police hat was ridiculous. It was too broad at the crown and ostentatious with gold embroidery. Her mother was not responsible for choosing the hat, of course, but she often wore it with her shorts or housedresses like a sun hat.

Her mother had been talkative and disruptive, but this woman with the different name was quiet and reserved and thirty pounds thinner. Her jeans and top showed off her figure but were not too tight or vulgar. Taína could not believe how good this woman looked. How, well, sexual . . . 

Her mother had insisted on divorcing Taína’s father and bringing Taína to Vega Baja from New York. The buildings and houses that surrounded Vega Baja’s central plaza had been abandoned long before Hurricane Maria. Named for Taína’s grand-uncle, Ángel Sandín, who had been mayor and had helped pen the island’s constitution, Vega Baja’s high school had been rundown long before Taína and her mother even moved to the town. After Irma, black mold had seemed to creep like a living thing along the school hallways and up the walls, making it hard to breathe inside the school. 

In Vega Baja, poor people lived on the side of the road and near the river in concrete boxes with old furniture and rusted car parts visible in their garages. The river had many turns like a snake. When it rained, the long snake slithered through the houses of the poor. Right after storms, caimans waddled out of the river, their jaws wide open, their teeth like stalactites and stalagmites, glistening wondrously.

Although she knew too well that they had come to the town because David O’Farrell had taken up with a woman only a year or two older than Taína, she was put off by the more backwater aspects of Vega Baja. 

Unlike Taína, her mother, Carmen-now-Maritza, had thrived in Vega Baja by becoming a policewoman. In Hurricane Irma, she rescued people from houses overrun by the river. She even brought some people, mostly old women, home to sleep in Taína’s bed. For most of the two weeks between Irma and Maria, Taína had to sleep with her mother in the same bed. This was annoying, because Carmen honked and snored all night long. 

It interested Taína that, despite having been a charity case herself, Maritza, unlike Carmen, didn’t look as if she went in for charity work. 

Maritza also looked like she did not snore. 

_____

Taína’s mother had been fearless, it was true. As the first rains of Maria started, her mother had tracked Taína and Taína’s boyfriend, Pito, to a wooden shack near the Cibuco River. She had led them to her cruiser in the rain that fell like spears and the wind that dislodged, sucked up, and masticated everything in its path.

Her mother’s cruiser slid away in the floodwater with her mother in it, and Taína and Pito ran for a cave that Taína knew of near the river. In the cave, they huddled on a rock shelf leading to an interior tunnel. They could so easily have drowned there, as so many did drown that day—in just that way—all over the island. Far too much water would have appeared, and they would have thought, Ay, we can still get out of this until the moment when they would have realized that they were done for. Floodwater rose in the cave and fist-sized spiders, with gleaming legs like fork tines, crawled over Taína and Pito. At some point, Taína felt as if she had split off from herself and was watching from on high at the top of the cave as Pito hugged her. Taína covered his mouth with her hand so that the spiders wouldn’t climb inside it. Their spiky legs stuck into her scalp as they crawled into her hair. There were so many spiders on their naked backs that, regarding herself and Pito from this impossible on-high perspective, the teenagers looked as if they wore some kind of mesh-like Gothy clothing with a spider motif. 

But the spiders did not bite them. Taína realized that the spiders were sheltering on Pito and Taína, just as Pito and Taína in turn had sheltered on the rock shelf. As soon as she understood that, Taína came to and dropped back into a closer view of what was happening. She shushed Pito and knocked a few spiders off his back, hoping that the water would not rise higher than her chin because she didn’t want to climb further into the dark hole behind them, which no doubt led deeper into the network of caves in the hills. 

But the water did rise and she and Pito slid into the hole.

So did the spiders.

The sudden death of someone you think you hate as much as love can make you all at once become a more complex thinker. In the past eleven months, Taína had often thought of hateful things she had said to her mother. Said and done. She hardly regretted the feelings that had made her say and do those things. What she regretted was not expressing herself with nuance. 

For instance, Taína had not been clear on the subject of Rafael. He was her mother’s cousin. Taína had invited him to shelter with them the day before Maria was supposed to make landfall, but had not told her mother about it. Rafael was a middle-aged man with ash-dark skin and a graying buzzcut who lived in one of the concrete houses by the side of the road. Her mother had not told her that Rafael was their relative—one of her secrets—and when Taína found out she was mad about it. 

But her mother had been right to shield her from Rafael, it turned out. Taína felt now she had a second chance. She wouldn’t be a good daughter exactly. But she would certainly ask more questions. And she would be nice. She would say the nice things that she felt she had never said to her mother.

“I’m sorry I never told you how proud I was that you saved those people in Hurricane Irma,” Taína said.

Her mother looked at her blankly.

“I know you don’t remember, maybe,” Taína continued. “But you were a hero. Everyone said so. I just . . . I didn’t tell you I was proud. Because I . . .” she swallowed. “I was mad that you made us leave New York.” Taína ran her fingers up and down her thighs. “I was a pendejita. You called me that a few times. Remember? You were right. I kind of was a pendejita.”

Her mother’s eyes finally became animated. Recognition. Maybe not completely of Taína. 

“Angry, sí,” Maritza said. “I remember you were angry. I remember you shouted at me. You shouted at me as we were getting into the car.”

“We had a fight . . . earlier that day,” Taína said. “About that guy, Rafael. We drove by his house every day. There was busted furniture and moldy mattresses in front. He kept animals in pens on both sides of the road, remember? They drowned too.”

Her mother frowned. “What about horses?”

“He rented horses for riding, but they were too skinny.” Taína sighed. “I didn’t know he was your cousin. And you didn’t tell me. I found out and I asked him to shelter with us. You got mad. It turned out he’d—he was a bad person—and that’s why you kept him away.”

“I remember my cousin Rafael.” Maritza shook her head. “He touched me under my clothes when I was little. He told me he was allowed to do it. But I knew it wasn’t right. I told my mother and my mother allowed him back in our house. Oh, it made me angry that she let him keep coming to the house.” She was quiet a moment. “The things I remember most seem to be from when I was a girl.”

“I’m sorry, Mami. I’m sorry I invited Rafael to shelter with us,” Taína said. “I didn’t know what he had done. You didn’t want to tell me, and I understand that now.”

“I remember him as a teenager, but not as a man,” Maritza said. 

“When he showed up, you took me into the kitchen and we didn’t see that Rafael stole something from us. It was a stone pestle made by the Taínos, a real one. Do you remember?”

Her mother shook her head. 

The girl shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. But I loved it—Tío Ángel gave it to you. It was made of river rock. It looked like a skull face, and also like a frog’s body. We were fighting and we didn’t see him take it. And he left. Then you hit me because I had invited him without telling you. I was just . . .” 

Taína massaged her left shoulder with her right hand. “I went off driving with my boyfriend even though the storm was coming. We went to the shack by the river.” Taína looked tired. “We were stupid.”

“That broken-down choza? I used to go there with Eduardo when I was young,” Maritza said. As an afterthought, she added, “To have sex.”

Taína stared at Maritza. Her mother, Carmen, would never have spoken like this, casually, without embarrassment about sex! Maritza’s frankness was kind of cool, but also a little strange. Taína opened her mouth to say something, then brushed lint off her white pants.

Finally, Taína said, “The shack doesn’t exist anymore.” She did not have to say it was because of Maria. It seemed that almost everything was. She was tired of saying “Maria.” Maria, Maria, Maria, Maria, all the horrible sounds of the world in a single word. 

“So, you went there to have sex,” Maritza said. “With Tito.”

“Pito,” Tani said.

“You went to have sex with Pito—”

“Don’t you remember? You went looking for us because Maria was coming. Mami, you saved us.”

The sound like trucks riding round and round the shack, about to run right through it. The girl naked on the bed, the boy fucking her fast and hard, the girl telling him to please slow down, her head turned to the side, eyes glazed. 

That other boy touching her so long ago, touching her under her dress on her bed and her mother walking right by the room with the door slightly ajar. She pulled away from those hands that stabbed her like doctor’s equipment. She went running after her mother and told her. Her mother had looked angry, but not at Rafael. Her mother shouted at her.

“I remember now that I didn’t like Tito,” Maritza said. “He lacked class.”

“Pito.” Taína smiled. “I broke up with him.”

“It wasn’t too bright going to have sex in the shack with the hurricane coming.”

“Did you mostly forget Daddy too?” Taína asked.

But what she really wanted to know was why her mother seemed to remember these other people—her dead mother and Rafael, her asshole cousin—better than she remembered Taína.

Maritza didn’t know how to answer, so she again touched her daughter’s skin, warm with long-held sunlight.

“You didn’t want to let Pito come in the cruiser with us,” Taína finally said. 

“What?”

“You pointed your taser at him and told him he couldn’t come in the cruiser. That’s why I yelled at you. I thought he would die if he didn’t come with us. You were going to leave him there. Then a wave of water came and took you and the car.”

The water that came into the cruiser was boiling with leeches and dead and dying things. A large rat, its body bloated but its eyes moving, looked into Carmen’s eyes. Carmen kicked at the rat. The rat had bright, black, intelligent eyes, like a professor. It was still alive. She knew right away that, on top of the bad luck of being caught outside in the storm, this was extra bad, the way the rat seemed to be both alive and dead and looking so tenderly into her eyes.

She shouted at Taína to get in, but Taína pushed the boy ahead of her. Some of the wormy things from the water were clamped on the boy’s naked body. Leeches covered his torso; a centipede was wrapped around his wrist; a lizard bit into an earlobe, hanging like an earring. 

Not nearly as smart as the rat’s, the boy’s eyes were glazed over. Death was close.

Maritza-then-Carmen pointed her taser at the boy. 

Her daughter, her own daughter, screamed and called her a “bruta” and slammed the cruiser door on her mother. 

Yes, yes, the girl had slammed the door on her and a wave of water swept over the car, which filled with blue light and rolled away in the floodwater. And Carmen started her journey toward Maritza.

“That’s what happened?” Maritza said. “The water came and took the car?”
Taína nodded.

“How did the door of the car close?” Maritza asked. It was a leading question, she knew.

“It stayed open. The water just took the car.”

Maritza saw that the girl was not lying. Taína really did believe that. The girl did not remember that she herself had slammed the door of the car shut. 

The girl had to believe it, of course. Maritza would not tell her otherwise. But then she’d always have to hold back this detail whenever she spoke to her daughter. How could she ever really talk to her?

Maritza remembered then what it was like to be a mother. It was shielding and protecting. Omitting things, even lying to protect the precious, but oh-so-difficult, child. The child that was part of you but also was becoming someone completely different and doing so in the blink of an eye. Much had to be—and clearly had been—sacrificed for this new person.

_____ 

After the girl left, Juancho asked, “How did it go?”

“Taína is a nice girl, very intelligent. I have forgotten many things but now I remember a few more. In fact, she helped me remember the most important thing. On the other hand, she remembers almost everything but not the most important thing.” 

Maritza sucked in her lips and tilted her head, her eyes narrowed. “Because of that, I doubt that I will see her again.”

Juancho stopped short, his jaw clenched; he clasped his hands, as if about to pray. “Don’t be so drastic,” he said. “You’ve only seen her once since that time, you can’t make a decision like that so quickly.” He shook his head. “I didn’t realize that she also had forgotten things that happened in Maria.”

“Who has not?” 

Maritza left the marquesina and went into the café.

Juancho followed her inside. 

Egg-shaped lamps fitted to the sides of the walls provided a warm lemony light. While the air conditioning exhaled a slight smell of humidity, it made the interior cool and pleasant. A young woman, a customer who had quickly devoured her plate of crab-filled mofongo, had gotten up from her table and was examining the Cajiga reproductions as if she were in a gallery. 

“Maritza, what is the most important thing?” Juancho said.

Maritza didn’t respond. 

“Tell me, what is it that you’re afraid of?” he asked.

She was too ashamed to tell him. What she feared most was that perhaps it was that circumstances were the opposite of what they seemed. Perhaps it was not so much that she had loved her daughter and circumstances had made her forget. It could be that she had not loved her enough in the first place and it had been easy to let go.

Maritza bent over a cardboard box just inside the door and took out cuttings of white azucenas, purple alelís, and yellow bitter gourd flowers. She started putting the flowers in the rum bottles on the tables.

Despite being composed of the same flowers with the same colors, each posy of white, yellow, and purple flowers in its own bottle looked entirely different to her.

 

Lyn Di Iorio’s recent fiction was published in The Kenyon Review, Big Other, and Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas; shortlisted in Best American Short Stories; and honored by a New York Foundation for the Arts artist fellow award. Her novel Outside the Bones (Arte Público Press, 2011) was shortlisted for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. She teaches at the City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center. She is from Puerto Rico.