Before We Were Free (15 page)

Then, very casually, I slip in,
“How are things in the sultan’s
court?”
I underline
sultan’s,
but then I erase my underlining, in case it is too obvious a clue.

I give the letter to my grandfather to mail because I don’t really want Mami to know I’m writing to a boy, even if he is my cousin. But Papito looks at the address on the envelope and explains that no mail is getting through. The country is all closed up, just like this place called Berlin, where an iron curtain has come down that keeps people from going in or getting out.

I take the letter back and tear it up in lots of little pieces. Then I open the window and watch them fall, a sprinkle of white to the ground below. Some of the people on the street look up. Maybe they think it’s snowing? The García girls out in Queens have told me all about winter in this country. By Christmas, they’ve promised, I’ll get to see the snow.

“I won’t be here by then,” I keep telling them.

But as each day goes by, and the leaves all fall off like the trees have some disease, and October turns into November, I wonder if I’m going to be here for a lot longer than just the first snowfall of this year.

Often, on the way home from school, I’ll stop at the grocery store for a visit. No matter how sad I am, every time I step in front of the door and it opens by itself, I feel a rush of excitement like I’m back at Wimpy’s. I love to walk down the aisles, half expecting I’ll find Chucha with the big feather duster the stock boy uses to clean the shelves. I can’t believe all the boxes and brands. Soups and sauces, cans of this and cans of that, a dozen different cereals, tons of candies. Even the animals in this country get lots of choices. Six kinds of cat food! What would Monsito say about that?!

Today, I don’t know what gets into me, but instead of just looking, I decide to take a cart. I go up and down each aisle, filling the basket with things I really like, pretending I have the money to buy them. When I’m done with all the aisles, the basket is piled so high, I can barely see over it. I head back the way I came, carefully putting everything back in its place.

Suddenly, a big, chesty man is barreling down the aisle toward me. He wears a white apron like a butcher and his face looks like a raw piece of meat, pinkish and maybe angry. I can’t tell for sure with American faces what they are feeling, but I would say this man looks angry.

I try to act like I’m old enough to be grocery-shopping by myself. In a month, I’ll be turning thirteen. Last week, a lady in the elevator at the hotel guessed I was fourteen! My baby face is sinking down to the past and a new face is coming to the surface, with my grandmother’s slightly turned-up nose and my father’s deep-set eyes and my mother’s coffee-with-milk-color skin. I guess the only thing that is all mine is the scar above my left eye, where Mundín once hit me with a pellet from a BB gun he had aimed at the sky.

The man stops directly in front of my cart like a roadblock. “Do you have the money to buy all this, young lady?” His tone of voice suggests that he knows I don’t.

I make the mistake of looking into his glaring eyes. In their harsh light, I am sure it shows that I am not one hundred percent certain I should be doing what I am doing. I stammer out a barely audible, “Sí, señor,” too scared at the moment to be able to speak in a second language.

“Don’t you understand English?” he says, taking hold of my arm.

I’m about to tell him I do, but already he is yanking me to the front of the store and out the opening door to the sidewalk. Some people walking by turn their heads to look.

“I don’t want you coming back without an adult, you hear me?” He is patting me all up and down checking to see if I’ve taken something.

At first, I just stand there, ashamed, submitting to his search as if I’ve done something wrong. But when he slaps his big hand on my chest, I cry out, “I wasn’t doing anything! This is a free country!” Actually, I’m not really sure this is true. Maybe this is a free country only for Americans? Maybe if a policeman happens by, my whole family will be deported home, where we’ll all be killed by the dictator’s son?

This thought is so terrifying that it’s as if I have Superman strength. I wrench myself free from the man’s grasp and take off running down the block, turning left, then right, trying to lose anyone who might be following me to the Beverly. When I get to the hotel, I rush past the American doorman, who is not as friendly as the Puerto Rican, and around the revolving door into the lobby, where, rather than wait for the elevator, I race up the stairs two at a time to the tenth floor, my heart pounding so hard, I’m sure it’s going to explode.

I stop before our door, trying to catch my breath and calm the wild panic that I’m sure shows on my face. Inside, I hear my grandmother crying. Mami has probably just finished one of her twice-a-week calls to Mr. Washburn in Washington.

Part of me wants to avoid going in and facing even more sad news. But the terror of deportation is bigger than a disappointment I’m becoming used to. So, I knock very lightly, and call out in a little voice,
“Soy yo.”
It’s just me.

Mundín opens the door, his face so drained and pale that I’m sure the police have somehow tracked me down and my family is in deep trouble.

I start crying. “I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

Mundín takes my hand. “Mr. Washburn is here,” he says in a flat voice, like a bulldozer has just run over it.

As I follow my brother into the main room, I’m puzzling over how Mr. Washburn could have gotten here all the way from Washington to deport us when the grocery store incident just happened? Maybe he was already in New York? Maybe the grocery store man had planned an ambush beforehand with the State Department? But even as I entertain these farfetched possibilities, I know that I’m just trying
not
to think of the obvious reason Mr. Washburn would be here, a reason more horrible than any angry store manager or policeman coming to report me for getting into trouble.

On the couch where Mundín sleeps at night sit Mami and Lucinda holding on to each other. My grandfather is leaning forward on the recliner, listening to something Mr. Washburn is saying. Another man in a military uniform with his back to me is standing behind Mr. Washburn’s chair. In the other room, I hear my grandmother crying. “She had to go lie down,” Mundín explains. “She had to take a tranquilizer pill.”

“Why?” I ask. My heart is tottering on the edge of a very high place, and I am waiting, breathlessly, for it to either fall down into a thousand pieces or be rescued by good news at the last minute.

Mr. Washburn stands up and folds his arms around me. When he lets go, I follow Mundín to a place on the couch beside Papito’s recliner, my hand on my chest as if I could reach in and steady my heart inside my ribs. As I go by Mami, she looks up and starts crying.

My grandfather reaches over and takes my two hands in his. “We are all going to have to be very brave,” he says quietly. His eyes are also red. Then he says the words I will never forget. “Your father and uncle are dead.”

“We got a report yesterday,” Mr. Washburn begins explaining. “The dictator’s family had agreed to leave.” His voice is officialsounding, but every once in a while, little clouds of sadness travel across it.

“Just before dawn, the son took off for his beach estate. Meanwhile, his SIM buddies drove over to the prison and seized the six remaining conspirators and took them to the beach—” Mr. Washburn stops abruptly.

After a moment, he adds,
“Lo siento,”
which means much more than that he is sorry, but that he feels what we are feeling.

“Tell us!” Mami orders. “I want to know how they died. I want my children to hear this. I want my country to hear this. I want the United States to hear this.”

She sounds so absolutely sure, Mr. Washburn clears his throat and goes on. “Trujillo Junior and his cronies were quite drunk. We’re not sure, but they might also have been drugged up. At any rate, they tied the prisoners to palm trees and shot them, one by one, until they were all dead. Then the bodies were taken out to sea and dumped over the side of the boat.”

Before Mr. Washburn is even finished, Mami is sobbing, great gouging sobs, as if she is trying to scoop out all the sadness inside herself so there will be room for other feelings. Lucinda sobs, too, but in a distracted way, watching Mami, afraid of such huge grief none of us has ever seen before. Papito and Mundín dab at their eyes, my grandfather with his monogrammed handkerchief that reminds me of Papi’s, Mundín with the back of his hand.

But I don’t cry. Not right away. I listen carefully until the very end. I want to be with Papi and Tío Toni every step of the way.

When Mr. Washburn is done, Mami and Mundín and Lucinda and I stand up and put our arms around each other. Papito joins us, all of us crying into the empty space at the center of our family.

eleven

Snow Butterflies

“What is it going to look like?” I ask my cousin Carla.

“It’s hard to describe,” Carla says. “Just wait and see.”

We are staying with the Garcías in Queens until we find our own place nearby. Mami and Lucinda and Mundín are inside with the rest of the cousins and my aunts and uncles and grandparents, but Carla and her sisters are standing with me in their backyard in mittens and hats and coats, waiting for my first snow to fall. All day the radio has been predicting a white Thanksgiving. The gray sky looks heavy and low, a piñata filled with snow.

Carla has grown up a lot since last year when we were best friends back home. She wears her hair in a flip with a hairband instead of tucking it behind her ears and puts glossy stuff on her lips, so they don’t chap, she says, but it looks sort of like lipstick. She speaks English so fast that sometimes I have to stop her and say,
“Por favor en español,”
which Tía Laura loves to hear, as she worries that the girls are forgetting their native language from having to speak only English in school.

“Usually, it doesn’t snow this early,” Carla is saying. She talks as though she’s lived in the United States all her life! “This is special, Anita.”

“It brings good luck if it snows before Christmas,” Yo adds.

“You’re making that up!” Carla cuts her eyes at her younger sister. And maybe Yo is inventing things again. But I think it’s sweet how the Garcías are trying to make it up to me after what happened to Papi.

“Girls,” Tía Laura calls from the kitchen window she’s just opened. “We’re almost ready to eat.”

It’s
el día del pavo,
as my grandparents call it, the day of the turkey, but I know from going to the American school that its real name is Thanksgiving, the day the Pilgrims in their black hats and capes gave thanks for surviving their first year in the United States. Some of my cousins have come down from the Bronx and my grandparents came from the city on a train that goes under the ground. We’re not all here because Tío Fran and his family are in Miami, and Tía Mimí has a boyfriend, who’s taken her over to meet his parents. But most . . . of the rest of our family is here.

Usually, Carla and her sisters have to help out, but today, there are too many cooks in the broth, as Tía Laura says. (Even I know that my aunt gets most of her sayings wrong in English.) So we’ve walked around the block I don’t know how many times, past the house where a cute boy in Carla’s class lives. Carla is always falling in love and talking about getting married. Mami says, and I agree, that Carla has become a little boy-crazy in this country. But Carla claims that that’s what happens when a girl gets to seventh grade. (I hate to tell her, but it happened to me in sixth.)

We moved in with the Garcías a couple of weeks ago, after hearing the news. Right away, Mami registered me at the Catholic school Carla and her sisters are attending. I was put back in sixth grade because I’d missed most of it back home. But the principal, Sister Celeste, has promised that if I make progress, maybe I can be jumped up to Carla’s grade by spring.

I had hoped we’d be long gone by then! But Mami now says we’re not going back, not for a long time, not till the wounds in our hearts have healed.

I wonder how long that’ll be? How I’ll ever get over the emptiness left behind by Papi?

Mami comes outside to tell us it’s time to eat. She looks so sad and thin, wearing a black coat that belonged to Tía Laura that seems too big on her, even though she’s the same size as my aunt, or used to be. Underneath the black coat is a black dress she’s been wearing for weeks. She has little Fifi by the hand, who I guess was crying because she wanted to be outside with her three older sisters.

“Has it come yet?” Mami asks, looking up. Mami has seen snow before, when she traveled with Papi to the States one winter, but she’s excited for me and keeps telling me about her first time. She and Papi scooped out balls from the windowsill of their hotel and threw them at each other inside the room. Since this morning, she’s been checking the sky as if it were the turkey in the oven that might get overdone. But not a flake has fallen from the gray mistiness above. “I guess you better come in now,” Mami says. “It might be a while, and you know how your mother gets.” She eyes the García girls. They know. Tía Laura worries just about as much here as she used to back home.

We head inside, little Fifi running alongside her sisters. I’m trailing behind, but Mami waits up for me, then puts her arm around my waist. We’ve become close again in these last few months of hoping and praying that things would come out all right. Now that they haven’t, she holds on to me whenever she gets the chance, as if she’s afraid of losing me as well as everything else she’s lost.

“How was your walk?” she asks me.

“It was okay,” I say so she doesn’t worry. But what can I report about the umpteenth time Carla has walked me by Kevin McLaughlin’s house, hoping to catch a glimpse of him eating turkey inside?

“Hard to get used to everything so gray and dead.” Mami sighs, glancing up at the bare trees. At the mention of death, I can feel her hand tighten on my waist. “Your first American Thanksgiving,” she says, trying to sound cheerful. As I follow her indoors, I see out of the corner of my eye a little flake of dust, and then another. But no, I think, it couldn’t be. I’m expecting lace doilies, like the ones my grandmother used to crochet before she had to leave her home behind and come to this country.

In the dining room, the big table is set with extra leaves to accommodate all the grown-ups. It looks like a gathering of black-birds, everyone wearing black. I sit with
la juventud
at the smaller table set up for the kids by the picture window.

“We thank you,
Señor,
for these gifts,” Tío Carlos begins, but he chokes up. Mundín says that our uncle has been feeling bad that he got out just in time, leaving my father and Tío Toni and others to bear the brunt of the dictator’s son’s wrath.

“Most of all, we thank you for bringing the family together,” our grandfather picks up, “to mourn and to celebrate those who gave their lives for all of us.”

“Amen!” Fifi calls out when nobody says anything. She’s learning how to pray, and every time she knows a word, she yells it out, loud and clear. Everyone bursts out laughing, some of us through our tears.

Earlier today, Mrs. Washburn called Mami to say we were all in her thoughts this Thanksgiving. She spoke to Mami for a little bit and then Mami handed the phone to me.

“Hi,” a familiar voice greeted me. “I’m sorry about your dad,” Sam said. “My dad says he was a real hero.”

I didn’t know what to say. Only stupid things came to mind, like, “Thank you for saying you’re sorry that my father was killed.”

“So, do you like New York, Anita?”

I told him what I tell everyone who asks me. “It’s okay.” Sammy used to brag that this was the greatest country on earth. I hoped I wasn’t offending him with my lackluster response.

“If you want to visit us, Mom says you and Lucinda and Mundín can come.” By the way Sam was hesitating as he moved through that sentence, I could tell his mother was coaching him on the other end.

Carla was standing beside me, mouthing, “What?” I turned my face away so she’d stop. I had told her about Sammy, making him sound like an old boyfriend in order to keep up with my cousin’s sophisticated life of seventh-grade romance.

“Thanks, Sam,” I said when he finished his invitation. Even though we’d outgrown each other, Sam was kind of my first love, so I added, “We’re getting our own place soon. Mami says when we do, I can have friends over. If you want to come here?”

“Wow! We could go to a Yankees game. Mom,” he called out, “Anita just invited me to come to New York to see Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle play.”

I looked over at Carla, who was lifting her eyebrows at me curiously. I shook my head, just so she’d know. No, I did not want to grow up and marry Sam Washburn.

I’m so stuffed, I can’t even finish what’s on my plate. As soon as the tables are cleared, Yo starts asking if we can go out. Mami calls,
“Un segundito,”
from the kitchen, and in a moment, she comes back in, carrying a birthday cake in the shape of the island, with thirteen candles flaming away on top.

Everyone starts singing “Happy Birthday” . . . to me!

“Since we won’t all be together next week,” Tía Laura explains.

Mami sets the cake down in front of me so I can make a wish before I blow out the candles. But I can only think of one thing I really want, which I can’t get. Maybe Mami can tell what I’m wishing for because she puts her hand around my shoulders and whispers in my ear, “If you want, save the wish for later,” which seems like a good idea, since I can’t think straight with sixteen people telling me to hurry before the candles melt down into the cake.

“So, now can we go out?” Yo asks as soon as we’re done with the cake. The snow has been falling steadily since we came indoors.

Tía Laura shakes her head. “You have to finish your digestion first.”

I can’t believe Tía Laura has gotten even more strict in the United States. Snow is made of water, I feel like telling her. It’s not an ocean, where you can drown if you swim right after a meal. But Mami has stressed that we are guests on our best behavior. I’m not about to remind my aunt that this is supposed to be the land of freedom.

The aunts and uncles push back their chairs and begin to tell stories. My grandmother starts off, a story about when Papi was my age. As she begins, I realize that it’s a story I’ve heard before and my grandmother is getting a lot of the details wrong. Mami whispers that Mamita is all confused with grief, to let it be.

I keep glancing out the window, watching the snow coming down thicker and thicker. I’m so glad my first snowfall happened before I turned thirteen. I’ve been wanting to cram lots of things in before next week, so when I have kids, I can tell them, “By the time I was your age . . .” I’ll have a lot to say: By the time I was your age, I had lived in a closet, I had survived a dictatorship, I had had two boyfriends, sort of, and . . . I had lost my father.

Tía Laura sees me looking out the window, and I think she feels bad denying me anything right now. “Okay, okay,” she says, “if the mountain won’t wait for Mohammed, then Mohammed better go to the mountain. Bundle up!”

Yo and Carla and Sandi and I put on our boots and coats. Little Fifi nags that she wants to go, and finally her mother gives in. Lucinda says that we’re crazy
loquitas
going outdoors when it’s so cold, where are our brains? Mundín shakes his head when I ask him if he wants to come along. He’s listening to the Papi stories as if he’s never heard them before. Tía Laura says Mundín is taking it the hardest, if you can measure stuff like that. I guess if hands are the measure, I’d have to agree. All you have to do is look down at my brother’s fingernails to see what he’s been doing in his spare time.

At the door, Carla slips away to the basement phone. She has an
important
call to make while her mother’s at the table. I know who it is, too. She’ll dial Kevin’s house, and once he’s on the line, hang up.

As we go out, I hear my grandfather telling the story of how he bought the land for the compound after the big hurricane of 1930. I know that story, too. How he built his house, and then each of his sons and daughters married and built theirs all around his, instead of like now, one in the Bronx, one in Miami, and a daughter in Queens. He is explaining that the new government will be returning the compound to us, that we’ll have to decide if we want to sell the property or keep it.

And then his voice is cut off abruptly by the storm door banging closed behind me.

A few days ago, Tío Pepe was in New York City with the Italian ambassador on some official business and he came out to see us at the Garcías’. Mami wept and thanked him for being so brave and helping us during a dangerous time. “My gratitude is to you,” Tío Pepe bowed, “and to your children, who sacrificed a husband and a father to liberate our country.”

Tío Pepe had a letter for me from Oscar. Carla was super curious, but I wouldn’t show it to her. I was afraid she’d start building an elaborate Romeo-and-Juliet romance about Oscar—just as I once did. Carla is also always asking about my diary, but it still hurts too much to read it over by myself, much less share it with somebody else.