The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico (14 page)

“You must obey and respect your parents. That’s in the Bible,” Padre said.

He took their side before I’d even explained.

“I try, but, Padre, they are liars.
They
are the sinful and wicked ones. Why doesn’t God punish them?” The words came out steamy and filled up the box.

“Why do you say your parents are liars? I know your mamá and papi well.” He didn’t know how they really were, not like I did. He didn’t live with us.

“Padre, they do bad things together,” I whispered.

“What things?” Padre whispered back.

Here it was—the undeniable proof. “I saw them one night on the couch. Without their clothes on—naked!” I widened my eyes so he could see I was telling the truth.

“Oh,” he said, and shifted away from the window.

That’s all? Maybe he misheard. I went on, “Lust.” I used his word.

“Verdita, what you saw your mamá and papi doing was natural. Ask your mamá to explain it and you’ll see. It isn’t sinful. It’s a part of God’s plan, and now your mamá is going to have a baby. Be happy! You have a little brother or sister coming.”

I shook my head. How could it be sinful for me and
natural for them? The tips of my ears burned, and I had to bite my tongue to keep from crying out just how unfair Padre’s rules were—how unfair God’s rules were!

“I pray that the Virgin will protect you and guide your mind and actions,” he said.

The Virgin Mary couldn’t help me. I wasn’t anything like her, and I never would be. I rubbed the sweat off my nose with my fallen hemline and kicked the confessional wall. Fine, I just wanted out of there.

I let the words I’d been taught run off my tongue. “I am sorry for these and all the sins of my past life.” And I was sorry. Sorry to be stuck in that black cage. Sorry to smell like sour fish. Sorry to be a girl in Puerto Rico. I was sorry for a lot of things. God understood that, even if nobody else did.

Padre Ramos said some words of forgiveness, and I crossed myself when I thought I should. It was almost over.

“Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good,” he said.

“For his mercy endures forever.” I reached for the curtain flap. “Amen.” I flung it shut behind me.

Mamá knelt just outside on a pew, pretending to be caught up in her own prayers.

“Mamá,” I said.

“Ay! Verdita!” She acted startled. I rolled my eyes. She didn’t need to pretend to me. She’d been standing next to the curtain flap the entire time. I had smelled her rose perfume. It stood out from the gray smoke and the
escabeche
stink of my fingers.

“So? Are you right with
Papá Dios?”
she asked.

“I have penance.”

“Sit down and start. And when you are done, you will pray until I say it is time to leave.” She pulled me down beside her and handed over her rosary beads. They were hot from her hands, each bead worn past the dark shine of the wood varnish to the lightness beneath. I guessed if you prayed hard enough and long enough, you could even change the color of wood.

I knelt before the Christ altar and said my Hail Marys and Our Fathers as fast as I could, the lines rolling into one another until I couldn’t hear the individual words anymore. They changed into something else, vibrations over my tongue, magic that made my mouth tingly and my head light. Beside me, Mamá’s swollen body swayed to the rhythm of her prayers, her mouth moved but no words came out; her eyes were closed like the Virgin Mary’s. Mamá was like her. I could see that.

I squeezed my eyes tight until shapes formed and moved under my lids, and I wondered if those were the saints that we couldn’t see with open eyes. Pray. I was supposed to pray, but I heard Elvis in my head. I tried to hush his voice by concentrating on the hard beads in my fist, and the magic worked because the singing quieted, and I was left alone with my voice.

I prayed that God would punish Omar—make his hair or teeth fall out, turn his toes green, or give him
solitaria
crawling inside his belly. He deserved to be punished, too,
for calling me a liar and a slut. But instead, he sat at home eating
con-flei
. He could say whatever he wanted and nobody cared, because he was a boy. They all liked boys better, even God. The Virgin Mary had Jesus, not Jesusa.

If Mamá’s baby was a boy, I’d be blamed for everything bad in our house, just like Teline. So I prayed that God would make the baby a girl. Lastly, I prayed that Blake would be my best friend instead of Omar’s, and if Mamá and Papi stopped loving me, I could go to the States and live with him.

I was out of things to talk to God about, so I peeked through the fuzziness of my lashes, and watched the candle flames flicker beneath the Virgin statue. I didn’t expect much from my prayers. They were as good as wishing into seashells.

When I was little, at the beach in Aguadilla, I found a shimmery pink shell that curled around itself like the inside of a gardenia. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Papi said shells that perfect belonged to the Ocean King, and if I made a wish into it and threw it back to the water, it would make its way to the sea castle. If the wish was worthy, if the Ocean King felt that it came from a pure heart, then he’d grant it. I spent months collecting shells, making wishes and throwing them off the shores of Puerto Rico. None of them ever came true. I stopped believing in seashell wishes when I saw a crab crawl out of one, and Señora Alonzo explained where they came from in science class. Papi lied. Just like he lied about other things.

I squeezed my hands together, the prayer beads digging into my palms. I wanted to leave. My knees ached. But Mamá still knelt, swayed, and mouthed words next to me. Being in church was worse than Papi’s belt or lectures.

By the time we left, my stomach growled and gurgled, and I felt weak. I hadn’t eaten breakfast. Mamá said we were fasting until I repented. Now that I had, I craved the
chicharrones
I smelled on the breeze. An old woman on the corner was frying pork skin and selling bags of it for a dollar.

“I’m hungry,” I said. “Can I get some
chicharrones
for the ride home?”

Mamá eyed the woman and licked her lips. She wanted some too, I could tell. Since the baby started to grow inside her, she was always eating. Today she’d gone hours with just wooden beads to suck on.

“Now that you’ve repented.” She rubbed her belly, then fished a dollar from her purse.

I paid the old woman at the corner, and she gave me a paper bag pocked in grease.

“Chicharrones
for the pretty girl,” the old woman said.

Me—with my floppy dress and dyed hair? I looked around. I was alone.

“Your mamá is lucky to have such a beautiful daughter.” She smiled. She had missing teeth and a wrinkled face, but her eyes were sky blue and almond-shaped. I thought she must have been beautiful a long time ago.

The fryer crackled, and she went back to fishing skins
out of the hot oil. I stood for a moment, not wanting to leave, and wishing she’d spoken in front of Mamá—to remind her that I was good and some people could see it.

We ate the bag on the drive home, both of us licking our fingers clean of the oil and salt.

At the bottom of our driveway, Mamá put the jeep in park. “Promise me you won’t do that again,” she said. Crumbs sprinkled her belly like she’d been blessed with holy
chicharrones
. “You will be a
señorita
soon. You must be careful, Verdita.”

I was too tired to argue and too full to talk any more about sin and God, lust and repentance. So I nodded.

Mamá pulled my head to her chest. “You’re a good girl,” she said. I didn’t push away. Even though I thought I ought to. I missed the way it felt to be close to her. And this time neither one of us let go for a long while. I wondered if she’d heard the old woman, or if the prayer beads actually worked better than seashells.

A
FTER WE GOT
home, I sat alone behind the house with a basket of corn ears between my knees. Papi had harvested five more baskets and left them on the veranda. There was a cockfight at the
jíbaros
bar, and he’d gone with Tío Benny. I tried not to think about it. It had already been a long day of thinking. So I shucked. I’d gotten good at it. I liked the way the threads slipped between my fingers like my hair underwater, the way the yellow kernels lined up
neat and even and smelled green and clean. Mamá was going to make
sorullo de maíz
that night. It was one of my favorites.

From down the side of the hill, Omar and Blake came carrying their baseball and gloves and shouting over who threw the farthest. They stopped talking when they saw me.

“Hey.” Omar nodded and took off his Yankees cap. I hadn’t seen him capless since the summer before. His hair was long and shaggy; dark curls stuck, wet with sweat, to his forehead. He took a seat next to me on the bench. I could smell his Right Guard and something sour, like he’d bathed in holy water.

“We were talking today and …” He hung his cap on his knee and ran his hand through his hair. It stuck up and stayed that way. “You shouldn’t have done what you did.” He tapped my basket with his glove. “But I’m sorry I called you a slut. So that’s all.” He eyed Blake and stood. “I got first bath.” The back door banged shut behind him.

I picked up an ear and ripped the husk from the cob.

Blake sat down beside me and reached into my basket. “I used to do this with Ma all the time. Patsy never liked the farm. She’d give me money to do her chores. Back before,” he said. He skillfully pulled the leaves. He was good at it and started on another ear before I was done with mine.

“You miss your sister?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Sometimes I can barely remember the jokes she told. I write them down so I don’t forget.”

He pulled hard on the silk, then stopped and turned to me. “You aren’t a slut. Omar was wrong to say it.” Corn threads webbed his fingers, and he gently picked at them until they caught on the breeze and flew away. “I’ll help you shuck. I don’t mind.”

“Thanks,” I said. I wanted my last prayer to come true—for Blake to be my best friend. I wanted God to give me a sign that he’d heard me, that I was worthy of my wishes.

Blake reached into the basket to take another, and when he did, his hand brushed across the inside of my thigh, rough knuckles against my soft skin. My legs went stiff and shaky. My knees buckled in tight against the basket weave, and it was a good thing I was already sitting down because I would have fallen right over. Down low and deep, a burning tickle spread outward until my whole body was a fever. I tried to keep my hands moving, to hide from Blake what I knew for sure he could see, a glaze of goosebumps and sweat. It was like the feeling I had when Teline kissed my neck, only bigger. I wished I could feel it again until my whole body caught fire or froze, whichever.

It didn’t seem as scary now—what Delia and Carlos did under the mango tree, what Mamá and Papi did on the couch. Maybe Padre Ramos was right about it being natural. I reimagined Blake’s touch over and over while we shucked, the earthy corn smell around us, the light changing to dark.

The Chupacabra

T
HE DAY BEFORE
O
MAR AND
B
LAKE FLEW BACK
to the States, Tío Benny and Titi Ana came for a good-bye dinner. Titi Lola couldn’t come. She had a late-night perm on Doña Guerrero, who’d just moved to our
barrio
. A Cuban family. They were the first Cubans in our mountain town, and it bothered me that I didn’t know everybody anymore. The town was changing. Strangers were coming and going.

Tío Benny played a lonesome melody on his guitar while we sat with empty plates and stripped cobs at our sides.

“Who wants to hear a story?” Tío Benny stopped his strumming. “How about a scary one?” He handed his guitar to Titi Ana. The adults pulled their chairs close while we scooted to his feet and sat pretzellegged. Two things Tío Benny did better than anybody else: sing and tell stories.

“What should I tell?” he asked.

“A good pirate story,” Mamá replied.

“No, tell them about the Chupacabra,” Papi laughed.

“What’s the Chupacabra?” asked Blake.

“Ay, sí
, the Chupacabra,” Tío Benny scratched his head. “Do you think it is wise—on such a dark night? I hear that even mentioning it on nights like these … you know, the jungle hears everything.”

I scooted close to Blake. My knee grazed his. The Chupacabra was a monster that lived deep in the rain forests of the island. Everybody in Puerto Rico knew that.

“Some say it is nothing but a child’s tale—but I tell you, I’ve seen the work of the beast, and once you’ve seen it, you believe. Right, Faro?”

“Sí
, Benny,” said Papi.

Titi Ana snickered beside Mamá. Papi lit the mosquito torches around the porch, then poured another short glass of gin and took a seat. The firelight cast an orange glow over Tío Benny’s face; his eyes were black as papaya seeds.

“One day when I was twelve years old and Faro was fifteen, we were walking through the jungle, bringing sacks of coffee beans back to the farm. Our mule, Zapato, moved slow. He was an old, stubborn donkey. Faro pulled him along by the bit and I walked behind, thwacking his hind end with the flat side of the machete, but still he moved like a water slug. The trip took nearly twice as long as usual, and before we knew it, night had come, and we were
pushing our way through darkness, chopping vines with our machetes, and praying we were headed in the right direction.