The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico (18 page)

“Great. Nice meeting you both. If you’re ever in Hartford, Connecticut, look us up. Milford. Bob and Jill. We’ll take you out for some of the best pizza you ever tasted,” Bob said.

I didn’t know what pea-sa was, but I nodded like I did. It sounded like a bean dish, pigeon peas, I figured.

They walked hand in hand out the entrance and across the long path. I wanted to go to Connecticut to visit them.
I wanted to eat pea-sa, pork chops, steak, and salmon. I wanted to see my
titis
and
tíos
, and Omar and Blake in Washington, D.C. I didn’t want to be stuck on this island with Chupacabras and evil spirits and sickness. I wanted to go to the United States where everybody smiled and was happy.

W
E WENT TO
the hospital that night and sat in the gray waiting room once again. Papi stood across from us, staring out the window at the black sky. We didn’t talk about what had happened at Mamá Juanita’s. But I couldn’t be mad at Papi for long. Mamá, yes, but Papi was different. Our spirits were connected. He knew I was sorry, and I knew he felt bad for hitting me. I wanted to forget it had ever happened, so I thought about the white sunglasses on Jill, the straw hat on Bob. I wondered if they liked the
arroz con pollo
as much as I did.

They operated on Mamá and took out a boy, a girl, and Mamá’s womb. A doctor in a long white coat came out. He said big words like
complication
and
hysterectomy
and
chorioamnionitis
. Words I had never heard in my life. Words much bigger than
automobile
. The only thing I knew for sure was that Mamá was okay, sleeping finally.

“Mr. Santiago, if you’d like to spend some time with your daughter, I suggest you do it now,” the doctor said.

I turned to Papi. I was right there.

“The baby daughter,” Mamá Juanita whispered.

Not me. I was almost a
señorita
.

Papi followed the doctor back, and an hour later, the nurse who’d given me apple juice told us that the girl had died. It seemed so far away, so dreamlike. I couldn’t cry. I hadn’t known her. Mamá Juanita crossed herself, and we said a prayer for her spirit. I imagined her swimming to heaven, her wavy black hair trailing behind; her light eyes shining through the night like a glow fish.

Papi returned soon after and sat beside me.

“You have a brother.” He sighed and wrapped his arm around my shoulder. I leaned into him. His shirt was warm and damp and smelled sour-sweet, like the Borinqueneer uniform.

“I’m sorry, Papi,” I whispered.

Papi nodded and kissed my forehead.

“How is the boy?” asked Mamá Juanita.

“Fine. The nurses have him,” explained Papi.

“And Venusa?”

Papi sighed again. The breath moved through his throat, his chest, his lungs. It echoed against his bones.

“She cannot—” He sipped in air, but it seemed to get stuck in the knobby part of his neck. “No more children.”

“You have a boy and a girl, Faro. An Adam and an Eve. Be thankful.” Mamá Juanita pulled rosary beads from her purse and bowed her head.

Naranja

T
HEY NAMED THE BABY
J
UAN AFTER
P
API AND MY
abuelo
. Papi put me in charge of holding the birth certificate. I read it over and over.

C
ERTIFICATE OF
B
IRTH:
Juan Ortiz-Santiago. Boy. August 2, 1962. San Juan, Puerto Rico
.

F
ATHER:
Juan Santiago
. O
CCUPATION:
farmer
.

M
OTHER:
Monaique Ortiz-Santiago

O
CCUPATION:
none
.

The nurse had a fair hand in printing. She wrote in loopy letters and dotted her
i
’s in circles, not black holes, making the words look like they had misplaced eyeballs. All in all, it was a nice certificate.

Mamá and the baby spent three days in the hospital before they were released. I wasn’t allowed to see them.
Papi said they were still sick and needed rest. So I stayed at Mamá Juanita’s.

When I finally saw Mamá again, a nurse wheeled her out of the hospital entrance, and she looked nothing like she had before. Her stomach was gone; her hair was pulled back in a lopsided bun, and her face was pale except for the dark lines of her eyebrows. She barely spoke, even when I kissed her cheeks and hands to let her know I never wanted her to leave for good.

“Come meet your brother,” Papi said. He held Juan in his arms, wrapped in a thin, blue hospital blanket.

I stepped away, worried that he knew all the wrong I’d wished him before he was born. Papi leaned in close and peeled back the blanket. A little orange face squinted against the light, pursed his lips, and fell back to sleep.

“He’s a different color from us,” I said.

“It’s called jaundice,” Papi explained. “It will pass.”

Papi pulled the blanket back over the baby’s face and handed him to Mamá.

“No,” Mamá grunted, and pulled herself into the front seat of the jeep. “Verdita can hold.”

Papi nodded. “Can you?”

I’d never held a newborn baby before. “What if I hurt him?”

Papi smiled. “I don’t think you’ll hurt him.”

I climbed in and buckled my seat belt. Papi handed me the bundle, and I cradled him the best I could, his head
in the crook of my arm, his feet snuggled against my waist. He fit perfectly in my lap.

“Naranja,”
I whispered. He smelled like dusted sugar. “I’m your sister, Verdita.”

Papi started the jeep. “What did you call him?”

“Naranja,”
I said. “‘Cause he’s orange.”

“Naranja,”
Papi repeated. “Like I said, Puerto Ricans are all colors of the rainbow,” he laughed, and it felt good to hear it again. “What do you think, Venusa?”

Mamá leaned against the side of the window without answering.

“I think it’s a good nickname,” he said.

On the way home from the hospital, we passed a group of people as big as the crowd that had gathered to see President Kennedy. For a split second I wondered if he had returned without my knowledge, but then I saw a man holding a poster with a black X through the American flag. He was shouting something with fist raised in the air. The man next to him held a sign that read:
Movimiento Pro-Independencia
. The crowd began to chant “MPI,” and pounded the air to a furious cadence.

Naranja slept in my arms, his tiny breath moving in and out, his heart thumping warm and steady. I held him close as we passed the protesters, shielding him from their voices and angry glares.

“Papi, why are those people so mad?” I asked once the crowd was behind us.

“Politics.” Papi shook his head. “By trying to make us a state, they think America is stealing Puerto Rico—our traditions, our people. So they fight for independence. Many Puerto Ricans believe you must be hot or cold. American or Boricuan. To be lukewarm is worse than death,” he explained.

I knew that was in the Bible, so it had to be true. “What are we?” I asked.

Papi sucked his teeth. “We are what we are,” he said, and I could tell by the tone of his voice that that was enough. I didn’t dare ask more, even though I was more confused than ever, and ashamed of my longings to be both.

When we got home, Naranja woke but didn’t cry, even when I bumped his feet against the screen door. Mamá went straight into her room and locked the door.

“She is still recovering,” Papi explained. “We’ll put him in the living room for now.”

Papi pulled my old cradle from the storage closet while I rocked Naranja on the couch. He made funny noises. Gurgles and hiccups and farts. They made me laugh, and when I did he yawned and stretched and made more noises, and I laughed some more. He was good as far as babies went, as far as boys went, too. And I started to love him. I hadn’t meant to. Each time he giggled or farted or blew a spit bubble, one of my fears about having a baby brother popped open and flew off on the night breeze. A wild dog howled somewhere in the distance, and I pulled
Naranja close to my chest. Slipping the gold
azabache
off my wrist, I slid it onto his, and pushed it up until it fit the upper part of his arm. Papi wouldn’t mind;
azabaches
were meant for babies. Everyone in Puerto Rico put them on newborns to keep jealous spirits from taking them back to heaven.

In the middle of the living room, we set up the cradle, a basket on stilts padded with Mamá’s blue and white blanket that spilled over the edges and touched the floor. Naranja looked like the baby Jesus in the
Navidad
scene. I pulled a chair close to him and touched his orange cheeks and chubby fingers. The tiny knuckles of his fingers reminded me of fresh corn kernels.

Over the next few days he slept a lot. And when he wasn’t sleeping, he ate formula, pooped, and cried. But he only cried when he wanted to eat or after he pooped, and I wished he could just tell us which one instead of wailing so loud that he woke the chickens. I wondered when he would learn to talk, and if he would speak English or Spanish. Or maybe he’d speak some other language—Russian or Chinese. Maybe God had accidentally given us a Chinese baby. I’d have to learn Chinese to talk to him, and Mamá and Papi wouldn’t understand. It would be our own secret language.

Mamá stayed in bed, only rising to use the bathroom. She ate a jar of peanut butter a day. The empty ones lined the side of the mattress; a full one sat on the bedside table, uncapped, with a spoon stuck in the middle like a grave
marker. I brought her a loaf of
pan de agua
in the mornings and picked up its empty paper sleeve at night. Mamá lived the same life as Naranja: sleeping, eating, and crying.

Papi tried to get her to breast-feed Naranja, but she was still sick with the infection and didn’t want to give it to “the boy.” I explained to her his nickname, but by then the jaundice had faded. She took one look at him and said she didn’t understand.

Almost a week went by and Mamá didn’t get better, so Papi stopped by town and bought aspirin and peanut butter for Mamá, gin for himself, a sack of rice, Palmolive soap, and seven cans of Similac. I learned to fix the powdered formula. It was just like the Klim that Mamá used to give me. Each morning I made us milk for breakfast, adding a little peanut butter to mine. Afterwards, it was time to burp and, an hour later, to diaper. Every day was the same. We moved the cradle into my room so Mamá could get well. Naranja’s cries made her breasts wet; it was best that he slept where she couldn’t hear him.

I forgot about books, my journal, and the States, everything outside of the house, everything outside of Mamá, Papi, and Naranja. It was my penance. I did the cooking and the cleaning and the laundry, but none of it very well. All the clothes were dingy. I scrubbed diapers with Palmolive, but they turned yellow no matter what, and my arms couldn’t reach the tops of the windows, so they stayed dirty. My
mixtas
tasted too salty, too soupy, but Papi ate them anyway, or at least he did at first. He
stopped coming home for dinner after a while, and spent his nights at the
jíbaros
bar. Sometimes he didn’t come home at all. When he did, he slept on the couch, and in the mornings I found him with pockets full of money and copper on his breath. I shook him hard to wake him and made
café con leche
the way Mamá did. Sometimes he drank it, sometimes he didn’t. We sat at the breakfast table: Naranja and I with our milk, Papi with his
café
. Then he’d leave for work. We didn’t talk.

Mamá stayed in her room with the door locked. I’d put my ear to the door and listen to her saying the rosary; the sound of her voice hummed through the wood, slow and steady. I couldn’t stop wondering if she blamed me for everything that had happened. I blamed myself and wondered if God had cursed the baby girl and Mamá on account of my prayers, my wishes. I was sorry for hating her.

Papi said that Mamá named the baby girl, but never spoke her name. I called her Angela, because that was how I remembered her on the night she died.

O
N
F
RIDAY OF
that week, I was pulling dingy rags off the back laundry line when the loud clatter of women’s voices interrupted.

“Venusa! Verdita!” Titi Lola called.

I left the clothes dangling by their pins. Papi was already at work; Mamá was locked in her room, and Naranja slept after his morning formula.

Titi Lola rapped on the screen door and called, “Anyone home?” With her were half a dozen women from town, including Delia, Titi Ana, Señora Delgado, and two women from the prayer group.

“Sí
, we’re here, Titi.” I unlatched the front door.

“
Ay
, Verdita. How’s my blond-ay bombshell?” My hair had almost grown out by then, frosted only at the tips. She kissed my cheeks. The others trailed in and did the same.