The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico (2 page)

I ripped my legs from their roots and ran to bed, covered my head with the sheets, and said Hail Marys over and over. It was the only prayer I could remember. But even the Virgin Mary couldn’t stop the music from humming. So I tried to think of something else—something good.

Under the sheets, I stared at the pink polka-dot buds on the cotton. The print reminded me of the dress Mamá just finished sewing. I’d picked out the exact pattern I wanted—a Simplicity with a blond girl on the cover wearing a small, blue-flower print dress. Bluebonnets, Mamá said. I’d never seen bluebonnets before. I searched the fabric store for hours looking for the same material, but Mamá said they only sold it in the States, and besides, she thought those flowers were ugly. Not like any of our island flowers. She liked the coral blooms best, young
magas
on the stem,
and bought the whole bolt to sew matching dresses, though hers had simple pleats around the waist and mine was belled for a crinoline slip. When Papi saw us in them, side by side, for the first time, he put his hand to his forehead:
“Ay! Muy bonita!
I have the two most beautiful girls on the island!” It had felt good to be seen that way—beautiful, like Mamá. But not now. The memory made me sick.

I pulled the sheet off my head to breathe. The dress hung in the closet. I shut my eyes to keep from seeing it. I never wanted to wear it. Never. I wanted something else—bluebonnets like the girls in the United States. When I grew up, I swore I’d go there and leave all this behind.

I
N THE MORNING
, my voice was back, my legs unstuck. So I decided to bounce my lime-colored ball on the bed-room tiles, counting each as loudly as possible, snapping the silence with each throw.

“One!” The ball bounced. “Two!” It bounced again. “Three! Four! Five!” I counted. The sound of the rubber springing against the floor vibrated the walls of our pink house. I wanted Mamá and Papi to know I was awake—wanted them to wake up too. Their bedroom door was closed. So I took my bouncy ball out onto the tiles of the living room, walking past the couch, being sure not to look at it. I flicked on the radio. A fast
bomba
played, and I bounced to its rhythm. I didn’t hear the front door swing open.

Mamá entered, fully dressed, her hair pinned up in a knot, carrying a bowl of brown eggs. She’d been up for hours already, or maybe she’d never slept at all. She didn’t say anything, just turned the radio down as she passed on her way to the stove. I didn’t really want to talk to
her
, but I wanted to talk. So I asked, “Where’s Papi?” without looking at her or breaking the steady beat of rebounding rubber.

“Allí,”
she said and motioned with her nose toward the veranda.

Outside, Papi swung his machete, splitting coconuts; a stack of five or six lay at his feet.

“Coconut milk, again? I bet Omar gets to have real milk in Washington, D.C. Wish I was with him. Not here on this stupid
finca
, this stupid island,” I said, and immediately wondered where the words came from.

Omar was my cousin. Tío Orlando and Titi Lita moved to the States when he was still cutting his teeth on sugarcane. In the summers they sent him back to visit because they said he was forgetting Puerto Rico. It was true.

The summer before, he’d asked me during breakfast if we had any cereal. “
Sí
, we have
con-flei,”
I’d said, and pointed with my nose to the cabinet.

“Huh? What’s that?”

Everybody knew what that was. I shook my head and motioned again with my lips for added emphasis, the way Mamá did. He stared back at me without moving.

“Ay bendito!”
I opened the cabinet.
“Con-flei
is sugar
flakes and Lucky Charms.” I said it slowly and in perfect English so he’d understand. I didn’t tell him that the same box of Lucky Charms had been there since the
Navidad
. A line of dots marched to and from it even now. Sugar ants. It was a wonder they hadn’t nibbled all the bits inside.

Mamá didn’t move in the kitchen. It must have been a shock for her to hear me talk that way. I’d never done it in the past. Her back was to me, so I couldn’t see her face. She cracked an egg into the bowl. It crumbled in her fist. Without speaking, she picked the shells out of the yolk, and I noticed how pale the skin on the back of her neck looked, hidden beneath so much dark hair. I wondered if I was hidden from the light for long enough, if my skin would turn white like that, like the girl on the cover of the Simplicity pattern. Colorless, like the jelly of an egg. I loved and hated that foreign skin; it didn’t match mine.

Papi came in when the eggs were fried. He set the jug of fresh coconut milk on the breakfast table, and I wished I could take back what I’d said about it. His forehead was beaded with sweat from cracking the thick shells and straining the juice.

“Buenos días
, Verdita.” He kissed the top of my head and then Mamá’s cheek. The same cheek that had been flushed and slick the night before. Now it was dry and smeared with rouge. She ran her thin fingers over his hand, and I thought they looked like spiders crawling over the dead.

“Verdita isn’t really my name,” I said. Papi turned from Mama to face me. “If I lived in the States, they’d make you call me what it says on my birth certificate. Maria Flores. They’d make you.”

Mama turned too. They looked at me, and Papi scrunched the skin on his forehead so that the sweat beads ran together down the middle arch between his eyebrows. He thumbed the trickle away.

I wished I could take back all my words from that day. Verdita was my name. I had
my
story, and I loved coconut milk.

Suddenly I felt nauseated. The eggs on the table smelled of pork grease and butchered chicks. I thought I was going to throw up.

“Verdita.” Papi took a firm seat at the table; the silver-ware tinkled with his weight. “Sit down and eat your breakfast.”

I sat. Mama sat next to me, and we all bowed our heads to thank God for the food. I prayed that whatever they prayed wouldn’t pray them into heaven and leave me there alone. And then I prayed as hard as I could, squinting until my eyes ached, that I could turn back into an emerald parrot and fly to heaven or find the Ocean King and become his mermaid—I’d take either. When I opened my eyes, they were still sitting there, and I hadn’t sprouted wings or a fishtail. I tried to swallow the slippery fried egg, but it nearly came back up.

After breakfast, Papi asked if I wanted to walk down
the road to buy sesame seed bars while he talked to his friends about the local news. I knew what he was trying to do: trick me into trusting him again—into forgetting the night before. I wouldn’t fall for it.

“I got schoolwork,” I said, even though I didn’t. “A paper.”

“A paper? School’s almost finished for summer,
verdad?”
Papi asked.

“It’s the last one. I have to write about—about myself,” I lied.

“What about yourself?”

“Just who I am. Teachers always want us to write stories about who we are.”

I tried not to look him in the eyes. I’d never lied to him before, and I knew I wasn’t good at it. I grabbed a pencil and notebook and went out on the veranda.

Odio. Odio. Odio
. I hate. I hate. I hate. I wrote in Spanish and English, just to keep my pencil moving fast. Then I switched it up.
Maria Flores Ortiz-Santiago
. I wrote my official name again and again until it became strange to look at, the letters nothing more than lines and dots. Maria Flores. To be able to live with Juan and Monaique, maybe that’s who I needed to be.

Papi walked out the back door and down the driveway, then turned to me. “I’ll see you later.”

I nodded, like I was too busy to say anything. But I liked that Papi was trying. So maybe I wouldn’t hate him as much. I’d just hate Mamá. In my mind, I saw her over
and over—barebacked, flushed and slick against Papi; her voice still echoed. “Go. Leave.” My stomach turned.

V-e-r-d-i-t-a
. I wrote slowly across the top of the page.
Verdita
. I read it to myself, the familiar
r
rolling off my tongue. I wanted my nickname story to fill me up, but worried that it never would again.

Dare

T
HAT SUMMER, WHEN THE COQUI MATING CHIRPS
grew so loud I could barely sleep, Omar came to visit. I couldn’t wait for him to arrive, but when he did, I noticed he’d changed too. The summer before, our arm muscles and feet and hands had matched each other, and we’d both liked to run and climb to the same spot on our
ceiba
tree where the branches widened and neither one of us could reach any higher. We were equals then, but now his fingers and toes stretched long and full, like
morcilla
sausages; he could outrun and outclimb me, and he did it every chance he got.

Papi said that Omar was becoming a man, and took him out on the
finca
a few times. He even let Omar use the machete to crack coconuts. Papi never let me do that. I wasn’t allowed anywhere near the toolshed. It made me burning mad.

Omar thought he was better than me, because he was older and a boy and had been to the States. I’d never left the island. He said he’d seen things in Washington, D.C., that would make me cry for my mamá and try to swim back to Puerto Rico. He’d seen a homeless man who froze to death during a snowstorm. They found his iced body on a street near the White House, where the president lived. I’d felt snow and could imagine freezing. But I told Omar, “So what?” even though I shivered at the thought of a dead man. I’d never seen one of those.

He told me about a place called Anaconda, a town of snakes. He’d never been, but my
tío
told stories about men who lived there and murdered each other for red devils and juice. Snake poisons, Omar said. There weren’t any poisonous snakes in Puerto Rico. He had me with that one. But no matter how much Omar had seen, I wasn’t going to let him get away with being all high and mighty.

Omar brought something else new with him. A game he said that everybody in the States played. It was called “Dare.” We didn’t have Dare in Puerto Rico, or at least not in Florilla, our
barrio
. But I was a quick learner.

“So, you up to the challenge?” he asked.

“Are you?” I said.

He’d spent a good half hour huffing and puffing over the rules of Dare, even though I got them all in the first five minutes. Basically, you made up things for the other person to do, and they had to do them or else be a coward—a chicken.

“We got to flip a coin to see who goes first. I call heads.” He pulled a quarter from his pocket and spun it in the air. It clinked tails on the tile floor. Omar smirked like he knew something I didn’t. I was tired of everybody thinking they knew something I didn’t.

“Dare me,” he said.

I was ready. The three dead roosters in Papi’s study were stiff and old. I might have thought of them as dolls, maybe even played with them, except that the skin on their claws was cold and goosebumped, and sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I could see them move. But of course they kept still when I turned to look straight on. Ever since we were little, we’d made up spirit tales about those cocks. No matter how grown-up Omar was, I knew he still believed in some things.

“I dare you to stay locked in the study with the dead roosters for ten minutes.” I eyed the clock in the hallway.

Omar coughed like a laugh stuck in his throat, like it was no big thing. But I knew it was.

“Fine,” he said, and walked into the study without blinking.

I held the door open for him. “See you in ten minutes. I hope.” I shook my head and sighed.
“Adiós
, Omar.” I shut the door. The metal key stuck out of the lock like the roosters’ stiff, dead tongues; I turned it and watched the clock tick-tock.

After five minutes, I put my ear to the door and listened. I could hear the clicking of Omar’s fingers. He did
that when he got nervous. I bit my lip to keep the excitement from squealing out. I liked him being afraid when I wasn’t.

He’d been in there seven minutes when he cleared his throat. I stared hard at the doorknob; inside, I knew that the roosters were winking and moving toward him in the blurs. He cleared his throat again.

“Verdita?” There was a sudden bang. “Verdita, you better not cheat me. How long has it been?” He banged harder with his fist.

“Not yet time,” I said. “But if you want to be a chicken, I can let you out.”

Silence. That got him.

A few moments later, he rattled the doorknob. “Okay. Now?” It was only eight minutes. “Nope,” I said.

“Liar! Open the door, Verdita!”

“I’m not a—” I began, but before I had a chance to defend myself, Omar yelled, “Let me out!” His voice had reached that pitch—that one just before tears.

Even though I was safe outside, my stomach jumped. I quickly turned the key and pulled open the door. He rushed out, breathless, and I slammed the door behind him, protecting us from the monsters. It was fun to be scared, but only when you could control when it started and when it stopped.