America's Dream (42 page)
“Run outside, run, Kyle, Meghan, run outside! Run! Run!”
She hears the children scrambling down the back stairs, so she heads down the front, because Correa is chasing her and she doesn’t want him to come near the kids. Not with a knife in his hand. Not with the intention of killing. I won’t let him. He won’t kill me. He won’t.
She’s at the front door, but her hands are wet, wet with some- thing slippery, wet with blood, her blood, and she doesn’t know where it’s coming from. There’s blood on the white wall and on the carpet, on the shiny wood floor where the runners stop.
Correa is behind her. There are cars outside. Meghan and Kyle are screaming outside, safe. He plunges the knife into her back, and she falls against the door. The knife flashes silver and red, and in the split second it takes him to lift it, she dodges
under his arm, but with the other hand he grabs her hair and pushes her hard against the wall of the den. He comes around to face her, and she can’t recognize him. No, this can’t be him, this can’t be, his green eyes so dark, so savage. There’s no love there. It’s hate that she sees, hate that she feels as she uses her last bit of strength to kick him hard in the one place she knows she can hurt him, between his hairy legs. He doubles over with a groan, and she kicks him again, connects against his lowered face this time, and he turns and falls. There’s a crack, like a twig breaking, as Correa’s head bounces against the angled edge of the granite coffee table. She watches him fall, then lie there, still. Oh, he’s so still. Her back against the wall, she slides down down down down, and there are voices, Meghan and Kyle crying and a man shouting “Police!” and Correa is so still, so quiet. Her chest burns and she can’t breathe. Correa is so still, and the house is full of people, men in heavy shoes and I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe.
hen she comes to, she smells roses. Elena is sitting nearby, reading.
“Mami!” Rosalinda’s voice comes from her left side. When América turns toward it, Rosalinda throws herself at her mother, sobbing into her bosom.
“It’s all right,” América murmurs, not sure if it really is. “It’s all right.”
Elena stands by her now, caresses her cheek. “I’ll go get the others,” and then she’s gone. Rosalinda still sobs, and América doesn’t know how to make her stop. So she cries too.
The others come. Leopoldo, Paulina, Carmen. Ester. What’s Ester doing here? A woman in a pink jacket tells them they can’t all be in the room at the same time, but no one moves. América can’t stop crying, neither can Rosalinda. Paulina is crying too. But Ester is smiling.
“What happened?” she asks, but even though their mouths move, none of what they say makes sense. She closes her eyes, and when she opens them again, she’s alone. I dreamed it, she thinks, and closes her eyes, and then Lourdes is sitting in the chair where Elena was, and Rosalinda is standing by a window. Was there a window there before? It’s daylight and then it’s night and everyone is gone again. No there’s no window. My
arm hurts. I have a tube up my nose. And then it’s daylight and Rosalinda is sitting in the chair and Ester is sitting next to her.
“What happened?”
Ester and Rosalinda look at each other. “How do you feel?” Ester asks.
“I’m alive,” she says, and Rosalinda and Ester exchange a look again. “Are the kids okéi?”
“They’re fine. The lady was here. She left these.” Ester points to a flower arrangement.
“Where are we?”
“I’m not sure,” Ester says. “They drive me here and back, so I don’t know.”
“Are you okay, Mami? Do you feel okay?” Rosalinda caresses América’s hand, the one with no I.V. needles.
“What happened?” América asks again.
“Don’t you remember?” Rosalinda seems incredulous. “She doesn’t remember,” she tells Ester, who’s across the bed.
“Don’t worry about it now. You just get better.”
“I want to know.” América looks from her mother to her daughter. They’re hiding something from her. “Tell me.”
“Correa,” Ester says, “won’t be bothering you anymore.”
No, of course not, she thinks. He’s in Puerto Rico. And we are…where are we? In New York. Rosalinda sobs again and once more seeks her mother’s bosom. Ester looks older than the last time América saw her. When was that? It’s too hard to focus. She closes her eyes again and sleeps.
pocket.
The apartment is small, two tiny bedrooms, a kitchen/din- ing/living room. It’s in the Puerto Rican part of the Bronx, not the quiet neighborhood with the tall green building. Paulina ad- vised her against living here, but América didn’t follow her ad- vice. She reasons that the more peace and quiet a person seeks, the less she’s likely to get it. So she lives on the Grand Concourse, above a bodega, close to the subway station that takes her into Manhattan five days a week.
She likes working in a big hotel. The guests never stay more than a day or two. She hardly ever sees them. Mostly business- men, they arrive at the hotel late and leave early. The hardest part of the job is having to wait for the supervisor to reconcile the minibar before she cleans the room. It’s a stupid rule. She could be in and out of rooms faster if she didn’t have to wait for him.
It’s also hard to be cooped up inside all day. The hotel has big windows that don’t open, so she gets to see the sun but not feel it. The interior halls of the hotel are elegantly dim, the carpets thick and luxurious. It’s so quiet a guest can sneak up on you before you know they’re there. But they don’t. Guests don’t sneak up on maids. They mostly ignore her. They don’t even see her half the time. She finds the indentations of their bodies on the bed, discarded scraps of paper with mysterious notes written on them, crumpled name tags. Sometimes they leave a dollar in the envelope with her name on it. But not as often as she’d like.
Even so, she makes more money and works less hours than when she was an empleada. She gets overtime, too, and health insurance.
She could have used health insurance to pay for the two weeks she spent at the hospital where Karen Leverett works. It would also have helped pay for the physical therapy necessary to get her punctured lung working again and to gain movement in her left arm where a couple of muscles were severed with the kitchen knife.
While she was at the hospital, the other empleadas came to see her, Frida toting a newspaper with the headline
HOUSEKEEPER KILLS INTRUDER.
“Is he dead, then?” América asked, and Frida looked at Mer- cedes and they both looked at Ester, who was sitting by the win- dow. “Is he dead?” They all looked so scared.
Ester stepped to the bedside, held her hand. “It was self-de- fense,” she said. “He would have killed you.”
América closed her eyes and tried to conjure up an image of Correa, but it wouldn’t come. The empleadas said something about the painkillers affecting her and left. Not so the policewo- man who showed up to interrogate her. If América closed her eyes and pretended to sleep so she wouldn’t have to answer the policewoman’s questions, she just waited. She sat there, it seemed to América, a whole day, asking how long she’d known Correa, how often he hit her, whether he’d visited her at the Leveretts’ house.
Karen Leverett came down to see her a couple of times, but
then there was another newspaper headline,
INTRUDER WAS MAID’S LOVER
. América wondered why she was a housekeeper the first time and a maid the second.
The day América was to leave the hospital, Karen came to see her again.
“How kids?” was the first thing América asked.
“They’re fine.” Karen fidgeted with an envelope, didn’t meet América eyes. “They send their love.”
América’s eyes teared. “I so sorry, Karen.”
“You should have told me. We would have helped you.” She seemed on the verge of tears herself.
“It was mistake to run away.” Karen looked at her uncompre- hendingly. “From Puerto Rico.” América amended. “Not possible run away from problems.”
Karen seemed about to say something but changed her mind.
She handed América an envelope. “Your salary.”
It was a white envelope. In the center of it, Karen had printed “America Gonzalez.”
“Under the circumstances, you understand,” Karen continued, “I’ve hired someone else.”
América nodded, stared at those neat block letters, at her name spelled without an accent. “Okéi,” she said. “I understand.”
Karen hugged her and said good-bye. América didn’t take her eyes off her name in the center of the white envelope until it was too blurry to make out, until tears splotched onto the letters, one two three.
América wishes that “the circumstances” hadn’t been discussed in the newspapers and talk radio. She received letters at the hos- pital from women who said they’d been battered themselves and she had given them courage to act. Are they all going to kill their men, she wondered. There was a stream of people who wanted to talk to her, lawyers, a psychologist, a counselor from a battered women’s shelter, a woman who wanted to write her life story. People, she was sure, she had passed on the street and had never so much as looked in her direction. They all wanted something from her, and it was a relief when, on the day
Paulina came to pick her up, she didn’t have to talk to or see any of them anymore.
Every once in a while she still gets a call from people who haven’t forgotten. Last week it was a producer from the Geraldo Rivera show.
“You should do it, Mami,” Rosalinda insisted. “They say your story might help some women in the same situation.”
“How would it help? I didn’t do anything. I kicked him too hard and he fell and broke his neck. How’s that going to help anyone?”
“You fought him, Mami. You won.”
“I wouldn’t consider making my daughter an orphan a victory,” she told Rosalinda, and that shut her up. Whenever that night comes up, Rosalinda tries to make América feel good about what happened, as if to make up for her betrayal. She rarely mentions her father, doesn’t like to talk about their life in Puerto Rico, has forgotten all about being a vedette when she grows up.
It amazes her that Rosalinda seems so well adjusted. She’s in school, is learning English faster than América would have pre- dicted, and seems to like living in the Bronx, although América frowns at some of the friends she’s made. Girls with lots of makeup and bored expressions, boys with pants that are too big, so low on their hips that América can see the crack of their culos through their shorts.
Ester says América should let Rosalinda make her own de- cisions about who her friends are. But América doesn’t listen to Ester’s advice. Since she appeared on Cristina Saralegüi’s show to talk about how domestic violence affects the lives of all mem- bers of the family, Ester has become an expert on human behavior and a celebrity in Vieques. She’s more opinionated than ever.
When América wipes down the mirrors in the hotel, she can’t avoid looking at her face. There’s a scar running across her nose. It wasn’t there before Correa attacked her with Karen Leverett’s kitchen knife, and América doesn’t remember being cut. Darío says it’s invisible, that no one else can see it but her. He once ran his finger across it, tracing a line from under her
right eye to just beyond her left. That was the first time she al- lowed him to kiss her on the lips.
To her, the scar is not invisible. It irritates her when people pretend it’s not there. It’s a reminder of who she is now, and who she was then. Correa’s woman was unscarred, but América Gonzalez wears the scars he left behind the way a navy lieutenant wears his stripes. They’re there to remind her that she fought for her life, and that, no matter how others may interpret it, she has a right to live that life as she chooses. It is, after all, her life, and she’s the one in the middle of it.
hile this is a work of fiction, it takes place in Vieques, which is real. La Casa del Franceés exists, in better condition than described here, and with a different history. I am indebted to Irving and Helen Greenblatt for their hospitality and generosity in allowing a fictional América Gonzalez to work in their lovely
hotel.
Muchisimas gracias to my friend and agent, Molly Friedrich, for her guidance and encouragement, and to my editor, Peternelle van Arsdale, for taking a chance on me and on
América’s Dream
Gracias to Judith Azaña, and to all the empleadas who provided
stories and insights.
And finally, dear Frank, Lucas, and Ila, thank you for being there for me. Your support means everything.
E
SMERALDA
S
ANTIAGO
is the author of the memoir
When I Was Puerto Rican. América’s Dream
is her first novel.
Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
AMÉRICA’S DREAM
. Copyright © 1996 by Esmeralda Santiago. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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