House Arrest (24 page)

She was going to leave all this behind. Her mother, her daughter, even her father. She was going to get on a plane and fly away and never look back. It would be the easiest thing in the world to do.

Milagro’s footsteps approached, her feet on the stone path,
through the leaves of the
júcaro
tree. The sky over the city was indigo and pale orange. Milagro was always on time and Isabel took her by the hand. It was dusk in Ciudad del Caballo. Cars sputtered home from work. Together they made their way through the streets, down alleyways. They walked until they came to a crumbling house near the sea.

It was the house where Isabel once slept in a room of yellow curtains with a cat named Topaz, where her father came to dance with her. Now it was an administration building for the Department of Public Works. But Isabel knew the way up the back stairs to the roof. She had been coming here all the time when the offices were closed, which was most of the time.

On the roof with its vista of the sea Isabel and Milagro began their routine. They stretched their arms high over their heads. Breathing deeply, they stretched higher, then dropped down, touching their toes. They spread their feet and reached again for their toes in long even strokes, like two pendulums in synchronicity.

Then they lay on the floor, feet touching, holding hands. Isabel sat back and Milagro pulled her up; then Milagro sat back and her mother tugged her up. They did this fifty, one hundred, two hundred times. They began again, only this time they did not hold hands. Two hundred sit-ups, two hundred push-ups. They panted and sweat.

Isabel picked up a heavy wire cable and handed Milagro a tire iron. They slapped themselves across the backs and legs. The whacks were sharp, like someone being flogged, but the women did not cry out. “This is nothing,” Isabel said to her daughter. “We must be brave,
mi hijita
. We must prepare ourselves for what lies ahead.”

L
ATELY Mummy’s been acting strange. Not that she’s not always strange, but now she does things she’s never done before. Like when I play Calle Ocho really loud she tells me to turn it down. No more pirated music. Even Tito Rodgriquez and my punk-salsa bands—
los metálicos
—she wants me to turn down. She wants everything quiet. No disturbances, she says. At night she closes the house up tight so nobody can see in. She’s playing it—how do you say?—close to the vest.

Mummy has always been very obvious about everything. She wears bright colors—hot pink and orange. And she doesn’t care who hears her or what they say. Her laugh is so loud you think something is wrong. Then last week not only does she want everything quiet, but she starts eating too. Before, a carrot stick and lemonade, that was lunch for Mummy. Now she cooks things that made her throw up before. Sticky pastries. Fat-rich stews. Pork rind, potatoes, dough bread. Smells that never came from our kitchen are
coming from there now and suddenly I come home to silence and pots cooking on the stove.

Once I read this story about a girl whose father was becoming a plant. His blood was green. Leaves grew from his head. That’s how I feel about Mummy. Not that she’s becoming a plant, but she’s not the same form of life she was a few weeks ago. Now she could almost sprout teeth and hair and start prowling at night.

I go about my business. Pretend nothing is wrong. With Chico like always I go to the sea. We sit on the seawall, smoke a joint. He cops a feel. Then we beg pencils and stuff off the tourists. Sometimes we score big. A pair of jeans, a heavy-metal T-shirt, and nobody expects much in return. It’s amazing what people will give you if you ask just right. Once a lady gave me a sweatshirt that read “Try Our Buffalo Wings,” but nobody knows what it means. I’ve gotten candy bars, cans of tuna, shampoo. Of course, technically, we don’t need anything at all. If Mummy would just get on her knees and grovel, we could have whatever we wanted. Be the dutiful daughter, keep your big mouth shut. But Mummy has always said whatever she wanted, whatever popped into her little head.

Like just last year when the surveillance men were across the street from our house all the time. They pretended they were doing road repairs, but why, tell me, when all the main streets of
la isla
have potholes big enough you could land a spaceship in them, would they bother to repair the potholes on our little deserted side street? So Mummy goes up to them each day and tells them that their
lider
is an
estúpida
and why don’t they do something useful like blow up his house. They just stare at her and sometimes they grin, then go about their business, fixing the road.

But now suddenly it’s all different and Mummy is silent as if there’s some big secret around here and you open your mouth and it will jump out of her head. But I am no
estúpida
. I can see things as they are. I know by the way she sips these stews and fills the house with the petals of roses and cowrie shells, the way she lights candles to Madre de Caridad, that something is going to happen. You don’t have to be a genius to see that Mummy is tossing out old clothes, throwing away what she doesn’t need anymore. Since she’s a bit of a pack rat, when she starts to throw things out, that’s when I know. She thinks she’s going somewhere, but for once she’s not talking about it and I know better than to ask.

Anyway, I don’t need to. Because that’s the one thing about me and Mummy. She can’t fool me.

I
T IS LATE in the day when Major Lorenzo brings me back to my hotel. The afternoon light is waning, the birds are returning to roost in the trees above the plaza. He asks if there is anything I need and I beg him to take me around, show me the sights. A quick visit to the fortress. “Please,” I beg him, “just let me take a short walk by the sea.”

He shakes his head because that is what he cannot do. “I wish I could. I understand how you are feeling.” I wonder how he could understand, but then he asks with concern in his voice if I will be all right.

“Yes, I suppose I will.” My eyes are burning, my skin stings from the salt of my tears.

When Major Lorenzo drops me off, I invite him in, but he refuses. He says it gently, but somehow I feel as if something has changed between us. “Wouldn’t you like a coffee?” I say. He points to his Rolex watch and says he must be getting home. I try to picture Mrs. Lorenzo—a short, stout woman, built close to the ground, preparing a mutton stew with rice
and beans. Or perhaps I would be surprised. Perhaps she is tall and European. He lusts after her all the time.

“That’s a nice watch,” I tell him.

“Yes,” he says, “it was a gift from a colleague.” He doesn’t say which colleague.

“You don’t have trouble getting nice watches like that here?”

“No, there is very little we have trouble getting.” He opens the car door for me. “You’ll be all right,” he says, “won’t you?”

“Yes, of course I will.”

The prostitutes are sitting at a table in the bar and they wave at me as I walk into the lobby. I find I am actually glad to see them, happy to see familiar faces. It seems as if the prostitutes have accepted me as one of their own. They don’t exactly understand it, but since I seem to more or less always be in the hotel like them, they decide I am an international operator. They motion for me to join them for a beer, which of course I will buy.

“Hey,” Flora says, “why don’t you come out with us tonight? We can drum up some business for you.”

“We see you went out with the commandant today,” Flora says with a smirk on her face. “Did you have a good time?”

They are joking, but then they seem to notice that my eyes are red, that something is wrong. “Hey,” María says, offering me a seat. There is something about her that I like, the gentleness of her features. She is so small and petite, always in the same red dress, her friendly smile, like someone I’d be happy to have baby-sitting for Jessica, telling her when bedtime is, what stories to read. “You’ve been crying,” she says. “Actually I’m not in a very good situation.”

She pulls a chair back and I sit down beside her. Her face is filled with concern. “What is it?” she says, “What did you do?”

I don’t know why it is, but I need to confide. “The last time I was here,” I tell her, “I helped someone leave.”

She gasps, catching her breath. “Ah,” she sighs, “I see.”

“Now I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know when they’ll let me leave.”

“Who was it?” she asks. “Who did you help go?”

I almost tell her, but then I think better of it. “It was nobody,” I tell her, “nobody you’d know.” She nods, a look of disappointment on her face that seems more extreme than the situation warrants.

Later I return to my room. As I approach the door, I see a small object leaning against the jamb. It is a little doll made of cloth, dark, with black hair. A scrawny, unappealing doll, though it looks vaguely familiar to me. I cannot imagine who left it here, or why. I’m not sure if its purpose is to protect me or harm me, but I take it inside. I put it on my dresser, turning it this way and that. Then it occurs to me that from a certain angle as I look at its dark hair, its stick-figure form, this doll could be Isabel.

T
HOUGH they rarely ate together, this night they would. Rosalba had a pot cooking on the stove. Chicken, rice, and peas. Isabel arrived with a bowl of flower petals and incense, talismans around her neck. Milagro wore a Disneyland T-shirt and carried with her a small stuffed bear. A faint odor of tobacco and a feeling that someone had recently been there filled the room. Isabel sniffed like a dog. “Who was it, Mother?” And then she asked again, more insistently. “Did he come and see you again?”

“No,
mi hija
, he did not come,” Rosalba said, “but I will tell you this. Your father is going to die.”

“We are all going to die,” Isabel said.

“But he is going to die soon.”

“So let him die and take his whole goddamn country to hell with him.”

Rosalba shuddered. She knew that when she approached her daughter, Isabel turned cold, as if Rosalba had done something Isabel could not forgive. She had seen Isabel’s
laughter turn dull when Rosalba entered a room and seen her daughter recoil at her touch. It was what Umberto Calderón taught her, Rosalba assumed. He taught all these ways of pushing away. We learn the most from those who do not want us, Rosalba knew.

“He was a man of great dreams,” Rosalba said. “You have no right to say these things.”

“I hate this place,” Isabel said. “I hate him. And I hate what I have become.”

Then Rosalba raised her gnarled hands, her joints like the burls of old trees, the only part of her that betrayed her age. “There is no use fighting over this,” she said. Then she turned to Isabel. “If you can,” she said, “you will go.”

That night as Rosalba sat on her patio, feeling the sultry breeze, she knew that soon her second child would leave her and probably her granddaughter too and she would be left alone. She thought how Isabel would take the eyes of El Caballo with her when she went. Once El Caballo said to her, Rosa come with me and we will change the world, but she was a woman with two children to raise. How could she go? A man cannot understand this.

She was with him for more than a dozen years and had thought about him every day since she was sixteen years old. That is a lifetime. Before she left the apartment that had been their love nest, she went to the
botánica
, where she bought votive candles, which she lit in every corner of their rooms. She bought new floor washes—Go Away Evil and Never Look Back. Rosalba scrubbed the floor and the walls as high as she could reach. She washed every inch of that apartment, then bathed in Love Leave Me bath oils.

She cut pieces of her hair and the traces she found of his. She found bits of a fingernail, flower petals, dust motes under
the bed. All this she burned in a small bowl. But Rosalba knew even as she sat on her patio, breathing in the breeze through the tamarind and jasmine trees, that there was this part that she could never wash or burn. And even if Isabel went and took what little she had left of him, or of anything in this world, this part would remain.

T
HE NIGHT I was supposed to leave my passport and ticket by the seawall, the streets were deserted in Puerto Angélico, though it wasn’t late, just after nine. I walked slowly, as if I were only out for an evening stroll, and listened to my own footsteps clicking on the cobblestone. I rarely walk alone at night in New York and so the sound of my footsteps surprised me. Only lovers and a few solitary souls were out that night, but no one paid any attention to me and I knew what it felt like at last to be invisible.

It was a balmy night and the moon was high and I wished Isabel were with me. The last time I saw her, she had told me that we would not meet again on
la isla
. That she would see me, as she put it, on the other side.

I walked a hundred paces past the fortress until I found the place where the two broken slabs of concrete made a cradle. Here I sat on the seawall and gazed out to sea, letting my bag rest on the wall and slip between the boulders that held back
the water. After a few moments I dug down and found the tickets and my passport.

Carefully I turned the bag over, listening as its contents tumbled into the space between the two slabs. I heard a lipstick, coins, a pen, and paper drop. I listened as they slipped down as if into a well. Then I dipped my hand into the bag and was surprised at how empty it felt. And when I was sure there was nothing left, I stood up and walked back to the hotel.

I imagine that later the same night Isabel stood in her garden. She was proud that she could name all the trees—the frangipani, the ceiba, the
júcaro
. Where she was going, she would not know what to call the trees or the flowers, but she knew they wouldn’t have names like these. She had no clothes to warm her thin bones. She had never felt the scratch of wool against her skin. She would learn to live without the gentle sea breezes, the do-nothing days.