Читать книгу A Falling Star - Chantel Acevedo - Страница 8

The front door of Daysy del Pozo’s house was a massive thing, gracing a small, modest ranch house, and made of iron bars. Behind the bars was a solid sheet of mustard-yellow plastic, dented to look like hammered gold. In the center was a lion on its hind legs, its claws extended and its mouth wide open. Daysy always put her fingers on one of the fangs when she came home from school as she imagined the door coming to life, the iron jaws snapping, and swallowing her fingers whole. The door was her mother’s prized possession.

“Like the castles in Spain,” Magda Elena said, though she had never been there.

“I don’t like it, Mami,” Daysy told her when she first saw the door.

“Be quiet, Daysy. Don’t you see it’s just the thing?” Magda Elena swept her arm to present a neighborhood of squat, pastel-colored homes, each with terracotta tiles, busted-up cars, birdbaths of La Virgen, twisty iron bars on the windows, and menacing, iron doors, the kind seen all over Hialeah, a city just north of Miami where the del Pozos lived, famous for its racetrack that now stood empty and decaying in the east side of town, the flock of flamingoes it once showcased still living and breathing, guarding the center island of the track. Hialeah was famous, too, for its Cuban population, for the street signs in Spanish, and for the flooding that happened after every rainfall when the canals swelled and took over the roads.

“Our house looks like a prison,” Daysy muttered. She had turned fourteen at the end of May, and her birthday had marked a change in Daysy that Magda Elena had not yet recognized. Daysy hid the signs well. Sometimes, a huge sadness would well up in Daysy’s chest for no reason, triggered by the whiteness of the sun, or by a sappy commercial on television. When she first discovered blood in her underwear the day after her fourteenth birthday, Daysy hid in the toolshed out in the backyard for hours, breaking up the hard, dirt floor with a stick. With some difficulty, she buried the stained clothing deep in the center of the shed. Two lizards scampered to the scene and marked the turned earth with their tiny feet, prompting Daysy to leave the shed at last and enter the house. She didn’t tell her mother, and bought herself sanitary pads with her lunch money.

There were other things Daysy did not tell Magda Elena. For instance, when two thin, sweaty men came to install the iron door, one of the saw blades used to trim the iron leapt from the machine and flew into the house, just as Daysy was walking from the kitchen through the dining room. She felt the swish of a flying thing behind her, just at her neck, and heard the thud as the circular blade lodged itself in the china cabinet. The saw had wanted blood, and it sliced open the leg of one of the men before it took flight. The man bound his leg with his shirt and kept working. Daysy didn’t tell either of her parents how close she’d come to death. The moment marked her in a way, as if the blade had nicked her, so that later, if she felt a cool draft on her neck, Daysy sensed a phantom pain there. She thought she’d keep that secret, along with her period, as a treasure in her pocket, a reminder of mortality, of growing up, of something to show for her life.

The del Pozos all stood in front of the house to look at the door, the sunset lighting the yellow plastic insets on fire, so that the lion was in a state of perpetual immolation, or at least until the sun finally went down. Magda Elena, Angel, and Daysy stood a little to the side, to avoid stepping in a dried puddle of the workman’s blood. From outside, Daysy could hear her grandfather singing loudly in his bedroom, “Don’t cry for me, Argentina,” in wavering tones, the few English words he knew. If her grandfather had been in his right mind, Daysy imagined he would have hated the door, too.

“My brother, Eddy, would have loved to see this,” Magda Elena said about the door, her voice a whisper. She mentioned her brother daily, the one who had died in Cuba, the uncle Daysy did not remember. It was as if his name clung to the inside of Magda Elena’s mouth and had to be spit out every once in a while or she might choke on it. The more she described this Eddy, this man who liked hideous iron doors, the less Daysy thought she would have loved him.

Daysy was ten when a letter arrived to report Eddy’s death in Havana. A massive heart attack had come upon him at dawn, as he was stirring sugar into his coffee. His wife Catalina’s letter described the scene—she’d found him on the kitchen floor with the spilled coffee on his chest, the liquid still steaming and releasing a wispy vapor into the air. Magda Elena had stayed in bed for days after the letter arrived, her eyes dry, wide, and dull. Her hair turned brittle from lack of combing. When Daysy turned on the stereo in her room a week later, Magda Elena had come in like a lioness, alive again, brandishing a worn flip-flop with which she hit Daysy over the back and shoulders until she turned off the music.

“¡Atrevida!” Magda Elena had yelled. “How dare you play music when my Eddy is gone from this world?”

Daysy was stunned. Later, after the moment had settled in her mind, she imagined a brave retort. Something like, “All you had to do was ask, Mother.” But the make-believe comeback didn’t alleviate the pain in Daysy’s jaw, the aching effort of keeping the tears away.

That evening, Daysy had sat in the recliner with her father and cried into his chest, soaking his undershirt that smelled like car exhaust. “Okay, okay,” he said, scratching her back. “She didn’t mean it. She’s upset about many things, not just her brother. Your mami has lost more than most, and when someone dies, it’s like she suffers every loss all over again. Understand?”

“What else has she lost?” Daysy asked then, and her father’s face had gone very still.

“Nada,” he had mouthed, unable to speak.

The night Daysy’s mother had come into her room brandishing her sandal over her head in grief and fury was a singular occasion. More familiar to Daysy was the routine of the day to day. Dinner, for example, seemed to follow the same script each evening. Silence was mandatory, except for Magda Elena’s incessant demand, “Daysy, come, come, traga, no hables,” to eat, eat, swallow, and not talk. From TV, Daysy knew that families came together for dinner to talk about school, work, and politics. Sometimes they fought at the table. Or resolved a family issue. There were mashed potatoes to be passed, and grace to be said. In the del Pozo home, dinner was only for Magda Elena and Daysy. Angel would eat early, as soon as he came home from the parking lot where he worked, slurping his steaming, thick, creamy soup in the kitchen, and then complaining about a burnt tongue all evening. “Coño, me quemé la lengua,” he would repeat, louder and louder, until Magda Elena would bring him an ice cream sandwich. Abuelo would eat whatever was on hand—bags of chips, bites out of avocadoes, skin and all, chunks of Cuban bread—all day long.

Magda Elena and Daysy ate in silence, because dinnertime was for eating, not speaking. They could talk later. Magda Elena watched Daysy eat, making sure she swallowed every single grain of rice. If Daysy drank too much water, Magda Elena would say, “You’re getting full on water. Eat. Eat!” and then push Daysy’s glass to the center of the table, out of reach. At the end of the meal were the obligatory slice of guava and cream cheese (“It’s very fattening, so eat up”) and then the lecture about how a girl had to be curvy to get a boyfriend someday.

One night, between gulps of water, Daysy had said, “Mami, do you think I’m smart enough to go somewhere like Yale some day? Someplace like that?”

“Jail? Jail? What are you talking about? Eat.”

Daysy laughed. “No, Yale. The university.” She had seen a movie set in New Haven, on Yale’s green, elm-filled campus, and had imagined an older version of herself there, wearing lab goggles like the character in the film and holding test tubes up to fluorescent lights.

“Ah, sí, la universidad,” Magda Elena said. “And where is this ‘Jale’?”

“Connecticut, Mami.”

“Co-netty-koo? No way, mi’jita. Nice girls don’t go away for college. That’s only for Americans.” Magda Elena dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “They don’t love their children and want to be rid of them, that’s the truth. Besides, there are plenty of good schools here.”

“What if I want to become a scientist?” Daysy asked, testing her mother. The truth was that she’d given it some thought. In the comic books she read, the scientists were always elevated above mere mortals. They had the power to turn even the mousiest human into a god. Just one radioactive zap would do the trick, Daysy thought.

“You can’t even wash yourself properly, and you want to go away?” Magda Elena said. “Who will make your bed? Who will cook your meals?”

“I’ll be grown by then. I’ll be—”

“Don’t be so ambitious. It’s not good for you,” Magda Elena said, shimmying Daysy’s plate so that the beans Daysy had so carefully compressed into a tight heap flattened out, filling the plate again. “You haven’t eaten a thing,” Magda Elena said, sighing.

During those meals, Daysy wished that Florida wasn’t flat, and that it wasn’t so long, so hard to get out of. She swore to herself that it was easier to leave Cuba than to leave this place. She wished her mother would let her go to sleepover parties, or to summer camp out of state. No, she had to be within Magda Elena’s reach at all times, in her viselike embrace. Sometimes Daysy imagined her mother transforming into a giant, rusty anchor that held the family in place. This anchor, her mother, was lodged at the bottom of a murky Hialeah canal. It would never let Daysy go.

“Don’t be such an arrepentida,” her mother said, when Daysy brought up Yale at dinner again the next night.

“What does that mean?” Daysy asked and rolled her eyes so far back in her head that her left eyelid twitched.

“It means you are ashamed of who you are. That you regret you were born to this family. That you…”

“Am not.”

“No, que va,” Magda Elena said. “Not a thing. But let me tell you something, muchachita. You leave Miami, and there will be lots to regret.” Magda Elena cleared Daysy’s dishes, though she hadn’t finished her food. Daysy thought she was done getting told off, but her mother whipped around, pointed a dish at Daysy and declared, “You don’t know what alone means. Alone. Sola. Your father and I had nobody in este país. Nadie. Y ahora, you want to throw away your family. Arrepentida is what you are.”

Some days, Daysy thought her mother was right. She felt she would trade her foreign birth certificate in a heartbeat, would delete from her family’s history the story about crossing the ocean from Cuba to Miami on a stranger’s yacht, and do away with the feeling of rocking waves in her dreams, a feeling she explained in great detail in her dream journal. In it, Daysy described the vivid images that came to her at night in colors more stunning than reality. The dreams had gotten more peculiar after her first period, and Daysy chalked it up to another downside of womanhood. They woke her at night with their brightness, as if someone had turned on a light in her room. Perhaps that was why her mother always looked so tired—the awful dreaming left no time for restful sleep.

Daysy dreamt often of hands, her own hands around her mother’s damp neck in the dark. In the dream, panic rose inside her chest, and a feeling like falling, slipping down her mother’s body accompanied the fear. The dream played itself out the same way each time—her limbs would go slack with exhaustion, she couldn’t get hold of her mother, and she was afraid of dropping into the darkness. She even dreamt her mother’s pulse under her fingertips, beating furiously.

She would wake in the morning feeling clammy, her chest hollow, the way one feels when she’s forgotten something important. Once, she described the dream to her mother over breakfast. She told her of the blackness of that place, how it felt as if she had no eyes. She described, too, her mother’s neck, her throat, and the desperation she felt in the wake of the memory, as if the moment had not resolved itself in the past, but rather, had only paused for a moment. Her mother choked on a piece of buttered bread, coughing, her eyes watering, as Daysy tried to finish the story.

“No es nada,” Magda Elena said without meeting Daysy’s eyes. “The bread went down an old road,” she said in English after clearing her throat a few more times. Magda Elena busied herself removing dishes then, coughing softly every so often.

“About my dream,” Daysy asked, looking at the curve of her mother’s neck and wondering if the skin there still felt the same.

“Mi’ja,” Magda Elena said, and took a breath so deep she seemed to grow taller. “I’m glad you told me. Dreams shared before noon can’t come true. Leave it alone. It’s those muñequitos you’re always reading.”

Daysy bent low over her cereal. “I don’t think it has anything to do with comic books. It’s, I don’t know, different. I’ve even looked up some of the elements in a dream dictionary, but it still makes no sense, and even when I…”

“Mi amor, ya.” Magda Elena wiped her hands on her pants. “You’re swimming so much, for what? To die on the shore,” she said in English.

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It does in Spanish,” Magda Elena responded. “Tanto nadar para morir en la orilla.”

“I still don’t get what it means.”

“It means stop trying so hard, Daysy.” Magda Elena closed her eyes then, and sighed with a long, drawn out, “Ay.” The hand on her hip came up to rub the back of her neck, and Daysy knew the conversation had ended.

Daysy also pasted pictures in her journal, and she would draw lines between the pictures and the descriptions of her dreams, trying to make connections between her waking life and the one she created at night. One such picture was a photograph Daysy had found of her father’s parents, Gregorio and Nieve, standing in front of an old stove, Nieve’s arms around his waist. Daysy knew that after Nieve died, Abuelo secured a visa to Spain, that he lived in Madrid for two years before getting to the States, and that when he arrived, he smelled like something dead. “It’s too cold for baths in Europe this time of year,” Magda Elena had said to Daysy at the airport, quite seriously. Daysy was only seven then, but she remembered her grandfather’s earthy smell, and sometimes caught the scent of it still when she passed the closet in which he kept his old Sherpa coat, the one he had worn in Spain. Magda Elena said nothing about Nieve, and when Daysy asked about her, her mother wrinkled her nose and shook her head, as if she had taken a mouthful of very bitter medicine. Daysy drew a straight line from the pasted picture to a lopsided box she had drawn and shaded. Inside the box, she described a dream in which Nieve had given Daysy a pair of hoop earrings. Beside the box, Daysy wrote the question, “What did Nieve ever do to Mami?”

Daysy had found another picture, too. It was in black and white. There, in a small apartment in Cuba, Daysy posed with her parents. She guessed herself to be about three years old in the photo. She wore a lace dress cinched at the waist and tied with a pale ribbon. Her hair was cut short, and little curls sprang up around her ears and on her forehead. Where had the curls gone, she wondered when she looked at the photo and, sighing, touched her straight hair. In the picture she was sitting on her father’s lap. Angel wore a short-sleeved shirt open at the chest, his white undershirt exposed, his strong muscles stretching the material. He smiled so broadly that his molars showed, and his hands rested on Daysy’s little thighs. In the picture, his left eye was still good and whole, not the way it was now—the lid thick and heavy, nearly always closed over the eye that looked fine except for a jagged, black line underscoring his iris.

The injury had occurred at Mariel, though Daysy had never been told exactly how it happened. Sometimes, she thought she remembered what the boatlift out of Cuba had been like, though she wasn’t always sure that the memories weren’t lifted from textbook pictures. She’d been nearly four when they left, old enough that something of those days stuck with her, but too young to string it into a logical story. Daysy stared at the image of her father a long time and found that with both eyes intact, he was less formidable, more handsome.

Then there was Magda Elena. In the photograph, her face was set in a partial smile. In her arms was a baby, its head covered in tufts of fair hair, only an eye and a nose peeking out over the patchwork blanket surrounding it. Daysy noticed her mother’s long fingernails, and how the dark, painted nails stood out against the white fuzz of the baby’s blanket. She tried to remember that moment, and sometimes, she thought she did, catching fragments of it in her head, of her mother pushing a curl behind Daysy’s ear, of a rotating fan in the corner. But the rest was blank. The memory came to her at odd moments, as all her memories of Cuba did, like when she was brushing her teeth, or rinsing a bowl of rice before cooking it. They were like waves, coming, going, pulling her under, then, letting her breathe again.

“A cousin,” Magda Elena explained when Daysy asked about the baby in the photograph. Magda Elena swore she couldn’t remember the baby’s name. “Ay, m’ija. That’s not your real cousin. Just one of the neighbor’s girls,” she explained when Daysy pressed her for more information. “Everyone’s family in Cuba,” Magda Elena said, slashing the air with her hands the way a conductor signals the last notes of a song. Daysy, who knew when to stop asking questions, pocketed the picture. She had no dream to link it to, but was sure one would come to her eventually one night, quiet and unassuming like the dew.

Daysy had found the photographs in her mother’s dresser, on one of her rummaging excursions. She had taken to searching for nothing in particular, opening closets and peering into the back of them, her hands flitting over oddly shaped items in the dark. She crawled into attic spaces and jimmied open closed boxes with hairpins. Daysy found a tarnished Aztec sun medallion fit for a chain, her parents’ marriage certificate, a drawer full of plastic saints, airmail letters from Cuba, a lone fork with a G initialed into the handle, a bag of shells, an old parking ticket, a packet of postcards from New York City, fur-lined gloves, and the photograph of her family and the strange baby. The find had thrilled her, had made her feel as if the world were shifting suddenly, the way it does when one closes one eye, then the other, back and forth. It was like this, too, when she found her birth certificate, and when she discovered her father’s wedding ring, the one he’d outgrown. Each time she’d unearthed something it was like finding a dollar bill—unexpected and gratifying. And each time she’d bring the found item to her mother, in the hopes that the story attached to the thing, the ring, the photograph, would be told. Daysy didn’t know what she expected of her mother, but what she usually got wasn’t it.

“Your father’s,” Magda Elena said when Daysy asked about the ring.

“Why doesn’t he wear it?”

“Fat fingers.”

“Where did you buy it?”

“A store. Enough questions. Eat your pudín de pan.” The conversations usually went in that vein. Daysy hoped to learn about how much the ring had cost, what she’d meant by inscribing his ring with her middle name, whether it hurt her that he no longer wore it. But Magda Elena was reticent in general, and when it came to telling stories about Cuba, ones that weren’t made-up tales meant to scare her into eating more, or staying away from the telephone during lightning storms, or keeping off sandbanks in the ocean, Magda Elena was nearly mute.

Daysy’s fourteenth summer was long and strange, beginning on the day she discovered a bunch of bananas tied up by ribbons of every color, lying on the tiles of the front porch like a gift. She’d brought them into the house. Upon eyeing the bundle, Magda Elena screamed “Solavaya!” a word Daysy didn’t know, though it seemed the kind of thing one would say to cancel a spell. Disappearing in the kitchen for a moment, Magda Elena emerged with a broom held high over her head. Daysy flinched as her mother ran toward her with the broom, and she felt the stiff bristles come down hard on her arms, knocking the bananas out of her hands. Magda Elena used the broom to shoo the bananas out the door, down the driveway, and into the gutter, where they bobbed up and down in the murky water. Daysy held her breath as she watched the last of the bright ribbons soak up water and sink.

Later that afternoon, they found a dozen broken eggs smeared on the fender of Magda Elena’s car. She gave the eggs the same treatment as the bananas. Then Magda Elena burned the broom inside an aluminum garbage can. The broom crackled and sent up golden sparks as it burned. Every once in a while, a bit of burning straw caught flight just over the garbage can and hovered for a moment in the atmosphere. Then it would fall back down, sizzling into ash as it went. Daysy stood by her mother the whole time, repeating “solavaya” with her.

At dinner that night, Magda Elena said, “It’s revenge, of course. That María Luísa, la muy hija de puta. I accidentally got her fired yesterday.” She said it as matter-of-factly as if she’d been commenting on the summer heat, but Daysy noticed how her mother’s hands shook as she dipped a ladle into the beans.

According to Magda Elena, what happened was that she’d asked, at her sewing station, “Where in the hell is María Luísa?” when she ran out of pockets to sew onto pants. It was María Luísa’s job to pass them on to Magda Elena, and Magda Elena’s job to sew the pockets and get the rest of the piece off to the next worker, and so on. The foreman got up from his recliner in the corner, where he had been reading the paper and drinking his fourth cafecito of the day to search for the unfortunate María Luísa. He found her in the women’s bathroom, smoking a joint and eating a giant Cuban sandwich, and he fired her on the spot.

“That’ll do it,” Angel said.

“I don’t believe in Santería,” said Daysy.

Magda Elena coughed a little, turning her head to the side. Her hands had stopped shaking, though every so often, Daysy heard her mother saying “solavaya” underneath her breath. “Me either,” Magda Elena said once she’d sat down. “But I respect it.”

Two weeks after that incident, Abuelo started acting strangely, yelling, removing all of his clothes to work in the backyard, eating only guava paste at every meal. In time, the doctors diagnosed him with dementia, because they couldn’t say Alzheimer’s for sure until he was dead and a chunk of his brain was under their microscopes. Magda Elena blamed it on the curse brought on by the bananas and the eggs, and Daysy shuddered at how badly she had wanted those ribbons, ribbons she now dreamed about in strange patterns and permutations. She dreamt ribbons wrapped around her throat, ribbons leached of their colors, ribbons braided into her hair.

Abuelo’s deterioration happened with such rapidity it caught the family by surprise. Daysy had been the first to see him disrobing in the yard. She’d covered her eyes as fast as she could, but she’d seen a shadowy thing between his bare thighs anyway. She’d had a hard time looking her grandfather in the eye for a few days.

Some time after that, they’d lost power to the house, and a technician from Florida Power and Light had come by, clambering up the pole in the backyard, his tools clinking on his tool belt. With a yelp, the man slipped and dropped to the ground. Daysy watched him fall from her seat at the patio table where she’d been sketching. Later, she’d remember the slowness of his fall. It seemed to her a kind of dance, almost. She’d expected the thud, but the crack of bones surprised her. Electric lines dangled like jungle snakes after him, spitting light just out of reach of him on the grass. Daysy had gone screaming into the house, afraid to go near the moaning man. It was Abuelo who comforted him as they waited for the ambulance, helping the man with the broken leg sit up and lean against an old, gnarled lemon tree that Abuelo had grafted a naval orange limb onto.

Other strange occurrences followed. On the Fourth of July, Daysy had found three dead kittens in the metal shed in the backyard. Her grandfather had shut the door, which was always left open. He had been yelling all day about shadows that creep into dark places and play foul tricks on people. The door stayed closed for days, and when Daysy opened it, she found the three small bodies, curled together in a pile of sawdust. At first, she thought they were sleeping in the stifling heat. The shed was like an oven in the summer. She lifted one and found that it did not drape over her hands in that way of kittens, but rather, was a hard thing, the skin and fur no longer pliable, but stuck to the bones and matted. Daysy shivered so hard her teeth rattled. She dropped the kitten, and the dull sound it made when it hit the ground reminded her of the man falling off the electric pole. She thought of Abuelo, too, getting sicker and stranger by the day, and Daysy imagined that all of these terrible things were connected in some way, perhaps, to the curse of the bananas and eggs. Daysy cried over the dead kittens for a long while. A lanky, full-grown cat stalked the doorway to the shed. It meowed at Daysy, but the sound was deep, like a growl, and Daysy guessed this was the grieving mother. The cat locked eyes with Daysy for a moment, then crouched low, its ears flattened on its skull. Leaping at Daysy clumsily, the cat struck a shelf and knocked down some PVC pipes Abuelo had put there. The plastic tubes tumbled onto the kittens and rolled off them. Stepping out into the sunlight, Daysy made room for the cat, which sniffed the bodies for a long time, passing her tongue over their heads. Later, Abuelo would dig a grave by the fence for the kittens, humming a slow tune as he turned over the earth.

Abuelo was always singing, or drumming his fingers against whatever hard surface he had at hand. His rhythms were the soundtrack of Daysy’s life. Long ago, her grandfather had been the set director at the Teátro Tacón in Havana, Cuba. Though his hands were calloused from sanding and lifting, his voice raspy from the years of swallowed sawdust, Abuelo could sing along with the operas. He enjoyed wispy kisses from the prima ballerinas backstage every night. Or so Daysy imagined. The stories he told of those times were long and colorful, and were the only clearly defined images left to him, it seemed. He told Daysy how he taught himself to play the flute, how from behind the curtains, he watched over the heads of the actors onstage to observe the orchestra below, miming their movements. If only he hadn’t been so dark skinned, his hair coiled so tightly against his head, he might have had one of the seats in the pit, playing his flute for the best productions on the island. He named his son Angel after the cherubs encased in the theater’s tapestry and arranged it so that his son might marry his girlfriend, Magda Elena, on the theater’s grand marble staircase. Abuelo still remembered the theater, could describe it in such glorious detail that each shining brass tack of each red velvet seat was accounted for in his head.

Out of all the stories Magda Elena told, Daysy’s favorite had to do with her grandfather and his gift for music. As the story went, Magda Elena was not yet married, and she’d gathered enough courage to visit Angel’s house on her own. Gregorio had opened the door and sung “¿Quien es ella?” operatically. Magda Elena smiled, wondered if she was being courted by a man with madness in his gene pool, and allowed herself to be led in by Gregorio. He’d sat her down then and sung a few more bars from the Spanish opera, Laura y Don Gonzalo. Sometimes, when she told the story, Abuelo would make his flute appear, as if by magic Daysy sometimes thought, and play a tune as Magda Elena spoke.

He’d smuggled the flute out of Cuba when he left in 1983. Those leaving the island for good were stripped of all belongings. The guard at the airport had pulled the flute out of Abuelo’s pocket and attempted to throw it onto a large pile of confiscated photo albums behind him, when Abuelo took hold of the guard’s wrist with one hand, seized the flute, and shoved the head joint underneath the guard’s chin, as if the flute were a knife. “My wife is dead and I’ve got nothing to lose but this flute,” he had said, and the guard, perhaps seeing something of his own father in Abuelo’s eyes, had let him go. Abuelo had told the story often, and even now, when his memory was failing him, he spoke of the guard he had bullied into letting him keep his flute.

These days, telling that story served as a moment of clarity for Abuelo. Mostly, he was lost in his illness, imagining that his backyard in South Florida was the park he’d played in as a child in Cuba. Sometimes, he called Daysy “Eugenia,” after the infant daughter he’d lost to dengue fever in 1935, before Angel was born. Once, in the shade of the lemon-orange grafted tree, Abuelo had crushed Daysy to his chest, crying, “Mi Eugenia, mi tesorito,” so loudly that Daysy could hear the air whooshing in and out of his lungs, her ear pressed so close to his body.

Days like that frightened Daysy. Even so, she enjoyed spending time with him in the backyard. That summer, while her parents went to work, Daysy stayed behind to watch Abuelo. In the fall, they’d have to hire a nurse to babysit the ailing man. For now, Daysy didn’t mind staying in the house with her grandfather, especially on sunny days. After breakfast they’d go outside, and she’d help him pull up the dwarf banana trees that grew in clumps. Abuelo’s movements were swift and strong as he killed the baby plants that seemed to sprout overnight, choking their tall, leafy mothers. His head bumped the low, flowery spike that was just forming into bananas. As they worked, she sometimes told him about the events of her life that she was afraid of sharing with her parents.

“You know that boy I told you about, Iggy Placetas?” she’d begin, tossing aside a small banana plant, then filling the dark hole where it had been with more dirt.

“Sí, mi vida,” he’d say, examining the banana tree’s flower, picking at the smooth, purple surface of its pointed petals with a tough nail.

“He and I, well, we made out in the art closet. Do you know what ‘made out’ means, Abuelo?”

“Sí, mi vida.”

“I think I love him,” she said. Abuelo nodded, and heaved against a stubborn plant. Daysy did not say that she didn’t think Iggy Placetas loved her back, that he’d gone into the art closet with another girl later in the day, and that when the teacher pulled them out, Iggy’s face was covered in pink lipstick. “I’m ready for a boyfriend,” Daysy told her grandfather, “but Mami and Papi would kill me.”

“Sí, mi vida.” Their conversations would go on into the afternoon this way, with Daysy telling her grandfather the things she could tell no one else, because he was a good listener, and because her secrets were often accompanied by his humming, which Daysy liked.

It was mid-July when Daysy found Abuelo crouched behind the boxy air-conditioning unit, picking at the skeleton of a little lizard trapped in the fan, just shy of the blades. His eyelids were a little swollen as he stared at the tiny bones. Daysy tried to get him to stand, but he was immoveable. Sweat formed on his forehead, and his cheeks burned red. It was noon, and the sun overhead was making Daysy dizzy. Above the metal AC unit, the air was blurry in the heat.

“Abuelo, stand up!” Daysy shouted, but he sat there, sweating and staring, as if he couldn’t hear her. Daysy ran inside, filled a glass with cold water, and brought it out to her grandfather.

“Mira, Abuelo. Take it. Drink, please.” She pressed the cold glass to his lips, and he opened them slowly, looking into Daysy’s eyes as he did so. He reminded her of the people who took Communion at church, the gold chalice brought so tenderly to their lips, their eyes often wide in anticipation of the moment. Daysy herself had only taken the wine once, her mother admonishing her that to drink from the cup, no matter that it was blessed, was to invite catching someone’s cold.

“Where is my mother? She said she’d be here at noon,” Abuelo said in Spanish.

Daysy closed her eyes and thought for a minute. She’d have to say the right thing to shake him out of his confusion. Mindlessly, she put her hands into her pockets, and her fingers brushed against the picture she’d found earlier in the summer, the one of her family in Cuba, which she hadn’t yet put in her journal. She’d hung up the jeans without washing them, and the photograph had remained in the pocket.

Daysy held the picture up for her grandfather to see. It trembled in the heated air coming out of the A/C unit. “Abuelo, mira, this is Cuba. See the picture? That was a long time ago, remember?”

Abuelo took the photograph, his face softening. It looked to Daysy that the many years of his life were returning him to the present in all their precision, so that his expression was more like the one he’d worn before he became ill. “Ay,” he said, “poor baby. She died so young.”

“That’s not Eugenia, Abuelo,” Daysy said, her voice sounding exasperated even to her own ears. She was often able to check herself, control her patience around Abuelo, but the day was so hot, the rumbling of the air conditioner so loud, that Daysy felt on edge.

“¡Claro que no es Eugenia! You think I was born yesterday? I mean your sister, Belén.”

“I don’t have a sister, Abuelo. Please, let’s go inside.”

“Your ignorance is your parents’ doing. When Nieve and I were told Belén had drowned on the way to Florida, that she fell into the ocean somewhere between Mariel and Key West, ay, que sufrimiento! It was too much for your poor grandmother, losing you both forever. They say people can die of sadness, and I think it’s true.”

“Abuelo, I don’t have a sister. That’s a cousin.”

“Pal carajo,” Abuelo said then, stood, and kicked the A/C unit so hard the motor stopped running for a moment, as if the machine had been shocked temporarily, before starting up again. “You shouldn’t call people liars, Daysy. Not people my age,” he said again. He thrust the picture back into Daysy’s hand and stomped into the house.

It was not until the evening of the next day, during a torrent of rain and wind that loosened three terracotta tiles from the roof of the house, that Daysy thought of the baby Abuelo had recognized in the picture.

She’d been in the living room when Angel came in and turned on the television, sighing as he sat down. In another chair sat Abuelo, wittling away at a bit of mango wood. The shavings came down between his slippered feet. His face held a fixed expression on the little branch in his hands, and it was that look that reminded Daysy of Belén, and Abuelo’s assertion that she had been his other granddaughter. It was the same look he had given the photograph. Daysy watched his hands, so leathery and dark. On his good days, he’d call Daysy over onto his lap and scratch lazily at her back, and she would close her eyes and pretend that Abuelo was not losing his mind. Now, she suppressed the inclination to sit on his lap again, afraid Abuelo might return to the subject of a dead sister. Daysy had never given much thought to Abuelo’s ramblings. He went on about ghosts one minute, the location of his long-dead mother the next. He called her Angel, by mistake, and once, Nieve. All of this had somehow become familiar and unsurprising. But when Abuelo told the story of Belén, Daysy felt unease. This story had come out of nowhere, had been so earnestly told, as if Abuelo were his old self again, and now, it troubled Daysy’s imagination.

Daysy sat on the floor between her father and grandfather and soon felt her father’s heavy hand on her head, rubbing her scalp as he watched the Spanish news come on. Images of rafts at sea, overloaded with sunburned, ragged humans, filled the screen.

“So many of them,” Angel said. Daysy watched her father watching the television. It was as if someone had injected hot water into his veins and he couldn’t keep still. Every muscle in his face tightened, and he began drumming his fingers on the top of her head, making a tap-tap noise deep in her ears that made Daysy nervous.

“You’re going to catch a heart attack. Calm down.” Daysy jerked her head away from her father’s fingers.

“Of course I’m going to catch a heart attack! Look at this disaster of a country!” Angel meant Cuba, and pointed at the television as if he were pointing to the island itself, as if he were marking it with a fingerprint, smudging its edges. Daysy squinted her eyes at the televised horizon, imagining that perhaps there was a slice of land out there that her father, bad eye and all, had seen and scored with a fingernail. Abuelo’s hand slipped, and he dug the tip of his pocketknife into his palm.

“Pal carajo,” he muttered, then began to suck at the blood.

“They’ve picked up hundreds,” Angel said, “not counting the ones who drowned.”

Again, Daysy thought of Abuelo’s story. Outside, the wind whistled through the screen mesh of the sliding glass door. Daysy felt her breath quickening, and her nose, stuffy from a slight cold, whistled along with the wind, sound mimicking sound. What if it’s true, she thought. After all, Daysy had no clear memory of her life in Cuba, nothing substantial at all to hold onto. She only remembered images here and there, like a quilt made of scraps.

“It’s been thirty years,” Angel said at the television, as if he were uttering a malediction that would travel through the electrical wires, speed underground and undersea, and kill Fidel in his sleep. “Thirty years!”

Then Daysy said a thing she didn’t mean to and that she didn’t really believe. It escaped her lips without permission, having erupted from that place in her that raged against her mother’s imperatives, that vibrated with anger whenever they were asked to stand in size order, arms’ distance at school, that threatened to explode whenever her mother stuck a piece of food into her mouth during dinner when she wasn’t looking. Later, she would convince herself that she’d been trying to get the story of Belén out of her mind.

“Get over it.”

The moment she said it, Daysy wished it back.

“Coño,” Angel cursed quietly. “Coño.” And in that word Angel had expressed the vast sadness he felt with such eloquence that Daysy felt her eyes sting.

“I’m so sorry, Papi. I didn’t mean it.”

“You meant it. You did.” Angel turned off the television. The house felt abandoned without the noise, though the wind outside howled. Daysy could see that the blood was still raging in her father’s veins. His cheeks were red, and his bad eye had twisted toward the ceiling, as if in imploration. “What if I asked you to say goodbye to your mother? Right now. Goodbye para siempre.”

There were times in the past, when she was younger, that Daysy had imagined life without her mother, and the thought had constricted her chest, had coiled around her body like a python, and so she always shook off the idea as quickly as she could. When she thought about it now, about life without either one of them, Daysy found that the python had lost its strength, that the idea hurt, but not with the same urgency, the same sense of panic as before.

“I…I, no sé.”

“Ah, no sabes. That’s a luxury.” Angel left the room, but Daysy stayed on the cool tile, her scalp burning, her throat tight. She hid her face in her arms, knew it was guilt that drove her to do it, and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

“Don’t do that. It’s disgusting,” Magda Elena said from the entrance of the living room. She’d brought a cup of coffee for Abuelo, who finished licking the tiny wound on his hand, then sipped at the hot, sugary drink. Daysy, her face still hidden in her arms, heard her mother drop into the chair beside her. “Did I ever tell you about the time I got sick with la fiebre del caballo?”

“What’s that?” Daysy muttered from underneath her arms.

“Like meningitis. Y bueno, I thought I was dying. And your Papi, so galante, picked me up and took me down two flights to where a doctor lived. He knocked on the door, and I remember this as clear as crystal, he told that doctor, ‘Doctor, save my wife,’ just like that. And you know what that desgraciado said? He said, ‘You missed the meeting, compañero,’ and fuacatá, he closed the door on us.” Magda Elena brushed her hands against one another, as if the memory had left behind its dusty remnants. “I’ll never forget it. Committee four, zone twenty-five. That was our neighborhood watch group, where those gossipy comunistas got together to talk about who bought a puny quarter pound of chicken on the black market, and who called Fidel a comemierda, writing names down in black ink. We skipped meetings all the time. Your father wanted to kill the man, but lucky for all of us, that doctor relented and opened the door. It’s the law there, you know. They have to treat you a las buenas o a las malas. He cured me with an enormous shot to the spine.”

Magda Elena turned the television back on, and the news was still replaying the scene at sea. They watched while the reporter interviewed one of the Coast Guard.

“That’s why my back hurts when it rains,” she said, as if there hadn’t been a break in her story at all.

“It’s a second Mariel,” Angel said, reappearing in the living room, “but worse now. Look at them all.” He seemed himself again. Daysy said nothing, and Magda Elena clucked her tongue.

“Who can blame them?” Magda Elena put in. “We all saw the wall going down in Berlin. Everyone knows the Soviets are in a panic,” she said, raising the volume on the television. “And now, it’s the Cubans pasando hambre. Hunger makes you do crazy things,” Magda Elena said. Then she turned to Daysy and lightly smacked the top of her head, saying, “And you with your terrible appetite. Those poor balseros are risking their lives for what you throw away.”

“Quiet,” Angel said. Magda Elena gave up her seat for Angel, and he took it, and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Mira pa’ eso.”

There was silence among them as the news flashed images of the rafters. The footage was shaky, taken by tourists on the beach. The camera held steady on a young woman with a small, brown dog in her arms, its fur matted and its eyes bloodshot from so many days out in the sun while at sea.

Daysy’s abdomen rumbled with cramps, and she winced. She began to fiddle with a comic book she’d left on the floor earlier. Batman looked out at her from between the Joker’s legs in a neat trick of perspective, his cowl wrapped around him in the fury of his righteous anger. It seemed to Daysy a stupid thing, suddenly. What could Batman do to help the people on television? The ones who didn’t make it? What did comic book heroes have to do with crossing the ocean in the dark, without a gun or spear to keep the sharks away, without a bed to sleep in, riding on crashing, devastating waves, stomach cramping, no toilet, dark, dark depths beneath a thin raft, babies drowning. Not even Batman, thought Daysy, would know what to do out there.

She set the comic book down and looked at her parents. How pained they looked, their eyes narrowed in concentration, their brows wrinkled. The del Pozos’ arrival in the United States had been so different from what they were now seeing on television. They had not washed up on Miami Beach, as some were now doing. The Mariel refugees had come in boats, fleets of them bought or rented by Cuban exiles. They’d been processed on the football field of the Orange Bowl, which was large enough to hold the thousands of Cubans who’d arrived. Of her few memories of that time, Daysy recalled a crush of bodies, long lines, touching her father’s injured face with her small fingers.

As they watched the television, Magda Elena, sitting now on the arm of Angel’s chair, held Daysy’s hand, grinding her knuckles together without noticing. When Daysy finally whispered, “Ow, Mami. Let go,” Magda Elena took hold of Angel’s hand instead. They continued to watch. The flickering light of the television began to give Daysy a headache. Every so often, a flash of lightning would brighten the dim room, startling Daysy.

The report on the balseros continued, irritating Daysy, who wanted to ask about Belén. She felt a kind of electricity in her chest, like when Iggy Placetas first put his thin hand on her shoulder in line for lunch. Daysy had wanted to press her cheek against it, the fluttering current traveling under her skin pushing her to do it, but she had held back. The urge to ask about Belén was just as insistent now. How easy would it be to say, casually, the way one talks about a lightning storm, “Hey, Abuelo said the craziest thing the other day.” And yet, Daysy could not bring herself to do it.

She felt herself grow nervous, and so Daysy blurted out, “Hey, you know Marisel?” instead. No answer from her parents. “Marisel? My best friend? Well, she is going with Julio Alvarez.”

“Going where, mi’jita?” Angel asked, his attention diverted from the news at last. Daysy smiled in response, happy that the thick silence was gone from the room.

“Going, Papi, going. You know. Boyfriend girlfriend going.”

“I don’t like that,” Angel said, and wagged his thick finger at her. His hands were tinged blue, red, and purple from the ink he used to stamp parking passes all day. He left rainbow fingerprints on the bathroom walls at home.

“But Papi,” Daysy said.

“No way, mi’jita,” Magda Elena jumped in. “You can bet I never had a boyfriend at your age. But I did have a neighbor in Cuba who had a boyfriend when she was young. And you know how boys are. They promise and promise until they get what they want. Then, pum! No promises. This girl stayed out with her noviecito late one night. Two weeks later, a baby was on the way. And babies bring only heartache. Her son died before he knew how to walk. It’s better not to have babies at all.” Magda Elena looked away and began pushing back the cuticle of her thumbnail.

Daysy had not heard this one before. Usually, Magda Elena’s stories seemed more fantastical, more grotesque. Daysy’s mother claimed to have known all the poor, unfortunate souls in Cuba, the ones who had not listened to their parents. There was the boy at the zoo who didn’t listen when his mother said, “Don’t you know your head weighs more than the rest of your body?” as he hung his pendulous skull over the wall of the alligator exhibit. Then, pum! The kid fell over and was eaten. And there was the girl who watched television during a lightning storm. The storm blew up the set and shards of glass flew into her eyes and blinded her. Best of all was the girl who didn’t tie up her long hair when riding a roller coaster. The hair was, of course, entangled in the ride’s monstrous gears and her head came clean off. It was no wonder that Daysy had a sustained fear of amusement parks, of lightning, of heights, of dark places, of green food, of portraits of Jesus, of cats, of rocking chairs, of kissing a boy for too long. The list grew with each passing year, each place or thing attached through the strands of memory and imagination to a nameless child who gave up his life for the benefit of giving Daysy a lesson to learn. But Magda Elena had told this last story so quietly, without meeting Daysy’s eyes at all. And the final bit, about it’s being better not to have children at all, stung Daysy.

“So what was her name?” Daysy asked.

Magda Elena perked up then and Daysy thought that her mother, suddenly, sat so tall that it was as if she’d shaken off a heavy coat. “Ay, I forget. But who cares now? I’m the only one who remembers her.”

There was silence for a moment, and Daysy knew that her mother was still constructing an argument in her head. Daysy understood her mother’s methods. Magda Elena knew when to press on, when to back out of a discussion, and when to go in for the kill. Daysy recognized the way her mother lifted her chin when she was about to make a final pronouncement. She braced herself for the final thrust. “Mira, niña, names are important,” Magda Elena began. “Let me say it in English so you understand. You name a person and you choose a path for her. And you are named after your abuela, Margarita. She was a good woman who died in church. Margarita was her name. Margarita. Daysy. Same flower. Different language. You have a lot to live up to, señorita. ¿Me oyes?”

“Daisy is spelled with an i,” Daysy mumbled, rolled her eyes.

“You think I didn’t study English in school? Besides, in Cuba, it’s spelled with a y.”

“No, it isn’t. You just made that up!”

“Fine. Your new name is Margarita,” Magda Elena said, and rolled her r’s loud and long. Daysy cringed dramatically. “Ay, ya,” Magda Elena said at last, and swatted her hand, as if brushing away a gnat.

Daysy chanced a look at her father, who sat very still, his eyes back on the television. Magda Elena took his hand and rubbed his knuckles until his fingers loosened and intertwined themselves with hers.

“And let me tell you something else,” Magda Elena began, pointing a long finger at Daysy, but Angel silenced her with a booming “¡Ya, coño!” that vibrated in the room. It was a shout so loud, and so unlike him, that the curse lingered in Daysy’s head, far more frightening than any of Magda Elena’s reprimands could be. He’d released Magda Elena’s hand with a movement so swift it reminded Daysy of a whip, and Magda Elena’s face registered the motion as if, indeed, she’d been struck by an invisible lash.

“Mi vida,” she said softly, trying to calm him, but Angel would not offer his hand again.

“We are watching something important, and you two are talking nonsense! How many cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, my own mother, coño, did we say goodbye to and haven’t seen in ten years? Cuéntame, how many?” Angel said, but this time, he let her take his hand, and he rubbed his thumb roughly against hers, as if he were rubbing out a spot, pushing the loose skin up and down.

“Too many,” Magda Elena whispered, then coughed a little. Angel’s breathing slowed and his eyes shone. Daysy hated it when her father became agitated. He was usually so calm, as if he were fixed in some kind of meditation even as he spoke and worked, but when it came to Cuban politics, he changed. The timbre of his voice would magnify, his hands would become more animated, and his eyes would take on a glossy sheen, his bad eye darting to the left, as if in anticipation of an enemy coming up to surprise him.

“He wasn’t always this way,” Magda Elena would sometimes whisper to Daysy in the middle of one of Angel’s rants about political prisoners, communists, or Fidel Castro. “I was the hot-headed one about these things years ago.”

Daysy once asked why they were so different, why her mother and father had switched roles, but Magda Elena became serious, and her face contorted as if she would cry. “Because I think that once you lose everything, there’s no reason to fight anymore, while your father thinks that it is all the more reason to wage war. I refuse to fight about something I can’t change,” Magda Elena had said, and Daysy remembered that now as she watched her mother calming her father down. Angel looked as if he’d just been in a boxing match. His face was red and his left hand was in a fist. Magda Elena watched Angel the way a mother watches a misbehaving child, with both frustration and love.

Daysy left the living room then, gathered her pajamas, and started running a bath. Lightning filled the small bathroom, and with each burst of light, the name Belén came to Daysy’s mind. Names are important, her mother had said. So, Daysy whispered it, rolled her tongue around the letters, and even wrote out the name on the foggy bathroom mirror. Belén del Pozo. The name conjured up a mud-splattered stone fount of ancient days, the soft-shoe shuffle of donkey hooves and sandals on dirt paths, the muted groaning of a woman in labor. “God, I’m stupid,” Daysy said aloud, and erased the name with the heel of her hand. Thunder shook the glass doors surrounding the bathtub, and soon enough, Daysy heard Magda Elena’s frantic knocking at the door.

“Get out of the tub,” she was shouting. “I knew a girl in Cuba who was electrocuted while taking a bath during a thunderstorm…”

Daysy remembered someone punching a hole through the edge of a turtle’s shell and looping a leash through the little opening. She remembered crying as she watched the turtle open its mouth wide, in agony she imagined, and her cries filled the emptiness within the turtle’s sharp mouth, the pointy beak. Daysy remembered a tiny red rocking chair in a foreign backyard, recalled rocking back and forth with such violence that she tumbled backward, and could still smell the bright orange iodine her mother put on her elbow scratches. She thought she could recall the feeling of her grandmother holding her so tightly that Angel pulled her away by force, and she dreamed of the buttons on her dress tearing in her grandmother’s hands. “No, no me la lleves,” yelling over and over again. Watery vomit over the edge of a boat she remembered, too. And there, beneath the riotous color of all the other images, was a chubby little hand, perhaps her own, and a gold bracelet with a name on it she couldn’t make out.

These were her thoughts as she changed into pajamas in the bathroom, her mother knocking on the door to hurry her the whole time. Daysy had been repeating the name Belén over and over again as she brushed her teeth, slipped off her jeans, combed her hair. It certainly was the kind of crazy name her mother seemed to like, but that was all the evidence Daysy could muster. Her days came and went without flourish, without surprise. But, scanning her memory now, Daysy recalled one afternoon hearing a sob from her parent’s bedroom. Her mother never cried. Didn’t seem to know how. When Daysy pushed open the door, she saw that the sound came from her father, his head buried in Magda Elena’s lap, Magda Elena’s hand drawing circles on his back. Daysy had been too scared to ask what had happened, and when Magda Elena lifted her head and saw Daysy, her eyes were so wild and frightened that Daysy shut the door softly and ran to her room.

The knocking continued on the door as Daysy remembered how every Christmas her mother placed a single figure under the tree, a tiny, parentless glass infant in a little glass manger. For years Daysy had asked about the rest of the set, and Magda Elena had always said, “They were left in Cuba,” without further explanation, so Daysy stopped asking. And she realized now, as she sat on the toilet, the things she did not know mounting in her head, that she’d often seen her mother holding the crystal Jesus, stroking its diminutive head and touching its hard bump of a nose before setting it down, and even worse, that she’d never asked her mother why she did it.

Daysy emerged from the bathroom and received a kiss from her mother, who said, “Finally. I was afraid you’d slipped and given yourself a concussion!” She settled into her room for the night, sleeping fitfully, and when she awoke in the morning, the unsettled feeling she struggled with overnight remained, amplified by an odd silence in the house. Typically, mornings at the del Pozos’ house were chaotic, with Angel slamming the front door against its iron frame on his way out so that the whole house rattled, and Abuelo singing one thing or another, or Magda Elena shouting at Daysy to wake up. But on this morning, the house was quiet save for the sour-sounding chimes of the grandfather clock in the dining room.

The silence caused a curious sensation in Daysy, similar to the way she often felt when she had the flu, or a bout of bronchitis, and was given medicine for it. Her mother, distrustful of doctors in general, often visited the pharmacy around the corner, owned by a man known to Daysy only as Márquez, who doled out medicine and advice without prescriptions. So it was that Magda Elena treated every one of Daysy’s afflictions with thick, pink medicines, and put dropperfuls of prescription-strength appetite enhancers in Daysy’s glasses of milk. The result of all this was that, when given the drugs, Daysy often felt as if the world had slowed down. Faucets dripped at impossibly slow rates. Her limbs moved through a thickened atmosphere. Voices turned single words into operatic notes. When the effects of the medication wore off, Daysy found that the universe returned to normal, and, to Magda Elena’s satisfaction and eternal loyalty to Márquez, her cold symptoms would be much alleviated. Daysy had never described the reaction to her mother because she was convinced that the feeling of torpidness that came over her at such times was a symptom of something wrong, not with her body, but in her head. Now, the immense quiet in the house made Daysy feel leaden, though her heart thumped at a killing pace. There was nothing for it, Daysy decided at last, but to step out into the silence and ask, once and for all, about Belén.

Daysy opened her door to find her mother just outside it, her hand in the air, poised to knock. Magda Elena took a step back, her hand flying to her forehead, startled by the sudden opening of the door. She laughed a little, and rubbed her cheek. “Qué susto,” she said. Daysy had not moved at all. She felt heavy still, unable to react quickly.

“I was only coming to wake you. Would you like toast?”

“Not hungry,” Daysy said, not sure now where to begin asking about Belén.

“¿Qué pasa? Not feeling well?” Magda Elena put a damp hand on Daysy’s forehead. She’d been washing dishes, and Daysy caught the scent of lemon soap. She inhaled deeply, a sign Magda Elena took as the relief a feverish person feels when something cool touches her. “¡Ay! ¡Fiebre!” Magda Elena shouted, finally breaking the muteness of the house. As if in celebration of the return of sound, Abuelo began singing a song with a few well-placed la, la, las to fill in the spots where he’d forgotten the lyrics.

“No, Mami,” Daysy said, and peeled her mother’s hand away from her skin. She found that with the quiet gone an opportunity had been lost. Secrets might come out of hiding in a hushed place, but now, she thought, the mood for telling tales was ruined. “Come inside, please.” Daysy tugged at her mother’s arm and closed the door, dampening Abuelo’s song a bit.

Magda Elena bent low to rub the carpet as she walked in, gathering fallen strands of Daysy’s hair until a small, wooly ball lay in her hand. She was incapable of entering any room without trying to clean it in some way. “Oye, Daysy, you need to vacuum in here more often,” Magda Elena announced, and Daysy winced at the volume of her mother’s voice.

“Abuelo told me something,” Daysy whispered.

“¿Qué?”

“Abuelo said you and Papi have kept a secret from me.”

“¿Cómo? Speak up. Why are you whispering?” Magda Elena said, and began rubbing a smudge of dirt off the light switchplate with the heel of her hand.

“Why aren’t you listening?” Daysy asked, and Magda Elena stopped mid-rub. She stared down at her hand for a moment, before looking at her daughter.

“I’m listening.” She kneaded her hands for a moment. Magda Elena’s eyes went to the switchplate again, her body turning toward it, as if the little bit of dirt was enticing her to wipe it out.

Daysy felt the heaviness coming on again. It made her dizzy, so she sat on the edge of her bed. “Abuelo said I had a sister. Her name was Belén, and that she died when we came to Florida.” It seemed to Daysy, for a moment, that her mother’s face was no longer one she recognized. The sensation came and went quickly.

Magda Elena began to cough, soft at first, then so violently she hunched over and Daysy began to pound on her mother’s back.

“Mami! Are you okay? Deep breaths,” Daysy said. Galaxies of spit and dust hovered around her mother’s head, glittering in a shaft of morning light.

“Sí, sí,” she choked out, and stood erect again. “That same old cough. I can’t get rid of it,” she said. Afterward, Magda Elena’s mouth opened and closed, but she didn’t make a sound.

“It’s just in Abuelo’s crazy head, right? Belén, she’s not real?” Daysy asked.

It felt like a long time before Magda Elena answered. She polished the switchplate with her skin until it shone. Outside, Abuelo’s singing was sonorous now, pealing through the house in long, vibrating notes. “No,” Magda Elena answered at last without looking at Daysy and left the room, the door wide open behind her.

The flood of sound, not only of Abuelo, but of a lawnmower starting up outside, a car blasting salsa music a block away, and the deep barking of a neighbor’s pit bull hurt Daysy’s ears. The world sped up at once in time with the cacophony. Daysy knew her mother hadn’t answered the question. Perhaps Belén was no longer real, but that did not exclude the reality of her having existed. Had she meant to say, “No, Abuelo isn’t crazy,” or “No, Belén was not real”?

Daysy knew she should have pressed on, reworked her question to force an answer from her mother. She hadn’t been tricky enough in the attempt. Daysy had read once about genies, how wishes asked of those swarthy demons had to be worded just so or risk breath and soul in reckless wishing. Her mother had deceived her like a proper genie, and now she was gone, not in a cloud of smoke and incense, but in a flurry of rubbing and polishing, wiping grime from the walls of the house. She’d lost the moment. If she asked again, her mother would get angry, would warn her that adults weren’t to be doubted aloud, and that would be the end of it.

Never had she felt so much physical discomfort. A true fever took hold of her body by that afternoon, and by nightfall, having taken two teaspoons of one of Márquez’s potions, Daysy fell into a welcome, dreamless sleep.

Daysy felt disconnected in her own home, shapeless like a cloud. Her father’s jokes did not seem funny, and even anger, which she tried to conjure in her mother’s presence, failed her. Her thoughts were only on Belén, or what she imagined her to be. Every time her mother avoided her eyes, or coughed, Daysy considered the possibility of Belén’s existence. She saw her sister as if she had been drawn by hand, the lead strokes smudged around the corners of her mouth, her hair darkened by a lighter hand on the pencil, so that each line seemed a strand of gray. If she let herself finish the drawing in her mind, Belén’s form would soon be enclosed in a box, trapping her forever in a gray, animated space. These were her thoughts, without much distraction. Her father had called her un zombi at dinner, and made a monster noise deep in the back of his throat to pull her out of her reverie. “Leave her alone,” Magda Elena had said at once, and then, dropping a few soggy platanitos on her plate, said, “Stop daydreaming. Eat.” But Magda Elena’s voice had been strained, lacking its usual forcefulness. That same night, thoughts of zombies kept Daysy awake.

Just a few months ago, Daysy knew, she would have asked her mother again and again about Belén, but she couldn’t now. If Abuelo was right, if she had a sister and had been allowed to forget, Daysy was afraid she would never forgive her mother or her father, certain if Magda Elena had lied to her that she wouldn’t ever feel the same way about her again, so she did not take the risk. The weird fog that had surrounded mother and daughter, not so strangely, given Daysy’s age, had thickened considerably. A part of her wished that things were the way they used to be, when Magda Elena would come home after work and Daysy would rush to her, crushing her nose in her mother’s shirts and smelling the oil they used to keep the sewing machines running. But now such an act seemed impossible. It would embarrass them both, Daysy thought, and she could feel herself physically recoiling at the thought.

She tried another tack and asked her father about Belén that weekend while she rode with him out to the west coast of Florida in search of a part for their van. A brush fire along Alligator Alley reached the edges of the street and had been licking at cars all day. Angel and Daysy had missed the news about the fire in their rush out of the house. They only knew that it was suddenly dark along the highway. Now, curtains of gray smoke had dropped over the desolate road. Angel turned a knob and the car’s fog lights came on. The Everglades lay burning along the road, the sawgrass frying and sizzling. Ash rained onto the car, and the smell of smoke began to come through the air vents. Still, Angel drove on, racing down the darkening path toward the junkyard. The man on the phone had said they had what Angel had been looking for—the joint for a rear window wiper that cost too much money new.

In the hazy distance, Daysy saw the spinning red-and-blue lights of the Florida Highway Patrol. The lights multiplied as Angel’s car approached until it was clear that the road had been blocked. Angel came to a stop and lowered a window. The smoke poured in. A patrolman approached. “Road’s closed, folks,” he said, his hand on the brim of his wide hat. Angel’s eyes looked off to the distance. Daysy leaned out of the window to see what he was looking at. Sitting in the bed of a pickup truck was a group of people. Two Miccosukee men and a little boy sat and stared out at the burning glades. They were wrapped in woolen blankets despite the heat of the fire. Daysy wondered if they had been caught in the burning grass, wondered if their home was out there in the flames, or if they hunted alligators in the swamp.

“I hope no one was hurt,” Angel said, shifting the car into reverse.

Daysy got a good look at the boy’s face. It was contorted with grief and fear, which, strangely, made Daysy feel brave. She leaned closer to her father. “Abuelo told me about Belén,” she said quietly, watching him for some sort of telling sign, one that would indicate that Abuelo’s story was true.

Angel adjusted his grip on the steering wheel. “What did he say about her?” he said.

Daysy felt suddenly sick at heart. So it was true. She had been deceived. Outside, the wind was stirring the ashes from the fire, and flakes were coming in through the air conditioning. Angel waved his hand through them, and they dissolved in the air. A fleck of charred Everglades landed on Daysy’s palm. She observed it for a beat then asked, “So I had a sister?”

“I thought your mother already cleared things up.”

“No. No, she didn’t really answer anything. I never get the full story about anything from…”

Angel reached out to tap her knee. “There’s nothing to worry about,” he said, and flipped on the radio to a talk show.

“So there is no Belén,” she said, but Angel did not echo her assertion. Instead, he raised the volume of the radio, doing so again a few seconds later, then again, so that the windows shook with the boom of the bass and Daysy felt utterly drowned out. Her father’s face was tense, and there was, she thought, dampness in his eyes. Daysy’s sense of the general wrongness of things strengthened. She looked out toward the light of fires here and there, formulating her next move.

She had to shout over the sound of the radio. “Papi, I—”

“This discussion is over,” Angel said.

“Papi—”

“I’m warning you,” Angel added. He lowered the volume at last. Daysy would not fight back. They both knew it.

It was clear now—no one would help Daysy unravel the story of the girl named Belén. So she came up with her own plan. If a baby had been lost at sea in 1980, surely some newspaper reporter, somewhere, would have picked up the story. And that story was hidden in the library across town.

The next morning, Daysy entered Abuelo’s room and the smell of Vick’s VapoRub made her eyes water. Abuelo slathered the ointment on his chest and neck every night, and no amount of washing ever took the scent out of his pillowcases.

“Abuelo,” Daysy whispered on the side of his bed. Abuelo opened his eyes.

“¿Qué? ¿Qué?” he mumbled. Radio Martí, the Miami-based Cuban radio station that attempted broadcasts to the island, played in the background.

“Listen, I’m going out. I’ll be okay. Don’t worry. And don’t get in trouble,” Daysy said in Spanish.

Abuelo smiled and patted her cheek. His hands were calloused, rough and warm. “Bueno, preciosa,” he said, closing his eyes again.

Daysy left his room feeling a twinge of guilt. That familiar fear, that Abuelo would get himself run over in the street, that he would make good on his promise to swim back to Cuba someday, that he would again sell off a good chunk of Magda Elena’s jewelry, as he had a few months ago, trading a diamond anniversary ring for ten dollars and a cafecito to a pawnbroker on Okeechobee Avenue, almost made Daysy stay home that day. But her summer vacation was waning, and the chance to use the library just a few blocks away would soon be over.

She couldn’t shake the picture of Belén from her thoughts, except now, under the glow of the library’s fluorescent light, the baby had taken on the pale blue of death. Daysy shook the thoughts away, thankful that she had never felt an unnaturally cold breeze or the light touch of an invisible hand on her shoulder, or any indication whatsoever that she was trailed by an infant ghost.

The smell of paper, mold, and carpet cleaner energized her. It was a smell Daysy loved, a smell she had explained to her mother as one of her favorites, and Magda Elena had laughed and called her strange. “Better to love the smell of my frijolitos cooking, and maybe you’ll get some curves on you,” she had said. The librarian sat on a high stool behind a wooden counter. She picked at a bowl of stew and was slurping loudly when Daysy asked her about the microfilm machines. “Mm,” the librarian said, her mouth glistening, her lips pursed, and pointed her fork toward the stacks.

Daysy looked through the drawer full of film rolls and found the Miami Herald. Then she searched for the date—May 13, 1980. That was the day the del Pozos had arrived in Key West, had come off a stranger’s yacht and started a new life. At least that was what her mother had always told her. Magda Elena’s story was always the same—vague, rosy, short. She’d explain the crowded boat, the sun, the dreams of a house and a job. The details Daysy asked for were always countered with the same phrase—”Ay, se me olvidó,” I forgot.

The tiny, brown roll of film with the date on it felt light in Daysy’s hand. She balanced it on her palm and watched it shake along with her arm, her body. For a moment, she considered throwing the roll into the trash, extinguishing it, obliterating its potential for truth. But the moment passed quickly enough, and Daysy sat down to work.

First, she selected five more rolls from the drawer, the dates covering the days after she and her family arrived. Then she scrolled through pages upon pages concerning the boatlift—scores of pictures of haggard people, of overfilled boats, of joyful reunions, of young men in handcuffs, lean faces, red-cheeked faces, eyes on one lost in the distance here, another, a young woman with a face so angelic Daysy was instantly reminded of church paintings. Daysy lost ten minutes staring at one picture full of children, searching for herself. A little girl wearing a tank top and short shorts, holding fast to a stuffed dolphin caught Daysy’s eyes. Her nails were chewed up. She had two plaits in her hair with lots of curls springing up around her forehead. She had gold earrings. The girl appeared in many photos, and it was clear she was a darling of the media. Daysy felt a ridiculous surge of jealousy, wished the photographers had found her among the thousands of children and selected her as their icon instead.

Next, Daysy read the stories and editorials. Surely there would be a story of a missing baby. There were articles about people who had heart attacks on the boats, or while waiting in the Orange Bowl to be processed. There was the story of one man who called himself Colonel and brought nothing with him but a pair of old castanets that he claimed belonged to the queen of Spain. There was the piece on the lady who swore she challenged Fidel Castro to a game of dominoes and won. There was the man who wrapped himself in a huge American flag, went to sleep on a cot, and didn’t wake up ever again. Stories and more stories.

Daysy scanned only the headlines, her eyes starting to tire. Children from one of the local summer camps began to pour into the library, shouting over the librarian’s shushing. Daysy put her finger on the off switch to the machine, ready to give up the search. Then her eyes caught sight of a headline on the bottom right corner of the page: SCHOONER CAPSIZES, MARIEL INFANT LOST AT SEA, and Daysy scrolled down to read the rest of it.

Miami— Richard Thoreau, captain of the sunken schooner, Big Virginia, hoped to bring strangers out of Cuba, but not at such a steep price.

“At least she went down doing good in the world,” the 55-year-old Thoreau said.

The replica of the 18th-century schooner sank approximately 50 miles off Cuban shores. There were an estimated 250 people on the ship designed to carry far fewer. All but one, an infant, are believed to have survived the catastrophe at sea.

Coast Guard representatives have voiced concern regarding overloaded boats leaving Mariel harbor since the crisis began. Thoreau’s story corroborates this.

“We could have safely carried 50 people across the Straits. They [Cuban officials] told us we had to take many, many more.

“It’s no wonder the ship broke in half,” Thoreau said.

The passengers aboard the Big Virginia were transferred to a shrimp boat, the El Ron, and a private yacht, the Adalah, while at sea.

The Thoreaus claim there was one drowning, though they have no official record of the passengers’ names, nor an exact headcount.

“I spoke with the mother when we were nearing Key West. She said the baby fell into the sea when they crossed over. Her name was Belén. A beautiful name, and a real sad thing,” Savanna Thoreau said from her hotel room in Miami Beach.

About the parents, Savanna Thoreau added: “A nice-looking couple, with another daughter. But I didn’t get any of their names.”

So far, none of the refugees have reported the death of an infant.

The Dade County Coroner’s office has examined 32 Mariel refugee deaths since April 21st, when the first boat of refugees arrived in Key West. That number is expected to grow as reports of more capsizing boats trickle in and efforts to recover the bodies are made.

On April 11th, President Carter announced that the U.S. would accept up to 3,000 refugees. The number of Cubans having arrived in Key West has already exceeded that number.

“I suppose it was worth it,” Thoreau said regarding the loss of his ship. “We got a lot of people out of Cuba.”

A dark feeling, heavy and sudden, overwhelmed Daysy. She was convinced of it now—her parents had been lying all these years. And it was a big lie, not a harmless Santa Claus-is-real sort of a lie, but the kind that shatters like glass, injuring people with its sharp edges.

Daysy printed the page off the microfilm and folded it clumsily. A pair of campers walked past her, chattering about the books in their hands. Daysy lowered her face to hide her trembling lip. She shut off the machine and left the library.