Come Together, Fall Apart Read online

  We were near a small bridge about ten minutes from the party when Yanina said, “My father died on a bridge.” She said it to the window.

  I thought she meant he jumped off, but I don’t know why. “Really?” I said.

  “He was a construction worker. A car hit him.”

  I had no idea why she was telling me this.

  “It didn’t knock him off, though. He just died there on the pavement.” She still had her face turned from me.

  I squeezed my hands around the steering wheel. “I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t say anything back. I wondered what her face looked like then. I wished she would turn to me but she didn’t. I hoped to Christ she wasn’t crying.

  “Mamá and I heard about it from his other woman. She called us. We didn’t even know he had another woman until then. Some Dominican I guess he was seeing.”

  I felt like there was something I was supposed to say, some perfect thing that a person better than me would be able to come up with.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  She shrugged.

  At the party, later that night, she asked me to marry her for the first time.

  In the afternoon, we go to the market—really just a four-aisle store with fruit and vegetables in wooden crates along the walls, canned food, warm soda, bread, bags of pork rinds, huge sacks of rice piled near the door, and a small freezer with frosty packages of meat and tubs of concrete butter. The old woman who works there is constantly knitting a scarf for her son in the United States. “He’s in New York,” she tells us proudly almost every time we go.

  “In New York,” she says today, “there is an enormous park, as big as Brazil, right in the middle of the city.”

  “Brazil is pretty big,” I tell her as I rummage through the freezer for a package of ground beef

  I find one that looks good and take it to the register. When I put it down, its icy underbelly makes it skate slowly across the countertop. Yanina has an assortment of cans and bags—food for the week. She still hasn’t said a word to me since walking away from the window earlier. When I told her I was coming here, all she did was march out of the house and get in the car, keeping her arms crossed the whole way over. Everything crackles and thuds as she drops it on the counter.

  “And the women!” The old woman smiles, shaking her head. “Like they should be in beauty pageants, my son says. All young and blond!”

  “I like the women here,” I say, looking at Yanina. Then I turn to the old woman. “They’re the most beautiful no matter what their age.”

  The woman blushes and grins. I feel good, being able to make her smile. Yanina raises her eyebrows at me and walks out, leaving me to carry the bags on my own.

  When we arrive back at the house, a small brown car is parked in front.

  “Are you expecting company?” I ask.

  She shakes her head but part of me wonders whether the car is a new plan Yanina has concocted, like it belongs to a guy delivering balloons that I’ll have to pop and inside one will be a ring. I half expect to see someone jump out of a cake when we walk in the house but instead I am greeted by a girl about my age and a man, both seated at the kitchen table, where they are playing cards. A wire cage holding flitting yellow birds sits on the floor.

  “They are parakeets,” the man says, pointing to the birds when he sees me eyeing them. He’s older, with full, charcoal-colored hair brushed straight back over his head. His eyelids droop and he wears rumpled clothes that look like they’re left over from the seventies.

  “What?” I say. I’m cradling the brown bags from the market in my arms. I want to ask what the hell he’s doing in our house.

  “They are parakeets,” he says again.

  I peer over my shoulder at Yanina, who, I realize, stopped walking a few steps behind me and hasn’t moved since. I give her a questioning glance.

  She stares past me to the man in our kitchen and slowly a smile spreads over her face.

  “Tío Mauricio,” she says.

  The man, who I now gather is Mauricio de Bernal, smiles back, his heavy eyes sinking into his face. I expect one of them to make a move to hug the other but Yanina just stands there grinning stupidly and Mauricio de Bernal sits there grinning back and I am standing there holding the groceries and the girl at the table is straightening the cards in her hands shyly, not looking at anyone, and the birds are chirping lightly, oblivious to it all.

  Finally I stride over and, under the weight of the bags, extend my hand. “It’s nice to meet you, after all this time,” I say. I’m on my best behavior, for Yanina.

  He shakes my hand but he says, “And who are you, may I inquire?”

  “René Calderón.”

  “René Calderón,” he repeats thoughtfully. “It finds a pleasurable place on the tongue, though it is not a name I am familiar with.”

  I’m waiting for Yanina to tell him that I’m her guy, you know, her boyfriend, but instead she makes her way to the table and says, “I can’t believe you’re here. When did you get back?” She directs her questions to Mauricio de Bernal only, entirely ignoring the girl at the table.

  I put the bags down. One of the dogs outside starts barking and then the other joins in. This makes the birds start flapping their tiny wings and they dart from one side of the cage to the other, tweeting and crisscrossing each other in the air.

  Mauricio de Bernal asks for a dish towel. When I hand him one, he drapes it over the cage. The birds quiet, twittering softly to themselves in the dark.

  “We’ve taken care of the dogs,” Yanina says.

  Mauricio de Bernal shakes his head. “I could not bring them with me,” he says, as if it’s something he thinks about—and regrets—every day. “I told your mother they were here. She was to care for them if you did not. But I expected you would.”

  The girl sets her stack of cards on the table and says, “Excuse me, I need to go to the bathroom.” She has a peculiar accent.

  Yanina looks at her, startled. I point the girl down the hall toward the bathroom. She is thin and tall, with fine brown hair the color of cardboard cut in layers that hang around her face. Her cheeks are pinkish and her skin very pale.

  “That is Charlotte,” Mauricio de Bernal offers. He has trouble pronouncing the name and stutters a few times before giving up and saying it in Spanish: Carlota.

  Yanina whispers, “Are you together?”

  Mauricio de Bernal laughs from a place deep in his stomach, squeezing his eyes shut. “She is my daughter,” he says.

  “What?”

  “From the United States. I had a daughter. I was unaware, all these years, that she existed. But it is the reason I went—to find her. Her mother told me of her. I had little hope she would want to see me, though. I prayed every day. But only God knows how things will turn out. So I did not tell anyone before I left. In case I had to come back and report bad news.”

  “I don’t understand,” Yanina says.

  Mauricio de Bernal takes her hand in his, kneading it with his thumbs. “I have a daughter,” he says again as if now, the second time, this explains everything.

  Yanina stares at him for a few sustained seconds before she starts blinking fast, a sure sign that she’s about to cry.

  Charlotte walks back into the kitchen and hesitates before taking a seat at the table. Yanina stares at her.

  Charlotte says “Hey,” softly.

  Yanina is blinking like crazy now and the tip of her nose is blooming red. She stands, yanking her hand from Mauricio de Bernal, and walks to where I’ve laid the bags. She starts pulling out the cans and the snacks and the meat wrapped in Styrofoam and shoves it all into cabinets and into the rusty green refrigerator, everything scraping and bumping and slamming and making a whole big riot. I want to go to her, put my arms around her shoulders, stop her from moving for just one second. But if I went to her, I know, she would shrug me off. In the middle of her despair, she needs to be alone. She’ll come to me later.

  “Hi
ja,” Mauricio de Bernal says plaintively, but she just hurries out, sprinting for her bedroom and closing the door behind her.

  The second time she asked me was at the start of the new year. By then we were, as her mother liked to say, inchy-pinchy. Some guys she knew were doing fireworks in Panama la Vieja. Buildings that used to stand tall there, hundreds of years earlier, were little more than broken skeletons of themselves now. It reminded me of El Chorillo, the area of the city destroyed by the Americans during the invasion, more than a decade ago.

  We sat on a pile of huge, weathered stones. All over the city, little poppers were going off, kids shooting them into the night. People dotted the grass below us. High in the sky, the fireworks sprouted arms and fell, breaking apart in the air.

  At one point there was a long pause and people started grumbling, thinking it was over without the usual grand finale. But then something whistled and exploded and a trail of light burned an R into the inky sky. A few seconds later, the finale started. Hundreds of fireworks all at once, crackling above us, leaving puffs of pastel smoke hanging in the air.

  Yanina turned to me. “That was for you, René,” she said.

  I must have looked at her dumbly because she said, “The R. It was for your name. I couldn’t pay for the rest of the letters.”

  “You paid them to do that?”

  She nodded. “Ricardo got me a discount, though.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s a good friend. He didn’t want me to pay full price.”

  “No. I mean, about me.”

  She looked like she was considering this but all she said was, “Maybe next year I’ll get you an E”.

  “Good thing my name’s not longer. This could take a lifetime.”

  “René,” she said suddenly, turning to me, “will you marry me?”

  I started laughing. I remembered when she had asked me the same thing, though with much less fanfare and much less seriousness, on the roof of her friend’s apartment, where we had gone to a party together. Only then I assumed it was just because she was drunk.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “You’ll ask me soon, won’t you?”

  “Soon,” I said, just to say it.

  She was crazy, I thought then. Absolutely nuts. Already, though, I had learned to love that about her.

  The first night Mauricio de Bernal and Charlotte are there Yanina and I stand outside. I try to draw her out. What’s wrong, mami? Tell me what’s going on with you. She’s been carrying on all day. She tells me what’s already obvious. All this about how Mauricio is like her father, how she’s always been taught to think of him that way, and how he never had children of his own so he had loved Yanina because she was like a daughter to him, only now he has a real daughter, flesh and blood, so what use does he have for Yanina anymore, and already things are changing between them, and on and on. I try to tell her that’s ridiculous. It isn’t like he can only love one person at a time. It isn’t like there’s a hole in his world in the shape of a daughter and once Charlotte steps into it, she automatically shoves Yanina out. And you shouldn’t hold it against Charlotte, I say, because she seems like a nice enough girl who just met her father and is in a new country and she hasn’t done anything to you. At that, Yanina hits me. Really wallops me on my arm.

  “What?” I ask, rubbing the spot.

  Yanina shakes her head like it is so exasperating to have to deal with me.

  After a while, I have her calmed down but the drama starts again when Mauricio de Bernal tells Charlotte to sleep in Yanina’s room. I hear Yanina trying to convince her padrino that there isn’t enough room in the bed for the two of them.

  “But it is a double bed,” Mauricio de Bernal argues.

  Yanina says, “She could sleep outside with Perro and Eva.”

  “The dogs?” Mauricio asks. “On the ground?

  “No?” Yanina says. Though I can’t see her, I can imagine her blinking fast, her jaw tight. “Because she’s special? You left the dogs behind and now you’ll leave me behind, but she is special, you know.” I know she has just flung her hand in the air. I recognize that tone. I am sure, too, that Charlotte is somewhere, hearing this as I am.

  “Yanina, hija. She’s—”

  “She’s your daughter. I know. She is.”

  Before she can get out anything else, I go, take her elbow, and drag her into the bathroom. She is a mess. “I hate her,” Yanina says.

  “Listen—”

  “Why did he have to bring her here?”

  “Charlotte sleeps in my bed—” I put my hand up before she can protest, “and I sleep in your bed. With you.”

  She doesn’t even flinch. “Okay” she says.

  One week later and there’s no sign of Mauricio de Bernal or Charlotte leaving. It’s close quarters. Yanina’s been angling to spend time with Mauricio but he’s kept busy taking Charlotte on long walks, showing her the spots of his youth and whatever.

  Today, after seven days of the birds shrieking at all hours, Mauricio de Bernal decides to let them loose in the house. This requires closing all the windows and doors without screens to make sure the birds don’t escape. He’s worried because they haven’t been eating any of their seed lately. But when he opens the cage, they don’t budge. Some of them look at him wonderingly and cock their heads, and the rest ignore the escape route altogether.

  I try to read for a while, the same magazine I brought from the city and have been reading over and over ever since. Behind me, Mauricio de Bernal keeps tapping the cage, coaxing the birds to come out. When the first bird swoops onto the back of the couch, tweeting with its lima bean lungs, I scream that I’m leaving. I yell for Yanina but get no response.

  I walk outside, squeezing through the door quickly. Charlotte is sitting on a sewer drain playing cards by herself. Today she’s wearing knee-length khaki shorts and a light blue tank top. I notice she has freckles on her shoulders.

  “I’m going to the store,” I say.

  She collects the cards and slides them into her back pocket. “Can I go?” she asks. She speaks in English, with that accent of hers, and I do my best with my English in return.

  “Do you like Panama?” I ask in the car on the way there.

  She doesn’t offer anything at first and then, “It’s strange that there’s no carpet here. And there are so many bugs.”

  “It’s too hot for carpet.”

  “Yeah. It’s, like, unbearably hot.” She shakes her head as if she still can’t get over that fact. She chews on a fingernail for a second and then picks herself up in the seat and plops back down to face me. “Have you ever seen the beetles outside at night? I’m just saying, there’s millions of them. Last night it looked like all these thumbtacks rammed together over one whole side of the house.”

  “Thumbtacks?”

  “Like little pins. You know, with heads?” When she sees I still don’t understand, she says, “Forget it.”

  At the store we get some food and toilet paper. Charlotte is dismayed to find there’s no chocolate to buy.

  The woman at the counter has started a new scarf now, I see.

  “You have a different woman,” she says. Before I can respond she goes on, “My son is in New York. He claims everyone in the United States gets divorced. It’s normal there. But a relationship should be sacred.” She raises her eyebrows disapprovingly.

  “She’s just a friend,” I say, pointing to Charlotte.

  “Where is she from?” the woman asks.

  “The United States.”

  “New York?”

  “No,” I say, though I realize I don’t have a clue where she’s from.

  “Bah,” the woman says, and wraps some yarn around her needles, like she has no use for anyone who’s not from New York.

  “Tennessee,” Charlotte tells me on the way home, but I’ve never heard of it.

  “Like tennis?” I ask.

  She laughs. Her eyes crinkle at the corners when she does this and her teeth—big hor
se teeth—break free from behind her lips.

  “Tennessee,” she says again.

  I shake my head.

  “Have you heard of Elvis?” she wants to know.

  “Don’t step on my blue shoes!” I warble.

  She laughs again and bites at her fingernail. “Blue suede shoes,” she says. “Elvis is from Tennessee.”

  “Do you know Rubén Blades?” I ask.

  She furrows her eyebrows. “Is he an actor?”

  “A singer. From Panama.”

  “Is he good?”

  “The best,” I say, even though I never listen to him. But suddenly I want someone to be proud of, too.

  When we reach the house, Mauricio de Bernal is on a chair in the bathtub, trying to grab one of the birds perched on the curtain rod. The bird keeps flying up and tapping down, like the curtain rod is a trampoline.

  Yanina emerges from her room while I watch him. “Where have you been?” she asks.

  “Hola, mami!” I say, and go to wrap her tiny body in my arms.

  “Come, my love,” Mauricio de Bernal’s voice echoes.

  Yanina tilts her face back. “All day like this!” She sighs, then drops her head against me again. “I missed you,” she says into my chest.

  “I went to the store.”

  “Why didn’t you take me with you?”

  “I couldn’t find you.” I pull my hand through the back of her hair.

  She looks up suddenly. “Did you take Charlotte?”

  I can’t lie to her. I want to, but I can’t. “Yes.”

  She takes two steps back. “Why?”

  “She asked if she could come.”

  “How did she know you were going?”

  “I was walking to the car and she saw me. Where else would I be going?”

  She stands still and I can’t decide if she’s going to cry or hit me. But she doesn’t do either. She looks at me with stony eyes, swallows hard, and then walks away without saying anything.

  I could recite a list of all the times she’s asked. In front of the lobster tank at Parrillada Jimmy; in a seminar room at the university; in the shoe section at Collins; with yellow icing piped onto a sheet cake in the bakery; on street corners; in the parking lot of Wendy’s; in the car; in love letters; so many places. By now, I think it’s just a thing we have between us. I know she means it, but she has to understand that she has to wait for me. I’ve told her: I’m getting closer. I swear. Like it’s a race where she’s already crossed the finish line and I’m kilometers behind, struggling for air. There are days when I am positive, when I’m ready to ask her and just take off together. I look at her and think that there could be nothing better in this world than falling asleep next to her every night, our feet rubbing together under the sheet. But there are still those times, like pinpricks, that blow the air out of everything and I don’t know again.