Come Together, Fall Apart Read online

  In the morning, Charlotte asks if I want to go for a walk. “We’ll take the dogs,” she announces, and goes to get them.

  “René,” she says as we walk. “That’s a funny name. It’s for a girl, you know.”

  “Here, it’s for a boy.”

  Perro tugs on his leash and barks at something in the distance. He scrapes his paws on the ground, trying to run, but Charlotte keeps him on the dirt path. The sun is brutal, tearing into the earth. Delicate tangles of plants and flowers line the path, ones that Charlotte fingers as we walk by. At some point, Charlotte gets excited when she discovers a patch of dormidera.

  “Why do they do that?” she asks when she touches one of the tiny green featherlike plants and it closes, pressing its fronds together tightly. She’s peering at me from her crouch on the ground, shielding her eyes from the sun.

  “They’re scared. They don’t like human contact.”

  “That can’t be true,” she murmurs.

  I watch her, the curve of her back, her elbows sliding off her knees from sweat, pieces of her light hair matted to her burnt neck. She studies the fern with seriousness, holding her finger close to the stem to see if the leaves will close and then pulling it away again in frustration when they don’t. I’m holding on to both Perro and Eva. They lie down, Eva thumping her tail against my toes.

  When Charlotte finally stands, I can smell the odor lifting off her skin. Her skin is flushed.

  “We call the plant dormidera,” I say.

  “Dormidera,” she repeats softly. “That’s nice.”

  We’re standing face to face. Her skin is damp with sweat. Then she takes a step forward and kisses me. She does it with her mouth closed, just resting her lips on mine. On my skin, I can feel her breath pulsing gently. After a second, I pull away. Charlotte blinks. Her eyelids are the palest pink I’ve ever seen.

  “I wanted to see what would happen,” she says.

  I don’t say a thing. She purses her lips and casts her eyes around. I realize she thinks I didn’t understand her and she’s trying to come up with a different way to say it.

  “What would happen,” I repeat.

  She focuses on me again, smiling. “You didn’t close.”

  I let the words linger for a moment, stuck in the muggy air like needles in honey. I feel light-headed and suddenly aware that Eva’s tail has stopped beating against my foot.

  “We should go back,” I say.

  At the house, Yanina is in the kitchen making arroz con pollo. I watch her tearing the chicken meat into pieces with her hands. She seems surprised when we come in. I walk up and put my arms around her shoulders. I have this overpowering need to be near her. Now. Maybe always.

  “What can I do?” I ask.

  “You went out with Charlotte again?” She’s trying to sound casual.

  This time I lie. “I was on a walk. We happened to come into the house at the same time.”

  “I would have gone.”

  “I looked for you, mami.”

  “I need to get out of the house, too, you know. These stupid birds are making so much noise!” She flings a shred of meat against the counter.

  It takes me a minute to realize she’s crying. The fear that maybe she knows about the kiss between me and Charlotte sinks in.

  From behind her, I smooth my whole hand over her face, trying to catch as many tears as I can. She kisses my palm as it passes her mouth. “I hate this,” she says into my hand, and I realize she doesn’t know after all. It’s the house. It’s the birds. It’s being here. It’s all of this.

  Suddenly, one of the birds squawks loudly. Outside, Eva and Perro bark in return. Yanina screams, too, like it’s an impromptu chorus.

  When it grows quiet again, I say, “We have to leave.”

  “No,” she says.

  “Yanina, this is crazy. You know it is.”

  She shakes her head, but weakly.

  “There’s not enough room for us.”

  She turns and stares at me. “You told me. You said there is no such thing as a space in the world that one person can walk into and force another out.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. And I am, for the fact that I was wrong and for the fact that things operate like that—not enough space in the world, not enough space in a heart. That night I sit on the patio, waiting for Yanina. Behind me the lights in the house are on, but in front of me is darkness. Mauricio de Bernal comes out and sits. It was a bad scene when he returned from church earlier and Yanina, tearfully, told him we were leaving. But he’s calm now.

  He’s quiet for a while and then he says, “Yanina is full of love for you. She hopes you will become a husband to her.”

  I slide my hands under my thighs and sit on them.

  “I want you to understand something about her parents. They were never married. That makes it easier for a man to leave. You know, of course, her father left. He found another woman. Lucia.”

  I didn’t know her parents weren’t married. Mauricio de Bernal grows quiet and focuses on something in the distance. A swarm of gnats, like a small web breathing in the air, comes together and then flies apart again.

  He asks, “Do you know how her father died?”

  “Yanina told me.”

  “The only reason for that job was to support the woman.

  I think back to the story, that night in the car.

  “I understand life does not work like that,” he says. “God has crafted plans for us.” He sighs. “But at times, in my head, I trace it back. If Carmen had married him in the first place, he might not have left. He might have felt bound to her. He might not have gotten that job. He might not have been on the bridge.” He squints and steals a glimpse at the sky as he runs a hand through his hair. “It is very difficult to say.”

  Yanina walks out then, the screen door clattering behind her.

  “You are ready?” Mauricio de Bernal asks, glancing up at her.

  She bends to kiss him on the forehead and then rests her hand on my hair. “Let’s go,” she says, and we do.

  We sleep on the beach that night. Who knows where we’ll go next. The sand is damp and packed underneath us; the air gauzy, like pulled-apart cotton. I remember the last time we were here, with the crab legs, pale and pointy, the meat of some poking out at the breaks, and I think how long ago that seems now.

  Yanina and I don’t speak. We just lie on the sand in the dark, her head on my arm, our legs tangled. Her skin smells of coconut milk and I breathe her in as I listen to the static ocean sounds filling the world. I pull strands of her hair from the corner of her mouth when they lift in the breeze and get stuck there. After a while, when Yanina falls asleep, I get up. I can see only the edges of things, lit by the moon, and I walk for a few seconds, sweeping my feet along the ground, until I find a stick. I pick it up and then, cutting it through the sand, I write: YANINA, WILL YOU MARRY ME? I do the best I can in the dark, not sure whether the letters overlap and whether it will make sense in the light. I leave the stick there and find my way back to lie beside her. I think, if it’s still there in the morning, if it hasn’t been washed away, then that will mean something.

  Then I will ask her.

  ASHES

  I’m at work on Saturday when I get the call. Carina, from the front counter, pages me over the intercom and when I finally get to the phone it’s my older brother, Jano, advising me to sit down because he has upsetting news.

  “Tell me,” I say.

  “Do you have a chair?”

  “Just tell me.”

  What I have is a hollow feeling in my stomach the size of a coconut.

  “Mamá’s gone,” he says.

  “What?” My heart seizes.

  “Señora López found her today.”

  “Found her? Where was Papi?”

  “Are you sitting down?” he asks again.

  “Stop asking me that. Why can’t you just answer my questions?”

  “It’s a little bit complicated, okay?”

 
; “How?”

  But he won’t answer that either. He just suggests we meet when I get off work because we have a lot of things to take care of now.

  I’m not supposed to use the phone during work hours but I call Armando as soon as I hang up. I hold the plastic beige contraption trembling next to my ear as I talk. He tells me I should take off early, that my boss will understand because this is an extenuating circumstance. Armando’s never had to work anywhere like this, though, and he doesn’t get the idea that I’m just a body doing a job, not somebody doing it. Still, I tell him I’ll try. He leaves me with, “We can go out for dinner if you want. You don’t have to cook,” like it’s his big concession to me. “Thanks,” I say, and slam down the phone.

  I end up staying at Casa de la Carne for my whole shift. Work helps keep my mind off everything. If I’d left early, I would have been a blubbering thing sitting on the curb in the parking lot—the way I can be only in private, or sometimes, when he’s being nice, with Armando. Never in front of my family. I know they think I’m more heartless than them for that, but I know the truth. I know my depths.

  The story is that she had a heart attack. She was cooking—she was always cooking—and she simply fell over on the kitchen floor. Papi was sitting in a wooden chair at the kitchen table, probably smoking a cigarette while she worked, waiting to be served. She fell right at his feet. We think he tried to help her, tried to blow air into her mouth, pumping and puffing. Jano says Papi picked up the phone but he couldn’t remember the number for emergency, and after trying a jumble of numbers over and over again, he just gave up.

  “Why didn’t he call one of us?” I say when I see Jano after work.

  Jano shrugs. “I don’t think he really knew what was happening.”

  We both know Papi is sick, mentally gone, but we never talk about him in those terms. We like to pretend he is just old.

  When Señora López got there this morning, she found Papi still sitting in the wooden chair with the phone in his hand, buzzing because it was off the hook. She saw Mama at his feet.

  “The oven was still on, too,” Jano says. “There could have been a fire on top of everything else.” He shakes his head.

  Señora López pried the phone from Papi’s hands and called Jano.

  “Papi’s going to stay with me now,” Jano says. “I don’t think he can be alone.”

  “He can stay with me.”

  Jano shakes his head. “Uh-uh.”

  “Why not?”

  “You have a newfound interest in him?”

  “Do you?”

  We’re at an ice cream shop near my work. The cold air has turned Jano’s lips faintly purple. Besides an employee in a pink apron, we’re the only people here. The bright lights bounce off the white counters and smack me in the face. I’m quiet for a minute. Then I start on a reel of questions. How does he know it was a heart attack? What are we going to do now? What’s happening to their house? Is his wife, Zenia, okay with Papi being there? What else did Papi say? Why did Señora López call him instead of me?

  He answers them all. He’s unusually patient with me. He’s waiting to see if I’ll break, I know, if this will be the thing that puts me over the edge. The last time I saw her, my mother was sitting with me on her patio. She was in the metal rocking chair we had my whole life, olive-green seat cushions and floral iron-work along the arms. She had her legs stretched out in front of her, knee-high nylons rolled down around her crossed ankles like life preservers, terry house slippers on her feet. She looked relaxed as she lectured me on her favorite subject—politics. She was telling me how fortunate it was that she had named me Mireya because the president of Panama was Mireya Moscoso. She must have said about ten times, “That could have been you,” as if the only prerequisite for becoming the president was having the right name.

  She hated that politics held no interest for me. The one thing my mother liked about Armando was his appetite for the political. Just for that, of all the people in my family, she was his only fan.

  That day, there was an election parade in the neighborhood. Martin Torrijos was riding all over our section of town, shouting from the windows of his van and waving a Panamanian flag in a bid to become the next president. This was the reason we were out on the patio. My mother was waiting for him. We’d been talking for almost an hour when his big white van, followed by pickup trucks with speakers on the flatbeds blasting music, rumbled up our street. My mother stood and smoothed out the front of her robe. She was old enough that her spine had begun to bow.

  Torrijos stopped his van in front of our patio. He asked my mother how she and her sister, meaning me, were doing.

  My mother shouted, “What will you do about the hospitals?”

  Torrijos smiled and waved.

  “And what about the canal?” she yelled into the sunlight.

  Torrijos tossed a T-shirt out the window to her. “For you!” he shouted.

  My mother let it land at her feet. “Pendejo!” she shouted, and the van continued up the street.

  It wasn’t everyone who would call a politician an ass-hole to his face. I smiled until it felt like my cheeks would burst. I’d always thought there was something special between my mother and me. Like she was somehow more mine than Jano’s. But maybe all children feel that—a sovereignty of ownership over the parent they love best.

  On the bus home from work that night, I pass strip malls with blinking neon signs; a place where there was once a major bust of Noriega supporters and where now a guy tries to sell Oriental rugs; billboards that advertise electronics and lingerie; high-rise concrete apartment buildings with laundry strung on every balcony; roadside stands with vendors selling fruit, the pineapples hanging from columns of rope attached to the stands’ roofs like beaded curtains; an older man holding a wire birdcage, being trailed as he walks down the street by an obviously American girl.

  When I get home Armando sprints out to see me.

  “Pobrecita,” he says. He’s making a face like I’m a puppy with a broken leg. “I have a poem for you.”

  “Another one?”

  “When was the last one?” he asks, leaning over the kitchen table, reaching for a book. He finds the page he wants and says, “It’s by César Vallejo. He’s one of the great writers. He wrote for the people.”

  I sit down as he reads it to me. I don’t understand poetry the way he does. Things either sound good to me or they don’t. That’s it. The poem he reads tonight is short. It’s about the poet’s brother, who died. My favorite line is: “And now a shadow falls on the soul.” feel the tears burn behind my eyes.

  “It’s nice,” I say when he’s done. Then I quickly scoot my chair back and head straight for the shower. Under the spray, the meat juices wash from my fingernails, from my pores. I tilt my head back and let the water stream down my face until I can’t tell anymore where the water ends and my tears begin.

  Armando comes in after me. He knows this is my place to cry. He peels off his clothes and steps into the stall and tries to hold me. His dark, moppish hair sticks to the sides of his face. His skin slips over mine. He pushes me out of the water and examines my eyes. “Are the tears gone now?”

  I shrug.

  “Tell me, Mireya,” he pleads. It’s that split second of something in his voice that, despite everything else, makes me love him.

  “I think they’re just starting,” I say.

  He bends down and licks one cheek, then the other, gently, with the tip of his tongue. “I’ll get them,” he says, and he does.

  My father cleaned government buildings at night. He came home in the early morning hours, high on ammonia and bleach, and made my mother prepare dinner for him in the dark. When he worked overtime, she cooked dinner while the sun rose. Many nights the smell of spicy chicken or ropa vieja woke me up and I knew that my father had just arrived. During the day, he should have been sleeping, but more often he was out in bars or with other women or smoking on our front step, ashes fluttering in the air lik
e confetti. My mother was never happy with him. I mean, she must have been at one time, but I never witnessed it. I’d hear her, at night, through our thin walls, sobbing in her room.

  She knew what my father did—I often heard them arguing about his carryings on—but, for all her strength, she was never able to change him and never able to walk away. There was one time when I thought she came close. My father had taken a job cleaning houses during the day and at some point he started returning home with hair dryers, mixing bowls, toaster ovens, picture frames. Of course, we knew where these things were coming from. No one said anything, though, until a police officer showed up at our house one afternoon asking questions. It was easy enough to get rid of him—my father offered him a speaker system—but I’d never, until that moment, seen my mother so angry. For a whole week, she spoke to him only once, when she told him, “You shamed me.”

  The only time I saw a moment of affection between them was much later, after Jano had married and I had moved out on my own. My father had retired and they were living off his pension and the odd lottery payout. My mother had asked me to get some melons for her at the stand near my house and bring them over. She was very particular about which melons she deemed acceptable. When I got there the front door was wide open and I saw my parents inside, sitting on our old peach-colored couch, my father at one end, and my mother stretched out at the other, her feet propped on his lap. He was tickling the soles of her feet with his fingertips and she was flinching, but laughing. Then he reached over and tucked her hair behind her ear. She followed the movement of his hand with her head, like a horse. That was all. But there was real tenderness in it.