Page 29 of This Could Be Us
“And where were younotplanning to go, exactly?”
“Bali. They don’t have an extradition treaty with the US.”
“Wow. You had it all planned out, down to sending us to live with your mother, who can’t stand me.”
“Just lay low and don’t ruin this. We’ll come out richer than you can imagine if you just hold down what you know and leave what you don’t know alone. You and the girls mean everything to me.”
“Right. That’s why you boughtoneticket to Bali that I didn’t even know about. I can tell how desperate you were to spend your remaining days with your family.”
“I love you,” he says, desperation leaking through his composure. “I did this for you.”
“Bullshit.” If I have to listen to one more word out of his lying mouth, I might fight my way through this phone and down his throat. “I gotta go.”
“Remember what I said,” he adds hurriedly. “Don’t tell them anything. Let this play out.”
I hang up without saying goodbye and flop back on the bed. Closing my eyes, I replay the call, fighting the urge to scream. There’s a little time before I have to get the girls from school. A little time here alone, where I don’t have to pretend everything is fine or that it’s all going to work out.
I used some of the cash I had on hand to get gas. I have the groceries Judah sent. Dr. Morgan has given me a little grace to figure out Lottie and Inez’s tuition, but the FBI will be back, and it will start applying more pressure the longer it takes to find the money Edward stole.
I need to be cautious, but I want to be bold. I want to be honest, but lying seems to be the thing that will protect us. I’m tossed in every direction and going nowhere. Hot tears leak from my eyes and slide into my hairline.
I miss Mami.
It’s not a constant ache anymore, the grief, the immeasurable loss of someone who is absolutely irreplaceable. Mami passed a few years after my father, and the compounded devastation was almost unbearable. Necessity compelled me to keep going. My daughters needed me. My husband needed me, though he seems to have forgotten that I played any significant role in his success. My mother was never Edward’s biggest fan, but when I got pregnant soon after I graduated from Cornell and we decided to marry, my parents supported the decision. She never spoke against him, but I would catch her watching him sometimes with a wariness usually reserved for strangers. I didn’t ask her then what she saw. Maybe I was afraid of the answer. Afraid the path I had chosen was the wrong one. Thathewas the wrong one.
“Mami, what do I do?” I whisper to the empty room.
There is no audible answer, of course, but a thought does occur to me, and I have to wonder if it’s a mystical nudge she managed from the other side. When Mami died, my sisters and I each took a few of her things we wanted for ourselves. I force myself to stand and walk into the closet. At the very back, in a cubby at the top, sits an old chest. Not too large and more than a little worn, it appears incongruous among my Hermès bags and shiny stilettos. I grab my step stool and reach up to pull the chest down.
I can’t hear Mami’s voice, but when I open this small chest of her things, I feel closer to her. It smells faintly of the Egyptian musk she used to wear from the beauty supply store. It was cheap, but I’d trade all my pricey fragrances just to hold her close now and bury my face in the crook of her neck. Let her stroke my hair and dry my tears.
But she’s not here, so I settle the chest on my closet floor and kneel, reverently opening it. Inside are treasures I haven’t looked at in years. Not because I’d forgotten they were here, but because it is bittersweet, the ache of missing her and the comfort of having her things.
The first is an old, dog-eared copy of bell hooks’sAll About Love. I flip through the pages of the book, which is more than twenty yearsold, and note Mami’s annotations, little colorful flags poking from the pages, her highlights, like neon mile markers, and her neat handwriting in the margins, sloping in and out of English and Spanish.
Mami’s favoritepilónis also in the chest. I watched her use the mortar and pestle to mash garlic and peppers for hersofrito. I pull it out and set it on the floor so I can take it back down with me to the kitchen.
One of her journals is here, though there’s still a stack of them in the garage at the house where we grew up. I hesitated to read this after I saw the poetry she wrote to Bray, feeling like an intruder on a part of Mami’s life she had kept for herself.
All loves aren’t created equal. Some spring from the earth and wrap around and twine through our souls like vines. Some are plants that start with tiny seeds in your heart and blossom over time, nurtured by years and commitment. Bray was Mami’s vine, a tall, handsome giant of a man. Abuela used to joke that Bray swept Mami off her feet. My father caught her when she fell. Bray wasn’t a good husband, but he was a terrific father, so he was always in Lola’s life. Always inourlives.
Once he dropped Lola off after a weekend visit, and I caught him with Mami in the kitchen. My sweet mother, who lingered after work to flip through the library’s new arrivals and loved the smell of books. Who knit in the evenings, glasses sliding down her nose while she watched Pat and Vanna onWheel of Fortune. When I walked into the kitchen, she was clutching Bray like he was air and she was suffocating. His hands were everywhere. On her ass, in her hair, which had tumbled down her back, loosened from the neat knot she always kept rolled at her nape. Her glasses lay forgotten on the floor. They made desperate, starved, craving sounds, and I understood that this was not what she had with my father. I stepped back, afraid they’d see, but I stayed at the door.
“I can’t,” I heard her whisper, tears in her voice. “Bray, we have to stop. Jason.”
My father’s name in the middle of all that passion was like a shot ringing out in a quiet forest. Bray didn’t come inside our house afterthat. Lola would instead bounce down the steps to his car, but sometimes I’d catch him looking, longing.
He attended my father’s funeral, and I believe he respected him. That he’d stayed away out of respect not only for Mami, but also for my dad. But once Mami was a widow, Bray couldn’t stay away. With us girls all gone from the house to pursue college and life, they started up again. Myabuelawould tut and shake her head, muttering about the power of thepolla, but it was more than that. When Mami was diagnosed with cervical cancer, Bray never left her side. And when she passed away, at the funeral he wept unashamedly. I never knew if it was just for her passing or for the years they’d missed because when he’d met the love of his life, he hadn’t been ready for her.
I still don’t crack the journal open even now. Maybe one day I’ll work up the nerve.
There is also a ticket to a Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam concert. She was our freestyle queen. I can still hear Mami belting “All Cried Out” and “I Wonder If I Take You Home” while she cookedarroz con gandulesfor dinner.
Next is a folded cloth. I take it out and unfurl it, my heart singing with pride to see the first Puerto Rican flag, that of the Grito de Lares, a symbol of rebellion against colonization. A battle cry for independence.
Finally, at the bottom of the chest, beneath a threadbare cardigan, lies the prized possession of kitchens in my family for years. A machete with a mother-of-pearl handle and surprisingly sharp blade. Women of my family have used this to cut back brush when seeking fruit and vegetables. It has split coconuts and sliced through pork shoulders. It goes back three generations, and the weight of it in my hands somehow connects to the weight in my heart, threads it through my soul like the eye of a needle. I feel these items stitching me together in a way I can’t explain but appreciate.
The respite from anxiety these things,her things, bring is short-lived. My phone buzzes in the bedroom. I blow out a short breath, stand, andcarefully replace the chest in its cubby. When I walk back out to the bedroom, my phone is lit up with a text message.