Chapter Eighteen
Palisades, New York
2023
Outside Mama’s living room window, a fog crouches down across the Hudson River, straddling the water from shore to shore, and extinguishing the winking lights of Dobbs Ferry on the opposite bank. Ruth sits next to Mama on the couch as they dial Benny’s number in Puerto Rico.
“Daisy.” Ruth says her daughter’s name quietly. A prayer. And stands up to pace the room. When Ruth was little, she knew by instinct that Mama’s cues were the only ones that mattered. As an adult, she still watches for them without knowing that she does. Ruth monitors Mama’s face, which can cause her own terror to shrink or balloon within her.
Rafaela, infinitely more self-aware than her daughter gives her credit for, despite the encroaching fog and the shock she is only beginning to process, notes Ruth’s rising panic. She sees her daughter observing her, and immediately fixes her face. She puts on a neutral, determined expression to replace the fear. She adjusts her voice, too, turning it into the hum of heavy machinery. Reliable. Steady.
“It’s going to be okay,” she says to Ruth while the phone rings against her ear.
Sixteen hundred miles away, in a house already darkened by the inevitable power outage, Benny has a cell signal. For now, the cell tower still stands. Benny’s phone glows to life on his coffee table, buzzing and rattling along the tabletop. Its blue light joins the flickering candlelight already blushing the room. He lifts the phone, presses the answer button.
“Hola,” he starts with a joke, “thank you for calling the apocalypse hotline.”
Rafaela tells her son everything, and quickly, all in a rush. She always has been a believer in ripping off the Band-Aid, hair and all. None of these trigger warnings the grandkids are always talking about. All of life should come with one big trigger warning. Isn’t that the sloppy, dazzling beauty of it all? They’re protecting themselves from the best parts, she thinks. Preventing themselves from healing. Resilience! Rafaela wants to shout. Resilience! Across a continent, and into her granddaughter’s battered, unmoving body.
After Rafaela delivers the news, Benny’s silence stretches just long enough for her to wonder if the signal has faltered in the storm. But she also knows that this is Benny’s way. An extra beat, perhaps three, while he processes the awful information. And then when he is ready to reengage, his tires will not spin at all, he will find traction immediately, he will bolt into efficient action.
“I’m going.” There he is already.
Rafaela imagines him standing from the red couch in his darkened living room, imagines his wife stirring from her book at the far end, alarmed, sitting up.
“Going where?” she can hear Pamela in the background. “You can’t go anywhere in this storm.”
Rafaela hears Benny muffle the mouthpiece, hears the rumble of his distant voice. In her small kitchen in New York, in her beautiful replica little home, Rafaela gazes at her wretched, beloved daughter. Ruth looks old, she looks ancient. Again, mother and child trading places in the cosmos.
“He’s going,” Rafaela says to her relic of a child. “Benny will be with her soon.”
Ruth nods, returning to the couch and sinking back down beside her. “Tell him I said thank you.”
“It may take me a little while to get there with the storm,” Benny says. “It’s really bad out, a lot of roads are already closed. But I’m leaving now. I’ll call you when I get there.”
“Okay.”
He hangs up before Rafaela can say goodbye.
“Be careful,” she says, though he’s already gone.
Even after she hangs up, Rafaela can still hear the storm in her ears. Or is that tempest happening right here in this room, is it emanating from Ruth? The cataclysmic rage of the wind, the unkind lashing of water that doesn’t feel like liquid at all, but a thing made of whips and chains. Rafaela can feel the very substance of that storm in her bones, she carries the DNA of this weather deep in the score of her memory. She has lived these storms.
Rafaela feels that perhaps it’s quite natural, at her age, and especially when she’s stressed, that the memory of an old storm might supplant the reality of the current one. She remembers a hurricane called Santa Clara when she was nine or ten years old. She remembers sleeping on the floor in the pantry with the whole family, Mamamía and Papamío and Lola and Candido and Priti, crammed in like sardines, feet in faces. Rafaela used a sack of rice as her pillow, and the wind made the whole house buzz and thrum, but she felt safe there in that closed-in place with everyone she loved. So it can be hard to hold the space between then and now, to reliably fix people and things on the timeline of her lifespan. Perhaps there shouldn’t be anything quite so alarming about that, she thinks. Perhaps she’s just made a scientific discovery, opened a wormhole where time has become irrelevant, where her life is all happening at once. She’s created a kind of miracle. When facing a tragedy of possibly magnificent proportions, why wouldn’t the mind be tempted to obliterate this moment in favor of some other trauma she’s already survived?
Rafaela is lucid now, anyway, despite the frightening little blip with Benny earlier. It just took her a minute. But now she’s aware, and her mind is clear, and she has an idea, but she waits for Ruth to stir, to open her eyes.
“I don’t know what to do,” her daughter whispers beside her.
“It’s okay. I do.” Rafaela stands up. “I have an idea.” She walks to the door and opens it. “Go pack.”
“Mama, there are no flights.”
“Just pack,” Rafaela says. “Call the boys, fill them in. This way you’ll be ready the moment there’s a flight.”
Ruth looks as though she might argue, but for what? There’s no energy for anything but fear. “Okay,” she says. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to make a couple of phone calls,” Rafaela says. “And then I’m going to pack, too. I’ll come over as soon as I’m done. I’ll stay with you tonight.”
Her daughter stands up and walks to the door but does not go through it. Instead she stops and puts her head on Rafaela’s shoulder. Rafaela feels the strength of her legs beneath her and knows that the power of her physical presence is what matters most right now. She makes herself into comforting bedrock, embracing her daughter while she cries. They stand like that for a long time, and Ruth heaves all her terror into tears.