Speak to Me of Home

Chapter Twenty-Nine

San Juan, Puerto Rico

2023

Daisy can feel pain now. Dull at first, and imprecise. But then it gathers itself, asserts itself. Makes brief but rigorous appearances in her physical body. There, in the hospital bed in Río Piedras, the pain is a corporeal thing. It feels encouraging. But she worries vaguely that the pain might be a staircase, and if she wants to emerge back into the waking world, which she very much does, the only way to get there is to mount that staircase and climb. She stands at the bottom of it and peers up. She doesn’t know if she’s strong enough. She’s not sure she’s ready to try.

Grandma is there sometimes. Carlos and Vic might be there, too, Daisy isn’t certain. But Mom is there, she is there, and she is always there. She jokes with the nurses. She sings to Daisy. She tells Daisy stories of her childhood here in San Juan, and then stories of her childhood in St. Louis. These are stories Daisy has never heard before, and they play like movies in the cinema of her brain. There is a banyan tree, a strangler fig, in the backyard of Mom’s house. Mom is a little girl with curly black pigtails and chubby knees. There is a lush, green kingdom in the branches, frogs and insects and birds, and little-girl Mom is the Queen and the King. Yes, Mom , Daisy thinks. This is my way back, you are the lighthouse. Speak to me of home.

“Have you noticed the banyan trees, Daisy? Have you seen them?” Mom says from her station at Daisy’s bedside. “With their multitude of trunks? Do you know there’s one right outside this hospital window? Open your eyes, and you’ll see it. Go on, Daisy. Open your eyes.”

Daisy’s eyes do not open. The machine beside her bed clicks and hums and breathes for her. On a digital screen, Mom watches Daisy’s heartbeat. She holds her hand.

“When I was little, I thought those trees had a thousand roots, a thousand trunks, but they’re actually not trunks at all. Do you know how they work?” Mom says, her voice just loud enough to be heard above the noise of the life-making machinery. “Those trunks are actually the branches. The branches stretch up and up and out, and then they just drop.” Mom raises Daisy’s wrist just two inches from the hospital bed and then lets it drop. “Just like that,” she says. “They drop and then they burrow into the ground, and that’s how they become the roots. Isn’t that the most magical thing you’ve ever heard? The roots become the trunks become the branches become the leaves become the roots. And on like that forever.”

This image materializes and repeats on a loop on the movie screen in Daisy’s mind A time lapse of leaves budding and unfurling and then curling, elongating, dropping, burrowing, growing anew. A tree recycling itself. Mom keeps talking in this way. For hours and days she does not leave that chair. She gives Daisy every story, every memory, every affirmation she can reach. Every intimate history she ever withheld. Every miserly, unacknowledged slip of pain, she shares. She tells Daisy that these traumas are her traumas, too, that she was wrong to deny them for so long. She asks Daisy to wake up because she needs to apologize properly. There is so much more Mom needs to tell her.

During their prolonged bedside vigil, the family members’ various roles are established early, because they are mostly extensions of the same roles they occupy at home. Benny, Pamela, Stefani, and Candido come and go with delicate regularity, too, often enough to demonstrate their love and concern, but careful not to intrude. Among the others, Ruth is the cog at the center, and her mother and children wheel around her. Rafaela’s movements have taken on a sort of stoic grace. She is able to smile and talk warmly to the hospital staff despite her devastation, so she fills the role of translator between the doctors and Ruth, not so much linguistically as emotionally. Vic has made himself into the indispensable son, as he always does. He drives everyone back and forth between Benny’s house and the hospital. He takes food orders and then goes out to get the food and bring it back. Then he watches his mother to make sure she eats, before he collects all the trash and takes it down to the street where he stuffs it into the dumpster so it won’t stink up the hospital room.

Carlos struggles the most to find his place without Daisy. For the first time in his life, his waggish irreverence fails him. So during the early afternoon of the fifth day of their vigil, Carlos retreats to his phone. He clears text messages, checks emails, wastes time on social media. He reads about the cleanup and recovery efforts that are ongoing around the island. San Juan was spared the worst of the damage, but a half a dozen small towns on different parts of the island were completely obliterated.

In one newscast, an old man sits in a folding chair outside the front door of his simple one-story, concrete home. According to the text at the bottom of the screen, the man’s name is David Pedrosa y Mulero. The house itself appears intact, but the man’s waterlogged belongings are strewn all over the yard around him. His furniture is bloated, caked with mud. He makes eye contact with neither the camera nor the reporter, who holds a microphone too close to Mr. Pedrosa y Mulero’s despondent face.

“Sir, can you tell me how you fared with the storm?” the English-speaking reporter asks. “It seems like there’s a lot of damage to your belongings, but the house?”

The old man looks up from his chair but then shakes his head. The reporter tries to help, prompting him.

“I don’t see a high watermark on the outside wall as we’ve seen in other nearby communities.” The reporter points to an exterior wall, causing the camera operator to pivot. “So that’s an indication the water didn’t come up so high, yes? It seems like you were lucky.”

The camera pans back to the Mr. Pedrosa y Mulero, who shakes his head. When he answers, he holds his voice at an even tone, an act of grace that makes Carlos think of a lion tamer at an old-time circus, a man who could bring all that strength and ferocity to heel with a snap of his fingers.

“There’s no high watermark,” he says, “because the water was over the roof.”

Mr. Pedrosa y Mulero looks away, and for a moment the reporter has nothing to say. There are thirty-seven confirmed deaths so far.

Thirty-seven people.

So far.

And everyone knows that this number is wrong, that it does not yet include the hardest-hit places, the destroyed places, the impossible-to-reach places, where the bereaved are already burying their unrecorded dead without aid or government accounting. Everyone knows that some portion of those lost will never be counted. Carlos looks at Daisy and feels this fact land in his chest, in his neck, across his clavicles. He is sitting in the deep window well beside Daisy’s bed with one sneakered foot drawn up beneath him and the other one dangling down. Their mother is silent, watchful, taut. She strains forward out of her chair and toward Daisy, as if she expects Daisy to return to them any second, and she doesn’t want to miss it, she wants her eyes to be the first thing Daisy sees when she wakes up.

Carlos blinks at their mother. He blinks at Daisy lying pale in the bed, her hard-fought tan fading rapidly. Soon she will fade to the color of the blankets, the sheets. Soon she will disappear entirely. Carlos needs to get out of this room. Instead, he returns his attention to his phone and closes all the news articles. It’s only because he urgently needs something to do with himself next that he finds the voicemail. He never listens to voicemail. Who listens to voicemail? Who even leaves voicemails these days? Only very old or very eccentric people.

Only Daisy.

He sees her name there at the top of his voicemail list, the little blue dot beside it, and his heart contracts. All of her voicemails have the blue dots beside them—he’s never listened to a single one of them. Whenever she leaves a voicemail, Carlos does what all normal people do, he just picks up the phone and calls her back. He drops down from his spot in the window well.

“You want a coffee, Mom?” he asks.

She nods her head, and Carlos steps out, pressing his thumb to Daisy’s name on the screen as soon as he’s out of the room. He takes a deep breath to steel himself before putting the phone to his ear. The first voicemail is three seconds long, and all it says is: Don’t worry, we’re still related. She left it at 6:57 P.M. last Tuesday evening.

Carlos stares at the phone. There’s a row of chairs lining the hallway across from the nurses’ station, and he sits down in the nearest one with a thump. Last Tuesday evening was the night of the storm. The night of the accident. Daisy was here at the hospital by eight o’clock, just an hour after she left this voicemail. What if she was on the phone leaving this message when she got hit by that car? What if Carlos is the reason Daisy didn’t see it coming? He shakes his head. He’s being dramatic. This isn’t about him, for crying out loud. Anyway, there was no sound of an accident on that voicemail. Just his sister, the brightness of her voice. The never-ending wackiness of her dispatches. Don’t worry, we’re still related . Carlos looks back to the voicemail list and realizes that the previous message is from the same minute, also from Daisy. He opens it.

Carlos, this is the weirdest thing, you’re not going to believe it. Obviously, I couldn’t wait for you and I opened the DNA results and HOLY SHIT, I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. Call me the moment you get this! Call me, call me, call me!

The feeling that shoots through his body at that moment is exactly how Carlos imagines a bell must feel after it’s been struck by the clapper. It’s an overwhelming vibration that obliterates any capacity for thought beyond the vibration itself. He rises from the chair and goes to find his mother a cup of coffee.

“I think I’ll go by Daisy’s apartment,” Carlos says, after he deposits the cup into his mother’s hand.

She takes her eyes off Daisy’s face long enough to look at him. “What for?”

He makes his voice casual. “See if she has any plants that need watering. I’ll take her mail in, let her neighbors know what’s going on. Do they know? Has Benny filled them in?”

Mom shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

“I know she’s close with Mrs. Fernández and Mr. Kurtzweiler. They’re probably worried about her.” He leans down and kisses the top of his mom’s head. “I’ll bring her some nice pajamas and a fresh change of clothes too,” he says. “For when she wakes up.”

Mom blinks at him. “Good boy,” she says.

Mrs. Fernández has a spare key, but she’s not going to let just anyone into Daisy’s apartment. Carlos produces identification, but she’s still hesitant, even after Carlos asks her how many Puerto Ricans she knows with the last name Hayes. So he calls his uncle Benny, who vouches for him over the phone.

“Carlos, you know I have a key,” Benny says after Mrs. Fernández hands his phone back. “You could’ve just asked me.”

“My brain isn’t functioning the best,” Carlos admits.

His sister’s apartment is hot and stuffy. The storm shutters are still down so he opens the balcony sliders and raises the shutters to let in light and fresh air. He’s been here three times before, and he thinks of it as the most Daisy apartment on the planet, yet somehow, each time he visits, she’s managed to make it even more her own. He notes a canary yellow birdcage on an end table with a collection of glass bottles inside, all in different shapes and colors. On Daisy’s nightstand, a feather sticks out of an inkpot. There are dirty clothes in a heap on the floor and clean clothes in a heap on the bed, but apart from that, the place is tidy. Her sole plant, a succulent on the windowsill, is doing just fine without his help.

“She was ready for the storm, I guess,” Carlos says, looking around. The bathtub is no longer full, but more than half the water remains, and Carlos can see the high watermark from where she’d filled it in preparation. He reaches into the tepid water and pops the drain. She also has three cases of water stacked beside the front door. Carlos unpacks a few of them and puts them in the fridge because it will be nice for her to have cold water when she gets home. He wanders into her small bedroom and finds a tote bag left hanging on her closet doorknob. He rummages through her drawers and puts a good deal of care into selecting an outfit for her. He settles on a loose-fitting, wide-legged jumpsuit covered with toucans and palm trees and jaguars. He adds a set of pink silk pajamas, a soft-worn Mars Volta concert T-shirt, and a couple changes of underwear. He brings the book from atop her nightstand too. There’s a bookmark—she was only on chapter three. He can read to her. He folds the clothing carefully and stows everything in the tote bag.

All the while, he searches for the DNA results, but there’s nothing here. There’s no desk in the bedroom, but he checks the nightstand drawer. Nothing. Back in the living room, he checks the bookshelf, the sideboard, the couch cushions, under the couch. He finds a drawer in the coffee table where she keeps paperwork, but his excitement dips as he flips through all of it without finding what he’s looking for. He opens the cabinet where she keeps her garbage and finds a few envelopes and junk mail stuffed into the recycling bin, but it’s not there.

“Dammit.” He stands up, leaning both hands on the counter while he surveys the small apartment once more. He sweeps his eyes across every possibility, any nook where a stray envelope might hide. He goes back into the bathroom, checks the vanity, looks beneath the sink. There’s nothing in the oven, fridge, microwave, freezer. The clock on her bookshelf is analog, because of course it is. It ticks loudly, taunting him.

“Daisy Hayes, you better not die without coughing up those results,” he says.

He knows as soon as he says it that it’s the worst joke he’s ever made.

Ruth’s stories are endless. She tells them until she is hoarse. She knows now, because of the gruesome things she’s learned over the last month about the vanity of stubbornness, that these stories belong to her children. She can no longer afford to withhold them. She’s wasted too much time wrapped up in her own muddy feelings about Puerto Rico. Or rather, not about Puerto Rico at all, but about her own experience being an island-born, mixed-language, ambiguously complexioned person in the wider world outside of Puerto Rico. She has projected these knotty feelings onto her children without explaining why. She was only vaguely aware she was doing it all these years, and she can admit now that she unwittingly withheld their father’s heritage from them too. This withholding was only partly because she was preoccupied being a single mother, earning money, bandaging scrapes, packing lunches, reading stories. It was also partly because she didn’t want her children to reach beyond the realm of their own comfortable lives, to sink roots into distant soil. That feeling was proprietary, yes, but it was also protective. She wanted her kids to have an identity that was easier than hers, easier than Thomas’s, even. Her kids had lived in one place their whole lives, or most of their lives at least, and Ruth had hoped that would be enough for them. She wanted them to feel the kind of belonging she had always yearned for and could never achieve. But she hadn’t told them that. She had never explained.

Well, she will tell them now, and she will let her children decide for themselves who they want to be. She will not be the one to exclude them; that was never her job or intention. She will mine her own life and extract treasure; she will wield the pickax of language, will relearn her own stories using words her children understand, words that aren’t natural to her vocabulary. Ethnicity. Inclusion. Identity. Race. Complicity. Ruth will face her own discomfort and she will learn.

She will share this with Vic and Carlos too. She’ll be generous with the details, will not flinch from the hard parts. She will start with Puerto Rico, then St. Louis, then Wodsley and Palisades. She will resurrect their father as well, in every story she can summon, his own faraway home, the hymn of his accent, his cultural perplexities, his mother’s early death from cancer and his father’s resulting descent into alcoholism. Ruth isn’t even sure she’s ever shared this with her kids, why they’re only half a family now, why there are no living roots left for them on the Hayes side. Why this family meant everything, absolutely everything, to their father. The way Thomas had rolled out a sleeping bag on the floor of Daisy’s room when she was a baby with croup. He slept with one hand tangled through the slats of his daughter’s crib just to be close to her until she was well again. Ruth wants them to know all of it, every detail. She will share with her children the imprint of their messy, magical inheritance.

But Daisy first. Daisy first.

“Wake up, Daisy,” she says.

Ruth weaves her stories into a rope, and this rope she tosses down the staircase of Daisy’s pain to the bottom. It lands with a soft, dusty poof at Daisy’s feet.

It is sixteen more days before Daisy feels ready.

She sidles up to the rope where it lies in a coil. She circles around it, testing her courage, and then she reaches out and takes the rope in hand, rough and strong, woven from many fibers. At last, she hauls her weight up onto the first step.

And she begins to climb.

Mom is telling a story. A playground in St. Louis. A boy named Eddie, a girl named Kathy. A bewildering wound inflicted. She is deeply involved in the telling of this story, and Daisy wants to listen. Has her mother ever told her a story like this? Daisy is reluctant to interrupt. Her vision is fluttery, feathered. Her eyes have been closed for a long time. There’s a mask on her face. Oxygen , Daisy thinks.

“Mom?”

Her mother stops telling the story. She shrieks. She stands over Daisy. She screams for the nurse.

“She’s awake, my daughter is awake!” Mom yells.

And there is pain everywhere. Most noticeably in her face, in her right temple, in her left arm, her left thigh. The pain is a searing, obliterating thing, and suddenly there are two nurses and a doctor there, and they move Mom away, and they come to stand in the place where Mom was before, and they are asking her questions, and they are adjusting all of her machinery, and one of the nurses removes the mask from her face, so they can all hear Daisy when she says quietly, “It hurts.”

But they all laugh, and the doctor says, “I bet it does, sweetie.”

And then one of the nurses promises to give her something for the pain after the doctor examines her.

It might be morphine.

Whatever it is, it works.

Daisy is in and out, but not like before.

In and out.

Out and in.

The stitching will hold.

She is here.

Daisy is aware that the days are passing. She knows this because sometimes it’s dark when she wakes up in pain, and other times, when she wakes up in pain, it is light. Then one day, she wakes up in the kind of pain that allows her to sit up in her bed and take a drink. The next day she eats. Jell-O at first, and then broth, and eventually actual food. Her mother and brothers are always there. Grandpa and Trisha are there for a few days. Grandpa insists on holding the fork and feeding her the scrambled eggs just like he did when she was a baby. While Grandpa feeds Daisy, his wife, Trisha, compliments every passing nurse on either her fingernails or her eyelashes, which makes Carlos giggle uncontrollably. Grandma and Benny and Stefani continue to rotate through on a regular schedule until Stefani has to go back to Tallahassee. She leans over Daisy’s bed on her way to the airport, kisses Daisy on the forehead, and says, “Good job not dying.”

Carlos tells Mom to please go home and take a shower, for the love of God. “She’s not dead,” he says. “But I’ve heard poor hygiene can be a killer.”

“All right, I’m going!” Mom says, because Mom takes everything in her stride now. She never stops smiling.

And then predictably, Carlos gets bored sitting by Daisy’s bed. He does mild calisthenics while he keeps her company. Jumping jacks, push-ups, crunches. He props one foot up high on the window sill and does some runners’ stretches. He does some pliés and then flips through the channels on the television and calls Daisy a drama queen, and she tries not to laugh because it hurts to laugh.

“What happened to the driver?” Daisy asks this question with the same suddenness with which it appears in her mind. She’s ashamed it hasn’t occurred to her before.

“What?” Carlos says.

“The driver of the car that hit me.”

“Oh.” Carlos stands up and opens the locker behind her bed. “He’s fine. He suffered a seizure while he was driving, but the airbag saved him. Or I guess he used your body to break his fall.” Carlos begins to rummage through her personal belongings in the locker. “I can’t believe I’ve been sitting in this godforsaken room for weeks and I never noticed this cabinet before.”

Daisy’s bloodstained clothes are long gone, cut to ribbons by the surgical team that wasted no time getting to the meat of her body that first night the ambulance delivered her to their care. But her backpack is there. Her keys. Her shattered phone.

“What’s this?” Carlos pulls a sheaf of papers out of the bag, then answers his own question. “Holy shit, the DNA results!” He drops the backpack on the floor and sits down in the room’s lone chair. “I went looking for these! Couldn’t find them.”

He is silent while he studies the papers. And then he looks at Daisy, her unwashed hair strewn out across the pillow, and the first thing he says is, “Maybe that smell wasn’t Mom.” And he feels more like himself than he has since the night of the accident. But then he waves the papers in front of her and says, “What the fuck, Daisy? What the fuck?”

“I know,” she says, her voice rusty and raw. She points to the cup of apple juice on the tray table, and Carlos hands it to her. She sips. “Imagine if I’d died without getting to the bottom of this?” She hands the cup back and Carlos sets it down.

“Unthinkable,” he says. But then he spreads his hands across the papers in his lap and suggests, “Maybe now isn’t the time for all this, though? Maybe we should wait until you’re a little stronger.”

Daisy looks at him, aghast. “Carlos, don’t be insane.”

He looks back, deadpan. “I don’t know any other way to be.”

So, when their mom returns an hour later, her hair still damp from the shower, Daisy and Carlos are waiting for her.

It’s an ambush.

Ruth reads the papers as best she can and then gropes around in her handbag for her reading glasses, because something must be wrong here. “This doesn’t make any sense,” she says quietly.

“Mm-hmm, we noticed,” Carlos says.

Ruth glances up at her son, but he can’t hold her attention; her eyes are drawn immediately back to the papers. She flips through them again and again.

“You gotta lotta ’splaining to do,” Carlos says in his racist Ricky Ricardo accent, an impression he’s always insisted isn’t racist when he does it because he’s Latino.

He is Latino, Ruth catches herself. No air quotes this time. Her son is Latino. Recent epiphanies aside, it even says so, right here on the page. Her children are just as Latino as she is, apparently, which makes no sense at all, fifty percent. Half Puerto Rican, as far as she can tell. Half some-Caribbean-flavor-that’s-definitely-not-Irish, anyway. They should be three-quarters Irish.

“This can’t be right,” she says.

Both Daisy and Carlos are quiet, perhaps wrestling with all the new information. Perhaps shifting and juggling everything they thought they knew about themselves, although of course whatever is written on this paper changes nothing. It’s just as Ruth feared, the very reason she has always opposed DNA testing, especially for Caribbean Latinos—it’s too ambiguous and it causes people to needlessly lose their balance.

Daisy has yellow bags beneath her eyes, a collage of unbeautiful colors that covers one whole side of her face, a deep wash of blood beneath the skin. Her voice is still scratchy from the machinery that kept her alive until just a few days ago.

“There must be some explanation,” Daisy says quietly.

Carlos scowls at Ruth just the same way he did when he was a toddler with tantrums, his face so expressive she had difficulty taking him seriously, even when he was in a red fury. Her baby child, her little clown. But the question he poses now comes with real venom. He asks it with all the simplicity and heartache of a child who does not remember his father.

“So was Dad our real dad?”

Ruth stutters. “Of, of course he was! What? Carlos!”

“Carlos!” Daisy raises her voice to correct her brother, but the effort causes a spasm in her fragile throat, and a sputtering cough follows. The pain ripples through her body then, as all her muscles tense with the coughing. She pales from the pain, and Ruth stands up to hold a cup of water to Daisy’s mouth. She feeds the straw between Daisy’s lips, and waits for her daughter to swallow.

None of which dissuades Carlos. “You never slept with anyone else?”

For a moment, Ruth is speechless. In her life, she never dreamed she would field a question like that from her child. Her resulting anger threatens to incinerate everything she’s learned about gratitude and regret during the last twenty-six days.

She turns her face to Carlos and says, “It is absolutely none of your business who I have or have not slept with. How dare you ask me a question like that. Who even are you?”

“That’s what I’m asking you, Ruth! Who am I?” He throws his hands in the air like he’s on a soap opera.

In the pit of Ruth’s stomach, another storm begins to swell. Because there are other feelings behind her outrage, of course there are. It’s too hot in this room. She feels sick. She could, perhaps, cure the feeling by retching, heaving, bringing it up. By blurting out one name into the room. But it can’t be, it really can’t.

Arthur Rodríguez .

No. Ruth needs to sit down, to breathe. She needs time to register this upheaval, but it’s happening at warp speed.

“Carlos, take it easy,” Daisy says. “Give her a chance to explain.”

“Explain what?” Vic is in the doorway with Grandma. “We brought you an iced coffee. You allowed caffeine yet?” He sets the cup on Daisy’s tray.

Ruth’s mouth is a grim line.

“You gonna tell them, Ruth?” Carlos says, folding his arms across his chest. He is the only one of her children who calls her by her first name, ever since kindergarten, and Ruth has always found this habit funny, endearing. But not today. Her boy leans against the windowsill, and Ruth can see the banyan tree through the window behind him. When she holds the papers out to her mother, she sees that her hand is shaking. Mama looks through them with her head slightly tipped back and her lips pursed.

“What am I looking at?” Mama blinks at the papers.

Vic moves to her shoulder and dips his head down to see. “Looks like some DNA test results. Oh boy.” He looks up at Daisy. “Yours?”

Daisy nods.

“And mine,” Carlos says.

“Cool,” Vic says, obviously not reading the room. “Can I see?”

Mama hands over the papers to Vic. “Be my guest—I can’t make heads or tails of them.”

Ruth sees that it’s only a moment before Vic’s expression changes too. And then his posture follows.

This family. This life. It’s so much more fragile than Ruth ever realized before. Even after losing Thomas, she never felt this kind of vulnerability. On the contrary, that loss was like cement. It bonded them, made them impenetrable. But now this. This moment feels impossible, inconceivable, the way all three of her children are looking at her with the same expression of distrust. Like she’s a stranger to them, and just at the moment when she’d finally learned what to do, how to correct the mistakes of her past.

Mama moves over to the chair, and Ruth stands out of it so her mother can sit.

“Wow,” Vic says, his voice slung low as he flips through the pages. “This is really something.”

“Well, what is it?” Mama asks then, lowering her weight into the chair. “What’s all the hullabaloo?”

“Well.” Vic clears his throat, unsure how to proceed. “It’s not—” he glances at Ruth, who nods. “It’s not what we would’ve expected. The DNA results.”

Mama pulls a ziplock baggie out of her purse. Ruth watches while her mother opens it and reaches inside. How can she snack at a time like this?

“How so?” Mama asks, shaking the little baggie at Ruth. “Sunflower seeds?” she offers.

Ruth shakes her head. Vic clears his throat again.

“Well,” he says, “Dad was from Ireland. And Grandpa Pete’s family too, also Irish. And then you’re from here.”

“Right,” Mama crunches on a sunflower seed, spits the shell out into a second baggie she appears to have brought for just that function. “And?”

“So out of the four grandparents, we have three Irish and one Puerto Rican. Which means we’d expect our DNA to be mostly Irish and then a quarter Puerto Rican.”

“Okay, yes,” Mama says.

Ruth is not looking at Carlos, but she can feel her younger son glaring into the side of her head. Daisy’s hands are folded peacefully on top of her blanket. She has survived, that’s all that matters , Ruth thinks. Why are we even talking about this? Who cares?

“But according to the test results, it looks like Daisy and Carlos are about half and half,” Vic says, glancing around at the other faces in the room.

“Oh!” Mama says. “Half and half?”

“Half Irish, half Puerto Rican,” Carlos says.

“Yeah.” Vic pauses. “I wonder,” but then he opts out of his sentence.

Carlos pushes him. “You wonder what?”

He commits slowly. “I wonder… if my results would be the same?”

“Well, of course yours would be the same!” Ruth throws her hands in the air. “You have the same parents, don’t you?”

“Do we?” Carlos slings the question like a dart.

“Oh dear,” Mama says.

But no one hears her, no one’s listening. All eyes are on Ruth. Demanding answers. Ruth’s hands are in the air, she’s making the universal gesture for stop. She’s trying to speak louder than her children, to be heard above their questions, but Carlos and Vic are both talking over her. Only Daisy is quiet, her eyes resting on her grandmother.

Rafaela reseals her ziplock baggie and replaces it in her purse. She clears her throat, then reaches for Daisy’s iced coffee, and takes a sip. Then she performs El Suspiro, with a long, high note on the exhale. A wind song with her body, an effort to interrupt the chaotic din in the room, to bring the volume back to a place of harmony, where they can hear one another. It works. Ruth and her grandsons all turn to look at her. She clears her throat quietly.

“I think I can explain,” she says.