After the Hurricane
- eBook
- Audiobook
- Hardcover
- Book info
- Sample
- Media
- Author updates
- Lists
Synopsis
Named by Etaf Rum as one of the Best Beach Reads of All Time for "Read with Jenna!"
Reminiscent of Gabriela Garcia’s Of Women and Salt, Leah Franqui brings us an engrossing, deeply personal novel with a mystery at its heart as a daughter returns to Puerto Rico to search for her troubled father, who has gone missing after Hurricane Maria.
From the outside, Elena Vega’s life appears to be an easy one: the only child of two professional parents, private school, NYU. But her twenties are aimless and lacking in connection. Something has always been amiss in her life: her father, the brilliant but deeply troubled Santiago Vega.
Born in rural Puerto Rico, Santiago arrived in New York as a small child. His harsh, mercurial father returned to the island, leaving Santiago to be raised by his mentally ill mother and his formidable grandmother. An outstanding student, he followed scholarships to Stanford, then Yale Law, marrying Elena’s mother along the way. Santiago is the shining star of his migrant family—the one who made it out and struck it rich. But he is a haunted man, plagued by trauma, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism. He’s lost contact with Elena over the years and returned to San Juan to wrestle his demons alone.
Then Hurricane Maria strikes, and Santiago vanishes. Desperate to know what happened to the father she once adored, Elena returns to Puerto Rico, a place she loved as a child but hasn’t seen in years. There she must unravel the truth about who her father is, crisscrossing the storm-swept island and reaching deep into his family tree to find relatives she’s never met, each of whom seems to possess a clue about Santiago’s fate.
A compelling mystery unfolds, as Elena is reunited with family, and with a place she loved and lost—the island of Puerto Rico, which is itself a character in this book. It’s a story of connection, migration, striving, love, and loss, illuminated by humor and affection, written by a novelist at the height of her gifts.
Release date: July 19, 2022
Publisher: HarperCollins
Print pages: 368
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Reader buzz
Author updates
After the Hurricane
Leah Franqui
“I think you need to get some help.” Elena has been practicing these simple words for almost a year when she says them to her father, over lunch, peering through the beer bottles on the table, all his, to look into his eyes. These words are so simple, so stupid, that they feel impossible coming out of her mouth, they feel like something from a television show, in fact, she thinks she might remember them from a “very special episode” of Saved by the Bell. And yet they are all she has, all she can offer him, and she hopes they will be enough.
They are not.
All she sees looking back at her on her father’s face is confusion, willful and broad. She wants to remember him as he used to be, when she was very small, so present and alert that it hurt her eyes to look at him. But it has been years since she saw him like that. She would like to cry. That hot hard feeling haunts the back of her throat, and her face prickles.
“Help with what?” her father asks her. He is smiling. She never knows how he will react to anything. Sometimes he becomes angry and sometimes the same thing will make him laugh for long minutes until he coughs, a deep dragging smoker’s cough. She is pleading with him, begging him to change, to give her the thing she wants, himself, just himself, but sane. Sober. The way he was until a few years ago. She is asking him to stop crumbling away, she is asking him to stay, although the way he is now is less than what he once had been. She wants to halt the decay. Why does he not see himself disappearing? And he smiles.
“Help with your problems.”
He waves at the air like a cat batting at a moth.
“Problems. What problems? You’ve been talking to your mother, haven’t you? She just worries. She’s got that anxiety thing. Now, enough. You tell me about something, tell me about your job,” he demands, taking a deep sip of his beer. They are at a Korean restaurant on St. Marks Place in Manhattan, and it is 1:00 P.M. on a Tuesday, and he has been drinking deeply.
“I’m just working at the university library, Papi,” she reminds him. He looks confused for a moment, and then nods, vigorously, covering up the evidence of his memory lapse.
“Tell me about classes.” Elena is in graduate school at NYU, getting her master’s in history. She is writing her thesis about the way cotton production in South America changed the fashion industry in the United States, and the lives of garment workers in New York City. She is working with professors from Stern for the economics, and students from NYU’s Costume Studies program for the fashion. She has sent her father article after article about her research. She tells him everything about her life, and he tells her nothing. She comes home to Philadelphia at least once a month and she has listed her classes for that semester at least three times, watching her mother’s hand tighten on her wineglass in frustration as she, who knows her daughter’s life well, mouths along, watching her father nod and smile, knowing he will remember nothing, hoping she is wrong.
“What are you taking?”
But she is never wrong about him. Heat rises up her throat, and she swallows water, pushing it down where it belongs.
“I think you need some help with your mental health,” she tells him, her voice low.
“What is this bullshit term? I read about this in the paper. What is this?” he asks, his voice curious, amused.
“Your mind. Your mental condition,” she says. They have never talked about this. Her father does not really talk withanyone. He talks at people. He talks at her. He tells her what he thinks of the world, and when, as a little girl and then a teenager, she asked him about his life before she existed in it, he told her he had been poor and now he wasn’t. And that she should stop asking. So she did.
“Have you given any thought to what you are going to do after you graduate?” he asks her, finishing his beer. He gestures to the waitress for another one. The only other people in the restaurant are a group of college students filling up on the free kimchi, four kids sharing a single order of bibimbap. Elena’s father looks at them.
“Poor kids. I was like that.”
“In college?” Elena asks, timidly. He never talks about himself. She knows he won’t answer her questions, but something inside of her compels her to ask. Maybe it is the disappointment that her carefully constructed attempt to talk about his mental condition burned down so quickly. Maybe it’s the beers, which she can see have loosened him, the way alcohol sometimes does. Other times it tightens him, making him tense and sharp. Even in his drinking, he is inconsistent and impossible to predict.
“I used to live around here. Did you know that?” Elena nods, her body trembling. She did know that, it is one of maybe five pieces of real information she has about her father before her birth. She does not want to speak, does not want to disturb his mood. How awful she is, that she can put aside her planned speech—her plea for him to stop drinking, to get more serious help for his bipolar condition, to stay on his medication instead of going on and off whenever it suits him, to see a therapist, to want to help himself—for a tiny piece of information about his childhood. She is pathetic, she knows.
“At First and First. Center of the universe. Not then, though. Then it was . . . God. What are those rents like now?”
“Expensive.” She breathes out. He nods, like she has delivered vital wisdom.
“We should go over there. You want to go over there? I can show you my old neighborhood. We can take a walk. You got time?” Elena has class in an hour. She does not care. She has never missed a class in her life, not in college, not now. She is due a skip. She nods. He smiles at her, and for a moment he is not the man in front of her, his jowls sagging from the weight he has gained, hair thinning, his body sinking under the load of the alcohol and lithium and time. For a moment he is the way he was when she was ten years old, lean and tall and tan and vibrant, and it is enough for her, Elena, that he hug her, that is all she needs to know she is loved.
“Great. That’s great. I want to show you this. I can show you where I lived with my mother, all the places, we moved around a lot. And where my grandmother lived, everyone. My whole family was there. Did you know that?” She did not. He has never answered a single question about his family in her twenty-four years of life, never responded to any inquiry, never volunteered more than a morsel of information. Now he is offering her a feast. She feels frozen, unable to move. Her heart is beating and she can hear it, she can feel herself vibrating. She doesn’t know what to do with her body. She wants what he is offering her so badly she almost extends her hand, like this information is a tangible thing she can feel, hold.
He leans back in his chair.
“We can walk for a bit, but I have to go around four.” His words break the spell. Where is he going? He still has not told her why he is here. She got the call the night before, that he was coming, taking her out to lunch. He has never just come to New York before. This is why she wanted to say something, her planned feeble speech. Because he had come, and she thought that might be a sign of something.
“Your mother and I, we’ve decided to take some time apart. I’m heading down to San Juan for a while, give her a chance to cool off. You know how your mother is, more now than before, she just flies off the handle. She’s hysterical. No logic, turns herself against me. I’m going to wait out the storm down there until it’s safe, you know?” Her father is laughing, smiling, as the waitress brings him another beer. Elena remains as still as before, as pain replaces the anticipation in her body. “I’m just gonna be down on the island until she’s ready. Don’t you worry, though.”
She is never wrong about him. But he can still surprise her. He can always be worse than she imagined.
“When?” Elena forces the words past her mouth. Her father looks at her, uncomprehending.
“When are you going?”
“Tonight. From JFK. Cheaper flight.” Her parents have never once flown out of New York to go to Puerto Rico, not since Elena was born, at least. They fly from Philadelphia, regardless of the cost. And he said flight, singular. One-way.
“I see.” She had hoped so deeply that his calling her for lunch was an act of love. An opening of a door. But it was merely a rest stop.
“I’m gonna take a leak, okay, and then we’ll go for that walk. Sound good?” Elena nods, her neck stiff with tension. The walk. She will still have that. That is something, more than anything that has come before. That is an act of love, is it not? That is a gesture, he will show her his young life, one of the many parts of him she has never seen. Maybe he will talk to her, maybe they can discuss what he is telling her about her mother, about their marriage, maybe it is not so serious, like he says, just a storm passing over the horizon.
He kisses her on the forehead, and stumbles to the bathroom. She watches him, turning her head to see him as he goes, and then turns back to her meal. The soup she had ordered is a beef bone and leek soup with a milky broth and she usually loves it, leaves the bowl empty. Today it has cooled and it turns her stomach to smell it, to see the fat floating on the tepid broth. She picks up her father’s latest beer bottle and drinks it, mostly to prevent him from doing so, but also for courage, and a little numbness. She does not want to feel as deeply as she does, for fear she will not be able to stand it. She trembles. Her hands are shaking, and she doesn’t know if that’s from anticipation or panic. She clasps them together so hard her nails bite into her flesh, but it’s better than the shaking, she decides. He has to give her something real now. If he won’t try to fix himself, get better, at the very least he has to give her some part of himself, some history that she can have. She is sick of studying other people’s stories and not knowing her own.
Maybe if she knows him better, he will find her more worth loving, more worth changing for. She hates how much she hopes for this, longs for it, cannot cut her need for this out of her no matter how much she tries. She never knows who she is angrier with, him or herself.
This is why, forty-five minutes later, although she knows that he is gone, that he has left her there, and isn’t coming back—not for their walk, not to pay, not to be her father at all, to be there, with her—Elena sits at the table still, looking at the soup she will never order again, and the remains of his spicy stir-fried squid, and the many bottles of beer he had to drink to tell her he and her mother were over, and hopes against hope that all of this is a mistake, that any minute he will appear.
He does not. She would like to break the bottles, she would like to burn the restaurant down, she would like to cry because she has less now than she did before she saw him, at least earlier she had hope. But she learned from an early age to cover her father’s mistakes, and so she instead pays the bill and walks out of the restaurant.
After she has walked from Manhattan to Brooklyn because the energy inside of her, the anger, is buzzing so brightly she can’t sit on a train, she will call her mother and ask just what the hell is going on. During a phone call that feels like someone stabbing her in the gut, she will learn that it is her mother who has asked her father to leave, that she has exorcised him from her life, trimmed him out of photos and taken him off the deed to their Philadelphia home.
In that call, she will learn that her father has been in the grips of a manic spiral for over nine months. That he overdosed on his lithium, accidently or on purpose no one will ever know, and then, after a hospital visit to flush out his liver, declared he would never take it again, that it made him numb and too calm, that he couldn’t move fast with it. That in the spirit of moving fast he then crashed his car driving drunk on the New Jersey Turnpike, and somehow walked away from it whole, with nothing more than a black eye. And $15,000 of damage. She will learn that he lost his license to practice law, that he has left his life behind, or been pushed out of it, by her mother, who is finally done. The anger that will fill her veins and clog her throat learning these things will be overwhelming, a murderous rage that makes her tremble, that she tells herself she cannot feel, will not feel. It will seem historic in nature, ancient Greek, and humans can’t survive that kind of thing. She will ask why her mother didn’t tell her any of this, and neither of them will tell the truth, which is that between them they have formed a habit of silence on the subject of Santiago, and habits are hard to break. She would like to hate her mother for her silence, but she can only hate one parent at a time.
She will begin to edit her father out of her narratives. She will learn how to say she is visiting her mother, not her parents. She will find that no one questions her, or points this out, and this makes her sad and angry in a way she will tell no one about.
Her parents will divide territory, him on the island, her mother taking the mainland, and Elena will not venture to San Juan. It would feel disloyal, and while her mother will never say it, Elena will know she is happy Elena has chosen not to go. Elena has always been an obedient child. She had hoped that would earn her love. It rarely seems to.
She will get a call from him a few months later, which she will answer, despite the sight of his name on her phone inspiring dread in her stomach. He will not remember this lunch, this moment, his offer to give her a piece of his past. He will tell her life is wonderful and perfect and that she must visit him soon, and she will say nothing. He will ask her what classes are you taking, and she will end the call before she can start crying. Before she can scream. She will tell herself that she is sad, very sad. She lies.
He will look at the phone, puzzled, these devices never make much sense to him, and wonder if he has hurt her, but only for a moment, before the rum clouds his chaotic brain chemistry, before he can, really truly can, no longer think of anyone but himself. He will return to his life on the island. He will sink into this new way of being and it will be as though all of the things that came before—his marriage, his child, his ambition as a lawyer, his friends, the first and last he ever made, his deceptions, his distant past and childhood all buried deep, his mother most of all—are behind him. He will have escaped them, left them all in the past, where they belong. He wants to be light, he wants to carry as little with him as possible. That has always been his deepest and truest dream.
This day, this lunch he will not remember, as he stumbles out into the fall sunshine, looking at the world through a haze of cheap Japanese beer, will be the last time in his life that Santiago will ever see the East Village, the place where he was born, the place he thought was the whole world for so long until he thought it was a prison.
Six years later, it is September once again. Her brain buzzing from wine, Dutch courage, Elena will find herself alone at night in the neighborhood that her father lived in long ago. She will pass First and First. She will not notice the schools he once attended, the apartments belonging to the family she has never heard of, will never meet. Eventually, she will stop, and stand at Avenue A and Third Street, looking at the first housing project, her bleary eyes reading the sign mounted on the brick wall, and she will take a picture, the historian in her never truly dormant, no matter that she works in real estate now. She will have no idea that she is on the walk, the one he promised her, and that this would have been a place her father would have shown her, now will never show her. Then, she will take the subway home, and sleep, and wake, and go on with her life, and look at other daughters and fathers and think, Well, that’s it for that, then. She will, she knows, be done with him, her own father, forever. She is never wrong about him.
But sometimes she is wrong about herself.
The next day, the storm comes.
When Elena wakes up four months, two weeks, and five days after Hurricane Maria landed in San Juan, she feels, for no particular reason, a sensation of deep dread. Her stomach rolls, and breathing through her nausea, she stumbles through her tiny apartment, her studio, single women in New York live in studios. Her head bows over her small porcelain sink, its white surface split by fine cracks that resemble the shoulder-length curly hairs on her head, and she retches. Thin yellow mucus, bitter and foul, floods her mouth, and then her sink. She leans backward, smiles weakly, grimly congratulating herself. At least you know you aren’t pregnant. She hasn’t had sex in a long time. Not since she ended things with Daniel. And besides, she knows, this happens, it means something bad is coming.
For most of her adolescence, Elena Vega threw up every morning. Not after breakfast, not to be thinner, though she would have liked to be thinner, as would everyone. She would throw up after brushing her teeth, deep racking spasms throughout her body, saliva pooling in her mouth, and then, a flood of bile. She would brush her teeth once more, and descend the stairs of her unhappy home. She never told anyone about it. What would she have said? My body is trying to eject itself. My stomach is trying to escape. Even my insides want out.
It would have been another worry, another thing for her mother, Rosalind, named for the famous film actress her own mother had so adored, to worry about. Elena has never wanted anyone to worry about her. There is no room for worrying about her in their family.
She should have known the day her father met her, six years ago now, that it would be a bad day. She had thrown up that morning, too. But that was all before she understood that her nausea is a kind of prescience, that her innards are augury, foretelling the future.
She had thrown up after Daniel had asked her to marry him, and every day afterward until she gave him back his ring. It never fit her well, anyway, and after she did her stomach had left her alone, settling into solitude with more contentment than her mind. Even now she was unsure why she had done that, given it back, she who was so lonely, who had wanted to be with someone badly. Her mother, who she loves deeply, does not understand it. Daniel was so kind to Elena, and her mother has come to value kindness more with every passing year. He was so stable, and her mother has always always told her stability is more than passion will ever be. Elena knows her mother speaks from experience, and she would like to follow it, really she would. But Elena knows she would never be happy with Daniel. Daniel loved her the way her mother does, because she is obedient, because she does and says all the right things. Somewhere in Elena something is burning and angry and it wants to explode all over her life. Daniel did not deserve to be there when it does.
It is not, as one friend says, joking but not joking, because Elena is an only child, so no man’s love will be enough for her. Some only children are spoiled, or at least, that is the myth Elena knows well, the one she smiles at and pretends to be amused by, donning an invisible mimed princess tiara and making others laugh. But Elena was not spoiled, not in the sense of being given too much and placed in the center of the universe. But in other ways I am spoiled, milk allowed to sit too long in the sun, curdled now. Living with her parents, with their clouds of unhappiness, with her father and his so very many things, so very many things she had to account for, understand, avoid, she had never been the center of anything.
The phone rings. A photo pops up, a frozen image of her mother, Rosalind Goldberg, her full name spelled out in Elena’s phone book, just like everyone else’s. Elena likes names, full names, something about how much time she has spent looking at historic records bled into her and everyone now must be known in her life, in her devices and notebooks, the way they would want to be remembered throughout time.
Elena wipes her face, hiding from her mother as she always has; no matter that she cannot see her, Rosalind will know, and Elena cannot have that. She cannot have her mother worrying about her. Elena is already too worried about herself. She takes a deep breath and accepts the call.
“Elena, it’s me. It’s about your father. He’s gone missing.”
Whatever Elena’s guts were trying to reveal to her, she had not expected this. She cannot breathe. She can feel her stomach bile rising again, and imagines it choking her. She is silent for a long, long moment. It is insane to her to hear about her father from her mother. She has been a locked vault about him since the day he left. Before, even. Rosalind has never answered any of Elena’s questions about Santiago’s past. After they separated Elena thought she would finally get answers, but Rosalind was loyal to Santiago in this way, and gave Elena as little as he had. When Elena pressed, Rosalind said that Santiago’s past had dark things in it and he had wanted to protect Elena from that, and she, Rosalind, had to respect that. Elena does not feel protected. She feels lost. And so, apparently, is he.
“Elena? Did you hear me?”
“What does that mean, he’s gone?” she asks, trying to keep her voice calm, she can feel it rising, feel a keening cry at the back of her throat.
“He is missing, has been missing, actually, but we, I, didn’t know.” Rosalind’s voice sounds stuffy and nasal, as it always does when she has had a cold, or been crying.
“You said he was okay. After Maria. You said you talked to him.”
It has been months since the hurricane.
“I talked to his neighbor,” Rosalind admits, her voice small. Elena closes her eyes, containing herself.
Elena had been frantic after the hurricane, truly, deeply frantic. It had surprised her. She had thought on the subject of her father she was entirely neutral. Then the storm blew through the island and through her.
She works for a company that manages a group of buildings in Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Crown Heights, and Clinton Hill. Most of the time she works from home, or shows prospective renters apartments, but twice a month they have company meetings in their central office space in downtown Brooklyn. She had been in one the morning after the Category 4 storm hit Puerto Rico, on September 20, and while she was waiting for her turn to talk about the recent rentals she had completed, Daniel, who was still her fiancé at the time, sent her an article about the destruction. Doesn’t your father live there? She was shocked by what she saw. Storms were normal on the island, but the images she was looking at were all flooding and destruction, downed power lines and whole towns under the waves and rain, and deaths, lots of deaths. She stared at the words on her phone screen, wishing they would reconstitute into something else, something good.
She realized she could not remember how words worked, their order, because she had lost all sense of nouns and verbs, how they interact. When she spoke, she sounded like she had taken every word in her head and jumbled them, a child’s block set of words, and then tried to arrange them again with no sense of meaning, just an interest in the color of each. She had excused herself and found a corner to curl into, breathing like she’d run up five flights of stairs, her heart burning with pain. A fellow agent, Jeff, found her and sat with her, silent and calm in the face of her panic. It was the closest she had felt to someone in months.
Elena and her father do not speak. Not really. He rarely called or texted her, preferring instead to email her random things he found on the internet, photos of cats in teacups, articles about cheese-making in Nepal and the Singaporean economy and the French legal system. She never knew what they meant, what he wanted to tell her with this information. She never responded, and he didn’t seem to care about her reaction. She dutifully sent him messages on his birthday and Father’s Day. She received emails twice or three times a month. That was the extent of their communication.
But after Maria, Elena thought he would call. He could not be so far from reality that he would not have noticed the storm, not have understood the way people would be fearful for him. He must have run out of alcohol at some point, sobered up enough to know that this was not business as usual, that the island was in crisis, that people would want to know that he was alive. But she heard nothing.
Her panic flared out at the edges, waking her at night. She went from trying to learn as little as possible about the problems, reading only the good-news articles, the stories of help and care and false positivity, to reading about disaster, starvation, anger, pain, planeloads of people fleeing to Florida, children turned away from hospitals, food running low, nights in total darkness, the crimes that darkness hides. She consumed everything, devoured everything, hoping to catch a glimpse of her father, but she never did.
Finally, after a week of this, after she realized that she hadn’t had a full meal since the storm, that her jeans were looser and she could not even celebrate the fact, Elena called her mother and demanded that she contact her father. Rosalind was reluctant, but understood, and she told Elena that everything was fine, that Santiago had found the only working liquor store on the island and was enjoying the evening sky without light pollution. Elena went home that night and made herself a roast chicken, a steak, a cacio e pepe, a salad as big as a cat, and a chocolate mousse. She ate them all by herself. A month later, she gave Daniel back his ring, and that night she slept with Jeff at his going-away party, relieved that the reality of him was a disappointment compared to the fantasy of him she had been building since he had comforted her. She is always relieved when people disappoint her, because she is always waiting for them to do so, anxious until they do, the way she feels deep relief on the way to the airport when she finally remembers whatever it was she had forgotten to pack.
All because she knew that her father was fine. And now Rosalind is telling her that her father is missing. She wants to curl up inside herself all over again. She wants to cry. She wants Daniel to hold her. She wants Jeff inside her again, however disappointing his performance. She wants Rosalind to laugh and tell her it isn’t true, that she is playing a horrible joke, that she will never do something like this again. She wants to hear her father laughing in the background, she wants to hear Rosalind shush him because he is spoiling her prank, she wants to be ten again when they were happy in San Juan and she watched her parents smile as the sun set and they sipped their wine.
And she is also angry. His house must be a mess. She doubts that he maintains it well, he never had a sense of maintenance, not like her mother has, not like Elena herself has, she does it for a living. That house is a piece of history, its floors from different centuries. Her father, she is sure, is letting it go to ruin. He never takes care of anything, anyone, Elena knows, and it enrages her, hurts her in her very soul.
“I talked to Gloria, you remember her, she has that little West Indian place, takeout lunches, she always puts it in Styrofoam, which I hated, but the food was good.”
Rosalind is rambling. She is talking about takeout containers instead of her missing ex-husband. That means that she, too, is nervous. Elena is as sensitive to her mother’s moods as a piano tuner is to vibrations. She can see her, a hundred miles away, as she picks at her nailbeds, turning the thin skin into a shredded mess of epidermis, red and swollen, easily infected, Rosalind’s long slim fingers ruined by her anxiety. This is why Elena can never worry her mother. She cannot be the reason for Rosalind’s hands to hurt.
“I remember Gloria, Mom,” Elena assures her, trying to quiet the screaming in her mind, the knowledge that she knows, always, that something is wrong, has known the whole time, somehow.
“She said she saw your father every day, he gets food from her, it’s not good for him, I’m sure it’s got a lot of oil, you know how Puerto Ricans are, they love their fat, his heart . . . I don’t even know the last time he’s seen a doctor.” Gloria is not Puerto Rican, although she speaks the lazy island Spanish well, far better than Elena, to her shame. Santiago never spoke Spanish with Elena. She learned it in college. Gloria is from Antigua, and her years in San Juan have given her more Spanish than Elena has.
Elena does not correct her mother.
“Why didn’t you talk to him?” Elena is trying to be calm, trying not to explode at her mother, trying to contain herself. She can feel steam hissing off her words, though, regardless.
“I tried to,” Rosalind insists. “He wouldn’t answer me. Gloria said his phone was broken by a power surge when the city grid came back on, but I don’t know. He might just not have wanted to talk to me. You know that he is difficult. I’m sorry.”
The storm hit the island in September, the height of hurricane season.
When Elena was nine, she had visited the island with her parents and gone to see her grandfather, a smiling happy man who made both of her parents very unhappy in very different ways. That year, Hurricane Hortense had blown Abuelo’s gardening shed away, and damaged his avocado tree. He teared up when describing the pain the tree felt, and her father had nodded, and said nothing when later her mother, livid, railed against Abuelo’s pain at the tree and disregard for the son he had abandoned. Elena, half asleep, her stomach swollen with her step-grandmother’s arroz y habichuelas, was woken up by her father, who, drunk, pained, stormed from the house and then drove their car off the road to avoid the truck that he had almost run into. They did not return to the island for a year after that, and she had wondered for a long time where the garden shed had landed, if someone else was using it now, if her grandfather had stayed sad about his aguacates.
Hortense had been a terrible storm. This one was worse.
“But today Gloria called me,” Rosalind says. Her nasal voice makes her sound like she is telling a joke, her tone makes Elena want to hold on to something, for safety. “She hasn’t seen your father in days, she says. Usually he gets food from her place, like I said, she said sometimes she checks on him because he can be in one of his bad periods. She thinks he might be missing.”
It is now mid-February. Months since the storm hit, and the island is creeping, slowly, toward recovery, denied the support it needed, needs, from the country that taxes it without representation, largely out of the headlines, an occasional piece popping up here and there to remind people that it exists, that it is still struggling. But as far as most people Elena knows go, despite their initial social media furor, their Instagram throwback vacation photos underscored with #prayforpuertorico, the hurricane is a thing of the past. Power has been restored, shakily, to parts of the island, to San Juan completely. The damage is very bad, but the storm is long gone. How can her father have disappeared now? Where has he gone? How has he left the house? And why doesn’t he have better timing?
“I hate to ask you this, honey, but would you be willing to go? I just . . . I can’t. I’m worried, but I can’t go there, Elena. It’s a haunted place for me. Would you go and just make sure your father is all right? And the house? The house is yours, anyway, or it’s supposed to be, when he’s gone. ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...