Teresa had only spotty memories of those six years in DC. Six years of exile and nightmares, of daughter-shaped voids and her own reflection, as tattered and worn as the portrait of her mother she had left behind in Barrio Ávila.
Cristina organized and held Amarga’s funeral service the morning after José María murdered her. A Holy Saturday as quiet and somber as it was intended. Just as Jesus’s disciples prayed at the foot of his tomb two millennia ago, so too did esteemed politicians and important businesspeople arrive to pay their respects. Many attended just to witness Amarga slammed into the family vault. Gossips came to speculate as to why José María had committed his crime and to where he had disappeared. Others showed up out of genuine sadness. They had come to find Amarga’s bitterness an endearing quality, comical in its execution. Even a few tears were shed, though whether from grief or the smoke from the burning AFC plantation was unclear.
The Costa Rican ambassador to the United States flew in for the burial on his private jet. His wife, an Italian socialite with a beak nose and shoddily tweezed eyebrows, was an old friend of Amarga’s. After the young priest rushed through the service (he’d been running late for sundown’s Easter Vigil), Doña Vicenza approached Teresa, fanned smoke from her face, and in her Genoese accent, offered Teresa a job at the embassy in Washington, DC, where she and her daughters could take a break from Costa Rica. Leave long enough to heal. But Teresa looked at her daughters’ faces—Lyra’s bruised, Carmen’s blank—and decided she couldn’t take them with her. When they regained themselves, they’d ask what she had no idea how to answer—explanations for things that once seemed impossible. Things that would never have crossed their minds, not even in nightmares.
For nine whole days, Teresa fought the urge to run, holding out for the entirety of the novenario to put her affairs in order before she left Lyra and Carmen with the Three Marías. Cristina never left Teresa’s side, and offered her and her daughters a room in which to stay. Every morning, Teresa awoke to the sight of her own house across the railroad. It was still a soft, beautiful structure, with the manicured gardens swaying in the hot breeze, carrying on as if nothing had happened.
Teresa left Lyra and Carmen with the Three Marías because she wanted them as far away from Barrio Ávila as possible. At first Cristina objected, but she soon accepted that Teresa was right: any reminder of that night would overwhelm them. This had all happened, Teresa reasoned, because she had let it happen. She should have rejected Desiderio’s advances, or should have run from José María when she had the chance. And she herself was a reminder too. Her exile would be her self-punishment.
AT THE DULLES Airport, Teresa saw sprawling trees of smoke on the horizon, growing around Washington, DC, like a black forest, swaying in a westward wind that filled the noon air with a charred-brick smell. She had left one fire for another.
A handsome Costa Rican greeted her on the tarmac and escorted her to a limousine. In a matter of hours, Teresa’s world had collapsed into itself, and she had imploded along with it, like the razed buildings here in DC they passed in the limousine—eaten alive from the inside out by vengeful blazes. Ignited by hurt and hearts that had been pushed to their limit. The handsome driver asked Teresa if anything was the matter. She said there wasn’t. At some point, she politely asked his name, but couldn’t remember it later. After he dropped her off, she never saw him again.
Doña Vicenza greeted Teresa at the gate and led her by the arm around the embassy to the back. While she’d been sweet and understanding at Amarga’s funeral, Doña Vicenza’s tone shifted—her smile, her demeanor, twisting.
“There aren’t many of us around,” Doña Vicenza said. “The whites here will treat you badly, though I’m sure you’re not unaccustomed to that. And the Blacks will hate you too. Although, I’ve always thought you looked like one. Your mother too.” Doña Vicenza laughed. “That might be to your benefit.
“I’m doing you a favor,” Doña Vicenza said before Teresa could speak. “I’ll treat you better than your mother treated me.” She pointed at the back entrance. “This is where you’ll enter the house. You’ll be cleaning and cooking for us,” she said. “¿Have you ever done either? I know sometimes you rich girls have been spoiled.”
Teresa knew then that she’d been led into a trap, but she couldn’t bring herself to go back to Costa Rica. Anything was better than that. She answered weakly that she knew how to scrub a toilet and bake a chicken.
“Good, good. Well, this will be your quarters.” Doña Vicenza pointed down to the basement with her lips. “Just be grateful I pulled those strings to get you here, girl. And again, I’m so very sorry about your mother.”
Teresa would share the embassy’s musty, dimly lit basement with another woman and her child from Costa Rica. Faqueza, Teresa noticed early on, organized her life by a series of debilitating neuroses, strung preciously like a pearl necklace tightening around her throat. She had many nervous outbursts, but Teresa found her pleasant. On the quiet side, but an excellent listener.
That first day, Faqueza’s easy voice brought Teresa out of her fractured mind.
“I’m going to call you Teresita, if you don’t mind,” Faqueza said.
Teresa didn’t.
“And I’ll help you until you get the hang of things. Doña Vicenza can be difficult,” she said.
Half listening, Teresa watched Faqueza’s son, Ricky, crash toy trucks into each other.
“¿Do you have any children?” Faqueza asked.
Just her Lyra with a black eye and swollen lip. And her little Carmen, unwittingly reading Teresa’s thoughts like a confession. Two young girls as broken as their mother. Unable to hold themselves up without trembling. She had left them there on the tarmac. Grandmotherless. Fatherless. Their less-than-a-mother too confused and embarrassed to explain how it all could have ended this way.
“No,” Teresa answered.
“That’s all right. You’re still young. There will be plenty of chances to reap motherhood’s rewards.”
THAT FIRST WEEK, the muggy air still hissed with embers. After helping Faqueza with a slew of errands, Teresa sat with her underneath the shade of an oak tree in Kalorama Park, the concrete bench radiating volcanic heat. Behind the trees, the sun marched down into the horizon, dyeing the sky and its canopy of haze an almost-beautiful color.
“Those fires everywhere, ¿they were all from the riots?” Teresa asked.
Faqueza nodded. Her hands quivered more than usual. “After they killed King.”
“¿What were you doing when they were happening?” Teresa said. “¿Did they reach the embassy?”
Faqueza took in a deep breath. She said she had woken up that first night of the fires to the slamming of doors. She had been dreaming of her village tucked in a mountain ridge. Doña Vicenza bolted down to the basement and locked herself in the closet. She screamed hysterically for Faqueza to leave—she would give away her hiding place. ¡Sacrifice yourself! she yelled through the door. ¡For your country!
Faqueza left Ricky in the safety of the bathtub and wandered into the street, where a dense procession of Black men strode, torches in one hand and their broken hearts in the other. Faqueza slipped into the running river of flames, following it through the streets. Its current swept up more mourners with more weapons—army guns, Molotov cocktails, bread knives, rocks, crowbars, sticks. The river sang songs Faqueza couldn’t understand. She watched as torch after torch was hurled at storefronts and well-lit houses. Still the river sang its harmonic, hallucinatory tune, and still she trooped as if she were one of them. On H Street, a good-looking man almost twice her size handed her a bottle of fire and nodded grimly. She couldn’t tell if it was sweat or tears dripping from his chin.
All around Faqueza there was burning, and finally, a fire within her kindled, and she pitched the bottle at the giant glass pane of a flower shop, and the hundred-proof alcohol exploded. Hydrangeas ignited, roses wilted, and their petals fell softly to the wildfire on the floor, spreading the blaze. Faqueza had destroyed something for the first time. She knew then how life had felt all this time. How it savored the addiction of being able to destroy her over and over again.
Faqueza shifted on the concrete bench and smoked the cigarette down to the filter. She said to Teresa, “If that negro had handed me the bottle in front of the embassy, I’d have thrown it twice as hard—straight at Doña Vicenza’s window. I’d have heard her screams and liked it. But then again, you wouldn’t have had a place to come to. And it seems like that was what you needed most. So I’m glad it didn’t play out that way.”
That summer descended upon Washington like a waxy burial sheet, blocking the city’s airways, sticking to buildings and maples. Mosquitoes of every size droned throughout the city, a horde of pesky, incorrigible nurses administering anesthesia, waking their patients for blood samples. Trees, flowers, grass, shrubs, and weeds all ejaculated a toxic cloud into the air; pollen coated everything in a thick, bright yellow. The humidity was perhaps the most unbearable. Teresa exited her ice showers already dripping with sweat. Some nights, dry lightning cracked the sky with hairline fractures and came crashing down on lampposts and newly constructed buildings. As far as Teresa was concerned, Washington was a swampy, thinly veiled circle of Hell. Where politicians and their servants checked in to pay handsomely for their sins.
THREE YEARS INTO Teresa’s tenure at the embassy, Doña Vicenza became increasingly irritable and increasingly violent. With Don Pepe Figueres’s new presidency, the Costa Rican government became more transparent, and the spending habits she and her husband were known for had come under heavy scrutiny. No more gallant galas or leather goods imported from Florence. To cut expenses, Doña Vicenza fired Faqueza, deported her and Ricky back to Costa Rica without a final payment. Teresa comforted Faqueza as they waited for the bus to the airport. Ricky rested his head against his mother’s hips, shivering.
“Teresita,” Faqueza said as the bus pulled up. “I know you are running from something, but even so, you can’t stay here. Nothing could be as bad as this place.”
Doña Vicenza brought a sixteen-year-old Guatemalan girl named Fátima to the embassy to help Teresa with her duties. Doña Vicenza provided her room and board, and nothing else. Teresa had never seen hair so straight, long, and luminous. Thick enough to hide the scars and bruises from Doña Vicenza’s beatings, which Teresa would find later. Doña Vicenza found Fátima, who spoke no English and little Spanish, an easy target.
To counterbalance Doña Vicenza’s abuse, Teresa doted upon Fátima, bought her a few pretty dresses from the discount store on U Street, baked cakes with walnuts and cinnamon, and combed her hair, being careful not to graze any scabs. But Fátima kept Teresa at arm’s length. Teresa found Fátima’s shyness soothing, her seeming inability to converse an invitation to monologue. She spoke of Lyra and Carmen, how she would brush their own hair and bake treats on cloudy days. The more she talked, the more she wanted to return to them, sweep them into a new house with no memories. A blank slate, a second chance. But when these thoughts caught hold, the image of Amarga’s body slumped on the floor resurfaced and wouldn’t leave.
One night, Teresa finished cleaning the back porch of glitter, after an anniversary celebration Doña Vicenza had spent alone, because the ambassador was away on business. Teresa soaked champagne flutes in the sink and made her way to the bathroom, where she found Fátima in the tub unconscious. Silver sparkles and flecks of blood in her hair. In that fluorescent light, Fátima looked like Lyra that April night.
It was all Teresa could take. She began planning their escape. Even though Teresa had nowhere for them to go, and little English to guide them both, she couldn’t sit and watch anymore as Doña Vicenza beat the poor girl to death.
“I HAVE NOWHERE else to go,” Fátima said later, pulling her arm away from Teresa’s grasp. “My family is gone, and this is the only opportunity I have to live on. ¿Where can you take me, Doña Teresa? ¿How can you save us?”
It was as if Fátima had seen deep into Teresa’s heart, her guilt.
If Teresa couldn’t save the girl, she could at least save herself. One humid dawn, Teresa left the embassy, proud that she had found the strength to finally wrench herself out of its grip—but standing at the entrance of the property was Doña Vicenza, a thin slit of a smile cutting across her face like a wound.
“Even if you can push past me, girl, you’ll return here, to me. ¿Because how else will you get back to them?”
FOR A WEEK Teresa roamed Washington like a ghost. A mirage of a woman sobbing, she floated from corner stores to the great marble monuments, where she bathed in their limpid fountains, taking quick naps on benches to recharge. Police officers shooed her along, and junkies left her alone, thinking she was just another hallucination. Teresa made it to the Lincoln Memorial one night and fell onto its steps, collapsing from an exhaustion three years in the making.
The next day Teresa walked miles along Pennsylvania Avenue, checking phone booth after phone booth for a dial tone. She wanted to call Liberia. Even if she still didn’t feel worthy, she wanted to speak to her daughters. Their mother might have been a ghost, but she still had a voice. She still had I love yous and I’m sorrys in her heart. But no change glittered on the sidewalk or on the floors of the booths, so she continued wandering. Across the Sousa Bridge, Teresa begged for bus fare. She couldn’t take it anymore; she would go back and swallow her fate with Doña Vicenza, her only chance of getting back to Costa Rica to see her girls. Passengers avoided eye contact, and bus drivers waved her off like a fly. When Teresa had all but given up, a young Black woman approached her, introduced herself as Alice, and spoke to her in familiar Spanish. Teresa recognized it as a Limonese accent, one she hadn’t heard since she was a girl.
“You look like you need a hand,” Alice said. She brought out Teresa’s smile with her own.
“I need to get back to Northwest,” Teresa said. Unconvincingly, because Alice interrupted her.
“You can get there any old time,” Alice said. “Come back with me, I can hear your stomach rumbling.”
“I must get there,” Teresa insisted.
“Trust me,” Alice said. “It will be there when we get some food in you.”
Alice brought Teresa to her mother’s house down the avenue. Doña Eralia took a good look at Teresa and sent her upstairs to shower. Teresa washed her hair, in between her toes, lotioned up with the luxurious creams crowded on the toilet lid.
“There,” Doña Eralia said when Teresa arrived in the kitchen in one of Alice’s dresses. “Now you can eat at my table, child.”
“I must get back uptown,” Teresa said.
Doña Eralia raised her eyebrow and smiled. “First, we must feed you. And then you must tell me your story. I like stories,” she said.
THREE YEARS LATER, Teresa collected bitter tomatoes and bundles of fresh thyme from the vendors at the Florida Avenue market. Crates of chickens sat next to cartons upon cartons of their eggs. Some medium, others jumbo. Half of them cracked. The market’s chaos reminded her of Costa Rica’s—vendors yelled to each other for change; old women haggled down prices as confidently as veterans on The Price Is Right; flies crowded around ripe bananas and day-old steaks. Teresa stopped to watch Frank, the oldest vendor, weigh pomegranates on a Chatillon scale.
“Back in the day, they used to weigh opposites against each other,” Frank said to Teresa. His usual mystical revelations. “In one of these dishes would sit Life, and in the other, Death. You see, Man was trying to find harmony between the two, trying to figure out the time he had left. And next to Life sat Good, and Evil sat its ass right next to Death. And only on the scales could Good and Evil ever sit across from each other civilly. But, like I said, that was in the past. Now, a scale only has one dish. So we got to weigh Good and Evil, Life and Death, as one. If you ask me, that seems a little crowded. That just makes things more complicated, don’t you think?”
Teresa picked a pomegranate from its pile.
“How much, Mr. Frank?” she asked in almost-perfect English.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Just tell Eralia I said hello. I know her legs don’t work great, but look at me. Ninety-four, and I’m still here. Tell her to buck up,” he said, laughing.
“I will,” Teresa said. “See you next week, Mr. Frank.”
Teresa balanced full bags of groceries onto the bus back to Southeast, to Doña Eralia’s. She didn’t get a chance to dust this morning, and still needed to take out the trash. Alice would be coming over for dinner, so Teresa would need to get the chicken into the oven by two o’clock. All around Doña Eralia’s neighborhood, FOR SALE signs sprouted from lawns, gathering dust and pollen. The whites, she explained, refused to live within a one-mile radius of any Black household. After the riots, they got spooked, Teresita. You should’ve seen their faces. I didn’t know they could get any whiter.
Doña Eralia had moved to this neighborhood after her apartment complex burned down during the riots, and ever since, house after house and business after business was packed up and sold at whatever price they could get. “Good riddance.” Doña Eralia laughed. “They’ve got no taste anyway. In food, in decoration, or in music.”
Teresa arrived at the house, a two-story brick structure painted from top to bottom in a gaudy, bright turquoise. It was, Alice liked to joke, a gumdrop eyesore. “No wonder the whites are moving out,” she said. “¿Who the Hell wants to live next to Candy Land?”
Doña Eralia was in the kitchen cooking. Teresa kissed her on the cheek from behind and watched her add a can of coconut milk to rice.
“My favorite,” Teresa said. She presented Doña Eralia the pomegranate.
“My favorite.” Doña Eralia smiled. “Come, let’s have a drink.”
Doña Eralia clutched her cane and made her way to the dining room table. Her silver locks were tied into two horns that rested on her shoulders. She cut into the fruit and sucked out its bloody seeds while Teresa unscrewed a bottle of expensive gin. Teresa was quiet as she poured, expecting one of Doña Eralia’s many stories from the anthology of her exciting life.
Doña Eralia was born in Limón in 1899, the same year the United Fruit Company lodged its claws in Costa Rica. She’d fed on so many bananas as a girl, she hadn’t touched one since her twenties and didn’t allow them in her house. (Alice still had no idea how they tasted.) Eralia’s parents were born in Jamaica, and immigrated to Costa Rica to work for the Company, her father a foreman overseeing mestizo workers who cursed him and her mother a bar maiden at the cantina. They taught Eralia to read early, and before long, she put on Shakespeare plays for the laborers, acting out Romeo and Juliet by herself. Her favorite character to play was Othello, and she donned a fake mustache and a crown made of dull coins. The audience applauded, and she had loved it, she told Teresa. “It was as if each clap made my heart beat.”
Before long, Eralia met a man named Marcus Garvey, who found her literacy and ability to pull in crowds invaluable. They toured the Americas together, often leaving Limón for months at a time. At one of Garvey’s meetings, Eralia found the man she would love, a syndicate head who had fought against the American Fruit Company for years—Jack Pemberton was his name.
“He was so handsome, I yelped,” Eralia told Teresa. “Like I’d seen a ghost. He was what I imagined Othello to be. And in that moment, I was Desdemona at last.”
Eralia said Jack was killed in a land dispute instigated by the Company. They found his body tossed onto a pile like just another bushel of fruit. Teresa never mentioned that Tácito and José María had worked for the AFC. She didn’t want Doña Eralia to draw any connection between Teresa’s family and Doña Eralia’s murdered husband.
After Jack’s death, Eralia knew she had to flee, as Garvey himself told her the Company found her just as dangerous. Eralia swaddled Alice and came to DC, where she had a network and community. Activists and extended family with whom to celebrate life and ponder its inner workings. “But that was long ago,” Doña Eralia sighed. “I’m the last one, and I’m too old to fight anymore.”
Doña Eralia never repeated stories. She had so many, Teresa thought she had lived too many lives for one woman. What delighted Teresa most was the way in which she told them—flailing her arms about, closing her eyes to reminisce, changing her voice with every character. There was something nostalgic about being around Doña Eralia, as if Teresa had heard all these stories before and wanted nothing more than to hear them again.
Teresa finished the cocktails. They clinked their glasses and sat in silence for a while.
“You know, Teresita, I’ve watched you all these years, but I’ve never figured you out. I think that’s why I’ve kept you around so long. You know how many girls I fired before you came along?”
“Four and a half,” Teresa said with a smirk.
“That’s right—that fifth ungrateful bitch quit before I could fire her. And all these years I’ve told you about my life and my adventures, and never once have you revealed anything about yourself. Hell, I don’t know about your family or your friends. I don’t know who you’ve ever loved or what you want out of life.”
“I guess I’ve always been quiet.”
Doña Eralia poured straight gin into their glasses. She wouldn’t speak until Teresa had finished hers. Teresa saw her grandmother staring back at her. When Doña Eralia laughed or scolded, Teresa could have sworn she was back home in Barrio Ávila.
“Look, Teresita, I know you’re lying to me. I can see it in your eyes. You were once happy and vibrant—pretty girls like you always are. No, you’ve known tragedy like it was your relative. But you’ve got to let it out. It’s obvious that it’s drowning you.”
“My daughters are still there,” Teresa said. The gin had loosened her tongue, her sadness. “I left them in Costa Rica.”
“Oh, child. We’ve all had to make sacrifices. You left them to seek out a better life for yourself here, and to give them a better life over there.”
“No, you don’t understand. I didn’t need to come here, I never meant for any of this to happen. I’m not selfless like you think. I ran. I ran away from all of it and left them there.”
Doña Eralia motioned for Teresa to come. Teresa rested her head on Doña Eralia’s bosom. Beneath her flesh, Teresa felt a thunderous heartbeat. Its rhythm gave order to the thoughts in her head.
“What is it you want from this life?” Doña Eralia finally said.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s the problem, Teresita. I watch you. I see you float about this house and this world like a damn phantom. Sometimes I doubt you’re even alive. You’re out of balance—you’ve let death overpower you. I see how it weighs you down. I can feel the corpses strapped to your back. And to me, it sounds like you were a damned silly fool to have left the only two creatures in the whole world who could love you unconditionally. Go back, Teresita,” Doña Eralia said. “Go back to them.”