On the final leg of its trip, the hurricane was making out like a bandit. It reaped dozens of lives, devoured entire orchards and farms, plucked stones from Indigenous ruins, and even checked in at a five-star resort in Alajuela. Newly rejuvenated by the bounty, it set its sights on the Pacific beaches, famous for their soft white sands, turquoise water, and resplendent sunsets. Its appetite strengthened its winds and made dense its icy water. There were raindrops the size of balloons. Hail in the shape of snow cones. The taste of the water unbelievably refreshing, if anyone just had the nerve to open their mouths.
At La Iglesia, Juan Julián picked out a cologne bottle labeled DAVIDOFF COOL WATER from his pyramid. Its cerulean glass cold in his bony fingers. He threw it against the wall. It didn’t break. Instead, it left a noticeable dent in the gypsum that the Mother Superior would surely punish him for leaving. No smoking privileges, most likely. Or no candy from the vending machine. Taking away privileges is something impossibly cruel to a trapped man—without freedom, a man is left with very few of them. Nicotine and sugar the commonest remnants of what life was like outside this place. Juan Julián was wifeless and childless, after all. He hadn’t seen Gabriel since he was born, and Carmen since she died. She hadn’t visited him in any dreams. He didn’t even have a picture of them—just blurry memories. Images behind fog on a glass pane. Sweat, and steam, and dripping. He scrounged for a more fragile Dior bottle. When he couldn’t find one, he began picking petals from a rose.
“Me quiere,” he said, picking petals from a rose. He remembered the men’s cologne Carmen wore instead of ladies’ perfume. Eaux de toilette and other muskier, penetrating scents. Sandalwood oil in her hair, lavender on her lips. The spit in her mouth: stale morning coffee, the natural, minty, baking-soda-y toothpaste she made from coconut oil in a jar. She tasted of earthy things.
“No me quiere,” he said, plucking a dried petal more violently. An eye from its socket. Or a feather from its wing. The petal’s edges crumpled and turned black.
Carmen jumped without a second thought.
Without thinking about him, or their child, or his mother, or her mother, or the rain. He’d watched in disbelief as she balanced on the windowsill, the rain slamming against her body as if trying to push her back, to stop her before she made a terrible mistake. He’d sprinted to the sill, but Carmen spread her arms and jumped. For a moment, though, she flew. But the rain was heavy. Maybe she hadn’t expected it to weigh her down. But it did, and she fell like a stone to the cracked concrete and cracked open. Apart.
Juan Julián hesitated at the window. If he looked down and saw her, it would become real. He looked at Gabriel sleeping soundly in his bassinet. So peaceful and bundled in leftover mother-love. Looking at his baby, something delicate within him shattered. He sat in the faux-leather folding chair beneath the wall-mounted television set, and while doctors and staff buzzed in and out of the room, he tried to convince himself Carmen had just gone to the bathroom. He waited patiently for his wife to reenter the room. While paramedics scraped Carmen’s mangled body from the sidewalk, Juan Julián didn’t budge. He didn’t pick up Gabriel. Didn’t cradle or whisper to him as a father does his newborn son the first moment his wife is out of earshot. He would never tell Gabriel how strong he would be, how clever, and how they would kick a ball to each other in the fields he had frequented as a boy.
“Me quiere,” Juan Julián said, picking an inner petal, disturbing the rose’s balance. The piece that completed the cosmic spiral. The part that convinces Man the universe is in harmony when, of course, it isn’t.