Sometimes it takes a storm to put out a fire. Whether the flames are fed by poison or by a father; whether wind and water care for an inferno’s intentions or not. And what the fire has ravaged—a home, or a forest, or a family (because families are flammable, too)—is finally cooled. Doused and relieved. And all that’s left is ashes to be discarded, swept into a gutter, and washed away, out of reach forever.
Gabriel flicks ash from his cigarette onto the wet sidewalk outside Juan Santamaría Airport. Lyra, balancing over her too-full suitcase, searches for her fanny pack with their colones, while taxi drivers jostle at the curb. Gabriel and Lyra have not been to Juan Santamaría—or Costa Rica, for that matter—in ten years. Not since the novenario for Teresa. Gabriel’s grandmother, he’d come to find out. He learned that fact right here, outside these automatic doors, a decade ago. But Lyra hadn’t been fiddling with luggage then. They flew to the United States with nothing but their broken hearts as carry-on.
On that one-way trip to DC in 1995, Lyra told Gabriel everything. Well, almost everything. In the boarding area, at a café, on the plane, through customs and immigration, she went step-by-step, story by story, explaining her life, and Carmen’s, and Teresa’s.
Lyra brought them to DC to build a new life. To erase the old one from their dreams. She did as Teresa had done so many years ago, but Lyra insisted on an important distinction: Lyra took her child with her. She moved them close to Adams Morgan, a loud, rambunctious neighborhood with grimy bars that held concerts every night, and the punk rock scene let out and rioted through the streets. Fights erupted, and sirens wailed into the night like birds. Gabriel loved the cacophony and adapted to DC just fine. After DC, he moved to New York City, where he lives now, a sophomore at NYU. He’s taking this summer to find himself. An American thing to do.
In the stifling taxicab, Lyra shuffles through the AFC documents. Anxious. Tomorrow she’ll present them to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, in front of television cameras, in front of everyone. Those seeking justice and those whom justice seeks.
They check in to a hotel about a kilometer from the court, in a neighborhood of ancient houses and newly paved roads. Palms sway like those of Evangelicals, reaching into the sky as if in exaggerated worship. Gabriel hears a gecko scamper across the ceiling, and he realizes just how much he’s missed Costa Rica all this time. The colorful animals that scurry beneath rocks and to the trees; the moon, bigger, brighter than in DC.
Lyra goes to shower. As with many days, his mind goes back to that week ten years ago. Gabriel pulls out a photograph from his backpack: the one bent right down the middle, of Teresa, Lyra, and Carmen in front of the crystalline river of Liberia. The one he’d presented to Teresa for her birthday just hours before she collapsed.
Gabriel remembers them saying his name. He couldn’t hear what Lyra and Teresa were arguing about, there by the train track. But Teresa collapsed. Lyra screamed and kept screaming. The Three Marías and Doña Cristina came running. They all crowded into the cars to rush Teresa to the hospital. They dabbed her head and tried to shake her awake, but, of course, they couldn’t.
Gabriel had shivered in that hospital, even though the night was humid. Conchita of the Three Marías, mascara painting thick lines down her cheeks, gave Gabriel her cardigan. Cobalt blue, floral. She held him close and began telling stories about their childhood. The river, the sun, the dancing. She held him close and sang, trying to distract them from her sisters’ shrieking.
They all took shifts that week Teresa was still alive. Unconscious, an inescapable coma. Some went home to shower and to eat with what little appetite they had, while others stood like statues beside Teresa’s bed, praying she’d open her eyes and tell them how good a time she’d had at the party. The party just for her.
Lyra cried over her mother, repeating that it was her fault. Everyone took turns consoling her. They assured Lyra it wasn’t. Alice especially took to her, eased her grieving with tales of Teresa in DC, moments Lyra had never heard, had never known her mother was capable of. “All that time she thought of you,” Alice said. “She never forgot her two little girls.”
Lyra hovered over Teresa, raining down tears, digging her nails into her mother’s arm, hoping the pain would stir her. “There isn’t much time,” Dr. Gallegos said.
A week later, they all felt it. The air in the room became warmer, and there was an odd fragrance. Earthy, like jasmine and dirt. Visita said it was time, and the Three Marías began a prayer. Individually, everyone whispered their last goodbyes to Teresa, each of the adults taking the time to apologize for individual trespasses and to say how lovely Teresa was, despite everything that might have happened between them.
“Things happen,” Lyra said as Gabriel stood at the foot of the bed, watching. “I never stopped loving you, Mother. I was a little mad, that’s all.”
Teresa passed at midnight. They all watched as her chest stopped rising, and the heart monitor’s waves evened out to a flat, glassy surface. It was as smooth as anyone could have hoped. “Peaceful,” they all whispered.
After the funeral service and the nine days of the novenario, Lyra bought two one-way tickets to DC. That was ten years ago. When Gabriel still lived with Lyra, he would hear her sobbing in her room at night. Blaming herself, obsessed with the idea that she had killed her own mother. Gabriel eventually gave up trying to convince her otherwise.
GABRIEL LOOKS UP at a water stain on the ceiling, its borders growing like a conquering country. His boyfriend, too, has water stains in his ratty apartment—on the walls, the ceiling, even the refrigerator door.
The most immaculate place in his boyfriend’s apartment is the altar to his family: old photos; lit candles; sweet, wrinkled oranges. He and Gabriel talk about those who came before them, who hadn’t survived long enough to add foundation to their lives—to make them feel whole enough to withstand the world. “My abuelita taught me everything,” Gabriel’s boyfriend often says, which coats his heart in jealousy, though he’d never say so. “How can we understand ourselves without our grandmother’s stories? They hold all the world within them.”
But Gabriel has no grandmother. She doesn’t even visit him in dreams. Just one photograph of her, bent right down the middle, and Lyra’s accounts. Spotty, subjective.
By the time Lyra exits the bathroom, it’s dark. She isn’t hungry, but her stomach needs something. They find a quiet enough cantina and sit at the bar. Lyra orders gin and Gabriel a beer. She’s fidgety, hesitant to say more than two sentences at a time. After their fourth round, Lyra removes an envelope from her purse. Gabriel assumes it’s a late birthday gift, a wad of hundred-dollar bills. But it’s the letter addressing him. Lyra doesn’t wait for him to finish reading before she breaks down. She wails and cries, so loud the bartender asks them to leave. They do, and as they stumble back to the hotel room, Lyra manages—through coughs, and hiccups, and sobs—to tell him the rest of the story. She confesses that she isn’t Gabriel’s real mother, and that the woman in the letter—Carmen, her sister—was. The beer strips Gabriel of any hesitation; he reassures Lyra that she is his true mother, because she raised him and kissed him good night, every night. What does being a mother mean if not that? But still, as Gabriel tucks her in, lifts her head to sip water before she passes out, she repeats her feelings of guilt. All this time, consumed by it. Guilt for everything. For having had to bury her own sister and mother. For forcing them to go to DC, isolating them, the final two of their bloodline, because of her own selfishness.
“I had to wait to give it to you until we were back here,” she cries. “I had to make sure we were back on our own soil.”
With Lyra finally asleep, Gabriel makes his way to the hotel’s white-tiled porch. Aloe plants and birds-of-paradise lean in with comforting limbs. He lights a cigarette and reads the letter without interruption. It hums like poetry, with deep, vibrating pen strokes that almost rip through the paper. It whispers unintelligible reasons that negate each other like waves against a beach. Carmen writes of the beauty of the world, but not why she chose to leave it. To leave him. It feels like just another promise, broken.
Gabriel is still stuck by the time dawn grips the sky, pulls the night away like a dirty sheet. He can’t decide on the note’s exact meaning, because he never met Carmen. Never knew her personality, her inflections, and the strength of her embraces. Another part of him lost to the fire. He flicks his cigarette too hard and watches the cherry drop to the floor, slowly dying down to a ball of ash. That’s what’s left of my family, he thinks, and goes back inside to lie next to his mother to sleep.
GABRIEL DOESN’T ACCOMPANY Lyra to the Inter-American Court that morning. After the night he had, a hot courtroom, with the buzz of wooden ceiling fans and the clicks of cameras, would be too overwhelming.
Something between Gabriel and Lyra that had always been frayed has unstitched a bit more. So many things are put into perspective, and yet again, across from him—at the table, within his heart—is his mother and everything she hasn’t said to him. Lyra kisses him on the cheek when she finishes her pineapple and leaves, goes to the courthouse all by herself.
She wears a bright fuchsia pantsuit—a threatening color in the courtroom, like a venomous animal or poisonous plant—and her dark hair is tied into a tight ponytail. She raises her hand at the witness stand, promises the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help her this country’s God. She speaks furiously and points to a screen with projected images of the documents she brought.
AMERICAN FRUIT COMPANY, say the letterheads. 1968, they read.
The prosecution calls experts and scientists, attestants and the man named Osvaldo, who worked for the Company. Witnesses from other plantations once owned by the AFC; all the places through which Nemagon flowed like blood. The experts speak of men purposely sterilized for a decade, and women who developed cancer and miscarried more times than they could count. To the courtroom and to the bored world watching on TV, they show parts of their bodies no longer there. Limbs the poison sloughed off like a snake’s skin. Hands, toes, one man’s ear. On the other side of the courtroom, rich, sunburned Americans sit at the defense table. And behind them, the children and relatives of those who served on the board of the AFC. Their trust funds coated in Nemagon. Awash in it. John Augustus Smith Jr. is still alive. At age one hundred, he can barely lift his head. His gold and diamond Rolex is thicker than his wrist. His suit is Armani, tie Brooks Brothers. The other defendants bow their heads in false penitence—they were young, they say. How in the world can someone be expected to pay for their parents’ crimes?
“How?” Lyra says to the defense attorney. “I’ll tell you how.”
WHEN GABRIEL FINALLY wanders out, San José is alive and ecstatic. A lottery ticket vendor whose wife has cancer smiles with every piece sold, every colón that will go toward her treatment. A café owner named Shakespeare recites lines from The Comedy of Errors; his patrons munch on croissants with their eyes closed, content. A stout, devout woman flits from passerby to passerby, quoting the good book—not the Bible but One Hundred Years of Solitude, she says. She’s confused, but so certain of her mission that she can’t be ignored.
Gabriel is envious of everyone around him. He imagines they all have real mothers, and grandmothers, and great-grandparents who were good or bad, decent or mean, beautiful or not so—but who at the very least are here, nearby or buried, in their country, on their land, where they can visit. To seek out advice and stories. He buys a banana from a stand, grips it like a sickle—the golden fruit that toppled governments, that sparkled in tutti-frutti hats, that burned like kindling—so benign now, a dull weapon. Gabriel wanders downtown, looking for answers to questions he doesn’t even know how to ask.
Death leads him along, gently poking at his back like a child—it doesn’t mean to claim him yet, rather, show him what it has done; what it has reaped and sown, buried and waited generations for something beautiful to grow. Gabriel reaches a graveyard, an extravagant forest of marble and stone. He slips off his shoes and wanders on the grass, in a deliberate, winding motion reserved for ghosts. Gabriel feels like a body made of ash, feels as if any breeze could do away with him. Could sweep him up into a crypt and lock him there, with families that aren’t his, but who are at least family.
What has been pulling him all this way is a vault with four drawers. Carved onto the surfaces are names, all ending with Cepeda Valverde. The top left bears Amarga’s, 1908–1968; Teresa’s right beside it, 1935–1995. And below Amarga’s is Carmen’s, 1960–1985. The final is Lyra, next to her sister, below her mother, connected by life but not yet by death, 1957–.
There they are, Gabriel’s lineage, filed away like papers, locked inside and inaccessible to him. There they are, the women from whom he came. He is so close, but the marble separates them as death does, as time and cruelty do. All that’s left of them are names, carved in stone, perhaps etched in him somewhere. Gabriel puts his fingers to the smooth space next to Lyra’s birthday—when that day comes, will he be ready? Will he be able to watch a stonecutter slice that final date, commemorating that his maternal line is finally lost, and all that remains is his flesh and heart of ash?
GABRIEL AND LYRA make it back to the hotel at the same time—9:00 p.m. Both are sticky with dried sweat, and unable to talk to each other. Lyra beats Gabriel to the bathroom with a playful scrambling. He doesn’t find it amusing, and instead sniffs his clothes: cologne and the city, the reek of diesel and dirt. Listening to the hiss of water, he abandons any hope of conversation with her, and sets back out. After a recommendation from a drunk on the street, he journeys to El 13, where he’s told there’s good dancing and attractive men.
It’s an overwhelming ecstasy of a bar. Gabriel avoids eye contact with queens in crop tops; closeted guys in baggy pants; tall, slender strippers; and drag queens with cyan lipstick. Black lights stain his white shirt purple; green beams shoot down from the ceiling. Tonight is Música Plancha night, and the DJ curates a playlist of music his mother would listen to on Sundays, when she washed and ironed a week’s worth of clothes. They’re ballads. Powerful, feminine. Sometimes heartbroken, other times triumphant. They speak of love, its loss; connection, its loss; men, their loss. Gabriel doesn’t know the lyrics like everyone else does, which makes him feel even lonelier.
The gay men remember their mothers, the perfume of detergent and white fabric starched by the sun. Something so simple as a mother doing laundry brings them bliss. But Lyra had never sung these ballads, had only ever visited the laundromat down the street. There were no memories of her slapping blouses against water and stone. Gabriel is yet again different from everyone around him. But even so, he catches the beat, throws himself to the center of the dance floor. He sways like his grandmother, closes his eyes as if beneath a blinding moon. He moves like Carmen, and all the men stop their song, witness him enter an enraptured state.
Gabriel will leave the bar around five in the morning, the night crisp, the moon a veneered half smile in the sky. He will follow a railroad leading back to the hotel, hear the horn of a commuter train echo from somewhere near the dawn-purple mountains. Hibiscus bushes will be sequined with dew; muggers will let him pass without incident. Priests will ascend their belfries, and time will be tallied.
Gabriel will return to the hotel room and consider waking Lyra from her dream; but if he does, he will spend the rest of his life questioning whether what she tells him is true. Instead, he will pass out next to his mother, and awaken yet again to an empty space because she has gone, reaping the fruit of her search. Gabriel will commit to his own searching, his own excavation of his lineage. He will stoke the past, hold a flickering light to its secrets. He doesn’t know how, but he will rekindle himself, his family.