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HER EARS STILL RINGING with Isabelita’s words from a few days earlier, Maria sat on Fina’s front porch staring out into the darkness. The lights had gone out again and the air was fresh. The sky was covered with stars—ice-blue stars hanging high and out of reach.
She took in a long breath, filling and expanding her lungs, letting the air out with a sigh of resignation. In the street crickets played sweet music. There were no shouting neighbors. No televisions, or radios sounding off the daily news. No rain pelting down on leaky roofs. No barking dogs like sentinels at the end of the road. No squeaky wheels, or sputtering engines, or children marching on their way to school. Maria reflected that it would soon be morning and that light, with its usual magic, would return all to its proper place. The coffee would brew, the sun would come up, and Elio would come home. In the darkness, all was misplaced and out of reach—in the light, something miraculous happened, and all was made anew.
“Oap!” she exclaimed, shaking her whole body in a spasm, as if waking from a dream. They had it in for her, these mosquitoes. “Here they are! A whole black cloud of them!” she whispered, not wanting to wake up Fina. They were everywhere, the little vampires. They meant to suck the life out of her, one sting at a time. They had her legs and arms covered with bright red welts, like she’d been the victim of a goddamn plague. “The lights go out, and they think it’s a carnival.” Maria swung a roll of tattered paper around at them.
With each passing day at Fina’s house, Maria felt less and less like returning to hers. The more time she spent at Fina’s, the more comforting and familiar she found the old woman’s trinkets, pots, pans, and picture frames. By contrast, her own house grew smaller, dirtier, more disorderly. She’d simply grown accustomed to the better life, she’d say, laughing to herself whenever she thought of it.
Elio was more and more distant. He’d lost some weight, too. Even his gut—unyielding as it was to daily bowls of gruel—had come down a bit. They just couldn’t move on. Pepe had been in every photograph, every birthday—every forgotten wedding anniversary. He was yet another irreparable tear they could neither mend nor talk about. Because without Pepe there wouldn’t have been a marriage at all. And yet, here they were. With Pepe drowned, so was their marriage. She never knew what took place, exactly. She had been in Cabañas at the time of Elio’s accident at the beach. By the time she returned, weeks later, she saw Pepe knocking on Elio’s door. They would become the best of friends in no time, and Pepe would never look at her again.
Five years later, buoyed by a sense of duty, Maria’s grandmother began cutting the first lines of her granddaughter’s wedding dress. Because, she said, “Elio’s broken. He will never leave you.” What her grandmother never considered—the thing that never crossed her mind—is that one day Maria might just want to leave him.
At Fina’s, she felt safe. It was the home she’d never had with Elio.
“Maria!” a voice called from somewhere inside the house.
“I’m coming. I’m here, Fina. Don’t panic—I’m here!” Maria rose from the rocker, startled.
“Hurry, Maria—I’m dreaming again,” the voice insisted.
Maria set the newspaper down on the bottom of the porch, swatting a few mosquitoes with her bare hands.
“Goddamn these creatures, they wanna eat me alive! I’m coming, Fina. Don’t panic!”
She walked inside the house, tapping the cool black and white tiles with her naked feet, and stretching her arms far in front of her to clear the way. A few candles flickered here and there.
“Maria! Hurry up, Maria!” The piteous sounds were heard again.
“I’m here, Fina. I’m here,” Maria answered, walking slowly toward the voice.
Once in the bedroom, she lifted the mosquito net and sat on the edge of the bed. Fina was drenched in sweat. “I’m here, Fina. I’m here now,” Maria repeated, holding Fina’s hands.
“Feel my heart. It’s Benito, he spoke to me.” She clenched Maria’s hands and held them to her chest, which heaved painfully.
“No, chica. It’s nothing, just a dream,” Maria said, gently untangling her hands from the old woman’s tight grip and patting her softly on the head, as if she were a child. “It’s ok. What did he want?”
“He wants me to make my will,” she said. Her eyes fixed on Maria’s.
“A will?” Maria, wrinkling her eyes together until they became two blue dots in the darkness, looked at the old woman’s face.
“I need my papers back, dear.”
Maria understood who’d won the battle, at last. But because Fina couldn’t bring herself to tell her, it was Benito who’d brought the very news Maria had been waiting for, with the conclusion she’d dreaded. “I’m so sorry, my dear,” Josefina told her. “Benito says the house should go to my niece and nephew, whether or not the state agrees.” Maria would never get Fina’s house. The old woman was taking the papers back and her family, the young man and woman of the picture frames, had been declared—once and for all—the rightful heirs.
The street was dark and deserted. The children were gone. Maria wondered what Fina’s exact words to the visitors had been—it didn’t really matter. That night, sitting at her kitchen table, resting her face on the palms of her hands, she dreamt as Fina had done, but with eyes wide open. She found her purse and pulled out the candle Isabelita had given her, wedged it in a crevice on the table, and lit it. What should she do now, she thought. Pray? She was worn out by sadness and effort and failure, by the debilitating realization that yet another dream hadn’t borne fruit. It was a blow as painful as it was unexpected.
Suddenly, it all came out, along with the tears. How she’d still pondered her feelings for Pepe all those years. How she speculated whether there was anything she could have done to change the outcome of her life. How she loved Elio, too. And why the hell not? Why couldn’t she love two people at once? Because Elio had been the love of her life, too—but differently, somehow. Elio had always been her only child, and what kind of a mother abandons her firstborn? Fina’s house had been the one thing that could have changed her life. The one thing that would have made her stay. Staying and leaving were both irreversible choices—Elio was right. But she didn’t need Elio to know, as she’d always known, that either choice was final. As long as Elio didn’t know about the house, leaving was a possibility of life; and Chicago, a letting go, where dreams were puffs of snow over rooftops. She had yet to tell Elio about his father's phone call, but she would soon.
She stared at the flickering candle flame and thought of Isabelita. What would she say to it? What words would Isabelita use to let it all go?