Chapter 23
When Dulce woke in the middle of the night, she heard snoring. The sound was coming from across the room. In the murmur between the loud inhalations, she also heard softer breathing coming from someplace closer. As she lay there, listening, she identified several different people. The snoring woman in the next bed. A man sleeping on the floor between the beds. Zavier had gotten the clothes from where he slept. It must be the Boogie Down guy.
And then she felt a slight shift in the bed and realized she hadn’t been sleeping alone. Zavier lay beside her. A respectful distance on the double bed. His breathing barely a quiet whisper of air. There were four of them in the room?
And then, as if in answer to her question, a woman got up from the other bed—not the snorer—and walked to the bathroom. Five of them. Just like when she was a little kid. Her sister, her brother, her two cousins, and her. Five of them. All in one room a lot of the time. Five different breathing rhythms.
The woman closed the bathroom door and came back to bed.
Did Dulce need to pee? No. She hadn’t drunk enough water.
And then, before she knew it, with the comforting sound of four other pairs of lungs breathing, she fell back asleep.
* * *
In the morning, Zavier was shaking her awake.
“Hey,” he whispered. “Our ride’s leaving in fifteen minutes.”
Dulce blinked and nodded.
In the bathroom, her clothes were damp but wearable. She changed and peed, only to feel a stab in her bladder. An infection? Maybe just dehydration. She’d have to see if Zavier had any water. She didn’t want to have to test the Obamacare.
She ran her tongue across her teeth and her mouth tasted foul. She hadn’t brushed in days. She rinsed a washcloth and put toothpaste on the corner, then brushed her teeth the best she could with that.
When she came back out, Zavier was packing his laptop and talking on his cell phone.
She folded the guy’s clothes and put them on top of his duffel bag.
There was nothing for her to pack except her water wallet, which had the passport, her phone, which was dead, and the keys to a storage space that was underwater.
* * *
In front of the hotel was a gray van with the driver chain smoking. He turned out to be a white American who didn’t speak Spanish. Fortunately, all the windows of his van were open, and most of the smoke blew past her. Meanwhile, the cigarette lighter was rigged up with ports for multiple cables, so she would finally be able to charge her phone.
Most of the seats were full with journalists looking at different tech devices.
“What are we waiting for?” Zavier asked.
“Guy from the Washington Post,” the driver said.
“Welcome to the fucking queue,” Zavier muttered.
“The queue?” Dulce asked.
“For transportation,” he said. “This is our unofficial carpool, a four-wheel-drive minivan to transport reporters from the major outlets.”
“How are they managing to get all these places with the gas rationing?” Dulce asked. “People in the shelter were saying they waited in line like eight hours to get twenty dollars’ worth of gas. Not just for cars, but generators, too.”
“It’s been really bad for locals,” Zavier said. “We have our own gas supply, but it’s limited. And it’s still hard to get through to so many places. Also, there are a lot of us, so each reporter can only get to a few locations during each day before curfew.”
He began skimming throught the newsfeed on his own phone.
As they waited, a young guy from the hotel approached them and reached through the van’s open window to tap Zavier on the shoulder.
“Hey!” Zavier said jovially. “Qué tal?”
“I might have a tip for you,” the guy said. “Something in the hills outside San Juan. I heard there’s a santera helping people bury the dead, like a Catholic priest.”
“When did you hear this?” Zavier said.
“Last night,” he said. “My wife heard it from a neighbor. I thought you might want to check it out.”
“Definitely,” Zavier said. “Thanks for the tip.”
Zavier wrote down the woman’s information, and the guy headed back to work.
“Another piece of evidence about the death toll,” Zavier said. “A santera in the mountains burying the dead, and yet the official death toll was supposed to be only sixteen.”
“Sixteen hundred?” Dulce asked, horrified.
“No,” Zavier said. “Sixteen people dead. Total. Governor Roselló upped it to thirty-four day before yesterday. The Miami Herald broke the story that it’s still too low but—”
Dulce’s mouth fell open. “How is that possible? I counted thirty-five bodies at the airport.”
“You what?” Zavier asked.
“Dead bodies,” Dulce said, and explained what she had seen.
“And he was so eager to get you out of there that they detained you for five hours without any food and water. And then drove you all the way to the Lumineer?”
She nodded. “No food. They did give me some water.”
“Oh shit,” he said. “We need to get right on this. I’ll tell my editor I’m changing up my focus.”
* * *
During the ride, Zavier got on the phone with his editor, the Puerto Rico Department of Public Safety, and several funeral homes. Then he asked her what seemed like a thousand questions, all the time murmuring in a low voice. Presumably because he didn’t want the other reporters to know what he was working on. By the end, she had gone from feeling like she had seen something important, to realizing all the things she hadn’t paid attention to: were there any markings on the truck? Did she see the names or ranks on on any of the military guys’ uniforms? What branch of the military? Zavier was nice about it, but she vowed to be more observant in the future.
* * *
An hour later, they were walking around the back of a funeral home. Dulce shaded her eyes from the bright sun at the back parking lot. “It was a truck like that, but bigger,” she said to Zavier. That she was certain of.
The two of them were standing at the edge of the lot, surrounded by broken glass and debris. In front of them was a large truck connected to a diesel power generator.
“Like a semi truck you’d see on the highway,” she said.
“And there were thirty-five bodies?” he asked.
“At least,” she said. “That was as high as I counted before the military guy stopped me.”
“May I help you?” a man’s voice asked in Spanish.
They turned to see an elder in a formal guayabera and slacks. He introduced himself as the funeral home director.
Zavier introduced them as being with the New York Times. Dulce was a little horrified to have her position so artificially inflated. But she kept her expression neutral and attempted to look however a journalist was supposed to look.
“The official count of deaths related to the hurricane is thirty-four,” Zavier said. “In your professional opinion, is that a fairly accurate estimate?”
“There’s absolutely no way that’s right,” he said. “Based on the customers we’ve had so far and what I’ve seen in hurricanes before, I’d say it’s got to be in the hundreds. If not over a thousand.”
“What are conditions like here on the ground for you?” Zavier asked.
“The situation is impossible,” the funeral director said. “We have only so much space and resources. We try to send bodies to the morgues, but they’re overloaded as well.”
“Is it true that the military is helping?” Zavier asked.
“They haven’t helped us,” the director said. “That truck and that generator you saw? We’re paying for that. This is a family business. I don’t know how long we can hold out, but people are depending on us, so we’re doing everything we can. How am I supposed to turn away a family who just lost a loved one? Whose previous funerals we always handled? But we can’t afford to keep operating like this. The cost of running a generator twenty-four hours is going to bankrupt us. But what choice do we have?”
Zavier asked several follow-up questions, and then he was getting ready to wrap up.
“One last question,” Dulce said. “Of the bodies autopsied so far, of the women, are there any who have died as a result of violence?”
Zavier’s eyebrows rose.
“None of the bodies we’ve officially autopsied,” he said. “There was one . . . she was pretty young . . . we haven’t had a chance yet. I don’t know. There are a lot of ways to get bruises in a hurricane. But sometimes you . . . you have a feeling. Maybe.”
“Thank you,” Dulce said.
“We may contact you to follow up if that’s okay,” Zavier said.
“Absolutely,” the funeral director said. “Whatever I can do to get the word out about the situation.”
* * *
When Zavier called the transport, they said it would be about three hours til they could pick them up. After some complicated negotiation, it was determined that Zavier and Dulce would walk to the morgue, which was about an hour away on foot, and then they could get a ride to another mortuary near the airport.
On the way, Zavier reached in his backpack for rations: water, beef jerky, and some dried fruit. Dulce started to make small talk, but she realized he was focused on the environment around them. She followed suit. He took a few photos of ruined houses, flooded streets, and looted businesses.
When they got to the morgue, the staff said the facility was overwhelmed with corpses. They had doubled up the bodies and were begging the authorities for additional refrigeration.
“They can’t count someone as dead until there’s an official death certificate,” the morgue attendant said. “And then it has to be entered in the system. But the whole government is shut down. We’re just trying to survive. Half our workers can’t get here, and the coroner is short of staff, too. Everywhere is backed up with the autopsies. Every aspect of the process is moving slowly except the death rate.”
The main attendant offered to show Zavier, who switched his phone into camera mode as the two men headed out of the room. Dulce stayed in the main office where another man was working at a laptop.
“Can I tell you something off the record?” the man asked, looking up from the computer.
“Absolutely,” Dulce said.
“My neighbor’s niece called day before yesterday,” he said in a lowered voice. “Her husband had died during the hurricane and they live outside San Juan. We tried to send a morgue truck, but it couldn’t get through. I told her to just go ahead and bury him. People can’t even refrigerate their food or their medicine, let alone their dead.”
“Can I quote you on that as an anonymous source?” Dulce asked.
He thought for a moment. “Yes,” he said.
She wrote down the quote and read it back to him for accuracy.
“And would you like to interview my neighbor’s niece?” he asked. “Those roads were impassable for our trucks a couple days ago, but you might get through, especially now that they’ve been clearing the roads a bit more.”
“Definitely,” Dulce said, and took down her name and address.
* * *
When the van picked them up from the morgue, Zavier asked about going to see the young widow outside of town. The driver said it would be another few hours before he would be back this way. But he had to come by the airport to pick up another journalist.
“Perfect,” Zavier said. “Drop us at the mortuary in Carolina. We have some business at the airport. You can pick us up there.”
They climbed into the van, and there was one other journalist in the passenger seat.
“Mendoza!” the guy called. He was a tall and white. Mid-30s. He was looking back at Zavier, but he didn’t even look at Dulce or introduce himself.
“You working on this death count story?” the guy asked. But it wasn’t really a question to get information.
“Yep,” Zavier said, and looked back down at his phone.
“Lucky you,” the guy said. “A morning at the morgue, huh?”
“Mmm,” Zavier said noncommittally.
“I don’t know how you do it,” the guy said. “I can do war zones, but I can’t do morgues. It’s like they’re just too dead.”
“Can you show a little respect, man?” Zavier asked. “The whole island is in mourning.”
“Oh come on,” the guy said. “It’s just gallows humor. We’re all in the same boat.” He called to the driver: “Hey! This is me just up ahead.” He turned back to Zavier. “See you back at the Lumineer.”
And then he climbed out of the van. All as if Dulce hadn’t been sitting right next to Zavier the whole time.
As they drove away, Dulce sucked her teeth. “I feel a little overwhelmed from all that eye contact,” she said.
“What?” Zavier asked. “Did he totally ignore you? Act like you were a lamp or a bookshelf or something.”
“Basically,” Dulce said.
“He’s like the Mike Pence of reporters,” Zavier said.
“The what?” Dulce asked.
“It’s a journalist joke,” Zavier said. “This is your only warning. You’re about to be one of us, so you need to know our jokes are corny.”
“I could have predicted that,” Dulce said.
“That guy really is such a dick,” Zavier said. “I guess I’ve gotten numb to it. Welcome to the world of journalism.”
* * *
The folks who ran the mortuary in Carolina said all the same things the other sources had said.
As they walked to the airport, Dulce could see that even a day later, more of the expressway had been cleared.
From outside the airport gate, Dulce was able to point out the area where she had been detained by the military.
Zavier had brought binoculars. He looked through them at all the trucks. There was nothing that looked even remotely like the transportation of bodies from the day before. They did, however, have a bunch of boxes of FEMA supplies: water and what looked like food rations. They were sitting on palates, the sun glinting off the plastic they were wrapped in.
As the two of them stood there, Dulce saw the bad cop from the day before. He was in a jeep that was exiting through a military checkpoint they had set up at the entrance to the tarmac.
“That’s him,” Dulce said. “The guy who detained me. The passenger.”
“Wait here!” Zavier said. He lifted the binoculars, tracked the man for a moment, and jogged toward the entrance.
“Sergeant!” Zavier yelled. Through the binoculars, he had identified the man’s rank from his uniform.
The guy looked up behind mirrored shades. Beside him, the driver was conferring with the guard at the checkpoint, studying a map.
“Sergeant,” Zavier said, slightly out of breath. “I have several eyewitnesses that saw dead bodies being loaded onto trucks here yesterday. What can you tell us about those cadavers? Are they hurricane victims?”
“No fucking comment,” the sergeant said.
“And what about the FEMA supplies on the tarmac today?” Zavier asked. “Are those going to be distributed to the US citizens here in need of food and water?”
“Goddamn media libtards,” the sergeant said. “What do you think? We’re gonna leave them to rot indefinitely? Relief efforts take time. They just arrived and we’re preparing the distribution routes now.”
“Is it true that civilian Puerto Ricans from Chicago were able to get food and water to some populations faster than the US government?” Zavier asked.
“Here’s a quote for you,” the sergeant offered. “The men and women of our military are working hard for the relief effort, despite the naysayers and critics like you. The people of Puerto Rico are lucky to have us here.”
“Don’t you mean the US taxpayers of Puerto Rico?” Zavier said, but by then the jeep had begun to drive away.
He walked back to Dulce. “What did he say?” she asked.
“Nothing useful,” he said. “But I’ll keep digging to see if I can find a second source for the article.”
He scanned the area a few more times through the binoculars, and called the van pool.
“Can I ask you something?” Zavier asked as they waited for transport to visit the young widow.
“Sure,” Dulce said.
“What made you ask that question at the funeral home?” he asked. “About women and violence?”
“Something I saw at the shelter,” she said. “Assholes taking advantage of the situation with the hurricane.”
“Makes sense,” he said. “Any particular story we should be pursuing there?”
“No? Yes?” she said. “I don’t know. Seems like women get their asses beat and get killed all the time and it’s not really a story. So why would it be news if it’s just extra in a hurricane, you know?”
“It’s fucked up,” Zavier said. “Thanks for helping me keep it on my radar.”
The van pulled up and they climbed in. An older guy was sitting in the back talking loudly on a cell phone.
“Nick?” he growled into the phone. “I was on fucking hold for ages. They just got me from the airport, and it’s like I’m on some Supershuttle from hell. I wasn’t expecting a goddamn limo, but I expected the vehicle to be heading toward my hotel and not making a two-hour excursion in the other fucking direction.”
Dulce and Zavier looked at each other.
“Total asshole,” Zavier mouthed.
Dulce nodded discreetly.
“Remember, you begged me to come report in this fucking disaster zone. I didn’t win three Peabody awards and a goddamn Pulizer to be roughing it like some fucking cub reporter.”
Eventually he talked himself out. Or Nick hung up. Either way, the van went quiet as they headed up to see the young widow. A half hour later, the guy was asleep.
The widow’s house was outside San Juan, and it was slow going, even in the sport-utility vehicle. Parts of the road were in foot-deep water. Other parts were covered in branches, and they had to take the van carefully off-road to get around them. At one point, it looked like they were caught in the mud, but the driver engaged the four-wheel drive, and the vehicle leaped forward. Further down that same road was a spot where the concrete had been torn to pieces.
It wasn’t really possible to find an address the traditional way, but the driver was able to put in the longitude and latitude of the address, and the driver’s GPS brought Dulce and Zavier to the right location.
There were no street signs. Not even a real street. And the houses were in different states of destruction. None was still fully intact.
The house they were visiting was half-destroyed.
Dulce and Zavier brought a rescue pack from the van and knocked on the door.
A young woman answered. Mrs. Martinez didn’t look much older than Dulce. So young to be a widow. She had her hair back in a disheveled braid and her arm was in a makeshift sling. Beside her was a toddler that had on a diaper so heavily soiled, it was hanging to his knees.
“Let me carry this in for you,” Zavier said, and set it on the counter.
“Bless you,” Mrs. Martinez said, looking into the box to find canned and packaged food, water bottles and diapers.
She handed one of the bottles to Dulce with her good hand. “Would you mind?”
“Not at all,” Dulce said, opening it for her. Mrs. Martinez took a drink, then gave some to her son. He finished the bottle.
The mother picked up one of the diapers, and tried to get it open, but it was difficult to do with her injured arm.
“Here,” Dulce said. “Let me help. I was always changing my nephew.”
“You’re an angel,” Mrs. Martinez said as Dulce picked up the toddler and walked him over to a coffee table that was buckling from moisture.
Mrs. Martinez leaned her head against the back of the couch. She didn’t cry audibly, but the tears just ran down her face.
Dulce glanced at her and then back to the toddler. “Si, papito,” she cooed. “Tú vas a tener un panuelo limpio! Yay!” She lifted both his hands and shook them, as if the baby was cheering. “My nephew used to love that. Looks like you do, too.”
The toddler giggled.
In the silence that followed, Dulce changed his diaper. She wasn’t sure where to put the dirty one, so she just used the tabs to seal it up, and left it on the coffee table.
Abruptly, Mrs. Martinez sat up on the couch. “We were planning to move to the mainland,” she said. “We’ve been trying to sell this house, but no one was buying. So my husband was working overtime to earn enough for us to fly out. We had tickets for next week. Next fucking week.”
“How did your husband pass away, Mrs. Martinez?” Zavier asked gently.
Dulce picked up the toddler in his clean diaper and carried him into the kitchen—or what was left of the kitchen.
“He got hit by a car,” she said. “Because the traffic signals were out. Two neighbors carried him to the nearest emergency shelter, but by then it was too late. Maybe if it had been a real hospital they could have saved him, but maybe not.” She rubbed absently at her injured arm. “And then we had to bury him there. Because there was no way for the funeral home to get to us. Like it wasn’t bad enough that I had to watch him die, but I had to literally bury him myself or watch him rot? My husband, buried with no coffin in the dirt outside an elementary school?”
Dulce looked at the woman through the kitchen door. Mrs. Martinez wiped her eyes with the back of her good arm.
“I wanted to leave sooner for Florida, but he said no. Just let him work a few weeks more. He could get a bonus. We would need the money when we got to the States. He worked so fucking hard. All that work and nothing to show for it. Nothing. Not one fucking thing. When I got pregnant, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep the baby. The economy had gone to shit. I was like, it’s such bad timing for us to have a baby. But my husband is so Catholic, you know. He was like God has a plan.”
She looked around at the house “Is this God’s plan?” she asked, her voice rising.
Dulce began to bounce the baby on her hip as she walked toward the sodden back bedrooms of the house. His mother’s voice wasn’t quite so loud there.
“Is this God’s fucking plan?” Mrs. Martinez asked, her voice even more shrill now. “To have our economy fucking crash and then all the water in the world land on our tiny island. Is God pissing on us?” she demanded. “Is He?”
“It’s not God,” Dulce heard Zavier say gently. “The United States is pissing on Puerto Rico.”
“I guess you’re right,” she said, her voice quieter now. “The United States is playing God with us. And I look at my son, and he’s so beautiful, and I’m glad I brought him into this world because he’s the only thing of my husband that I have left—” She choked off into a sob. When she spoke again, her voice was a strangled whisper. “But I’m also sorry I brought him into this world. A world where he’s gonna grow up without a father. A world where he’s not even two years old, and already treated like shit. Es una mierda!” she said.
The child had stayed quiet through the first part of her tirade, but now he began to howl.
“It’s okay, papito,” Dulce said. “It’s okay.” But the child kept crying, his little hands balled into fists, his face turning scarlet. Because even the toddler could tell that it wasn’t okay at all.
* * *
On the way back down the hill, they were alone in the van with the driver, and all three of them smoked. Dulce and Zavier shared a single cigarette in the back seat.
“When I was a kid, I always envied Puerto Ricans,” Dulce said in Spanish. “Technically, I’m Puerto Rican, because I was born here, but my mom and my brother and sister were born in the DR. I always figured if we had all been Puerto Rican, it would have been different. My mom would have had papers and wouldn’t have had to work under the table. My brother wouldn’t have gotten deported when they caught him selling drugs.” She took a long drag on the cigarette and blew it out the window. She handed the cigarette to Zavier.
“But now, I don’t fucking know,” she said. “That woman was right. It’s all una mierda.”
Zavier gave a bitter laugh. “Everybody’s jealous of somebody,” he said. “When I was growing up, I used to envy the kids who lived on the island,” He flicked the ash from the cigarette out the window. “They just seemed to know who they were. Nobody was calling them a spic and trying to beat them down on the way to school. They never had to fall on their ass in the snow. They lived in houses with yards and chickens running around. We lived in apartments with rusty fire escapes and roaches. But I always thought I’d get back here. Retire or maybe just live in the US long enough to . . . set myself up as a freelancer and then I could work from here or something. But now?” He trailed off and took a drag of the cigarette. “I don’t fucking know.”
Dulce took an absent drag on the cigarette and it almost burned her finger. She threw it out of the van, and for a split second she panicked. She had forgotten where she was and worried about fire. It was a reflex. She sat forward suddenly, as if to chase the flaming ember out of the window. Only she could prevent forest fires. Then she sat back in a burst of clarity. Those ads didn’t apply to the Caribbean most months of the year, let alone during hurricane season, and especially not now.
* * *
After they got back into San Juan, Dulce looked out the window as they picked up a few other reporters around the city. The beauty of the orange and pink sky contrasting with the ruined urban landscape sank Dulce into a state of melancholy.
Zavier’s phone rang, startling her.
She still hadn’t gotten reaccustomed to the sounds of technology. Before the hurricane, she had just grown accustomed to their constant signals. Calls. Texts. Alerts. Her phone. Her friends’ phones. Boyfriend’s and clients’ phones. But for so may days, there had been no pings and jingles. So when they did happen, they were jarring. Like a nearby siren or a fire alarm.
“Dígame,” Zavier said when he picked up.
She realized she hadn’t checked her own phone since the morning.
Dulce dug it out of her pocket, hoping that she had a signal and maybe Phillip had texted. By now he must have seen the news of the hurricane. She imagined a text where he said he was sorry. He had underestimated the danger. To make it up to her, he was sending her a ticket to Miami or New York or maybe an open ticket to anywhere in the world. She could go to Barcelona. Or even Brazil. Make good on her fake identity.
Instead, when she powered up her phone, she started getting several texts from her family:
From her mother:
Luqui, we’re praying you’re okay.
From her sister Yunisa:
Luqui, I’m so sorry I was such a bitch when you called and wouldn’t help you. You better fucking get out of this okay, or I’ll never forgive you.
She laughed out loud and tried calling, but didn’t have a strong enough signal. Instead, she texted back:
I’m ok. I’ll call when I get a chance. have a friend who might be able to get me home with the press corps.
She tried calling the landline and her family’s apartment. She dialed and put a finger in her ear to listen for the sound of ringing. But instead she got a message that her call could not be completed. She hung up.
When she looked up, Zavier was grinning.
“I have good news,” he said.
“Great,” she said. “I really need a happy ending to this day.”
“Delia Borbón’s coming,” he said.
“Delia Borbón?” Dulce asked, unable to imagine the glamorous film star in this dystopic landscape.
“She’s giving a press conference tomorrow in San Juan,” Zavier said. “And I got passes.”
“Passes?” Dulce asked, eyes wide. “As in more than one?”
“Dos,” he said. “One for me, one for my lovely assistant.”
“I hope that would be me,” Dulce said.
“No one lovelier,” he said.
As they rode back to the hotel, Zavier went online to see what he could find about Delia Borbón’s visit. Next to him, Dulce closed her eyes, so she didn’t need to see any more of the broken trees, ravaged ground, and half-collapsed houses.