Chapter 14
Over a year earlier, when Dulce had first arrived in Cuba, she was sure Jerry would come after her. She had a vague memory of drunk dialing him to say goodbye before she left New York. Maybe she had mentioned Cuba? Maybe she had said her grandmother’s last name? At some level she knew it was farfetched.
Just because he had stalked her from The Bronx to Manhattan didn’t mean he would stalk her all the way to her grandmother’s small town outside Havana. But she felt the clench in her chest every time she saw the back of a tall, heavy man. Every time she caught sight of a thickset guy with straight dark hair, buzzed short at the nape of his neck. There was a tourist from Madrid and a businessman from Bogota, and plenty of locals who fit the description.
Her first couple of months in Cuba, her body was on high alert. Every time she and her family went out somewhere, her eyes scanned for him. Mostly she stayed in the house. Her grandmother was recovering from a stroke, and Dulce was there to take care of her while her uncle worked during the day. They had previously had a caretaker, but now that would be Dulce’s job. Everybody in Cuba had a job. But even staying in the house all day, Dulce couldn’t relax. Men’s voices on the street made her jumpy. Her eyes flew to the door each time it opened. She was certain Jerry would come charging in, furious.
As it turned out, Jerry never stormed into the house. Instead, news of his death slipped in quietly by way of the New York paper her uncle read. “Bronx Man Fatally Shot” was the headline of a story without warning or preamble. “Jerry Rios, 46 . . . pronounced dead . . . .44 caliber bullet . . . shot twice.”
And it was as if a switch had been flipped. No longer was Dulce oriented toward terrifying visions of Jerry coming after her in the future. It was as if the news had spun her around several times, turning her in an about face toward the past. After receiving the news of his death, she began recalling every dimension of his brutality, all the times he had come after her when he was alive.
The flashbacks started. Each time she closed her eyes at night, she was reliving the worst of it. The rough sex with him, with clients. The times she’d said yes, but hadn’t meant it. The times she’d said no and it hadn’t mattered.
The memories descended on her at night like an avalanche. She started hanging out with a party set in Havana, staying out til the wee hours, coming home on the camello buses in the morning, exhausted. She started drinking heavily. She woke from a nightmare in the mid-day and drank half a bottle of rum to quell it. Soon, she’d finished all the liquor in the house.
Her grandmother didn’t complain or scold her. But a few days later, a cousin named Josefina appeared from Santiago to stay with them. In her white clothes and colorful beads, Dulce knew she was a practitioner of Santería, the syn-cretized African tradition that was so strong in the Latin Caribbean. Josefina called it Lucumí.
She gave Dulce a ritual bath, herbs and flower petals and Florida water filling their grandmother’s claw-foot tub. She cleansed her with a live chicken, the bird squawking and flailing as Josefina held it by its feet, its wings beating against Dulce’s naked skin. She said prayers in Yoruba over her. And through it all, Dulce sobbed and sobbed.
When the nightmares woke her, Josefina was there with a cool palm for Dulce’s forehead and a soothing song, her contralto voice flowing with melodies in the liturgical language of Ifá, singing stories of the Orisha and calming the twist in Dulce’s chest.
“I feel like he’s haunting me,” Dulce confessed one day. “I know he’s dead, but he just won’t leave me in peace.”
Josefina lit candles that night. Spit rum onto a stick covered with dusty feathers and bright ribbons. She read broken pieces of coconut.
“He’s not here,” she said. “He’s not at peace, but he’s not here. New York, I think.”
“Then how come he’s got such a hold on me since he got killed?”
“He had a hold on you when he was alive,” Josefina said. “But sometimes it not til you’re finally safe that you can see just how much danger you’ve been in.”
“What can I do?” Dulce asked. “Can you give me another ritual to cleanse him off me?”
“There’s nothing more to do,” Josefina said. “Now you just need to allow yourself to feel what it was you weren’t able to feel before.”
She gave Dulce a couple of prayers to say. And at Dulce’s insistence, she gave her a spell: write his name on a piece of paper and put it in the freezer.
Dulce continued to have nightmares. She would lay on the couch next to her grandmother and watch telenovelas and cry.
This was when she began to watch A Woman’s Dark Past.
Teenage Xoana, in a school uniform, walks down the hallway of a boarding school to the main office. A woman in a neat suit sits behind a desk.
“You wanted to see me, headmistress?”
“You have a visitor,” she says.
Tío Juan steps forward from the sidelines. He isn’t really her uncle, but a trusted friend of the family.
Xoana gasps when she sees him. “Is it my mother?”
“She’s alive,” Tío Juan says. “But she’s in a coma. You must come see her.”
“Your teachers have prepared homework for you,” the headmistress says, handing her a packet. “You need to keep up with your classes to maintain your scholarship.”
“Of course, headmistress,” Xoana takes the packet and exits with Tío Juan.
* * *
The next day, Xoana is at the hospital with her mother, a beautiful woman in her mid-thirties. Xoana sits on the side of the bed. A monitor beeps in the background as her mother lies still.
“You would be so proud of me,” Xoana says. “My grades have been good. I’m learning to play tennis.” She laughs and shakes her head. “Tennis. Who am I turning into? I was hoping it would be easier to make friends playing tennis, but most of the girls have been there for years. It’s hard to get close to anyone.” Xoana begins to cry. “And I just miss you so much. I had this dream that if I just came home, just held your hand, kissed your cheek, you’d wake up. Please, Mamá, wake up.” She sobs into her mother’s chest. “How am I supposed to go back to school? I just want to stay here with you.” She wipes her eyes. “But I know that school is what you wanted for me. What you still want. I’ll go, Mamá. I’ll stay strong for you. But you have to stay strong for me. Don’t give up on this life. Stay strong.”
Tío Juan walks into the room. “Xoana,” he says. We have to go.”
“Adios, Mamá,” she says, and leaves with Tío Juan, holding back tears.
Later, at dusk, they are driving in the car. Xoana is wiping her eyes. She takes several deep breaths and looks around.
“This isn’t the way to school,” Xoana says.
“We just have to make a brief stop,” Tío Juan says.
Later, Xoana sits in a dim room with a single window.
Outside, it’s completely dark.
The door opens, and Xoana stands up.
“Tío Juan,” she says. “Where have you been? I thought—you’re not Tío Juan.”
“No, sweet thing,” the strange man says.
“Where’s my Tío Juan?” Xoana asks.
“A girl can have more than one uncle,” the man says, advancing toward her.
“Get away from me,” Xoana says, as the camera zooms in on the stack of homework on the dresser. In the background, Xoana screams, and the camera fades out.
Each day Dulce lay on the couch, crying beside her grandmother and watching soap operas. And slowly, Jerry began to take breaks from haunting Dulce’s dreams. Sometimes she’d dream of her tía’s house in Santo Domingo. Or that she was back in middle school and hadn’t done her homework for English, the one class she loved, the only subject she excelled in. Or she dreamed that she was flying. Dulce loved those dreams. When she woke up, she didn’t feel leaden and could tell that her life still held plenty of possibilities.
Yet even after the flashbacks slowed down, the tears continued.
Her grandmother sat on one end of the recliner sofa, and Dulce lay with her head in her lap. They watched afternoons of television, until Dulce got up and made dinner. Each night, her uncle would come home and eat with them, bringing groceries and stories from his job as a pharmacist in Havana, and newspapers that talked about the rest of the world, one that Dulce hardly bothered to go out and see.
* * *
Yet a couple of months later, Dulce began to take short trips to the local market. Soon, in addition to cooking and keeping house and taking care of her grandmother, Dulce was shopping and even taking directions from her grandmother on keeping the garden.
Eventually, even the crying stopped. And then there was nothing to connect her to her old life in New York, not even the grief.
Until six weeks later, when her grandmother had another stroke. She needed more care than Dulce could give her at home, and the family moved her into a nursing facility. The house was lonely all day. Dulce sat and watched A Woman’s Dark Past by herself, but it wasn’t the same.
Teenage Xoana is in a favela, a poor neighborhood in the city. She sits on a ragged couch with three other girls.
They hear an altercation outside, and a pair of women run in. They’re dressed like respectable suburban ladies, one blonde, germanic looking, the other dark.
“Quick, girls, come with us,” they say. “We can get help for you.”
Xoana jumps up, but the three other girls move more slowly.
“Did Juan send you?” one of the girls asks.
“No,” the blonde woman says. “We’re here to rescue you.”
The girls begin to follow them towards the door.
“The police are right outside,” the other woman says.
The girls recoil as if they have discovered that the door is on fire.
“No police,” Xoana says.
“We’re not officials,” the blonde woman says. “I’m from the university, and she’s a journalist. We don’t have any authority.”
“The police are men who can’t be trusted with young girls,” Xoana says. “You wouldn’t bring a wolf to rescue chickens, would you?”
The two women look at each other.
“Where else can we take you?” the blonde woman asks.
“Not to any of the authorities,” Xoana says. “But somewhere Tío Juan can’t find us.”
“We’ll figure it out,” the blonde woman says to the other. “I’ll go tell the police the house was empty. You bring the car around to pick up the girls.”
In Cuba, Dulce’s uncle decided to move his daughter and her two kids into the house. Dulce was welcome to stay, and he could probably get her a job at the pharmacy. Everybody in Cuba worked. Now that she was no longer her grandmother’s caretaker, she’d need to find something. Dulce was in the process of cleaning the house for the arrival of her cousins, when Josefina invited her to come live in Santiago. She liked her uncle, and she enjoyed their visits to her grandmother, but she truly loved Josefina. She finished cleaning the house and her uncle took her to catch the bus.
On the long trip across the island, she met a young Cuban-American man who was visiting from Miami. He was every part of the US that she missed. They flirted the whole ride down, and by the end of the trip, he promised to come by and see her.
Josefina welcomed Dulce with open arms. She had two teenage daughters of her own, but there was a small back room where they put a twin mattress. The next night, the four women of the house were sitting on the couch after dinner watching A Woman’s Dark Past.
Xoana sits with the blonde woman in the woman’s study.
“Why did you pick me to bring to your home?” Xoana asks. “Out of the four girls that you rescued. Why me?”
“I couldn’t take four girls to come live with me,” the woman says. “I had to choose.”
“Yes, but why me?”
There’s a knock at the door.
The woman looks up sharply.
“Who is it?” she asks.
In the hallway, we see a blonde, teenage Izabel, standing outside the study door.
“Mamá,” Izabel says. “What time are we leaving tonight?”
“You know you are not to bother me while I’m working,” the woman says sharply. “I told your father I’d be down at dinnertime.”
In the hallway, Izabel storms away with a scowl.
“You want to know why I chose you?” the woman says. “You were different.” She leans back in her chair. “When I asked who wanted to leave, you were the first to rise. You were the one who spoke up. You’re obviously educated. The other girls were more of what I expected. You weren’t. We have a network of families that are prepared to take young women in. I hadn’t been part of the network, but for you, I made an exception.”
“So you want to—what—study me?”
“I will be doing several interviews, yes,” the woman says. “But I also want to do more than get data. I want to make a difference.”
“How many interviews?”
“Two or three,” the woman says. “I’ll find out about your life story, and monitor your emotional responses.”
“So you’ll interview me,” Xoana says. “Do I get to learn anything about you?”
“Not much to tell,” the woman says. “My parents immigrated from Germany. They were very focused on education. I defied them by marrying at twenty to a young German man and having Izabel before I finished at university, but the marriage didn’t work out. We divorced. Izabel stayed with me. Eventually, I finished my doctorate in psychology. Then I remarried a Brazilian man, and we have two boys.”
“Okay,” Xoana says. “So I’ll do two interviews and that’s it?”
“Two in the next week,” the woman says. “But then I’ll do follow up interviews every year for the next three years.”
“So that’s the price for living here with you and your family?”
“Xoana,” the woman says. “Not everything has a price.”
“Maybe not in your world,” Xoana says. “But in my world it does.”
The novela was interrupted by a knock at the door. As a well-known priest, Josefina was used to people coming to see her at all hours.
But when Josefina opened the door, it was the young man Dulce had met on the bus. Josefina regarded him with narrowed eyes and only asked him in reluctantly.
He invited Dulce out and she eagerly accepted.
Josefina followed Dulce into the bathroom. “He’s not good for you,” she warned as Dulce put on a bright shade of lipstick for her date.
“Don’t worry,” Dulce said, regarding her face in the mirror. “I’m just going to have a little fun. Didn’t you say I should focus more on the joy in life?”
Josefina sucked her teeth. “That boy is definitely not what I had in mind.”
But Dulce went. He took her to a local bar and they drank tequila. They had sex in his cousin’s car.
For the first time ever, Dulce insisted that he wear a condom. And he did.
She felt so bossy and powerful. She liked him. But she especially liked this new version of herself. This bolder, sassier version of herself. So when he asked her to come to Miami with him, she went. Hugged Josefina goodbye and thanked her for everything. Then let the guy from the bus buy her a ticket to Miami.
Dulce had a friend from New York she could stay with. But when they first arrived in Miami, the Cuban-American guy said she could stay with him for a few nights. So she did. A few days stretched into a few weeks. By then, he had convinced her to stop using condoms and she had gotten on the pill. Within a month, they had broken up, and she was living with her New York friend. She was deciding whether or not to go back to Cuba when she met a Dominican drug dealer and he had wooed her.
“Stay in Miami and be with me,” he said over dinner at a steakhouse.
“How would I get a job?” Dulce asked. “I can’t stay at my friend’s forever.”
“Mami, you won’t need to work,” he said, his voice like the purr of a leopard. “I can take care of everything. Would you do me the honor of letting me pay your bills? Money is nothing to me when it comes to an amazing chick like you.”
The attention dazzled her. She said she’d be willing to try it. He moved her into a one-bedroom apartment. She never asked him to use a condom. Not even at first.