Chapter 17
At first Dulce thought she was hearing disco music. Was she back in the club in Miami? Her body was drenched. She usually didn’t let herself dance that hard. She didn’t like to sweat out a good blowout in her hair. Her eyes opened for a moment, and it was too bright for a club. Rainwater trickled from her sodden hair into her eyes and she closed them tight again. Everything around her was wet. It made no sense.
The sound above her was like fluttering percussion with a whizzing whine in the background. It reminded her of that part of techno music where the beat drops out, and they were ramping up the dancers all over the floor. The pitch gets higher and higher in anticipation. Dulce was waiting for the beat to drop. The thudding one-two of disco. The ramp-up music kept getting louder. Like some DJ was preparing them for the biggest dance explosion ever, but the beat never dropped.
Instead, Dulce heard a woman’s voice over the music. The voice spoke to her in Spanish. Was she okay? She wanted to respond, but wasn’t sure of the answer. Yes? No? Was this woman the DJ?
Then, above the whining beat, she heard a man’s voice, arguing with the woman in English.
“Ma’am,” the male voice said. “My orders are just to fly you over the city to assess the damage. We’re not supposed to intervene.”
“I’m sorry,” the female DJ responded. “If I see a woman lying on a rooftop who may need medical assistance, I’m not going to just leave her there. I don’t care what your orders are.”
Dulce opened her eyes for another brief second and the vision was so surreal. A helicopter hovering above her. A woman with glasses and bobbed blonde hair under an army cap was climbing down a rope ladder to her. Dulce felt the woman touching her neck for a pulse. Asking her questions in Spanish. Dulce still couldn’t answer. Her eyes fluttered shut.
The blonde woman half-dragged her back down off the roof into the shade of the stairwell. “I’m coming back for you,” the woman DJ said. And then Dulce heard the music fade out, as the helicopter flew off and she slipped back into unconsciousness.
* * *
Nidia, Zara, and the baby moved out of their half-roofless home and stayed with a neighbor whose house had fared better. The first post-hurricane days were taken up with just the basics. Preparing food, keeping everyone sheltered, managing makeshift bathrooms. They shared news with families who lived in the immediate cluster of houses, but it was hard to get info from anyone much beyond that. Nobody had electricity, water, or phone service. One family had a radio, but by the second day, they decided to take out the batteries for more urgent needs.
It had continued to rain, which made it dangerous to go much farther from home, because there was flash flooding in Las Palmas’s hilly terrain.
* * *
By the fifth day, the neighbor’s house where they were staying was out of drinking water. Everyone was running out.
The rain had let up for a bit and Nidia carefully waded down the tributary where the road had been. The water was up to her waist, but she was determined to get to a neighbor on the other side of the hill. She asked if they could spare any drinking water. They were almost out too, but they offered a can of juice. “For the baby.”
The neighbors with the juice also had a working radio that could be powered with a crank. Nidia learned that power was out on the entire island. Most roads were blocked. Curfew from six PM to six AM. Nidia was worried about her aunt who lived in a town right in the path of the hurricane. But there was no way to find news of her. Nothing to do but pray.
While Nidia was there gathering news, another neighbor came by. A young woman with wet, frightened eyes. Her mother was diabetic and the insulin she depended on needed refrigeration. They had gotten a battery-operated refrigerator and enough batteries, but some of the batteries had gotten damaged. The unit was failing.
“Have you tried using the car battery?” Nidia asked.
“We don’t have a car,” the young woman said.
“You can use ours,” Nidia said. “Come on, I’ll get it.”
“Who’s watching your baby?” the other neighbor asked the young woman.
“She was asleep when I left,” the young woman said. “The battery alert sounded on the refrigeration unit, and I just ran over here.”
“You should go home,” the neighbor said to the young woman. “Your little girl is walking now. If she wakes up, you don’t want her loose in the house. Your mother can’t keep up with her. I’ll go with Nidia to get the battery.”
The young woman nodded and hugged them, then ran out the door.
Nidia and the neighbor waded through the mud and water back to Nidia’s house and retrieved the battery.
“I don’t know how long it will last,” Nidia said.
“After it runs out, she can use ours,” the neighbor said.
“Any word on the radio about how long they think it’ll be til the power comes back?” Nidia asked.
“They don’t know,” the neighbor said. “Weeks. Maybe even months. She’s gonna need to get her mother to an emergency shelter where they have a generator.”
From where they stood, Nidia could see the land covered in fallen trees and branches, theirs was one of several towns along a washed out road. The shelter was at least five miles away.
As the neighbor waded off to give the battery to the young mother, something caught Nidia’s eye beneath the car. She looked closer and was startled to see the face of her grandmother, bobbing like an apparition in the muddy water.
She reached down and saw the black and white portrait was facing out from her double ziplock bag of passports and family photographs. She snatched it from the water that had pooled beneath the car. As she rotated the bag, she could see that the inside was dry. Through the entire storm, it had mercifully stayed closed tight. She held the bag to her chest, and her body hunched into sobbing. She leaned on the broken car, weeping with gratitude that all her preparation had made the difference in this one thing.
* * *
Dulce woke up on the floor of a rescue center.
“Where am I?” she asked.
“Albizu Campos elementary school,” the woman said. “But you were in a makeshift hospital for a few days. They say the mayor brought you in.”
It was daytime, and she had somehow been moved from the storage building to another place and then to here? She had no memory of it. Looking up at the ceiling, she saw fluorescent light fixtures, none of them illuminated, all the brightness came in through skylights. She tried to sit up to see where she was, but the movement caused a stab of pain in the back of her head where she had hit it. She lay back down and closed her eyes against the throbbing. From the sounds around her, she could tell that she was inside a large school auditorium. She turned her head to the side and opened her eyes. Next to her was a woman with a little boy, who was screaming. Dulce would have thought that she couldn’t have slept with a kid screaming, or with her head in such pain. But somehow, she drifted back off.
When she woke up again, it was evening. The last rays of sunlight illuminated the room with a dim glow. Dulce tried to sit up, and moaned as the back of her head began to throb again.
A woman came over to her.
“You’re awake,” the woman said in Spanish.
“I’m so thirsty,” Dulce said. “Can I get some water?”
The woman stepped away and came back with a dropper bottle.
“What are you giving me medicine for?” Dulce asked.
“This isn’t medicine,” the woman said. “This is the water.”
The woman explained that they had begun with enough drinking water for fifty people for three days, but they ended up sheltering over a hundred people. By the time Dulce came in, they were down to only a few gallons of fresh water, and had more people coming in. They expected FEMA or the National Guard to be on the way with more water, but so far they hadn’t gotten anything. The woman gave Dulce a dropperful of water every couple of hours.
Slowly, Dulce began to feel more grounded, not quite as dazed. She felt an awkward bulge under her arm. The water wallet. She didn’t try to lift her head, but she pressed it with her fingers to make sure everything was still there. The top was slightly open. Had she left it like that?
Running her hands over the outside of it, she felt the phone, the charger, the passport. But where was the cash? She opened it all the way and felt inside in the dusky room. Her fingers touched the crumpled bills in the bottom, the few coins. But where were the five crisp hundreds? Her life savings. She slid her entire hand into the wallet. They were nowhere. She pulled out the wallet and held it in front of her face. No hundred-dollar bills.
Had she spent them somehow? No. Someone must have robbed her. She had been asleep here in the shelter. Did someone say she had also been in a hospital? As Dulce tried to make sense of the muddle in her brain, she fell asleep again.
When she woke back up, the woman with the water was sitting next to her with a dim lantern.
Dulce blinked and looked over at the lady with the little boy. The woman’s back was facing her, curled up. Finally, he had fallen asleep.
The woman with the water fed her two dropperfuls. In the darkness, Dulce couldn’t quite read her expression. She looked more solemn than before. Dulce whispered to her: “How’s the little boy?” she asked. “Better? He’s quiet now.”
The woman shook her head: “That little boy is with God, now.” She crossed herself and was swallowed by the blackness.
Dulce felt nauseous. The mother’s curled back was invisible in the darkness now, but the image burned into Dulce’s mind. She couldn’t stop seeing it, even though she didn’t know if her eyes were open or closed. But eventually she fell back asleep. Or unconscious. So her eyes must have been closed.
* * *
She woke in the night to a candle blazing in her face. The woman’s hand hovered above her nose. It took a moment to realize that she was checking to see if Dulce was still breathing.
“Can I get some more water?” Dulce croaked.
The woman shook her head. “It’s all gone.”
From behind the woman, Dulce could hear the drone of a priest in Latin. Last rites. He was praying over the mother.
Dulce tried to focus on the light, a white seven-day candle, like her cousin Josefina used to use in Cuba. She could feel her eyes getting moist. “For the little boy?” she asked the woman.
“For both of them,” the woman replied, and moved away with the candle.