Chapter 20
When she awoke that next morning, Dulce was able to sit up. Her body felt stiff, achy. She had a bump on the back of her head.
The woman who had given her water helped her to her feet and pointed her to the bathroom. She probably could have found it from the smell. The water wasn’t running. They had set up buckets. She relieved herself, but noticed that her own shorts were damp with urine. There wasn’t anywhere to wash them.
Feeling self-conscious, she walked back to where she had been lying. Sure enough, the blanket she’d been sleeping on had the dank smell of urine, as well.
She sat back down on the blanket and felt totally lost. She didn’t know anyone. Not to mention that she felt like a little girl who had just wet the bed. Was she supposed to tell someone? She had no idea what to do next.
She lay on the floor in the large school auditorium. The walls still bore back to school announcements and scores from soccer and basketball games.
The cafeteria tables had all been pulled toward the far end of the room, near the kitchen.
On the other end, there was a row of tables with medical personnel and other staff attending to people as they came in.
Dulce lay on her back and looked up through a skylight, watching a sliver of clouds passing overhead.
When she got up to walk around the room a bit, she saw that someone had put out a bin full of paperback books. There were some young adult novels in Spanish, translations of US teen angst stories that focused on white girls in high school.
As a younger teen, she had read those books from her school library before she dropped out. But then, during her years with Jerry, white girl drama about friends and boys seemed so far from her life. She regarded those stories like kiddie books that began with “once upon a time,” or something. In the Jerry years, she had preferred to read gritty urban stories for adults: sex, violence, betrayal, chasing money—they felt like real life. But she only read those books on the rare occasions when she was able to get her hands on them. Mostly, the girls watched TV when they weren’t working or keeping house.
But now, in the hurricane, she hungered for something light and innocent. She took a trio of teen books back to her pallet on the floor. She had just started the second book, when a nurse came over to check her out. She was a white woman from the US.
“Head injury, huh?” she asked, handing her a tiny bottle of water.
The nurse made Dulce walk a line, then close her eyes and touch her nose with each of her pinkie fingers. She asked her questions in English: her name, where she was from, the date and time. When the nurse asked who was president, Dulce’s face puckered into a scowl.
Before she could even say anything, the nurse laughed. “You’re gonna be fine,” she said. “You might be sleepy for a few days, but the concussion is healing, and there’s no neurological damage.”
As the nurse went to move on, Dulce grabbed her arm.
“Is there anywhere for me to wash my shorts?” she asked. “I smell like piss from when I was knocked out.”
The nurse put a hand on Dulce’s arm. “Sweetheart,” she said, her voice gentle, “nobody’s worried about that right now. We’re rationing the water again. What little clean water we have is for drinking. If it’s not quite drinkable, it can be used for washing dishes or hands. I don’t recommend bathing in any of the flooded areas. That water could be contaminated, even though it doesn’t smell.”
“Contaminated with what?”
“Sewage, bacteria, toxins,” the nurse said. “Take your pick.”
“I seriously need to go around like this?” Dulce asked.
“Tell you what,” the nurse said. “If you’re feeling better, you can join one of the crews outside clearing the roads. If it rains this afternoon, you’ll get the shower you’ve been wanting. Now I gotta go. Lot of people need medical attention.”
“Of course,” Dulce said. She thought of the mother and baby. How could she be worrying about how she smelled? She got up to put on her shoes so she could help clear the road and realized she didn’t have any shoes.
What now? Was she just supposed to wait? Everyone here was eager to get back to their homes. If their homes were still standing. To salvage what they could. But what did she have to return to? A pile of ruined designer outfits? A Cartier chain tangled in a mass of branches, clothes, and trash? This had never been home. She needed to get off this island.
A couple hours later, a man called for volunteers to do some road clearing, and Dulce raised her hand. They distributed machetes, axes, and even a saw. There weren’t enough to go around, so they would take turns. Armed with their various weapons, the ragtag brigade marched outside.
* * *
There was too much sky.
The tropics were usually landscapes of trees, bushes, and vines, rising thick up out of the land, towering, blocking out the horizon. But not now. Tall palms had been snapped like toothpicks. Leaves scraped away by wind. The sky stretched out, uninterrupted by greenery, as clusters of naked trunks reached up from the land like claws.
That was the strangest part. How much the sight of the land reminded her of New York winter. The hillsides covered with leafless trees had her recalling the trip they’d taken one Christmas to visit the parents of her sister’s boyfriend upstate. The hurricane had made its own winter, like after snow melted in the city and the lumps of trash that had been underneath became visible again, perfectly preserved. Suddenly, Puerto Rico became much more like New York in March, with its barren trees, sodden trash, and people huddled indoors. It had everything but the cold.
* * *
They gave her a machete to hack up the brush. One of the men showed her how to swing it safely, so that it came down on the fallen tree branches with maximum chop.
“Watch your eyes,” he said, and left her to work.
It took a long time to even hack off a single branch. Some of the other people were much quicker.
After about an hour, she’d managed to clear away a few branches, and had a small sense of accomplishment. From time to time, she’d feel a little lightheaded and would stop to rest.
“You need water?” the head of the crew asked.
Sí, por favor,” she said.
He had her tilt her head back and poured some in from a gallon jug, carefully so as not to spill any.
She licked the drops off the side of her mouth and thanked him.
A little later they took a break for lunch.
“Courtesy of FEMA,” the crew chief said.
Several members of the crew groaned as the chief handed out small packets of beef jerky and Cheez-Its.
“Shit,” one of the young women said. “We’re lucky to have food, tú sabes?”
Dulce agreed. “You from New York?” she asked the girl as she tore open the beef jerky packet.
“Upstate,” she said. “I just moved back last year. I came for college.”
“La Yupi?” Dulce asked, using the nickname she’d heard for the University of Puerto Rico.
The girl nodded. “It’s been fucked up though, with the debt crisis and everything,” she said through a mouthful of Cheez-Its. “Now with all this, I’ll probably end up back in the Bronx.”
Dulce tried the jerky. It was nearly as hard as the wood they were chopping. “Are you sorry you came?” she asked.
The girl gave a sudden bark of laughter that also seemed to be partly a sob. “I don’t fucking know,” she said. “I’ll tell you one thing. This shit solved my little identity crisis. I certainly feel like a real fucking Puerto Rican right about now.”
* * *
After lunch, the sky began to darken. Half an hour later, there was a heavy rain. Dulce heeded the nurse’s words. She put her head back and drank. She undid her ponytail and let the rain soak her hair, wash the sweat from her forehead. She raised her arms and scrubbed under her armpits with her bare hands. The hair was growing in under her arms, scratchy against her palms.
She pulled out the front waistband of her shorts and let the water fill them, soaking her underwear, washing away the old urine. Then she pulled out the back waistband and did the same.
After a moment, she went back to clearing, even in the rain, using the machete to hack at the branches.
* * *
When the crew came back inside, she asked the nurse to give her a band-aid for a cut on her foot.
“You shouldn’t be working barefoot,” the nurse said, offering her one, along with an antiseptic wipe. “Why didn’t you take your shoes?”
Dulce looked down at a pair of gray athletic sandals with a closed toe. She had never owned shoes like these. Her shoes had always been either sneakers, flip flops, or sexy shoes.
“Those aren’t mine,” Dulce said. “They belonged to the lady in the bed beside me, the one with the baby.”
“The one who died?” the nurse asked.
Dulce nodded somberly.
The nurse sighed. “They’re yours now.”
The shoes proved to be a size too large, but Dulce stuffed a couple of rags into the toes and then they fit okay.
* * *
That evening, everyone lined up for dinner, which was a small portion of beans and rice, and a few swallows of water. They sat on the floor and ate. Dulce sat beside some of the people she met while clearing. It turned out that her friend from La Yupi was there with some of her neighbors, including a pair of middle-aged women who lived in the apartments above her.
“I’m not saying there’s much good coming out of this hurricane,” she said. “But my aunt is eighty. Her husband is eighty-three. She’s bedridden, but strong, you know, her mind is sharp. So before the hurricane, her husband used to boast that he never even set foot in the kitchen of their house. His wife did all the cooking and cleaning. Then my niece here took over.” She put her arm around the thirtyish woman next to her. “His granddaughter. You did it all, right? Cooking. Cleaning. Todo.” She turned to the niece. “You tell it.”
“Well,” the niece began, holding back laughter. “During the hurricane the kitchen flooded. And I was dealing with my grandmother, tú sabes. And he was saying ‘water is flooding in from the kitchen!’ You know? Like ‘the British are coming! ’ or some shit. Like he needed to inform us about it. I was like coño, tío, get the escoba and fucking sweep the water out. I’m taking care of abuelita over here.”
The aunt interrupted her: “Y sabes qué?” she said. “Ese macho got the fucking escoba and swept the fucking water out of his kitchen. And so to keep our spirits up since the hurricane, whenever we visit them, we just do this.” She held one fist above another as if she were holding a broom and made a sweeping motion. “And all the women can’t stop laughing.”
Likewise, the women at the table cracked up.
Ha roto su record perfecto,” the aunt said.
“After the gas gets back on it’s not like he’s gonna go in there and cook,” the niece said. “But I’ll bet now he’ll be able to go in and fix himself a goddamn sandwich.”
“Some of these men are so damn stubborn, it takes a fucking hurricane to change their ways,” the girl from La Yupi said.
Dulce laughed along with all the women, some of them laughing so hard they cried.
* * *
Later that night, Dulce regretted not having taken her blanket out into the rain, as well. The room was totally dark, with just a lantern in the corner where the nurse was talking to a man with a small child.
Dulce’s body felt tired, but her mind was buzzing. She was hungry after the small dinner, the paltry FEMA rations, and the time she was unconscious and went without eating before that. She had never been so thirsty in her life.
Not only was her body uncomfortable, but she was never, ever still like this. She felt agitated, raw. There was no light to finish the teen book. Usually, she would watch TV or look at something on her phone. Was her phone even still working?
She pulled it out of the translucent case for the first time. The phone was dry, as were the charger and cash. Phillip was an asshole, but at least he bought her quality trinkets. Although the water wallet was all that remained.
When she pressed the power button on the phone, she was afraid that it would be broken, out of charge, or that the screen would be cracked. But instead it sparked to life. Just like any other day. The phone had no idea she had been through a hurricane, knocked out, covered in piss, had slept beside a woman and baby as they died.
Something about the phone turning on caused her chest to surge with emotion. Not hope exactly, but the idea that something that mattered to her had survived. So her eyes were filled with tears, and it took a moment for her to see the screen clearly and notice that she had messages.

You’re running low on data. You have 25% remaining
with eight days left. Get unlimited data on the best 4G
LTE network in the Caribbean. Switch today.

She deleted the message. The other one was from a number she didn’t recognize.

It’s Zavier. Texting from a friend’s phone. Mine is dead.
At the Lumineer hotel in San Juan with press corps.
Praying you’re somewhere safe to sit out the hurricane.
Hit me back when you can. Or better yet come over if you can. xo

The Lumineer Hotel.
The tears started up again. Zavier was worried about her. Somebody cared about her. She knew where to find him. He wanted her to come.
She had a goal now, a destination. She needed to find him and with his help, she could get the hell off this island.