I am. You’re right. And I haven’t forgotten about that for a single second. I’ve avoided telling you about my mother because I haven’t wanted to shift blame onto her, or her curse, or her brother, or my father, or whoever or whatever.”
Isabel was scowling, her bony shoulders hitched up by her ears. Her rickety frame looked like it held a world of damage and pain, like it had been patched up and reglued countless times.
“You never found out what happened to your mom?”
“What’s to find out, Lucas?” Isabel asked, exasperated. “She’s gone, desaparecida. When I was a kid, my dad used to take me with him as he searched the island for my mother. He made it all the way to the village near Ponce where she was born. He told me later that all he found there was an empty village, a deaf old man, and his three-legged dog. There weren’t even any houses left.” She glared at me. “What about your mom? She’s desaparecida, too, right?”
Stung, I turned onto my back and closed my eyes. “Yeah, she’s . . . gone.”
A couple of seconds ticked away. “That’s it?”
Of course that wasn’t it, but what little of my mother I had, I liked to keep to myself. The thing was, Isabel and I were the same this way. The two of us clung to the scraps of stories that when cobbled together made a strange and incomplete picture of a parent.
“She grew up in the Dominican Republic,” I began. “She was adopted by a couple of white doctors who worked with poor people out in the countryside. When she was my age, she went away to boarding school and then college in Texas. She met my dad there. They got married, had me. She moved to New York when I was ten. We lost touch. End of story.”
“I would have never have guessed you were Dominican,” Isabel said. Her machine clicked and whirred back to life. “You look just like your dad.”
“If you saw pictures, you’d think I looked just like my mom. She had blonde hair and blue eyes. She never knew who her real parents were, and my grandma never talked about it.”
“Does she have a new family?”
“As far as I know she’s alone.”
“So, that’s where you get your solitary nature from.”
I barked out a laugh. “When I was a kid, I dreamed of living here in this building. I thought there was no way I’d ever get tired of finding new places to explore and to hide in.”
“It’s a good place,” Isabel said. “If I wasn’t the way I am I could live here. I’d mostly keep to myself, except for once a year when I’d have a party. I’d invite the entire island. There’d be music and dancing. I’d wear a dress, a long, sparkling green dress with no sleeves. That way the people, when they passed me, might skim up against my bare skin. And on that one night I would turn on all the lights in the building, and it would be so bright that sailors miles away could see it.”
Isabel stopped talking, so I opened my eyes and turned to see why. She’d hit a snag and was hunched over the machine, her nose scrunched up and the tip of her tongue pushing past her teeth as she concentrated on untangling a mess of thread and plant fibers.
It was all so real. Isabel wasn’t a myth. A myth is simple. Isabel was a muddled mess. Like Marisol, she had big, impossible dreams. Like me, she was teetering on a line between bending to the will of her father and piloting her own future. She was just a girl trying to make a blanket out of leaves. In that moment, it seemed perfectly within the bounds of normalcy.
“I guess for someone who’s spent most of her life creeping around in the shadows it makes sense you’d want to be the center of the attention every now and then,” I offered.
“Oh no, Lucas.” Isabel shook her head and glanced up. “You don’t understand. The party wouldn’t be for me. It would be for the island.”
Isabel eventually got her snag straightened out, and the regular humming of the sewing machine eventually lulled me to sleep. That’s when I dreamed of the real Isabel for the first time—no green skin, no grass for hair. She was at her party at La Andalusia. The ballroom looked like I’d always thought it should’ve: lit up brilliantly by