eyes.
Then someone took my hand. Small fingers, soft flesh. And out of all the obliterating white shapes I saw the darker form of a very young girl. Serious, big wounded eyes. Thick dark hair. Skin honey-brown—flesh of my flesh, the color of me. My oldest child, Babe. Who held my hand in both of hers, gently, urging me away from this white erasing center of things. Saying, Come on Daddy, let’s get out of here. Let’s you and me go home.
Señorita de mi coraz ó n, I said.
Girl of my heart.
She lifted me up by the hand and I followed, rose easily for just that moment into a safe unanchored place that was warm and still and dark, and all my own.
*
I remember, now, how she looked not so long ago: tall, strong, lean and tanned, bubbling competence, winning. What she’d been trained for since childhood. No ordinary-looking girl. A girl meant for special things.
Two weeks after we brought her home from the hospital I happened to step into her room and found her sitting on the floor against the bed, head bent nearly to her knees, face beaten and thin, and she looked up at me with the frightening new hollowness of her eyes and said I’m sorry, Dad, I’m sorry. I am so sorry.
What? I asked desperately, kneeling beside her, what? What are you sorry for? But she wouldn’t answer.
Barbara and I argued that day, bitterly. One of our few true knock-down drag-out fights in all the years together.
Leave her alone, Barbara said. Don’t you understand that she wants to be alone?
Alone? I stormed back. Alone? Do you think she knows what she wants? Alone in the ocean for fifty-one hours, and you tell me to leave her alone again. What in the name of God is wrong with you?
The argument did not recur. Still, it left a scar. When I think back I’m hard-pressed to come up with another one as bad—not even concerning her parents. No, she and I have always gotten along magnificently. But I wonder, now: Did the sacrifice begin then, with that fight?
Even before the visit to Tia Corazón, did I call the Powers without knowing it?
Because somehow—since Angelita—there has been this feeling in the house of a strange new presence, something damaged, enraged, askew.
What nonsense. Outmoded superstition, Delgado. A lapse into the very forms of irrational thought that have enslaved people’s minds for centuries.
*
It was an out-of-the-ordinary fight, though, not like our little quarrels.
The ones we had about naming each child, for instance—those first two times I lost out, and Mildred and James were the results. I still don’t like their names, really, but reconciled myself when the nicknames caught on. Babe. Jack. Friendly-sounding.
With the next two I stood my ground. My second son would be named Roberto, and there would be no substitute like Bob or Bobby. Teresa would be Teresa, without the Anglicizing h .
I felt better, then.
Which is odd. Since I really don’t mind the subtle corruption of my own name. I even introduce myself to others as Phil. Not Felipe. Phil Delgado. Hello there, pleased to meet you.
I gaze up at the ceiling. Blank darkness. Remembering hot sunlight, red-stained streets. There were soldiers stationed outside our home. And I asked my father what they wanted. Nothing, Felipe, he said. Go to bed.
But I remember the smell of his sweat, full of helplessness and terror, while we waited. Odd that after all that—the fear that was like a rotting acidic substance dripping through all the organs of our bodies until we felt more dead than alive—we survived. Still, such things change you. You become a different sort of person in your soul, a man less capable of spontaneous thought, action, feeling—a person willing to give up certain things called for by the heart in order to shore up security against the future.
Barbara moves drowsily.
“Phil?”
“Hmmm.”
But she’s sleeping again.
It’s okay, I say. Everything’s okay. I move closer to her on the bed. Turn away from the ceiling, the
Then someone took my hand. Small fingers, soft flesh. And out of all the obliterating white shapes I saw the darker form of a very young girl. Serious, big wounded eyes. Thick dark hair. Skin honey-brown—flesh of my flesh, the color of me. My oldest child, Babe. Who held my hand in both of hers, gently, urging me away from this white erasing center of things. Saying, Come on Daddy, let’s get out of here. Let’s you and me go home.
Señorita de mi coraz ó n, I said.
Girl of my heart.
She lifted me up by the hand and I followed, rose easily for just that moment into a safe unanchored place that was warm and still and dark, and all my own.
*
I remember, now, how she looked not so long ago: tall, strong, lean and tanned, bubbling competence, winning. What she’d been trained for since childhood. No ordinary-looking girl. A girl meant for special things.
Two weeks after we brought her home from the hospital I happened to step into her room and found her sitting on the floor against the bed, head bent nearly to her knees, face beaten and thin, and she looked up at me with the frightening new hollowness of her eyes and said I’m sorry, Dad, I’m sorry. I am so sorry.
What? I asked desperately, kneeling beside her, what? What are you sorry for? But she wouldn’t answer.
Barbara and I argued that day, bitterly. One of our few true knock-down drag-out fights in all the years together.
Leave her alone, Barbara said. Don’t you understand that she wants to be alone?
Alone? I stormed back. Alone? Do you think she knows what she wants? Alone in the ocean for fifty-one hours, and you tell me to leave her alone again. What in the name of God is wrong with you?
The argument did not recur. Still, it left a scar. When I think back I’m hard-pressed to come up with another one as bad—not even concerning her parents. No, she and I have always gotten along magnificently. But I wonder, now: Did the sacrifice begin then, with that fight?
Even before the visit to Tia Corazón, did I call the Powers without knowing it?
Because somehow—since Angelita—there has been this feeling in the house of a strange new presence, something damaged, enraged, askew.
What nonsense. Outmoded superstition, Delgado. A lapse into the very forms of irrational thought that have enslaved people’s minds for centuries.
*
It was an out-of-the-ordinary fight, though, not like our little quarrels.
The ones we had about naming each child, for instance—those first two times I lost out, and Mildred and James were the results. I still don’t like their names, really, but reconciled myself when the nicknames caught on. Babe. Jack. Friendly-sounding.
With the next two I stood my ground. My second son would be named Roberto, and there would be no substitute like Bob or Bobby. Teresa would be Teresa, without the Anglicizing h .
I felt better, then.
Which is odd. Since I really don’t mind the subtle corruption of my own name. I even introduce myself to others as Phil. Not Felipe. Phil Delgado. Hello there, pleased to meet you.
I gaze up at the ceiling. Blank darkness. Remembering hot sunlight, red-stained streets. There were soldiers stationed outside our home. And I asked my father what they wanted. Nothing, Felipe, he said. Go to bed.
But I remember the smell of his sweat, full of helplessness and terror, while we waited. Odd that after all that—the fear that was like a rotting acidic substance dripping through all the organs of our bodies until we felt more dead than alive—we survived. Still, such things change you. You become a different sort of person in your soul, a man less capable of spontaneous thought, action, feeling—a person willing to give up certain things called for by the heart in order to shore up security against the future.
Barbara moves drowsily.
“Phil?”
“Hmmm.”
But she’s sleeping again.
It’s okay, I say. Everything’s okay. I move closer to her on the bed. Turn away from the ceiling, the
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