Our mother had been gone now for eleven days. Her longest recess yet. Recess is what I’d nicknamed her time away. That’s what it felt like to me: She’d be in the middle of being a mother, caring for us, and she’d stop—take a break. Much of my time was spent trying not to trigger her leaving: keeping my younger sister, Renee, quiet, laying out her clothes for school, cleaning without being told. But it wasn’t enough.
That first time I dreamt of the almost indigo-hued baby elephant, I was in a dentist’s chair in Falls Church, Virginia, having a cavity cleaned and filled. The dentist had given me Novocaine, and I must have fallen asleep. How else to explain the sudden vision I had of a small Nilgiri elephant, barely a few years old, stumbling about in a circle while beside her a trainer yelled commands, wielded a baton, and then, horror of horrors, let fly so the hard steel rod struck the defenseless creature hard on the skull, the neck, the top of her delicate trunk.
The bike was left to Cuauhtémoc Lázaro Hernández de la Cruz by his second cousin who had gone to live en el Norte at the age of ten. By fourteen the cousin had given in to gang life in New Mexico. By sixteen he was dead; found in the city dump by a vagrant. In the short life that he lived the cousin had amassed only two symbols of success: one a giant silver crucifix and a two-wheeled candy apple green low rider bicycle named Esmeralda, built to his exact specifications one chrome twisted pipe at a time.
I had to leave Miss Clarissa in her sick room. I was sent to the smokehouse to get meats for the cook. When I arrived, I gave the overseer the list and waited as he told a slave the quantities of each meat to load on the wagon. The slave then told me to follow him into the smokehouse, where there was a low fire burning on the dirt floor and meats dangling from the rafters.
El Comandante gazed out the window at the stale light of another tropical morning, at the long curve of crumbling seaside buildings. Spindly, sun-sick palms splintered the skies with their spiky fronds. The sea was a rumpled bed of blues. The usual lovebirds tangled on the malecón, verging on public fornication. He’d passed laws against such displays but it hadn’t deterred the couples. The seawall remained theirs, as it had for generations of lovers before them.
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