Crux Read online

  Jeannette was the third of their four children, the most delicate in complexion and size—the skinniest, the fairest, the most prone to sickness. A verdant tangle of plants and panapen trees separated their house from Playa Crash Boat, with its peach-colored sands and reaching blue waters. Jeannette’s hardy siblings spent much of their time there, imitating the coqui frog’s song, kicking coconuts, chasing crabs in the mud. Jeannette liked the ocean from an aesthetic point of view, but she preferred the indoors and its comfortable, controlled environments. Her favorite pastime was reading—medical literature, for the most part, which she checked out from the local library, dreaming of discovering a cure for the asthma that asphyxiated her almost every day. Naturally, her goal was to become a doctor. Even with all the doors and windows of their little Aguadilla house shut, Jeannette suffered. Even after the sugarcane harvests, when the fields were clean, the attacks came. One day, as she doodled unicorn intestines in an anatomy text, it occurred to her that maybe the sugarcane pollen was not the sole cause of her asthma. Posiblemente, she thought, it was also the creatures in the attic next door. Every evening she saw the bats emerging in droves. She wondered if spores from their dung or dander clung to the ubiquitous humidity and floated into her breathing space, irritating her lungs. When her family moved to a nearby house for unrelated reasons, her asthma attacks abated, and she remembered her hypothesis. She had a gift.

  Luz nurtured it. It is humiliating to have to ask a man for everything—even underwear, her mother whispered in Spanish. In her adolescence, Luz had been known in her neighborhood as La Rubia Peligrosa—the dangerous blonde. The attention had planted vague dreams of grandeur in Luz’s teenage mind: perhaps she would be a movie star someday, or a powerful curandera. Now she was a devoted wife and mother, linked forever to the whims, worries and wanderings of the man to whom she had committed. Luz did not know how to read, write or drive a car. She rarely left the house without her husband. She had been eclipsed by her man and feared the same fate for her daughters. She poured her passion into things she made for the family, food like savory sorullitos de maíz and pasteles de yuque. Luz also made the girls’ clothing, expressing her rebellion in bright colors and bold cuts.

  Luis was old-fashioned, and didn’t believe women should aspire beyond domesticity. When he hired a painting tutor for his daughters, it was to increase their desirability as housewives. But on the walls of their Caribbean home, Jeannette painted murals of an indecorous medical nature—for example, a grinning feline with a sinewy esophagus visible through a slit in its throat. The oldest daughter, Irma, expressed plans to attend law school. The youngest, Myriam, announced she would be a professional painter. Luz’s nocturnal whispers had worked like magic on the girls. The three would make their way to the mainland in pursuit of their ambitions. Only their brother established himself in Aguadilla.

  My mother was the first to leave. As valedictorian of her high school class, she secured a full scholarship to pursue a bachelor’s in biology in Mayagüez. There, she applied to the U.S. Air Force for a medical school scholarship. But she had worn thick glasses since she was twelve, and at the time, the Air Force required 20/20 vision. She applied to the Coast Guard and the Navy. She was underweight. Jeannette told herself it was for the best; it was hard enough to breathe on land. Despite living footsteps from the ocean, Jeannette had never learned to swim. A rip current had sucked her out to sea once, endowing her with a permanent terror of el mar. She had been splashing waist-deep on the shore, clasping her sisters’ hands, when a swell of water buoyed the girls and separated their fingers. Jeannette alone lost her balance. Disoriented, she watched as her rooted sisters shrank, and the palm trees on the white beach became farther away. She sought a place to rest her feet, in vain. A tall wave crashed around her, knocking off her glasses and plunging her into the deep. She saw the blurry sun cracked to golden pieces by turbulent undulations. She was accustomed to mortal terror, thanks to her asthma—and as water filled her throat, she mentally chanted traga, traga, traga, like a magic spell, swallow, swallow, swallow. She resolved to imbibe the whole sea if necessary…traga, traga, traga, don’t let water into your pulmones…Even as her lungs screamed for air, Jeannette refused to succumb to irrational impulses. So many times in the course of her life, she would be imperiled by invisible forces like the rip current over which she lacked control—or like Interstate 5, which would push her straight into my father’s arms. Her will to survive was always militant. She sank, her hair floating upward like Medusa’s snakes, eyes wide open, respiratory system secured. Her uncle dove in and saved her.

  After rejections from the Navy and Coast Guard, Jeannette applied to the Army. The recruiter looked at her with pitying eyes and advised her to try the National Health Service Corps: she could remain a civilian and repay her debts as a primary-care provider in an underserved community. She applied. The Service Corps notified her she would be going to medical school, all expenses paid. She completed her bachelor’s in three years and moved to San Juan. She specialized in internal medicine: the treatment, prevention and diagnosis of adult illness.

  For a year, in anatomy class, she familiarized herself with the innards of an unclaimed corpse. Having studied mutations, protrusions, rashes, gashes, warts, wounds and putrefactions in books since she was a child, Jeannette was not a queasy person. She was fascinated by the labyrinth of tubes inside this human. She sliced open the gray-haired man with scalpels, planting labeled flags in his arteries, muscles and organs. She removed his heart and held it in her hands, imagining the limp, defective organ in its last moments, its once-moist coronary arteries clotted and trembling. When Irma moved into Jeannette’s apartment to study law, she was aghast to discover that Jeannette placed her textbooks on the dead man daily and brought them home to study on the kitchen table. The corpse is sterile, Jeannette thought, shrugging. They keep it cold.

  Living on their own was liberating. Jeannette cut her hair short, bleached it and styled it voluminous and layered like the actress Farrah Fawcett’s. She had the same wide-open eyes and pale, delicate lips. She weighed ninety-five pounds. She was a top student, but her adventurous wardrobe, inspired by her mother—thick belts, audacious colors, tall boots—meant she was also named Most Fashionable in the yearbook.

  A medical student named Carlos proposed to Jeannette. Like her, he was spindly and half blind. Thick-rimmed glasses hid the small eyes on his prodigious head. They were engaged for about a year. But as they neared graduation in 1983, Carlos realized he wanted a housewife. He begged Jeannette to give up medicine. She refused. Carlos asked her to return his engagement ring. For a few weeks, Jeanette’s grades slipped.

  Heartbroken, Jeannette flew to New York for an interview at the Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center. She took in the shining, metallic skyscrapers, an alternate universe compared with the ripe green Eden of her home. The silver city beckoned her. When the cutting-edge trauma center offered her a residency, she said goodbye to her relatives and moved to the mainland.

  Jeannette sent her family money and gifts, writing letters that focused on the positive aspects of her new life, such as the hospital’s ethnic diversity—I feel like I live all over the world!—and her improving English. She described the workload—thirty-six hours of emergency-room duty every three nights—in cheerful cursive Spanish: I find a way to sleep one or two hours, it’s enough.

  She said nothing about the dead who plagued her dreams, the patients she failed to save, such as the man whose skull was splintered by a bullet, whose heart she kept beating for nearly an hour. She made no mention of her romantic anxiety, her fear that she might never love again. Although she cloaked her insecurities in her letters, I detect them in her praise for Myriam, the artist, whom she called the smartest of the sisters for pursuing a passion she saw as less exhausting. Career is not everything in life, Jeannette wrote. I hope God blesses you all and helps me keep going forward with…a whole life in se
rvice of health. She ended her letters on playful notes. P.S. They’ve changed my name a little bit; they call me Jeannette D’val. As if I were French. Americans—or Gringos—don’t know how to pronounce my beautiful last name Del Valle…

  The winter of the East Coast sank into her tropical bones like teeth. Gargantuan, grimy rats wriggled into her apartment. She slept with her inhaler under her pillow and scattered glue traps. In the mornings, her landlord stopped by to toss their sticky tombs from her window. Once or twice, she passed their twitching tails protruding from the snow like stems of animate flowers.

  In the emergency room one night, Dr. Del Valle admitted two drowned bodies as blue as icicles. The corpses had been pulled from a frozen river and transported by helicopter. For hours, Jeannette warmed these dead lovers with blankets, intravenous injections of warm fluids and the aggressive motions of cardiopulmonary resuscitation. She watched as the woman’s cheeks regained color and she took a sudden breath of air. The man did not awaken again, but the woman’s recovery was remarkable. Miracles such as this, and the role she played in them, allowed her uncertainties about prioritizing her career to dissolve with the snow. Spring came.

  She befriended an aspiring radiologist starting his residency at a nearby hospital. Mark Anthony had a thick brown beard, vulnerable brown eyes and a contrasting conspiratorial air that gave him an edgy charm. In Puerto Rico, men had not preferred Jeannette because of her thinness and her ambition, perceived as masculine traits. In New York, with its multicultural range of ideals, she was a desirable Twiggy, with a sexy, superior mind, and Mark Anthony was infatuated with her. They went dancing. He lifted her petite body, spinning her as others looked on with envy. They spent hours conversing about their fields. They both felt that familiar tug of the heart, but they resisted it. They wanted to be realistic. Mark Anthony was younger than Jeannette, and would not finish his residency for another two years. Jeannette planned to establish herself in a more habitable climate, ideally in the Golden State.

  She was accepted at several Service Corps facilities, including her top choice: the San Ysidro Health Center in San Diego, California. She picked up her residency diploma and hired a moving van. Maybe you can follow me someday, she told Mark Anthony. Maybe I will, he said. Then she got on a plane and flew to California.

  San Diego, she knew, had the weather of paradise: sun-drenched like Puerto Rico, without the sticky humidity. When she stepped out of the airport, a cool breeze from the west carried the fresh smell of the salty sea. The skyscrapers of downtown San Diego shimmered. This paradisiacal metropolis would be her home—modern and urban like New York, minus the crippling cold and rodents. Dr. Del Valle, the first professional in a lineage of housewives, was euphoric. She was driving to her hotel when she got lost on I-5. Her travel agent had scribbled the wrong freeway in his directions.

  Passing exit after exit in a doomed search for Bonita Road, Jeannette grew nervous. The landscape was changing up ahead. Tall mountains covered in incongruously colored houses on foundations of car tires were in stark contrast to the orderly suburbs along the highway. She saw a colossal Mexican flag. A large green sign loomed ahead: “Mexico Only.” She gasped. She hit the brakes, checked her rearview mirror and swerved.

  She almost didn’t make it. At the stoplight of the last U.S. exit, her hands shook on the steering wheel. She couldn’t believe the mistake she had nearly made. She knew nothing about Mexico. She had never been to a foreign country. What if she had crossed the border by accident? What if she had gotten stuck on the other side? She was a U.S. citizen, like all Puerto Ricans, but her citizenship felt questionable on the mainland: she had an accent and no passport.

  She pulled into the nearest gas station. A tall Mexican man with ink-black hair was leaning over his engine. He wore faded jeans and a white undershirt. His car had overheated and he was pouring water over the radiator with a plastic gallon jug. Jeannette rolled down her window. Excuse me, she called.

  The man turned around. His eyes were golden, squinting against an afternoon light that seemed to swirl and spring in his irises like fire. She had never seen eyes like his.

  Papi smiled as if he knew her, as if he had been waiting for her. He wiped his oil-blackened hands on a rag hanging on the hood of his car. Yeah?

  The wind entered her window, entangling in her hair. The wind whipped her hair across her eyes. She was blind only for a second, but one second was enough. She asked him for directions.

  LA MISIÓN

  Papi says I was conceived on a Mexican beach called La Misión. My parents pitched a tent there in the summer of 1987. They caught a squid and cooked it over a campfire. Then they crawled into their tent and made me.

  “That’s why you’re the outdoorsy one,” my father claims.

  My sister, he says, was conceived at a New Year’s Eve celebration. “That’s why Ruby’s a party girl.” He adds a cartoonish chuckle: “Heh, heh, heh.”

  Years later, I am flipping through my mother’s photo albums. I come across a picture of my mother on a beach at night. A campfire illuminates her. She is surrounded by darkness that emerges from the sea. The darkness has a flame-like quality of its own, leaping and slanting at my mother. I pull the photo from behind its plastic covering. On the back, in my mother’s handwriting, reads “Summer 1987, La Misión.”

  I bring the picture to my mother and ask her my question. She nods. Moments after my father took this photograph, the two entered the tent behind her to mix the witch’s brew of me. I search for myself in the sinister blackness lurching toward my mother from the direction of the sea.

  * * *

  •

  In the summer of 1986, the man who would become my father often drove across the U.S.-Mexico border on I-5. He owned a Honda CX650 Turbo motorcycle and an Oldsmobile Cutlass. He liked the feel of the wind on his face, of speeding back and forth between two countries. He sought challenging coastal rock faces to free-climb and cliffs from which to dive into the Pacific Ocean.

  Marco Antonio Guerrero had just been laid off from the National Steel and Shipbuilding Company, NASSCO, where he’d built oil tankers and cargo carriers for a decade. He cut shapes out of steel plates with a torch. He leaned into shards of scattering flame, removing welts, beveling seams and dodging molten metal. He worked quickly, doing in one hour what others did in three or four. His coworkers laughed at him, reminding him that idle workers earned the same as busy ones. But Marco enjoyed efficiency. Physical work was something his body took pleasure in doing—like eating or drinking or having sex. Cigarette dangling from his lips, he reveled in the agility of his limbs. As the Exxon Valdez neared completion, the company decided to downsize by a thousand workers. His position, one of many burners, was expendable.

  Marco took advantage of the unexpected free time. He visited the library for books about world wars, quantum mechanics, economics, Arthurian legends, mammalian biology, electrical engineering. He read voraciously. He wanted to know everything. He felt the whole world was within his mind’s grasp, despite the heaviness in his chest when certain recollections came: his crushed dreams of attending medical school, the abuse of his stepfather, the deaths of his best friends, the nightmares that felt prophetic. He had migrated to the United States at the age of eighteen, to transcend the past. He rarely thought of his childhood or adolescence in Mexico.

  Within weeks of the NASSCO layoffs, his stepfather, Jesus, asked him for a favor. Jesus owned a meat-packaging plant called the Butcher Block, which had amassed unprecedented wealth for the Guerreros that decade. In Mexico, they had lived without electricity or running water. Now they owned an ocean-view house in San Diego.

  The idea for the Butcher Block had come a few years before, while Jesus was chopping meat at a San Diego grocery store, Miller’s Market. A fellow immigrant, Roberto Robledo, came to the meat counter regularly to buy shredded beef for his Mexican drive-through restaurant, Roberto’s. He doused the mea
t in red salsa for burritos. Roberto told Jesus he was losing faith in his American dream. He feared gringos were never going to like Mexican food as much as burgers and French fries. Jesus protested. He recalled seeing long lines of American tourists at a place in Baja California that sold burritos stuffed with roasted steak, salsa fresca and guacamole. They call it “the carne asada burrito,” he said. Why don’t you try adding that to the menu? The tip proved useful, to say the least. Roberto’s expanded north and east, metamorphosing into one of the largest Mexican fast-food chains in the state, then in the Southwest. The carne asada burrito hooked gringos on Mexican food. As Don Roberto came by to double, then triple his meat orders, he urged Don Jesus to start his own carnicería, and promised to buy his meat from him. Jesus launched the Butcher Block. The sales of the two businesses exploded in tandem. Copycat chains inspired by Roberto’s (Alberto’s, Filiberto’s, Gilberto’s, Humberto’s) sourced their meat from the Butcher Block, eager to achieve Roberto’s taste. Several times, an inspector from the U.S. Department of Agriculture told Don Jesus he needed to make changes to comply with federal food safety standards. When he went on as usual, the government shut down the plant.

  Jesus didn’t speak English well and didn’t understand what the USDA required. Marco was the oldest and most responsible of his six children: his English was fluent, he read books, he listened to National Public Radio, he had purchased his own house in Lemon Grove. More important, he had worked in carnicerías alongside his stepfather since he was ten. Jesus asked Marco to oversee the launch of a law-abiding version of the Butcher Block. He promised Marco the managerial position of the company.