Before We Were Free (2 page)

For the rest of the afternoon, I mope around the house, until Mami sends me over to help Chucha move in. Chucha has been part of our family for as long as anyone can remember and has taken care of every baby since Papi was born. In fact, Chucha took care of me, too, as she likes to remind me. “You’re never too old to mind me,” she’ll say. “After all, I was the one who changed your diapers.” What a thing to be reminded of! At least she’s nice enough never to bring it up in public.

First thing we move over is Chucha’s coffin. Porfirio, the gardener, balances it across the wheelbarrow, and Chucha and I walk on either side, holding on to each end. I know it’s pretty strange, but this is Chucha’s bed she sleeps in every night! She says she wants to prepare herself for the next life. Chucha’s people came from Haiti, where they do things different from us.

Inside the coffin, we’ve packed up all her purple clothes. That’s another thing. Chucha always wears purple because she once made a promise that she would always wear purple. But she’s never said why she made such a promise or to whom or why she decided on purple. Yellow or even lavender would be a lot more cheerful.

Chucha also has dreams where she can see the future. Mundín likes to say, “You would, too, if you slept in a coffin!” As a matter of fact, a few weeks ago, Chucha dreamed that my cousins would be leaving for a city of tall buildings before my cousins even knew they would be leaving for New York.

Strange as Chucha is, I’m glad she’s moving in with us. I feel safer when she’s around. And now especially with everyone gone, it’ll be comforting to have Chucha in our house.

“Chucha,” I ask her after we’ve moved all her things over, “how soon do you think I’ll see the Garcías?”

Chucha narrows her shiny eyes. Her wrinkled black face wrinkles even more when she concentrates. She doesn’t say anything for a while. Then she looks straight at me and says one of her riddles: “You will see them before they come back but only after you are free.”

I feel too scared to ask her when that might possibly be.

At supper, Papi explains that the construction business isn’t doing all that well, that we’re going to have to economize, that the
familia
is going to be scattered for a while—

“For how long?” I want to know.

Mami gives me her warning look that reminds me that I am interrupting. Little parrot or not, I am almost twelve and have to learn some manners.

Suddenly, a black moth flaps into the room. Talk about interrupting! It’s as big as my hand. “A bat!” Lucinda screams, and ducks under the table.

“It’s not a bat. It’s a black butterfly,” Mundín observes, leaping up to catch it.

“Don’t touch it!” Mami cries. We all know from Chucha that a black moth is an omen of death. Mundín stops in his tracks. The moth lifts off and disappears into the night.

“You can come out now, Lucinda,” Mami calls in a teasing voice. But she looks pretty shaky herself.

Lucinda rises slowly from under the table. Tears are rolling down her face. “This place is just . . . just . . . just . . . so . . . sad,” she sobs, then storms out of the room.

Mami and Papi exchange a tense look. Papi stands up from his place at the table. As he goes by me, he plants a kiss on top of my head. “My grown-up baby girl,” he says.

I feel proud to be acting more mature than Lucinda, but the truth is, I’m just as sad even if I’m not showing it.

After supper, I try tidying my room to make myself feel better. But when I empty the contents of Carla’s schoolbag on my bed— her neatly sharpened pencils, her notebooks with pictures of kittens tangled in balls of yarn, her funny eraser that she got for winning the recitation contest on Independence Day last February—I feel the sadness stir up again like a storm inside me. There’s no way I’ll be able to use my cousin’s supplies. I pack everything back in her bag and stick it in my closet. Or so I think. A little later, I crawl into bed and jump right back out. I’ve felt something hard, a cockroach or scorpion, under the covers. But when Chucha draws back the sheets, we find the eraser in the shape of the Dominican Republic.

two

¡
Shhh
!

The day after my cousins leave, Papi goes to work early, taking Mundín with him. Now that none of my uncles are around, Papi has a lot more to do at the office.

I’m alone at the breakfast table, already feeling how long and lonely this Saturday is going to be without Carla. Chucha and Mami and Ursulina, the cook, are in the kitchen, discussing what’s needed at the market. Lucinda is still sleeping her beauty sleep that will last all morning long. Outside, Porfirio is watering the ginger plants, singing a Mexican song.

The woman I love ran off with another—
I followed their footsteps and murdered them both.

What a cheerful start to my day!
I’m thinking when, suddenly, Porfirio stops singing. I glance out the window.

A half-dozen black Volkswagens are crawling up our driveway.

Before the cars come to a complete stop, the doors open, and a stream of men pour out all over the property. In their dark glasses, they look like gangsters in the American movies that sometimes come to town.

I run to get Mami, but she’s already headed for the door. Four men stand in our entryway, all dressed in khaki pants with small holsters at their belts and tiny revolvers that don’t look real. The head guy—or at least he does all the talking—asks Mami for Carlos García and his family. I know something is really wrong when Mami says, “Why? Aren’t they home?”

But then, instead of going away, this guy asks if his men can search our house. Mami, who I’m sure will say, “Do you have a
permiso
?” steps aside like the toilet is overflowing and these are the plumbers coming to the rescue!

I trail behind Mami. “Who are they?” I ask.

Mami swings around, a terrified look on her face, and hisses, “Not now!”

I race to find Chucha, who’s in the entryway, shaking her head at the muddy boot prints. I ask her who these strange men are.

“SIM,” she whispers. She makes a creepy gesture of cutting off her head with her index finger.

“But
who
are the SIM?” I ask again. I’m feeling more and more panicked at how nobody is giving me a straight answer.

“Policia secreta,”
she explains. “They go around investigating everyone and then disappearing them.”

“
Secret
police?”

Chucha gives me her long, slow, guillotine nod that cuts off any further questions.

They go from room to room, looking in every nook and cranny. When they come through the hall door to the bedroom part of the house, Mami hesitates. “Just a routine search,
doña,
” the head guy says. Mami smiles wanly, trying to show she has nothing to hide.

In my room, one guy lifts the baby-doll pajamas I left lying on the floor as if a secret weapon is hidden underneath. Another yanks the covers back from my bed. I hold on tight to Mami’s ice-cold hand and she tightens her hold on mine.

The men go into Lucinda’s room without knocking, opening up the jalousies, lifting the bedskirt and matching skirt on her vanity, plunging their bayonets underneath. My older sister sits up in bed, startled, her pink-foam rollers askew from sleeping on them. A horrible red rash has broken out on her neck.

When the men are done searching the room, Mami gives Lucinda and me her look that means business. “I want you both in here while I accompany our visitors,” she says with strained politeness.

I run to her side. “Mami, no!” I start wailing. I don’t want her to go with these creepy policemen. What if they hurt her?

The head guy turns to me. With his dark glasses on, I can’t see his eyes, only the reflection of a terrified girl clinging to her mother. “What are you crying about, eh?
¡Tranquila!
” he orders.

It’s as if his steely command cuts off the breath in my lungs. I can’t even move when Mami gently undoes my hands from around her waist. She follows the men out, pulling the door closed behind her.

Lucinda turns to me. She’s scratching the rash on her neck, even though Mami has told her not to. “What is going on?”

“Chucha said they’re secret police,” I tell her. “They were asking for the Garcías, but Mami acted like she didn’t know.” My voice breaks when I think of Mami all alone with them right this moment.

“The SIM know perfectly well where the Garcías are,” Lucinda says. “They just want an excuse to traipse through here. And of course, they’d love to get their hands on Papi.”

“But why?”

Lucinda looks at me as if I’m a lot dumber than she thought I was. “Don’t you know anything, Anita?” Her eyes stray up to my hair. “You’ve got to do something with those bangs,” she says, brushing them back with her hand. It’s the closest she can come to saying something nice when she sees how scared I am.

Lucinda and I wait in her room, listening at the door, tense with concentration. When we don’t hear noises anymore, Lucinda turns the knob carefully, and we tiptoe out into the hall.

The SIM seem to have left. We spot Chucha crossing the patio toward the front of the house, a broom over her shoulder like a rifle. She looks like she’s going to shoot the SIM for tracking mud on her clean floors.

“Chucha!” We wave to her to come talk to us.

“Where’s Mami?” I ask, feeling the same mounting panic I felt earlier when Mami left with the SIM. “Is she okay?”

“She’s on the
teléfono,
calling Don Mundo,” Chucha explains.

“What about . . . ?” Lucinda wrinkles her nose instead of saying their names.

“Esos animales,”
Chucha says, shaking her head. Those animals, the SIM, searched every house in the compound, getting more and more destructive when they didn’t find what they were looking for, tromping through Chucha’s room, turning over her coffin and tearing off the velvet lining. They also stormed through Porfirio’s and Ursulina’s rooms. “Those two are so terrified,” Chucha concludes, “they are packing their things and leaving the house.”

But the SIM stay. They sit in their black Volkswagens at the top of our drive, blocking our way out.

At dinner, Papi says everything will be fine. We just have to act as if the SIM aren’t there and carry on with normal life. But I notice that, like the rest of us, he doesn’t eat a single bite. And is it really normal that Mami and Papi have us all sleep on mattresses on their bedroom floor with the door locked?

We lie in the dark, talking in whispers, Mundín on a mat by himself, Lucinda and I on a larger mattress, and Papi and Mami on theirs they placed right beside ours.

“How come you don’t just stay up on your bed?” I ask.

“Keep your voice down,” Mami reminds me.

“Okay, okay,” I whisper. But I still don’t get an answer. “And what about Chucha?” I ask. “She’s all by herself at the back of the house.”

“Don’t worry,” Mundín says, “I don’t think a bullet can get through that coffin!”

“Bullets!” I sit right up in bed.

“Shhhh!” my whole family reminds me.

Those black cars sit there for days and days—sometimes there’s only one, sometimes as many as three. Every morning, when Papi leaves for the office, one of the cars starts up its colicky motor and follows him down the hill. In the evening, when he comes home, it comes back with him. I don’t know when those SIM ever go to their own houses to eat their suppers and talk with their kids.

“Are they really policemen?” I keep asking Mami. It doesn’t make any sense. If the SIM are policemen, secret or not, shouldn’t we trust them instead of being afraid of them? But all Mami will say is “Shhh!” Meanwhile, we can’t go to school because something might happen to us. “Like what?” I ask. Like what Chucha said about people disappearing? Is that what Mami worries will happen to us? “Didn’t Papi say we should carry on with normal life?”

“Anita,
por favor,”
Mami pleads, collapsing in a hall chair. She leans forward and whispers in my ear, “Please, please, you must stop asking questions.”

“But why?” I whisper back. I can smell her shampoo, which smells like coconuts in her hair.

“Because I don’t have any answers,” she replies.

Not that Mami is the only one I try talking to.

My brother, Mundín, who’s two years older, sometimes explains things to me. But this time when I ask him what’s going on, he looks worried and whispers, “Ask Papi.” He’s biting his nails again, something he stopped doing when he turned fourteen in August.

I try asking Papi.

One evening when the phone rings, I follow him into our living room. I hear him say something about some butterflies in a car accident.

“Butterflies in a car accident?” I ask, puzzled.

He seems startled that I’m in the room. “What are you doing here?” he snaps.

I put my hands on my hips. “Honestly, Papi! I live here!” I can’t believe he’s asking me what I’m doing in our own living room! Of course, he immediately apologizes. “Sorry,
amorcito,
you startled me.” His eyes are moist, as if he’s holding back tears.

“So what about those butterflies, Papi?”

“They’re not real butterflies,” he explains softly. “It’s just . . . a nickname for some very special ladies who had an . . . accident last night.”

“What kind of an accident? And why are they called butterflies anyhow? Don’t they have a real name?”

Again a
shhh
.

My last resort is asking Lucinda. My older sister has been in a vile mood since the SIM cornered us in our own house. Lucinda loves parties and talking on the phone, and she hates being cooped up. She spends most of the time in her room, trying out so many hairstyles that I’m sure that when we finally leave the compound and go to the United States of America, Lucinda will be bald.

“Lucinda,
por favor,
pretty please, tell me what is going on?” I promise her a back rub that she doesn’t have to pay me for.

Lucinda puts her hairbrush down on her vanity and makes a sign for me to follow her to the patio out back.

“We should be okay out here,” she whispers, looking over her shoulder.

“Why are you whispering?” In fact, everyone has been talking in whispers and low voices this last week, as if the house is full of fussy babies who’ve finally fallen asleep.

Lucinda explains. The SIM have probably hidden microphones in the house and are monitoring our conversations from their VWs.

“Why are they treating us like criminals? We haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Shhh!” Lucinda hushes me. For a moment she looks doubtful about continuing to explain things to a little sister who can’t keep her voice down. “It’s all about T-O-N-I,” she says, spelling out our uncle’s name in English. “A few months ago, he and his friends were involved in a plot to get rid of our dictator.”

“You mean. . . .” I don’t even have to say our leader’s name. Lucinda nods solemnly and puts a finger to her lips.

Now I’m
really
confused. I thought we liked El Jefe. His picture hangs in our front entryway with the saying below it: IN THIS HOUSE, TRUJILLO RULES. “But if he’s so bad, why does Mrs. Brown hang his picture in our classroom next to George Washington?”

“We have to do that. Everyone has to. He’s a dictator.”

I’m not really sure what a dictator does. But this is probably not a good time to ask.

It turns out that the SIM discovered the plot and most of our uncle’s friends were arrested. As for Tío Toni, nobody knows where he is. “He might be hiding out or they”—Lucinda looks over her shoulder. I know just who she means—“they might have him in custody.”

“Will they disappear him?”

Lucinda seems surprised that I know about such matters. “Let’s hope not,” she sighs. Tío Toni is a special favorite of hers. At twenty-four, he’s not that much older than she, at fifteen, and he is very handsome. All her girlfriends have crushes on him. “Ever since the SIM uncovered that plot, they’ve been after the family. That’s why everyone’s left. Tío Carlos and Mamita and Papito —”

“Why don’t we leave, too, since we’re not going to school anyway?”

“And abandon Tío Toni?” Lucinda shakes her head vigorously. Her pretty auburn hair is up in this hairdo called a chignon, like Princess Grace wears in her magazine wedding pictures. It comes undone and cascades down her back. “What if he comes back? What if he needs our help?” Her voice has risen above her usual whispering.

For once in the last few weeks, it’s my turn to tell someone else in our house, “SHHHH!”

About two weeks after my cousins leave, Mr. Washburn comes for a visit. He has been stopping by briefly every day since the SIM raid. “How’re those little ole bugs?” he asks mysteriously, looking out the window to where the black Volkswagens are still parked. Papi always replies, “Still biting.”

But this evening, Mr. Washburn has a proposition to make. He sits in the study with Papi, talking in English. Mami looks from one to the other as if she’s at a tennis match eagerly awaiting the outcome of the game. Unlike Papi, Mami has a hard time with English.

“Sounds like a great idea,” my father is saying. “Anita!” He calls me in from the hallway, where I’ve been trying to be invisible so no one will ask me to leave. “We’re going to have neighbors. What do you think of that?”

Just as long as the neighbors aren’t the SIM, I’ll be glad for anyone living in the compound with us. It’s creepy being in a place with so many empty houses. Besides, I’m so lonely and bored without Carla or any of my other cousins around. “Who’s moving in?” I ask.

“
El señor
Washburn,” my mother says, smiling. It’s the happiest I’ve seen her in weeks. With someone from the United States embassy living next door, the SIM might not bother us anymore.

But the best news of the evening is that Mr. Washburn has a family that will be joining him—a wife and two kids!

“How old are they?” I interrupt.

“Cotorrita,”
Mami reminds me.

“Sammy’s twelve and Susie will be fifteen in February.”

“I’m going to be twelve next week!” I blurt out in English. Mami hushes my rudeness again, but I can tell she is proud of my being confident in a language she finds so hard to learn.

Mr. Washburn gives me a wide smile. “Happy birthday in advance. And by the way, young lady, you speak English very well.”