25
RAFAEL HADN’T known his mother was coming to New York until she showed up at the jail. Yara had come alone, which surprised Rafael: he would’ve expected her to hide behind his grandmother.
Yara had given birth to Rafael when she was little older than he was now. His parents had never been legally married, though they’d lived together in Vieques for the first few years of his life. When Rafael was about three his father had come up to New York, looking for work. The idea had been for Yara and Rafael to follow a month or so later, but that month had somehow turned into a year of waiting to be summoned north.
So Yara had finally taken matters into her own hands, bringing Rafael with her on an unannounced trip. Rafael was too young to remember any of it himself, but what Yara had discovered in New York was that his father was living with another woman.
Looking back, Rafael understood that his mother must have suspected what she was going to find. Nevertheless, she’d decided to stay in New York. A short time later Yara’s mother had come up from Vieques and moved in with them. In Rafael’s earliest memories, he was already living in Jacob Riis with his mother and grandmother. He had never seen his father again, had no actual memory of the man, wouldn’t recognize him if they passed on the street.
When Rafael was twelve his mother had been arrested and sent to prison, and his grandmother had brought him up on her own from there. Rafael gave her most of the credit for seeing that he came up right: she’d been stuck with the hard years, when the temptations of drugs and gangs claimed so many of his classmates from the projects. Rafael had stayed in school, graduating from high school last spring, been working full-time at Alchemy ever since. He loved it at the restaurant, was taking classes so that he could one day become a proper chef, maybe even open a restaurant of his own.
But those dreams were distant now. It was hard to imagine any kind of future at all while in the harsh confines of Rikers. So Rafael focused on the present, and the surprising sight of his mother in the visiting room.
This was the first time Rafael had seen Yara in almost a year. It’d been nearly seven years since they’d last lived together, since her arrest. She’d been caught in her then-boyfriend’s apartment in a raid, charged with possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. Yara had insisted she wasn’t involved, resisted taking a plea till the last possible second, and even then she’d refused to testify against her boyfriend. She’d ended up being sentenced to eight to twelve years and doing over five. Upon her release Yara had decided to return to Vieques. Rafael hadn’t considered going with her: he’d grown up in New York, it was home, and by then his grandmother felt more like his parent than his mother did.
Rafael had gone down to Puerto Rico the last two Christmases, but other than that he hadn’t seen his mother since right after she got out of prison. She hadn’t previously come up to New York since moving back to Vieques: Yara blamed the city for what had happened to her, though Rafael thought that bullshit, just a way of making excuses for herself.
“You didn’t need to come up here,” Rafael said in Spanish as she sat across from him in the visiting room.
“Of course I did,” Yara replied, also in Spanish. Her eyes were already welling with tears. She’d just turned forty, although Rafael thought she looked older: she’d grown heavy, her hair fast turning gray. “My only son in jail.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I should’ve made you come back home with me,” Yara said, a tear escaping. She made no effort to wipe it away, as though she didn’t even know it was there. “It’s this city; it just eats our people up.”
“Don’t cry, Mom,” Rafael said. “I don’t want to see you cry.”
“You were always so good. I know I disappointed you, but I tried.”
Rafael’s own vulnerability came out in anger. “How could you try from a jail cell?” he said.
Yara looked stung; he could see her fighting her own anger down. “I held you in my heart every day I spent in jail,” she said. “I said a prayer for you first thing when I woke up and last thing before I went to sleep.”
Rafael didn’t know why he’d brought it up, why they were rehashing all of this again. But now that it was there it was hard to let it go. “You could have made a deal right away; you could have testified against Emilio. You didn’t have to end up spending all that time in prison.”
Yara finally took out a tissue to wipe the tears off her face, Rafael feeling bloated with guilt and shame for making her suffer more than she already was just by seeing him like this. “It was nothing but hard choices back then,” Yara said. “If I could make things come out different I would.”
“I know, Mom,” Rafael said, trying to make peace.
“I wish you’d come back with me after I’d got out. Things can be hard in Vieques too, but people stick together there.”
“I thought New York was where I belonged,” Rafael said, realizing as he said it that he was no longer sure it was true. “One thing I’ve learned in here—I’ll always be a Puerto Rican, not an American.”
“When this case gets cleared up, maybe you can think about coming down to Vieques to live. What does your lawyer say?”
“The DA offered a plea if I’d do twenty-five years. Turned that down, so now we got to fight it.”
“I don’t understand why they can’t just clear this up.”
Rafael had felt the same way when he’d first been arrested, but not anymore. Now he found it naive. “Nobody cares what really happened,” he said. “Just find the first Puerto Rican who might have a reason to shoot the white guy, put him in jail for it. How it’s always been.”
Yara started crying again, more fiercely this time. “I know I messed things up with you. This city, I just couldn’t live here anymore. I haven’t been there for you when you needed me.”
“You didn’t need to come back here,” Rafael said, coldness seeping back into his voice. He wasn’t going to trust his mother to be there for him, wasn’t going to open up to her. She couldn’t help him here—she’d never helped him, and he didn’t need to be let down right now. “I’m going to get through this same way I have everything else—on my own.”