I took my place in the line, and just before I made the turn onto the jetway—a move that would take us out of each other’s sight until at least Christmas—I spun around to wave at him one last time. He stood there, arms crossed over his white V-neck shirt, his feet shoulder-width apart, his jeans tucked into laced-up work boots, the soles of them so thick he looked rooted to that cheap carpeting, his face still turned to the fixture, his neck, with its shadow-beard, the color of a tree trunk. I kept craning my own neck around the line that trailed me, waiting for him to look away from the ceiling, for his gaze to meet mine, until the person behind me said, Miss, you can go now, and made me keep moving.
I found him again after I sat down, my bag tucked under the seat in front of me, the safety card—something I never, ever look at anymore—unfolded on my lap. My dad still stood there, his face turning between that imaginary leak in the ceiling and the dotted line of windows on the plane as he scanned them for me. I waved and waved, willing him to see me, to wave back, and we both kept at what we were doing, our attempts at saying something never understood, until the distance between us made it impossible to know when the other gave up.
36
SKIRTING THE EDGES OF THE ISLAND on which my parents were born—the island both even now still think of as home—are some of the most pristine and healthy coral reef systems in existence today. The industrialization of farming that’s likely contributing to the death of reefs elsewhere in the world (with its runoff of pesticides and fertilizers, the things that make canals everywhere such nasty places) just never happened in Cuba, and so that country, inadvertently and thanks to unrelated measures outside of its control, has managed to preserve the very thing I’ve spent my adult life studying and working to understand.
My PI is careful around me when he brings up these facts—or I should say, he is careful to stick to facts, which I very much appreciate. Over the last few months, it’s become clear that a research trip to Cuba will be necessary: we both know that the data we’d collect from Cuba’s reefs would be invaluable to our current research project. If those reefs were anywhere else in the world—if they didn’t surround the island at the root of my family’s biggest heartaches—I would’ve jumped in their waters years ago. I’ve seen the abstracts float across my PI’s desk with the phrase Pending State Department approval leading them off. Our group has submitted the grant proposals; I’ve seen my name on them; I know what will happen should they be funded, should America choose to send me back to a place I’ve only visited via stories, photos, and dreams.
Don’t be worried that I’ll do something ridiculous like go looking for Ariel. For the most part, the world knows where he is, what he’s doing. The Cuban government is good at giving us updates, at releasing photos, year after year, of Ariel in crisp school uniforms, of Ariel speaking before groups of students, of Ariel in his army uniform. And I stopped most of my searching a couple years ago anyway, after a trip back to Miami as the ten-year anniversary of the raid approached, when I went to that house-turned-museum in Little Havana and saw so many of the photos and artifacts I’d already seen from three thousand miles away on my computer screen; I saw many of them again last year, when my mom moved into the other half of Leidy and David’s duplex. I’d come back to help pack up her old place, cleaning out the drawers and closets stuffed with all those useless relics.
—Who’s this kid? asked my niece Angelica, named after David’s mom, who died the year before he married Leidy.
—Oh god, I said. She kept all this?
I took the stack of pictures and flyers from her hands, flipped through the mess of them. Mold framed the edges of most of the papers, and my scientist brain wondered, since Angelica was then only seven, if I should find her a mask to wear while we cleaned up.
—These are from before you were born, I told her.
—Oh. She frowned down at them. Who cares then?
She took the stack back, her hands dirty and her fingertips gray from the long day of sorting through my mother’s memories, and shoved it all in the latest trash bag.
—Keep moving, Tía, she’d said. No time to get reminiscing!