“My dearest Rachel!” he said. “I thought I’d never see you again!”
It was. It was him. The shabby man who had lurched from the shadows like an escapee from a mental asylum was Josef’s father, Aaron Landau.
Josef shuddered. His papa looked nothing like the man who’d been dragged away from their home six months ago. His thick brown hair and beard had been shaved off, and his head and face were covered with scraggly stubble. He was thinner too. Too thin. A skeleton in a threadbare suit three sizes too big for him.
Aaron Landau’s eyes bulged from his gaunt face as he turned to look at his children. Josef’s breath caught in his throat and Ruthie cried out and buried her face in Josef’s stomach as their papa pulled the two of them into a hug. He smelled so ripe—like the alley behind a butcher shop—that Josef had to turn his head away.
“Josef! Ruth! My darlings!” He kissed the tops of their heads again and again, then jumped back. He looked around manically, like there were spies everywhere. “We have to go. We can’t stay here. We have to get on board before they stop us.”
“But I have tickets,” Mama said. “Visas.”
Papa shook his head too quickly. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. His eyes looked like they were going to pop out of their sockets. “They’ll stop us. Take me back.”
Ruthie clung to her brother. Papa was scaring her. He scared Josef too.
“Hurry!” Papa said. He pulled the family with him into the stacks of crates, and Josef tried to keep up with him as he darted from place to place, dodging imaginary enemies. Josef gave his mother a frightened glance that said, What’s wrong with Papa? Mama just shook her head, her eyes full of worry.
When they got close to the ramp, Papa hunkered down behind the last of the crates.
“On the count of three, we make a break for it,” he told his family. “Don’t stop. Don’t stop for anything. We have to get on that ship. Are you ready? One. Two. Three.”
Josef wasn’t ready. None of them were. They watched as Aaron Landau ran for the ramp, where other passengers had already queued up to hand their tickets to a smiling man in a sailor’s uniform. Josef’s father threw himself past the sailor and stumbled into the ramp’s railing before righting himself and sprinting up the gangway.
“Wait!” the sailor cried.
“Quickly now, children,” Mama said. Together they hurried to the ramp as best they could, carrying all the suitcases. “I have his ticket,” she told the sailor. “I’m sorry. We can wait our turn.”
The startled man at the front of the line motioned for them to go ahead, and Josef’s mother thanked him.
“My husband is just … eager to leave,” she told the sailor.
He smiled sadly and punched their tickets. “I understand. Oh—let me get someone to help you with those bags. Porter?”
Josef stood in wonder as another sailor—a German man without a Star of David armband, a man who wasn’t a Jew—put a suitcase under each arm and one in each hand and led them up the gangway. He treated them like real passengers. Like real people. And he wasn’t the only one. Every sailor they met doffed his cap at them, and the steward who showed them to their cabin assured them that they could call upon him for anything they needed while on board. Anything at all. Their room was spotless, the bed linens were freshly laundered, and the hand towels were pressed and neatly stacked.
“It’s a trick,” Papa said when the door was closed. He glanced around the little cabin like the walls were closing in. “They’ll come for us soon enough,” he said.
It was just what the Brownshirt had told Josef.
Mama put her hands on Josef’s and Ruthie’s heads. “Why don’t you two go on up to the promenade,” she said softly. “I’ll stay here with your father.”
Josef and Ruth were only too glad to get away from Papa. A few hours later, they watched from the promenade as tugboats pushed the MS St. Louis away from the dock, and passengers threw confetti and celebrated and blew tearful kisses good-bye. Josef and his family were on their way to a new country. A new life.
But all Josef could think about was what terrible things must have happened to his father to make him look so awful and act so scared.
Isabel and her grandfather set her papi in a chair in their little kitchen, and Isabel’s mother, Teresa Padron de Fernandez, ran to the cabinet under the sink. Isabel hurried after her. Mami was very pregnant—she was due in a week’s time—so Isabel knelt down to find the iodine.
Isabel’s father, Geraldo Fernandez, had always been a handsome man, but he didn’t look it now. There was blood in his hair, and the area around one of his eyes was already turning black. When they pulled his white linen shirt off him, his back was covered with welts.
Isabel watched as Mami cleaned his cuts with a washcloth. Papi hissed as she disinfected them with the iodine.
“What happened?” Isabel’s mother asked.
An Industriales baseball game played on the television in the corner, and Isabel’s grandfather turned down the volume.
“There was a riot on the Malecón,” Lito said. “They ran out of food too fast.”
“I can’t stay here,” Papi said. His head was bent low, but his voice was loud and clear. “Not any longer. They’ll come for me.”
Everyone was quiet at that. The only sound was the soft crack of a bat and the roar of the crowd on the television.
Papi had already tried to flee Cuba twice. The first time, he and three other men had built a raft and tried to paddle their way to Florida, but a tropical storm turned them back. The second time, his boat had a motor, but he’d been caught by the Cuban navy and had ended up in jail.
Now it was even harder to escape. For decades, the United States had rescued any Cuban refugees they found at sea and taken them to Florida. But the food shortages had driven more and more Cubans to el norte. Too many. The Americans had a new policy everyone called “Wet Foot, Dry Foot.” If Cuban refugees were caught at sea with “wet feet,” they were sent to the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, at the southern end of Cuba. From there, they could choose to return to Cuba—and Castro—or languish in a refugee camp while the United States decided what to do with them. But if they managed to survive the trip across the Straits of Florida and evade the US Coast Guard and actually set foot on United States soil—be caught with “dry feet”—they were granted special refugee status and allowed to remain and become US citizens.
Papi was going to run away again, and this time, whether he got caught with wet feet or dry feet, he wasn’t coming back.
“There’s no reason to go throwing yourself onto a raft in the ocean,” Lito said. “You can just lie low for a while. I know a little shack in the cane fields. Things will get better. You’ll see.”