Still on the Ferry

I see I'm crying now. The sky is getting light and still no Machi. Not my baby boy...I say that or think it and I cry. ..Julia appeared by my side. My tears, or needing to pee again, woke her. She sat beside me and asked why I was crying. “I was a bad mother. I did everything wrong. Many things wrong.” She put her arms around me. “You tell me I'm not to blame for my son's struggles yet still believe you failed to protect your son.” I sobbed. “I thought if I gave him politics he would know better than to let oppression take him. Oppression took my son, I couldn't save him.' I'm sobbing racking sobs now. “I just realized we are coming up on Grito Day when the City scheduled it's co-opting Island Day parade, the one where you and I almost lost our boys.” She held me tighter. “You're right, we are coming up on the anniversary of losing our boys on the train.”
I dried my tears on my t shirt and sat up. “I can't remember a single year since I've been in the City when I didn't go to the Parade on Grito so called Island Day, first as onlooker with my parents and later as a marcher with the Partido's protest contingent. Desfile un Dia, Pobreza Todos los Dias.”
Julia said, “Not this year.”
We both looked at three men with fishing nets who walked past us on the path to the right of our shelter. They waved at us and we waved at them. Every morning I saw them on their way to fishing boats they kept on the other side of the dunes.
Julia said, “We lost each other because we almost lost our sons, and found our way back to each other to find our sons.” I feel a wave of outrage, righteous indignation. “No Julia. They are not going to get my son, our sons.”
Julia took off to help the Senoras serve the rice and beans.
On that deck, on the ferry, I walked up close to where Machi was standing with Franz watching Isla Caiman coming closer. I stood as close as I could get to him. There was so much I wanted to say to him. But I hardly ever caught him alone and when I did I never found a way to show myself without pissing him off. I wanted to say, 'I have to keep looking at you to remember, to believe, that you are back inside my life, and maybe not permanently lost to the street and alcohol and weed after all. That every moment I have you, is one more moment I have you. The thought formed in my mind. 'I lived to fight for you (with you) another day. Maybe I can string enough days to keep you alive until we make the revolution that will set up a world with room for you and your friends.' But of course I can't say those things. I picture him walking away with Franz to the other side of the boat, telling me to shut up or go fuck myself. He catches me smiling and says, “What's so funny?” I say, “Conversations I have with you in my own head.” He grinned. “Don't wanna know.”
04 08 11
I'd wanted to tell him, “I'd given up on ever getting you back when I found you just last month. I thought I would die from losing track of you, not even a sighting on the street, for a year.' I pictured myself screaming and tearing my hair and hitting him with my fists. 'A year I lived in hell with you gone and Ori gone. And then to think after all the times I went looking and all your friends I asked, that I found you only because Julia's son David was running from the cops, and his face was on wanted posters all over our barrio. I imagined telling you the story you won't let me tell you. This thing that happened to both of us but still feels like it happened to each of us because you refuse to talk to me. Tell you how that morning after I called in sick from Julia's phone, I promised her I'd go into La Terraza, that terrifying mushroom town in Moon Park, where I had to believe you had been living, to see what I could find. I'd gone in there dozens of times looking for you and not once found even a sign. I went to Moon Park every morning for a week looking for David and I found you.'
He'd got his arm around me and we were looking at the water and even though Franz was with us, or maybe because I imagined Franz was a little on my side, I said these words aloud. “You found me. I just realized now that it was you who decided to let yourself be found.” He didn't step away, but he didn't look at me. Franz looked at me, interested, and I went on. “You appeared. You emerged from the maze of smoky shelters. I saw you running toward me with a beard! I rose from where I'd slumped onto that bench, my bench on the top of Moon Park Hill, where I sat every morning wondering which path among the shacks to take, which way to go, where to look, what to do.” Having Franz listening was making room for me to talk to Machi and his interest was keeping Machi from walking away. I took a chance and went on. “I stood and you were almost beside me. You ran into my arms. After an entire year gone there you were running toward me. This moment I'd longed for and given up on was here and I couldn't believe it, take it in. You burst out of the smoke that always rose from those pieced together homes of the shanty town. We fell into each other and sank down onto the bench arm in arm. I sobbed. I forgot I wanted to kill you for making me crazy. I was almost drunk with happiness.”
He turned and looked at me. Franz said nothing but his attention was rapt.Tears were running down my face but Machi didn't walk away. And now, for the first time, he spoke about the morning we had found each other. “I picked up the conversation right where I broke it off ...”
“The night a year ago when you punched your fist through your bedroom plaster wall and said, "I'm going to go find Pa. I'm not waiting for you." I wanted to apologize for my passivity but he didn't let me interrupt.

“I said, 'Ma, don't cry like a baby.' In the park, I could feel you sobbing and shaking.”
“You were laughing. You held me.”
"I pretty much told you why I let you find me. Remember, I told you I 'd heard you were helping Julia look for David..”
“ You said you were sure he'd gone to the Encampment in Isla Caiman.” I asked you how you knew and you told me I already knew more than I needed to know.”
“And I told you I was sure Pa is in the prison in the Camp.”
“You told me you were going and you asked me to come with you.I 'm going and you can come with me if you want." I turned to Franz, “I could barely believe that he wanted me with him. I could barely contain my joy.”
Franz nodded, “There it was, your future delivered to you by your son. I wish I had that with my Mom.”

Telling Franz was letting me tell Machi. “And so I followed him. We followed him, Julia and I and David's little girl Taina. But not Liani. Up until the last day of screaming fights with Julia David's younger sister refused to come with us. I don't know how Julia was able to leave her behind with Arturo, his three year old twins, and his most recent Babymama.” Machi pointed to where Julia sat with Taina, momentarily still, on her lap. “Maybe Julia left her because Liani's like a middle aged woman, more careful than anybody, and because although we broke up years ago and we were only 12, she's still wanting to keep us apart.”
Taina jumped from Julia's lap and joined us. She hung onto the railing, and called out “doce," twelve dolphins in our pod. I said to Franz, “I like to watch Machi squat beside the little girl.”
What about Liani..she wanted to stay and wanted to keep Taina..Machi's age? Crush on Machi? His g friend instead of Sammy?

04 09 11
5. ON FERRY: MEMORY: THE RIGHT PLACE
The Right Place

“It looks like Caiman is moving toward us.” Franz pointed to the green crescent, looking less like a crocodile the closer we got. “I love this place. Not many any more are born and bred here. Gone to the City where you're from.” He turned to Machi and they walked away. I watched them talking, their heads close, as if they had known each other a long time.
“What shortcut to closeness do they have?” Julia thought about what I'd just said.
“Can't be just that they are young and men?”
“Not elders like we are, traveling to the island looking for lost sons, and for lost fathers, Machi's and Taina's. Maybe they are instantly close to survive? Our men are a species as endangered as the dolphins, targeted for destruction by the empire.”
Julia put her arm around my waist. She pointed to Taina who had revived from her short nap and was leaping with happiness, pointingto the Island and screaming, “Mi Papi, Mi Papi.“Let's forget for one moment and be as joyful as Taina. Look how the sunlight makes the water clear as blue air.
“All this Sunlight water air heat remind me of the real place, the right place...”

“Ventura I remember you telling me years ago that the City never felt quite real, Not for me either. I am always, someplace longing for La Isla. I think it's the Taina in me they didn't manage to kill....
> “....that place always on the edge of my mind showing me that wherever I actually am, was elsewhere, wrong.”
“ Being the right place has to do with the light in our childhood, in our first homes, you in
Ventura and me in the Island...”
“ Scorching bright light fell on trees, red dirt, rough concrete. Some childhood moment in the patio de abuela in Ventura was constructed by my mind into the emblem of the real..”
“.... The City is never quite right except rarely on very sunny days if the light reaches the sidewalk...” “...that terrifying no ozone brightness, the blinding wrongness looks right. More right now that the atmosphere is so thin.)
“...and Here, approaching Isla Caiman, the light is right. I remember that from when I was here when Machi was a boy, and then later with Ori for a Congress of the Partido.”
Taina screamed with joy. I took in a breath and was in tears.
“I'm feeling as if I myself were six years old, forced to leave Ventura for the first time when my Father went to seminary, everything in the City was wrong. I was just a bit younger than Machi when we moved to the City not forever, but it turned into forever. The bad guys had won in Ventura, or rather the good guys my Father conspired with had turned into bad guys in his eyes, and so my father chose exile. (How fucked up that later after meeting Danny and Jimmy and Ori I learned the bad guys were good after all and my father had made a historic error; I learned my whole life in exile was a big mistake,
“....a sentence to life in the other place, the wrong place. 'Julia said. I looked at her. Sometimes she understood exactly what I meant.
04 10 11

Julia said, “Look at Machi. Did you see him glance at you, at your tears, and turn away fast back to Taina.” I wiped my face. “He's tired of this sad and angry woman.” She shook her head. “Or he's trying to hide his own tears. Look at him take Taina's hand. He devotes himself to watching her, to keeping her safe.” I smile. “Or he keeps himself safe by watching her.”
Foreshadow her esm problems and proneness to affairs earlier...

6.MEMORY: THAT FOOL AFFAIR
That Fool Affair

This doesn't work...but what to do...Too many stories being told thru talking..
1. Fool affair

“I just flashed on Machi when he was Taina's age. I want to go back to that age and do it all over, get it right. Was that the year I'd ruined his life? He was her age the year I left the family for that fool affair with the cad whose name I can't bear to say out loud or even think. That was the year Machi liked to play this game: He would take hold of my hand and close his eyes and tell me to keep walking, navigating the Avenue crowds, making sure he didn't hit anyone or anything. That same year Machi decided Ori should have a trophy for father's day. At the trophy store he chose one with a figure of a muscular athlete on top. He dictated the inscription: Fine Nurturing Pa. Where did he get that phrase? How had it all gone bad? I don't believe Ori's in the Camp because I believe he at last got sick of me and left me the way my father always left. I didn't grow up to be not my mother, to be the woman a man wouldn't leave, but just as abandonable as she had been.”

Someplace insert about the falling apart of the burocrazy, the layoffs, and Marina's decision to take a voluntary layoff “a personal sacrifice” as Xiomara or Solly put it

10-11-10
All Those Catastrophes
Julia took my hand and walked me to the prow (bow?)of the Isla Caiman ferry. She wanted to shut me up. “You’d think we’re tourists from the look of us.” She pointed to a distant rise of green and a crescent of sand. “Is that Playa Caracol?” I nodded. “I remember coming here with Ori when we were first together, and with Ori and Machi when he was six years old. That's the beach where Machi nearly drowned. All those catastrophes succeeded each other that same year. The other catastrophes hung between us, unspoken: losing the boys on the subway, my fool affair.” She said, “I remember I cornered you outside the bodega after I heard you'd left Ori and screamed at you, told you you were insane.' “Now I think you were right. What was I thinking? I barely remember what I longed for.” Taina came running to her abuela. She pulled Machi behind her by the hand. "Are we going to that playa? Is this where my Papi went to hide? Where's my Papi?" Machi shushed her. "Where's my Papi?" He repeated her words under his breath. He took hold of my arm and pointed to the harbor in the distance. “That's the navy base, somewhere in there is the prison Camp. You can’t see the Camp from here.”