Chapter 7

7

FRANCISCO’S SON OMAR HAD NOT BEEN HOME IN DAYS. THAT WAS UNUSUAL.

Francisco stood on the dirt road that led up to the house and waited that first night, crossing his arms and uncrossing them and crossing them again, impatient, listening for footsteps in the dark. He heard crickets singing in the weeds and the rustle of the ocean, but there were no sounds to indicate the boy’s approach. The moon was behind the clouds. After a while, so tired he could hardly stand, Francisco went back inside and burned a candle and waited in a stiff wooden chair. He fell asleep there with his head bent back over one of the slats, and when he woke to the crowing roosters in the morning he had a pain that reached from the top of his scalp all the way down between his shoulder blades. Trying to stretch it out only made the pain worse. He rubbed his neck with his fingers to no avail. Slowly he stood up and shuffled to Omar’s bedroom at the back of the house. His son was not there. Francisco went back outside, this time into the bright blaring sun, and stood again on the road, peering down the length of it. It was bordered by tall grass and small fruit trees, and the roadbed was muddied at this time of year—muddied but today untouched. Theirs was the only house this far out at the edge of the bay. No one else came this way. If the mud showed no footprints, then it meant that Omar had not come home.

Francisco trudged inside. He could have stood outside all day, but what would that accomplish? He had work to do, fish to catch and to sell. He could go looking for the boy, too, he supposed, but how? Aimlessly walking through fields and city streets, calling Omar’s name? Going to La Boca and hoping to find a single errant boy among thousands of men? Both would be pointless, and, as for the latter, he refused to step foot there. La Boca was Francisco’s name for the canal, how he thought of it in his mind: a mouth, a gaping hole, ravenously consuming everything in its path. It was as his hero, the great Belisario Porras, had said: Panamá was being swallowed up by the United States. Francisco refused to be swallowed, too. He refused to wade into enemy territory among that army of invaders. That his son decided to do it day after day was a grave disappointment, a humiliation that he found nearly intolerable.

The next morning, Francisco went out to sea and did what he had done his entire life: fish. It was the same thing his father before him had done, one of the truly honorable professions, Francisco believed. For as long as people had inhabited this land, they had fished from its waters, its rivers and seas. The very name Panamá meant “abundance of fish.”

Francisco unfastened his boat, which was tied to a post that stood between two large rocks on the shore, and climbed inside. He shoved himself off and battled against the choppy, brusque waves until he was out far enough to cast his net into the water, then slowly he paddled. The boat wobbled. The sky was pink with morning light. As he paddled, he stared at his hands, at his fingers that would not work the way they used to. They were stiff and stubborn. Like him, he supposed. They hurt when he held the paddle these days. Where was Omar? Why had he not come home? Had something happened to him? Francisco tried to put that last thought out of his mind. Maybe it was nothing. After all, Omar was old enough now that he made his own choices, as he had made abundantly clear. Maybe he had found a new place to stay, a place all to himself, and had not told him about it. And of course Omar would not tell him since they were not speaking and had not been speaking for all of six months. So maybe that was it—a new place—that was all. And yet, Francisco felt the frantic pulse of a hummingbird inside his chest. He sighed and peered over the side of the boat at the deep, murky water rippling past. Every day out here by himself, he tried to see through it, down to the bottom, to the things that were lost. But he never saw what he wanted to see.

***

THE CITY FISH market was attached to another, larger market that sold poultry and fruit. Every day after netting his catch, Francisco paddled over, tied his boat at the pier, and hauled his bag up onto land. He carried it through the stench and noise of the other market until he got to the fish market, where he set the bag down and dragged it across the slick, bloody floor straight to the stall of the only buyer he ever used, a man named Joaquín who lived in the city and who, Francisco had found, paid the best prices of anyone there.

Joaquín was a bear of a man, with broad, rounded shoulders and a neck as wide as his head, but his distinguishing feature was the grin he commonly had on his face. Francisco had been doing business with him for nearly twenty years by then, and although the grin went away at times, it always came back.

“My friend! How are you?” Joaquín said when Francisco walked up.

Francisco did not answer, and Joaquín bent down to get a good look at his face. “You look terrible,” Joaquín said.

“I did not sleep well.”

Joaquín patted the table next to him. “Dump them out here. Hopefully the fish today look better than you.”

The catch that morning had been chiefly cod and corvina, with one lone lobster somehow mixed in. Everything was still stiff-alive, in the liminal state between life and death, and when Francisco poured the fish out onto the table, they twitched.

With his bare hands, Joaquín began to sort through. “Why didn’t you sleep well?” he asked. “You had bad dreams?”

“No.”

“No? That is like me. I never have a bad dream. I never have a good dream, either. When I sleep, I sleep. Valentina, however, is a different story. My wife has the sorts of dreams that wake her up in the middle of the night. But the worst part is that she proceeds to wake me up to tell me about them, as if there is a rule that we should share the same dream. I love my wife as you know, and we share many things, but I do not believe we need to share that. ‘Let me sleep, woman!’ I want to say.”

Francisco nodded. He knew Joaquín loved to talk.

“One time she had a dream about a horse whose four legs were cut off at the knees and yet it was trying to run, and she woke up sobbing. ‘Isn’t it sad?’ she kept asking me. ‘But it is not a real horse,’ I pointed out. A mistake. I should not have said that. She went from being sad about an imaginary horse to being mad at me for not being sad about the imaginary horse. We were up for an hour in a fight over it!” Joaquín shook his head. “Lately she has been having bad dreams about the house. The house disappears in a puff of smoke, the house is devoured by cockroaches. I told you, didn’t I, about the rumor circulating that everyone in her hometown will have to move? Everyone! Even her sister, who still lives in their childhood home.”

Francisco nodded again. Joaquín had told him numerous times that the North Americans wanted to build a dam in Gatún, causing everyone in that town to move.

“Yes, well, I try not to judge. Why is it that her sister still lives in that house in the first place? And she lives there alone! Why is she not married by now? Don’t answer that. I know the answer, and if you saw her, you would know the answer, too. But there must be some man somewhere who does not mind her looks.” Joaquín grinned. “As I said, I try not to judge. And of course I do understand that she would have an attachment to the house where she grew up. Myself? I have been to that house, and between you and me, I prefer my apartment in the city. Even so, I do understand. The house is important—to both her sister and Valentina. They have memories there. The thought of having to desert it, of it being destroyed...” Joaquín shook his head. All this time he had been sorting the fish, and now he stopped. “I’m sorry. Let’s talk about happier things. How is your boy? I do not hear much about him anymore.”

Francisco grimaced. The last thing he wanted was to talk about Omar.

“Oye, did you hear me? I asked how is your boy? What is he doing these days?”

Francisco scanned the market, searching for a way he might change the subject, but all he saw was vendors doing business with clients, everyone around him carrying on. The sound of voices mingled in the air amid the brackish odor of fish.

“Have you taught him how to fish yet?” Joaquín asked.

“No.”

“No? How old is he now?”

“Seventeen.”

“Well, what are you waiting for?”

Years ago, Francisco had taken the boy fishing. He did not always know how to be a good father, the ways to guide a young boy, but he knew how to fish, and that, if nothing else, was something he could pass along to his son. The outing, however, had not gone as planned. Omar had seemed terrified from the moment they pushed off from the shore, gripping the sides of the boat, and by the time Francisco asked him to open the net on the floor by his feet, somehow, in unrolling it, Omar managed to tangle the whole thing. It had taken Francisco a full ten minutes to unravel it, and when at last that was done, he showed Omar how to tie it to the side of the boat. A basic knot, but even at that, Omar had struggled. “Calm yourself,” Francisco had said with some concern. Maybe the boy was not cut out for fishing. But it was not until the poorly knotted net slipped into the ocean that Francisco suspected the true source of Omar’s fear. The water was powerful, and Omar had a connection to it beyond what he knew. Yet it seemed that the boy could sense it somehow. Quickly, Francisco had snatched the net from the water before it sank, and when he sat back on his heels, holding it up, he had said, “You see? Everything is okay.” But Omar sat rigidly, looking as though he might cry. He did not relax until they stepped back onto land. By then, Francisco knew with certainty what he had seen. Not wanting to subject Omar to a torment that was beyond his comprehension, he did not ask his son to go fishing again.

“Eh, maybe it makes no difference,” Joaquín said, brushing past Francisco’s silence.

“What?”

Joaquín began weighing the fish as he went on. “Do you know the number of times I have offered to take my son Horacio around the market, to teach him about my profession? But each time I bring it up he tells me no. ‘The world is changing,’ he says. ‘The world is bigger than fish.’ Of course he is right in a way. The world is changing before our eyes, is it not? But that has always been so, and still people need fish.” Joaquín frowned at the cod he had just set on the scale. “This one is not good. I can keep it to feed to the dogs, but I cannot pay you for this one.”

Francisco looked. “What is wrong with it?”

“The color is not good.”

Joaquín grabbed the fish by the tail and flung it across the room. It skidded across the floor and stopped when it hit the wall. Immediately, three dogs crowded around and began fighting for it.

Joaquín grinned. “Now they have a treat.” He laid the next fish on the scale and carried on. “The problem with young people is that they will not listen to us. They think that after spending half the amount of time on this earth, they somehow know twice as much as we do.”

Joaquín was almost done weighing. So far there were seventeen fish today by Francisco’s count, not including the one that had gone to the dogs. Seventeen fish should come out to 35￠, give or take, enough to buy another day of existence. Of course, Omar was earning money now, too, but Francisco considered it blood money, and even if Omar had offered to help pay for their expenses—things like coffee and bread—Francisco would have refused.

Joaquín slapped the last fish down on the scale. Satisfied, he tossed it onto the glossy heap with the others. On the floor beneath the table was a pink puddle of blood.

“Eighteen today, friend, plus the lobster,” Joaquín said. He counted out the coins and handed them to Francisco.

“So what will he do?” Francisco asked.

“Who?”

“Horacio.”

Joaquín rolled his eyes. “I do not know. He earns money here and there, but he does not have the sort of job he can rely on. Nothing steady, you understand? Valentina tells me that just because he has no interest in the fish market does not mean all is lost. He could still find a respectable job. As long as he does not work for the Yankees and their canal, I guess.” Joaquín snorted.

Francisco’s face burned. He stayed quiet.

“Children,” Joaquín said. “What can you do?”

Slowly, Francisco nodded. But standing there, he felt exposed, as if Joaquín knew something dark and shameful about him, or anyway about Omar, which by extension implicated him, and suddenly he just wanted to leave, to get out from under the glare.

He turned to go. As he walked away, he heard Joaquín yell, “Until tomorrow, paisa!” But Francisco, in his searing humiliation, said nothing in return. And when one of the dogs, a dog with speckled black-and-white fur, came over sniffing at his feet, Francisco shoved it aside so hard that it whimpered, and he would feel bad about that for the rest of the day.

***

TWENTY YEARS AGO, the first time Francisco saw Esme, she was standing in the square in front of the Catedral Metropolitana. She was wearing a bright purple dress with a ruffled top and a skirt that hung to the ground. Her raven-dark hair was parted in the center and pulled into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. At the time Francisco was twenty-two years old. He had seen many striking women before, but not a woman like Esme, who, even from a distance, Francisco could tell had the darkest eyes he had ever encountered, deep-set and rimmed by the darkest lashes, like the wings of a bat. She had a mole beneath the outer corner of her left eye, like a drop of ink, as though the darkness had overflowed and left a mark.

Francisco was mesmerized. He could not stop looking at her. Esme was talking to a friend in the square, and when she sensed Francisco staring, she turned her head to meet his gaze. Francisco felt himself shiver. Now the darkness was trained upon him. Her friend turned, too, but Francisco took no notice of her. Everything other than Esme dissolved. He could see only her, etched out in relief from the rest of the world.

The day was overcast, and clouds roiled in the sky, promising rain. Francisco walked across the square as if drawn. He could barely feel his feet touching the ground. When he came to Esme he said, “I beg your pardon. My name is Francisco. I would be pleased to meet you.” He held out his hand. She did not give him hers—neither her hand nor her name. She smelled like a flower. He repeated himself. “I beg your pardon. My name is Francisco. I would be pleased to meet you.” She kept her dark eyes pinned on him and he felt oddly entranced. There was some kind of magic in the depth of those eyes. Her friend giggled. At that, Francisco realized he still had his hand out in midair. He tried to lower his arm but found that he couldn’t. His arm simply would not move. It was as if it had been turned into stone. Could that be? Panicked, Francisco broke Esme’s gaze and looked down. As soon as he did, his arm fell to his side. He wiggled his fingers to make sure they still worked. He shook his arm and then shook his head, wondering what had happened to him.

Afraid to look up again, Francisco backed away, then turned and hurried across the square. He ducked into an alley and flattened himself against a cool wall. After a minute, he peeked around the corner, but when he looked, both the girl and her friend were gone.

***

IT WAS ONLY a dream. It must have been. That is what Francisco kept telling himself in the days after. Lunacy to think that a woman’s gaze could render him, or even part of him, immobile. He was a man who dealt in the physical world. If he could hold something in his hand, then he knew it existed. If he could smell something or taste it or hear it or see it, then he believed it was real. Everything else—mystery, faith, magic most of all—held little meaning for him.

Down the road from his house, nearly a half mile away, there was a woman, Do?a Ruiz, who claimed she could see the future, that one’s fate could be mapped out in the lines around one’s mouth, and that she could communicate with the dead. People came from all over the city to see her, and once, after the fire of 1894, a fire that left five thousand people without homes, the line for her services was so long that it stretched all the way down the long dirt road to Francisco’s small house. Francisco had gone out to the line of unfortunate beings and studied them one by one—a woman with a gold hoop through her nose, a man who stood biting his nails to the quick, a woman holding the hands of two children who were only as tall as her knees. The line went on and on. He looked at the people with pity, and when they looked back at him and asked him, as some of them did, what he was doing, he laughed. What was he doing? What were they doing but wasting their time? Even after Do?a Ruiz walked partway down the road and shouted at him to leave her paying customers alone, Francisco laughed. Even after Do?a Ruiz crossed her eyes and spit on the grass and said, “You will see,” and even after five dead frogs appeared belly-up on his property and his best hen stopped squawking and died, Francisco merely shrugged. Others might have thought there was something magical about these occurrences, but he knew better. There had been so much rain that week that the frogs had simply drowned, and the hen—well, she was just old.

But the girl made Francisco rethink all of that.

He went back to the square, hoping to see her again. He stood in the exact same spot and looked in the exact same direction at the exact same time of day, but she did not appear.

And then one day when he was out in his boat, he saw another boat in the distance, not too far away. That in itself was typical. Other men fished those waters, of course. What was strange, what caught Francisco’s breath in his throat, was that the boat was sailing toward him, and when it was thirty or so feet away, he saw that the person inside the boat was the girl. She was wearing a simple white dress this time, but her raven hair was pulled back in a bun at the nape of her neck just like before, so glossy that it shone like glass in the sun. Francisco waved, but she did not wave back. Quickly, Francisco dragged in his nets and paddled out to where she was, his heart beating hard. The morning was bright and perfectly clear. He paddled closer and closer... and then he seemed to sail right through her. He looked back over his shoulder, but now there was only the open empty surface of the water. He turned in every direction, and she was not there. But she had been there only a moment earlier! Francisco peered over the side of his boat and gazed into the water. Had she capsized? Or sunk? That seemed impossible, but how many other explanations could there be? Francisco sat back on his heels, mystified. She had been there and now she was not. Was he losing his mind? He had been a perfectly rational man until now. It was as though this woman, whoever she was, had cast a spell over him, as though one instance of looking straight into her eyes had been enough to make him completely possessed.

Francisco smelled her before he saw her again. He was at the fish market, selling off his catch, and Joaquín was standing in front of him with his hands in the pockets of his stained apron, waiting to see what Francisco had brought. They were new acquaintances then, two young men who had done only a few transactions with each other. As Francisco opened the bag that day, it released not the briny, coarse odor of fish but a powdery, delicate fragrance.

“Do you smell that?” he asked.

“Smell what?” Joaquín said. “The fish?”

“No.”

“Because if the fish smells rotten already, then I do not want to buy it.”

“Not the fish.” Francisco inhaled the sweetness again. “Something... like flowers.”

“Flowers?” Joaquín said. “We are in a fish market, not a field, my friend!”

Francisco, still holding the top of the bag open so that Joaquín could inspect the fish for their fleshiness and sheen, turned to look back over his shoulder. The powdery aroma grew stronger. The market was crowded. Raw fish lay on pallets and tables, dripping seawater and blood onto the floor. Sellers wandered about. Francisco kept turning his head, trying to identify the source of the sweet smell, when across the market he saw the dark-eyed girl who had been haunting his dreams. Instantly, he dropped the bag. Joaquín yelled, “Hey! Where are you going? We are not done here!” Francisco walked quickly, afraid that, as had happened on the water, as soon as he got to her, she would disappear again, but when he was within several feet of her, she was still there, and as he barreled closer, she looked at him in alarm. He stopped when he was right in front of her. The powder-like scent was overpowering now. Francisco reached out his hand to touch her arm, just to make sure she was real. She creased her dark brows and yanked her arm away.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I wanted to see...” He had the good sense to stop himself and clear his throat. “I beg your pardon. My name is Francisco. I would be pleased to meet you.”

As she had in the square, the girl stood still, expressionless. As he had not in the square, Francisco also stood still. By now, he had ascribed so much power to her—though in actuality she had done nothing at all—that he was almost afraid of her. Almost. This time, though, he refused to run.

“If you would allow me,” he said, “I would be honored to take you for a walk.”

He waited, looking into her eyes, awash in the smell of flowers, his heart beating with the wildness of the wind-whipped sea.

Esme looked him in the eye and was impressed to find that for as long as she looked, he held her gaze. She had not recognized him at first as he charged across the market toward her, but now—yes, she remembered his face. He was handsome. He had a strong chin and dark, hooded eyes. As she looked at him, she thought about how all her life men had been scared of her, like skittish field mice. Men looked at her and stared, and she had learned to let them because usually it went no further than that. They stared for a while and then they tore themselves away, shaking their heads as if there was a ringing in their ears or a cobweb in their brain that they were trying to work loose. The bolder men would, after staring, say something banal, and Esme had found that if she did nothing at all, it rattled them so much that they scurried away. Bemused and disappointed, she watched them go. Men were cowards. Every once in a while, she looked at herself in a pane of glass held at an angle to the sun to see what they saw. But when she looked, she saw merely a girl with dark eyes and a long aquiline nose. She saw no reason why a man should run from her in fear. And yet they did. And that was the last she saw of those men. None had the nerve to find her again and not one, in all her eighteen years, had had the balls to ask her out properly. Not one, until then.

***

THE COURTSHIP WAS easy, all things considered. Esme’s family, Francisco learned, came from the mountains in the region of Veraguas. Tumultuous people, Francisco took this to mean. Ascent and descent was in their blood, a jagged up-and-down life. And it turned out he was right. Esme was a woman of many moods, mercurial until the end. One day Francisco would see her standing at the stove, stirring a pot of sancocho, smiling sweetly and humming a tune, and the next day she would lock herself in the bathroom and weep or sit in a chair and stare at the floor, and nothing Francisco could say or do seemed to pull her out of the morass. He pressed his ear to the bathroom door and listened to her cry, but when he knocked, she would not answer, not even to tell him to go away. When she stared at the floor, he dragged a chair over and sat next to her, hoping she would glance up at him, but she did not.

Those were periods of darkness. A small pool in her soul flooded her, and Esme would sink, and though Francisco would offer his hand, she was either unable or unwilling to take it. It was best those days just to let her be. Eventually, after a few hours or, at the extreme end, a few days, she would resurface and come back to him. In that way, being with Esme was an exercise in patience. Francisco learned that if he waited, she would always return.

And when she did, away from the darkness, Esme exuded incredible light. No one he knew laughed like she did, a full-body laugh that sometimes caused her to snort, and she was not embarrassed by that. No one else made him feel like she did—more aware of everything, infinitely more alive. He experienced with her the kind of happiness that felt so out of proportion to everything he knew that he had to stop and ask himself sometimes, Is this happiness? Is this what it feels like? , just to be sure. He was, simply put, taken with her, and to Francisco’s surprise, she seemed equally taken with him.

One night as they lay in the bed, which smelled thoroughly of violets now, and Francisco kissed her shoulder across to her neck, Esme murmured, “The only one...”

“The only one what?” Francisco asked.

“Mmmmm?”

“The only one, you said.”

“Ah.” She ran her hand through his hair. “You were the only one with the courage to come after me.”

But it was not courage, he knew. Something else drew him to her, like a wave to the shore. It was, he had started to believe, akin to divine fate. He almost laughed at himself for thinking it. Divinity! Fate! Ideas he would have scoffed at in the past. But Esme had changed something elemental in him. Because of her, he believed in things that he had not believed in before. Why, earlier that same week he had walked to the house of Do?a Ruiz and found her sitting on her front patio, stroking the back of an iguana she held in her lap. “Congratulations,” she had said as Francisco approached. “I hear you have been married.” Francisco stopped in the road. It was untrue. He had felt himself lean toward laughter, his old response to the nonsense of Do?a Ruiz, and he chided himself for coming to her. He had come to get her advice, to see how to handle Esme’s erratic disposition, not for a confused message about something she had heard—and heard from where? Do?a Ruiz went on. “I am sorry. I said that too soon. I have heard it, but you have not yet. Leave now and come back in a few months’ time so I can say it again. It will make more sense to you then.” She shrugged. “Sometimes I get ahead of myself.” Francisco had been flummoxed. He had stood in the dirt road under the furious sun and looked at this woman petting an iguana in the shade of her patio. What was she talking about? And had she really just told him to leave? He had been on the verge of leaving of his own volition, but once she had suggested it, he almost wanted to stay out of spite. But also—he did want to go. He wanted to go and never come back. Francisco stood in the road, paralyzed by indecision. The maddening thing was that Do?a Ruiz seemed to recognize all that was going through his mind at that moment, for she smiled at him. Patronizingly, Francisco thought. If he left now, she would believe it was because of her influence. If he stayed, she would pat herself on the back for that, too. Occasionally when he was fishing, a school of fish swam beneath his boat from one side to the other. He watched them dart back and forth, but he lost sight of them sometimes. When that happened, he had learned, it was because the fish had gathered directly under the boat and hovered there in the shadow, but to him up above they had effectively disappeared. Francisco walked over to a large boulder along the road and sat down behind it. He circled his arms around his knees and made himself small enough that Do?a Ruiz could not see him. He sat still. He stayed there until dark when he heard Do?a Ruiz get up off the patio and walk inside. Only then did he stand up, too, and return home.

He had told Esme none of that, of course. But he mulled it over himself. What could explain such behavior? It was so unlike him. Hours huddled against a boulder, that day in the square, what had happened to his arm, the afternoon on the boat, the fragrance of violets in the fish market. What could explain all of that besides the belief that some greater force was at work, something deific that had impelled him toward her? Francisco had not thought that a woman like Esme could exist, but even after he accepted that she was in fact very real, it diminished none of her mystery. She was always to him, from the first moment back in the square, the most magical being ever to walk the earth.

***

THEY WERE MARRIED in the Catholic Church by a Catholic priest who delivered the entire Mass in Latin, so Francisco had no idea what he was saying. The priest’s words and incantations were either a blessing or a curse, but Esme smiled so beatifically throughout the ceremony that Francisco had to believe it was the former. Only later, after everything happened, would he wonder if he had been right.

What Do?a Ruiz had said that strange day now made perfect sense, as she had predicted it would, but Francisco did not go back to her house as she had instructed. There was no need. Later he would wonder about that, too—whether by not going back, he had made a costly mistake, whether he had angered Do?a Ruiz perhaps, enough that she cast a spell that determined his fate.

After the wedding, Esme moved into the small house overlooking the bay. The earthen floors darkened when it rained and the thatched roof leaked sometimes during the worst downpours, but that was of little concern, especially in those early days when Francisco and Esme were both so fortified by love that it seemed that nothing could go wrong. When they left the front door open, as they often did, the smell of the sea stepped right inside, mixing with the smell of violets, and when they made love, Francisco licked Esme’s skin till his tongue stung with salt.

They lived too far from the city to walk there often with ease, especially in the heat, so while Francisco went fishing during the day, Esme stayed home. She was used to the vitality of the city, used to strolling with her girlfriends and buying food on the street. In her new life she was happy but bored. She picked limes from the trees and squeezed them till they were pulpy and dry. She drank all the juice. She saved the seeds and when she had collected enough, she pierced each one with a needle and, using a long strand of her hair, threaded them together into a necklace that she wore. She walked down to the water where the sea stretched like a blue velvet field to the edges of the world in three directions and plopped down in the sand, listening to the faint sigh of the water as it skidded up and dragged back out. It came again and again, and as long as she listened, she could never decide whether the sigh was from sadness or surrender, or whether they were one and the same. When the sun was too hot, she sat in the shade of the banana trees and watched processions of ants. She chewed her nails and spit them out. She cooked patacones, frying them once, then smashing them between two flat rocks and frying them again before sprinkling them with salt. She ate them, and then she made more. She lit candles and prayed. She touched herself not because her new husband failed to satisfy her desires but because there was nothing else to do and because it felt good. In the evenings after he had gone to the market to sell off the day’s catch, Francisco came home. Esme stood on the shore and watched as he tied up the boat and climbed over the rocks to where, in the frail evening light, she was waiting for him.

***

QUICKLY, ESME BECAME pregnant, and for the next nine months after that, from the roof to the floor, the small house was bursting with joy. And from her head to her toes, Esme was bursting with life. Her dark eyes glowed, her skin seemed to shimmer even at night. She asked for octopus to eat and coconut water to drink. She lay in the bed with her feet in Francisco’s lap while he counted her toes and she laughed. Her hair, already thick and dark, grew six inches in a month and before long was down to her knees.

In the middle of his sleep, Francisco heard Esme sometimes, awake, talking to the baby, narrating the recipe for arroz con pollo or explaining how to judge when a papaya was ripe or, most often, singing him songs.

It was possible, Francisco would think later, that every human being only gets a certain allotment of joy and theirs had come in a windfall, the entirety of it used up across those nine glorious months. For after the baby was born, at what should have been the most jubilant time in their lives, Esme turned suddenly morose. For the first few weeks, she did not get out of bed. Staying in bed was one thing. Francisco understood that her body, after creating a new life, needed time to recover. But her spirit as she lay in the bed was melancholy. She did nothing but stare at the wall. She was naked under a thin bedsheet that was stained with brown spots of dried blood and yellow crust, and though Francisco offered to wash the sheets and pull a nightdress over her head, when he said these things, Esme did not move, much less answer. When he brought her food, she did not eat. A few times Francisco asked if she had any ideas for names for their son, but she maintained her silence. Finally, tired of saying “el bebé” all the time, Francisco proposed Omar because “mar” meant sea. Esme did not object.

During those weeks Francisco did not fish. From the very first day, when Omar cried, Francisco brought him to Esme and nestled him up to her swollen breast. Esme lay still on her side, staring at the sun-streaked wall. Omar whimpered and cried.

“He is hungry,” Francisco pleaded. “He needs to eat.”

Finally Francisco reached down himself and cupped Esme’s heavy breast in his hand and lifted it up just an inch to meet Omar’s small mouth. The baby rooted around. Then, miraculously, he began to suck. The entire time Esme hardly batted an eye.

When Omar ate and slept were the sole times Francisco had any reprieve. And then he was so exhausted that all he could manage to do was wash his armpits and between his legs, or take a shit, or eat fried fish or a cup of rice, the only two things he knew how to cook, and sit by himself and worry about Esme, about the way things had turned, and in the next second try not to worry. He kept telling himself it would all be okay. He prayed to God to make it so.

And then one day when Francisco woke in the morning, Esme was not there. Ecstatic, thinking she had emerged from her melancholy at last, Francisco got out of bed. Omar, not even two months old, was asleep at the foot of the bed, swaddled in a blanket so meticulously wrapped that it amplified Francisco’s hope. He rushed out of the bedroom expecting to find Esme at the stove, making something to eat, or bathing herself finally, dabbing on the violet water that he loved so much, but everywhere he looked, there was no trace of her. On a hunch, Francisco went outside. Before he even walked down to the shore, he could see that the boat was gone. His stomach dropped. He ran down to the water and screamed, “Esme!” into the white morning sun. “Esme! Esme! Esme!” Francisco flung himself into the ocean and started to swim. He swam like mad until he reached the boat, bobbing listlessly on the water. He held on to the side and looked all around. But unlike the instance more than a year earlier when he had paddled out to meet her, Esme had not only vanished—she was gone.

***

FRANCISCO THOUGHT OF all this again now that Omar had not come home. Omar had inherited certain traits from his mother—her dark, brooding eyes, her sensitive nature, her slender frame. And of course the one time that Francisco had taken the boy out on the water he had witnessed Omar’s reaction to it—but Francisco hoped against hope that his son was not like her in that way. If he had believed in a benevolent God, he would have prayed, but he didn’t—not anymore—so he merely hoped and he waited for Omar to return.