More Advance Praise for A Falling Star
A Falling Star is a novel in tapestry form, interwoven from the various threads of an exiled Cuban family, tied to the mystery of one daughter’s disappearance during the ocean crossing. The surviving daughter, Daysy, is the inquisitive Penelope figure who weaves and unweaves the story of her family through old photos, newspaper articles, and constant questioning. Chantel Acevedo writes with insight and tenderness about the complex reality of unanchored lives both in Cuba and in the U.S., while at the same time involving us in a captivating tale of loss and redemption.
—JUDITH ORTIZ COFER, author of Call Me María and An Island Like You
A Falling Star is filled with the ghosts of lost children and siblings, lost cultures and minds. It’s as if the characters are standing on a Florida shore looking toward Cuba, waiting for the remnants of their former lives to wash up along with the refugees who appear again and again. Chantel Acevedo has created a world so steeped in longing and lore that it’s entirely possible missing children can fall star-like from the sky, or emerge fish-like from the ocean. This haunting novel delivers not only secrets and lies, pounding guilt and grief, but glorious redemption.
—MARIE MANILLA, author of The Patron Saint of Ugly and Shrapnel
The enduring love for a lost sister is the focus of this beautifully written novel set against the chaotic backdrop of the Mariel Boatlift. Daysy del Pozo is having a hard enough time dealing with adolescence when her beloved grandfather reveals an explosive family secret in the confusion of dementia. What really happened to the del Pozo family after a rescue at sea creates a gripping mystery, and the suspense builds to a dramatic climax and bittersweet denouement. The homesickness, fragmentation, and disorientation of the Miami exile community are vividly portrayed and deeply moving. This is a beautiful story about instincts that keep families together in even the most horrifying of circumstances.
—SANDRA RODRIGUEZ BARRON, author of The Heiress of Water and Stay with Me
In one unforgettable scene in this fine novel, a woman travels far just to stand outside the prison that holds her lover. She wants to listen to the same singer he hears at nightfall—it’s the only way to be close to someone she’ll never see again. In evocative, careful prose, A Falling Star tells a simple tale of family loss, exile, of two worlds forced apart. But Chantel Acevedo does something more: she conjures the secret history of the Cuban-American soul.
—MOIRA CRONE, author of The Not Yet and Dream State
© 2014 Chantel Acevedo
Editor: Robin Miura
Design: Lesley Landis Designs
Author Photograph by Orlando Acevedo ©2014
Cover Image by Elaine Palladino ©2011
The mission of Carolina Wren Press is to seek out, nurture, and promote literary work by new and underrepresented writers, including women and writers of color.
This publication was made possible by Michael Bakwin’s generous establishment of the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman, and the continued support of Carolina Wren Press by the extended Bakwin family. We gratefully acknowledge the ongoing support of general operations by the Durham Arts Council’s United Arts Fund and a special grant from the North Carolina Arts Council.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Acevedo, Chantel.
A falling star : a novel / by Chantel Acevedo.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-932112-95-8 (alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-932112-67-5 (ebook)
1. Immigrant families–Cuba. 2. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3601.C47F35 2014
813’.6–dc23
2014001309
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owner. This collection consists of works of fiction. As in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience; however, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.
A FALLING STAR
A NOVEL
CHANTEL ACEVEDO
Carolina Wren Press
For Penelope
and
Mary-Blair,
who changed
everything
I spilt the dew —
But took the morn —
I chose this single star
From out the
wide night’s numbers —
EMILY DICKINSON,
from “One Sister
Have I in Our House”
DAYSY DEL POZO
HIALEAH, FLORIDA 1990
The front door of Daysy del Pozo’s house was a massive thing, gracing a small, modest ranch house, and made of iron bars. Behind the bars was a solid sheet of mustard-yellow plastic, dented to look like hammered gold. In the center was a lion on its hind legs, its claws extended and its mouth wide open. Daysy always put her fingers on one of the fangs when she came home from school as she imagined the door coming to life, the iron jaws snapping, and swallowing her fingers whole. The door was her mother’s prized possession.
“Like the castles in Spain,” Magda Elena said, though she had never been there.
“I don’t like it, Mami,” Daysy told her when she first saw the door.
“Be quiet, Daysy. Don’t you see it’s just the thing?” Magda Elena swept her arm to present a neighborhood of squat, pastel-colored homes, each with terracotta tiles, busted-up cars, birdbaths of La Virgen, twisty iron bars on the windows, and menacing, iron doors, the kind seen all over Hialeah, a city just north of Miami where the del Pozos lived, famous for its racetrack that now stood empty and decaying in the east side of town, the flock of flamingoes it once showcased still living and breathing, guarding the center island of the track. Hialeah was famous, too, for its Cuban population, for the street signs in Spanish, and for the flooding that happened after every rainfall when the canals swelled and took over the roads.
“Our house looks like a prison,” Daysy muttered. She had turned fourteen at the end of May, and her birthday had marked a change in Daysy that Magda Elena had not yet recognized. Daysy hid the signs well. Sometimes, a huge sadness would well up in Daysy’s chest for no reason, triggered by the whiteness of the sun, or by a sappy commercial on television. When she first discovered blood in her underwear the day after her fourteenth birthday, Daysy hid in the toolshed out in the backyard for hours, breaking up the hard, dirt floor with a stick. With some difficulty, she buried the stained clothing deep in the center of the shed. Two lizards scampered to the scene and marked the turned earth with their tiny feet, prompting Daysy to leave the shed at last and enter the house. She didn’t tell her mother, and bought herself sanitary pads with her lunch money.
There were other things Daysy did not tell Magda Elena. For instance, when two thin, sweaty men came to install the iron door, one of the saw blades used to trim the iron leapt from the machine and flew into the house, just as Daysy was walking from the kitchen through the dining room. She felt the swish of a flying thing behind her, just at her neck, and heard the thud as the circular blade lodged itself in the china cabinet. The saw had wanted blood, and it sliced open the