The del Pozos all stood in front of the house to look at the door, the sunset lighting the yellow plastic insets on fire, so that the lion was in a state of perpetual immolation, or at least until the sun finally went down. Magda Elena, Angel, and Daysy stood a little to the side, to avoid stepping in a dried puddle of the workman’s blood. From outside, Daysy could hear her grandfather singing loudly in his bedroom, “Don’t cry for me, Argentina,” in wavering tones, the few English words he knew. If her grandfather had been in his right mind, Daysy imagined he would have hated the door, too.
“My brother, Eddy, would have loved to see this,” Magda Elena said about the door, her voice a whisper. She mentioned her brother daily, the one who had died in Cuba, the uncle Daysy did not remember. It was as if his name clung to the inside of Magda Elena’s mouth and had to be spit out every once in a while or she might choke on it. The more she described this Eddy, this man who liked hideous iron doors, the less Daysy thought she would have loved him.
Daysy was ten when a letter arrived to report Eddy’s death in Havana. A massive heart attack had come upon him at dawn, as he was stirring sugar into his coffee. His wife Catalina’s letter described the scene—she’d found him on the kitchen floor with the spilled coffee on his chest, the liquid still steaming and releasing a wispy vapor into the air. Magda Elena had stayed in bed for days after the letter arrived, her eyes dry, wide, and dull. Her hair turned brittle from lack of combing. When Daysy turned on the stereo in her room a week later, Magda Elena had come in like a lioness, alive again, brandishing a worn flip-flop with which she hit Daysy over the back and shoulders until she turned off the music.
“¡Atrevida!” Magda Elena had yelled. “How dare you play music when my Eddy is gone from this world?”
Daysy was stunned. Later, after the moment had settled in her mind, she imagined a brave retort. Something like, “All you had to do was ask, Mother.” But the make-believe comeback didn’t alleviate the pain in Daysy’s jaw, the aching effort of keeping the tears away.
That evening, Daysy had sat in the recliner with her father and cried into his chest, soaking his undershirt that smelled like car exhaust. “Okay, okay,” he said, scratching her back. “She didn’t mean it. She’s upset about many things, not just her brother. Your mami has lost more than most, and when someone dies, it’s like she suffers every loss all over again. Understand?”
“What else has she lost?” Daysy asked then, and her father’s face had gone very still.
“Nada,” he had mouthed, unable to speak.
The night Daysy’s mother had come into her room brandishing her sandal over her head in grief and fury was a singular occasion. More familiar to Daysy was the routine of the day to day. Dinner, for example, seemed to follow the same script each evening. Silence was mandatory, except for Magda Elena’s incessant demand, “Daysy, come, come, traga, no hables,” to eat, eat, swallow, and not talk. From TV, Daysy knew that families came together for dinner to talk about school, work, and politics. Sometimes they fought at the table. Or resolved a family issue. There were mashed potatoes to be passed, and grace to be said. In the del Pozo home, dinner was only for Magda Elena and Daysy. Angel would eat early, as soon as he came home from the parking lot where he worked, slurping his steaming, thick, creamy soup in the kitchen, and then complaining about a burnt tongue all evening. “Coño, me quemé la lengua,” he would repeat, louder and louder, until Magda Elena would bring him an ice cream sandwich. Abuelo would eat whatever was on hand—bags of chips, bites out of avocadoes, skin and all, chunks of Cuban bread—all day long.
Magda Elena and Daysy ate in silence, because dinnertime was for eating, not speaking. They could talk later. Magda Elena watched Daysy eat, making sure she swallowed every single grain of rice. If Daysy drank too much water, Magda Elena would say, “You’re getting full on water. Eat. Eat!” and then push Daysy’s glass to the center of the table, out of reach. At the end of the meal were the obligatory slice of guava and cream cheese (“It’s very fattening, so eat up”) and then the lecture about how a girl had to be curvy to get a boyfriend someday.
One night, between gulps of water, Daysy had said, “Mami, do you think I’m smart enough to go somewhere like Yale some day? Someplace like that?”
“Jail? Jail? What are you talking about? Eat.”
Daysy laughed. “No, Yale. The university.” She had seen a movie set in New Haven, on Yale’s green, elm-filled campus, and had imagined an older version of herself there, wearing lab goggles like the character in the film and holding test tubes up to fluorescent lights.
“Ah, sí, la universidad,” Magda Elena said. “And where is this ‘Jale’?”
“Connecticut, Mami.”
“Co-netty-koo? No way, mi’jita. Nice girls don’t go away for college. That’s only for Americans.” Magda Elena dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “They don’t love their children and want to be rid of them, that’s the truth. Besides, there are plenty of good schools here.”
“What if I want to become a scientist?” Daysy asked, testing her mother. The truth was that she’d given it some thought. In the comic books she read, the scientists were always elevated above mere mortals. They had the power to turn even the mousiest human into a god. Just one radioactive zap would do the trick, Daysy thought.
“You can’t even wash yourself properly, and you want to go away?” Magda Elena said. “Who will make your bed? Who will cook your meals?”
“I’ll be grown by then. I’ll be—”
“Don’t be so ambitious. It’s not good for you,” Magda Elena said, shimmying Daysy’s plate so that the beans Daysy had so carefully compressed into a tight heap flattened out, filling the plate again. “You haven’t eaten a thing,” Magda Elena said, sighing.
During those meals, Daysy wished that Florida wasn’t flat, and that it wasn’t so long, so hard to get out of. She swore to herself that it was easier to leave Cuba than to leave this place. She wished her mother would let her go to sleepover parties, or to summer camp out of state. No, she had to be within Magda Elena’s reach at all times, in her viselike embrace. Sometimes Daysy imagined her mother transforming into a giant, rusty anchor that held the family in place. This anchor, her mother, was lodged at the bottom of a murky Hialeah canal. It would never let Daysy go.
“Don’t be such an arrepentida,” her mother said, when Daysy brought up Yale at dinner again the next night.
“What does that mean?” Daysy asked and rolled her eyes so far back in her head that her left eyelid twitched.
“It means you are ashamed of who you are. That you regret you were born to this family. That you…”
“Am not.”
“No, que va,” Magda Elena said. “Not a thing. But let me tell you something, muchachita. You leave Miami, and there will be lots to regret.” Magda Elena cleared Daysy’s dishes, though she hadn’t finished her food. Daysy thought she was done getting told off, but her mother whipped around, pointed a dish at Daysy and declared, “You don’t know what alone means. Alone. Sola. Your father and I had nobody in este país. Nadie. Y ahora, you want to throw away your family. Arrepentida is what you are.”
Some days, Daysy thought her mother was right. She felt she would trade her foreign birth certificate in a heartbeat, would delete from her family’s history the story about crossing the ocean from Cuba to Miami on a stranger’s yacht, and do away with the feeling of rocking waves in her dreams, a feeling she explained in great detail in her dream journal. In it, Daysy described the vivid