Sofía was looking through some of my old photographs and found one of Carmen and me when we were young.
She asked where it was taken and I said I thought it was Mar y Sol.
She said, "What's Mar y Sol?"
So I told her.
When I got to the part about Carmen telling her mother she was staying at my house and me telling Mami I was staying at Carmen's, Sofía looked at me like she'd never seen me before.
"You did that?"
I reminded her that I was 21 years old.
Apparently this did not make it better.
Then she wanted to know everything.
Who we saw. Where we slept. What we wore. Whether my mother ever found out.
Some of it I knew.
Some of it I couldn't remember.
And some of it I realized I hadn't thought about in more than fifty years.
I found a box of old negatives while cleaning a closet.
I almost threw it away because I couldn't tell what was on most of them.
Then I started holding them up to the window.
Mexico. Culebra. Carmen. My parents.
There were photographs I hadn't seen in thirty or forty years.
I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on the floor instead of cleaning the closet.
There was one photograph of Carmen and me covered in mud that I was convinced was from Mar y Sol.
I sent Carmen a picture of it.
She immediately called me and said, "That's not Mar y Sol."
I said, "Of course it is."
She said, "Amalia, look at my hair."
We're still arguing about it.
After Papá died we had to go through his things.
Rafi and I kept putting it off.
His toolbox was still exactly the way he'd left it. Every screwdriver had its place. Little jars with screws and washers. Pieces of wire he had apparently decided might be useful someday.
I opened one drawer and the smell of it brought him back immediately. Metal and oil and something I can't describe.
I took one of his screwdrivers.
Rafi took the toolbox.
I still have the screwdriver somewhere.
What I remember most about Georges is the sound.
We had prepared. Everybody had prepared. We had water, food, batteries, the windows covered.
None of that prepared me for listening to the house all night.
You could hear things hitting outside and sometimes something would make a noise and Tomás and I would look at each other trying to figure out what part of the house it had come from.
Water started coming in under one of the windows and we kept putting down towels even though there was obviously no point anymore.
Clara was eleven. She was scared but trying very hard not to show it.
The next morning was incredibly bright.
That's another thing I remember. After all that noise, walking outside into this beautiful blue sky and seeing everything everywhere.
I taught Clara to snorkel when she was about five.
She hated the mask. She said it smelled bad and wouldn't breathe through the snorkel because she was convinced water was going to come through it.
I suddenly remembered Papá teaching me.
Without even thinking about it I told her exactly what he had told me: don't look ahead, just look down.
She finally put her face in.
A few seconds later she squeezed my hand and started pointing at a fish.
I don't think I had thought about that day with Papá in years.
Then there I was saying his words.
Clara was born in 1987.
Everybody told me I would forget the difficult parts afterward. This was a lie.
I remember being exhausted and scared and very annoyed at anyone who told me to relax.
Then suddenly there she was.
Tomás cried immediately. I didn't. I remember looking at her and thinking, very clearly, that's Clara.
There wasn't really another name after that.
I read La casa de los espíritus not long after I came back from Mexico.
I loved Clara.
Not because I thought I was anything like her. I just loved the name and the character stayed with me.
I lent the book to Carmen afterward and she kept it for months, which was fair considering I still had Miguel's copy of Rayuela.
A few years later when I was pregnant and we started talking about names, I suggested Clara.
Tomás liked it immediately.
I don't think I told him until much later where I'd gotten it.
I knew I was home before I was really outside the airport.
The doors opened and the heat hit me.
I'd forgotten how heavy the air could feel here. Mexico City could be hot but it wasn't this. This was like walking into something.
Mami cried when she saw me. Papá didn't, but he hugged me for a very long time.
For the first few weeks everybody kept asking when I was going back to Mexico and I kept saying I didn't know.
Eventually I realized I wasn't going back.
The strange thing was that Puerto Rico didn't feel exactly like home anymore either. I had spent almost five years missing it and then I came back and felt slightly out of place.
That lasted longer than I expected.
Rafi was five years older than me and his records were absolutely forbidden. Naturally I listened to them whenever he wasn't home.
His room had a little record player and he kept the albums standing against the wall. I would sit on the floor and try to put everything back exactly where it was so he wouldn't know I'd been there.
He always knew.
I scratched one of his records once and blamed it on one of his friends. I don't remember which record it was anymore, although Rafi probably does.
That's where I heard a lot of music for the first time. The Beatles, the Stones, Dylan. Later Hendrix. I didn't understand half of what they were singing about. It didn't matter.
The funny thing is that Rafi wasn't especially patient with me about anything else, but sometimes he'd come home and find me there and instead of throwing me out he'd put something on and say, "Listen to this one."
I don't know exactly when this was. I must have been about nine.
Papá taught me to snorkel at Escambrón. We had one of those rubber masks that covered your eyes and nose and smelled terrible. I was scared to put my face in the water because breathing through the tube felt completely wrong.
He held my hand and told me not to look ahead, just look down.
I remember the moment I finally did it. There were little fish right underneath us and suddenly I forgot I was scared. I wanted to stay in until my fingers got wrinkled.
For years I thought the water had been incredibly deep. I went back much later and realized we were probably standing in four feet of water.
I don't know how old I was, maybe six or seven. The electricity went out at Abuela's and everybody ended up sitting outside on the balcony because it was too hot inside.
I remember the candles and the mosquitoes more than anything. The whole neighborhood was dark but you could hear people talking from the other houses. The grownups stayed up much later than usual and I was allowed to stay with them.
I don't remember what they were talking about. I just remember liking that nobody could send me inside to bed because it was hotter in there.
