I was trying to plan the first real vacation my son Dante and I would take with just the two of us, and I only knew we couldn’t go back to Guánica.
Before my husband Vincent died, the three of us would spend most winter breaks at a no-frills resort in the sleepier, southwestern part of Puerto Rico, a place rife with mangroves. This vacation happened for a couple of weeks in February or March—when you couldn’t feel your face in New York—almost every year until Dante graduated from middle school. We would gleefully squint away the sun, burn our thighs kayaking, and search in quicksand-like muck for my missing flip-flop. Most memorably, ever since Dante was old enough to pull his mini penguin suitcase behind him, we would plow through our stack of books on the beach as a family, lying on a curtained bed while the waves rolled in and out. I would reread my old copy of Jesus’ Son while toddler Dante paged through Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! In the late afternoons, when the daylight would start to slink behind the clouds, Dante and Vincent would often wander down the dock. Dante would come back, his long, brown hair lightened by the sun, saying “Daddy has a present for you!” before dropping a bag of plantain chips in my lap.
I couldn’t go back there.
The last few years had been brutal. A year after Vincent’s death in 2020, my then 15-year-old son suffered cardiac arrest. It happened in the middle of his school musical, as he stood in the wings. They announced a medical emergency, stopped the show, and asked if I was in the audience. I hurried backstage as two people were performing CPR on him. I was in utter denial about why he was unconscious on the floor and kept talking to him as if I could wake him up. EMTs flooded in, cut his shirt open, and yelled instructions as they shocked him. I stood on the stage and watched in horror.
Time slowed and I began to see the clear fork in the road of my life. I fought down my panic and over the coming days he overcame each hurdle: the night in the ventilator, the days in a coma, the mornings of short-term memory loss, his surgery to install a defibrillator, and the frustrating diagnosis that there was nothing wrong with him physically and nothing in his system to explain his incident.
Miraculously, he came home a week later, on my 44th birthday. I was relieved but stunned that we had gone from being in a hospital surrounded by help to just me and him in our apartment, doctors visits and tests ahead of us. I spent that summer with him on family leave in a rented house in upstate New York but I was too frazzled to relax, forever wary of the ticking time bomb that was his beating heart.
***
Vincent followed literary news and kept a revolving roster of new releases on the bedside table, but he was also an English teacher who liked to pontificate on older classics. He raved about Carson McCullers to me, particularly The Heart is A Lonely Hunter: the story centers on a deaf-mute man named John Singer in 1930s Georgia, and the fates of four townspeople who interact with him. Vincent said she was a genius, and that the novel was underrated, among the best he’d ever read. He wanted me to read it so we could discuss. I never got around to it.
