The Name She Dried With Her Breath
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The key was labeled "Summer House" but there was no summer house, only a storage unit in Queens she'd never heard her grandmother mention, paid for sixty-two years, contents unknown. She envisioned the five others entering the house with her and rummaging through file boxes, stacking paperwork spilling from drawers, and the urge to clear it out. She closed the door, desperate not to feel this way, and entered a more intangible anger. On every level, her life was more than fair. Her entitlement to happiness dwarfed her heritage. Whomever owned her, sold her. That struck too close to home, and Felicity clenched her fists. Vehemently she dispelled the thought and let her anger flow through her and over her. "These people don't deserve anything from me." This anger turned to longing as she took the file labeled "Graduation" down from the shelf. The date of her college graduation was jotted on the top, handwritten in the grandmother's unmistakable florid cursive. Faintly she remembered her grandmother loving her, not caring about anything but her. Too young to recognize how deeply disturbed and needy her grandmother had been, she understood it now through a crevice in the door her grandmother had left open long ago. In the privacy of her apartment, Felicity opened the folders and turned the brittle, yellowed pages, reading letters and newspaper articles clipped and distributed by an insistent and emotional woman who had been trying, eventually fatally, to find her only true love for sixty-two years. Graduation: February 1963 My dearest Berna, My dearest Berna, My dearest Berna: Today is my graduation. I walk, pretending the emotion is pride for an accomplishment ending some form of childhood. How sweet that definition is. The peak of my youth was Rafael's letters sent care of the building management in the city. Your sickly cellophane parcel of one potato, one carrot, and two onions told how long the boat had taken his family to escape. Him, his mother, eventually his sister; or cousins accompanying his mother, pretending they were friends, the siblings(and her)raising him. They'd paid, many months ago, for Rafael to write the letters, denying affection to "a stupid slut your age" if he didn't comply. I’d send letters and illicit photographs; the three photographs with every letter seared my heart. In black, or blue with orange highlights, sunglasses resting on Rafael's dark face. Rafael could never live their dream of "the summer house." The chance of him reaching U.S. shores exceeded his new identity, as I revealed in each subsequent letter. He despised me as much as he loved me, and I confessed to no one my correspondence with Rafael but you. I knew you would understand my feelings—you, more than any others, would never judge. I stole it out of the privacy of Rafael's locker. Neither Rafael nor I had social licenses. I unwrapped each photograph and blew on the image to dry the water from the envelope, tearing at a seam, tissue shredded, on every photograph, a short note on which Rafael had tried to carve my name. He never got it exactly right; Rafael wrote strangely. Two years after the letters stopped, I could match his wordless notes. No one ever knew about the photographs but Petra and me. What a gift they were. Had I cheated to survive then, what future would I cheat to survive today? The man I believed to be Rafael picked me up at Bellerose Gardens, an apartment house filled with refugees, where I worked cleaning the hallways. I was lucky. New York was a big city swollen with refugees. I didn’t want to work in a restaurant. Rafael looked like Rafael but blonde. His mother had been a World War One refugee as Rafael was not, they never met. I realized he was a frazzled thug of a man, raw nerves wearing the boy’s barely filled-out body suit. I had my own déjà vu but understood what I'd kept secret so long. Rafael would never find me as Rafael. So I married him. Felicity chocked on her own bile, laying against the counter as she finished the final paragraph. Broken hearts, stale secrets and guilt. She remained in the fatal position, turning the pages. Three folders shared the same feeling—a trapped feeling, agitated and anguished. She slowed her pace. She held in the letter petrifying her in three opening paragraphs and fingered the photograph of the two young people reclined in deck chairs. The man handsome, lovingly caressing the woman who watched him as incorporated into her dark hair and eyes. It wasn’t her. It was not Petra. Felicity turned the sheet in a small rebellion and recognized the image of what her grandmother and her ex-husband had once stolen from her grandmother's friend, Petra. The black and white photograph bore the same title: My Dear Berna. "It’s Petra." There were other documents packed tightly in the folder she also read. The hospital report of Petra's miscarriage: August 1938 “When we take her home, she’ll die,” Pablo said. He traced a finger over her head. “Our girl will grow up knowing what love is.” “Eventually she’ll forget,” Rafael contended. “Where did it go to, Petra? Valencia?” Pablo stood, pulling Rafael's wife out of the hospital bed. "My name is Berna Álvares" she shouted, defending the dignity her father had taught her. "You took that from me too, but this, this I won't let you take.” Felicity retrieved the other folder. Just photographs. Same paper quality. Still fragile and yellowed, but she’d replace the box with a leather bound◆ About the ending
❧ About the title