Clap When You Land

  Dedication

  For my grand love, Rosa Amadi Acevedo,

  & my sister, Carid Santos

  In memory of the lives lost

  on American Airlines flight 587

  Epigraph

  El corazón de la auyama,

  sólo lo conoce el cuchillo.

  —DOMINICAN PROVERB

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Camino

  The Day

  Yahaira

  Camino

  One Day After

  Yahaira

  Three Days After

  Four Days After

  Camino

  Five Days After

  Ten Days After

  Yahaira

  Fourteen Days After

  Fifteen Days After

  Camino

  Nineteen Days After

  Yahaira

  Twenty-One Days After

  Camino

  Twenty-Two Days After

  Yahaira

  Twenty-Three Days After

  Twenty-Five Days After

  Camino

  Twenty-Eight Days After

  Yahaira

  Thirty-One Days After

  Thirty-Five Days After

  Camino

  Yahaira

  Thirty-Six Days After

  Thirty-Seven Days After

  Camino

  Forty Days After

  Forty-Two Days After

  Yahaira

  Forty-Three Days After

  Camino

  Forty-Five Days After

  Forty-Six Days After

  Yahaira

  Forty-Nine Days After

  Fifty Days After

  Camino

  Yahaira & Camino

  Fifty-One Days After

  Fifty-Two Days After

  Fifty-Three Days After

  Fifty-Four Days After

  Fifty-Five Days After

  Fifty-Nine Days After

  Sixty Days After

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Elizabeth Acevedo

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Camino Yahaira

  I know too much of mud.

  I know that when a street doesn’t have sidewalks

  & water rises to flood the tile floors of your home,

  learning mud is learning the language of survival.

  I know too much of mud.

  How Tía will snap at you with a dishrag if you track it inside.

  How you need to raise the bed during hurricane season.

  How mud will dry & cling stubbornly to a shoe.

  Or a wall. To Vira Lata the dog & your exposed foot.

  I know there’s mud that splatters as a motoconcho drives past.

  Mud that suctions & slurps at the high heels

  of the working girls I once went to school with.

  Mud that softens, unravels into a road leading nowhere.

  & mud got a mind of its own. Wants to enwrap

  your penny loafers, hug up on your uniform skirt.

  Press kisses to your knees & make you slip down to meet it.

  “Don’t let it stain you,” Tía’s always said.

  But can’t she see? This place we’re from

  already has its prints on me.

  I spend nights wiping clean the bottoms of my feet,

  soiled rag over a bucket, undoing this mark of place.

  To be from this barrio is to be made of this earth & clay:

  dirt-packed, water-backed, third-world smacked:

  they say, the soil beneath a country’s nail, they say.

  I love my home. But it might be a sinkhole

  trying to feast quicksand

  mouth pried open; I hunger for stable ground,

  somewhere else.

  This morning, I wake up

  at five a.m. Wash my hands & face.

  There is a woman with cancer,

  a small boulder

  swelling her stomach,

  & Tía Solana needs my help to tend her.

  Since I could toddle,

  I would tag after Tía,

  even when Mamá was still alive.

  Tía & I are easy with each other.

  I do not chafe at her rules.

  She does not impose unnecessary ones.

  We are quiet in the mornings.

  She passes me a palm-sized piece of bread;

  I prepare the coffee kettle for her.

  By the time Don Mateo’s rooster crows,

  we are locking up the house, Tía’s machete tucked into her bag.

  The sun streaks pink highlights across the sky.

  Vira Lata waits outside our gate.

  He is technically the entire neighborhood’s pet,

  a dog with no name but the title of stray;

  ever since he was a pup he’s slept outside our door,

  & even if I don’t think of him as solely mine,

  I know he thinks of me as his.

  I throw him the heel of bread from the loaf,

  & he runs alongside us to the woman with cancer,

  whose house door does not have a lock.

  Tía knocks anyway before walking in.

  I do not furrow my brow or pinch my lips at the stench

  of an unwashed body. Tía crooks her head at the woman;

  she says I have a softer touch than she does.

  I murmur hello; the woman fusses in response;

  she is too far gone into her pain to speak,

  & since she lives alone, we have no one to ask

  how she’s been doing. I rub a hand across her

  forehead. It is cool, which is a blessing.

  She settles down with a deep sigh the minute I touch her.

  I bring the bottle of water Tía passes me

  up to her lips; she sips with barely there motions.

  It is said she was once a most beautiful woman.

  I lift the blanket that Tía wrapped

  around her the last time we were here

  & press gentle fingers to her nightgown-covered abdomen.

  Her stomach is hard to my touch.

  Tía burns incense in all the corners

  of the small house. The woman does not stir.

  It is easy in a moment like this

  to want to speak over this woman,

  to tell Tía there is nothing more we can do,

  to say out loud the woman is lucky

  that her lungs still draw breath.

  But I learned young, you do not speak

  of the dying as if they are already dead.

  You do not call bad spirits into the room,

  & you do not smudge a person’s dignity

  by pretending they are not

  still alive, & right in front of you,

  & perhaps about to receive a miracle.

  You do not let your words stunt unknown possibilities.

  So I do not say that her dying seems inevitable.

  Instead, I brush her hair behind her ear

  & lay my hands on her belly—chanting

  prayers alongside Tía

  & hoping that when we leave here

  Vira Lata, & not death, is the only thing that follows.

  Tía is the single love of my life,

  the woman I want to one day be,

  all raised eyebrows & calloused hands,

  a hairy upper lip stretched over a mouth

  that has seen death & illness & hurt

  but never forgets how to smile or tell a dirty joke.

  Because of her, I too h
ave known death,

  & illness & life & healing.

  & I’ve watched Tía’s every move

  until I could read the Morse code

  of sweat beads on her forehead.

  So, when I say I want to be a doctor,

  I know exactly what that means.

  This curing is in my blood.

  & everyone here knows

  the most respected medical schools

  are in the United States.

  I want to take what I’ve learned

  from Tía’s life dedicated to aid & build a life

  where I can help others.

  There have been many days

  when Papi’s check comes late,

  & we have to count

  how many eggs we have left,

  or how long the meat will stretch.

  I don’t want Tía & me to always live this way.

  I will make it.

  I will make it.

  I will make it easier for us both.

  The Day

  I am beginning to learn

  that life-altering news

  is often like a premature birth:

  ill-timed, catching someone unaware,

  emotionally unprepared

  & often where they shouldn’t be:

  I am missing a math test.

  Even though Papi will get in a taxi upon arriving,

  I skipped my last two periods so I could wait at the airport.

  I’ll make up the exam tomorrow, I convince myself.

  Papi’s homecoming, for me, is a national holiday,

  & I don’t rightly care that he’s going to be livid.

  (He reminds me once a week he pays too much money

  for my fancy schooling for me to miss or fail classes.

  But he shouldn’t fuss since I’m always on honor roll.)

  I also know Papi will be secretly elated.

  He loves to be loved. & his favorite girl waiting at the airport

  with a sign & a smile—what better homecoming?

  It’s been nine months since last he was here,

  but as is tradition he is on a flight the first weekend in June,

  & it feels like Tía & I have been cooking for days!

  Seasoning & stewing goat, stirring a big pot of sancocho.

  All of Papi’s favorites on the dinner table tonight.

  This is what I think as I beg Don Mateo for a bola to the airport.

  He works in the town right near the airfields,

  so I know he’s grumbling only because like his rooster

  he’s ornery & routinized down to every loud crow.

  He even grumbles when I kiss his cheek thanks,

  although I see him drive off with a smile.

  I wait in the terminal, tugging the hem of my uniform skirt,

  knowing Papi will be red-faced & sputtering at how short it is.

  I search the monitor, but his flight number is blank.

  A big crowd of people circle around a giant TV screen.

  (Tía has a theory,

  that when bad news is coming

  the Saints will try to warn you:

  will raise the hair

  on the back of your neck,

  will slip icicles

  down your spine,

  will tell you brace brace

  brace yourself, muchacha.

  She says, perhaps,

  if you hold still enough,

  pray hard enough,

  the Saints will change fate

  in your favor.

  Don Mateo’s AC was broken

  & the hot air left me sweaty,

  pulling on my shirt to ventilate my chest.

  Without warning a stillness.

  A cold chill saunters through a doorway in my body,

  a tremble begins in my hands.

  My feet do not move.)

  An airline employee

  & two security guards

  approach the crowd

  like gutter cats

  used to being kicked.

  & as soon as the employee

  utters the word accident

  the linoleum opens

  a gnashing jaw,

  a bottomless belly,

  I am swallowed

  by this shark-toothed truth.

  Papi was not here in Sosúa the day that I was born.

  Instead, Mamá held her sister Tía Solana’s hand

  when she was dando a luz.

  I’ve always loved that phrase for birthing:

  dando a luz giving to light.

  I was my mother’s gift to the sun of her life.

  She revolved around my father,

  the classic distant satellite

  that came close enough to eclipse her once a year.

  But that year, the one I was born, he was busy

  in New York City. Wired us money & a name in his stead.

  Told Mamá to call me Camino.

  Sixteen years ago, the day I was born, was light-filled.

  Tía has told me so. It is the only birthday Papi ever missed.

  A bright July day. But it seems this year he’ll miss it too.

  Because the people at the airport are wailing, crying,

  hands cast up: it fell, they say. It fell.

  They say the plane fell right out the sky.

  It’s always been safer to listen to Papi’s affection

  than it is to bear his excuses. Easier to shine

  in his being here than bring up the shadow of his absence.

  Every year for my birthday he asks me what I want.

  Since the year my mother died, I’ve always answered:

  “To live with you. In the States.”

  I’ve heard him tell of New York so often you’d think

  I was born to that skyline. Sometimes it feels like I have

  memories of his billiards, Tío’s colmado, Yankee Stadium,

  as if they are places I grew up at,

  & not just the tall tales he’s been sharing

  since I was a chamaquita on his knee.

  In the fall, I start senior year at the International School.

  My plan has always been to apply to

  & attend Columbia University.

  I told Papi last year this dream of premed,

  at that prestigious university, in the heart of the city

  that he calls home. & he laughed.

  He said I could be a doctor here. He said

  it’d be better for me to visit Colombia the country

  than for him to spend money at another fancy school.

  I did not laugh with him. He must have realized

  his laugh was like one of those paper shredders

  making a sad confetti of my hopes.

  He did not apologize.

  It is a mistake, I know.

  A plane did not crash.

  My father’s plane did not fall.

  & if, if, a plane did fall

  of course my father

  could not have been on it.

  He would have known

  that metal husk was ill-fated.

  Tía’s Saints would have warned him.

  It would be like in the movies,

  where the taxi makes a wrong turn,

  or mysteriously the alarm does not go off

  & Papi would be scrambling

  to get to the airport only to learn

  he had been saved. Saved.

  This is what I think the whole long walk home.

  For four miles I scan the road & ignore

  catcalls. I know Don Mateo would come back to get me

  if I called, but I feel frozen from

  the inside out. The only things working

  are my feet moving forward & my mind

  outracing my feet.

  I create scenario after scenario;

  I damn everyone else on that flight

  but save my father in my imagination.

  I ignore the news alerts

  comi
ng through on my phone.

  I do not check social media.

  Once I get to my callejón,

  I smile at the neighbors

  & blow kisses at Vira Lata.

  It isn’t true, you see?

  My father was not on that plane.

  I refuse.

  Papi boards the same flight every year.

  Tía & I are like the hands of a clock:

  we circle our purpose around his arrival.

  We prepare for his exaggerated stories

  of businesspeople who harrumph over tomato juice

  & flight attendants who sneak winks at him.

  He never sleeps on flights, instead plays chess on his tablet.

  He got me one for my birthday last year,

  & before he boarded his flight this morning

  we video-chatted.

  They’re saying it’s too early to know about survivors.

  I am so accustomed to his absence

  that this feels more like delay than death.

  By the time I get home, Tía has heard the news.

  She holds me tight & rocks me back & forth,

  I do not join her in moaning ay ay ay.

  I am stiff as a soiled rag that’s been left in the sun.

  Tía says I’m in shock. & I think she is right.

  I feel just like I’ve been struck by lightning.

  When a neighbor arrives, Tía lets me go.

  I sit on el balcón & rock myself in Papi’s favorite chair.

  When Tía goes to bed, I go stand in front of the altar

  she’s dedicated to our ancestors. It’s an old chest, covered

  in white cloth that sits behind our dining room table.

  It’s one of the places where we pray & put our offerings.

  I sneak one of the cigars Tía has left there. I carefully cut

  the tip, strike a match, & for a moment consider kissing

  that small blue flame. I lift my mouth to the cigar. Inhale.

  Hold the smoke hard in my lungs

  until the pain squeezes sharp in my chest

  & I cough & cough & cough,

  gasping for breath,

  tears springing to my eyes.

  I rock rock rock until the sun creaks over the tree line.

  I listen for the whine of a taxi motor,

  for Papi’s loud bark of a laugh, his air-disrupting voice

  saying how damn happy

  he is to finally be home—

  Knowing I’ll never hear any of his sounds again.

  Camino Yahaira

  When you learn life-altering news

  you’re often in the most basic of places.