Milagros had a cold and the pre-K teacher told Mabel she had to keep her home, but since the gallery was usually pretty quiet on weekdays and on Mabel’s way to work, Olga offered to watch her so Mabel wouldn’t have to miss a day of work.
“If only Julio wasn’t a piece of shit,” Mabel lamented, “then I wouldn’t have to bother you.”
It wasn’t a bother, and frankly, Olga was happier to babysit than to have Mabel involve Julio too much in Milagros’s day-to-day life. They weren’t married for more than three years before Mabel realized he was spending money faster than she could make it, but never managed to keep a job for long enough to actually bring anything in. Then Mabel got pregnant, right as the coronavirus pandemic began. Stuck in a house with Julio for nearly a year, she quickly discovered that she didn’t have the energy for two babies and, just before Milagros was born, she moved out of the apartment in Bay Shore and back to Fifty-third Street. Christian had, as Olga suspected, missed Manhattan living and, having gotten on his feet, used this opportunity to find a place uptown in one of Matteo’s newer buildings. Olga had encouraged him to start investing in other vanishing neighborhoods and he’d found a music store and a Chino-Latino restaurant that he wanted to be sure “we can take our kid to if we want.”
He had said that when they were still trying, of course. Before Olga decided that the process—the nightly injections in alternating ass cheeks, the daily “monitoring” visits requiring early morning schleps uptown, the constant false hope—was too exhausting. She felt, she told her therapist, that she had only recently become content with her life and herself and didn’t want to become fixated on chasing another imagined love. For Matteo’s part, he assured her, he was relieved. Not that he didn’t love kids, but he was happy not to have to share her with a baby. To Olga, that felt very honest, and put her mind at ease knowing that she hadn’t disappointed him. Slowly, they had been getting rid of furniture, replaced all the old TVs with one flat-screen （Olga liked to watch the news in bed）， and had recently sold his collection of Vibe magazines to a twenty-four-year-old cryptocurrency miner who was obsessed with golden-era hip-hop. Olga decided that she didn’t mind if the thing he still wanted to hoard was her time.
The gallery was in Gowanus, in a corner building of Matteo’s that used to house a tire shop but was vacated when the owner died. Olga had been inspired by Matteo’s Brooklyn salvation project. She remembered her earliest days in Fort Greene, filled with these fabulous Black and Latino artists, and wondered where they had gone. Then she remembered why she herself had abandoned her art and had the idea to start a nonprofit gallery. The proceeds from each sale split between the artist and a foundation that helped artists of color with emergency expenses. She had gotten the gallery a fair amount of publicity and, on the weekends and at their annual benefit, many of her former clients and other New Brooklyn residents came. Olga enjoyed using her old skills to steer them towards the pricier works. She had named it Comunidad.
As she approached the gallery now, she saw that her brother was once again calling.
“Prieto, I can’t with the wedding right now,” she started into the phone.
“No, Olga.” His voice sounded urgent and a nervous sensation fluttered in her chest. “I got a call this morning … I mean, at this point, it’s on the news.”
“I was running out to help Mabel with Milagros. Is everything okay?”
“She did it.”
“Who?” she said. But then she knew. “Fuck.” She was fumbling with her key in the lock. She ran over to her computer to check out the news for herself.
“Early this morning a bomb went off in La Fortaleza; it didn’t do too much damage, so I think they were trying to keep it quiet but … well, fuck, just look.”
They had not heard from their mother since just after Maria. They had, after much torment and a commitment to therapy, come to the familial decision to mourn her like the dead, so speaking of her now was like being grabbed by a ghost. Of course, she had lingered in the back of their minds. Her brother had served two more terms before deciding to run for governor of New York, and though he did plenty for the people of Puerto Rico, he never did go back.
They had both, of course, seen the headlines: after Maria, as their mother predicted, the awakening among the people that had begun after PROMESA only became louder, more organized and intense. Estimates on Maria’s death toll ranged in the thousands; one team of scientists put the count at 4,645. Outraged and grief-stricken, people stopped looking to the central government and strengthened the organization of their smaller municipalities. Just as they had been organized in the beginning, when the land was Borikén.