“Are you there?” Prieto asked.
“Yes.”
“Did you get the news alert?”
“If I’m on the phone with you, how could I see the alert?”
“Why do you have to be such a fucking smart-ass? Oye … they bombed the airport.”
She gasped and hit refresh on her browser. And she saw it now. Chaos.
“Luis Mu?oz Marín…，” she said.
“The traitor.” Parroting the way their parents would talk about the Yanqui lapdog.
“Oh my God,” Olga gasped. “So many people…”
“Yeah…，” Prieto said.
But then Mabel was at the door, struggling with the stroller, and Milagros was fussing and Olga needed to go.
“I’ve gotta help Mabel. I’ll call you later.”
“Wait, Olga. Do we just let her do this?”
There was a pause and she had to let go of the phone. In truth, she didn’t know.
* * *
FOR THE REST of the day, bombs and unrest in Puerto Rico took over her newsfeed. In the streets of San Juan, the people had taken over government buildings, removing the U.S. flags from any and every flagpole they could reach, while the Pa?uelos systemically bombed the airports, military outposts, and ports, cutting the island off, at least for a moment. Pigs’ heads were mounted on stakes outside the Fortaleza, police cars set on fire. This, Olga could tell, was it. This was what revolution looked like. What she’d sacrificed so many parts of herself for.
She’d been hearing about it her whole life and now, finally, she was seeing it with her own eyes. Her mother had told her that when this day came, Olga would be proud. This was true, but the pride that welled was not related to her mother. This, she could see, was bigger than one woman. Her mother had anticipated the cause and the effect, but it was not her mother who had ushered in this metamorphosis, this force. No, this was a sea change, an awakening to over a century of abused power, the last drop of water in the glass. This would continue tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that, regardless of what or where her mother was. This was by, of, and for the people.
* * *
AFTER MABEL PICKED up Milagros, Olga walked from the gallery over to the Fulton Mall. She stopped at the ATM, picked up a nice bottle of wine, and then made her way into one of the last gold fronts/collectible sneaker/unlocked cell phone spots that still existed in Brooklyn. She liked bringing Matteo little gifts, so she bought him a money clip, paid cash for a phone, and stopped to sit at a café table at one of the new ped malls they had put up. She looked up Bonilla’s number on her own phone and dialed it on the new one.
“Hello?” she said. “Yes, I’d like to report an anonymous tip.… It’s regarding the bombings of the airports in Puerto Rico.… Yes, I can hold.…”
But as she waited, a voice whispered in her head. It took Olga a second to recognize it as her own.
What do you think happens next? She goes quietly? Nah. It’ll be guns blazing and she’ll be a hero and for the rest of your life you’ll have to see her fucking face on murals and T-shirts and have people talk about what a martyr this puta was, and do you really need that shit?
No, she decided. She did not.
She hung up, dropped the new phone into the nearest gutter, and got on the R train so she wouldn’t be late for dinner. It was a glorious fall day. Matteo was going to grill.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks begin with my two most devoted readers: Mayra Castillo, my mother-sister-friend, and Yelena Gitlin Nesbit, whom I met in a Brooklyn public library when we were eleven years old and to whom I first confessed, while picking through the racks of Neiman Marcus Last Call, that I would, at forty, like to try writing. She told me that this was what I was meant to do.
My prayers were answered for the perfect team: Mollie Glick, who had a vision for my writing career before one existed, and Megan Lynch, whose love and care for this book—and for big, weird novels—moved me so. Thank you for being such champions of both Olga and me. Thanks to Dana Spector, my savvy lodestar, and to André Des Rochers, who reminded me to always bet on me. And to the passionate Flatiron team that so lovingly cared for this book: Kukuwa Ashun, Malati Chavali, Nancy Trypuc, Katherine Turro, Marlena Bittner, Claire McLaughlin, Keith Hayes, Erin Gordon, Nadxieli Nieto, Dominique Jenkins, and Lauren Peters-Collaer.
I am in creative debt to the art of Alynda Segarra and the critical journalism of Naomi Klein. This novel crystallized during a morning Q train commute as I read The Battle for Paradise while listening to Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Navigator. “Rican Beach” came on, and suddenly I was near tears and it all clicked and Olga was born.