Reviewing the file, the date stood out to Prieto for different reasons—Ojeda Ríos’s murder was just a day after his own grandmother’s death. He’d found it difficult to braid this political homicide with such an intimate loss in his own life, of his family’s. He imagined his mother planning an assassination as they watched their father’s slow descent into death. He pictured her plotting rebellion while his ex-wife was birthing their daughter. While he had sat in mourning for his grandmother, her daughter was shedding tears over this failed revolutionary. A sense of neglect washed over him that turned his worldview quite gray. His thoughts morphed into a feeling of dull pain.
As a young man, with his father a walking zombie and his mother gone, Prieto had to make a choice. Was he going to love them or hate them? He chose love. But in his mother’s absence that love became something else. He idolized her, worshiped her. She, who was so committed to bettering the world that she left her own children! In light of this, he began to shape his life so that it reflected the values of this exalted figure. To signal to her that while she was off on the front lines, he was keeping up the good fight at home. The ideal soldier. Discovering that she had left it all behind—left them behind—to follow a fringe figure in an independence movement that would never succeed was, for Prieto, a pernicious blow. Her file recast their abandonment as futile: her cause not only impossible, but the means insane. What did this say about the woman, his mother, who’d dedicated her life to it? What did this say about him, whose life’s purpose had been defined, not in small part, to please such a woman? Dwelling on this question took Prieto into dark, existential terrain, and so he packed the information away.
* * *
HIS MOTHER HAD written to him ceaselessly prior to the PROMESA vote, warning of the dire consequences and utter destruction of the Puerto Rican people that it would bring. But he had faced tremendous pressure, both from his peers and of public opinion—to say nothing of Lin-Manuel Miranda. Plus it was, he felt, a matter of common sense. It was the only real choice and so he made it.
Sort of. Truth be told, though Prieto tried to forget the information he’d seen in his mother’s file, in the months and years following, he often found himself feeling angry with her. He went through and reread all of her letters, running the dates against milestones in his family’s life. He was struck for the first time by her self-absorption, by her single-minded focus on her vision of how the world should be, the lack of interest in their lives outside of what she deemed important about them. Where these letters once filled him with warmth—random reminders that he wasn’t motherless, he was loved—for the first time, he began to feel manipulated by her correspondences. So, when she began lobbying him about PROMESA, he didn’t so much vote for it to enact revenge as he didn’t give her approval the consideration he historically would have. He didn’t care if she was disappointed in him. He was disappointed in her.
For days and weeks after the vote, through the appointment of the panel and the creation of the fiscal austerity plan, he held his breath. Waiting for the angry, scolding missives from his mother that he knew Olga was accustomed to receiving. A waste of his position; a waste of his power. Yet nothing came. After a while, he began to sense that his mother was more than just “a bit” upset. Of course, PROMESA quickly proved humiliating for all who’d supported it. It was nothing more than a private-sector money grab. Whenever the topic of PROMESA came up he’d be flooded with a wave of anxiety, one that was rooted in more than concern for the island. Prieto found himself desperate to apologize to his mother for it. He hadn’t realized how much his status as “the good one” had grounded him.
* * *
“THE ACTUAL PACKAGE was from a compost store on eBay,” Agent Bonilla told Prieto over drinks at Le Diplomate. “But I was able to track down the bill-to address on the order: a Karen Price of West One Hundred Forty-ninth Street in Harlem.”
Years of hiding—his sexuality, his father’s addictions, his compromised position with the Selbys—had perfected Prieto’s poker face. Karen Price was his auntie Karen, his mother’s first and arguably only real friend.
“Hmm. Not a name I recognize,” Prieto said.
“Well, it’s an interesting biography,” Bonilla replied as he took a sip of his whiskey. The bar was loud, but Bonilla was careful not to raise his voice. “I can’t find a direct link, but I can’t help but feel she’s an associate of your mother’s.”