LITMIR.BIZ

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with their brightness, as if someone had turned on a light in her room. Perhaps that was why her mother always looked so tired—the awful dreaming left no time for restful sleep.

      Daysy dreamt often of hands, her own hands around her mother’s damp neck in the dark. In the dream, panic rose inside her chest, and a feeling like falling, slipping down her mother’s body accompanied the fear. The dream played itself out the same way each time—her limbs would go slack with exhaustion, she couldn’t get hold of her mother, and she was afraid of dropping into the darkness. She even dreamt her mother’s pulse under her fingertips, beating furiously.

      She would wake in the morning feeling clammy, her chest hollow, the way one feels when she’s forgotten something important. Once, she described the dream to her mother over breakfast. She told her of the blackness of that place, how it felt as if she had no eyes. She described, too, her mother’s neck, her throat, and the desperation she felt in the wake of the memory, as if the moment had not resolved itself in the past, but rather, had only paused for a moment. Her mother choked on a piece of buttered bread, coughing, her eyes watering, as Daysy tried to finish the story.

      “No es nada,” Magda Elena said without meeting Daysy’s eyes. “The bread went down an old road,” she said in English after clearing her throat a few more times. Magda Elena busied herself removing dishes then, coughing softly every so often.

      “About my dream,” Daysy asked, looking at the curve of her mother’s neck and wondering if the skin there still felt the same.

      “Mi’ja,” Magda Elena said, and took a breath so deep she seemed to grow taller. “I’m glad you told me. Dreams shared before noon can’t come true. Leave it alone. It’s those muñequitos you’re always reading.”

      Daysy bent low over her cereal. “I don’t think it has anything to do with comic books. It’s, I don’t know, different. I’ve even looked up some of the elements in a dream dictionary, but it still makes no sense, and even when I…”

      “Mi amor, ya.” Magda Elena wiped her hands on her pants. “You’re swimming so much, for what? To die on the shore,” she said in English.

      “That doesn’t make sense.”

      “It does in Spanish,” Magda Elena responded. “Tanto nadar para morir en la orilla.”

      “I still don’t get what it means.”

      “It means stop trying so hard, Daysy.” Magda Elena closed her eyes then, and sighed with a long, drawn out, “Ay.” The hand on her hip came up to rub the back of her neck, and Daysy knew the conversation had ended.

      Daysy also pasted pictures in her journal, and she would draw lines between the pictures and the descriptions of her dreams, trying to make connections between her waking life and the one she created at night. One such picture was a photograph Daysy had found of her father’s parents, Gregorio and Nieve, standing in front of an old stove, Nieve’s arms around his waist. Daysy knew that after Nieve died, Abuelo secured a visa to Spain, that he lived in Madrid for two years before getting to the States, and that when he arrived, he smelled like something dead. “It’s too cold for baths in Europe this time of year,” Magda Elena had said to Daysy at the airport, quite seriously. Daysy was only seven then, but she remembered her grandfather’s earthy smell, and sometimes caught the scent of it still when she passed the closet in which he kept his old Sherpa coat, the one he had worn in Spain. Magda Elena said nothing about Nieve, and when Daysy asked about her, her mother wrinkled her nose and shook her head, as if she had taken a mouthful of very bitter medicine. Daysy drew a straight line from the pasted picture to a lopsided box she had drawn and shaded. Inside the box, she described a dream in which Nieve had given Daysy a pair of hoop earrings. Beside the box, Daysy wrote the question, “What did Nieve ever do to Mami?”

      Daysy had found another picture, too. It was in black and white. There, in a small apartment in Cuba, Daysy posed with her parents. She guessed herself to be about three years old in the photo. She wore a lace dress cinched at the waist and tied with a pale ribbon. Her hair was cut short, and little curls sprang up around her ears and on her forehead. Where had the curls gone, she wondered when she looked at the photo and, sighing, touched her straight hair. In the picture she was sitting on her father’s lap. Angel wore a short-sleeved shirt open at the chest, his white undershirt exposed, his strong muscles stretching the material. He smiled so broadly that his molars showed, and his hands rested on Daysy’s little thighs. In the picture, his left eye was still good and whole, not the way it was now—the lid thick and heavy, nearly always closed over the eye that looked fine except for a jagged, black line underscoring his iris.

      The injury had occurred at Mariel, though Daysy had never been told exactly how it happened. Sometimes, she thought she remembered what the boatlift out of Cuba had been like, though she wasn’t always sure that the memories weren’t lifted from textbook pictures. She’d been nearly four when they left, old enough that something of those days stuck with her, but too young to string it into a logical story. Daysy stared at the image of her father a long time and found that with both eyes intact, he was less formidable, more handsome.

      Then there was Magda Elena. In the photograph, her face was set in a partial smile. In her arms was a baby, its head covered in tufts of fair hair, only an eye and a nose peeking out over the patchwork blanket surrounding it. Daysy noticed her mother’s long fingernails, and how the dark, painted nails stood out against the white fuzz of the baby’s blanket. She tried to remember that moment, and sometimes, she thought she did, catching fragments of it in her head, of her mother pushing a curl behind Daysy’s ear, of a rotating fan in the corner. But the rest was blank. The memory came to her at odd moments, as all her memories of Cuba did, like when she was brushing her teeth, or rinsing a bowl of rice before cooking it. They were like waves, coming, going, pulling her under, then, letting her breathe again.

      “A cousin,” Magda Elena explained when Daysy asked about the baby in the photograph. Magda Elena swore she couldn’t remember the baby’s name. “Ay, m’ija. That’s not your real cousin. Just one of the neighbor’s girls,” she explained when Daysy pressed her for more information. “Everyone’s family in Cuba,” Magda Elena said, slashing the air with her hands the way a conductor signals the last notes of a song. Daysy, who knew when to stop asking questions, pocketed the picture. She had no dream to link it to, but was sure one would come to her eventually one night, quiet and unassuming like the dew.

      Daysy had found the photographs in her mother’s dresser, on one of her rummaging excursions. She had taken to searching for nothing in particular, opening closets and peering into the back of them, her hands flitting over oddly shaped items in the dark. She crawled into attic spaces and jimmied open closed boxes with hairpins. Daysy found a tarnished Aztec sun medallion fit for a chain, her parents’ marriage certificate, a drawer full of plastic saints, airmail letters from Cuba, a lone fork with a G initialed into the handle, a bag of shells, an old parking ticket, a packet of postcards from New York City, fur-lined gloves, and the photograph of her family and the strange baby. The find had thrilled her, had made her feel as if the world were shifting suddenly, the way it does when one closes one eye, then the other, back and forth. It was like this, too, when she found her birth certificate, and when she discovered her father’s wedding ring, the one he’d outgrown. Each time she’d unearthed something it was like finding a dollar bill—unexpected and gratifying. And each time she’d bring the found item to her mother, in the hopes that the story attached to the thing, the ring, the photograph, would be told. Daysy didn’t know what she expected of her mother, but what she usually got wasn’t it.

      “Your father’s,” Magda Elena said when Daysy asked about the ring.

      “Why doesn’t he wear it?”

      “Fat fingers.”

      “Where did you buy it?”

      “A store. Enough questions. Eat your pudín de pan.” The conversations usually went in that vein. Daysy hoped to learn about how much the ring had cost, what she’d meant by inscribing his ring with her middle name, whether it hurt her that he no longer wore it. But Magda Elena was reticent in general, and when it came to telling stories about

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