Read Online Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil by Rafael Yglesias - Free Book Online Page B

destroyed.
    My father and the waitress exclaimed with dismay. I looked up at Grandpa’s car and saw my mother staring at me. Grandma Jacinta was talking to her, again with an unusual animation and uncertainty. My mother’s curly flop of black hair, parted on one side and covering half of her brow, was still while she listened. That too was unusual. She always seemed to be in motion, especially her hair; it would tremble from her nervous energy. Her green eyes were wide as she stared at me. But she wasn’t seeing me. She didn’t react to the ice cream cone’s death.
    I sagged. I didn’t keel over. I slumped against my father. I felt weak and exhausted. There was commotion. My mother came out of the car. Grandma called my name in a faraway panicked tone: “Rafa! Rafa!” The waitress said she’d get me water. Francisco picked me up.
    “Ugh,” he groaned at my weight. “What a big boy you’ve become.”
    “What’s wrong!” my mother said in an angry shout.
    “He’s tired,” my father insisted. “You can lie down in the back, Rafael. We’ll go home and you’ll take a nap.”
    I was horizontal in my father’s arms as he carried me to Grandpa’s car. The low Tampa buildings bounced. A blue car with a white hat bobbed up and down. It was across the avenue, stopped at a gas station, but not at a pump. I didn’t notice the occupants before my father turned away from them to angle me at the Plymouth. I wondered if the man with the baseball cap and aviator glasses was inside that blue and white car. I thought about mentioning the men and the car to my parents. Ruth had lectured me around Christmastime about strangers watching us. She told me to let her know if I saw men hanging around outside our apartment building. I asked why they would. She didn’t really answer. She said that some men had been questioning our neighbors about us. When I pressed for a fuller explanation, she was vague. (I had no idea that for a decade my parents had been subject on and off to harassment—some might prefer to call it surveillance—by the FBI. They had been members of the Communist Party until 1950 and then there was my father’s friendliness to Fidel’s Cuba.) She made me promise I would report any men lurking about. I wondered if these men in the blue and white car qualified.
    I didn’t get a chance to bring it up. When Francisco maneuvered me to the rear door, a disagreement started between Ruth and Grandma about who was going to sit in the back with me. At first, they expressed their desires passively.
    “Jacinta, you sit up front,” my mother said. “You’ll be more comfortable.”
    “No,” Grandma said, “there’s not enough room for you in the back.”
    “There’s plenty of room.”
    “No, I’ll be fine. I’ll put Rafa’s head on my lap,” Grandma insisted.
    “I can put his head on my lap,” Ruth said.
    “It’ll wrinkle your dress,” Grandma objected.
    “For God’s sake,” my father said. “Somebody open the door!” He was still holding me. It was hot. He shifted me in his arms, weary from the weight.
    Jacinta opened the rear door and slid to the far seat. “No!” my mother protested. Francisco put me in and Grandma eased my head onto her lap.
    “I want to sit with him,” my mother insisted to Grandma. The sharp tone she used on Jacinta was rare—in fact, unique. She was always solicitous of Grandma. “Why aren’t you paying any attention to what I say? I’m his mother. I want to sit with him.”
    “Take it easy,” my father mumbled.
    “You take it easy,” my mother said loudly. She was angry, but she wasn’t hysterical. She had confidence. “It took over two hours to get Rafe treated. He hasn’t had anything to eat since breakfast and he threw that up. I think he’s dehydrated and your great solution is to give him ice cream and pinch him and shove him around like he’s some chum in a bar—”
    And then something extraordinary happened. So extraordinary that I completely