The Storyteller's Death: A Novel

Copyright © 2022 by Ann Dávila Cardinal

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cardinal, Ann Dávila, author.

Title: The storyteller’s death : a novel / Ann Dávila Cardinal.

Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2022]

Identifiers: LCCN 2022011070 (print) | LCCN 2022011071 (ebook) | (trade paperback) | (epub)

Subjects: LCGFT: Detective and mystery fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3603.A73526 S76 2022 (print) | LCC PS3603.A73526

(ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23/eng/20220307

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011070

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011071

For Carlos Victor Cardinal

I’ve been working on this story for most of your life…

It has always been for you.

Contents

Chapter One: death in a back room

Chapter Two: forgotten luggage

Chapter Three: a boy like that

Chapter Four: a mound of earth

Chapter Five: skin of my teeth

Chapter Six: shed skin

Chapter Seven: too many hospitals

Chapter Eight: abuela’s story

Chapter Nine: death of a cuentista

Chapter Ten: and the monkeys came

Chapter Eleven: a detective’s return

Chapter Twelve: claridad means clarity

Chapter Thirteen: the last word

Chapter Fourteen: everyone loves a parade

Chapter Fifteen: a liar’s truth

Chapter Sixteen: the party of the red head

Chapter Seventeen: a sleeping rose

Chapter Eighteen: the pit with the fruit

Chapter Nineteen: shadow and storm

Chapter Twenty: great-grandfather’s office

Chapter Twenty-One: not one drop of blood

Chapter Twenty-Two: the many meanings of bueno

Chapter Twenty-Three: home at last?

Chapter Twenty-Four: a gift becomes a curse

Chapter Twenty-Five: full disclosure

Chapter Twenty-Six: diversions for a lazy mind

Chapter Twenty-Seven: the scene of the crime

Chapter Twenty-Eight: buying time

Chapter Twenty-Nine: the airport…again

Chapter Thirty: two halves of a whole

Chapter Thirty-One: learning her place

Chapter Thirty-Two: puzzle pieces

Chapter Thirty-Three: little girl island

Chapter Thirty-Four: esperanza means hope

Chapter Thirty-Five: embellishing the truth

Chapter Thirty-Six: at the heart of it

Chapter Thirty-Seven: it was just a dream

Chapter Thirty-Eight: untold stories and other regrets

Chapter Thirty-Nine: the truth hits everybody

Chapter Forty: the whistleblowers

Chapter Forty-One: kissing the horizon at the top of the world

Excerpt from We Need No Wings

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Reading Group Guide

A Conversation with the Author

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Chapter One

death in a back room

There was always some old woman dying in the back room when I was a child. These women were just an expected part of the decor, like a lamp or a coffee table. I didn’t know who most of them were, one ancient relative or another, and each summer I would usually find a new inhabitant. What I’ve come to understand, in the twilight of my own life, is that they were a nameless introduction to what would be my long and intimate relationship with death. They were also a doorway to true understanding of my Puerto Rican family and the gifts and curses that came with them.

I was eight years old in the summer of 1970 when I first encountered one of the inhabitants of the back room. That particular day, my cousins and I were running through Tío Ramón’s one-story, concrete house at top speed, sliding over the slick, tiled floors, as adult reprimands in rapid-fire Spanish trailed behind us like a kite tail. We had to pass through the last room, a bedroom, before breaking free of the building and barreling into the back courtyard, scattering chickens and dust in every direction.

I remember I stopped short at the threshold, staring at the unexpected body on the shadowed bed. My cousins collided into me from behind and, seeing my apprehension, said in English, Don’t worry about her, Prima, as they pushed around me and pulled at my arms, coaxing me to follow them. She can’t hear you. Vamos! I wanted to follow them, to be so unafraid as to walk through life as if there weren’t something horrible waiting for me just out of sight.

The smell hit me first. Medicinal. Antiseptic. Stale. Like my father’s hospital room back in New Jersey, that chemical odor that reached down into my stomach and squeezed. I pulled free of my cousins, my feet rooted to the doorsill, their voices fading as they scampered out into the daylight. I looked down at the scrubbed white Formica floor, the gray and blue dots forming moving patterns if I stared at them long enough, trying to pull me into their vortex, to get me to tip over and fall in headfirst.

The room was spotless: Tía Lourdes always made sure of that. She had been a nurse in the war, and so the care of the infirm family members always seemed to fall to her. These days, I can’t help but wonder how she felt about that, or if she was even given a choice. This was one difference I found between the Larsen part of me and the Sanchez side. Even as a child, I couldn’t imagine just blindly obeying someone simply because they were an adult, because they’d seen the sun rise and set more times than I had. Why did that alone impart the qualifications of authority? But that attitude was not understood nor appreciated by my mother’s side of my family.

That summer afternoon, I stood in the doorway alone. The lights in the room were low; the bright afternoon glare permitted entry only through the wooden louvers that covered the windows, a narrow stream of sunshine spilling through the partially open back door, still swinging from my cousin Carlos’s escape. Because of the near darkness, it was at least ten degrees cooler than anywhere else in the house. A large wooden crucifix was the only decoration on the white walls, the graphic dying figure of Jesus a ghastly contrast to the room’s sterility. I imagined the blood from the wounds on his hands and feet snaking down and among the small white peaks of the stucco wall in a race to see which would make it to the floor first.

And there she was. An elderly female relative lying on the bed like an empty insect husk, her papery eyelids closed but quivering. A current of anxiety ran through my limbs. Or was it a thrill? The line between repulsion and fascination was blurred in that moment, but one thing was certain: I couldn’t stay there forever. I decided to steal quietly but quickly through the room and not look over at the bed. If I didn’t look, it would be all right; she couldn’t get me. I had made it halfway across, escape mere feet away, when a crackly voice rose from the waxen figure under the chenille bedspread.

¡Ay, Virgen! ¡Madre de Dios! the old woman bellowed through her toothless mouth. I jumped, pictured her bony fingers reaching for me as I tore into the backyard, temporarily blinded by the summer sun but grateful to be free. I stopped and closed my eyes for a moment, imagining the sun was cleansing me, bleaching away the stain of dying that shivered across my skin.

I avoided going through the room for the rest of that summer. Not just because I was afraid but also because I felt a reverence for that shrunken woman teetering on the precipice leading from this world to the next. But occasionally, I would sneak away to peer at her through the slatted window from the safety of the concrete courtyard, sweat pouring down my neck, the sun on the back of my head reminding me that I was still outside the room and far enough away that she couldn’t drag me with her when she went.

Chapter Two

forgotten luggage

Nineteen seventy was also the first year my mother left me at Great-Aunt Alma’s house for the entire summer like a piece of forgotten luggage. We had always gone as a family, the three of us, but that year, my father remained in his hospital bed, the bright-blue fluorescents an artificial and gloomy substitute for the Caribbean sun. I can still feel his cool hand on my face, still see him reaching up from his sheet cocoon. It was then, when I put my hand over his, that I realized his skin no longer fit. His body was shrinking inside its pale shell.

That night, back at home as we were preparing to leave, I watched my mother open the hall closet, watched her fingers hesitate over the handle of my father’s large black suitcase and then pull her teal Samsonite bag from its side, leaving a shadowed hole like a missing tooth. As my mother stood silently beside me in the closet doorway, I ran my hand over his scratched black bag, smoothing out the wrinkled airline tag from his last trip that hung forlornly from its white rubber band.

I guess we won’t need this one this trip, I said, my voice sounding loud in the empty hallway. We’d had a routine, I remember. My mother always packed for him first and then helped me fill my pink duffel bag with shorts and tank tops. But that year, everything changed. At first my mother just stared at me, then anger flashed across her face. I thought she was going to yell. Instead, she slammed the closet door, shrouding the view of my father’s bag behind the slab of wood. Then she just stood there, and I watched her face fall, her shoulders slump, her body fold into itself like a paper fortune-teller.

Oh, Isla… was all she said as she dropped to the floor, her suitcase falling between us with a thump. She sobbed then, hands covering her face, her legs awkwardly bent beneath her in the shadowed hallway. That was the first time I’d seen my mother cry, but it certainly wasn’t the last. I knelt beside her and caught the faint citrusy smell of the gin and tonics she’d had with dinner.

I can’t believe Dad’s not going with us, I said, my voice almost a whisper. I swallowed down a flicker of anger. Somehow it seemed her fault, though even then I knew that made no sense.

My mother choked out in between sobs, I can’t either.

The phone rang once, its metallic trill echoing through my parents’ bedroom doorway, but neither of us moved. It was as though there were no air in that hallway and my father’s absence was a tangible thing, like the ominous crawl-space door in the downstairs bathroom or the groaning boiler in the basement. Things I wanted to forget but always knew were there, lurking.

Later, as she drove to Newark airport with her fingers tight around the steering wheel, I begged her to let me stay with my father at the hospital. I could sleep in the chair! I offered, but I knew it was an empty suggestion. I knew the only people who slept in hospitals were sick. We parked, checked our bags, and boarded the plane in silence, the empty seat between us in the 747 an unfinished sentence.

***

A week later, I sat on the high, brass bed in Alma’s guest room watching my mother repack, folding her cotton sundresses with shaking hands, then carefully placing them into her bag, her matching makeup case teetering beside her on the hideaway bed. The lipsticks rolled back and forth in the top tray, accompanying her movements in a rhythm section.

Don’t leave me here! Take me back with you. I can help take care of Daddy, I said for what felt like the fiftieth time. Truth was, I was panicked. She was leaving me on the island, alone, and the terror was immeasurable. The two most important people in my life would be an ocean away.

My mother’s voice was tired, her repeated answer rote. Oh, Isla. It’s only for a few weeks, mi amor. You’ll have more fun here with Tía than coming back to New Jersey. Daddy needs to rest so he can play with you when you come back. She attempted a smile, but I could tell from the tightness tugging across her lips and the way her glassy eyes stared off that she wasn’t being truthful. I could always tell when she was lying.

I wanted to argue and plead some more—I was furious, disappointed, petrified—but the words wouldn’t come. Then I had an overwhelming desire to climb off the bed, sit next to my mother, and hold her, but I couldn’t make my body move. I wouldn’t make my body move. This was her fault too.

Later, after my mother had disappeared through the gate door with only a quick glance over her shoulder, I stood next to Alma at the big plate-glass window that looked out on the tarmac of Isla Verde International Airport. We watched her walk in a line behind the other passengers toward the waiting jet, then slowly make her way up the stairway to the plane. She was wearing a straight green dress and thong sandals, her bobbed hair uncurling in the hot wind. She stopped halfway up the stairs, her left hand gripping the railing, and looked toward the window where we stood, her hand shading her eyes from the morning sun. She gave a quick wave, and for a moment, just a millisecond, I thought I saw hesitation, a shadow of regret. My heart leapt. I knew it! My mother couldn’t leave me there alone.

I yelled into the wall of glass, Mom! a circle of steam from my breath forming, then retreating in front of me. I waved wildly at my mother, imagined her running back down the airplane’s steps. But she said something to the woman a stair below and hurried onto the jet without looking back.

I stared at the plane as the rest of the passengers boarded and the crew stuffed suitcases and boxes wrapped with brown twine into the plane’s belly. As they pulled the stairs away, then closed the door. I studied the teal globe skeleton on the side of the plane, repeating the name Pan-Am over and over to myself like a litany. Any moment, they would reopen the door, roll back the stairs, and my mother would hurry down them, carry-on bag flying behind her. As the plane taxied out, I stared into every small black rectangular window along its side, the midday sun glinting off them as if they were jewels. I stared until the plane was just a dot in the sky over San Juan.

Alma stood next to me, silent, but when the black dot finally winked out of existence, she put her hands on my shoulders and steered me away from the window. On the way to the parking lot, she bought me a soda, something usually reserved for special occasions, and held my free hand, occasionally squeezing it and clucking her tongue on her teeth as if disapproving of something.

We drove back to Alma’s house in silence as I counted the corrugated tin-shack homes with oversized TV antennas that framed the highway from the airport.

Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.

She occasionally leaned over the Buick’s red leather seat and patted my knee with her hand, murmuring, Ay, bendito, pobrecita.

Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four.

When we arrived at the house, Alma’s guard dog, Guardián, barked and growled at us from the end of his chain, making me jump. Then, for the first time that day, I cried. The sobs came so fast and close together that I barely had time to gulp breaths. Alma led me into the house and sat me in the front parlor on the glider chair that was always my favorite. She rustled off to the kitchen, returning with a cold glass of water. I lifted the glass to my lips, the clean scent of chlorine wafting up as I drank. Alma sat next to me and carefully tucked her polyester skirt beneath her like the hospital corners on a bed. The lacy edge of her white slip appeared at her knees as she put her arm around my shoulders. She hummed quietly as we rocked back and forth, the only sounds the squeal of the chairs’ rails and birds in the trees outside.

Tell me a story, Tía. My voice was nasal from crying.

Alma stopped moving for a moment but then started again. Ay, m’ija. You know I don’t tell stories.

The thing is, until that moment, I didn’t know that. Had I just never noticed? Back then, it had seemed to me that everyone on the island had a story at the ready, each one lined up behind the other like shark’s teeth. I pulled back and looked at her, her visage fuzzy through my wet lashes. But why?

Alma just went on rocking and humming.

Abuela tells stories, I said, knowing that bringing up Alma’s sister, my grandmother, was sure to get a reaction. I knew Abuela was competitive with her sister, and I was banking that it went both ways. You see, Abuela was a true cuentista. My mother thought her evil, and given how the woman spoke to her, I tended to agree. Abuela was always yelling and judging and fighting; no one was safe from her wrath. Many times I’d watched her suck the life out of my mother with just words. But boy, could she tell a story.

When my abuela settled in a chair and the words I remember the time… escaped her lips, anyone nearby would stop and gather around her. She held court from her cane rocking chair, the smallest of her yappy dogs scattered over the expensive but severe dress that stretched across her breasts. I would sit at her feet, next to her support-hose-varnished leg, mesmerized by her ability to ensorcell with tales about the family, long-dead relatives and their lives on the island. What I loved best was that her stories always had a hint of magic woven through them, like a silver thread that glinted now and again. My abuela was never particularly kind to me, always criticizing and pointing out where I fell short compared to my cousins, but her tales were funny and nostalgic, and it was never clear if they were true. And, as I would come to learn, it didn’t really matter.

Alma freed a strand of hair that was stuck in my drying tears. Yes, well, I don’t tell stories. As my father used to say, ‘Stories are mere diversions for a lazy mind.’

I sensed an undercurrent of judgment in the quote, so I crossed my arms and pouted.

How about I play you a song on the piano instead? Hmm?

I nodded and looked at her gratefully. When Alma played just for me, the notes hanging crisp and clear in the humid air of the parlor, it was a gift.

Alma walked over to the upright piano, the clean thunk of the cover being raised followed, and then she settled herself on the piano bench, back straight, eyes ahead. Soon the familiar notes of Für Elise were riding on the dust motes in the midday air, and I was able to forget for a time.

Chapter Three

a boy like that

After Mom flew home that summer, Alma and I were inseparable. My mother’s departure left a void, and my great-aunt swooped in to fill it. She took me to visit friends and relatives in the mornings, and I felt grown-up sitting in the rocking chair my mother would have occupied, listening to the melody of conversation in Spanish, sipping my syrupy Coca-Cola as if at high tea. Our afternoons were spent walking through the open-air market in Bayamón, sniffing papayas and playing with hand-carved maracas, the words Puerto Rico crudely painted on the gourds’ sides. We walked arm in arm through the town square, talking about nothing and everything. It took three of my steps to equal a single stride of my tía’s. Alma marched around the town as if she owned it, and back then, I often wondered if she did.

Alma was one of those women who seemed to have been born sixty years old, as if she had always been matronly. Last year, I ran across an old photograph of her, and I was surprised to see she actually had a curvaceous figure in her youth. But her military bearing and, I would imagine, her entitlement made her unapproachable and intimidating. She always walked with great authority, her upper body leaned forward, her chin held high in the air, as someone striding up a hill with great purpose.

She kept her salon-styled salt-and-pepper hair short and beauty parlor curled and wore custom-made dresses in jewel-toned polyester fabrics. She wore stockings until her dying day, though they must have been impossibly warm and my mother tried her best to get her to switch to pantyhose. Her ensemble was never complete without the omnipresent patent leather handbag clutched over her left arm, its crisp satin-lined contents including an embroidered handkerchief, a Spanish fan, a rosary, and a mantilla. Oh, and a dusty mint to remedy church boredom.

Alma spent the rest of each day busy in her garden, which I found boring and insect-infested, so in the first two weeks of that summer, I used the time to explore the house. In the past, my mother was always with me, and each hour was carefully planned, so the freedom was exhilarating. I spent hours looking at the delicate robin’s-egg-blue Lladro porcelain figures in the curio cabinet: Don Quixote, a young ballerina, and the Virgin Mary, all neighbors in their glass-walled nest. I wanted them, each and every one, though I can’t imagine what I would have done with them. I think it was their inaccessibility that made them so appealing, their aloofness. I was fascinated by the marble-topped hall table in the parlor with the ancient rotary phone, and a piano-shaped music box. Even the collection of old sheet music in the womb of the piano bench was a treasure to uncover. That summer, I explored it all; I was an eight-year-old archaeologist.

But there was a room off the parlor in the front of the house that was unavailable to me, its door always locked. I asked my mother about it once. She shushed me, pulling me aside as if Alma were just around the corner, ears cocked for any transgression. In an angry whisper, Mom explained that the closed-off room had been Great-Grandfather’s office, that he’d died in there, and afterward Alma had made the room off-limits to anyone but her.

Mom warned me that I was never to speak to Tía about it and never to go in there. But there was no need for such warnings: after she told me that, I couldn’t even walk by the door without shuddering, especially since the wall behind the head of my bed was shared with that very same room. I pictured the door opening to a dark cave or a black chasm with flames licking from its bowels. It was the room that killed great-grandfathers. So, like the basement of our house in New Jersey, I would walk quickly by its door and try to forget it existed.

Once I had explored all there was to explore in the house, I became bold and ventured out into Alma’s jungle. I understood it wasn’t an actual jungle, but during those afternoons, as I ran among the trees, hopping over roots and stray coconuts, it certainly felt like one. Alma was comforted by plant life, and the vegetation was allowed to grow lush and wild around her low stone house. The plants reveled in her nurturing, enveloping the property in a rich, green sheath, shielding it from the neighboring maze of high-rise buildings that were multiplying as quickly as the foliage. To me it was heaven, a refuge from expectations. Under that canopy, I could forget that my mother had left me, that my father was sick. In that small wilderness, I was free.

Was it sad that I was left alone in a make-believe jungle? Perhaps. I had cousins my age, but they were still in school (the school year down there seemed preternaturally long to me), and honestly, it was a relief to be alone. I sometimes worried that my cousins only played with me because Tío Ramón insisted. They were always kind to me, but I often had the feeling there were other things they’d rather be doing. Real friends they wanted to play with, friends who spoke Spanish fluently, who understood their jokes. But me? Each summer, I had to pull my Spanish out from under the cedar blocks of winter storage in New Jersey, where the only Spanish I heard was one side of occasional phone calls from the island or at the local bodega where my mother bought her guava paste.

Among my cousins, I always knew I was different: larger, pastier, louder. I longed to be like them, switching so easily from elegant Spanish to an English that was more grammatical than my own. My play clothes that had seemed fine alongside the neighborhood kids in New Jersey felt shoddy and mismatched on the island, my hair ungroomed, too thin and dull. But the truth was, I didn’t have any real friends at home either. Since my father had fallen sick, the other children acted as if I carried a contagion.

One glorious, solitary afternoon, I was playing detective, skulking from palm trunk to palm trunk and watching the workmen as if they were enemies on whom I was assigned to spy. I was scribbling on an imaginary notepad when I heard a crunch on the ground behind me. I leapt, my heart taking off in a run, and spun around. My shoulders relaxed when I glimpsed a boy standing a few feet away, his large eyes watching me. He looked to be about my age and was wearing nothing but a threadbare pair of navy shorts. He was tall but very thin, with a small round belly and deep-brown skin. I considered him and determined him no threat.

¡Hola! Me llamo Isla. ¿Como te llamas? I asked with a careful, friendly voice. But instead of telling me his name, he just ducked behind the hatched trunk of a nearby palm. I shrugged and resumed my surveillance duties: I was accustomed to not being understood.

What are you doing? he asked in accented English.

I’m on a secret mission, I stage-whispered.

Can I play? he whispered back.

I assessed him again, looking closer into his dark-brown eyes. I had a gift, even back then. I could see meanness like a color in people’s eyes, the sharpness at the edges, the extra glint off the surface. This boy was okay.

Sure. I’m a secret agent and you can be my partner. What’s your name?

José. He flashed a bashful smile.

Okay, Detective José, we’re on a stakeout. I pointed toward the workmen carrying materials from their truck to the shed. These guys have stolen a secret invisibility machine, and we have to find out where they hid it. I’ll watch the short guy with the mustache who looks kind of like a weasel. You watch the fat guy over there. Shoot him if he makes any wrong moves.

That’s my father, José replied.

Oh. Well, you watch the other guy working with him, okay? Then we have to make a plan to capture them.

I remember we spent the afternoon running in and out of the trees, imagination painting stage sets of spy caves and international intrigue. José didn’t try to control the game like my male cousins did, and he didn’t make me feel a tomboy by worrying about getting dirty like my cousin Maria. By the time José’s father called him to leave later that afternoon, we were friends.

I’m going to see if my father will bring me with him tomorrow too, José said, his eyes bright. "See you