The Garden of Absences

On Saturdays I get up before the sun. Not out of discipline. Anyone has that during the week when there are hours to bill. I get up because the garden is at its best at that hour. Plants don’t pretend when no one is watching. They stretch however they please, without the composure that noon imposes on them. And I need to see that: what they are when they’re not performing for anyone.

I make my coffee with the greca because I left the Keurig for office days, for the mornings when what matters is speed, not flavor. On Saturdays the coffee has to smell like something. I owe it to the patio. I go out barefoot, cup in one hand and pruning shears in the other, and I sit on the cement step that separates the marquesina from the little square of dirt I’ve been calling my oasis for years.

Ten feet by ten feet. A handkerchief of grass and dirt ringed by cement on all four sides. My little house in Villa Paz doesn’t allow for more. The yard is narrow, functional like everything they built in the seventies: a clothesline, space for a BBQ, and that little patch of earth that was probably meant for a plantain tree and not much else. But I turned it into something else.

The sábila is in the left corner, against the wall. That was the first. Papi had an aloe on the balcony of the apartment in Isla Verde that was older than me, and when he died, mami wanted to throw everything out fast, sell, clean, turn the page as if things erased with Pine-Sol. I took the sábila. I didn’t ask permission. I put it in the car and transplanted it that same night with my hands still smelling like hospital. Five years it’s been in that corner now and it’s given me about eight little ones that I gave away, except for two that stayed stuck to the mother like candle stubs.

Next to the sábila is doña Carmen’s fern. Doña Carmen lived three houses down and used to give me pasteles at Christmas. When they found her in the rocking chair she’d already been dead two days and the fern was on the balcony drying out. I brought it home. It wasn’t a spectacular fern, one of those that sometimes doesn’t even have a name, but it had been in doña Carmen’s house for years, breathing her air, and it seemed to me that somebody had to keep taking care of it.

The peperomia was from the office. I bought it for myself when I started at the consulting firm, put it on the desk next to the monitor, and had it for three years until they laid me off on a Tuesday at eleven in the morning with an HR email that didn’t even have my name spelled right. They gave me a cardboard box. The plant didn’t fit. I carried it in my other hand, like a nene.

There are more. There’s the colored croton I bought the day Bigotes, the cat, died. There’s the pothos Valeria gave me before she left for Orlando and stopped answering messages. There’s the succulent I bought on the day that would have been papi’s birthday, without thinking much about it, like someone lighting a candle. Each plant is a point on a map only I can read. Seen from outside it’s a pretty yard, a little cramped. Seen from inside it’s a living cemetery.

I don’t call it that. I call it my oasis. And on Saturday mornings, with the coffee and the pruning shears, I’m the calmest person in Trujillo Alto.

That October morning was like all the others until it wasn’t. I was pruning the dry leaves off the pothos, which always wants to eat up the peperomia’s space, when I saw something between the sábila and doña Carmen’s fern. A sprout. Dark green, two little leaves opening like small hands, coming up from a point of dirt where I hadn’t planted anything. Ever.

I crouched down. I touched the dirt around it. It was damp, packed tight, as if the plant had spent weeks working underneath without my noticing. I felt something cold in my stomach. Not fear. Something worse: disorder. Something had entered my system without my permission.

* * *

I searched Google for “climbing plant Puerto Rico heart-shaped leaves” and got forty results. But I’m a project manager. I don’t settle for forty results. I cross-referenced images, read gardening forums, even joined a Facebook group of ladies from Aibonito who spend their days identifying plants. By the third photo I posted, some woman named Mildred answered with three heart emojis and a name: Antigonon leptopus. Bellísima. Coralita. In Puerto Rico it grows wild. A seed can arrive with a bird, with the wind, with the rainwater running down off the roof.

I read that it’s a climber. That it grabs whatever’s next to it and climbs. That it produces small pink flowers that look like clusters of paper hearts. That it’s lovely. And that if you let it, it eats everything around it.

I didn’t pull it.

I told myself it was small. That I had time. That maybe it would flower nicely and give the garden a touch of color, which was a little dark green, a little serious. I told myself a lot of reasonable things while I watched it grow between papi’s sábila and doña Carmen’s fern.

Abner came over that Saturday afternoon. He pulled up in his work truck, a Toyota Tacoma that needed an alignment he was never going to get, with a bag of Popeyes and two Medallas. He kissed me on the forehead like we were an old married couple, sat down on the marquesina and asked me what was new. I told him there was a new plant in the garden. He said “ah cool” and opened the beer.

Four years. Four years we’d been together and that was the depth of his curiosity. Ah cool. I was telling him about something that had been turning my stomach since morning and he was looking at his phone for a video of some guy who restores old cars on YouTube.

It’s not that Abner is a bad person. You have to say that because people always want the men in these stories to be monsters. Abner Colón is not a monster. He’s a handyman who does his work honestly, who charges little because he doesn’t know how to charge more, who has a steady clientele of old ladies in the metro area who call him Abnercito even though he’s forty-four. When the power goes out, which in this country is LUMA’s national hobby, Abner shows up at my house with gas for the generator before I even have to ask him. When the sink clogs, Abner is under there with the wrench and a smile. When I wanted to put a block border around the garden to separate it better from the cement, Abner spent a whole Saturday mixing cement and leveling blocks under the Trujillo sun like it was an Army Corps of Engineers project.

Abner gets things done. What Abner doesn’t do is grow.

I’ve told him a thousand times. You have to hire employees. You have to get another truck. You have to charge more. You have to tell don Esteban you can’t paint his whole house for eight hundred dollars because that’s barely enough for paint. I’ve made him spreadsheets. I’ve drafted proposals for him. I’ve written the messages to the clients and put them in his phone so all he has to do is hit send. Abner listens to everything, nods, says “you’re right, nena,” and the next day he’s the same. Scraping by. A little job here, a little job there. No plan. No structure. No change.

Abner has already had another life. He has a son from that relationship, Christopher, who’s fourteen and a normal teenager. Sometimes he’s a sweetheart, sometimes he’s unbearable. Abner loves him. What he doesn’t do is raise him. He treats him like a pal, not like a father. Christopher can be failing math and Abner tells him “easy, bro, you’ll be fine.” And me, who didn’t give birth to that kid, I’m the one who checks his grades, who sits him down to do homework, who tells him he can’t be up until eleven at night on the PlayStation because there’s school tomorrow.

Christopher loves me. He calls me Eli with a trust that sometimes moves me and sometimes scares me. Because I’m not his mother. I’m the girlfriend of the father who’s been the girlfriend for four years without anyone saying a word about it. And Christopher needs me more than he should, because neither his father nor his mother gives him the structure a fourteen-year-old needs so he doesn’t lose himself.

One Friday Abner asked me to pick Christopher up from school because he was on a job in Bayamón and wasn’t going to make it. I went. Christopher got in the car, threw his backpack on the back seat and stayed quiet for three blocks. Then, without looking at me, he told me that his English teacher had humiliated him in front of the whole class over a presentation he’d done badly. I asked him what happened. He told me the whole thing, in detail, with the tight voice of a kid holding back tears because he’s already fourteen and men don’t cry. When he finished I told him the teacher had crossed a line, but next time we were going to practice the presentation together before he gave it. He looked at me for the first time since he’d gotten in the car and said, “you’d help me with that?” As if no one had ever offered him that. As if the idea that someone would sit down with him and prepare something were a new invention. I said yes. He said, “thanks, Eli.” And he turned on the radio.

Sometimes I look at Christopher and I see Abner in thirty years. The same sweetness. The same lack of urgency. And I get a thing in my chest that I don’t know if it’s tenderness or panic.

* * *

The bellísima grew fast. By November it had already climbed the stem of the sábila and was catching the first wire of the clothesline with a tendril as thin as a baby’s finger. The first flowers appeared on a rainy morning: pink clusters, delicate, trembling under the weight of the water. They were beautiful. I won’t lie. They gave the garden something it didn’t have, a soft color, feminine, that contrasted with all that hard green of the other plants.

But I knew what it was doing. I had read enough. Bellísima doesn’t grow alongside things. It grows on top of them. It uses them for support, wraps them, cuts off their light, and in the end it smothers them without it looking like violence. It looks like an embrace. It’s an execution.

November was the month I started seeing things with Abner differently. Or maybe I saw them the way I always had but stopped making excuses for them. On Thanksgiving Day we went to his sister’s in Caguas. Abner spent the whole dinner talking about fishing with his brother-in-law. He didn’t introduce me to the cousin who came in from New York. He didn’t include me in any conversation. I spent two hours sitting among people who treated me as Abner’s girlfriend and not as Elizabeth. When we came back in the car I told him I had felt invisible. He said, “but you get along with everybody, nena.” And he turned up the radio.

In December I texted him on a Tuesday at three in the afternoon asking if he’d called the guy for the proposal I had put together for the remodeling project in Condado. He answered at nine at night with a “I forgot, I’ll call her tomorrow.” He didn’t call her tomorrow. He never called her. They gave the project to someone else.

I went out to the garden after each of those things. Not to think. To work. I pruned, I watered, I cleaned the croton’s leaves with a damp rag. And I watched the bellísima grow. It was already on doña Carmen’s fern. It had wound itself around three fronds and the fern was starting to look yellow where the vine was blocking its light.

One day I was looking at it and thinking about how it was covering up the other plants. And the next day I was looking at Abner asleep on the couch at seven in the evening and thinking about how the vine was taking the light from the fern. And after that they weren’t separate thoughts. They were the same thought.

One night in January Abner came over after a job in Guaynabo. He arrived tired, smelling of paint and sweat, and he wanted to be with me. He kissed my neck in the kitchen while I was washing the dishes. He took me to the bedroom with that energy he gets when something has gone well on the job, that kid-joy of someone who just connected a home run. He took off his clothes and took off mine with that sweet clumsiness that at the beginning of the relationship I had found sexy and that now seemed like something else to me.

Abner was incredible that night. Present. Attentive. Doing everything he knows how to do with his body, which is a lot, because Abner with his hands has always been good. It’s with everything else that he fails. I felt his weight on top of me, his breath in my ear, his hands on my waist, and I was somewhere else. I was in the garden. I was thinking that the bellísima had already reached the peperomia, that I needed to check if the roots were affecting the sábila, that next week I had to buy a new fertilizer because the fern was starting to look bad.

Abner finished and held me. He said “I love you, Eli” in that hoarse voice he has after, the one that always used to disarm me. And I said “I love you too” looking at the ceiling. And it was true. I loved him. But I was taught that things get built, get planned, get executed. And Abner was in no plan. Abner was in first gear, happy, leaned back with his beer and his YouTube, and my life was slipping away.

Four years. Four years and we were still boyfriend and girlfriend. Him in his apartment in Trujillo Alto with the clothes on the floor. Me in my little house in Villa Paz with the garden. Nothing moved forward. Nothing had a delivery date. And I am a woman who lives by delivery dates.

* * *

February was the month I stopped pushing.

It wasn’t a conscious decision. I didn’t sit down to plan my emotional withdrawal like someone drawing up a Gantt chart, though I could have. It was more like letting go of a rope I’d been pulling for years. The fingers get tired. The fingers open. And the rope falls.

Abner would write to me and I’d answer three hours later. Before, I answered right away, before I sent him good-morning with a little heart, before I asked how work was going. Now I answered him “ok” or “I was busy” or just the thumbs-up emoji, which is the coldest way there is to tell someone you read them without caring.

I stopped putting together proposals for the business for him. I stopped writing the messages to the clients for him. When he told me he’d lost a job because he showed up late, I no longer told him, “Abner, you have to get organized.” I told him, “ah.” And the “ah” contained four years of compressed frustration, but Abner heard “ah” and kept talking about something else.

Christopher called one Sunday to ask me about a science assignment. I explained what he needed to know, told him to go to bed early, and hung up. Before, I’d have stayed on the phone for half an hour with him, asking about school, about his friends, about his mother. Not that time. And I felt something awful when I hung up, because none of this was Christopher’s fault, but I was already cutting ties and the ties included the kid.

I canceled on him two weekends in a row. The first one I told him I had a work project. The second one I told him I didn’t feel well. Both were lies. The first weekend I spent in the garden, rearranging the pots, moving the croton so it would get more sun, checking on the bellísima, which was everywhere now. The second weekend I stayed in bed watching Netflix without really watching anything, feeling a strange emptiness that wasn’t sadness and wasn’t relief but something in between, like the sound a house makes when the power goes out: a silence that used to be noise.

It took Abner three weeks to notice something was wrong. Three weeks. That should tell you everything you need to know about Abner Colón. He came over on a Wednesday night without telling me, with Chinese food from the place I like on 65 de Infantería, and when I opened the door he looked at me with that puppy face he puts on when he senses something is broken but doesn’t know what.

“Eli, are we okay?”

“Yes, Abner. We’re okay.”

“It’s just, I feel like you’re far away.”

“It’s work. I have a lot going on.”

He stayed that night. We ate in the living room, watched something on TV I don’t remember, and he fell asleep on the couch before ten. I went out to the patio. It was night but there was enough moon to see the garden. The bellísima had flowers everywhere now. Pink clusters hanging from the clothesline, from the wall, from the stems of the other plants. At night, with the moon, the flowers looked like something else. They looked like small open wounds.

Abner was snoring inside. The garden was breathing outside. And I was in between, on the cement step, thinking that nothing that was coming was going to surprise me because it was already written there, among the leaves. It was only a matter of time.

In March I asked Abner what he saw for us in the future. I didn’t do it out of malice. Or I did. I don’t know. I did it knowing what the answer was going to be, which is worse than malice because it’s engineering.

Abner scratched his head. He said: “Well, keep going like this. We’re fine, right?”

Keep going like this. Four words that confirmed everything. Keep going like this was Abner’s plan for everything: for the business, for Christopher, for us. Keep going in first gear. Keep going with no change. Keep killing the day until it was over.

“Keep going how, Abner? Four more years of boyfriend-and-girlfriend? Eight? You in your apartment, me in my house, seeing each other three times a week like we’re a couple of college kids?”

“Eli, why do you have to complicate things?”

That was the last question Abner asked me that actually hurt. Because for him, asking for structure was complicating. Asking for a future was complicating. Asking that the relationship grow, that it put down roots, that it become something more than two people who care for each other and see each other when they can, that was complicating things. And the bellísima was already smothering papi’s sábila. And I let it happen the way I had let the vine happen. Watching. Recording. Waiting for what I already knew.

* * *

I left him on a Sunday in April. I picked Sunday because on Sundays there’s no urgency. On Sundays everyone is slower, softer, and I needed it to be fast.

Abner came over for lunch. I made him rice and beans and pork chops, because it seemed to me that if I was going to break the man’s life, at least he should eat well first. We ate at the little kitchen table. We talked about Christopher, who had gotten into trouble at school for talking back to a teacher. Abner kept saying “that’ll sort itself out” and I didn’t correct him anymore. I didn’t say, “Abner, you have to go talk to the principal.” I didn’t do anything anymore.

I cleared the plates. I washed the pots. I dried my hands with the kitchen towel, like some Trujillo-bred Pontius Pilate. And I told him.

I didn’t shout. I didn’t cry. I told him I’d been feeling alone for months. That I loved him but that loving him wasn’t enough for me. That we were two people at different speeds and I couldn’t keep slowing mine down so he wouldn’t fall behind.

I said all of that and it sounded so reasonable, so clean, so organized. Like a PowerPoint presentation with bullet points and soft transitions. Like the Elizabeth Rodríguez who closes projects and delivers reports and always, always, has the KPIs in order.

Abner didn’t shout. Of course he didn’t shout. Abner never shouts. He just sat there in the kitchen chair with his hands on the table, looking at the empty plate as if some answer were written on it. He said “ok.” He was quiet for a while. Then, still looking at the plate, he said, almost to himself: “I never knew how a woman like you ended up with a guy like me.” It wasn’t self-pity. It was something flatter, more honest. The way you say something you’ve known for a long time and finally had a reason to say out loud. He lifted his eyes then and asked, “And Christopher?”

That question was the closest Abner Colón ever came to fighting for anything in his life, and it wasn’t even for himself, it was for the kid. And worse: it wasn’t only love. It was an admission. He was asking if I would keep being for Christopher what he, the father, didn’t know how to be. His own parents had been churchgoers, not affectionate people, and he had learned fatherhood from nobody. I had known this for years. But hearing him lay it down like that, quietly, on my kitchen table, was something I had no category for. He wasn’t pleading. He was just asking.

I told him Christopher could keep calling me whenever he wanted. I told him that wasn’t going to change. And as I said it I knew it was a lie. Because things always change. Because the kid was going to call once, twice, and then less and less, and then nothing, because that’s how people work when they split up: the bridges fall down even if nobody tears them down.

Abner got up. He kissed me on the forehead, the same old-married-couple kiss he gave me when he came over. He left in the Tacoma that still needed an alignment. He didn’t slam the door. He didn’t peel out. He walked out of my life the way he’d lived in it: slow, without making noise, without bothering anyone.

I sat down in the living room and waited to feel something. Relief, sadness, liberation, anything. What I felt was hunger. I went to the fridge, I ate a strawberry yogurt standing in front of the sink, and I went out to the patio.

The garden was destroyed.

No, that’s not true. The garden was beautiful. That was the problem. The bellísima had bloomed on everything: pink clusters on the wall, on the clothesline, on the stems of every plant I’d cared for over years. It looked like a postcard. It looked like one of those vertical gardens that show up on Pinterest with a thousand likes and comments from people saying “goals.” But I knew what was underneath. I knew doña Carmen’s fern was half dead. That papi’s sábila had its leaves flattened under the weight of the vine’s stems. That the peperomia wasn’t visible anymore. That Bigotes’s croton had turned yellow. Everything I had planted was being devoured by something I had let grow because it was pretty and because it suited me.

I grabbed the bellísima by the base. The main stem was thick now, woody, stronger than I’d expected. I pulled. It didn’t come out. I pulled harder and I felt the roots resist, gripping the dirt like fingers. I knelt down and started digging with my hands around the base, pulling out dirt, finding roots that went in every direction, tangled with the roots of the sábila, of the fern, of everything.

I pulled again and this time it came out, but not alone. It came out with half the garden. The sábila came with it, its roots torn. Doña Carmen’s fern broke in half. The dirt lifted up in pieces and the roots of the bellísima came out from among the roots of the other plants like veins of a body that could no longer be separated.

I kept tearing. I didn’t stop. I yanked out the bellísima and I yanked out the croton and I yanked out the succulent from papi’s birthday and I yanked out what was left of the fern and I yanked out plants and dirt and roots and everything. I tore with my hands until they bled. I tore as if I were digging up something that had been rotting under the garden all this time and finally had a name that I wasn’t going to say.

When I finished I was sitting on the cement with my legs covered in dirt, my hands red, surrounded by pulled-up plants that looked like bodies on a sidewalk after a hurricane. The ten-by-ten square was empty. Disturbed dirt, a few holes where roots had been, bits of stem. The oasis was a vacant lot.

I looked at all of that and felt something I wasn’t expecting: space. For the first time in years I could see the dirt without it meaning anything. It was dirt. Nothing more. Ten feet by ten feet of nothing.

I didn’t assign a plant to Abner.

I don’t know why. To papi I gave the sábila. To doña Carmen, the fern. To Bigotes, the croton. To every loss its plant, its place on the map, its lit candle in the garden of absences. But not to Abner. Four years of a man who loved me in his way, who showed up with gas when the power went out, who set blocks in my garden under the sun, who helped raise at my side a son who wasn’t mine, who told me he loved me in a hoarse voice in the dark of the bedroom, to that I didn’t give even a plant.

I got up. I brushed the dirt off my knees. I gathered the dead plants and put them in a black trash bag, carefully, as if it still mattered not to hurt them. Papi’s sábila was the last. I looked at it for a while before I let it drop into the bag. It weighed more than I remembered.

I left the bag next to the trash can. I washed my hands at the kitchen sink. The water came out dark with dirt and pink with blood and then clear. I sat on the cement step with another cup of coffee, looking at the empty square.

My hands were shaking. I hadn’t noticed before. I brought them together around the cup, tried to hold them steady, and they kept shaking under the porcelain. I raised them to my face. They still smelled like sábila. Even after the soap, even after the water running dark and then pink and then clear, the sábila was there, green and bitter, on my fingers. I held them against my mouth a second longer than I needed to.

Night was falling over Trujillo. You could hear the coquíes starting up, and the distant noise of reggaetón in some house down the street, and the hum of the LUMA transformer that any day now was going to blow. It smelled like wet dirt and coffee and nothing else.

I thought that the next day I was going to Home Depot to buy cement. I was going to cover the little square. I was going to level out the whole patio so it would be even, functional, clean. No dirt. No plants. No map.

I drank my coffee slowly. I wasn’t in a hurry. It was Sunday and on Sundays there’s no urgency.