My mother was always asking my sister and me to do things—to call her union about her monthly pension checks (forty-nine dollars), to research the contraindications of a new prescription, to drive her to the wholesale distributor to pick up fifteen-pound boxes of frozen tilapia and some nice eye-of-round roasts. Six years ago, when she was eighty-seven, she wrote a letter outlining everything that we would need to tend to after her death. Her first request was that we send a hundred and fifty dollars to Tía Niña—our name for her sister Ada—every December, March, June, and September. She included the phone number and address of the man in Hialeah who would deliver the money to Cuba. “Even dead,” she added in parentheses, “I will bug you.” If we cooked the food she cooked and made sure that her granddaughters could play dominoes, she would be happy in Heaven. She would await our arrival there, she wrote. Buried in the middle of the letter was my mother’s most fervent appeal, one we had heard before. “As to Poly, don’t ever abandon him,” she said. “He is the way he is because of me.”
My half brother Poly, or Hipólito, was born in Havana in 1953. Our mother and his father were married only briefly, and, when Poly was still small, he and my mother went to live in the three-bedroom rental out of which her family ran a little restaurant. It sat half a block behind the city’s military hospital and not far from Camp Columbia, Cuba’s main military installation at the time. In 1957, as many Cubans were waging a revolution against Fulgencio Batista and his government, my mother met and fell in love with my father, an Army stenographer and a lunchtime regular.
In the early-morning hours of January 1, 1959, Batista fled the island in defeat, and Cubans poured into the streets to celebrate. Cars blasted their horns, churches rang their bells. Fidel Castro, who had been fighting Batista’s troops in the mountains of eastern Cuba for more than two years, arrived in Havana a week later, to thunderous cheers. My mother was delighted, and distributed red T-shirts to her neighbors. My father, who was wary of the new regime and steered clear of revolutionary rallies and political organizations, immediately quit the Army and began to sell sandals in the park behind Havana’s capitol. He moved into my mother’s family home; every night he would count out his earnings in front of Poly and give him a small share.
In March, 1960, President Eisenhower approved a plan for the C.I.A. to train Cuban exiles in guerrilla warfare so that they might return to Cuba and topple Castro. Though the operation was supposed to be covert, the training camps in Central America and elsewhere made the headlines in the U.S. and Cuba. As John F. Kennedy took office, Castro was already preparing to repel an invasion. On April 15, 1961, exile pilots bombed Cuban airfields, missing many of their targets and killing at least seven people. Castro addressed the nation at a funeral for the victims, calling on Cubans to defend the revolution, which for the first time he defined as socialist. Across the country, the government began to arrest thousands of people who it suspected might side with the invaders.
That night, my father did not come home for dinner. My mother eventually found him, and many other detainees, at the Blanquita Theatre (later renamed the Karl Marx). He was still there on April 17th, when, in the early hours of the morning, exile troops landed on Cuba’s southern shore, at the Bay of Pigs. The invasion failed spectacularly. A hundred and fourteen of the exiles were killed, and 1,189 were captured and imprisoned.
In the aftermath, the U.S. government severely tightened its economic embargo on Cuba, and Castro accelerated the country’s transition to a one-party state. Every day, twelve hundred Cubans applied for entry to the U.S. The Kennedy Administration welcomed the arrivals, pointing to their growing numbers to discredit the revolution. In April, 1962, when my mother was seven months pregnant with me, my father left Cuba and settled in New York City, working as a short-order cook in a hotel in midtown Manhattan. As soon as he could, he began the paperwork for my mother, Poly, and me to join him.
But Poly was someone else’s son, and his father, a member of the revolutionary police, wanted Poly to remain in Cuba. My mother, my aunts, and my grandmother begged him to let Poly leave with her, but he refused. Years later, my mother told me that one day, as she was walking with us near the docks in Old Havana, she saw a crowd gathered around an American ship—it may have been the S.S. African Pilot, which had arrived in Havana with medicine and other supplies to be exchanged for prisoners from the Bay of Pigs invasion. In a last-minute arrangement, relatives of the prisoners were allowed to board for the return journey. My mother said that the scene was chaotic, and that she saw passersby seizing the opportunity to flee Cuba. Holding me in her arms and my brother by the hand, she considered going, too, but she turned back. She hadn’t been able to leave without saying goodbye to her mother.
Four months later, on April 29, 1963, she left Cuba with me, without saying goodbye to her son. We had left the house the evening before, at 6 p.m. Poly was out playing with friends. When he came home, my grandmother and my aunt Ada told him that my mother had gone to the countryside to care for an ailing relative. I don’t know how long it was before they told him the truth. Decades later, when I met my aunt Ada, she explained that for weeks, maybe months, after we left Poly would clutch my mother’s housedress at night and cry. He was nine years old.
My mother wore stiletto heels for the journey, her legs so skinny that her shinbones protruded. I was ten months old, a baby on her hip. At the airport in Havana, a customs agent almost confiscated the tiny gold posts in my ears, a gift from my grandmother. Direct flights to the U.S. had been suspended the year before, so we flew to Mexico City. A distant relative of my mother’s was supposed to collect us from the airport, but he didn’t show up. My mother had no money with her. “_¡Cómo pasamos trabajo tú y yo! _”—“How we struggled, you and I,” she would say, taking my hand, as she told me the story of our departure. In the most consequential passage of her life, I had been her companion. She always kept an eight-by-ten portrait of my brother on her dresser.
Ours was not the only family torn apart by the revolution. Between 1960 and 1962, thousands of children were sent abroad alone, their parents fearing that Castro’s government would ship them off to the Soviet Union for indoctrination. Young men of military age were forbidden from leaving. Some teen-agers stayed behind when their parents fled, committed to a cause that their families rejected. Revolutionaries were not supposed to communicate with people who had left, so family members often spent decades without contact.
I can explain how, amid the turmoil, my mother felt forced to take one child and leave another. She did not think a Communist revolution on an island less than a hundred miles from the U.S. could possibly survive. She assumed that we would return to Cuba before too long. She told herself that, once she was gone, Poly’s father would relent and her son would join us. None of it—not the revolution, not our migration, not Poly’s abandonment—was ever meant to be
Still, my mother’s decision has always haunted me. After I had my own children, I sometimes found myself measuring the progress of their childhoods against my brother’s. Alina is turning nine, I thought—Poly’s age when we left him. Lucía’s ten—by that age, Poly had spent almost a year without his mother. I would look at my daughters and wonder what could ever make me leave them. Could I have gone, as my mother had, in secret, without saying goodbye? I couldn’t picture it at all.
At nine, Poly was a sweet, skinny boy, quick to smile, with large eyes and big ears. He was smart and liked to read, although he sometimes got into trouble; a neighbor had once jokingly advised my mother to enroll him in military school to keep him in line. As a teen-ager, he cut school, got into fights, and began committing petty crimes. More than once, someone denounced him to the state-sponsored neighborhood-surveillance network, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, for one infraction or another. Poly’s father was, for the most part, absent. Poly dropped out of school, couldn’t keep a job, had run-ins with the police. Maybe he expected to join us in the U.S.; maybe he feared that he never would. Only under exceptional circumstances would the government allow a man of military age to leave. Poly lived in the house where we had left him, with my grandmother, who tried to guide him, and my aunt Ada, who had no children of her own and became his de-facto mother. She made him write letters to my mother, to me, and to his new sister, Aixa, who was born in Brooklyn in 1964.
I remember Poly’s letters, the way his “A”s looked like triangles. I usually responded on Saturdays, as I watched cartoons about English prepositions or how bills became laws. We lived in West New York, New Jersey, a working-class Cuban enclave across the Hudson River from midtown Manhattan, where my father had continued to work as a cook. My mother worked in a factory five blocks from our apartment, sewing collars onto winter coats. She taught us old Cuban songs, patriotic poems, the chants of street venders. At our church, priests led us in prayers for the release of Cuban political prisoners; once a year, we marched in a procession in honor of La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. We ate mostly Cuban food, and we always kept a drawer full of clothes to send to Cuba. Most of our neighbors did the same, and many of them, too, expected to welcome loved ones to the U.S. I awaited Poly’s arrival unambivalently. In my mind, he was like a brother in a Beverly Cleary novel, handsome and funny—maybe I would fall in love with his best friend. I speculated that the shape of his “A”s showed that he was a born architect, like the father in “The Brady Bunch.”
No one in our family had gone to college, and few people in our community went away to do so, but my mother always insisted that I would. I was already browsing through college brochures when Castro’s government agreed to allow Cuban exiles to return to the island for short visits. In 1979, my mother was one of more than a hundred thousand who participated in the family-reunification trips, as they were called. I remember her singing as she packed, writing Poly’s name on the labels of the clothes she had bought for him. He was twenty-five by then. My grandmother had died, but most of my mother’s eleven siblings were still living in Cuba, and had their own families. As she counted out five-dollar bills for nieces and nephews, I made her promise to take a photograph in front of the University of Havana, which, I explained to her, I would have attended had we stayed in Cuba.
My mother never told me what it felt like to return to the old house or to reunite with Poly. But I can see her there, laughing warmly, sadness be damned. My brother went with her to the university, and he must have taken the picture I have of her in which she stands in the distance, a blurred figure near the top of the university’s steps. I have another photo of them from that trip, posing together on the capitol steps. In the image, Poly is unsmiling, with his arm around her shoulder.
In the spring of 1979, the Miami Herald estimated that the Cuban government might make as much as a hundred and fifty million dollars from the exiles that year alone. The government paid dearly in other ways. The cash, the gifts, and the tales of American plenty all fed the desire of many people on the island to leave. The following year, on April 1st, six Cubans stole a bus and crashed it through the gates of the Peruvian Embassy in Havana, demanding asylum and safe passage out of the country. When the Embassy refused to hand them over to the government, Castro ordered the removal of the security detail around the building. In the next forty-eight hours, nearly eleven thousand people flooded in, perching on eaves and tree branches, camping out with little food or water. According to one account, a baby was born there and an elderly woman died.
Pro-government protesters gathered outside, angrily chanting, wishing them good riddance: “_¡Que se vayan! _” But at first neither Peru nor Cuba could figure out how to evacuate so many people. The Cuban government gave the members of the crowd the option to go home and await instructions. Some stayed anyway, worried that, if they vacated the Embassy, they might never leave the country; others, hungry and exhausted, went home to find themselves subjected to state-sponsored harassment by their neighbors. About three weeks after the crisis began, the government settled on a plan. It would allow Cubans from the U.S. to pick up their relatives by boat at the port of Mariel, some twenty-five miles west of Havana, provided that they also collect Cubans from the Embassy.
The operation quickly took on its own momentum. Thousands of Cuban-Americans mobilized, hiring so many vessels that, as one observer remarked, had they lined up one behind the other, people would have been able to walk from Mariel to Key West. Castro insisted that those leaving were “antisocial elements.” He routinely called them “scum.” Soon, disgruntled Cubans embraced the label, and began appearing at local police stations, asking to be cleared for departure. The government also took the opportunity to expel from the country certain prisoners and psychiatric patients. By the time the boatlift ended, in October, some hundred and twenty-five thousand Cubans had reached Florida.
In May, my mother boarded a Greyhound bus at Port Authority and travelled to Miami, then caught a ride to Key West. She feared the sea and couldn’t swim, but found a boat that was taking Cuban-Americans to Mariel, and paid the captain in cash. She spent the duration of the voyage, ten or twelve hours, clutching her purse and pretending to sleep. At one point, she told me, the captain had misgivings and announced that he was turning around. A passenger took a machete out of his duffel and threatened to kill him if he didn’t continue on to Mariel. My mother reached for the rosary beads in her bag and led some of the passengers in prayer.
At Mariel, hundreds of boats jockeyed for position. Every captain was to give the Cuban officials a list of the people his passengers wanted to pick up. It took time for the government to locate them, and the boats sometimes had to wait for days, even weeks. A night club was set up aboard a government-owned ship to entertain impatient sailors. Other vessels patrolled the harbor while guards on the shore pointed their weapons toward the water. At night, floodlights illuminated the scene. My mother managed to disembark, find a phone, and call the house to let Poly know that she had come to collect him. My aunt answered and told her that he had already left. It had not been hard for Poly to convince someone that he should be banished. My mother returned to the crowded pier and talked her way onto a boat back to the U.S.
Poly told us that he arrived in Key West on May 11, 1980—Mother’s Day. It was one of the busiest days of the boatlift, with more than forty-five hundred Cubans landing in Florida; one boat alone, the America, might have carried as many as seven hundred people. Sentiment in the U.S. was turning. The Times ran a front-page article titled “Retarded People and Criminals Are Included in Cuban Exodus.” More than sixty thousand Cubans who arrived without family members were sent for processing to military bases across the country while the government determined what to do with them. Poly ended up at Eglin Air Force Base, in the Florida Panhandle. A plane circled the facility, flying a banner that read “The KKK is here.” By mid-June, he had been cleared to enter the country; my mother and father flew down and brought him home.
My brother was not at all what I expected. He didn’t talk much, and when he did his voice sounded loud and angry. My sister and I were used to having dinner in the living room in front of the TV, but after Poly arrived we began eating together in the small kitchen. I asked Poly continually about Cuba, until my mother told me that my questions were making him feel bad about not having an education or a career. My sister and I soon went back to the TV, while the adults ate alone at the dinner table, my mother trying to keep a conversation going with her husband, who was silent as usual, and her estranged son. At the end of that summer, I left for my first year at Vassar College.
My mother helped Poly rent an apartment in our building, and an uncle helped him get a job at an embroidery factory. Poly soon lost the apartment and moved back in with us, sleeping on the couch in the living room. When I came home on school breaks, the apartment smelled of beer and cigarettes. I spent as much time as I could at the riverfront park, reading on a bench with a bag of cherries. Poly had grown a thick mustache, and I hated it. At night, he would come home late. From my bedroom, I could hear him on the sofa next door making strange noises, sounding wounded and scary. Was he crying? Masturbating? Maybe sick or hungover? One afternoon, while my father was out, Poly got angry about something, and when he stormed off toward the kitchen I assumed that he was getting a knife. My mother suddenly collapsed, and all three of us—my sister, Poly, and I—rushed to help her, the altercation temporarily forgotten. My mother told me later that she had only pretended to faint.
The summer between my freshman and sophomore years, my parents took us on vacation to Miami. We stayed at the Bancroft, a modest hotel in South Beach where most of the guests were Cuban. Relatives came to see us, and Poly sat at the pool drinking beer with old friends from Havana, other Mariel arrivals. My sister and I spent our days swimming and tanning, our evenings playing Ping-Pong and pinball. One night, Poly slapped my sister after he thought he saw her flirting with a boy. I confronted him, and he threw me to the ground and began kicking me, stopping only when a cousin grabbed a phone to call the police. As I lay on the floor crying, he warned me that, if I told my father, “va a haber muertos”—there would be bodies. When I told my mother what he’d said, she asked me to keep it to myself. She didn’t want my father to leave or to kick Poly out.
It was around this time that my mother first told me that Poly had threatened her, too, when she’d picked him up at Eglin Air Force Base. He told her that he was in the U.S. to ruin her life just as she had ruined his by leaving him in Cuba. I began to imagine all kinds of terrible scenes unfolding. I was reading a lot of Hardy and Balzac, and knew how the sins of parents were usually visited on their children.
In 1986, two years after I graduated, my parents moved to Miami with my sister, and Poly followed a year later. I moved to Austin, Texas, to begin a master’s degree in Latin-American history. I spent Thanksgiving with Jeanne Claire, a new friend, and her brother, Gregg, a Ph.D. student, who was visiting from New York. He was handsome, and we were both reading books about revolutions. He was caring for his father, who was dying of aids and whose longtime lover had died earlier that year. Gregg and I fell in love, moved in together in New York, and, in 1989, got married at Columbia University, where his father had taught. We invited Poly to the wedding, and I prayed that he wouldn’t attend. He didn’t. My husband and I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I did my doctorate, and then to Washington, D.C. Eventually, we moved back to New York, and Alina and Lucía were born there in 1995 and 2001. We didn’t invite Poly to their baptisms, in Miami Beach.
I became a history professor at N.Y.U., focussing my work on the history of Cuba and on revolutions. I often travelled to Cuba to conduct research in archives and libraries across the island. The flights left from Miami, so I would visit my parents on the way. My mother always gave me gifts for Tía Niña: clothes, shoes, medicine bottles sometimes full of medicine and sometimes stuffed with oregano and bay leaves or needles and thread. My aunt would open the packages with delight—“¡Mira que mi hermana me conoce! ” She would tell stories about my mother, my grandparents, and Poly as a boy. I met the cousins he had grown up with. I met another half brother, my father’s son, whom I had learned about only as a young adult, and travelled to General Carrillo, a tiny town in central Cuba, to see where he lived and meet his family. He was a funny, soft-spoken high-school literature teacher with an elegant mustache like José Martí’s. Late at night, as we walked around, he pointed out the Milky Way. That was the first time I heard its name in Spanish—Vía Láctea. By then, Cuba had become a kind of home for me. It also became a professional base; I won prizes writing about its history.
One time, I went to Cuba for a week with my mother. At the Havana airport, as we waited to board our return flight to Miami, I went to buy a carton of cigarettes for Poly. My mother had lost her voice from all the talking and laughing with her family, and when I got to our gate I found her sitting there, exhausted. She rested her head on my shoulder and looked at the cigarettes. Had she known what her departure would do to Poly, she said, she would never have left. I imagined that alternative, asking myself, for the first time, Was my good fortune built on Poly’s suffering?
While I made my life in New York, my sister raised her daughter, Nailah, in Miami with the help of my parents, who joined the ranks of the elderly poor. When they could no longer afford the rent in South Beach, my husband and I bought them a small one-bedroom there. My mother spent most of her time at home, cooking, cleaning, and doing word-search puzzles, which she referred to as studying. She pored over mail-order catalogues, buying gifts for her three granddaughters. She read El Nuevo Herald and invariably supported Republicans.
In 2000, she became obsessed with the case of Elián González, a six-year-old Cuban boy who had been rescued alone at sea in November, 1999, three miles from the coast of Fort Lauderdale. He had been making the crossing with his mother and several other people on a small boat; she and most of the other passengers had perished after the boat capsized. Elián, who had drifted at sea for two days, was treated at a hospital and handed over to relatives in Miami. The boy’s father and the Cuban government wanted Elián back on the island. His family in Miami wanted him to stay. My mother would often call to talk to me about the case, but she couldn’t discuss the subject calmly, and our conversations sometimes grew heated. I remember hanging up on her at least once. When federal agents seized the boy from his Miami family, on April 22nd, my mother was furious. She took a newspaper photo of Bill Clinton’s Attorney General, Janet Reno, and, using a pair of sewing scissors, poked out the eyes. Elián shared Poly’s birthday, December 6th.
Poly lived in studio apartments in the poorest blocks of Miami’s Little Havana and nearby Hialeah. He drank heavily and gained weight, his belly protruding. My mother routinely gave me updates on his life. He showed up drunk at a party for a friend’s child and beat someone up. He did cocaine, grew his pinkie nail long, and ran drugs by boat. One of his best friends, another Marielito, was found in pieces in the trunk of a car. Once, someone shot Poly in the head, and somehow he survived. Another time, someone beat him with a pipe; surgeons reinforced his skull with metal. In 1991, he was arrested and charged with attempted murder, but a jury acquitted him. My mother and father went to the trial and made Aixa go with them. Other arrests followed—for petty larceny, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, driving under the influence. In 2002, he was arrested after stabbing a man in a bar and seriously wounding him.
Poly called my mother collect from jail at least once a day, often in a rage. He blamed her for all his troubles, for his inability to find love, to marry, and to have children. She visited him weekly, dragging Nailah with her on two city buses. Nearly two years after his arrest, Poly was convicted of attempted murder in the first degree, and sentenced to twelve years of probation. He lived at a court-approved facility and attended a compulsory rehabilitation program. After a few years, he was allowed to leave, provided that he wear a tracking device. My mother helped him rent a small studio in Hialeah, and called him every night. He often hung up or yelled at her. Sometimes he threatened suicide; sometimes he said that he would kill her and my father. If he did that, he said, he would be deported to Cuba, which was fine with him. One time, he sounded so desperate that my parents spent a night hiding in a hotel room with my sister, her husband, and Nailah. My father occasionally urged my mother to break ties with Poly, but he knew that she never would.
I mostly kept my distance. He would sometimes call me at home, to ask for money, or just to rant. When I visited Miami en route to Havana, I’d ask my mother not to tell Poly that I was there. At other times, I found myself putting off plans to visit Miami, booking flights only at the last minute. My family and I visited Poly twice a year, with my mother, who would ride in the back seat with the girls. I would leave my cell phone in the car, not wanting Poly to see it and ask me for the number. Before entering his apartment, I would remind my mother not to hold my hand, knowing that it made him jealous. I was glad that my daughters could distract themselves with Gordi, a stray Chihuahua he had adopted at some point. At the end of each visit, my husband would take a picture of Poly with the girls, I would give Poly a little cash, and we would all hug and kiss. I think my mother thought that if we went through these motions enough times Poly would find a way to forgive her. She had faith; she prayed for Poly all the time.
I prayed, too—mostly that Poly would change and find peace. But sometimes I wished that he would die, or that he would be deported without hurting anyone first. As my parents got older, I began to feel that it would be better for my mother to die before my father did: if he died first, Poly might move in with her. If we held her wake according to her wishes—with an open casket and mourners milling around for hours, murmuring prayers over rosary beads—we would need to hire security, in case my brother lost it and did something awful. Poly had not changed, and surely my mother’s death would make everything worse. Perhaps sensing the same thing, my mother routinely elicited promises from my sister and me not to abandon him. He was our brother, and he would be our burden.
My aunt Ada died first, in April, 2017, in the house behind the military hospital. Poly kept a picture of her on his bedside table in his Hialeah apartment, and I knew that he would be devastated by the news. I called him—perhaps the first time I had ever done so when it wasn’t his birthday. He didn’t answer, and I left him a voice mail sending my love. He later told me that he had appreciated the call, but he never wanted to talk about our aunt; it hurt him too much, he said. I think her death changed us both a little. I saw him again as vulnerable, and he saw my mother that way, too, noting her ailments: hypertension, diabetes, heart failure. Her usually skinny feet were now always swollen and purple, her fingers crooked with arthritis.
A year later, my mother fell and broke her hip. To the astonishment of the entire family, as she recovered in a rehabilitation center, Poly visited three or four times a week, sitting by her side, sometimes for hours: a stocky, sixty-four-year-old man with trembling hands, his voice loud but less angry. He brought her sweets and an occasional scratch-off lottery ticket. After she was discharged, Aixa and I hired two caregivers to watch my parents, one for the daytime and one for the evening. My sister, who worked as an administrator at a big law firm, looked after them at night, sleeping on the couch. I made monthly trips to spell her. About six months later, my mother had heart surgery, and, not long afterward, a pleurodesis procedure on her left lung. Then my father fell and broke his hip. Poly visited my mother regularly the whole time, bringing groceries once a month. I think he may have purchased them with food stamps; she gave him cash. He was affectionate and eager to surprise her with the perfect pineapple, a Cuban tamal, his favorite ramen soup. She loved it when he brought Gordi, and called Poly every night after “Wheel of Fortune.”
In March of last year, as New York City went into lockdown, Poly called to check on me, ending his voice-mail message as he had signed off his letters to me when I was a girl: Tu hermano que siempre te quiere. Your brother who always loves you. My mother’s heart failure was worsening; her lungs kept filling with fluid. My sister and I arranged at-home hospice care. In May, I took my family to see her. Remarkably, she revived. Sometimes I lay down next to her, on the small hospital bed in her room, my head in the crook of her shoulder. Sometimes she sat in her wheelchair at the dining table, where she would talk the girls into sharing their Coke with her. With her first sip, she would sigh with loud and thorough satisfaction, like a character in a commercial. She was sometimes confused, but seemed happy and light. My daughters painted her nails and combed her hair. We played dominoes together, my parents sitting in their wheelchairs. Over and over, we listened to her new favorite song, Mercedes Sosa’s rendition of “Gracias a la Vida.” Every night, when I asked if she wanted to talk to Poly, she perked up and said “_¡Claro! _” I would dial the number, chat with him, and then hold the phone to her ear. She wanted to know how he was, what he had for dinner, what he was watching on TV. He called her mamita linda, encouraging her to eat well to regain her strength. When I returned home in late June, I called her almost every night, but she was often too sleepy to talk. I also began to call my brother every few weeks. We joked about our mother’s new loopiness. One time, he complained of chest pain, attributing it to his new diabetes medicine, and I told him to get it checked out. I sent him money without his asking; it felt like love.
On August 4th, Aixa received a call from a Hialeah detective asking whether she was Poly’s sister. The detective was on his way to her office. Aixa called me, worried that something had happened to Poly or that he had reverted to his old ways. At her office, the detective told her that Poly had been found dead, sitting on the toilet, at home. He had been there for days before a neighbor reported the smell. His body was so bloated that the medical examiner could not lift prints from his fingers, but the metal in his skull helped the forensics team to identify him. The medical examiner ruled out suicide and murder, recording hypertensive crisis as the cause of death. It was a horrible end, seeming to me almost designed to validate Poly’s complaints—that we had never been there for him, that he was all alone.
Aixa and I discussed how best to break the news to our mother. I offered to be there via Zoom or FaceTime, but my mother’s medical team thought it best not to tell her at all. She was confused and sleeping most of the time, and was no longer asking to call Poly. We postponed the decision. Her condition deteriorated. On the afternoon of August 16th, I flew to Miami, wearing blue rubber gloves and two masks beneath a face shield. I recall scolding a woman on the plane for wearing a mask under her nose. It was nightfall when I arrived at the apartment. My father and one of the caregivers were watching television in the living room. My mother was asleep in the bedroom, a male nurse seated by her side, the portrait of Poly as a boy on the dresser.
Late the next afternoon, one of the nurses gestured to us and we gathered around her bed: my sister, my niece, the caregiver, and me. My father lay on the other twin bed in the room, his eyes open, staring at the ceiling. I held my mother’s left hand, Aixa her right. I bent down to her ear and told her what she had always told me, that everything would be all right. I promised to keep sending money to her nieces and nephews in Cuba. I said we would take care of our father. I told her she was the best mother in the world, that I adored her. My sister, holding her other hand, said the same things. Then, as I stroked her hair, I told her a lie. “We will take care of Poly,” I said. “We won’t abandon him.” I think my sister nodded. My mother died a few minutes later. On this journey, she went with my brother, and I am the one left behind, wondering whether he ever forgave us. ♦
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/01/my-brothers-keeper