Herencia

The collection of jewels in the box ranged from costume tiaras to a necklace of rubies, every piece beautiful in the way of well-loved objects.  He laid back on the bed, leaning the now empty box on his stomach, and wept, fingers tingling with shock.  He hadn’t thought Tía Naci’s death would hit him this hard.  It surprised him to be named in her will, that she left him something tangible to remember her by. 

His heaves rattled something rattled loose in the box.  A pearl earring, small and pitted with age and disregard, had fallen into the seams of the box.  Seams which, on further inspection, concealed a hidden compartment; secrets were the currency that bound them.  The compartment made him smile, its sly reference to his coming-out strangling a mournful laugh.  She was an Incomparable, and the world would be poorer for her absence.

Her vanilla-and-lilac scent permeated the box.  Thank you tía.  Although he had seen her only a half-dozen times in his entire life, he never doubted that she loved him.  And here it was, love in all its guises.  She loved him enough to give him definitive answers to long-suspected questions, enough to wait until he was ready to know. 

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It was San Pedro de Macoris on the postcard.  He’d had to look it up.  Capital city of a namesake province in the Dominican Republic, which was the larger half of Hispaniola, a predominantly Catholic Spanish speaking country, its people a mix of European colonizers and their Indo-African slaves, the birthplace of a proportional large number of MLB players.  The recitation of facts gleaned from Wikipedia made no sense of his great-aunt’s letter.  Until that moment, he hadn’t realized he hoped it would.

Tatianna wasn’t his mother.  This vaguely gypsy-looking woman who signed her name in shaky lower-case letters and wore polka-dot heart bikinis was.  He stared at the two photographs abstractly.  One black-and-white, the other color, and in both he could make out the curve of his chin, the fullness of his lips, the cat’s eyes that belonged to no one else in his family.  Yes, it made sense.  That very well could be his mother. 

Ignacia Moreno Santiago, with her sharp face and guileless eyes, who he’d known only as Tía Naci.  This was the woman his father loved, the reason his mother – no Tati was not his mother, he could dispense with that fiction – the reason Tati watched him with mistrustful eyes, the cause of the coldness between him and his three younger brothers.

“Remember, mi hijo, that you are special.  And that I have loved you as no one else will.”

The punch of relief left him dizzy.