I pictured Ethan hitting this same kind of roadblock—What am I even doing here? Who decides what counts as general interest? Why does no one else’s research make them an activist?—and realizing the same thing about what he needed to do. A few months after Leidy’s wedding, I found and applied for the lab manager position here at the Institute, knowing I was perfect for it, though maybe a little young for such a role. But I knew (or knew of) many of the researchers affiliated with the lab—including Professor Kaufmann, who served as one of my references—and after driving hours and hours (and missing many meetings with my advisor) for the various rounds of interviews down in San Diego, I successfully convinced them of what I’d known all along. The day after I signed the contract, I quit the grad program, channeling some imaginary combination of Ethan and Leidy as I picked up the one box all my things fit into and left, my middle finger the only part of me waving goodbye to my advisor’s empty lab.
My parents each approved of the move for the wrong reasons (See? You didn’t need more school to find a good job!), but that could change if my work took me to a certain Caribbean island. I already know what each would say should I ever have to tell them about an upcoming research trip to Cuba: my dad would talk about being a little disappointed in me, about the unfairness of me being able to travel to a country he can’t enter, but he’d mostly not say anything, only leave me guessing at his meaning from the way he’d wait a day or two longer than usual to call me, the way he’d not leave messages on my voice mail for a while, choosing instead to just hang up; my mother would bring out familiar words—betrayal, loyalty, traitor—words that have come to define our relationship no matter how much time passes but whose sting has faded and turned into something I can manage, something Leidy is just as tired of hearing. My mom would, she’d say if I went, not be surprised.
To tell them would also mean inviting them along in a way. We still have family there. Go see this cousin, that aunt, I can hear either one of them demanding. Or more likely now: Go see this grave. And when I tell them there’ll be no time for that, that this is a work trip, that I’ll mostly be on the water, in or under a boat, that what they want me to do takes me clear across an island I don’t know: Oh, I see. You don’t have time to take a piece of paper and a crayon to your grandmother’s headstone? You don’t have time to do that for me who will never see it? Oh, that’s right, of course you don’t. I should’ve remembered how busy you always are. I shouldn’t have even asked.
Truth be told, I don’t know if I would tell them, since keeping quiet would be the easiest thing, the familiar thing, the way I’ve dealt with so many of my choices ever since that first year away. I’d say only that I was traveling again, to one of the dozens of islands I’ve already been to over the course of my career, so there’d be no expectation of presents. But it would make me sad to keep Cuba from them, because I’d want them to know I brought a part of them back to where they started, that some part of them had finally returned home. Even if—thanks to the summer I left them behind—they wouldn’t see it that way.
*
After that first summer, I left straight from Santa Barbara to Rawlings with enough time to move my stuff from the college-owned storage place to my new room—a single, more expensive than a double, but what was another grand each term on top of my other loans? It was peace of mind, a year I could be alone and not worry about how people saw me. I used the days before classes began not to track down Jillian in her new apartment or enjoy the sun-soaked campus the way Ethan would’ve, but to write letters to my mom and sister—something I’d never, ever done. Earlier that summer, I had a test run at writing as a way of apology: I’d written to Ethan a couple weeks after getting to Santa Barbara, after learning that the work I’d do that summer would lead to my name appearing on an actual publication. He was the only person to whom I could imagine telling that news who’d understand its significance, so I finally replied to his OK, OK e-mail, trying to open things up again with just one line of my own: I’m in Santa Barbara and therefore on your coast, I said. But he sent only this single line back: You’re still a long way from where I’m from.
So in writing to Leidy and my mom, I tried harder. I tried to say what I felt, thoughts that seemed big and important back then but that I can’t even remember now. I imagine I was trying to explain myself as a way of asking for forgiveness. I imagine I was trying to figure out why I could never be like Caridaylis but how at the same time I was already like her—I wanted my mom to see that. A week after the letters would’ve arrived, my sister called the new phone number I’d written in each.
—You are so weird, she’d said. A letter? Who does that?
I asked how things were in Miami. Ariel was being used yet again, this time for the presidential election happening in a couple months. My mom had thrown in with George Bush Jr.—her newest cause, the first of many until David and Leidy moved her back to Hialeah. I was not surprised.
—The news down here is saying that Al Gore was the one who basically made the actual phone call to raid Ariel’s house, she said.
—That’s not true, I said.
—How do you know?
I said, It’s probably not true.
—Mom says she forgives you, Leidy told me just before we hung up, after we’d stopped trying to prove each other’s certainties wrong.