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I thought I was writing a piece about resistance. But I came to see the writing more genuinely concerned with negative space.

Crossing the Talamanca Range for the first time, heading to Puerto Limón on a rickety train while devouring a mango, I watch vertical peaks melt into the Caribbean. Farther on, banana plantations settle the sultry valley once owned by United Fruit, like a page out of One Hundred Years of Solitude. “Oh, this is why I came.”

“What kind of urn do you have in mind?”


“No need,” I tell the funeral director. “My mother was a potter.”

Not long ago, I went to a concert by a folk singer who used to live in the apartment above ours, in Brooklyn Heights, where I grew up. His songs were funny and genuine and his guitar-playing beautiful in the way you’d expect after decades of composition and performance. Midway, he sang a selection from his first record, which I’d played over and over again as a girl.

Eva Baltasar’s well-paced, debut novel opens with a glimmering scene of existential crisis: the narrator is standing on the roof of a building, contemplating suicide. “If surviving is what it’s all about, maybe resistance is the only way to live intensely.”

Was it over? I felt joy, of course, but had lived so firmly in the grip of denial that relief barely registered.

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In the last few months of her life, when she could no longer get out of bed without falling, my mother told her nighttime caretaker that she had contemplated throwing herself from the subway platform into an oncoming train.

For a time, he flew into our side door. Made a habit of hurling himself, red chest and wingspan smashed to two dimensions by the windowpane.

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“Cheerful!” she said, “What is it?” Then recognizing the compact rows of marigold trophies lining spray upon spray arcing over the yard, “Oh, kerria, that was my mother’s favorite.” A moment of silence for one mother’s mother gone twenty years.