Fleeing hurricane-torn Puerto Rico, a mother and son try to make a home in Arizona

Alden Woods | The Republic | azcentral.com

She wanted to believe she was safe, but now another storm was on its way, and Aida Waleska Marquez couldn't be certain. The pressure in her head and the pain in her back meant the storm was close. She huddled on the couch and watched as sunlight slipped out of the lonely apartment.

Her therapist left specific instructions, so Aida steadied her breathing and narrowed her gaze, locking onto the details of her new life. She saw the games stacked atop her roommate's PlayStation, the amusement park map taped to the wall and the shiny Phoenix police sticker that hung next to it, all of it meant to remind Aida that she was safe in Arizona — 10 months and 3,000 miles from the hurricane that swallowed everything.

But Aida couldn't hold on all night. For a moment she felt herself back home in Puerto Rico, hiding in the bathroom as floodwaters rose and furious winds threw a washing machine across the front yard.

Then the storm broke. The pressure in her head deflated. Her roommate left for the night shift, locking the door behind him, and Aida was alone.

Citizenship, but not much else

They kept the apartment cold and spare. Blinds blocked the one-bedroom's single window, turning away sunlight and the outside world. Inside were the fragments of an American life in progress: a sunken couch, a stationary bike nobody used and a set of folding chairs, where Joel Sanchez sat in the Thursday morning darkness, watching hurricane videos he had already seen.

Joel tapped a purple link. Images of destruction flashed on the screen.

He wasn't there when Hurricane Maria made landfall over Yabucoa, his and Aida's small town on the coast, but Facebook and YouTube seared the scenes into his memory. Now he watched again, staring at the hospital whose front windows exploded and the baseball stadium, once the pride of the small city, that folded in the winds.

The video was loading as Aida, 41, emerged from the bathroom. Her hair was wet. Dark circles rimmed her eyes. It had been another sleepless night, fueled by fibromyalgia's chronic pain and a mind that always drifted home, where her 9-year-old son, Lionel, was visiting his grandparents.

Hurricane Maria leaves path of destruction in Puerto Rico Video shows the path of destruction left by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

"How are you?" Joel asked in Spanish.

"A little pain," she said, pointing toward her head. She glanced at Joel's phone, where wind and rain filled the screen. She looked away, then turned into the kitchen for toast and coffee. No video could show her anything new.

She had filmed one herself, fighting to steady her hands as Maria swept over the island. She asked God to make it stop. Then it did, and Aida stepped into a Puerto Rico that was uninhabitable, where she lived four months without power or federal aid, waiting for a way off the island. She found one in Joel, a childhood friend with an air mattress and room in his Phoenix apartment. So in January, she packed two suitcases and went to rebuild her life on the mainland.

In Arizona, she had citizenship and safety, but little else. The government offered no help. A middle-class life had been reduced to a borrowed bed in a place where she only knew one person and barely spoke the language.

She wasn't quite a refugee. But she didn't feel entirely American.

"Should we go?" she asked after finishing the last of her coffee. Brown sugar swirled at the bottom.

"Yeah," Joel said. "Almost 9:30."

Her son's tiny black dog, Nube, clawed at the front door as they walked to Joel's gray Corolla. A Puerto Rican flag adorned the back bumper. Another hung from the rearview mirror, bumping against a rosary.

Aida dropped into the passenger seat. She still wasn't comfortable driving in Arizona, not at the speed people here seemed to like. Joel drove her most places, taking her to government offices, grocery stores and a community center in Maryvale, which was where he pointed the car now, taking Aida to her weekly therapy session.

Twenty minutes later, Joel parked between a slate-gray building and a small market. He told Aida he'd meet her inside, then went next door to look for plantains from Puerto Rico. They had been eating the Costa Rican kind, but it wasn't the same. They didn't taste like home.

Aida checked in and sat next to a TV blaring Spanish-language cartoons. A receptionist told her the session would begin soon. Aida tried to smile.

Back home, she had worked in a place like this. She had a master's degree in social work and used it well, focusing on childhood trauma. She believed in the power of therapy, in healing processes and helping people talk through their fears. Never had Puerto Rico needed her more than now.

But she was a world away, walking in to cry through her sessions and explain the visions that came at night. In her dreams, she floated over collapsed barrios, blackened beaches and floodwaters that never drained away. Sometimes she remembered so many bodies that the city built a second morgue.

From above, Maria’s plight on Puerto Rico is undeniable From the air, the devastation Hurricane Maria brought to Puerto Rico appears to be catastrophic.

Her therapist, a young woman with a blond bob, diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. She compared Aida to a soldier returning from war.

Now the therapist came out and led Aida to a back office, where they talked about the thunderstorm and the coping techniques that almost worked. An hour later, Aida walked back into the lobby. Black hair clung to her face. Tired eyes glistened.

"I got the mix for dinner," Joel said, standing to leave. A bag of Costa Rican plantains waited in the Corolla.

They walked out, headed to the next futile appointment. The car radio played soft songs in Spanish. Joel steered east and pulled into the parking lot of a Department of Economic Security building, a government office where Aida had already been turned away, denied the extra few dollars that could get her through each month.

"This is the one that scares me the most," Aida said.

The car doors slammed shut. Joel marched toward the front door. Aida lagged behind. She tried to look inside, to get a glimpse of what she was walking into, but all she could see was her own reflection, and Joel's next to her.

MORE: Thousands of Puerto Ricans flee ravaged island for mainland, including Arizona

'Get me out of here'

They had known each other since they were kids in Yabucoa, a small beach city of sugar plantations and fishing boats. She grew up in the mountains, a perfect student and the 1994 queen of her school. He was a lounger in the valley. Somehow they became friends anyway. Not best friends, she still teased, but close enough to stay in touch when Joel chased jobs off the island.

First, he tried Cleveland, but Ohio winters forced him back home. He left again in 2013, settling in Phoenix, where he lived alone and worked too much, sending spare money back to a family that refused to leave Puerto Rico.

He sent an extra few dollars last September, as he tracked a storm swirling across the Atlantic. Hurricane Maria hit just as he checked in for another night shift at a medical device factory. Aida called a few minutes later. He heard a barrage of wind, and then her shaking voice.

Streets look like rivers in Puerto Rico from hurricane Hurricane Maria's strong wind and heavy rain has turned some of Puerto Rico's streets into rivers, and the reports of damage continue to grow.

She was stuck in Yabucoa, standing outside her brother's house because she didn't trust it to withstand the wind. Already the concrete walls were rumbling.

"Stay calm," Joel told her. "Stay there."

Then the line went dead.

For days afterward, Joel's calls wouldn't go through, and he couldn't think about anything else. His island had crumbled and almost everything he knew was trapped inside.

"Get me out of here," Aida cried when they finally spoke again.

She had already decided to leave, but she couldn't afford it. Joel was her only way out. He picked up extra shifts at the factory and drove for Uber and Lyft, setting the money aside as flight prices spiked. When that still wasn't enough, he used his retirement savings to buy two tickets across the country, San Juan to Charlotte, North Carolina, to Phoenix. One for Aida, one for her son.

The flights were long and choppy, landing in Phoenix on a January midnight. Joel picked them up and drove to his small apartment, where they slept on air mattresses and tried to start over like he had. Joel eased Aida into English and helped Lionel through the homework his mother couldn't understand.

On the rare days she could withstand the pain, Aida cleaned the apartment and helped cook Puerto Rican dinners. The rest of her time she spent alone on the couch, flipping through documentaries and reading books on her phone. Some days she waited until after sunset to head outside, standing on the sidewalk to watch airplanes drift across her horizon. She once dreamed of becoming a pilot. Now she just wondered where all those people were headed, and if anybody was going home.

It was easier for Lionel. Already he spoke near-perfect English and had a few friends. But then he left for a summer in Puerto Rico, taking one of those faraway planes to visit his grandparents in Las Piedras. He called his mother when he could, assuring her that he was OK, that life in Puerto Rico still existed. Aida wasn't sure she believed him.

She prayed for his safety and searched for traces of home in Arizona, looking for Puerto Rican plantains in a city that didn't have them. She found the Puerto Rican restaurant a few blocks from the apartment, another in Mesa, and the Puerto Rican community center that didn't actually have a building, but not much else. Being with Joel helped. Sometimes people saw the flag tattooed on his forearm and asked about his hometown, or they noticed the flags on the Corolla and rolled down their windows to wave through traffic.

Joel and Aida smiled back. But then the light turned green, the windows rolled up, and they were alone again.

Starting over ... and over and over

The door was locked.

Of course it was. Aida threw up her hands and walked around the building. Pain shot through her body with each step. Why was this all so hard? All she wanted was enough to live: a disability check to offset three years without work, or somebody to make sure her son's father paid his child support.

But the America she knew was a thicket of voicemails and closed offices and not-my-departments. It felt like nobody wanted to help. She was stuck in a place she didn't understand, jamming together pieces of a life that didn't fit.

She considered herself a refugee, but the federal government didn't. As if her American citizenship had ever helped. There was federal aid for Maria survivors, but none of it applied to her, because she didn't need a hotel room in Florida or a loan to rebuild her house. Her application for disaster relief was rejected anyway. She still had the letter.

All she had to start over was $277 a month in food stamps and a $400 child support check that sometimes didn't come.

Around the building, Joel held open another heavy door. Stifling a wince, Aida walked to the front desk, where a short receptionist clicked at a computer. The woman smiled. Aida tried to tell her story.

"How do I change a case from Puerto Rico to here?" she asked a few minutes later, leaning against the cold desk.

"I don't know how to do that decision," the woman replied. The office was closed, she explained. She apologized. No, she said, she didn't know why the man on the phone had directed her here. There was nothing she could do. But maybe Aida could try again next week.

Aida turned to leave. She didn't make it far before the receptionist stopped her. She waved to another employee, a bald man who pulled the headphones from his ears and tried to look interested.

"She's from Puerto Rico, and she needs to change a case to here," the receptionist told him. "She also has a son."

"And she lives in this area?"

Aida nodded. Hope flickered across her face.

He reached into his pocket. Out came yet another phone number. Aida dropped it into her purse, next to all the others, and they moved on.

At the next office, they waited half an hour before somebody told them it was the wrong building. So they tried a third. That receptionist pointed Aida to a side window, where a caseworker handed her a thick application packet. She flipped through 24 pages, filling in the details of her new life. The pen left grooves in her fingers. She signed the last page and turned it back in. The caseworker said she would be in touch, but the process might take a couple of months.

Until then, she'd have to keep figuring it out on her own.

"So many things," Aida whispered to herself, and they headed home.

Wasn't she brave, too?

Aida's home was still an island of clear beaches and calm water, of mofongo and arroz con gandules, of mountains and valleys and rainy 85-degree days.

For months after the storm, she refused to see it any other way. She scrolled past news articles about death and destruction and darkness. When Joel watched his videos, she moved across the room. Months passed before she understood that the hurricane had ravaged all of Puerto Rico, not just her little city on the coast.

But once she started reading, sometime in April, she couldn't stop. The stories sliced at her resolve: The American president who saw a desperate crowd and decided to throw them rolls of paper towels, and the people who stooped to take them home. The Twitter fight he started with the mayor of San Juan. The slow phase-out of relief efforts. The death toll estimate that never stopped climbing. The politics and corruption that seemed to consume it all.

MORE: Puerto Rico acknowledges higher Hurricane Maria death toll: 1,427 fatalities

"The same discussion," she wrote on Facebook, below a story about the governor's $245,000 armored car and his trip to the World Cup final in Russia. "The same as always."

A stranger quickly wrote back: "You don't even live here."

She had heard it before. The accusations followed her across the country. People claimed she had given up on Puerto Rico, that she couldn't leave the island and still claim to be part of it. It was part of Puerto Rican pride: to have withstood the worst and still cling to the island. #YoNoMeQuito, some tweeted. I don't give up.

"You just ran away," one neighbor told Aida.

"I was here for months after the storm," Aida started to explain. She survived four months and left only because she had to. The hurricane washed away her entire life, and she was starting over from nothing. Wasn't she brave, too?

Each day took her farther from Puerto Rico, but no closer to feeling like an American. She understood English, but couldn't speak it. Everybody here seemed to assume she was Mexican. When a new Arizona driver's license appeared in her mailbox, she picked it up with a shock of guilt, as if she had abandoned her people.

A new worry crept over her.

She could never go home.

'Like what we have back home?'

Aida gave up on sleep just after a Monday sunrise. She shuffled into the empty living room and collapsed onto the couch. Nube jumped in her lap, and Aida kissed his stringy head.

Today would probably be lonely, because every day was lonely. Joel worked all the time. Lionel would be home in August, but that left just a few days until he started at a new school, trading a school of friends for one where he knew nobody at all. "Don't make me go," he begged his mother, but she had no choice. He would have to start over again.

The door cracked open. Joel walked in, peeling off a camouflage Red Sox cap and dropping his keys inside. He flopped onto a footstool and closed his eyes. It was just past 11 a.m., and his work day had just ended. A few early-morning Uber pickups earned him an extra $100.

"Joel, do you want coffee?" Aida asked, standing to walk to the kitchen. In the pantry, she found a glass tray of brown sugar and a can of decaf.

"Not today," he said. He pulled Nube close and swiped open his phone, searching for another video.

The coffeemaker shivered to life. Aida opened the refrigerator and took out a bowl of pastries. Cream cheese and cold fruit spilled out of the sides. She dropped them onto the kitchen table and reached back in, pulling out a stout brown bottle of Maltex, a Danish soda that tasted like molasses.

It was the closest they could find to home. In Puerto Rico, they drank Malta, a syrupy, sugary drink that seemed to live in every kitchen. But that was before everything fell apart. Before the island Aida never wanted to leave changed forever and stranded her here, in a kitchen that wasn't hers, holding a bottle that would never be what she wanted.

She sighed. The bottle went onto the cold kitchen table.

"That's like what we have back home, right?" Joel said, looking up from another video. He eyed the bottle from across the apartment.

"No," Aida said. She sat at the table, surrounded by empty chairs. "It's not the same."

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