Covering the Sun with My Hand

It’s the summer of 1979, Salsa music is blaring and all Julia Acevedo wants is to dance her way into the long awaited freedoms of young adulthood. Instead, she’s dancing in the living room with her twin brother, who has been acting increasingly bizarre. With their father lost in the depths of his sixth cold one of the night, and their mother adding another newspaper to the growing stack in the kitchen, Rene turns away from Julia completely–and he never turns back.

Rene Acevedo has schizophrenia, and with her alcoholic father largely out of commission, and her mother ever more lost to the compulsion of hoarding, Julia becomes Rene’s sole hope for salvation. Julia breaks up with her boyfriend, Victor, and begins to negotiate visits to the psychiatric emergency room, a Park Slope apartment often full of police, and her parents’ denial of the whole situation.

She escapes reality by entering into an affair with a married man. After her parents’ deaths, Julia allows herself the one pleasure of combing through NYC, tentatively searching out the happiness she’s denied herself. On one of her Saturday treks she enters a SoHo gallery, where she meets up with her first love, Victor, who is now a renowned photographer.

As Julia struggles with fulfilling her desires, Rene accidently sets fire to his bedroom. The severity of his illness is exposed. Grappling with the realization that he can no longer live at home; Julia breaks her death bed promise to her mother.

She and Rene travel forty miles toward Pine Ridge Adult Residence. Neither have any idea what life will be like from now on. The two separate. Julia boards the Metronorth home and in doing so moves closer to her brother and to fulfilling her DNA as a Latina.

I am currently in the process of finding a publishing house for this novel. I can be contacted at theresavarela@gmail.com