The Sweetness in the Lime

by Stephen Kimber

  So I must find them instead.

  You entered my life after the Americans refused me the visa. At first, I tried to convince myself I would never consider what I knew I was already considering—using you to get to the United States to find him. I didn’t. Not then. But then the hurricanes happened, and you were so kind—and I took advantage.

  What am I saying? That I did not love you at all? No. What is that American song about loving you in my fashion? I do, my darling, and perhaps, if not for Tonito, I could love you in your fashion too. I know I have been happier in my life since I met you. I am happier than I ever was with Alex. I feel so comfortable with you, especially when it is the two of us.

  So why am I leaving you now? Because I never intended to stay. That may sound cruel—and it is—but I knew from the beginning that whatever happened between us could never be enough to dissuade me from what I must do, the answers I must find.

  I don’t expect you to forgive me. What I have done is unforgivable.

  Please do not try to find me or follow me.

  I hope you find happiness.

  I must go now, before I can’t.

  All my love,

  Mariela

  6

  It didn’t take the skill set of a Columbo to figure out where Mariela was headed. Her letter left little doubt about either her general direction or her eventual destination. But she’d also inadvertently left behind a trail of boulder-sized, flashing electronic bread crumbs to make it easy for me to discover all the gory how-I’d deceived-myself details too.

  Mariela had taken her cellphone, the one registered in my name, whose bill came to me and whose calling details were available to me online anytime anywhere. But her device was also digitally tethered to my own Find My Phone tracker because Mariela could never find hers. And, though she’d taken her phone, Mariela had conveniently left behind the laptop I’d also bought for her. Her Wi-Fi-connected laptop contained some of the same applications as the ones on her phone—mail, messaging—and they were conveniently synchronized with her phone so I could now monitor her continuing electronic life in real time. So far, she wasn’t emailing, or messaging.

  Because I’d put the credit card I’d arranged for Mariela in both our names—so the bill would come to me to pay—a record of all of her purchases was now also conveniently available in updated electronic form for my viewing with just a few computer strokes.

  What did I learn? Well, for starters, I discovered Mariela had been planning this for some time. Retracing the steps in her browser history, I realized she’d begun researching various combinations of “rafters,” “Florida,” “coast guard,” “May 2004,” “2004,” “Alejandro Jones,” “Alex Jones,” “Antonio Jones Pérez,” and “Tonito,” within weeks of arriving in Halifax. She’d scoured the Miami Herald’s online archives for May 2004. She’d even purchased one article, “Four Cuban Rafters Die at Sea in Attempt to Leave Country.” I found the article in a Desktop folder labelled “Untitled Folder” (all the folders were untitled since, apparently, I hadn’t taught her how to change folder names), but the article turned out to be about unrelated dead Cuban rafters. I tried to imagine how difficult it must have been for Mariela to order a copy of that article, and the relief she must have felt when she read it. Relief coupled with…I stopped trying to imagine.

  I’d taught her to use Google Alerts. “Let’s plug in Cuba,” I suggested. I thought it would be a good way for her to keep up with news from her homeland, though almost all the sources Google chose turned out to be American, and all the stories anti-Castro, which she didn’t want to read. Later, Mariela plugged in her own alert using Tonito’s full name and “Cuba.” But there had never been, so far as I could tell, a single story in all of Google News matching her search terms.

  Mariela also began bookmarking links in her browser for “Cheap Hotels Miami,” and “Cheap Flights Halifax Miami.” She discovered the unfettered, un-Cuban joys of Expedia and Tripadvisor. Cross-checking with her Gmail history and then retrieving the online records for her credit card purchases, I realized she’d booked her ticket from Halifax to Miami via Toronto more than six weeks before…before our family gathering! It was a one-way ticket, and it had departed at 6:30 this morning. During the same Expedia session, Mariela also booked a week in a very cheap hostel in Miami Beach called the Sand Castle, saving herself—me—close to twenty per cent by booking flight and hotel together.

  The Find My Phone app now reported her cellphone—and presumably Mariela—was at the Toronto International Airport. Her flight to Miami wasn’t scheduled to take off for another hour. Should I call? I should. I needed to talk to her, tell her I love her and convince her to come home…. No, I shouldn’t. She’d made her decision and I should get on with my life. Shouldn’t didn’t stand a chance. I called. She didn’t answer. Damn Caller ID.

  Which gave me the opportunity to reconsider. What would I have said anyway? And what would I have really meant to say? Mariela had gifted me an unanticipated opportunity to jump off this out-of-my-control Tilt-a-Whirl. Who knew relationships could be so difficult, so mind-mashing, so all-time consuming?

  I had managed to live most of my first five-and-a-half decades—give or take those few bad, late teenaged years—without the need of anyone else to accommodate, bargain with, bow to, be jealous of, obsess about, love. And I had been happy. In my fashion.

  I checked Find My Phone again. Where had the time gone? Mariela was now in Miami, comfortably ensconced in Room 107 at the Sand Castle on Miami Beach. Based on Google Street View, as well as its 1.8 rating on Tripadvisor, the hostel appeared to be a dive.

  Now, where was I? Oh, yes. The question was not really whether I should walk away while I had the chance—I should—but how would I explain this life-turn of events to everyone? To Sarah? To the people at work? To myself? Mariela left me. There would be tut-tuts, of course, and unspoken—spoken too, probably—I-told-you-so’s, accompanied by knowing nods. Perhaps there would even be the occasional supportive “that bitch.” Worse would be the dollops of pity, served with a shovel. “Poor Eli.” People would try to be kind, invite me for drinks, or to dinner parties where I could be the obvious uncoupled guest, a dangler for the divorcées and recently widowed. Everyone could watch, without watching, the petri dish of our coming together to see if the experiment would take.

  Who was I kidding? There were not that many among my acquaintances who would self-identify as a friend, and most of those were situational, work friends like Steve and the women at C3, who would miss me for a week before forgetting to remember my name. Most of my former colleagues at the Tribune already had. As I had forgotten theirs. None of them would care enough to invite me out to commiserate, let alone set me up with someone else.

  Sarah would have eagerly taken on that role if, that is, she wasn’t so pretzel-twisted-up in her own many and various family-related psychodramas. My relationship, or non-relationship, with Mariela could now never be more than a minor, digressionary subplot in the complicated drama of her current life. How had Sarah and I reached the late middle of our lives, an age when we should be settling into the smug, comfortable contentment of pre-retirement years, only to find ourselves trapped again in the throes of our own teenaged angst?

  My own teenaged angst seemed all too grown up. My wife had—has—a child I never knew existed because she never told me. She told me she loved me when she didn’t, when all the time she was planning to leave me. And now—like Eleanor—she had left, disappeared. There was a pattern here I had obviously missed. Maybe it did all fit together. Donnie loved Eleanor. Mariela loved her son. Who loved me? Anger welled up in me. Anger at anyone, everyone who might conceivably be responsible for whatever this had become. Starting with the bellhop at the resort who had arranged my ride to Havana with Uncle Lío and his niece. Fucking Reynaldo! I did remember his name.

  Mariela had gone dark. She hadn’t sent one email or made a s
ingle cellphone call since she’d left Halifax…how long ago? Forty-two hours. I hadn’t slept. I couldn’t. I wanted—needed—to turn away, to turn off my computer, to forget everything that had happened, was happening, would happen. I couldn’t.

  I obsessively checked, re-checked Find My Phone. The morning after she’d landed in Miami, Mariela left the hostel, took what I guessed, by the swiftness of the beacon’s movements, must have been a bus into downtown Miami. Then she proceeded slowly—walking?—up 8th Street Southwest. I soon discovered—Wikipedia knows all—the street was better known as Calle Ocho, the heart of Miami’s Little Havana Cuban exile neighbourhood. Mariela stopped occasionally and had appeared to linger for a few hours around Maxímo Gómez Park, which Wikipedia informed me was a popular gathering spot where Cuban exiles played dominoes and chatted over old times. Was Mariela chatting up the exiles, asking if they’d seen Tonito? The domino park, I also learned, was near the Latin American Walk of Fame where Latin American pop culture icons were immortalized with their own pink marble stars embedded into the sidewalk. Willy Chirino, I discovered, had a star there. Had Mariela stopped at his star, perhaps even chuckled, remembering my Chorizo mispronunciation from a few lifetimes ago?

  Find My Phone didn’t answer that question. It did tell me Mariela had then walked ten minutes north to 1st Street SW and spent an hour in Miami Dade’s Hispanic Library. After that, she appeared to walk in circles for several blocks—was she lost?—before finally heading west for close to an hour back into the heart of downtown Miami. According to the beacon, she’d ended her journey at the Intercontinental Hotel. The Intercontinental Hotel? But then the beacon shifted slightly across the street—recalibrating?—to Bay Front Park, where Mariela’s phone seemed not to move for the next two hours. It took me a while, but I finally figured out that Bay Front Park housed a statue known as the Liberty Column, a round white marble column, which, according to my Google Images search, reached skyward from two outstretched hopeful hands to “commemorate the journey and suffering of Cuban rafters….”

  In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to be there in that park with Mariela, my arm around her shoulders, her tears soaking my shirt, sharing her agony.

  What was I thinking? I was not thinking, not rationally. If I let her go now, this will not end well for her. I will be searching for her, just as she is searching for Tonito. I remembered I had allowed Eleanor to disappear from my life long ago. That had not ended well. It seemed nothing ended well, so perhaps I should not let it end at all.

  I checked the beacon one more time. The cellphone had returned to the hostel. I did not call Mariela’s cellphone this time. Instead, I looked up the Sand Castle’s website, found the number for registration.

  “Thank you for calling your Sand Castle,” chirped a female voice that could have been recorded but clearly wasn’t, given the crazy cacophony of surfing music and shouting revellers in the background. “How may I direct your call?”

  “Mariela Pérez, please?”

  “Mariela, Mariela, Mariela…Pérez, Pérez—here we are.” Cheerful, chipper, spaced out. “One moment please.”

  Sudden silence. Then the sound of ringing. One ring…two…three. Maybe she wasn’t even—

  “Yes….” Mariela. Tentative. Who’d be calling her here now?

  “Mariela. It’s me, Eli.” Silence. “Don’t hang up, please. I just wanted to say—” What did I want to say?—“I just wanted to say I want to help. No strings, no expectations. I just want to help you find Tonito. Will you let me?”

  Silence. And then a heavy sigh filled with un-shed tears.

  “Yes…please come.”

  My Blank Pages

  Havana, 2017

  It’s close to midnight when I hear a faint knocking on the door to our family quarters.

  I had long since retired back to my windowless room in our un-air-conditioned apartment in the casa. I keep cool here on hot nights by dressing down to my boxers and T-shirt and directing the fan, high speed, toward my face. Tonight, as usual, I’d poured myself a glass of rum, settled into my rickety wooden chair, propped my feet on my battered desk, and stared into the abyss of the empty first page of the reporter’s steno pad on my lap. I’d brought a dozen notebooks with me from Canada because I planned to write my way to some understanding of all that has happened to me. Tonight, as usual, the page is still blank. It doesn’t matter.

  I throw on a robe and snake my way past the room where Mariela and Tony are sleeping and open the door. It’s Charles and Sandra, the carpenter from Bayonne and his wife. “I’m sorry,” Charles stage-whispers. “We didn’t mean to wake you.” I can see he’s tipsy. “But we’ll be leaving first thing in the morning and we just had to thank you.”

  “That restaurant you suggested was just so great,” gushes Sandra, who extends her arm for me to admire. “Carlos gave me this!” She’s wearing an antique-looking silver costume-jewelry bracelet on her wrist. I knew Carlos—Carlos Cristóbal Márquez Valdés—San Cristóbal’s chef-owner, often visits diners at the end of their meals, pouring each one free snifters of aged rum and offering small gifts—Cuban cigars for the men, costume jewelry for the ladies—as a thank you for their patronage. I had known that when I suggested Charles and Sandra eat there.

  “This is such a wonderful city,” Charles says. “Such wonderful people.”

  “I think so,” I tell him. And I do.

  After Charles and Sandra make their farewells—“We’ll be back,” she tells me earnestly—and retire to their room, I tiptoe to the open doorway of the bedroom next to mine, the one Mariela now shares with Tony. That had not been the plan, at least not mine. But life intervened, Tony mostly. He had been a colicky baby and a fitful sleeper. During his terrible twos, he would wake up screaming almost every night. At first, Mariela tried to comfort him back to sleep in his own bedroom. After a while, when she couldn’t settle him there, she would bring him to sleep in our bed. Later, I began sleeping in Tony’s single bed so Mariela and Tony could have the bigger bed, and I could get some rest. It wasn’t supposed to be a permanent arrangement, but it is. And I’m OK with that. I am.

  I remember the last time Mariela and I made love. It happened four years ago, the night we finally bid adieu to our contractor and claimed the renovated casa as our own. We made warm, languorous, unhurried love in the largest guest room while the air conditioner conditioned the room and Tony slept beside us in a crib.

  The time before that? I remember that too. We were in Key West in a hotel near the bus terminal. Our lovemaking that night had been different…slow, intense, then cathartic. That was the night that changed the course of the rest of my life. And I’m OK with that too. More than OK.

  In This Moment

  Miami, 2011

  1

  “You are kidding me? Right?” Jonathan Gravenor eyed me incredulously as he glanced up, oh so briefly, from the half-finished plate of Paella Valenciana in front of him, his mouth still semi-stuffed with a semi-masticated mess of lobster, squid, chicken, and rice. His eyes skipped dismissively over the photos and documents Mariela had scattered on the table in front of him.

  “We’re not even in needle in a haystack territory here,” he said. “More like a grain of sand in an ocean’s worth of shitstorm.” He swallowed and then scooped, without pause for breath, another mouthful into his oversized maw.

  So why the fuck did you agree to meet with us, I wanted to scream. And why the fuck did you order the most expensive item on the menu, a dish that not only took the chef forty-five minutes to prepare—more than enough time for you to slosh down three Yankee-dollar mojitos that were not nearly as good as Esteban’s—but, worse, order the only item on the menu that just happened to require a “two-person minimum,” forcing me to order it too? We hadn’t discussed the details, but I already knew I was paying for Jonathan’s (“call me Juany”) meal and his drinks. Which might have been OK if…I turned
to look at Mariela, who had ordered but not yet tasted the mixed salad, the cheapest item on the Versailles’ menu. She had seemed so hopeful when we first sat down. Now, she looked stricken.

  Juany was not at all the person I’d expected, or the person I’d led Mariela to expect. But he had been my last resort. His website said he was an award-winning freelance journalist who’d written a number of what appeared to be thoughtful, balanced articles for Miami New Times about the local Cuban exile community, including its raft refugees. He’d sounded reasonable enough on the telephone when I explained, cryptically, why I was calling. He hadn’t said, “You are kidding me?” He’d said, “Sure. I think I might be able to help you with that. Why don’t we meet at the Versailles? We can have some lunch and I can give you some direction.”

  I had vague recollections of the Versailles. The restaurant’s name popped up in the news during American presidential campaigns when politicians visited Little Havana to court the Cuban American vote. According to its website, the Versailles was “a neighbourhood restaurant founded to feed and assuage the nostalgia of a people…where exiles gather to plot against and to topple Fidel Castro (at least with words), or so the urban legend goes.”

  But the bustling real-life restaurant where we sat on this humid late afternoon more resembled a popular, high-end truck stop than some mysterious den filled with cigar-smoking exiles hatching regime-change schemes. The establishment, which sat on a site that seemed to occupy most of a city block off Calle Ocho, boasted plenty of parking. Inside, its rabbit warren of large and small dining rooms, each framed by space-expanding floor-to-ceiling mirrors (its homage to Versailles?), filled and emptied like the tide with endlessly configurable tables and endlessly changing configurations of customers. Most of them, it seemed to me from their accents or from the unfamiliar languages they spoke, were probably package-bus-tour tourists boisterously enjoying their all-inclusive taste of Cuba in the middle of Miami before heading off to whatever was their next cultural culinary sampler.