“I came alongside,” Bob answered simply, “attached a tow line, and then I went aboard. The smell was something awful…sorry, ma’am, but it was. I don’t know now what I thought I was going to do. Probably I didn’t think…otherwise, I wouldn’t have…or I don’t believe I would have…the idea just came to me, sudden, some lines in my head….” He was reciting now, words I recognized. “But such a tide as moving seems asleep/Too full for sound and foam/When that which drew from out the boundless deep/Turns again home.” Bob saw my reaction. “You know the one I mean. We buried my daddy out here years ago. He was a fisherman too. Gave him a big send off. The minister read that whole poem. I was so taken with it, I remember, I memorized it. Word for word. So then I decided that’s what I’d do. I’d bury them at sea, let them go home again…. I kneeled down beside those people, spoke those words….” Bob’s voice faltered for a long moment. “And then I rolled them over the side and into the ocean, watched them all disappear.” He had to stop again. He looked now at Mariela. “That little boy, your boy? I could swear he had a smile on his face.” There seemed to be nothing left to say.
We stood in awkward, isolated silence for what seemed like forever. Finally, Mariela took Bob’s hand and then mine, and walked us to the stern of the boat. We each looked off into the nothing between here and Cuba. Mariela began,
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea…
I couldn’t help but marvel. Had Mariela learned that poem growing up in Cuba? When she studied English? Or had she—like Bob with his own father’s pastor—been so moved by Sarah’s reading of it at my father’s memorial she’d memorized it too. There was no point in puzzling this out. As she continued, I added my voice. Bob joined in too. I couldn’t have told you where the words came from. It didn’t matter.
****
Despite Maudie’s entreaties, we didn’t stay for dinner. “Thanks, really, thank you, but we should get the bus back to Miami tonight,” I said, though we didn’t. We checked into a hotel near the bus terminal. Bob and Maudie’s grandchildren had returned from wherever they’d been, and the small bungalow had filled with the childish sounds of shouts and laughter. I wasn’t sure Mariela could cope with that now. I wasn’t sure I could either.
“I’ll drive them back to the station,” Bob said, relieved. To Maudie, “I won’t be long.” At the bottom of the outside staircase, Bob directed us to wait by the truck. “I’ll be right there.” He walked over to a shed near the rear of the yard, opened the door, went in, turned on a light. A few minutes later, he returned. “I found this. On the raft,” he said simply, handing Mariela a small, stuffed, handmade doll. “I’m not sure why I kept it,” he said, almost to himself. “Maybe I knew you’d come someday.”
Mariela was still clutching Mi Toni to her chest when we checked into the hotel. It sat, watchful, at the head of one of the room’s double beds while we ate our room service meal in silence.
“I knew,” Mariela said finally, her voice as flat as the afternoon’s ocean. “I always knew I would find out Tonito was…that Tonito had died. But I had to know it. Does that make any sense to you?” It did. “All these years I’ve kept myself going by pretending I didn’t know. And now I know. Now what?”
We made love. It was love of a different order…slow, intense, then cathartic.
Afterward, she said, “I want to go home.” It was only later we decided where home would be.
Acknowledgments
A special thank you to my wife, Jeanie Steinbock Kimber, who set me off on the decade-long odyssey that became this novel by suggesting, ever so gently, over drinks on a beach at a Cuban holiday resort sometime in the early 2000s, that I set my next book somewhere other than in Nova Scotia. As in all things, she was right. As in many things, I met her halfway.
Thanks, too, to Alejandro Trellis, Cuban tour guide extraordinaire. During the initial research for my novel, I asked Alex to introduce me to the Havana “I wouldn’t see as a tourist.” He did. But he also, incidentally and coincidentally, derailed my fiction-writing plan for five years by introducing me to the incredible, unbelievable-but-true story of five Cuban intelligence agents then serving unconscionably long sentences in US prisons for trying to prevent terrorism against their country. I thank him for telling me about them. The story of the Cuban Five was one more than worth the learning-writing side-trip.
The years I spent researching their story, in fact, helped deepen my understanding of Cuba and Cubans. That said, for me, Cuba remains endlessly intriguing, always fascinating, occasionally confounding. Which is also part of its charm.
Many people—Cubans and Canadians—educated me along the way. At one time or another, in one way or another, I learned from, among others, Lee Cohen, Elena Díaz González, Brenda Durdle, Dyam Fernandez Perez, Fred Furlong, Dayana Garcia Valdez, René González, Fernando González, Antonio Guerrero, Bill Hackwell, Gerardo Hernandez, Alicia Jrapko, Emily Kirk, John Kirk, Ramon Labañino, Jesus Magan, Valerie Mansour, Elizabeth Palmeiro, Adriana Pérez, Jesus Rolando Casamayor, Anna Sanchez, and Olga Salanueva. I thank them all.
Sue Ashdown, Karen Dubinsky, Irma González, Michael Kimber, Emily Kirk, John Kirk, Hilary McMahon, Kelly Toughill, and Bill Turpin all generously read drafts of this novel in its various stages of dress and helped save me from many errors I didn’t know I was making. Thanks. They are not, of course, responsible for the other mistakes I am sure I made anyway.
I also want to express my thanks to Whitney Moran, the managing editor of Vagrant Press, and editor Elizabeth Eve. Their thoughtful suggestions and encouragement to dig deeper have made this a much better book.
Although this is a work of fiction, I am a journalist and a researcher, and I’ve borrowed bits and pieces from real life and the internet, then bent and shaped them for my own fictional purposes. The result is a novel and any resemblance to anyone, living or dead, is accidental.
About the Author
Stephen Kimber, an award-winning writer, editor, and broadcaster, is the author of ten books, including two novels and eight works of nonfiction. His most recent nonfiction book—What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five—was longlisted for the Canadian Booksellers Association’s Libris Award as Nonfiction Book of the Year, won the 2014 Evelyn Richardson Award for Nonfiction, and the Cuban Institute of the Book’s 2016 Reader’s Choice Award. A journalist for fifty years, he is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax and co-founder of the King’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction program.
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