A Scarcity of Condors

by Suanne Laqueur

  “So were you two fooling around in this house?” Tej asked, looking up at the windows.

  “No,” Val said, as Alex said, “Yes.”

  “You liar, it was never in the house,” she said.

  “The intentions were in the house,” he said. “Totally counts.”

  “You’re so full of shit.”

  “I love how-we-met stories,” Tej said.

  Val caught Jude’s eye and inclined her head toward Tej. “Where’d you find this one?”

  “In a bar.”

  Tej sighed. “Our story is so boring.”

  They turned onto the main street, which appeared lifted from a Norman Rockwell painting with its brick buildings, flapping American flags and charming train station. As they walked along, Val pointed out the scale models in each window. Every store and shop had a miniature version of itself, creating a parallel Main Street.

  “My mother made these,” Val said.

  “All of them?” Jude said.

  Tej peered closer at an intricate, scaled barber shop model. “She was like a professional…miniaturist? Is that a word?”

  “She had a dollhouse gallery on the top floor of that building,” Val said, pointing. “Which my great-grandfather built.”

  “It’s called the Lark Building,” Alex said. “Val’s sister owns it.”

  They passed Val’s place of business, Deane Fine Tailoring. Next door was Lark’s Wine Bar & Tapas. Last was a bookshop and coffee bar called Celeste’s.

  “Named after Great-Aunt Celeste,” Val said, opening the door and letting out an indescribable perfume of coffee, chocolate, paper and ink. “This was her shop.”

  “Val brought me here the day we met,” Alex said. “We went out walking the dogs together. I barely spoke English but somehow, we had a whole conversation. Then I came into this place and got all bummed out.” He glanced at Jude. “Papi’s bookstore was just like this. Tables and comfy chairs and books. A pot of coffee always going. People gathered. Soon as I walked in, I was back in Chile, back with him. I lost it. And I didn’t know how to explain.”

  “He dropped the leash and walked out in tears,” Val said. “Of course, I was only twelve, so I took it personally and got really mad at him.”

  Tej laughed. “Did you follow him out?”

  “No, I went home and sulked. But Aunt Celeste came over later that night and brought me a Spanish-English dictionary.” She leaned and rubbed her nose against Alex’s temple. “My siblings and I kidnapped him, took him out for ice cream and started over.”

  They sat at the long bar and were served by Val’s younger sister Trelawney Lark, a beautiful, elfin woman with cropped blonde-white hair and a captivating, genderless face. Between them in age was their brother Roger.

  “Wait,” Tej said. “Roger Lark. The Treehouse Guy? On HGTV? That Roger Lark?”

  “None other,” Trelawney said.

  “My mother loves that show,” Jude said, resisting the umpteenth urge to clarify mother.

  “We get that a lot,” Val said.

  “I love him,” Tej said. “He’s such a lunk. Is he coming to dinner? Say yes.”

  Trelawney smiled. “Sorry, he’s on his honeymoon.”

  He snapped his fingers and shrugged. “Knew it was too good to be true.”

  “This place is great,” Jude said, spinning on his stool to take in the shop. “Put a piano in here and I’d never leave.”

  “There’s a piano in Lark’s,” Trelawney said, gesturing toward the wine bar on the other side of the wall. “Come to happy hour tonight and play a set.”

  So they did, and Jude sat at the keys, taking requests from Meatloaf to the theme from The Flintstones. He pulled out all the Billy Joel hits, then played “Hey, Jude” the way he liked it best—with an enthusiastic crowd singing along. Drinks held high, swaying and na-na-ing the vamp, one or two brave souls improvising the falsetto scat line. The whole time, Alex sat right next to him on the bench, with a slightly territorial air. The same way Aiden Tholet, on a long-ago night, claimed the spot next to Jude’s body and would not move. Because a brother swearing “I will be there” was no more lip service than Tej declaring, “You are welcome here.”

  Alex’s voice was nicely on pitch and the way he occasionally harmonized seemed unconscious. Jude started a sneaky experiment, telling Alex the key of a song before playing it, casually throwing in music theory as he improvised between ditties. After an hour, he covered Alex’s eyes with one hand and played a note. “What’s this?”

  “C,” Alex said.

  Jude played another.

  “E-flat.”

  A third.

  “G?”

  “Dude.” He took his hand away. “You have perfect pitch.”

  Alex’s dimples flickered. “Is that a genetic trait?”

  “It is now.”

  Deane hugged and kissed Jude goodbye before heading to bed. She had to be up early to drive back to the University of Vermont.

  “Thanks for taking the time off,” Jude said. “It means everything.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it.” She screwed her index fingertips into his dimples. “I cannot believe what a mini-me you are.” She smiled big enough to make her own, single dimple show.

  “Oh,” Tej said. “That reminds me. Alex, hold out your arm. Make a fist.”

  Alex looked puzzled but complied.

  “He’s looking for the palmaris longus,” Jude said.

  “I don’t have it.” Alex ran fingertips on the inside of his wrist, which was smooth and flat. “I can’t retract my claws.”

  Tej looked fast at him. “I don’t believe you said that.”

  “Deane doesn’t have it either.”

  Deane held out her smooth arm. Jude held his next to it. Tej and Val put their fists in, both showing the raised tendon beneath the heel of the hand.

  “Genetics, man,” Tej said. “It’s a crazy thing.”

  Val turned in as well. The three men had a nightcap, then Tej went up to the guest room. Leaving the brothers in Alex’s study, telling stories, looking at family photos and touching the Penda artifacts. An antique dagger Eduardo had used as a letter opener. Two cardigan sweaters Alex had pulled on when he was hiding in the closet in the Santiago apartment. One on top of the other. Creating the haven of his parents’ arms the only way he could. He was still wearing them when he was pushed through the gates of the American embassy. Still wearing them when he deplaned at JFK airport, where he was collected by his uncle.

  “Tell me about him,” Jude said, looking at the photo of Felipe Penda. He sat on some porch steps, smoking a cigarette. Slick and dapper. Wingtip shoes and a sweater knotted around his neck. Like a young Ricardo Montalbán.

  “He was loving, generous, intellectual, cultured,” Alex said. “You may have noticed I don’t really have the quintessential Chilean accent?”

  “I did notice,” Jude said. “You’re not as mushy.”

  “That was Felipe’s doing. He was a linguistic snob, always on my case to enunciate and use correct grammar. Looking daggers at me if I used po or hueón.”

  Jude wagged a finger. “Watch your language, young man.”

  “It was his one hang-up in terms of being a disciplinarian. In all other aspects, he was a hopeless guardian. No practicality whatsoever, but then again, Papi was pretty impractical, too.”

  “He was?”

  “Oh yeah. He’d walk out of the house with two different shoes at least once a week. He constantly lost keys, lost his wallet, lost his glasses. Easily distracted by shiny things. He’d put water to boil on the stove and walk away for an hour. Mami was the field general. She had her finger on the pulse of everything. Unfortunately, Felipe didn’t have anything equal to her.”

  Jude smiled above his phone. He was texting a picture of him and Alex hugging in the airport t
o his parents. Adding the caption, So this happened…

  “If Felipe was useless,” he said, “who ended up raising you?”

  “The Larks,” Alex said. “Val’s family.” His face went soft, and a little dopey. “I wasn’t in the country twelve hours when Val came into my life. She and her brother and sister became my best friends. Her parents treated me like another son and when Felipe died, they became my legal guardians. The Larks were my family. Are my family.”

  But you never stopped wondering about me, Jude thought. Every day for all of your life, wondering what became of the baby your mother was carrying when she was arrested.

  “I legally changed my name to Lark-Penda after Deane was born,” Alex said. “It’s her surname. It’s on the mailbox.”

  “Lark,” Jude said. “You literally were taken into a nest.”

  “A group of larks is called an exaltation,” Alex said.

  “Hm?”

  “Nothing.”

  Jude’s phone pinged with a text from Cleon: It’s happened before, sweet boy.

  Right after came a picture. Or rather, a picture of a picture from the family gallery: the shot of Louis and Felix Tholet hugging on the pier at Valparaiso.

  “Cabrón,” Jude said softly. “Alejo, mira ésto.”

  Alex looked. “Who is it?”

  “My grandfather and his brother. Great-Uncle Louis. It was taken the day he arrived in Valparaiso. This little boy here is my father.”

  Jude swiped between the two photos, taken sixty-three years apart. The composition was eerily identical between the two sets of brothers. From the tight, tangled embrace, to the hands on heads. In the Valparaiso shot, little Cleon Tholet stood wide-eyed and wondering. In the New York shot, Deane Lark-Penda wore the same amazed expression.

  “That’s crazy,” Jude said, the hair prickling up on his forearms.

  Alex nodded, a hand cupped loose over his mouth. “I’d say that’s kind of like…destiny?”

  Alex took Jude to Guelisten Cemetery to see the graves.

  Jude sat on little bench, staring at the Pendas’ headstones and unable to connect to the chiseled names. “It still doesn’t feel real. I mean, it doesn’t feel… It doesn’t feel. I’m still standing outside looking in.”

  “You’re connected to the intense emotion of the story,” Alex said. “Caught up in the dramatic arc, but you can’t quite believe it’s yours.”

  “Yeah. Exactly.”

  “Val said that last night.”

  “She’s great. You picked a winner.”

  Alex chuckled. “She picked me.”

  The day was gorgeous. Blinding sunshine in a pristine blue sky. Above a ridge line of trees, hawks were catching thermals and spiraling lazily.

  “El cóndor pasa,” Jude said.

  “Hm?”

  “The hawks over there. You ever see an Andean condor?”

  “Sure. When we’d go skiing in the mountains. We took a trip to Patagonia once and I saw a ton of them.”

  Jude steepled his hands over his mouth. “All the political upheaval in South America was called Operation Condor.”

  “I know.”

  “The guy who broke my leg? He was the school baseball star. Sick pitcher. He had a seven-foot arm span and they called him El Cóndor. It’s an historical irony I don’t particularly appreciate.”

  Alex drew and let out a long, pained breath. “Me neither.”

  Jude glanced at the tight muscles in his brother’s jaw and indulged in some revisionist history. Alex jumping a chain link fence and coming to Jude’s rescue. Chasing down and tackling Juan-Mateo Díaz. Picking up the dropped bat and taking a few practice swings before breaking the Condor’s legs…

  But that would mean erasing Aiden from the story. Aiden sitting bedside in the hospital, his sleeping head by Jude’s hip, his fingers closed tight around Jude’s wrist. With no manner of coaxing, pleading or ordering that could make him move until Jude woke up.

  These are my stories, he thought, sighing. I can’t let them go. I don’t want them to change.

  I don’t want to pick between brothers.

  “You all right?” Alex said softly.

  “Yeah. Just trying to let the condor pass.”

  “Not to be a nerd, but the Andean condor is technically a vulture.”

  “Not to be a nerd, but I knew that.”

  “Did you know vultures have three different group terms? A group in flight is called a kettle. If they’re in trees or on the ground, it’s a committee. And if a group is feeding, they’re called a wake.”

  “Well aren’t you a font of useless information?”

  “Papi knew all the group terms for animals. He taught them to me. It was a game we played.”

  They went quiet. Jude chewed on Alex’s easy use of Papi. Took a taste of his ownership in the word. Nothing. Papi belonged to Cleon.

  “A group of condors is called a scarcity,” Alex said.

  “Good,” Jude said. “The less of them the better.”

  Alex cleared his throat and got up. He picked at the grass around the base of the stones, fussing, pulling out weeds. Jude looked at his brother. Eleven years older. Greying and mature. This brave, resilient human being who lived a haunted life, wondering what became of his people.

  “I wish I could tell you that I always had a feeling something was wrong,” Jude said.

  “What do you mean, wrong?”

  “That I didn’t fit in or felt some essential piece of me was missing or…I don’t know.”

  “Hearing you grew up a misfit would not make me feel better,” Alex said. “At all. I mean, yeah, of course I wondered if you even had an idea you were someone else’s child, but rarely in a way that meant you were unhappy or ostracized or unwanted. Those kinds of scenarios could make me lose my mind. If I couldn’t ever find you, then I just prayed, begged you had a good life and you were loved and safe.” He gestured toward the gravestone. “That’s what I always believed would put their hearts at rest.”

  “I understand. But at the same time, I don’t know why I feel so strongly that I let you down somehow.”

  “You had no idea. This literally all happened before you were born. Hours after you were born. You didn’t have a consciousness yet, let alone a memory.”

  “I know. And yet it’s there, stuck in my chest and making me feel like apologizing. Atoning. I feel like I should have… I don’t know. This guilt I feel is hard to explain.”

  Alex nodded slowly, then stood up. A long sigh as he stared at the silver granite where bone fragments were buried. Bones that told the truth.

  “Believe me, Jude, I get it. Guilt’s been a friend of mine my whole life.”

  Jude got up and stepped closer. Behind and a little bit to the side of his brother’s tall frame. Feeling so small and unworthy, he slid his hand into Alex’s.

  “No fue tu culpa, Alejito.”

  It wasn’t your fault.

  Alex glanced down at their twined grip. His fingers squeezed a little. “It’s nice to hear someone call me Alejito again.”

  They stood still, holding hands. Letting Clementina and Eduardo see their sons. Jude closed his eyes, imagining wispy, spectral hands rising from beneath the ground. Touching their faces. Ascertaining. Could it be true? What was lost was returned to them?

  Are these our boys?

  Are we together again?

  Hold still. Let us see you. Let us claim you.

  Yes. It’s you. We see you.

  It’s all right now.

  All is well now.

  Jude opened his eyes. “I’d like to go to Chile someday,” he said. “See where I come from. If it’s possible, I’d like to go with you.”

  “We can do that.”

  “Is your house… Our house still there?”

  “It’s ther
e. I’ll take you to Chile. I’ll show you everything.”

  Jude hesitated. “My parents… I mean, Cleon and Pen—“

  “Your parents,” Alex said. “Look, I don’t want you to stop calling them that, I don’t expect you to transfer Mami and Papi to people you don’t even know. Cleon and Penny are your parents and I respect it. I’m fucking grateful for it. I’d like to meet them and say so.”

  “You’re not angry?”

  Alex freed his hand and put an arm around Jude’s neck. “The people to be angry at are out of my reach.”

  Jude nodded and started over. “My parents might want to come to Chile, too. They’ve never been back. But something in my gut tells me it might be time.”

  “Es hora de dejar pasar al cóndor.”

  It’s time to let the condor pass.

  After thirty-seven years, the Tholets were going back to Chile. It was all arranged. Alex was coming to Seattle with his wife. They’d stay a night, then the six of them—Penny and Cleon, Jude and Tej, Alex and Val—would fly to Santiago together. Jude said if they were going to do it, they may as well fucking do it, so he booked the flight first class both ways, wouldn’t take anyone’s money and wouldn’t listen to any protest.

  “This is my gift back to the divine order,” he said. “I’m taking the sad song and making it better.”

  “Mami, are you nervous?” Serena asked.

  “No,” Penny said, truthfully. “I’m excited.”

  In the weeks since Jude had connected with his brother, Penny had found peace in reflecting on Clementina Vilaró, embracing her as a soul sister. When she did her meditations and visualized the garden in La Reina, she patted the bench and asked Clementina to sit with her. She pretended they walked arm-in-arm through the flowers. Or sat at Penny’s kitchen table, going through photos and keepsakes of Jude’s life. Watching him grow and evolve. When Jude forwarded a picture of Clementina, Penny printed it out. She kept it on the kitchen windowsill, lighting a candle beside in the evenings. She brought her compañera little offerings—pretty pebbles picked up on the beach, a gull’s feather, a perfect dahlia bloom.