The Woman She Was

by Rosa Jordan

  • • •

  Joe was surprised when he pushed open the door to his apartment at how crammed it seemed: the long sofa and big recliner facing a forty-eight-inch-TV screen, coffee table and end tables cluttered with books and magazines, a globe, a GPS he hadn’t got the hang of yet, the large collection of CDs, a trumpet he had never gotten around to learning to play, the telescope he had used only once, a bag of toys he intended to give to the girls if and when he ever saw them again, an open gym bag with contents pulled out to get at the tennis shoes and racquet he had meant to take to Cuba and decided at the last minute to leave behind, a desk with phone, fax, answering machine, PC, and printer—smaller versions of the ones at the office. He dropped his luggage on the bedroom floor and headed for the kitchenette, where he hoped to—and did—find a cold beer in the refrigerator.

  He walked back into the living area and stood for a minute breathing the musty odour of the closed-up apartment, predominately his own stale smells, before flipping on the air conditioner. Then, with something less than enthusiasm, he pushed the New Messages button on the answering machine.

  The first words of the first message caused him to choke on his beer. It was what he would discover was one of seven left by Vera, her voice rising with apparent panic on each subsequent call. “Joe, please phone the instant you get in. This is an emergency and I’ve got to make a decision. You have no idea what Keri is going through!”

  Joe’s stomach did a flip-flop. He hit the automatic dial for Vera’s number and waited for what he hoped would be an immediate pickup. It was. However, it was not Vera’s voice but Keri’s that came over the line.

  “Hal-loo,” she drawled in her sweet Southern child voice.

  “Keri?” Joe tried to modulate his voice and the thudding of his heart. “How you doing, honey?”

  “Hi, Daddy!” she exclaimed. “Mommy got me a kitten. It’s fuzzy white all over.”

  “That’s great, Keri.” Joe’s mind was running in circles, trying to figure out what signals he was getting and what ones he had missed. Keri certainly didn’t sound sick, but accident or illness was the only thing he could think of that would account for Vera’s semi-hysterical tone of voice. “Are you in bed, sweetheart?”

  “No, but Fluffy is. She’s sleeping on my pillow.”

  Vera, allowing a cat on the bed, when she’d never even allowed one in the house for fear the kids would catch something from it? He hated to brush Keri off, given how long it had been since he’d had a chance to talk to her, but this whole thing was beyond weird. “Could I, uh, speak to Mommy for a minute?”

  “Mommy!” the child called, forgetting, as small children often do, to move her mouth away from the receiver before raising her voice to a volume meant to carry to some other part of the house. Joe rubbed his ear as her footsteps pattered down the hall, to be replaced by the quick tap-tap of Vera’s heels on the tiles.

  “Joe! Thank goodness you’re back. Listen, this awful thing—” Vera’s tone changed and he heard her calling, “Keri, honey, why don’t you go upstairs and check on Fluffy?” Then Vera came back on the line, her voice a tragic whisper. “It’s Keri.”

  “What? Has she had an accident? She sounds okay.”

  Vera’s voice sliced into his eardrum even sharper than Keri’s had. “It was no accident. And the damage—well, there’s just no way to tell. Not until I get her to a specialist.”

  Once again Joe’s blood pressure shot up, and he wanted to yell at Vera that if it was that serious why the hell hadn’t she taken Keri to a specialist already? Instead, he asked in as calm a voice as he could muster, “Just tell me what happened, and whatever needs to be done, you know the girls are completely covered for every medical—”

  “She’s not covered for this.” Again Vera lowered her voice. “There was a man outside the fence at her school.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “He exposed himself.”

  Joe was flooded with disgust and relief. He wanted to lay bare hands around the guy’s neck and strangle him and do something not much less violent to Vera for the emotional roller coaster ride he had experienced during the past few minutes while under the impression that his four-year-old angel had been seriously hurt. But perhaps there was more; sure, there must be more to the incident.

  “Did he touch her?”

  “Certainly not ! Keri and the little girl she was playing with screamed and ran to the playground supervisor. She called the police but the man disappeared before any adult got a good look at him.”

  Joe picked up his beer and took a swallow. “So you said this was an emergency. What exactly do you want?”

  “What I want,” Vera said tersely, “is to take Keri to a sexual abuse specialist. That is not covered by the children’s health care policy.”

  “For what? So she can tell the shrink what she told the playground attendant and her teacher and the police and you? How many times do you want her to have to repeat it, for God’s sake?” Joe exploded.

  Vera’s voice came across the line with icy calm. “Until someone who knows children and cares about their feelings can determine that she hasn’t been scarred by the incident.”

  “Is she afraid to go back to school? Having nightmares or anything like that?”

  “No, she has been too distracted by the kitten. Which was my idea, while I was waiting for you to get back to consult with you as to what should be done.”

  Joe, who was taking another sip of beer, almost choked on that one. Vera had never consulted him on a damned thing concerning the girls, other than when, exactly, he was going to write the next cheque. Which was what this was about; him writing a cheque to some high-priced specialist to deal with a non-existent emotional trauma.

  “I appreciate that,” he said after he had cleared his throat and wiped the sputter of beer off the mouthpiece. “Tell you what, Vera. I’ll come over and take her for a ride and have a talk with her. If it seems like there’s a problem—”

  “I want her seen by a specialist,” Vera snapped.

  And what Vera wants, Vera gets, Joe finished silently. Well, not this time, baby. Aloud he said, “I don’t think it’s that big a deal, Vera. Getting her a kitten was probably the best thing you could’ve done.”

  “Joe—”

  Vera’s tone was ominous, but he didn’t let her finish. “Since she hasn’t been sexually abused, I don’t think it’s necessary to send her to a sex abuse specialist. But if that’s what you want to do, I won’t object. As long as you pay the bill.” Up to that point, he managed to keep his voice neutral, but his last words came out dripping with sarcasm. “Which I’m sure you’ll be willing to do if it’s as important as you seem to think it is.”

  Two weeks in Cuba had dulled his reflexes, which is why he didn’t get the receiver away from his ear in time to avoid a third shattering screech. “You cheap bastard! Your own daughter—”

  Joe eased the receiver back onto the hook. He had been in this mental space before, this insane mixture of helplessness, vindictiveness, uncertainty, disgust, and anger. Been there many times and knew exactly how to get himself out of it.

  He dropped a Gloria Estefan CD into the machine, cranked up the volume, and went into the bathroom. He turned on the water and let the tub fill to a depth that would just cover his testicles, then stripped and lowered himself into it. The warmth of the water and rhythm of the music was precisely what he needed to get his own rhythm going. He closed his eyes and let images of Celia, Gloria Estefan, and the big-breasted woman who had kept rubbing her thigh against his on the plane kaleidoscope through his head.

  Afterwards he showered, slipped into a cool silk dressing gown, and with the smell of dinner wafting from the microwave, sprawled in his leather-covered recliner with profound pleasure at being back in his own space. Again he took in the cluttered apartment, most of it visible from where he sat. Funny, he could visualize Celia astride him in any bed, but no way could he imagine her in this room. Not that he would bring her here. He’d want somethi
ng more appropriate for the two of them, and—he winced at the thought—probably space for Liliana at least part of the time.

  His brow wrinkled as it occurred to him that Celia would not find the kind of upscale neighbourhood Vera had demanded to her liking at all. Where then? Miami had neighbourhoods with houses built back in the 1950s that weren’t all that different from ones you’d see in Santa Fe, Cojímar, or parts of Vedado. They were comfortably middle-class there, lower middle-class here. However, Celia had moved out of Vedado in order to live on the ocean. Where could he offer her that?

  Given what he’d sunk into Vera’s dream house and what he was paying out monthly for the girls, he could hardly pop for a beachfront condo, which would be the nearest thing Miami had to offer to the place Celia lived now. Not that there was any comparison between that dilapidated four-storey public housing unit and a modern Miami high-rise. If he could ever get her here, once she got used to it, how could she not like it?

  The microwave dinged and Joe went to take out the chicken whatever-it-was. He found an open bottle of white wine toward the back of the refrigerator and emptied the last of it into a glass. “Fit for a king,” he muttered as he peeled the wrapper off the TV dinner, sipped his wine, and breathed the aroma of hot, instant food.

  Just about everything he’d ever dreamed of owning was in this apartment, in his office, or parked downstairs in the garage. But there was no denying that it would be nice to have Celia sitting across from him, challenging him to find his way through her prickly words into the yielding softness he knew was underneath. Celia, once he got her here, would be the ultimate antidote to that goddamned poisonous Vera, an ever-present reminder of what a stupid jerk he’d been to let her get her hooks into him in the first place.

  FORTY-FIVE

  CELIA drove out of Trinidad feeling better. Almost intolerable thoughts of Liliana prostituting herself to middle-aged or elderly sex tourists had been replaced with the possibility Magdalena had suggested: that she might have hooked up with foreign young people who, like her, only wanted to explore Cuba and have a bit of fun. If they treated her badly and she dared not return home for fear that the authorities would cart her off to a re-education camp, she might well have hitchhiked on to Santiago. The notion that Liliana would at any moment land in Franci’s lap was a comforting scenario—one Celia needed as much as she needed Franci’s wise counsel.

  The drive was slowed by frequent stops to pick up hitchhikers: students, teachers, medical personnel, farm workers, women carrying children to the nearest clinic for a checkup, and many more. Celia handed out flyers to her passengers as they got out of the car and asked them to post the notice in a public place in their town. Everyone promised to do it, and as she pulled away, she saw them reading the information she had not felt like sharing in person.

  Darkness descended around Holguín and she saw that she wasn’t going to make it to Santiago. Trinidad, she now understood, had been barely a third of the way to Santiago, not halfway as she had imagined. But in another hour she would be in Bayamo. She could overnight with Joaquín and his wife, Sylvia.

  She had last seen Joaquín when he came to Habana for a fencing event six years ago and was billeted near the Pan American stadium with his team. Celia took Liliana to see the match and invited Joaquín to dinner. At Liliana’s request, he brought a rapier and showed her some moves. She watched with intense interest, but informed him, with ten-year-old seriousness, that he should tell the team members to be careful and never mess around without their masks because you could put out somebody’s eye with that thing.

  Celia’s own eyes blurred as she thought of that sweet, clingy child who had so inexplicably disappeared into an adolescent whom, it seemed, she did not know at all. Angelica had assured her that the running-wild adolescent would come back, and Celia believed that. But the child she had cared for since infancy, had lived with for nine years, who felt like an extension of herself—how did one bring back that person?

  Celia parked in front of Joaquín’s stucco house, flat-roofed and square as a box, its stark facade broken only by curving wrought-iron steps leading to the terrace. If she had been less tired she would not have stopped. Having gone through the whole sorry story of Liliana’s disappearance only that morning with Angelica, she dreaded recounting it again for Joaquín almost as much as she dreaded the conversation they certainly would have about Luis Posada Carriles. Yes, she had read The New York Times article in which Posada had claimed credit for bombing seven Habana hotels. Yes, she knew Posada was now in jail in Panama for an attempted assassination of Castro; she had read a statement by the Panamanian security forces stating that if the bomb planted by Posada and his collaborators had detonated it would have killed not only Fidel but also the two thousand-plus medical school students and staff assembled to hear him speak. Yes, but—could she just say to Joaquín that she had enough pain on her plate at the moment without dredging up past losses and injustices? Especially now that Posada was behind bars.

  It was not Joaquín or Sylvia who answered the door. An auburn-haired woman, speaking not the Spanish of Cuba but that of Spain, said the couple was out for the evening. Celia explained that her family and Joaquín’s were old friends, she was en route from Habana to Santiago and had decided to drop by on the spur of the moment. With that she would have been on her way, but when the woman understood that she intended to continue on to Santiago, she would not hear of it. “What would they say if I told them you had come all the way from Habana and I allowed you to leave? I’m Sylvia’s sister Lydia, by the way. You must stay, you must!”

  “Well . . .” Celia murmured indecisively. She had reached that point of tiredness when the take-charge attitude of a woman like Lydia was hard to resist.

  Lydia stepped out onto the terrace and called down to a couple of boys playing baseball in the street, “Pietro, Juan! Open the garage door for my friend.”

  Again Celia protested, “Please, no! I cannot take their garage space.”

  “Oh my dear!” Lydia laughed. “They don’t have a car. Nor does anyone else on this street. When Joaquín’s family traded their house in Habana for this one, it just happened to have a garage. A taxi driver one street over normally parks his vehicle there but it is at the mechanic’s now so it’s quite empty. And here”—she walked back inside and motioned to a door that opened off the living room—“you can sleep. The bathroom is there. Rest a bit, shower if you like, and we shall have dinner.”

  “Oh no! Really! I do not need—”

  “Ah, but I need the company. Would you have me eat alone?” Lydia gestured dramatically toward a long table at the far end of the big room. “Go!” she commanded. “Put the car away. And when you come back—oh, I almost forgot! Don’t turn on the air conditioner while you’re running the shower. The water heater and air-conditioning unit together trip a circuit or blow fuses or something like that. We shall end up in the dark.”

  “Thanks for warning me.” Celia laughed.

  When she returned from putting the car in the garage, Lydia was nowhere to be seen. Glancing about the living room, a pair of crossed rapiers on the wall above the sofa caught her attention. When she and Joaquín were children, those rapiers had hung exactly so, above the sofa in his family’s Vedado home. They had belonged to Joaquín’s father.

  On the other side of the room was a cabinet that held trophies. The ones on the top shelf she had seen before; they, too, had belonged to Joaquín’s father. The next shelf held ones Joaquín had earned while still in his teens, and on the bottom shelf, those from his years on the Cuban Olympic team.

  She heard kitchen sounds and thought of offering to help Lydia prepare their meal. But tiredness compelled her to opt for the shower. When she came out twenty minutes later she found the table set for two and nothing resembling Cuban food in sight. Instead, there were two delicate green salads, hot garlic bread, and a heaping dish of paella redolent with unfamiliar spices. Lydia was already seated, sipping a glass of wine. Celia sat d
own, feeling blessed to be in the company of a hospitable stranger with whom she could converse on impersonal subjects.

  “How wonderful of you to take me in like this,” Celia said. “This truly is beyond the call of hospitality.”

  “Not Cuban hospitality,” Lydia disputed. “I cannot count the times Cubans I barely knew opened their homes to me. I hope a little of that openness has rubbed off.”

  Lydia was not exaggerating about Cuban hospitality. Had a stranger appeared at Celia’s door claiming to be Joaquín’s friend, she would have shown the same hospitality, albeit not the same ability to throw together a gourmet meal on the spur of the moment.

  “Do you come to Cuba often then, to visit your sister?”

  “To visit my sister, no. We are too far apart in age and interests to be friends.” Lydia smiled brightly. “However, our relationship is not so strained that we can’t use each other. When Joaquín’s work takes him to Spain they stay with me, and from time to time I come to here to pursue my love affair with Cuba.”

  The turn of phrase piqued Celia’s interest. She knew Joaquín’s wife was from a cultured Spanish family, yet neither sister showed the condescension toward Cubans that Celia had often encountered among Europeans.

  “I grew up with Joaquín,” Celia explained. “Our families lived across the street from one another. But I don’t know your sister very well, nothing about her interests.”

  Lydia leaned forward confidentially. “Sylvia’s interest, singular, has always been sexy athletes, plural. Fortunately Joaquín is intense enough to hold her attention, which, let me tell you, has been a great relief to the family. If Joaquín hadn’t come along and touchéd her, God knows where she would have ended up.”

  Celia barely concealed her surprise, both at Lydia’s characterization of her sister and the notion of Joaquín being sexy. Intense, yes, but sexy? Well, maybe he was in a bone-thin way, especially when all that dancer’s grace was on display in the sport at which he excelled. “And you?” Celia asked, diplomatically turning the conversation away from the private life of the absent sister who was technically her host. “What is it you like so much about Cuba?”