Land of Careful Shadows

by Suzanne Chazin

  She’d never called him back today. She could be like that sometimes, as if she forgot that Joy was his child too, not simply an extension of her life with Alan. It didn’t help that her world had the gravitational pull of family, home, and faith that his so sorely lacked. There was no comparison. So he deferred. Again and again until he himself had to admit that he’d become a ghost in his daughter’s life.

  The funny thing was, he and Wendy had started out being charmed by each other’s differences: Wendy, the Jewish, Barnard-educated psychologist, five years his senior; Vega, the fatherless, Puerto Rican working-class musician. Romance is built on such differences. Marriage and parenthood—they soon discovered—was not. When they first made love, it turned her on when he spoke Spanish to her. After Joy was born, she got annoyed if he blasted his salsa in the house. She considered everything brightly colored or sexy as “too Puerto Rican.” Anything boisterous or playful made her stiffen and sulk. His friends thought she was a snob. Her friends treated him like a simpleton.

  Their home didn’t even feel like it belonged to him. Their shelves were lined with dreary tomes about the Holocaust and self-help books full of complaints disguised as advice. Her mother got upset every year when Vega put up a Christmas tree and made sure that by age six, Joy knew there was no Santa Claus. Wendy left him because she’d been fooling around with Alan and had gotten pregnant with twins—a devastating blow to Vega on so many levels. But on their divorce decree they cited “irreconcilable differences” as the reason for their split. Vega thought in many ways it was closer to the truth.

  “There are so many stories here,” said Adele, stacking folders on every surface that would take them. “Every life has a story, I suppose.”

  “In most cases, more than one.” Vega felt like he’d lived about a dozen already.

  Adele closed the drawer and handed some of the folders to Vega. They began carting them into the front room where Adele piled them on one side of the table. At first she wouldn’t let Vega look through the folders. He just sat there balancing his chair on two back legs like a kid in detention. But finally, faced with the overwhelming amount of material she had to look through and her desire to make the quinceañera, she relented and handed him part of the pile.

  Vega was struck right away by the variety of people who came through the center: a social worker from Colombia with a college degree, a stone mason from Guatemala taking basic literacy classes, a preacher from Honduras, a car mechanic from Mexico. He noted the less appealing aspects in some files too: the addict who crossed the border to break his drug habit, the alcoholic trying to get sober, the manic depressive who needed medications he couldn’t afford. Adele snatched one file he was reading right out of Vega’s hands.

  “I thought this was about finding Maria Elena.”

  “It is. I’m not going to do anything with the information. I told you.”

  “You appear a bit too interested.”

  “I’ll make a point to look bored.”

  She gave him an exasperated look. “You don’t get it, do you? This isn’t a game, Vega. These people have given up everything to be here and one arrest could take it all away. You have no idea what it feels like to be on the other end of your job.”

  She went back to reading a file. He went back to balancing on two legs of his chair.

  “I’ve been on the other end,” he said softly.

  “For what? A DWI after some cop’s stag party?”

  His eyes got hooded. The irises turned inky. She didn’t know he wounded so easily.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just assumed—”

  “—I’ve never been like that.” Not as a teenager, not even after Wendy left him. He was tempted, mightily tempted. He put a few fists through a few walls, but he kept his dignity. And most of all, he obeyed the law.

  “What happened?”

  “I borrowed a friend’s car when I was seventeen and accidentally ran a red light. A cop stopped me, searched the trunk, and found a pretty sizable stash of marijuana and cocaine my friend was keeping in there.”

  “Did you tell them it wasn’t yours?”

  “Oh, right. Of course.” He smacked himself on the head. “Why didn’t I think of that? The police are always sooo trusting of minorities, especially considering my friend was white and his dad owned the hardware store here in Lake Holly.”

  “You mean Rowland’s Ace Hardware?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Your friend was Bob Rowland?”

  He seemed to realize belatedly where this was headed. “This is ancient history, you understand.”

  “You mean the drug use? Or the friendship?”

  “Both.”

  “You didn’t do jail time, did you?”

  “Almost. The cop started calling me the usual names so I took a swing at him and got assault added to the charge. I did a night in jail but I had no priors so I got probation.” Vega could still see himself, a skinny kid sweating through a borrowed sports coat before an indifferent and patronizing judge. “It was a juvenile offense, fortunately, so it got expunged from my record when I turned eighteen. Still, it cost me a scholarship to study music. And not that it matters now, but it cost me my girl.”

  “Linda.” It wasn’t even a question.

  Vega closed a folder without answering and slapped it on the finished stack. Maria Elena wasn’t here. There were plenty of Marias, all right. But they were from El Salvador or Mexico or Peru. They were too young or too old or had come over at the wrong time. If anybody was from Aguas Calientes, Guatemala, they hadn’t mentioned it on their intake sheet.

  “Anybody else have access to these files?” asked Vega.

  “All my front office staff,” said Adele. “Kay and Linda and Rafael and Ramona. Plus, the board members, but they’d really have no reason to remove an individual sheet.”

  “You keep any records on people who hire your clients?”

  “Some.” Adele answered slowly. Vega caught her checking her watch. He was conscious of becoming that last party guest who wouldn’t take the cue to leave. But he had to explore every option.

  “Morales said he brought Maria to La Casa to find a job,” said Vega. “If she found a job, wouldn’t you have some sort of contact information for the employer?”

  “Not necessarily. Look, Vega—” She pointed to her watch. “—I’ve got to go.”

  “But if you have that information—”

  “—No—”

  “—No, you don’t have it?”

  She sighed. “Even if I had such a file, there wouldn’t be that much personal information about a client in it.”

  “That doesn’t matter. If I can track down the employer, I might be able to fill in the blanks from there.”

  “It’s possible Maria never even got a job through La Casa. Or she did, but she didn’t give us enough information to verify that the person in our files is her.” Adele began to gather the files to put away. Vega took out his wallet and slapped a fifty-dollar bill on the table.

  “Twenty minutes and fifty bucks says you’re wrong.”

  Adele frowned. “What? You think you can buy me?”

  “Buy you? Never. Bet you? Absolutely. You’re a lawyer and a fencer. My guess is, you hate to lose at anything.”

  “So do you, apparently.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” he grinned. “I don’t get much practice.”

  She sighed. “Twenty minutes—if only to wipe that smug look off your face.”

  “Deal.”

  The employer files were in Adele’s back office in a locked cabinet. A red light blinked on her answering machine and she listened to her messages, scribbling notes on a pad.

  “Do you need to call someone? Let them know you’ll be late to the quinceañera?”

  “I don’t think I’ll get Gabby’s father. The whole Martinez family’s probably still at the church.”

  “I mean—” he stumbled about “—a date.”

  “It’s not that s
ort of event.”

  “You could’ve fooled me with that pretty red dress you’ve got in the car.”

  Adele blushed. He hadn’t meant to embarrass her. He wondered whether she had many opportunities to wear such a dress if she was wasting it on the fifteenth birthday party of a former client’s daughter. He never cared much for quinceañeras. All the frills and formality. All the rampant materialism dressed up in the guise of faith and culture. Just like Joy’s bat mitzvah.

  “Diego Martinez was one of my first clients at the center,” Adele explained. “He was one of the plaintiffs in my suit against the town. I’m very close to his family.”

  “Sure. Okay.”

  Adele pulled four files out of the middle drawer and laid them on her desk. “These are the records we have of people who hired clients from the center between September and December of last year. I’m not sure what good it will do you. Like the clients, a lot of employers won’t give us any information because they don’t want to get in trouble for hiring someone without papers. So these files are mostly homeowners who hire clients sporadically.”

  She handed Vega a stack of folders and he began to thumb through the contents. Most of the individuals who hired La Casa’s clients were from surrounding towns or The Farms. The board members themselves hired a lot of people. The jobs were what Vega expected: nanny, cook, groundskeeper, handyman, stonemason, housepainter.

  Adele was right that the files were sketchy. Most offered a more telling glimpse of the employers than of the immigrants. One lady hired Rodrigo and his friends to move her exercise equipment—presumably because moving it required too much exercise. Another lady hired a woman to do nothing but clean out her twelve-year-old son’s room. Still another, to babysit her three dogs while she went skiing in Aspen. There were outrageous requests as well: for a cook who could fix vegan, gluten-free meals. For a housekeeper who could care for three kids, two dogs, a four-thousand-square-foot house and also tutor the children in Spanish for their Regents Exams every evening. Vega wondered how these Anglos managed before they had a steady source of cheap labor. He supposed they actually had to raise their own kids, walk their own dogs, cook their own meals, clean their own homes, and mow their own lawns. The immigrants had allowed upper-middle-class Americans to live like pampered adolescents. No wonder the country was getting soft.

  He even found a page from Wendy in the files. She had hired a man named Pablo to weed her flower garden. Kenny Cardenas’s father Cesar was a gardener. He would have probably welcomed the work. Vega was surprised Wendy didn’t hire him. Maybe it made Joy uncomfortable to have her boyfriend’s father working like a field hand for her mother. Vega could understand that.

  Adele slid a sheet in front of him. “I think I may owe you fifty bucks.”

  The sheet was dated September thirtieth of last year. Cindy Klein of 43 Apple Ridge Drive, Lake Holly, had hired a live-in housekeeper from La Casa. Name: Maria Elena Vasquez. Age: thirty. From Aguas Calientes, Guatemala. Apple Ridge Drive, Vega knew, was in The Farms. About four streets over from Wendy.

  “If it’s her, you can use the fifty to buy Gabby Martinez a quinceañera present from me for keeping you all this time,” said Vega.

  “You said Vasquez wasn’t Maria’s real name.”

  “That’s what Morales said. I’ll just have to see what I can get from Cindy Klein.” He copied down the particulars in his notebook and dialed Klein’s number. No answer. He was in the process of leaving a message with all his contact information when Adele got a call on her cell. He could hear her speaking to the caller in Spanish, assuring him that she’d be on her way soon.

  Vega finished his call and stuffed his notepad in his jacket. “I’m real sorry I kept you, Adele. This helped a lot. I won’t involve you or La Casa in any of this. You don’t even have to drive me back to the station. I’ll walk.” He headed for the door.

  “Come.”

  He turned. “Pardon?”

  “You could come.” Her words had the weightless quality of a child’s soap bubbles. Vega felt like if he examined them too closely, they’d burst and disappear.

  “You mean—to the quinceañera?”

  She ran a finger absentmindedly across the dented edge of her desktop. “You want the Latino community in Lake Holly to open up to you and trust you.” She shrugged. “A quinceañera’s a good place to start.”

  “But I don’t know Diego Martinez or his daughter Gabby.”

  “I was invited along with a date. You can be my date.”

  “Huh.” Vega rubbed the back of his hand along the stubble on his chin. He was surprised and more than a little flattered. Adele fascinated him. That sharp intellect. That fiery streak. But she scared him a little too. Either way though, it was out of the question. “I can’t, Adele.”

  She turned away. “Okay, never mind. Bad idea.”

  She thought he was rejecting her. It wasn’t that at all. He glanced down at his muddy, blood-stained shirt and trousers. “Look at me. I can’t go to a quinceañera dressed like this. Not with you in that pretty red dress.”

  “You can just say ‘no,’ you know. You don’t have to let me down easy.”

  “I’m not letting you down easy. Honest. I’d go if I had clean clothes.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  A smile slowly curved the corners of her lips. “Okay. Wait here.”

  She went into the front room and came back moments later with something on a hanger wrapped in a dry cleaning bag. Vega frowned. He wasn’t wearing some castoffs she had lying around for the day laborers.

  “Adele—”

  “—A couple of my clients have a little cumbia band going on on the side. I do them a favor and keep their clothes and instruments here so they don’t have to worry about them getting stolen. The clothes are clean, I assure you. I get them dry-cleaned in exchange for the band playing at some of our events. I picked the shirt and pants of the tallest band member.”

  “I’m not wearing some mariachi getup—”

  “—It’s not. It’s just a black cotton shirt and tan pants. Would you at least look before you say no?”

  The shirt was a hand-stitched guayabera, a traditional Mexican wedding shirt with four patch pockets across the front and tiny rows of tailored pleats running along the front and back. Vega had a shirt just like this before he married Wendy, also in black. He loved that shirt. It was comfortable, lightweight, and you never had to tuck it in. Wendy teased him that he looked like he was auditioning for the movie Scarface—all that was missing was the Cuban cigar. She gave the shirt to Goodwill a couple of years after they were married. He always said he’d buy another but he couldn’t figure out when he’d wear it so he never did.

  “Come on,” Adele coaxed. “It’ll be fun. Good music. Good food.”

  “My presence might make them uncomfortable.”

  “Their presence might loosen you up.”

  Chapter 13

  The quinceañera was in full swing by the time Vega and Adele showed up. They had missed the Mass at the church and the opening waltz but to Vega’s mind that was better. All the formalities had been dispensed with. Men were already loosening their shirts and taking off their jackets and some of the women were kicking off their high heels so they could dance more comfortably to the cumbia and salsa tunes being rolled out at fever pitch by the live band. The smell of chili-and-garlic-spiced beef filled the air. Colored lights twinkled from strands that crisscrossed the ceiling of the assembly hall and gave the whole place a Christmas-like feel. In the middle of the dance floor, Gabby Martinez whirled around a sea of girls in poufy pastel-colored ball gowns. She was easy to spot because she was the one in pink ruffles wearing a rhinestone tiara and carrying a matching scepter that one of the teenage boys was stroking rather obscenely at the moment to all the teenagers’ delight.

  There were easily a hundred guests inside what had once been some sort of warehouse and now constituted the banquet space of the church next door: Ig
lesia La Luz del Mundo. In English: Light of the World Church. The immigrants didn’t attend Our Lady of Sorrows, which probably explained why Vega never saw more than a handful of old-timers and bored children coming out of there these days.

  “I don’t know any of these people,” he said nervously. “Maybe they wouldn’t like me being here.”

  “Relax, Vega. You’re my guest.”

  “Well if I’m your guest,” he flashed her his best smile—“maybe you should start calling me Jimmy.”

  She blushed until she was practically the color of her dress. He wanted to tell her how beautiful she looked, the way the seams hugged her curves in all the right places, the way every man turned his head as she walked across the floor. But he knew he couldn’t. Greco would have a fit if he found out Vega was here. It wasn’t bad enough that he might be charged with police brutality. Now he was skating dangerously close to a departmental reprimand for conflict of interest. Being off-duty didn’t change that. So he took a seat next to Adele and smiled and nodded at conversations in Spanish he could barely hear from wave after wave of people who gushed at Adele like she was royalty, which, in this world, Vega supposed she was.

  A lot of these people owed their jobs and their sense of security in this town to her, including Diego and Inez Martinez who came running off the dance floor to embrace her like she was a long-lost relative. Vega had wondered before this why someone with a Harvard law degree would choose to spend her days running a struggling community center when she could have been a player on Wall Street or in some other glitzy and powerful venue. But seeing the outpouring of affection these people had for Adele, he could sort of understand. If he’d learned anything in his four miserable years as an accounting major, it was that most things worth having couldn’t be totaled up on a balance sheet.