He sighed again.
“Look,” he said. “I should not have called you so early and gotten you out of bed, but I knew you’d be upset, and I’m going to be busy later, so—”
“You think I’d be less upset if you’d called at noon instead of at eight a.m. the morning after your date with your wife? Really?”
“What I think is you’re trying to start a fight.”
“What if I am?”
“You might not like it. I don’t care much for them myself.”
“I’m already not liking it, so where’s the loss?”
“Mariela, I’m trying to give you an explanation. Would it kill you to be nice?”
“You mean play dead? Yes. It would kill me. Mistresses don’t do that. Wives do.”
Shit. I’d gone too far.
“You know, Mariela, I have, eh, a lot of problems in my life right now. I don’t know what I did that is so bad. But I know I don’t need this.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like what?” he repeated.
“Yes. Like what? What problems do you have in your life right now?”
“I wish I could tell you.”
“So tell me. Whatever it is. Tell me.”
“I may have no choice,” he said.
“See? That’s a good start. I’ll tell you mine, and you tell me yours,” I said, trying to bring us both down from the brink.
“I have to go. I’ll call you later.”
I’d spent Wednesday night after our rendezvous stewing and writing potential breakup letters. This angst over being left was not what I’d signed up for. I couldn’t handle it. Not from a married lover. I needed to move on from him before he sucked me in like Jorge had. One minute, I’d been resolved to break it off with him come morning, the next, unsure once more, I’d rip up what I’d written only to begin anew moments later. I’d gone back and forth between the two stances so many times that by the time he called to explain Thursday morning, I hadn’t known better than to back him into a fight. And now he’d hung up before I could subtly remind him of my fortieth birthday the day after tomorrow.
There was something else I’d done last night. For the first time in little more than two decades, I’d tried to see. I’d actually closed my eyes with the intention of reaching into the realm of intuition, wanting to see what he was doing, where, and what was going to happen between us. Of course I’d failed. Even if I’d been taking care of my abilities and had remembered what to do, a petty, ego-driven request such as mine would never have been answered.
And now, feeling anxious after he hung up, I did what we all do when we are afraid: rely on whatever seems strong and true from our childhoods, a prayer, a story, a remedy or spell, anything. In my case, it was something I’d often seen my mother do: If she wanted a person to stay away from her, she’d write his or her name on a piece of paper, put it inside a coffee cup filled with water, and place it inside the freezer until it became ice. Then she’d leave it there, among the chicken thighs and frozen vegetables. There were entire families in our freezer for years. From Fidel Castro to the family of a neighbor who’d once screamed at my mother in the middle of the street that her gentleman callers were a bad influence on me, to which my mother answered that at least her callers visited openly, in broad daylight, and not at three in the morning, like hers.
If, on the other hand, she wanted to keep someone close, she’d write his name on a piece of paper, place it on a saucer, douse it with honey, and leave it on a windowsill for the sun to warm.
I now wrote “Hector Ferro” with a thin-tipped Sharpie on a purple Post-it and placed it on a white ceramic saucer, drenching it with orange blossom honey and putting it in front of the window next to the sink, right next to my Cuban oregano, my mint, and my lavender. We’d see.
I made myself some strong coffee and braced for the day ahead of me. In between bouts of listening for Hector’s car and imagining him slow dancing with Olivia at some tango hall, I’d also spent the night thinking about my financial situation. If I could keep all the apartments rented and figure out how to barter for some of the more critical repairs the building needed, I might be able to weather the downturn. This just couldn’t be my life, like my mother, having her home in Cuba yanked from under her feet when she’d had to come here as a child, never quite able to get it out of her memory and missing her island so much she used all her money to buy as many homes as she could, somehow trying to make up for the one she could never go back to.
I had to do something and decided to start by fixing the whole Ellie mess. I’d go up there, talk to her, offer some kind of a compromise on what she owed and the chance to stay if she would just make an effort. Defusing the situation made sense financially because fixing up the apartment after she left, advertising, showing, and ultimately renting it would involve more money, skill, and energy than I had at the moment, and certainly more than it would take to get her to stay and pay at least some of her rent.
But when I knocked on her door, the stench coming from her apartment slapped me in the face, telenovela style. It smelled like burning metal, spoiled food, and God knows what kind of dead animal. After knocking several times and getting no answer, I went downstairs for my spare key to her apartment and ran into my neighbor Iris.
She was babysitting Henry while Abril ran some important errand downtown, but had come over with him to bring me a postcard that the mailman left in her mailbox by mistake. It was a happy birthday wish from my dentist.
“Here you go, neighbor. And may I say you look great for any age.”
So did she, late into her sixties as she was. She had strawberry-blond hair, and I don’t mean people’s idealized version of strawberry-blond hair. I mean golden blond hair streaked with thick strawberry-colored highlights. She had bright blue eyes and great cheeks that always seemed to be pulled up into a smile. Most importantly, she had a fabulous sense of style. Like that day: She wore black-and-white-striped leggings, a cut-up, or, as she called it, a “redesigned,” deep pink T-shirt, and a silver sequined scarf that showed her to be every bit the joyful soul she was. She’d put that sense of style to good use too, designing summer dresses and T-shirts made from vintage women’s slips, lacy affairs she tie-dyed all shades of happy.
“Nice try, Iris. As far as you’re concerned, I’m still and always will be in my thirties, okay,” I said, motioning her and Henry inside.
“Oh, honey, I used to hide my age. But nobody cares if I’m sixty-eight or one hundred and eight. It’s all still old as hell to most.” She laughed, following me in. It was sad, but true, like most of the things Iris said.
“All right. It’s forty, and it’s the day after tomorrow,” I said.
“So Saturday, September the twenty-fourth, a Libra, but barely. Well, then I’ll say it again: You look great for any age.”
“Thanks, Iris,” I said, Ellie’s key now in hand.
I was about to ask Iris to go upstairs with me when I heard Henry in the kitchen.
“He . . . He . . . Hec—”
“Hey, what are you doing there, my friend?” I said, scooping him up and planting a big sloppy one on his cheek as I brought him back into my living room/office with me.
“Is that my name in the pancake syrup? I can’t read it if you cover it up with syrup!”
“It’s not syrup. It’s honey, and, it’s, uh, for the plants,” I said.
“Plants eat honey?”
“I’ve got a bit of a situation upstairs. Will you go up with me?” I said to Iris, trying to change the subject.
“Ellie?” asked Iris, knowing the answer.
I nodded.
“Hey, plants can’t read!” said Henry, making a big deal of smoothing his polo shirt now that I’d set him free and he was standing on his own two feet again.
“Well, the ink is good for them,” I retorted, heading for the stairs and ignoring Iris’s baffled look.
“I can read very good, Mariela, but the syrup made the words blurry,”
said Henry.
“It’s not important, Henry,” said Iris. “Come on. We have a scamp to catch. Oh, my Lord, what in hell’s name is that smell?”
“What’s a scamp?” asked Henry, hurrying to catch up with us despite his heavy shoes.
But the word scamp was a gross understatement. Inside, it was as if a suicide bomber had failed on his first attempt and had had to try several times to get it done, and either those were his remains all over the apartment or Ellie had never cleaned a single thing since the day she moved in. In addition to the filth, she’d made deep scratches in the original wooden plank floors in at least a dozen places, burned the kitchen countertop in several areas, and allowed water from a clogged pipe to filter down onto the kitchen cabinets, rotting the woodlike material at the corners. There was a broken windowpane, the intense smell of a cockroach colony all settled in, a broken ceiling fan, about a half-dozen full-to-the-brim ashtrays, and the toilet tank’s porcelain top had a deep crack on one of its corners. There were relatively dirt-free sections of flooring where furniture appeared to be missing, and the only clothes I could see were either in piles or strewn on the floor.
There was also some marijuana inside a filthy rice cooker and some sinister-looking black-brown pieces of rock in little plastic Ziploc bags.
Okay, so I cried. I cried remembering the girl who’d first moved in. I remembered telling her she should write stand-up comedy after listening to her tales of working the drive-through window at the McDonald’s on Fifteenth, purposely mixing up the orders for rude customers or leaving the thing they’d asked for a dozen times out of their bag. They were immature pranks from a girl playing at being an adult, something I felt I’d never had a chance to do, since I had to grow up the moment my mother got sick. (If you’ve ever wondered why is it that they can never get the damn order straight, I’ve got one word for you: Ellie.)
I saw the curtains I’d given her as a moving-in gift still folded neatly in the closet, the only clean thing in the whole apartment, not even worth taking along to wherever she’d begun to move her things to.
“Iris, stay here. I’m going to get some large trash bags to haul all of this stuff out to the Dumpster.”
“What about the, um, stuff? Should we call the police?”
“Nope.”
“Let’s call the police!” chirped Henry.
“We’re not calling the police, Henry! And don’t touch anything. I’ll be right back.”
Three hours and eight large, dark green trash bags later, Iris and I had cleared it all out, and Gustavo had changed the lock to Ellie’s apartment and left a message on her cell phone telling her that her things would be next to the recycling bins on my side of the building for the next forty-eight hours, after which they’d be thrown in a Dumpster. He also told her that I’d found her drugs and that if she didn’t pay back every cent she owed me—eight hundred and fifty dollars in total for the current month’s rent—I’d take them to her mother. It was a gamble. I’d flushed it all down the toilet, and calling her mother (whose number she’d listed as her emergency contact) was a weak threat meant more to scare her into not questioning my dubious eviction practices than to get her to pay me the money she owed.
Still, I figured I’d get her out of the unit with a minimum of trouble, and then, once things calmed down a bit, I’d find a way to let her mom know what was going on with her child so she could get her some help. The pot was bad enough, but I was sure those dark, ugly rocks were worse, and I couldn’t stand silently by and let whatever Ellie was doing kill her. I just couldn’t.
“Gustavo, thank you so much for rushing over on your lunch hour. I couldn’t have peace until that lock was changed.”
“It’s no problem, Mariela. They weren’t even expecting me at the hardware store today. I’d asked for the day off to take Abril downtown. Planned to make a day of it, accompany her on her errands, take her to lunch, save her the hassle of coming back on the bus. But it must’ve been something I said because she changed her mind about having me drive her, got upset, and accused me of wanting to control her,” he said, shaking his head, his face contorted in confusion.
Iris and I looked at each other, but Iris lowered her eyes and busied herself taking the Windex from Henry, who didn’t understand why he was only allowed to help clean with a wet rag and not given the fun pump with the blue liquid to use, as if he were “a little kid.”
We opened all the windows to let a little fresh air circulate through the space and went down to my place.
“So Abril took the bus?” I asked Gustavo, unable to imagine anyone passing up a ride for Miami public transportation.
“I don’t know. I’m not going to think about it, and Henry knows why,” he said.
“Because nobody can understand women,” said Henry very seriously upon hearing his cue.
After Gustavo had swallowed the black coffee I had made for him and gone back to work, Iris told me, “Even I don’t understand that girl. You’d think she’d let herself be helped.”
“What do you mean?”
Iris gestured toward Henry, who was listening intently, so I turned my TV on to some cartoons for him and followed her into the kitchen so we could continue our shameless gossiping while I made sandwiches and more coffee for us, and some oatmeal for him.
“I think she’s found Henry’s father,” whispered Iris.
“When did she lose him?”
“I’m not sure. You know she used to live down here in Little Havana about eight years ago.”
“You mentioned it once.”
“She was eighteen or nineteen and living here with an aunt. Then she went to New York City to be near her family. They live in Washington Heights.”
“Is that where she met Henry’s father?” I said, even as the answer came up from somewhere inside me, surprising me: no.
“That’s what I thought. But Henry is seven and change, so you do the math.”
“She was pregnant when she left.”
“Exactly. And I think she came back because of him. To find him. Or to force him to take care of Henry.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Well, first she moves in asking for a month to month lease and a discount because she’s just here to resolve ‘an important family issue.’ Then she begins to ask to use my printer to make copies, and every time I’m able to catch a peek, it’s a legal-looking form, an application, or a copy of something official like a birth certificate or a medical record.”
“Maybe she’s sick,” I said quietly, thinking about my mother.
“And she’s always asking me to watch Henry or to get him onto the school bus because she has to go downtown at these ungodly early hours. Now, what does all that tell you?”
“Not much, Iris.”
“She’s going to court!”
“Well, maybe not court, but you may be on to something. She may be going through a child support case process with the state attorney’s office. It makes sense. She won’t be able to get Medicaid to help with Henry’s medical bills unless she has at least made an attempt to locate his father and have him pay child support. Maybe that’s all it is.”
“Maybe, but get this, yesterday, she asks me to take care of Henry today because it’s teacher-planning day and she didn’t want to take him where she was going. So I ask her, ‘Where are you going?’ and she sort of waves me off, saying that if all went well, everything would change, and that Henry was going to be a very happy boy. You know, you’re right. I say she’s either suing the bastard for child support or she had sued him before and the state just found him.”
“Well, I’ve had a few clients with the same problem, and it can take years for the child support enforcement division at the state attorney’s office to locate a father, if that’s what she’s doing.”
Except it was Thursday. Last I’d heard, the child support enforcement division didn’t see clients on Thursdays. Still, maybe Abril had found herself a badass Miami motherfucking lawyer, as
my client Silvia would say, though I decided not to say so, asking instead: “So you think Henry’s father is here in Miami and doesn’t want to do the right thing?”
I was starting to get a strange, yet not altogether unfamiliar, feeling about all this, an uneasiness the source of which I couldn’t quite locate inside my body.
“I think there’s more to it. You know, Henry does have her last name,” she said, twisting a strawberry pink lock of hair with her right index finger and a blond one with her left.
“So what? You can give a child any last name you want, and you said yourself she got the money to go to nursing school, so maybe he is paying child support.”
“Maybe he’s married and famous,” she said, ignoring me.
“That doesn’t mean anything. If he’s famous, all the more reason to avoid a scandal.”
“Maybe he refuses to give poor Henry his lousy last name and the child support he’s entitled to,” finished Iris, as if finally articulating a theory she’d been working on for some time.
“Yeah, I can see that,” I said, surrendering. “Maybe Henry is Enrique Iglesias’s love child. Or Luis Miguel’s!”
“Hey, she’s pretty enough and smart. Maybe it is Luis Miguel.”
“He doesn’t have a house in Miami.”
“That you know of. And you don’t need to own a house to run out on your wife, girlfriend, or whatever the guy has,” she said.
Well, didn’t I know that much to be the truth?
“I’m telling you, Mariela, that girl is going through some big things, but she won’t confide in anyone or ask for help beyond having me watch Henry every once in a while. Even poor Gustavo, who’s completely gaga over her, she treats like a distant relative.”
“Well, he doesn’t see her as a distant relative, I’ll tell you that. I ran into her coming out of his apartment with Henry yesterday, and they all looked quite chummy, like a little family. It was cute, actually,” I said.
Iris remained silent for a moment.
“I miss my husband, Mariela,” she said finally.
The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho Page 6
