“I did, but it was one hamper, not three. How long can it take to wash and dry one load?”
“I’m almost done,” I said now, heading down the short hallway in Abril’s apartment, past a light blue bathroom, to the only bedroom, right above Iris’s.
Abril and Henry’s bedroom was in keeping with the rest of their home: sparse and neat, a light yellow chenille bedspread on the only bed in the house, queen-sized, providing the frill factor in the room.
I went straight to the single night table. There were just some barrettes, a tube of Neosporin, and a faxed confirmation of an order for a school dictionary. I closed the drawer and quickly opened the top two drawers of the white laminate bureau facing the bed. I felt along the underside of the mattress’s edge, finding nothing.
I was giving the room one last glance to make sure everything was as I’d found it when it dawned on me. The force of the realization was so strong, it closed my eyes and almost made me sit on the bed, catching myself just before my butt disturbed the perfect alignment of the chenille popcorn detail on the bedspread.
I opened the drawer on the night table again and picked up the fax confirmation sheet knowing exactly what I was going to find, for why would Abril, who didn’t even own a computer of her own, fax a confirmation to buy a dictionary for Henry or anyone else?
Sure enough, the fax confirmation had been sent to Del Tingo al Tango by a teacher for twenty copies of El Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado 2010 (The Little Larousse Illustrated 2010—Spanish Edition). I turned it around and read the handwritten scribble: “Coffee Park 11 p.m., if okay with your boyfriend.”
I wasn’t sure about the handwriting, but the sarcastic tone was unmistakably Hector’s, the “your boyfriend” like an echo of his ghost’s announcement of Jorge at my door less than an hour ago. And now the vision came again like a hammer on my head. There was Hector facing Abril, but the feeling was definitely tense, adversarial, and painful. What had I been thinking? This woman didn’t care about affairs! This woman only cared about her son’s father, about finding him and making him pay, or something.
I couldn’t believe it. How could I not have seen this? I thought, walking back into the living room.
“Mariela, we should really get out of here,” said Jorge, eyes trained on the hallway through the narrow slit of the slightly open door.
Abril hadn’t been trying to make Hector stand in for Henry’s missing father. Hector was Henry’s father.
“Are you okay, Mariela? What’s wrong?” Jorge said, closing the door and coming toward me as if intending to carry me out of there by force if he had to.
But I ignored him, shocked out of my skull, all the events of the past year sprouting new meanings in my head, and went back to the file cabinet and to the detective’s invoice I’d put back into the shoe box. The attached receipts were all from just before Abril moved into this apartment and corresponded to coffee shops and cafeterias that were next to, or right across from, Hector’s bookstore. The man meeting her that morning had been a detective.
“Come on, Tatica. Let’s go!” Jorge said, in his desperation, using his old nickname for me, which I’d always loosely translated as “my sweet girl,” but had any number of meanings along the same lines. “I don’t want to have to leave this apartment by jumping off a ledge.”
“Jorge, I think I know,” I breathed.
“You know who killed him?” asked Jorge, eyes wide.
“No, but I know something just as important.”
And that’s when we both heard it, coming from the street below and through the window: Henry’s voice.
“How is it fair that it’s always after? Why can’t I have ice cream while I do my homework? It’s still going into my stomach.”
“I don’t want you to be distracted,” Abril was saying, her voice now directly underneath the window, meaning she and Henry were standing on the stoop, probably looking for her keys while balancing her folded clothes.
“Who gets distracted by ice cream? It’s just ice cream!” whined Henry.
“Stop it, Henry. No ice cream until you’re finished with all your homework. Now, come on, help me with the key,” said Abril, a minute before the entry door swooshed open, then closed with a clean click.
“Damn it, Mariela. We have to get out now!” whispered Jorge, putting his arm around my waist and basically towing me toward the door, the voice of the little boy I now knew was at the center of this entire mess still echoing in my head.
Chapter 27
I’d been so scared when I realized Abril and Henry were back from the Laundromat that I’d allowed Jorge to carry me out before he locked the door to her apartment and took my hand to steady me.
“Relax,” he’d said, slowing me down to a stroll. “We’re not going to make it. They’re going to see us, so let’s not look like someone who just broke into another someone’s apartment.”
And then they were upon us.
“Mariela!” said Henry, grinning at me.
“Hi, Henry,” I said, touching his chin with the tips of my fingers. “I’ve missed you.”
“What are you doing up here?” asked Abril, pulling Henry back.
“I came to see if Mr.—” I gestured toward the door of the apartment facing hers.
“Mrs.”
“Right, if Mrs . . . the lady who lives there . . . was home.”
“That lady’s crazy, right, Mami?” said Henry.
“Henry!” said Abril. “She’s not crazy. She’s sick.”
“Oh, well, maybe that’s why she didn’t hear me knocking, and by the way, this is Jorge. Jorge, Abril. Abril, Jorge.”
“We’ve met,” she said, giving us a wary look before turning to open her door without so much as a good night.
“Yes, of course. You’re Gustavo’s ex,” said Jorge.
“I’m Gustavo’s friend,” she said with her back to us.
I couldn’t help snorting at that.
“Okay, well, now that that’s all cleared up, um, good night,” said Jorge.
“Good night!” said Henry. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
I smiled, looking into his beautiful, innocent dark eyes, searching for (and finding!) Hector in his face, before waving good-bye to him and following Jorge down the stairs and onto the sidewalk. I walked slowly, my hand still in his, my eyes shut tight with fear and dread of all that lay ahead. It was true: Abril and Hector. Maybe not now, but at some time.
When we got to my stoop, I turned to go up the stairs, while Jorge turned toward the sidewalk, pulling me.
“Where we going?” I asked, eyes wide open now.
“Across the street,” he said, gesturing toward the park.
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. Now come on.”
“I can’t, Jorge.”
“Would you rather go by yourself?”
“No.”
“Are you going to avoid the park you live across from forever?”
I couldn’t do that either. The park, that apparently inconsequential square patch of green and brown, was the heart of Coffee Park, of this place that had sheltered me after every one of life’s blows.
So I went.
As we neared the bench where Hector’s body was found, my body began to quake. My knees, like poorly secured stilts under an old, creaky beach house, started to sway left, then right, until I had to sit down on the bench right across from it.
Coffee Park was silent, all shadows and rustling leaves.
“How do you feel?” Jorge asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You were lovers,” he said.
“Yes,” I admitted this time.
“Okay. How do you feel?”
“Sad.”
“Were you in love with him?”
“I think I might have been. His smarts, his brain, how he made things interesting. I think I wanted to be the feminine version of him, and yet I didn’t want to marry him, or even live with him. Does that make sense?”
<
br /> “I’ll make it make sense,” he said.
It was something he’d say to me when we were together, and back then it had been enough to make me feel safe when he was close.
I kissed him, and he kissed me back, his tongue tasting faintly of coffee and cinnamon.
“Okay. Not what I brought you here for,” he said after a few seconds, putting his hands on my arms and gently pushing me to rest my back on the bench.
“Well, this is no fun,” I joked.
“You’re avoiding it.”
“Avoiding what?”
“Mariela, you just broke into a person’s apartment to find out what happened to him. There are obviously things you need to deal with. Now we’re here. Where he died. Talk about him, think about what happened, remember him, cry, whatever, but face it.”
When I didn’t answer, he said, “Here, I’ll help you. Tell me about him.”
“No.”
“Come on. Please.”
“Uhn-uhn,” I said.
“Talk to me, woman,” he said in mock exasperation.
“Since when are you such a grown-up?”
“Start talking.”
So I told him everything up to Hector’s death. And then I cried, and he hugged me, and the hugs turned into kisses that felt good, but also good for me. And then he told me everything. About Yuleidys, and how mind-blowing it had been to realize he missed me while being with her. About how he’d kept on missing me, but hadn’t known how to approach me or what to say. About the day that had turned him around: He’d gone to work high on pot and screamed at a customer who’d sent back his signature dish—baked white fish on a bed of mango, avocado, cucumber, and crabmeat. The customer’s wife had looked at his enraged face and begun to cry.
“I will never forget her face. She was afraid of me! She thought I would hurt them. That’s when I decided I needed to do something with my life. Get over Cuba already, carry it with me without letting it drag me down, and put down some roots here, you know? Get high on life, as they say.”
He told me how he’d thought of me as he worked on turning his house into a proper restaurant, fantasizing he’d invite me to his place, to see everything he’d done, and how he’d changed, and that I’d be proud of him.
I listened to him in that place that had recently witnessed death, but also, no doubt, life, and children’s squeals, and the banter of friends. I wanted to tell him how much he was making me want to believe in the existence of happy possibilities. That sitting next to him, I could almost see myself having a good life, a loving life free from fear of my own sight, strong enough to see what I was meant to see, and wise enough to use what I saw to help myself and others.
“I’m afraid,” I said instead.
He let out a huge laugh and put one hand on each of my cheeks as if he couldn’t believe the clock had somehow turned itself back to this place, the “place” where time and space and circumstance had intersected to let us meet again.
“Mariela, I get it. You’re working through some stuff now, and I don’t want to rush anything, but—”
“Jorge, I don’t even know what will happen or what I’m feeling. A part of me is still grieving for something without knowing exactly what that something is, and there’s all this unfinished business surrounding Hector’s death.”
Not the least of which was his ghost, living in my house.
“I know. I know. When you’re ready. And if it’s a no-go, fine. I think I’ve proven to you I can take a hint. But. If it’s even close to being a maybe. Then we’ll figure out how to take it one day at a time. How’s that? Deal?”
“Deal,” I said, happy to be offered a short-term layaway while I mourned Hector and thought about the little boy to whom he’d never teach the joys of a good book.
Chapter 28
In case you’ve wondered, people don’t change just because they’ve died. And if my early experiences connecting people with dead loved ones are any indication, this is especially true of men.
Two whole days had passed since I’d discovered the secret of Henry’s paternity. Or at least, the pieces of evidence that pointed to the fact, since what I’d found fell rather short of being the equivalent of a smoking DNA gun.
Still, Hector refused to show his face, or whatever it was he’d been showing during our post-death conversations, which, to me, was proof enough.
“Hector, this isn’t the way it works. You can’t just show up when you feel like it, and then refuse to come when I call you. Hector? Hector!”
Nothing, and I’d tried it all. I’d held objects of his, mostly books like the copy of Chiquita that he’d given me that last time at the St. Michel. I’d filled the bathtub and sat on the toilet clinking my Tibetan bells, thinking of specific moments of our time together and trying to connect with him through shared memories. I’d chanted repetitively for him to make his presence known to me, substituting legitimate chants with funny words like knock-knock, mango, and guavaberry (my cell phone’s alias) and singing them in the most ceremonious tone I could manage, trying to make it impossible for him to refrain from a snarky comment. Exasperated, I’d read positive newspaper stories about the Miami Book Fair, cofounded by his mortal enemy, Mitchell Kaplan, thinking his jealous ego wouldn’t be able to resist, and had finished by further provoking him: “Now there’s someone who knows how to sell a book, I tell you.” But not even a snort.
Finally, I’d tried talking to him, promising not to judge or say a word about what I was sure I knew, to understand anything, no matter how horrible. But no Hector. Trust a man to disappear when you need him most.
The police had been by a few times. But the plainclothes officers had gone right past my door and up to Olivia’s apartment. If she’d ever had to accompany them as I had, I didn’t see it.
Still, no Hector.
Knowing him, I’d considered the possibility he might be jealous of how quickly my “boyfriend” and I seemed to have fallen back into a hybrid courtship/rekindled friendship since that evening in Abril’s apartment.
And then, weeks later, after I’d almost convinced myself I’d lost my abilities again, he came back.
It was 5:55 a.m. on a Miami winter’s Monday, according to my microwave’s digital readout, and narrow, pinkish mango slivers of light had begun to sneak in through the slats of the wooden blind covering the little window that took up the upper half of my kitchen door.
“You want me on my knees?” Hector had asked after a while.
Before I could explain to him how little that would solve in his present state, he’d slid toward the floor, a mass mostly made up of a crumpled khaki trench coat and slacks, barely held together by my memory of his tanned skin and dignified manner. This stance, so proud and self-assured even now, was Hector’s version of kneeling.
When he “hit” the floor, we’d already been at this for almost an hour: him begging me to protect Olivia from danger he had not been able to articulate in any way I could understand. Me, seated at the kitchen table, leaning forward with knees pressed together and arms crossed in front of my chest, as much because I was feeling the evening’s misty cold giving way to the peaceful quiet of morning in Coffee Park as because I wanted to create a bit of a barrier against the intensity of his dead energy.
I’d walked into the dark kitchen for a glass of water and found him sitting at the kitchen table, moaning softly and sitting in the same chair of the dream that warned me of his death weeks before, only, this time, there was no cigar and no newspaper.
“Please, Merry Ella. I’m begging you!” he demanded again now, his eyes, usually mischievous in life, now frantic, piercing, and haunted.
“Okay, again: How do you even know Olivia’s in danger? Or is it that you think the police are coming after her?” I asked, thinking of how he’d known when they were coming to fetch me for interrogation.
“I don’t know! I sink she wants to hurt herself. You have to tell her. Tell her is not her fault. Tell her I’m sorry, please, tell her I’m
sorry,” he said.
“Hector, I told you: Olivia knows about you and me. She doesn’t want my help.”
“I know she’s in trouble, I knooooow . . . I know . . . whooooooo . . . whooooooo . . . who-whoooo-whoooo . . .”
He’d finally broken down, defeated, crying his futile tears like the ghost he was having a hard time understanding he was. It was like watching a junkie agonize. But don’t think of a strange junkie, a junkie you don’t know. Think about a junkie who’s your brother, or the son or daughter born out of your womb, a junkie you care about. It was like watching that junkie thrash and tremble, sweat and sob, and it was unbearable.
“Please don’t cry, Hector. I promise I’ll figure something out.”
I’d told him I knew all about Henry the minute I’d seen him sitting there in my kitchen after so many silent days. I’d asked him how he could have done something so terrible to his own son. But he’d just grown even more frenetic, refusing to talk about Abril or Henry and insisting I go to Olivia that minute.
“Sorry, Hector. Not until you tell me the truth about them. I mean, don’t you care about Henry? How can you be so coldhearted?”
That’s what had brought on all the kneeling and begging and sobbing: All my chanting and calling him forth since finding out about Henry had forced him to remember. He’d remembered that somehow Olivia knew about Henry and Abril. He was sure that’s why her last look had been one of hate, effectively handcuffing him to this world. That was the reason for all of this, he said, wailing his pain with “wooohooohooos” again and again, until I could no longer stand it.
“Enough! If you can’t tell me what happened, then I don’t want to keep talking to you.”
“It’s, it’s . . . I can’t, I . . . I can’t,” he managed, stressing the sounds, wanting me to understand every word.
And then I saw. It was regret! Regret had paralyzed him. He couldn’t move in any significant way because the pain was blinding him so, making him heavy, unable to see, just like me.
I began to say words, synonyms of light and love to try to calm him down, as I’d read from the family journal I’d almost memorized in a matter of weeks.
The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho Page 22
