It was five, maybe six months ago now. Marabela ran into the wife of El Tribunal’s rival publisher in the restroom of Andres’s favorite restaurant. The women had always been acquaintances, but had recently crossed a line into friendship, confiding in each other their parenting frustrations, the occasional marital spat. Marabela was reapplying her lipstick when Lidia asked if she still took pictures.
“Only as a hobby,” she said, squeezing a piece of facial tissue between her lips. “Why? You hiring?” Marabela meant it as a joke, but Lidia barely cracked a smile. “What’s wrong?”
“You never found out, did you? Years ago, Andres told my husband he shouldn’t hire you. He asked it as a personal favor, to all the big papers. I thought you should know.”
It only made sense that Andres was behind it. She’d once suspected Rolando of jeopardizing her career; it was clear he’d never really wanted her on his staff. But only Andres would’ve wanted to keep her from working for any of the papers. She couldn’t believe she’d been so blind.
Marabela tries to push the memories away. They are not the reason she came here, but every time she tries to think of something to say, it disappears beneath the baggage between her and Elena. She leans forward and whispers the only thing that feels right.
“I’m sorry, Ele.” Her friend’s old nickname slips past her tongue, surprising them both. Elena turns and looks her in the eyes. “It was wrong of me to step into your life like that; to take your place. I regret it. I think in the end it didn’t work out as well as it could have for any of us.”
Marabela tries to reach for Elena’s hand, but she pulls away before they’ve even touched. It’s not a strong motion—just a twitch, really, the kind of thing a person does when she’s been startled by the pop of a balloon. There’s no part of Elena’s body that isn’t tense with fear. Marabela wishes she could help her, but the only thing she has to give is a story she’s never wanted to tell.
“I came to see you today because I realized we have more than we’d like in common now. I was kidnapped, just like you. Everything you went through . . . I know what it’s like.”
These words are like invisible knives stabbing into Elena, and she squirms as she starts crying out, yelling for her to stop. “No. No! You weren’t there. You don’t know how hard I tried. It wasn’t my fault—they said they’d stop. They said they’d stop!”
Marabela’s strength is no match for Elena’s madness. Within seconds a nurse rushes into the room with a sedative, screaming for Marabela to help her hold Elena down, and as she kicks and flings her arms around, Marabela remembers the moments when her kidnappers first grabbed her. The thought of causing such terror to someone she once loved is too much for her. When the nurse finally injects the needle into Elena’s pale skin, Marabela feels the life flowing out of her, too, every bit of fight suddenly exhausted.
The driveway is empty, and Guillermo’s car is missing from the curb. This surprises Andres. He can’t imagine Marabela being alone in the house, but he doesn’t know what would make her leave, either. When he walks in, he catches Ignacio running up the stairs, chasing after his little sister. His first reaction is to run after them, thinking they’re in some sort of danger, but when he arrives at Cynthia’s bedroom, they’re just rolling around the floor, Cynthia laughing under Ignacio’s tickling fingers.
“What’s going on? Where are your mother and Guillermo?”
“They had to go out for a couple of hours,” Ignacio says.
“He was supposed to watch you two.”
“It’s okay. We’re fine.”
Andres nods. “You’re right.” This moment feels almost normal, so long as he lets it be. “Well, I’ll wait for them in my office.”
He stops by the bedroom first for a change of clothes. As he unbuckles his belt and loosens his tie, Andres feels like he’s coming undone; the things that used to hold him together no longer do. In his office, he finally opens the thick manila envelope that Edith sent home for him, and ends up tossing most of its contents in the trash.
It’s odd to be back in this room that used to be the heart of his home. The display cases for his company souvenirs have a thin layer of dust covering the glass, so he carefully wipes them off with his sleeve. Andres is proud of what he accomplished, but it’s all in the past now. He can’t imagine what to expect at the paper tomorrow, but somehow it doesn’t matter; he is about to do something with his life that he should have done long ago.
An hour passes before he hears the garage door open. Andres rushes to the stairs to see Marabela taking the steps two at a time, her head facing the ground. He’s actually happy to see her so full of energy until they meet in the middle of the staircase.
“Where were you?”
Her eyes are bloodshot, her cheeks puffy and red. “I had to see her, Andres. I couldn’t have her thinking I didn’t care.”
“Please don’t tell me you mean Elena.”
“Who else?”
He has to grip the handrail just to keep from losing his temper. “What happened?” he whispers.
She passes him and continues on to the bedroom. When they’re both inside, Marabela reaches under the bed for her suitcase. Even though it’s empty, she struggles with the bag’s weight. Despite his horror, Andres offers to help.
She refuses. “This was all wrong from the beginning.” Her voice is low and she’s not looking at him, so he can’t tell if she’s talking to herself or to him.
“Please don’t do this. Don’t leave us.”
She opens their closet and starts pulling out clothes, letting them pile up in the center of the suitcase. As the closet starts to empty, he sees the frame they had hung on the back wall, of the certificate of papal blessing for their marriage, and the white rosary next to it. It was meant to be a small display over the chest of drawers, but over the years an excess of shirts and sweaters obstructed the view. Marabela doesn’t seem to notice it as she grabs and tosses several items onto the bed. When the pile finally tilts over, Andres bends down to pick up a pair of pants. They’re his. It dawns on him that Marabela is packing for him.
“I’m not leaving,” she explains. “I won’t do that to the kids again. It’s your turn now.”
“What? No. There’s no way.”
“It’s what you want. You may not admit it to yourself, especially now that you think I need you. But I don’t. So you need to go.” She waves her arm toward the window, as if he were a bird that needed to be shown the way out of a house he accidentally flew into.
But suddenly, he has no idea what he wants. He stands still and waits.
“You’re free to go,” she says, coaxing him. “It’s something we both should have done a long time ago. I can’t live like this anymore. Neither can you.”
“Live like what?”
“We can’t keep lying to each other.”
“You said we’d try to start over. We agreed we’d try to pick up the pieces.”
She scoffs. “What pieces? You keep acting like it’s this big favor we got, the fact that my kidnapping tore us down to nothing. Can’t you see what it really did? How it exposed all our weaknesses? We shouldn’t have to start over. If we were stronger, we’d be picking up where we left off. But we have nothing left to stand on anymore. If this is what it took for us to realize this, then I refuse to ignore it. Even if you choose to.”
The pants are still in his hand and he folds them several times over, setting the small package of fabric on the bed so he can smooth out the wrinkles with his palms. It helps calm him and gives him time to think.
“What about the kids? They finally have you back and now I leave?”
“It won’t be the same as when I was gone. They’ll know where you are; they know you’ll be back to see them. We can talk to them together.”
Nothing like when you left them the first time, he wants to say.
She sighs. “They’ll be strong if we are.”
“Do you feel strong?” It’s a low blow, but she ignores
the malice in his words and tries to answer the question.
“I don’t know. I’m trying to be. Seeing Elena today, it made me realize I don’t want to live another moment of regret, as much as it might scare me. You and I both know this is as far as we go.” She sits next to him on the bed and places her hand on his knee, as if Andres were the weak one. This isn’t the way things were supposed to go. It feels unnatural to have her try to comfort him when he should’ve been the one carrying them.
She stands up quickly and adds, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll figure things out on my own.”
When she resumes packing, Andres reaches for her arm and nods, barely, in a silent plea for her to stop. She steps back and lets him take over. He arranges his belongings as he always does before a long trip: shoes with socks stuffed inside them to save space, pants rolled instead of folded to avoid wrinkles. When he’s finished, the exhaustion of the past weeks, months, even years, finally catches up to him, and he feels he could sleep for days. Andres lifts his suitcase off the bed, but the room no longer belongs to him; it’s not his place to rest here.
He gives Marabela a gentle kiss on the cheek. “Okay. We’ll try this. If it’s what you want. I’ll call you from my mother’s tomorrow. Maybe you can bring the kids over.”
She offers to help him load the car and he lets her. In the garage, under the dim shadows of dusk, he sees that the muscles are slowly returning to her body, small but more defined than ever.
15
AUGUST IN THE city always brings a cold breeze at night, just enough to crack open the windows and sleep with the curtains dancing against the walls. On these quiet nights, Marabela lies in bed and imagines that life is different.
Tonight, she can see silhouettes melting into each other through the red curtains of the house behind hers. They are slow movements, and when the wind blows, the curtains lift up like fire and reveal glimpses of flesh pressing into flesh. She can’t help herself: she watches the lovers’ movements escalate; their gentle touches turn to desperate grasps. Their moans travel into her room, and Marabela closes her eyes, thinking of past winter nights. They were always the best nights to make love.
When it’s over, she hears a light knock at the door. “Señora?”
She sits up and sees Guillermo standing outside her bedroom. She crosses her arms to cover herself, even though she is fully dressed.
“I hope this isn’t a bad time. Andres hasn’t called yet and I wondered if you knew when we could expect him home.” His eyes travel away from her as he speaks, and she follows them, watches as they settle on the open window for just a second.
“It’s fine. He’s not coming home tonight. You’re free to go if you’d like.”
He nods and wishes her a good night. As he walks away she listens for the fading sound of his footsteps, but hears nothing. She tiptoes to her bedroom door and looks into the hall to see Guillermo unlacing his shoes and getting comfortable on the couch. When he catches her looking at him, he only pauses for a moment, then continues fluffing a green-and-yellow decorative pillow Marabela knows is far too stiff to sleep on.
“You don’t have to do that,” she says. “It’s not just tonight that he’s not coming back. I don’t want you to feel like you have to keep staying.”
He already has his eyes closed, his arms crossed over his chest. “Just until I’m needed, then.” He leaves it at that.
Marabela starts to close the door but looks out one more time. The sight is strange to her; no one except she and Cynthia ever uses the living space upstairs, but it used to be her favorite part of the house. It gets the most sunlight through the windows that cover the entire length of a wall, and she used to dry her pictures here, images of villages and children and lives that no one paid much attention to at all.
She misses those pictures. She thinks about the ones left behind, still undeveloped, from her last roll of film. They’ve been waiting for her like a homeless person waits at a street corner, with a quiet longing that’s difficult to ignore.
Back in her room, Marabela opens the nearly empty closet and pulls out the top drawer of her dresser, rummaging through socks and bras and underwear to uncover her camera. Andres used to say this was an odd place to keep it, but Marabela argued that she’d just as soon leave the house without her underwear as she would without her camera. She holds it in her hands and it feels heavier than she remembers, all the weight in the lens, tilting forward. The film inside is all used up, though she can’t recall what she shot last. With her thumb and forefinger, Marabela turns the small knob at the top of the camera, winding the film back into its case. She feels the faint, familiar click as it turns under her thumb, and when she’s sure that no exposed film is left, she pops open the camera and tips it over, letting the roll fall into her hand. It fits perfectly in her palm, blanketed by the curl of her fingers.
A roll with twenty-four exposures might contain just four or five images worth developing; if you’re lucky, maybe one or two will be worth keeping. There are shots the photographer knows will be spectacular the instant she hears the click of the camera, and because of this, developing the film becomes a rushed, impatient thing, like unwrapping a gift when its contents are already known. Other images are complete surprises. Their beauty is not obvious in the moment or through the lens; it hovers beneath the fluid’s surface and reveals itself slowly, like the fog of breath against a windowpane.
Marabela clutches the roll of film in her hand and wonders what moments it holds, weighing her curiosity against her fear. No other lights are on in the house, and the room will give her complete darkness if she can take it. Unlike developing a photograph, which can be done under the warm tint of the safelight, developing film to create a negative is a delicate, precious thing. It requires complete absence of light; the kind of darkness Marabela’s eyes never adjust to.
She takes small, quiet steps as she crosses the hall into the darkroom, leaving the door ajar to let the moonlight in. The room is just as she left it, just as Guillermo promised it would be. From a small cabinet over the developer trays, she pulls out a stainless steel reel, a cylindrical tank the size of a small soup container, and a half gallon of developer fluid. The reel looks like two round coils set apart by a few one-inch bars in the center, and it’s about as wide as her hand. She sets all three items on a small table in the corner of the room, taking a moment to commit to memory where everything is arranged.
All that’s left now is the door. Marabela steps back toward it, clutching the roll in one hand and the doorknob in the other. She twists the doorknob, but doesn’t pull. She lets it turn back into place and tries again. With one deep breath, she closes her eyes and gently shuts the door.
When she opens her eyes, she can’t be completely sure she’s done so. She blinks several times, hard enough to feel her lashes press together, but she’s overcome by a disturbing sensation that her sight’s been robbed, that her eyes no longer function, and the wider she opens them, the more the blackness swallows her. The dark is unforgiving. This is how it looks when she closes her eyes and remembers the kidnapping. Her breath accelerates and her heart pounds, and her fingers tremble as they feel around, wanting answers but afraid to find them.
Marabela’s hand still clutches the doorknob, her only connection to a physical sense of self. She wants to turn it back and push it open with the full weight of her body, but instead, she waits. She lets the darkness and fear wash over her, and for a moment it feels like she could drown in them. Her breath quickens uncontrollably until it’s all she can hear. The air rushes in and out of her, the sound of her body clenching and expanding, steady and impatient as her heart.
I’m home, she thinks. She tries to let the full meaning of the words sink in. The past can be nothing if she’ll let it be, if she simply lets it slip from her fingers. But then what else would she lose with it? Life is a fluid mix of all the things she’s been through, and she’s not ready to throw out the good with the bad. She thinks of Ignacio and Cynthia sle
eping through this night, remembers the sour sweetness of their breath when they would wake her, gasping for her milk as newborns. She thinks of the birth and death of her marriage, hopes that she’ll look back one day to find the happiest memories outlived the rest. She imagines new moments unspooling before her as she pulls the strip of film from its case, small pieces of life before the kidnapping that she managed to freeze in time. They will be a gift, she thinks, proof that life existed before this. She steps away from the door and begins to feel her way through the dark.
Andres waits for Elena to wake up, wonders what kind of dreams she has, if any. Every few seconds, her left hand twitches, and two of her fingers flinch as if they’re being pulled by invisible strings. For the first time in years, he studies her hands: nails so short that the skin of her fingertips seems to have grown over them; cuticles with tiny beads of dried blood along the edges from her biting them. They were once smooth and graceful, with nails so long Andres teased that she could paint a mural on them.
He’s been hesitant to touch Elena, but now, without thinking, he picks up her hand and starts kissing each finger. First the nails, then the knuckles. His lips make their way over her bandaged wrists, soft as air.
It was in this way that his lips first came to touch her, back when they were only teenagers. Elena had given herself a paper cut while opening a piece of Andres’s mail, an acceptance letter from the university. He’d asked her to open it, thinking that whether it was good or bad news, it’d be better coming from her. Seeing the paper in her hands made it less intimidating. The moment became small and intimate; this wasn’t his future or his life, it was just he and Elena, learning something new together. When she hissed from the sudden sting and brought her finger to her mouth, he pulled it away from her and kissed it. It was meant to be innocent, but the flutter of Elena’s lashes—the way she nearly blinked but opened her eyes wide again, as if everything before her had disappeared from her vision for that one millisecond—gave her away and changed everything. No longer could they pretend they were just friends.
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