one hot summer

by carolina garcia aguilera

  With as much strength as she could muster, Vivian threw the dove across the room, nearly vomiting when she saw the bird’s blood trace an arc in the air. Then she jumped and ran as fast as she could. Her primary regret was that she hadn’t gotten a refund on the eight hundred dollars she had paid—in cash, in advance—for the experience. Years later, she still shudders whenever she remembers what happened, although even she has to laugh at the fact that in Miami someone covered in blood can drive by a police car without getting stopped.

  Vivian tried a few more possibilities, such as past-life regression and channeling—swearing Anabel and me to secrecy each time, lest someone in the Miami legal community find out. Then she found Violeta, a grandmotherly woman who rocked in a wooden chair while she spoke with the spirit world. What really convinced Vivian that Violeta was on the level was the fact that the spiritualist didn’t charge for her sessions. There was a glass bowl placed discreetly by the front door, and clients could pay as much or as little as they felt they should.

  I know how all this sounds. I was completely skeptical at first, but Vivian started to wear me down with little details of things that Violeta had predicted for her. I still wasn’t convinced entirely, and I knew that most things supernatural and psychic were bullshit designed to free fools from their money. As time went on, Vivian told me more and more things that Violeta had predicted—at work, in her family, in her love life. And, as a bonus, Violeta offered commonsense advice and insight. As Vivian pointed out, it was a hell of a lot cheaper than seeing a shrink.

  Three years ago for Vivian’s birthday, she surprised me by declaring that I didn’t need to buy her a present—instead, she wanted me to go for a session with Violeta. If I didn’t get anything out of it, Vivian insisted, then she’d never bring up the subject again. Having listened to stories of Violeta for years by then, that promise of silence appealed to me almost more than the prospect of the visit itself.

  Violeta, it turned out, didn’t accept just anyone as a client, and I had to be introduced to her over the telephone before she agreed to see me. While we were driving over to Violeta’s house in Little Havana for the birthday session, I kept thinking that Vivian and I should both have our Florida Bar cards torn into little pieces. At the very least we should have lobbied to have our tuition money reimbursed, because obviously we hadn’t learned much in law school. As practicing attorneys, we were trained in facts and logic; now, here we were consulting a psychic about our lives. Even the most practical and hard-nosed Cubans harbor a healthy amount of superstition within us, I knew, and respect anyone who claimed to be able to foretell the future. I thought I was the exception who proved the rule—until I met Violeta.

  I was hooked right away. We had walked in, Vivian had told her that my first name was Margarita and that I was a friend. That was it. From there Violeta had talked about my childhood, about my family, about my career concerns, all in a totally convincing fashion. It was as though she knew me long before I came to her. I may have been put off at first by her appearance—my mental image of a psychic didn’t involve a woman in her mid-sixties with a too-tight perm in a lavender leisure suit and little white sneakers. But her eyes were kind and soft, and her voice was mesmerizing. Soon I thought of her more as a spiritual adviser than a psychic, more a wise and trusted friend than a fortune-teller.

  Violeta lived in a three-bedroom house in a middle-class section of Hialeah. Nothing about her or her home advertised her profession. Sessions were conducted in a sunny, tiled room in the back of the house. It was decorated with the usual smattering of Santeria saints, along with bowls filled with water, coins, apples, and lots of lit candles everywhere. There were a couple of statues of the Virgin, and a huge, impossible-to-miss oil painting of a Native American chief hung in the middle of the wall behind the spot where Violeta always sat. I hadn’t yet mustered the courage to ask who he was, and why he was hanging in such a position of prominence. During sessions, Violeta sat in her rocking chair three or four feet from me, her eyes closed as she searched for visions. She would open her eyes only when she had information to impart, or to ask me a question if she needed clarification about something she was seeing.

  While I drove on the causeway from Miami Beach for my latest appointment with Violeta, I was filled with gratitude for the police having raised the speed limit on that stretch of road from forty to fifty. I needed to see Violeta as soon as possible, and getting stopped by the cops for speeding would surely spoil my frame of mind. Besides, the Courvoisier from the night before hadn’t done its job; instead of falling into a deep, dreamless sleep, I’d spent a fitful night and woken up with a low-grade hangover.

  Ariel, thankfully, hadn’t recommended his tri

  ed-and-true remedy for sleeplessness, which was to make love repeatedly until sheer exhaustion made us both fall asleep. He probably assumed that I was still upset from seeing my mother, and that she had surely voiced her opinion again that I should leave my job permanently and have another baby. He was in total agreement with Mamá, of course, but he also knew that he had nothing to gain by bringing up such a hot-button issue between a mother and her daughter. Ariel was wise and intuitive. But he was surely wrong about what was bothering me the night before.

  I could hardly wait to see Violeta. I needed spiritual counsel, not to mention the sense of serenity that normally came over me after I had visited her. In the last twenty-four hours, the life I thought I was living had been thrown into turmoil. I needed to find out why.

  And I hoped I could deal with the answer.

  [13]

  “Margarita, mi amor,” Violeta called out to me as soon as I opened the car door. She was standing, waiting, under the portico of her house. “Bienvenida!” she said as she walked slowly to me.

  The psychic didn’t drive, and didn’t own a car, so there were always places to park on the easement right in front of her house. That spared me time circling the block looking for a space large enough to accommodate my huge car. I could see that Violeta had been pottering around her garden, because she was carrying a straw basket filled with pink, red, and white roses. In her other hand was a menacing pair of oversize clippers.

  I locked the Escalade, pressed the button on the keychain to activate the alarm, and sprinted up the walk to kiss her. Violeta took a good, long look at me and shook her head.

  “M’hija, my daughter, you are troubled. It’s good that you’re here.” She carefully placed the clippers in the basket along with the roses and led me toward her house. “Come.”

  I meekly followed her inside, already feeling more peaceful. Violeta could calm me in an instant. I also knew that I could unburden myself to her without her being judgmental. There weren’t too many people in my life whom I could say that about.

  Violeta led me to the back room, pausing only to set down her flower basket on a table by the front door. She closed the door behind us and settled into her rocking chair, closing her eyes. I put my purse in the usual place on a stand by the door, sat down, and waited quietly for her to speak. During my first visit I had put my purse on the floor, which Violeta considered bad luck and which she swiftly corrected.

  Her chair squeaked quietly as she began to rock back and forth. It might be a while before she spoke, I knew. Sometimes it took longer than others. I was bursting with impatience, though, and it felt like it was taking Violeta forever to get into the mood. I looked around the room, knowing there was nothing to do to hurry the process along. If I fidgeted too much, I would earn a lecture on patience.

  Finally, Violeta stopped rocking and opened her eyes.

  “You are very troubled, Margarita,” she said. “But it’s not the usual preoccupations that bring you here today.”

  We both knew what she was talking about: my job, the pressures from Ariel and my family, and the big decision that was looming over my life. She closed her eyes again, but opened them quickly this time.

  “I see Ariel hovering around you,” she said. Then she frowned. “But he
’s not the only one. Ariel is fading away. Now there is another man around you.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” I said in a miserable tone of voice. “Because of the other man.”

  Violeta looked puzzled. “Margarita, you’ve come to see me many times without ever mentioning this other man. And I have never seen him anywhere near you.”

  For the first time, Violeta seemed positively annoyed. She clearly didn’t like being blindsided by me or by the spirits.

  “That’s because this man—his name is Luther—was an important part of my life years ago,” I explained, somewhat apologetically. I certainly didn’t want to incur the wrath of Violeta or her spirits.

  I hadn’t failed to notice that Violeta had immediately picked up on Luther. But, at the same time, she had failed to warn me about his reappearance in my life. I had been to see Violeta just a couple of weeks before my old lover arrived in Miami.

  Once, during an early session, Violeta had warned me to avoid a black-haired Salvadoran named Melchor, who was going to bring a lot of trouble to the law firm. I was astonished when a man matching that description turned out to be a computer technician who put a virus in our computer network and deleted most of our files. I almost fainted when our office manager told me who had caused such havoc in our firm. I didn’t say anything to my partners about what Violeta had told me—they might have respected my inside connection to the world of spirits, but they also would have quickly removed my name from the letterhead.

  It was troubling that Violeta hadn’t warned me about Luther. He had been watching me for years, he said. So why hadn’t Violeta picked up on it?

  My life was on the verge of unraveling. I realized how much I counted on Violeta for support, advice, and for her vision. All of a sudden I felt alone and without support. Dios mio. I knew that no one was infallible, but I had somehow thought Violeta came close.

  She closed her eyes. “He is a good man, this Luther. He loves you very much.” She opened her eyes, stared hard at me. “And you love him, too.”

  “But I’m married to Ariel,” I said, hearing the despair in my voice. “And I love him, too.”

  “Sí, I understand, Margarita,” Violeta said. “But the time will come soon when you will have to make a choice.”

  She rocked softly, peacefully. I remembered all the times I had held Marti in my arms, rocking him to sleep. Cubans all love rocking chairs. Maybe it reminds us of the repetitive, rocking motion of the ocean and the movement of waves as they hit the shore.

  “What should I do?” I asked her. “Please, counsel me.”

  I knew that she wouldn’t tell me what to do. She never did. But she could point out my choices, and which ones I would do well to avoid.

  Violeta was silent for a moment, her eyes staring into the distance. Then she nodded, as though someone had said something to her.

  “This is a decision only you can make, Margarita,” she said. She tapped the sides of her chair as she rocked. “Tell me about this man. Why is he so important to you that you should be in such a state?”

  How to begin to explain Luther?

  I remembered the feeling that came over me when I saw him on the first day of classes at Duke. It was at the ungodly hour of eight in the morning, when all the first-year law students gathered for a presentation to mark the beginning of orientation. In order to wake myself up, I’d consumed an entire batch from the six-cup Cuban coffeemaker I brought with me from Miami. My heart was beating loudly in my ears, a sure sign that I was seriously wired. It had seemed like a great idea at the time, but when I got to school it felt as though I might have overdone it. I walked from the parking lot to the law school, trying to remember if I had ever heard of anyone overdosing on Cuban coffee.

  We were all congregated in the main reception area prior to being split into two groups. The first-year class was small, only about two hundred men and women, and it wasn’t hard to give the crowd a quick scan to see who I was going to be dealing with for the next three years.

  I noticed Luther right away. He was standing in a corner, his body language completely at ease, his blue eyes taking everything in. His expression was quizzical, and slightly amused. He was the only person I saw who seemed to belong there.

  We were all issued identification tags with our names and undergraduate schools. I maneuvered closer and learned Luther’s name, along with the fact that he had gone to Dartmouth. I was disappointed when we weren’t assigned to the same group, but later that day, after lunch, we landed in the same twenty-student campus tour.

  I didn’t want Luther to know that the very sight of him made my knees quake, so I adopted a time-honored strategy: I behaved like a complete ice queen toward him. We shared three classes, and in those first weeks I barely acknowledged his existence. All the while, my attraction to him was growing. I hadn’t felt such a crush since Mariano Arango, my sophomore year at Penn. That had been understandable, since Mariano was an Argentinian polo player; the fact that he was also insufferably conceited took me a while to figure out. Luther, on the other hand, was an American, a quintessential WASP. And he seemed to be unaware that I was alive. It didn’t exactly seem like a recipe for romantic success.

  My friend Lola was in a study group with Luther, and she asked me to join. I refused, knowing that I would surely flunk out of school if I tried to get anything done in close proximity to him. It was getting ridiculous. As it was, I was starting to have a hard time sitting in the same classroom with him. It wasn’t easy to listen to an aged professor drone on about contracts while constantly struggling not to look across the room to where Luther sat.

  Another month went by and, to my complete amazement, Luther called me one day to invite me to dinner. There was no way to convey to Violeta the nervousness and apprehension I felt before that date. The day before, I got my period early. It seemed a catastrophe, and I knew my skin would break out and my body would bloat. Then I calmed myself by remembering that I was no longer in the seventh grade, and that guys couldn’t tell when girls were having their period, and that they knew periods existed and weren’t repulsed by the very idea. I was so anxiety-ridden that I actually took a diuretic, just to make sure my ankles didn’t swell up. Mamá would have been proud of me.

  We female law students were supposed to be above such trifling concerns as our appearance but, as far as I was concerned, a woman was still a woman, even if she was sitting on the Supreme Court. Even now, years later, my heart still beats faster when I remember Luther standing in the doorway of my apartment that night, his blue shirt making his blue eyes jump out at me with the color of a wintertime lake reflecting the sky above. He seemed like a man totally at peace with himself, presenting himself to the world exactly as he was. It was up to others to take him or leave him, it seemed, and he would be perfectly content either way.

  In hindsight, it was probably a blessing that I had my period for our first date—otherwise, I probably would have jumped into bed with him right after dessert. I was hyperventilating in the car just from being so close to him, and by the time we arrived at the restaurant I was in need of CPR. I cursed the fact that my female condition had effectively rendered me out of commission, but I remember thinking that God works in mysterious ways. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.

  I didn’t volunteer all these details to Violeta; I didn’t want to change her opinion of me as a sensible, self-assured woman. But now, closing my eyes, I saw the mess I made of my bedroom that night before the date. I had pulled out and tried on everything I owned in the hour before Luther picked me up, critically examining each outfit before discarding it in an ever-growing heap. Finally I decided that nothing I owned was suitable and hopped in my car for a frenzied trip to one of the trendy boutiques in Chapel Hill. I was a woman on a mission, in search of the perfect outfit for a date with a hot guy, and nothing would get in my way. I prayed that Violeta’s psychic abilities wouldn’t give her a window on my behavior that day.

  I forced myself to return to the present,
and to my scaled-down description of the role that Luther once played in my life.

  “Me quita el hipo,” I said simply.

  No further explanation was necessary. Any Spanish-speaking person understands the significance of something that made such a strong impression that it “scared the hiccups out of me.”

  Violeta nodded. “And now years have passed, and he has come back into your life. What effect does he have on you now?”

  I didn’t have to think before replying. “The same.”

  Violeta rocked with her eyes closed. “And Ariel. Tell me how you feel about him now.”

  Violeta knew

  all about Ariel, how we had met and the details of our life together. But she wasn’t asking me about the past. She wanted to know how Luther’s reappearance in my life was affecting my relationship with my husband. Because, obviously, it had. Nothing I said to Violeta was legally protected—even in freewheeling, loosey-goosey Florida, consultations with psychics aren’t considered privileged—but I knew I could tell her anything with total confidence that she would keep it to herself.

  I had been able to talk about Luther without thinking, but now I had to take a moment to consider Violeta’s question. I could see by a slowing in her rocking that my hesitation hadn’t gone unnoticed. Violeta saw meaning in everything, and she interpreted the slightest reaction as revealing.

  “No me quita el hipo,” I said sadly.

  Violeta just rocked.

  [14]

  After I said good-bye to Violeta I walked down the path to my car, looking at my watch. I had spent almost two hours with the psychic, a definite record. I was exhausted, and felt as though every bit of strength had been drained from my body. Normally I felt refreshed and rejuvenated after seeing Violeta, like I did after a long, restful sleep. Today, though, I felt disoriented, light-headed. It reminded me of how I used to feel sometimes at noon, during high Mass, when I had to sit for hours in a hot, stuffy, overcrowded church without anything in my stomach.