one hot summer

by carolina garcia aguilera

  After a while it was too dark to see much of anything, so Ariel and I took Marti inside. Ariel retreated to the den to watch the news, and I carried Marti to the bathroom for his bath. After a long soak in a tub filled with Mr. Bubble—the only way I could get him to bathe without protesting—Marti was so relaxed that he was about to fall asleep from sheer exhaustion. I dried him by rubbing him with a towel until his skin turned pink, then sprinkled some baby powder on him and dressed him in pajamas that Jacinta had laid out on his bed.

  There was a short window of opportunity left for feeding Marti something before he fell completely asleep, and it was rapidly closing. I carried him into the kitchen and put him in his booster seat. Before he passed out, I managed to get him to eat some of the spaghetti that Jacinta had made for him. Then I put him to bed and said his prayers over him—he was too sleepy to join in—then leaned over and kissed him good night. My eyes welled with tears as I held his soft, sweet-smelling, warm body close to mine.

  I went to my bedroom and took a quick shower to wash off the chlorine from the pool, then dressed in a pair of chinos and a black T-shirt. I found Ariel happy in his favorite leather armchair, sipping scotch and watching the evening news. There were splotches of pool water on his shirt from when he laid on the chaise longue next to Marti. He looked tired, but he also looked like a man at peace with himself and his world.

  Before guilt consumed and paralyzed me, I perched on his armchair. Ariel pressed the mute button on the remote control.

  “A glass of wine?” he asked, getting up, confident that I would accept his offer. On his way to the bar he hugged me and kissed my lips.

  “Great,” I said.

  “God, Margarita, you look like a teenager,” Ariel said in an admiring tone. He stepped back to admire me more closely. “Look at you. No makeup, wet hair, pants, and a T-shirt. And you look like a young girl.”

  “Thanks.” I laughed. “I like it when you don’t wear your glasses.”

  Ariel walked over to the wet bar and opened the small Sub-Zero refrigerator under the counter. He peered inside and reached for the Morgan, a California chardonnay.

  “This okay?” he asked, holding up the bottle. He knew it was my favorite.

  “Perfect.” And it was. Ariel always knew what I was in the mood for. “Gracias,” I said as he handed me the glass.

  He refreshed his scotch, and we went back to the chairs positioned in front of the T

  V. By then the news was over, so we switched over to Law and Order, our favorite show. We decided to have dinner on trays while watching it, so during a commercial I told Jacinta then settled back in my chair.

  “This is nice,” I said, almost purring.

  Ariel smiled. “You know, not working agrees with you. Playing with Marti, staying home, all that,” he said, keeping his voice casual and his eyes on the TV screen. “You look so relaxed and carefree. It makes you seem years younger.”

  “Does it?” I asked.

  I guess he sensed me stiffening. “No, querida, don’t take it wrong, por favor. It’s a compliment. I don’t mean to pressure you. The decision about going back to work is yours to make, really.”

  I took a sip of my wine. Why was it, I thought, that both the men in my life pressured me about the biggest decisions, then said that they hadn’t? First Luther at Bice, then Ariel at home.

  No pressure. Right.

  [19]

  The next morning I set off for the office, making good on a promise to Maria. I had mentioned to Ariel the night before that I would be going in to clear up some paperwork, but I don’t think the information had sunk in. He looked completely surprised when I came out to the terrace for breakfast in a cotton dress and high-heeled sandals, holding a jacket over my arm. I was wearing makeup, and had washed and blow-dried my hair. I definitely didn’t look as though I was planning to spend the day at home playing with Marti.

  To his credit, Ariel refrained from commenting. He kissed me as I sat down at the table. He had already finished, and he read the Herald while I sipped my café con leche and buttered my toast. Marti was busy flicking Cheerios at the seagulls milling around our feet. It was the picture of a normal, relaxed family about to start a busy day.

  Before I went to sleep last night, lying in the dark, I had made up my mind never to see Luther again. I was taking too much of a risk by having contact with him, and it had to stop.

  It wasn’t a decision I made lightly, but last night had convinced me that I belonged with my husband and my son. Ariel and I had had dinner, and afterward made love for hours, tenderly and inventively, in a way that we hadn’t in a long time. Afterward I lay in bed listening to Ariel breathing quietly next to me.

  I still loved him deeply, but I had to be brutally honest with myself: He was not the love of my life. Luther was. And I hadn’t realized it until he showed up in Miami.

  I’ve always believed in the romantic idea of one person being the greatest love in an individual’s life. And if that person is lucky, and the timing and circumstances work out, then they end up together. But it doesn’t always work out, and that doesn’t mean fulfillment and happiness can’t be found elsewhere. Sometimes getting together with one’s true love isn’t meant to happen, I don’t know why. The same idea probably applies to friends, houses, cars, all the big-ticket items in life. Sometimes things don’t work out. That doesn’t mean that a woman can’t be content.

  It was hard to get to sleep that night. I should have been tired, after swimming with Marti and energetically frolicking with his father in bed. It was reassuring to know that, even at thirty-five, Ariel and I could still romp around like a couple of randy teenagers.

  After tossing and turning for a while, I had given up on falling asleep and got up, careful not to wake Ariel. I went to the den in my nightgown, opened up the refrigerator, and poured myself a healthy glass of the Morgan that Ariel had opened earlier in the evening. I switched off the alarm, walked out to the terrace, and stretched out on one of the chaise longues where I had played with Marti hours ago.

  I felt the night breeze and watched the waves lapping up against the dock, sipping wine until I dozed off without realizing it. The sky was beginning to lighten when I woke up. I gathered up my wineglass and went inside with hopes of taking a brief nap before starting the day. Ariel was sleeping so deeply that he never noticed I was missing.

  Although I had only gotten a couple hours of sleep, I felt wide awake at breakfast. Ariel and I left the house together just before eight, headed for Miami. Fifteen minutes later I was pulling into my assigned parking space downtown.

  I arrived so early that Ashley wasn’t yet at her post in the reception area. I was disappointed to miss her outfit, but I knew I could see it on the way out. At least I had something to look forward to.

  Maria arrived just after nine; by then, I had gone through a quarter of the documents she had left on my desk to review. Her look of disbelief when she found me in my office, sitting at my desk hard at work, was something to behold. I knew she doubted I would keep my word and show up in the morning. Years working with her had taught me that Maria was a glass-half-empty kind of thinker. She never gave anyone the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t know any of the details, but I suspected that life hadn’t been kind to Maria.

  By leaving yesterday a few minutes after arriving, I knew I had shaken Maria’s faith in me. I was going to have to work hard to get her to trust me again. With that goal in mind, I worked through documents that represented billable hours that Maria could send off to the firm’s clients for collection. I knew that would make Maria happy, keep up our visibility in the firm, and maintain a perception that we were valuable and productive.

  Maria and I worked without a break for the next two hours, going through about half the stack of work, when my cell phone rang. I held my breath until I saw Vivian’s number appear on the screen.

  “I called your house, and Jacinta said you’d gone to work,” Vivian announced. “You’re not back there permane
ntly, are you?” she asked, sounding suspicious.

  “Hola, Vivian,” I said, vaguely remembering that I’d promised to do something with her. “No, I’m not back full time. You know I’d tell you if I was. I’m just here clearing my desk. What’s up?”

  “You didn’t forget about meeting with me and Anabel, did you?” she asked, peeved. “Remember, we talked about it yesterday?”

  “No, of course not,” I lied. Yesterday seemed like years ago. “Give me the when and where, and I’ll be there.”

  I sensed Maria stiffening with thinly disguised displeasure as she listened to me making plans, realizing that the workday was most likely going to be cut short. She had been in a frenzy deciding which files were most important, and even as I spoke on the phone she was rearranging them and placing them in front of me.

  “Anabel said she can meet us at noon at Greenstreets,” Vivian informed me. “She’s in the Grove this morning, checking up on that project at Cocovillas.”

  “Fine.” I looked at the clock. It was just past eleven. Forty-five minutes until I would have to leave. “Noon at Greensteets.”

  Having heard my plans and calculated a timetable, Maria started shoving papers in front of me. During the next hour I signed off on so many documents that my hand started hurting, but we finished going through the pile. It was almost noon when I grabbed my jacket from the back of the chair and sprinted out the door with a wave. This time, I didn’t make any promises about returning.

  [20]

  I drove as fast as a teenage boy on the way to a Friday-night date, but I was still almost half an hour late for meeting Vivian and Anabel. I called on the way and placed an order for tuna fish on whole wheat and an iced tea, so my tardiness didn’t really delay our lunch. I would have liked a glass of wine instead of tea, but I knew that my drinking had really picked up ever since Luther came to town. Besides, I had drained that glass of Morgan in the middle of the night, so technically I’d already had a drink that day.

  Greenstreets was one of the outdoor restaurants—a café, really—in the heart of Coconut Grove, on the corner of Main Highway and Commodore Plaza. Its menu was pretty basic: salads, sandwiches, and omelets. But it was centrally located, and there was parking nearby. Vivian and Anabel were waiting for me inside, because it was far too hot even to contemplate eating in the sun. Outdoor dining in the Miami summertime was strictly for tourists. After a quick glance once I was inside, I saw that my friends had already started their lunches. My tuna fish sandwich and iced tea were waiting in front of an empty chair.

  “Hola, sorry I’m late,” I apologized as I kissed them. “I had a hard time getting out of the office.”

  “Busy working? Just like old times,” Vivian said, rather dryly. For some reason, she was annoyed with me.

  Instead of replying, I shrugged and started my sandwich. Vivian wasn’t usually so crabby. I hated to invoke her time of the month, but maybe that was what was going on. The three of us concentrated on our lunch; whatever Vivian wanted to talk about would have to wait until we were finished.

  Anabel was off in her own world, making serious headway on her omelet; that was a good thing, considering the effect her clothes were having on Vivian and me. I wished Anabel had consulted with someone at home before venturing out that day because her outfit screamed to the world that she was color-blind. She was dressed in a grungy green, like a female Peter Pan on St. Patrick’s Day. But none of the shades of green matched, so her pants, T-shirt, and jacket made her look like an urchin who had put together an outfit at Goodwill. The greens clashed violently with her flaming red hair and brilliant blue eyes. I was used to Anabel’s sartorial felonies, but I would remember this one for a long time.

  Vivian saw me glancing at Anabel and knew exactly what I was thinking.

  “I know, Margarita. I already talked to Anabel about her outfit. She’s promised never to wear it again,” Vivian said, delivering this devastating pronouncement in an icy-cold voice. She could be ruthless about a fashion faux pas, and Anabel’s color blindness didn’t earn her an exemption.

  Vivian was dressed in her latest Armani, a form-fitting, tailored slate-gray suit with color-coordinated purse and shoes. Her blond hair, although real, was streaked through with lighter tones. It was impossible to tell whether it was natural or not. Of course, I knew the truth.

  The contrast between the three of us was normally stark, but that day it was even starker. As usual, I was somewhere in the middle, between my two friends. My dress and jacket were nondesigner, but at least they matched. Anabel made me feel like a fashion plate, while I was a frump next to Vivian.

  The waiter cleared away our plates, took our coffee orders—three double espressos—and then left us alone. It was time for Vivian to talk.

  “You two are my best friends in the world,” she said in a halting voice. “That’s why I’m telling you this first.”

  Anabel and I looked at each other. This was a new Vivian, hesitant and unsure of herself. I began to think that she had been so short with us because she was worried and preoccupied with the news she needed to deliver. Was she getting married? Coming out of the closet? Pregnant?

  No, not Vivian. She would never stand for pregnancy, losing her figure and suffering stretch marks.

  The waiter appeared with our espressos. I could have strangled him because the interruption made Vivian lose her nerve. The three of us sipped our coffees until she was ready.

  Suddenly, she blurted out, “I’m adopting a child.”

  That was a good one. It certainly proved that Vivian never did anything half-assed.

  “She’s a little girl,” Vivian added.

  Anabel and I clinked our coffee cups down onto our saucers at the same instant, as though we had rehearsed it. Nothing had prepared us for this news, no warning or premonition.

  “Maybe I’m wrong,” I said to Vivian. “But I think you just said that you’re adopting a baby.”

  “Not a baby,” Vivian corrected me. “A child. A two-year-old little girl.”

  Vivian reached into her purse and produced a photograph.

  “Look,” she said, suddenly beaming.

  Anabel and I pulled our chairs together and huddled over the picture. Anabel, being nearly blind, had to hold the picture up to her face, which made it hard for me to see. I made out the form of a small child.

  “I don’t understand.” Anabel looked up. “You’ve never seemed interested in kids, Vivian. I mean, you’re great with your nieces and nephews. But adopting a child?”

  “You’ve never talked about this with us!” I cried out, hurt that my friend had gone out and done such a monumental thing without telling me first.

  “Okay. I should explain.” Vivian held out her hands to calm us down.

  Anabel and I nodded, our heads going up and down as though we were bobbing for apples. Vivian was exactly my age, we were born just two months apart. I wondered if she was going through a midlife crisis. First I had thought it was her period, now I suspected early menopause. Maybe that explained why I was going crazy, too.

  Of course, I was also sick and tired of having every aspect of a woman’s behavior attributed to hormones.

  “All three of us are thirty-five,” Vivian explained. “Both of you are happily married, with children. Anabel, you have the triplets. Margarita, you have Marti. But my situation is totally different from yours. There’s no man on the horizon that I would even consider marrying, much less having children with. And my biological clock isn’t ticking anymore—the alarm’s gone off.”

  She took a deep breath. I was amazed by how hard this was for her.

  “I’ve had to do a lot of thinking,” Vivian continued. “I decided I don’t believe in having a child out of wedlock just to satisfy my own maternal feelings. It just seems selfish to place that kind of burden on a child.”

  Vivian looked imploringly from me to Anabel. “You know what I mean. No matter how liberated we think we are, none of us could deal with having a child outside
of marriage.”

  I had to agree with her. Regardless of how far we’d come, we were still the product of our shared background. In the Cuban social circles in which we were brought up, unwed motherhood was a huge taboo. Many a Cuban girl had entered into a loveless marriage because her belly was expanding. I knew lots of brides who had to get their wedding dresses let out before they walked down the aisle.

  Thinking about it, I couldn’t recall any girl or woman in my social circle who decided to have a child on her own. Somehow a husband and father always magically materialized at the critical moment to ensure the child’s legitimacy. In some cases, the name on the birth certificate might not have been the biological father’s, but the important thing was that the child had a father. No one commented if a child had no resemblance to its father, as long as the child had a last name that wasn’t its mother’s.

  I finally got to look at the photograph that Anabel left on the table between us. It was fuzzy, out of focus. All I could make out was a barefoot little girl dressed in a too-big cotton dress, her dark hair chopped unevenly around her face. She was standing in the middle of an unpaved road.

  “Here.” Vivian took a little magnifying glass out of her purse and handed it to me.

  I wondered how many times my friend had looked at this photo. Most women didn’t carry a magnifying lens close at hand. I peered closer until I could make out the little girl’s features. Her face was delicate, almost doll-like, but her eyes immediately captured me. They were huge, black, and round; even in this poor photograph, they shone with intensity.

  “This is her?” I asked, feeling stupid for asking the question. “Your daughter?” I added, as though speaking the word could make the reality settle into my mind.

  I thought I saw tears glisten in her eyes, but this was Vivian. Apart from the scene at Caballero Funeral Home a few days past, when she bumped into her married lover and his wife, she hadn’t cried since the sixth grade, after her archenemy, Maria de la Concepcion Immaculada, won a prize for best student that Vivian had thought she had in the bag. I wondered if this was a new Vivian, with some of her barriers of protection dropped.