“What’s so funny?” Omar said.
“I wasn’t laughing.”
“But your mood shifted. You were scared just a minute ago.”
“Not really scared. Startled.” She sat across from him. Even with the lights off, she could see his deep features bathed in the coolness of the streetlights that shone through the windows. Now that she had a moment to take him in, she was struck by his resemblance to Martin, or rather, Martin’s resemblance to him. He had a full head of white hair and a thick, salt-and-pepper beard. Martin’s hair was pitch black, and he was always clean shaven, but his cheeks got all prickly by midafternoon. As a result, both men’s skin looked thick; their huge pores gave them a rugged, worn appearance that she had always found attractive. Omar was slightly shorter than his son, with a wider build. He was the perfect example of the after to Martin’s before, an almost uncanny representation of the natural progression of time.
Of course, there was the minor difference in mortality. Earlier in the car she had been too overwhelmed to notice that Omar’s stillness wavered. When she looked directly at him, he seemed as solid as any other being, but the instant she glanced away, and his image shifted into her periphery, it stuttered, like a video call reloading over a weak connection.
She felt an urge to wake Martin, to hold him and let him anchor her to their world. But she resisted, remembering what her husband had asked before drifting into sleep.
Husband. Even thinking it felt like a revelation.
Omar crossed his legs, then slid his ankle up to rest atop his knee.
“God. Even your gestures are the same,” she said.
“Is this too strange for you? I can leave.”
This time, she didn’t bother suppressing a laugh.
“You’re right. Of course it is,” he said.
“The only thing that could possibly be stranger than you being here would be me asking you to leave now that you are.”
“I have a feeling my son would disagree,” he said, lowering his voice.
“I have a feeling you’re right. But you don’t have to whisper. An earthquake couldn’t wake him right now.”
“The sleep of a very happy man.”
She didn’t bother arguing with that. Outside it had started to rain, quiet drops that don’t tap at the window but hiss as cars skid over them through barely wet streets.
“I didn’t expect you’d be back after this afternoon.”
“I wasn’t planning on it. I tried to visit Elda and Claudita before the reception started, but they wouldn’t see me.”
“That’s strange.” She had always suspected Elda would give Omar a mouthful if she had the chance. “They didn’t seem at all bothered this evening.” On the contrary, Claudia had been uncharacteristically chipper.
“I’m glad I didn’t spoil the party, then.”
“Why wouldn’t they be happy to see you? Why wasn’t Martin? You’d think, after all these years.”
“Time doesn’t make feelings go away. It just makes people more willing to push them aside. Not them, though. I’d have to die eighty deaths before they’d be happy to see me, and even then they’d simply relish the chance to see me die the eighty-first.”
“I doubt that’s true.”
“You don’t know my family like I do.”
His words stung, though she wouldn’t have expected them to. Immediately, he seemed to regret it. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s insensitive of me to point that out on your wedding day.”
“But you don’t deny it’s true?”
Omar said nothing, and Isabel felt the last bit of the day’s adrenaline seep out of her. In just minutes, he had exposed the one blind spot in their relationship she had spent the past few years ignoring. Whenever Martin pretended his father’s absence was not a big deal, she would pretend to believe him. She felt embarrassed, like she’d been caught telling a lie.
“Forgive me,” Omar finally said. He looked at the clock as the minute hand twitched its way closer to midnight. “I shouldn’t have said that either. In my rush to prove a point I sometimes forget my manners.”
“It’s okay. It’s just that I suppose I’ve lost all opportunity to make a good impression with you. A more loyal wife wouldn’t ask questions. She’d respect her husband’s wishes not to speak with you.”
“He told you not to speak with me?” Omar sat up, as if flattered his son had spoken about him at all. Isabel said nothing more, afraid she had already betrayed Martin’s trust.
“If it makes you feel better, I’ve never been impressed by people who don’t ask questions,” Omar said.
She couldn’t help smiling. “Me neither. I’m sorry to be so frank, but it’s just that . . . you’re asking me to start my marriage by going behind my husband’s back.”
“Please don’t ever apologize for being frank.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes. I’m more and more proud of my son each minute that passes.”
“Thank you,” Isabel said. She stood up and took a deep breath, pulling her robe tighter. It was the kind of silence she thought was socially universal, that purposeful, heavy pause at the end of the evening when guests realize it’s time to go. If Omar recognized this, he didn’t let on. A flush of panic came over his face. She waited a moment longer and cleared her throat.
“I’m sorry. I’m only here a few more minutes. Can’t we just talk?”
She sat back down and crossed her hands over her lap, sitting up straight.
“About what?”
Her directness seemed to confuse him. Perhaps the question was too simple to be answered simply.
He smiled and brushed her cheek with the tingly tips of his fingers. “You tell me. Ask me anything you want. Anything you’re comfortable with.”
“All right. Why are you here, Omar?”
“With you? I told you. Elda wouldn’t see me, so I came here.”
That wasn’t exactly what she’d meant, but Isabel let it slide.
“And why is that?”
He shrugged. “You’d have to ask Elda.”
“What about Martin?” Her patience was wearing thin.
“I was surprised he saw me at all.” Omar shook his head in bewilderment. “But then again, it is his wedding day, and I’m his father, even though—”
“Even though you left when he was seven?”
“Ah. What else has he told you?”
“Enough to make it clear why he wouldn’t want you here.” This was not entirely true. Martin had a way of answering questions with no answers at all or (if he couldn’t completely avoid it) with answers to completely different ones. It’d been charming when it came to trivial things like how his day had gone, but as soon as the topic turned to his father or his childhood, he would offer up a cheerful family anecdote in place of any real substance.
“What else would you like to know?” Omar said.
She wanted to prove she knew his family more than he thought she did. She remembered one of the only stories Martin ever shared that included both his father and mother.
“Tell me about the time you played hide-and-seek, and he hid so well no one could find him for over an hour.”
“What?”
“He was four. In the closet? He won a ribbon. He loves telling that story.”
“When we lived in the little apartment on Pecan?”
“Yes, that one.”
“I don’t . . . I’m surprised he remembers. We’d only been here four years. We’d sent for my family in Mexico. First my parents, and then my cousin Julio. We never should have helped him. He’d been trouble since we were kids, and I don’t know how I got it into my head that as an adult he’d be any different. We were all naive then. We all thought coming to this country changes everything, and maybe it does, but not in the way you expect. Elda knew, though. That’s why she insisted we offer him our couch, but only for a month. That’s all the time he’d have to find a job and a place to stay. One day, he was helping me fix
a leak in our bathroom when we realized we’d need a different kind of wrench. But I had to go to work, so he offered to drop me off, take the car, and fix the sink. We agreed he’d pick me up after my shift was over. I wasn’t really thinking when I gave him the keys. Hours later, I’m still waiting for him like a fool. I take the bus home, and Elda’s waiting up with a friend, but no Julio. Of course we start imagining the worst. He got in an accident, or a fight, or he got himself pulled over and deported. And we would never know. It’s not like we could call anyone, you know? So we just waited. Finally we heard sirens in the distance, and then real close, and then you know that moment when they get extra loud and you wait for them to pass because you know they’ll just keep going? They didn’t. The red and blue lights started flashing into our living room, and Martin woke up wondering what was going on, and we had no idea but we knew it couldn’t be good. Elda said, ‘You take care of your cousin, I’ll take care of our son.’ So I go outside and I see Julio getting pulled over not even fifty feet from our apartment entrance. He’s getting one of those walk the line tests and failing, and I’m thinking this is it, he’ll get sent back, and maybe I’ll see him again in a few months if he manages to raise the money to cross back over. And I’m thinking they’ll find all of us, and we’ll all get sent back. So I stop halfway through the parking lot and pretend I’m going to the vending machine for a Coke. Like I didn’t even know him, my own flesh and blood. And he probably didn’t recognize me either; he was so drunk he couldn’t tell a cop from a clown. I got my soda, and I went back into the house and turned off all the lights, and we waited for the cops and Julio to disappear. It was more than an hour. Martin was in the closet the whole time. Elda spent much of it pacing the house, from nerves is what I thought, but I guess she was pretending to look for him. She told me that’s how she protected Martin from the truth that night. I didn’t know about the ribbon.”
“That’s . . . that’s not how I thought that story would go,” Isabel said. She sat back down on the couch.
“How does my son tell it?”
“It’s one of his first memories. He talks about it like it’s an early triumph. He remembers how late it was. I guess that’s part of the excitement. A kid up way past his bedtime, and he gets to play hide-and-seek, and he sets a family record and gets a prize.”
“Ay, Elda. Always so good with him.”
“And what about you? Were you good with him?”
Now it was Omar’s turn to stand up and cue his exit. He stretched his arms, and Isabel wondered if his bones cracked, if his limbs tired, or if the motion was simply a habit.
“I guess it depends who you ask.”
“I’m asking you. I’ll ask him later,” she said, raising her eyebrows toward the bedroom.
He looked at the door with longing. “I thought I was. I tried to be. But sometimes our best intentions become our worst mistakes.”
Something in the way his voice traveled away from her, as if he wished he could hide this confession, struck her. This was worse than helplessness; it was injustice—worse even than robbing a man of his dying wish. Here he was, aching to say things he never got a chance to say, but her reluctance to hear had reduced the man to riddles and veiled truths. She wished she could do more for him.
“Tell my son I’ll try him again next year.” He kissed her on the forehead, soft as a breeze. She smiled and closed her eyes, and when she opened them, he was gone.
In the weeks following their wedding day, Isabel and Martin discovered that married life was not very different from premarried life, and they delighted in telling people who asked, over and over, “How’s married life treating ya?” that it was the same.
“But that’s a good thing, or else I wouldn’t have married her,” Martin would say after an awkward pause. He loved setting up this joke, and occasionally Isabel would humor him by appearing to be just as shocked as the person hearing it, then join them in an outburst of laughter.
“How long do you think before people stop asking us?” Martin said one night. They were walking to their car from Claudia’s apartment, carrying a half-finished bottle of rum that her boyfriend, Damian, had insisted they take back to their place for next time. To Isabel’s relief, the guests had been a mix of teachers from Damian’s school and flight attendants Claudia worked with. They asked the usual questions people ask to get acquainted with one another, but eventually the living room became a teacher’s lounge, while Claudia’s friends sipped wine and shared passenger horror stories in the kitchen. Isabel mostly listened, laughing at their airline jokes even when she didn’t understand them. It was much easier than trying to have a real conversation with Claudia, who had been keeping her at arm’s length ever since they’d reentered each other’s lives.
“At least a year,” Isabel said, happy to turn her thoughts elsewhere. “Or until someone else gets married. I don’t really mind.”
“You put up with my joke, so you must not.”
“It was in my vows. Put up with husband’s dumb jokes.”
“How’d I miss that?”
“Subtext. You were never good with subtext.”
“I see.” He walked around the car and opened the passenger-side door for her in a theatrical fashion. “As long as we’re playing the good husband and wife.”
Isabel laughed as she stepped into the car, her legs slightly numb from her three glasses of wine. Moments like these, she marveled that they were even together. Despite her knowing him as a child, Martin often caught her by surprise. They had only reconnected in the last couple of years over a series of odd encounters at mutual friends’ parties, during which they had felt sparks of interest at the worst possible times.
The first time they ran into one another, Isabel almost didn’t recognize him. He had a wide chest and stood several inches taller than she, so that his jawline was right at eye level. His dark hair fell in one swoop over his forehead, and his eyes (which she had always thought too big for his face) were now perfectly punctuated behind thin-framed glasses. Everything about him was the same, just more settled and refined. She was happy to see he had outgrown what she and Claudia once secretly called his Kenny G phase, and for a moment debated telling him this. She opted to ask about the family instead.
They stood chatting in the narrow hallway of a friend’s two-bedroom apartment, waiting for the bathroom. He made a joke about how people spend half of a relationship concealing their most basic human functions, yet they’re perfectly content to stand outside a bathroom complaining about how long the line is, as if all they plan on doing once they get to the front is admire the shapes of the tile. “Or the soaps,” Isabel had said. “I’m always hoping they’re seashell shaped.”
He had smiled and tried to say “seashell shaped” three times fast, but couldn’t. They laughed, and the bathroom door opened, and Isabel realized Martin had been waiting for his girlfriend.
Some four months later they ran into each other again. Isabel was single. She recognized Martin’s girlfriend before she saw him, and as she took in the woman’s long legs and wide hips, Isabel doubted she would ever be Martin’s type. She told herself she probably wouldn’t want to be. They ended the evening playing Scattergories, and she and Martin called out the same answers so many times (Things people throw away: Lives) it became a personal mission to outdo each other.
By the time Martin was single and asked her to dinner and a movie, Isabel had been dating one of the pharmaceutical reps from her hospital for nearly a year. She was caught so off guard by his invitation that she misunderstood it to be for a double date.
“Richard’s been dying to try out their new menu,” she said, too late to back out of her mistake. The evening became awkward the second Martin’s date asked how he and Isabel knew each other.
“We’ve known each other most of our lives,” Martin said.
The truth was they barely did; they only wanted to.
Months after they had finally seized a window of opportunity to start dating, Marti
n admitted he’d decided he disliked Isabel’s ex before the two couples even finished dinner. “Every time I was trying not to look at you, I’d catch him looking away from you. It’s like he had no idea what he had.”
Their relationship had been a crazed, rushed thing. There was no need to introduce her to his family; the first time she saw them again, Elda acted like Isabel was a daughter who had just returned from a long trip. Claudia, on the other hand, greeted her with the indifference of someone who hadn’t even noticed she’d been gone. At first it barely registered; Isabel mentioned it to Martin, and he reassured her that his sister was just a bit aloof. Not that she had needed the reminder, but this was different. It was always Elda, not Claudia, who asked to get caught up on the details of Isabel’s life after ninth grade. Claudia didn’t dare steer the conversation toward the past, and soon their history as BFFs seemed almost inconsequential, serving no other purpose than giving Isabel and Martin a head start in their romance. They began dating in the summer and were engaged soon after the new year.
“I knew it,” Claudia said when they told her.
“Thanks.” Isabel couldn’t tell if she was happy with the news or the fact that she had seen it coming.
“I always hoped you’d end up together,” Elda said.
Isabel heard Martin stifle a laugh, and she knew they had both been thinking the same thing: one morning after the girls had had a sleepover, Elda chastised Martin for coming into the kitchen wearing nothing but boxers, shooing him away to put on some clothes and insisting that Isabel would not be so easily impressed by the cuatro pelos on his chest just yet.
“Mom, you embarrassed me in front of Isabel every chance you got,” Martin said.
“It’s because you were too young to think such things.”
“We weren’t the ones thinking them.”
Moments like these, when Isabel felt like the only one who hadn’t forgotten her and Claudia’s friendship, it was always Martin who remembered.
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