“I wish, darling, but I don’t think so. We’ve got to finish decorating and then I have to go to work.”
“We can finish the tree tomorrow,” Sofia protested.
“It’s the day before Christmas Eve, we can’t leave it until tomorrow. Look, let’s do something else: we’ll finish the tree, I’ll go to work, and when I get back, we can order those burgers you love, watch a film on the sofa and after,” he looked at her with his sex-eyes, as she liked to say, “you know.”
Sofia’s face lit up.
“You mean Netflix-and-chill?”
“Exactly.”
“With ice cream?”
“With ice cream.”
“And snuggled up under the blanket?”
“We’ll get the duvet!”
“It’s a plan, Jiminy Cricket, you’ve convinced me. You’re a very persuasive man.”
Jaime grinned.
“Come on, let’s finish the tree,” he said turning back to the box.
Sofia grabbed two red baubles and carefully hung them up.
“Can the film be a romantic one?” she said all of a sudden.
“Any film you like.”
“And the ice cream with chunks of biscuit!”
“But, of course!”
“Oh look, we’ve almost run out of decorations. Why didn’t you get more?” she asked with a frown.
Jaime looked at her as if she had lost her marbles with all the talk of the tree, film, blanket and biscuits.
“I’m joking, silly!” Sofia burst out laughing.
A few minutes later, the lights on the tree were twinkling different colours as shy rays of sunshine were poking through the storm clouds.
“Get thinking about the film you want to watch,” Jaime said from the door.
“I’ve already thought of one!”
Sofia hurried to give him a goodbye kiss and, when he had disappeared down the stairs, she closed the door. Leaning her back against the solid wood, she gazed at the tree and nodded. They’d done an excellent job. She hummed absent-mindedly to Cher while she tidied away the boxes into a cupboard.
Someone rang the doorbell and interrupted the instrumental version of Believe.
He must have forgotten his keys with the rush he was in, Sofia thought as she hurried over to the door.
“I haven’t got the film rea..” her voice broke.
“Hi.”
“Erm... Daniel, what a surprise!”
She couldn’t believe it. Since Ricardo had called her to let her know that his brother had come out of his coma, a day hadn’t gone by when she didn’t think of buying a plane ticket and flying to Madrid to see Daniel. Or at least call him. For some reason, she hadn’t. That reason had a first name and a surname: Jaime Vergara. The idea of returning to Madrid, and reliving the stormy moments of the past with Daniel terrified her. She never thought that those memories, personified in him, would cross half the world and stand in her apartment saying ‘hi’.
“You look great,” he said still standing in the corridor. His hands were buried in his trouser pockets. “How are you?”
“Very well. Thanks.”
Sofia shook her head. She was being rude.
“Please, come in. I’ll make you a coffee.”
Daniel thanked her and entered the flat.
“What a lovely tree.”
“Yeah. We just finished putting it up.”
We. The use of the plural pronoun was sure to have made Daniel’s stomach turn. Sofia stood behind the breakfast bar to make a couple of coffees with the feeling of being unfaithful to both Daniel and Jaime at the same time. James Brown, Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan were trying to ease the tension through the radio.
“I still haven’t put mine up,” Daniel said.
“Put what up?”
“The Christmas tree. I haven’t put it up. I haven’t even got one.”
“Well, you’ve got a good excuse, you haven’t had much tim....”
Sofia bit her tongue to stop yet another inappropriate comment. While the coffee heated up, Sofia asked herself how she could keep her mouth shut. Luckily, Daniel hadn’t seemed to have heard her.
“How are things going here in New York?”
he asked, changing the subject. “Where are you working?”
“I’m a waitress.”
“That’s good that you’ve found a job so quick.”
“But next week I’ve got an audition for a theatre show.” Sofia smiled sincerely for the first time since Daniel had rung the doorbell.
“Great,” he exclaimed smiling. “You haven’t stopped until you got what you wanted, even crossing the pond and abandoning whatever necessary along the way.”
Sofia frowned. Was he being sarcastic?
“So this is where you live now?” he said looking around.
“Mm-hm.”
“Great view, you can’t complain,” mused Daniel running his fingers along the window pane. Down below the traffic crawled along like cockroaches. Remembering that he was standing on the nineteenth floor he turned away feeling a bit dizzy.
“If you’ve come here to make reproaches, then get it over with,” she blurted out, tired of futile formalisms.
Daniel raised his eyebrows.
“What do you mean?”
“You have no right to be annoyed at me. I know I wasn’t there when you woke up, but that’s because I live here now.”
“I know. Don’t worry.”
“No, you don’t know.” Sofia’s voice was shaking. “And I do worry. I spent months going to the hospital every day to see you, hoping that one of those days you’d wake up. So you’ve got no right to reproach me, quite the opposite.”
An awkward silence took hold. Sofia, unable to believe what she had just said, waited anxiously for a response. Daniel sighed and went over to the breakfast bar.
“I know that too, Sofia,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
“So why the hell are you here?”
From that distance she could smell him. It was a mixture of cologne and moisturiser.
“I’ve come to tell you...” Daniel gulped and looked her in the eye. It shook Sofia to the core. “To tell you something I should have told you a long time ago, when I had the chance. But I was an idiot.”
Sofia’s heart was thundering.
“I don’t think now’s the time.”
“It’s the only time I have,” he interrupted. “You loved me, didn’t you.”
Fear gripped Sofia’s heart, fear of what she was about to hear.
“I don’t know... I-I guess so.” She didn’t dare look him in the eye.
“I’m not talking about a few months ago, I’m talking about another time.”
Sofia frowned. Her heart was slowing down to a normal pace.
“What do you mean?”
“Many years ago, when we were just kids. Did you love me? I think you’ve loved me since then.”
Sofia looked up to see if this was all just a big joke. It wasn’t. Daniel’s expression was of someone who knows, in the way that few times in life lets us understand without needing words or reasons, what we are talking about.
“I did. I loved you,” she eventually replied angrily. “You were like my soul mate, you know?” she pushed him away with her arm. “I was a little girl, and little girls aren’t supposed to feel true love. But I did. Then you disappeared, you never came back to the village, and I had no way to get in touch with you. I waited for years for you to come back. I waited in the garden, next to the church... always hoping that one day you’d be there and take me in your arms.”
Sofia began pacing, gesturing with her arms.
“You didn’t come back. I didn’t blame you. Your mother died and you didn’t come back to the village. You carried on with your life and I did the same. But I never forgot about you. I never felt anything like what I felt for you. Never.”
Daniel made to speak.
“And then one day, years later, I found you,” Sofia continued, raisin
g her voice. “You didn’t recognise me. I had been dreaming about that moment every day ever since you left. But fate is a bastard and ruined it all. Over night you fell into a coma with little hope of ever waking up. My life completely changed. I went to that damn hospital every single day, I went to bed crying for you, for my bad luck, every single night. I was acting like your widow, and I wasn’t even your girlfriend. And I wasn’t your girlfriend because you, you stubborn piece of shit, made up a false one!”
“I’m here now, Sofia,” Daniel said slowly, gently stroking her arm.
Sofia snatched her hand away.
“You’re here now?” she shouted. “And where were you years ago, when we were supposed to be inseparable? Where were you when I did nothing but chase after you and you made up excuses not to love me? I don’t give a shit that you’re here now.”
“Pardon?”
“I spent a year like a zombie because of you, and now I finally take my life back, I’m happy and you turn up,” she was mumbling now. “You know what? A few days ago, I had a dream, it was so real. You and I were in your brother’s bar, just where we met. Do you remember?”
“Of course I remember.”
“Good. Well, in my dream, you were kissing me with such passion. When I woke up I was sweating, and I hated myself for wishing that dream had been real. Ironically, your brother called me a few hours later, who I hadn’t spoken to in months, to tell me you’d woken up.”
Daniel leaned forward until his face was just a few millimetres from hers.
“I was in a coma, Sofia,” he whispered. “You just said that when you woke up from that dream, you wished it had been real. We still have time to make it real.”
Sofia fixed her gaze on the floorboards.
“I want you to leave my house,” she ordered.
Daniel took a few seconds to reply.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Jesus Christ! You have no right to come here now and expect me to follow you!” Sofia shouted. Daniel wanted to hold her in his arms, but he couldn’t.
“I do.”
In the end he held her upper arm and got close enough to kiss her. A harsh kiss. Dry. As soon as their lips were apart, they continued their argument.
“You’re so selfish.”
“Look at me and tell me you don’t love me.”
“I don’t love you.”
“If you don’t love me, then why are you crying?”
“Don’t do this to me.”
Daniel kissed her again but this time without holding back. All of Sofia’s rage came undone in a cry, a relief from the lips of her platonic love.
Maybe she was right, thought Daniel. Maybe he had no right to chase her half way round the world to ask her to leave her boyfriend and her dream job to go away with a some guy who she’d had a beer with over a year ago. Who would do that? He’d listened to his father, he’d fought to the end, risking failure. He’d chosen to love in spite of the risk of suffering that would come with it. The theory of balance at its extreme. But sometimes, things just don’t turn out well. Stories don’t always have a happy ending, especially those you don’t take care of from the very beginning. Daniel had been an imbecile, and now she had every right to carry on with her life without him.
Daniel stepped back from her. There was no point in making her suffer any more. He walked back to the coat rack with the intention of grabbing his jacket and leaving the flat. But just then, the magic kicked in. Some guitar chords played over the radio. They were familiar.
The Sound of Silence, Simon & Garfunkel.
“Give me one last chance,” he said, turning around.
She looked up, taking her hands away from her tear-stained face.
“What?”
Daniel smiled. It was the song that had been playing in his brother’s bar the moment he’d kissed Sofia, just after arguing like they were doing now. A rooftop bar, from which you could see almost all the buildings in the city, a view that wasn’t dissimilar to that from the window of Sofia’s flat. That moment hadn’t belonged to real life, but it hadn’t quite been a dream either. It had been another lesson, like the countless others he’d received from the hands of Jorge, Manu and Steve during his journey.
“I know what you dreamt the other night,” he said before Sofia’s glassy-eyed gaze. “You can believe me or not, but being in that hospital, I’ve seen things that have turned me into another man.”
Sofia opened her mouth as if unsure between letting him carry on or calling the police.
“But let me tell you about a dream I had.” Daniel took a step forward. He was next to her once more. “It was about two kids who met one summer. A boy and a girl. He went to her house every day and they would spend the afternoon together dreaming about the future. Falling in love without knowing it. Every day until the sun went down, and their parents made them go home.”
“She always used to say that she wanted to be a professional dancer, and in the end, you won’t believe it but she ended up on Broadway.”
Daniel had to pause as he felt a lump forming in his throat.
“One day,” he continued, “the two kids had arranged to meet in a place that was very special to them. But he didn’t show up.”
“She, sad as she was, left messages carved with a stone on the wooden bench with the hope that one day he would read them. A habit she kept up for three more years. The boy hadn’t disappeared for nothing, he’d had a family tragedy which had made him leave the village. What the girl didn’t know was that he loved her too, and finally, many years later, he went back to the village. He could see the marks on the wood. They had her signature. That was when he remembered how much he still loved her. Deep down, he’d never stopped loving her and without realising it, looking for her. He didn’t think twice and he went around the world looking for her but....”
He paused. She was watching him with her eyes wide open. How does he know about the things I wrote? she seemed to be thinking.
“But the end of the story is up to you.”
Daniel held Sofia in his arms. He wasn’t going to last much longer without crying.
“A few days ago, I found you and we argued. We were listening to this exact same song on the rooftop bar and your hair was blowing in the wind. We ended up kissing and we made that the best night of our lives. Then you woke up here, in your bed in New York and you didn’t see me again until just now.”
Sofia’s heart had sped up. She didn’t know what to say. A few minutes ago she’d been decorating the Christmas tree ready to celebrate the holidays with her boyfriend, and now she felt as if someone had taken a jar with all of her memories in and stuck it in a blender. Should she listen to her head or her heart? And more importantly, what was each of them telling her?
“I know what you dreamt,” insisted Daniel, predicting Sofia’s questions, “because I dreamt it too. But it wasn’t a dream, at least not for me. Never have I ever lived something as real as that night. As that kiss. And now, if I walk out of that door, it will be gone forever.”
A prolonged silence, only disturbed by the sound of the radio, followed Daniel’s words. Both of their hearts did backflips as they heard the sound of a key in the door. Someone was about to enter the apartment.
37
“Darling, I forgot my wallet. This head of mine...,” Jaime stopped in the middle of the room. “Are you ok? Your eyes are red.”
Sofia, who hadn’t had time to wipe away her tears, shook her head as she leant on the breakfast bar.
“It’s this damn dust. I’ve just had a sneezing fit,” she lied. “By the way, I have some bad news. My dad just called. Em... he said he’s had something like a heart attack and he’s asked if I’ll go home to spend the holidays with him. I’m really sorry.”
Jaime didn’t move, and for a moment, Sofia felt like he could read her mind: something like a heart attack? Either it was a heart attack or it wasn’t. And that allergy? Ten minutes ago she’d made no sign of sneezing and now her eye
s were as red as the devil’s.
“Right... well, what a shame,” he said in the end. “Well, I’ll come with you back to Spain. I’ll make the most of it and make some visits of my own.”
“No!” she exclaimed. “I mean... I’d love you to come, but there’s no way. You’ve got work to do here and you can’t just go.”
Jaime tilted his head and wrinkled his forehead.
“Is something wrong?”
“No, really. I’m just worried about my dad, that’s all.”
“OK then,” Jaime sighed unsettled. “And when are you off then?”
“This afternoon. I was going to call you now to tell you.”
Sofia fixed her eyes on Jaime’s with the confidence that if she didn’t look down at the two cups of coffee that sat on the bar, he wouldn’t either.
“In that case, take care of yourself. Call me when you get to Madrid, OK?”
He turned away and went to the sofa in search of his leather wallet. When he found it, he slipped it into his inside pocket and headed to the door.
“I’ll call you as soon as I land,” she said. “By the way,” Jaime turned back without managing to wipe the hurt look off his face. “Merry Christmas, Doctor.”
He nodded in silence. Sofia wasn’t sure if it was disappointment or tenderness that she saw in his eyes. She felt like one of those deer that have to sacrifice a member of their family to save the herd. Doctor Jaime Vergara was about to be devoured by a lion.
Jaime closed the door and Sofia was silent. She held her breath for a few seconds and then let it all out.
Daniel appeared from the other side of the breakfast bar, where he had been hiding. Sofia looked at him and sighed, blowing up at her fringe. Then they both laughed. It was the perfect way to release all the tension.
“How about we have that coffee in the airport?” asked Sofia.
Daniel’s eyes sparkled.
“Great idea! I think they do the best coffee in New York there,” he joked. “Hey, kid, don’t you think that Christmas tree is a bit over the top?”
She looked at him in mock offense, but her eyes gave her away.
“Excuse me? It’s perfect! And don’t call me ‘kid’.”
Reflections in the Mirror Page 18