No matter. We were only going to get into the limo anyway. When she arrived (not if anymore, but when!) I would need to remember to call the number on the business card so the limo driver would be waiting for us outside after we picked up her luggage. Would she think a limo too ostentatious? Airport limos are no big deal in Canada, I’d tell her, just glorified taxis. But would she then assume that was the way I always travelled? Why hadn’t I learned to drive? What if she’d changed her mind? Maybe she’d never boarded.
More de-planing passengers descending escalators, exiting, meeting, greeting…I already knew she wouldn’t be among this group either. The arrivals board said her much-delayed flight wasn’t scheduled to land for another twenty minutes. But you could never be sure. Maybe the arrivals board hadn’t been updated. Maybe…not her…not yet.
My mind skittered, careened, crashed into itself. I needed to slow down, breathe. Everything had happened more quickly than I’d expected.
“These things take for-fucking-ever, compadre,” Vince had warned when he helped me fill out the formal application to sponsor Mariela to become a permanent Canadian resident the day after I’d returned from Havana a married man. “Months…years…if you’re lucky. Be prepared.” Which is why Vince had suggested coupling that application with a temporary visitor’s visa application so Mariela might, possibly, at least, get to spend some time with me in Canada while we waited. “Let her experience a Canadian winter,” he joked. “Then we’ll see how much she loves you. Seriously though,” he added seriously, sensing the sugar plums already dancing in my head, “the Canadian government will probably say no to a visitor’s visa until they consider the permanent application. Even if the Cubans say yes, which they won’t…don’t get your hopes up, my man.”
I hadn’t. I’d filled out the official visitor’s visa letter-of-invitation application form—“Kind of relationship (Please specify)”—which Vince had then notarized and couriered, along with my $224 Canadian processing fee, to the Cuban embassy in Ottawa. According to Vince, the embassy would eventually send the invitation, “probably by courier pigeon,” to Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Havana “where some non-functioning functionary will sit on it for a few months before, maybe, blessing it with some legal-bullshit stamp and then sending it on to some other cash-grabbing money-suck who will want even more of your money and take more of our time, and finally, they may—or may not—say yes. Or nothing at all. In my experience anyway. They claim the whole thing should take three months. I think the truth is more like Celsius-to-Fahrenheit. Double that and add thirty-two. Like I said, compadre, I’m happy to take your money. Just don’t expect results in return.”
But the Cubans had said yes! In half of the time Vince had predicted. And then the Canadian government conferred its blessing on Mariela’s temporary visitor’s visa.
“That’s fantastic,” Vince said, not sounding fantastic, “but you’re not there yet, not even close. First you gotta read all the fine print, the print where it says even a valid visa is not a guarantee of entry into Canada. Some fucking border guard can still say no at the port of entry for some reason or no reason, and your chica is on the next plane back to Havana.”
Mariela’s plane had landed! The screen now officially declared her flight “Arrived”…if, in fact, she was on the plane. Was she? She’d lent the cellphone I bought for her—the one I bought to replace the one Lío now seemed to think was his—to David.
“I won’t need it when I’m with you,” she’d explained sort-of logically the day before she was supposed to fly. But her initial flight from Havana to Toronto had been delayed, her connecting flight to Halifax cancelled and then rescheduled for today because of a blizzard here, and I couldn’t get in touch with her. That’s when I began to panic that she’d decided not to come at all.
Some days I liked my life better when I didn’t care.
Which reminded me. I would need to call the office to let them know I wouldn’t be back today. I had an office. I had a job I needed to keep. I was now a Vice President and Senior Content Strategist at Coastal Communications Consultancy. My embossed business card boasted C3 was staffed with “Canada’s finest full-service public relations and crisis communications management team.” Including me.
I’d only applied for the job because Vince said having one would bolster my application to sponsor Mariela, and because Peggy Aylward heard I was looking and promised to put in a good word for me with her friend who owned C3, and because Wendy Wagner—Wendy!—had offered to write me a letter of reference. “You’ll be great,” she said. I only wished I believed she knew what she was talking about.
Luckily, Steve LaChance, the owner of C3, had the PR professional’s misplaced reverence for journalists. “I hate fucking PR types,” he’d declared, even though he was clearly a public relations lifer. Steve hired me immediately, offering an excellent—much-better-than-the-Trib—salary, but on a month-to-month contract with no benefits and no guarantees any of it would last beyond the next paycheque. “We’re in a volatile business environment,” he told me. “Everything is contract to contract.”
“Fine with me,” I said. But the job had turned out much better than I could have hoped. Back in the newsroom, I’d been expected to do my job without getting praised for doing it. At C3, Steve and his account executives seemed to want to heap praise on my every breath. “I can’t believe how fast you came up with that”, “You have such a way with words”, “I wish I could write like that.”
It was bullshit, of course—they were PR types, after all—but I was happy to let it go to my head. Just as I was happy to let go of my newspaper editor’s fixation on facts.
“But that’s not accurate,” I remembered telling Steve the first week about some fluff he’d asked me to write for a client.
“Don’t worry,” he’d replied. “In our business, facts are aspirational.” It was a liberating moment.
That said, Steve was smart enough to recognize I should not be allowed anywhere near C3’s corporate clients. I think the rumpled mismatched sports jacket and pants, golf shirt, and sneakers I wore for my interview were his first clues. So, despite my lofty title, I served mainly as support for Steve’s stable of inevitably attractive, inevitably young but also inevitably whip-smart female account executives who faced-to-face with the clients. They promised. I delivered. They thanked me. It worked well, so long as I did not let myself think too deeply about what I was really doing. Think Mariela. Think sponsorship application.
Steve didn’t know about Mariela—I’d kept that on a need-to-tell basis, which so far had been limited to my surprised, and surprising, sister, Sarah—but he’d been quick to acquiesce when I asked last week for a few days off for “personal stuff.”
“No problem, Writer Man,” he’d replied, using one of his many something-Man names for me. Word Man, Speed Man…occasionally Solitary Man, à la Neil Diamond, whenever he saw me eating alone in the lunchroom. “Whatever you need,” he added. “We don’t do timecards here. Just check in on Thursday. We’re expecting word on that Emera contract, and we may need some of your speedy words. OK?”
“OK.” But of course I’d forgotten. It was now Thursday. I’d need to—
There she was! On the escalator. Still as beautiful as I remembered, reconstructed in my mind. Wearing, despite the winter-like weather outside, a flowered summer dress with only a thin white cotton cardigan. Thank god I’d brought a winter coat. No gloves—forget the gloves! Mariela had landed. She saw me, smiled her radiant recognition smile. Or perhaps it was just relief. Had she also worried whether I would be waiting for her?
“I am so happy to see you,” she said, wrapping her arms around my shoulders, kissing my neck.
“Me too,” I said, pulling her closer, feeling her heartbeat. “Me too.”
The rest was a blur. Waiting at the carousel for her luggage (the big red suitcase I’d left behind during my last trip to
Havana, now stuffed to bursting with her life), listening while Mariela recounted her hassle-free journey through customs—“The nice woman agent,” she marvelled, “said, ‘Welcome to Canada,’ and told me I could stay for six months”—remembering to call the limo, forgetting to call the office…. The limo ride was uneventful. We sat, thigh to thigh, on one side of the back seat, my left hand smothering her much smaller right, her face pressed against the window, transfixed by the snowbanks whizzing by. I tried to imagine what that must be like, seeing snow for the first time, realizing this had to be the new rest of your life.
“Over there.” I pointed past the driver as he crested the suspension bridge from Dartmouth to Halifax. “There’s your new home.” She turned to look, just as a moving van passed in the other lane. “Too late,” I said, and kissed her on the lips.
I gave the limo driver five twenties and told him to keep the change. I couldn’t remember if the fare was $65 or $75. No matter. He was unseemly grateful. I practically had to wrest the suitcase from his hands to prevent him from accompanying it—and us—up the stairs and into the house.
“My house,” I announced to Mariela, looking at what was, in reality, a nondescript two-storey wooden house on a street of nondescript two-storey wooden houses. Her eyes—those eyes—went wide anyway. “Your house now,” I added.
Part of me wanted to lift her in my arms, carry her up the dozen concrete stairs and over the threshold, just like newlyweds in the movies. But I didn’t want to make a fool of myself slipping and falling on the icy steps, and besides, there was her luggage to carry. Not to mention a long, narrow box leaning against the front door, blocking the entrance. Where had that come from?
Inside, while Mariela stared at the opulence I knew was merely dowdy, I unwrapped the brown paper covering the box, opened it, glanced at the card. I handed the bouquet to Mariela. “For you,” I said, adding, not quite believing, “from my sister.”
Mariela took the flowers, read the words on the card.
“Welcome to Canada, Mariela!
Welcome to the family!
Your sister-in-law, Sarah.”
****
My far too long delayed conversation with Sarah—“I’m married to that Cuban woman and, oh, by the way, I’m also the father to a long lost love-child daughter who is about to make me a grandfather and you a great aunt”—had taken place more than a year earlier, a month or so after I’d returned from Havana. It had not unfolded in any of the ways I’d hoped, expected, and feared it might.
“Hey,” I said when she picked up the phone. “I have some news.” Get the worst out of the way fast, I thought to myself, and then deal with the fallout.
“Eli!” Sarah almost shouted in response. “You must be psychic.” There was a strange edge in her tone. Hysteria? “I was just about to call you. I have news too. So much!”
“You go first,” I said quickly. Anything to put off the inevitable.
“How to begin?” she began. Unlike me, she knew how to begin. “Amy’s a lesbian!”
I hadn’t seen that coming. Amy, the good daughter dutifully following her mother and father into the family business of law, was a lesbian? How should I respond? I’m sorry. No. Commiserating at this point might be presumptuous. What then?
“She is?” I said, neutral, let Sarah lead.
“I’m OK with it, I am, really I am,” Sarah continued, responding to the question I didn’t ask. “It’s her father who’s not.” OK. More information. Keep quiet. Let it happen. “She told us this spring when she came home from Yale. That’s the part I really can’t believe. She was doing so well in law school. Straight A’s in every course, and she gives it all up. Just like that. She quit law school.”
“She did?” And being a lesbian had what exactly to do with law school?
“I was going to call, tell you then. But I knew you were dealing with your own stuff. Dad. Your job. That Cuban woman. I didn’t want to add to your burden.” Thanks. “Besides, I thought it might be temporary, you know, a passing fancy.” Amy being a lesbian? Or that Cuban woman? “But now Amy’s moved to Vancouver, moved in with her undergraduate thesis advisor. The woman’s almost my age, for heaven’s sake.”
“Oh.”
“They actually became lovers—that’s what they call it—when Amy was still an undergrad. That woman could be fired. She should get fired. But…I mean, it’s fine. I raised my kids to believe they could be anything they wanted to be. I never even guessed,” she continued. “I mean, there were no signs. Amy was so popular. Boys lined up to invite her to her high school prom. And she had boyfriends. She even lived with a boy during her second year at UBC. I told you about that, right?” No. “It doesn’t matter. But, I mean, how are you supposed to know these things? As a parent, I mean? If they don’t say? Thank god for Jacob. He’s been a mensch. He keeps me sane. Unlike his father.”
His father? Her voice faltered. Was she crying? “Saul’s left me,” she said finally. “Thirty-three years of marriage. And then gone. Just like that. He says he couldn’t deal with Amy, couldn’t deal with me dealing with Amy. Like I’m to blame.” She was sniffling now. “So he moved out. But he didn’t just move out. He moved in too. With a junior associate in the firm. He was supposed to be mentoring her. Instead, he was fucking her.” I couldn’t remember my sister ever using the word fuck in my presence. “I complained to the firm’s professional ethics committee,” she said, “not because I expect those fucks to actually do anything about it but because I wanted to watch the worms squirm.” She laughed. It wasn’t a funny laugh. “So now I have a daughter who’s living with a woman my age, and a husband—former husband—who’s shacked up with a woman young enough to be my daughter.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am.” I was. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Tell me something that will make me happy,” she said.
So I did. And it did. I hadn’t expected that. I told her about Kim, and about Kim’s son, who then was due any day.
“I never thought I’d be an aunty,” Sarah said. “And now a great-aunty in the bargain. How wonderful!”
I told her about Mariela, about our wedding in Havana, about the status of my application to sponsor her to be a permanent Canadian resident, about the fact I was applying to bring her to Canada, even about just how nervous I was about everything. Sarah didn’t tell me I was making another crazy, impetuous mistake, didn’t promise to fix it by putting her immigration lawyer guy on the case, didn’t even ask if I’d at least renovated the house, as she’d suggested many times already, in preparation for my bride’s arrival. Instead, she said, “I wished I’d been there. For the wedding, I mean. It sounds like it must have been fun.” It was. Should I have invited her?
“I’m so happy you’re happy,” she said after a long silence. “Perhaps it’s a zero-sum game,” she mused, “or maybe family happiness is serial. I was happy for thirty-three years. Now it’s your turn….”
“I don’t think it works like that,” I said. “You’ll be fine. We’ll be fine.”
“I hope so. I may have lost a husband, but I’ve gained a niece and a great-nephew. And a sister-in-law. I want to meet them all.”
“You will,” I said. “You will.”
****
Mariela held the flowers in her hand now, read and re-read Sarah’s words on the card.
“She sounds so nice,” she said. “I can’t wait to meet her.”
I couldn’t wait to meet that Sarah either.
“You will,” I said. “You will.”
I really should call the office. I did. We hadn’t won the contract with Emera. I was off the hook.
2
“Umberto found it really difficult at first,” Lily told me, warning me about adjustment issues for Mariela. “No family, no friends, no job to go to. For the first few months, he just sat in front of the TV and channel surfed—the new
s, old movie channels, monster truck shows, The Bachelorette, even Say Yes to the Dress…. I’m not sure he understood what they were saying.”
“What happened?”
“Luckily, I remembered Umberto had studied painting in Cuba. So I turned the guest room into a studio, enrolled him in painting classes at the art college.”
“And….”
“He’s happy now.”
I wasn’t so sure. Mariela and I now socialized exclusively—past the point of tedium—with Lily and Umberto. Pub nights, dinner parties, even a full month binge-watching all five seasons of The Wire. Umberto, whose English was, after five years in Canada, still rudimentary at best, routinely fell asleep in the middle of shows, not to mention at our dinner parties, even occasionally during pub nights, snoring loudly while the rest of us pretended not to notice.
Umberto only seemed to come to life whenever he and Mariela reminisced in Spanish about their lives back in Cuba. I was slowly mastering my own halting variation of Spanish. I forced myself to spend at least a couple of hours a week with my Rosetta Stone CDs, but I had long since resigned myself to the reality I would never be able to follow a conversation between two speed-talking Cubans, which sounded in my head like a Spanish LP played at 78 rpm.
“Speak English,” Lily would instruct Umberto. “Remember what we talked about.” To me. “He needs to practise his English.”
Mariela certainly didn’t need to practise her English. But what did she need? I’d bought her an Apple laptop computer and an iPhone, set her up with her own Gmail address and shown her how to communicate with her friends back in Havana. I promised to buy her one of the new iPads.
“What does it do?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said, “but everyone wants one.”
The Sweetness in the Lime Page 20