Keep This Promise

by Willow Winters

  I went to give Charles a quick hug.

  “VeeVee,” he said in his condescending accent. After spending time in London, I learned that his accent was “BBC English.” I knew because I imitated him a lot.

  “Looking good, Chuck,” I said, knowing he hated that as much as I hated him calling me VeeVee.

  We retreated into the sitting room by the balcony, my mom having bought wine from Spain for the occasion. As we sat around, only chatting mildly about Spain, I felt like I was thousands of miles away, across a continent, across the Atlantic Ocean. The Vera who was making small talk and sipping wine that didn’t quite taste the same, she was just a hologram.

  Before we left for the restaurant, I went into my room to grab my purse and leave my phone on the table. Mercy poked her head in, and I expected her to comment on how messy my room was but instead she spotted the Las Palabras photo on the wall.

  “Ooh, this is new,” she said. “This from Spain?” She crossed the room and then peered at it.

  “Yup,” I said in a strained voice, wishing she wasn’t looking at it and making her judgements, which I knew she was doing in her head. I didn’t want anyone to assume anything about these people.

  “Who is this handsome man who has his arm around you?” she asked in surprise, her finger pointing at Mateo. I wanted to swat it away.

  By now Charles had followed her in and was looking at it too, like spectators at a zoo.

  “He looks familiar,” Charles mused, frowning.

  I couldn’t help myself. “He played for Atletico Madrid,” I told him proudly. “Mateo Casalles.”

  I hadn’t said his name out loud in a long time. It sounded larger than life.

  Charles nodded. “Ah, that would explain it.” Charles was a big soccer fan and often dragged Mercy out to five in the morning games, cheering on Manchester. At least he used to—she probably complained about it until he stopped.

  “He’s married,” Mercy said with a twist of disgust on her face. I raised my brows, wondering how she could see his ring clearly but she just showed me her phone. She had Googled his name and brought up a damn Wikipedia page.

  Shit. I hadn’t even thought of Googling him.

  I peered at the picture, swallowing hard. It was of him back in his team uniform, yelling at someone during a game, all dark tanned skin, wild hair, and fiery eyes. It stunned me.

  Now I was really glad I was leaving my phone behind.

  Mercy sucked at her teeth and put her phone away into her designer clutch. Then she smacked her clutch against Charles as if he’d done something. “When we’re married, there is no way in hell you’re going to learn another language overseas. Especially if there are hussies there, leaning all over you.”

  Wait. Did my sister just call me a hussy?

  “Hussy?” I repeated darkly. What was this, the fifties?

  “Oh VeeVee,” she said with a coy laugh. She grabbed Charles by the arm and led him out of the room.

  As soon as they were gone, I gave them the finger. Mateo probably wouldn’t have approved of my anti-family behavior but whatever.

  Dinner was a lonely affair. Funny how you could be surrounded by your family, your blood, and yet feel totally alone. Even with the sun shining on the sparkling shores of English Bay and Josh at my side, I felt like I was invisible, and in a dark, dark place.

  My fingers itched for my phone, cursing myself for leaving it at home. I wanted to check to see if he responded, I wanted to cyberstalk the shit out of him. I was going crazy, this feeling of despair that carved out a hollow place in my bones. I knew this wasn’t good, that I shouldn’t be so upset over losing the people I cared for and loved when I hadn’t really lost them, they were still out there alive and living their lives. But I was no longer a part of his life. And sitting with my mom and my sister and Charles, it made me realize I wasn’t a part of anyone’s lives.

  I thought about calling my dad tomorrow and asking if I could come and visit him in Calgary. He and Jude were always so welcoming, and now that the program was over and I didn’t have an internship, I was free to do whatever I wanted in the summer. Well, I suppose I had to try and get my job back at the coffee shop and try and earn some extra money before I headed back to school.

  Wow. I wasn’t looking forward to any of that. Not the job, not the school. I wondered how long it would take for me to go back to the way I was before. Spanish Vera did not belong in Vancouver.

  When we finally got back home, I practically ran to my room, my nerves tingling, my heart kicked up a notch. I closed the door behind me and picked up my phone.

  And there it was.

  Mateo’s name as the sender.

  He had sent a reply.

  Now I really started shaking, the phone nearly jostling out of my hands.

  Breathe, I told myself before my anxiety got out of control. I felt giddy, excited, nervous, and pukey all at once.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, took in a deep breath and then opened the email.

  Vera,

  It is good to hear from you. I thought you were ignoring my emails, more or less, and did not wish to harass you by phone, but I see now I was sending it to the wrong address. It looked like you wrote down “VerastarS” instead of “Verastar5”. Now, I am a bit worried what VerastarS thinks about me.

  You sound like you are happy to be back, yes? I wish I could say the same for me, but that is not the case. I miss La Palabras terribly, and most of all I miss you. I couldn’t tell from your email if you feel the same. You sounded different. I wish to talk to you, hear your voice. My English is slipping away fast. I look up to the sky and I can’t see the stars from the city.

  Let me know if you ever want to talk on the phone. Give me a time and I will call you. I believe I am eight hours ahead of you, but I don’t sleep much without you anyway.

  Love,

  Mateo

  (The man you had siestas with in Spain)

  I thought I was going to die from happiness. Relief pulsed hot in my veins and I was filled with this drug-like sense of euphoria. I read the email again and again, making sure it was true, it was real, I wasn’t missing anything. Each time, I grew happier.

  Mateo had been trying to reach me but my chicken scratch handwriting led him astray. Oh god, I can’t believe he thought I was ignoring him. And then my actual email was so cool and professional compared to his. Ugh, I felt like such an asshole.

  He didn’t sleep much without me. If I could hug my phone to my chest and dance around my room like a Disney heroine, I would. Okay, maybe I just did.

  After I was done with my pathetic twirling, I quickly wrote him back. I calculated it being about four in the morning where he was and reminded myself not to expect anything back from him right away. I told him he could call me tomorrow morning after eight my time, which would make it around four his time, perfect for after work. Or, if he was really ambitious, he could call me tonight—I was staying up late.

  I really hoped he was feeling ambitious. If he woke up around six o’clock, that meant he could phone me in as little as two hours from now.

  Not sure what to do with myself, I grabbed a bottle of wine from my mom’s collection, took it in my room, and opened it. I put on what I knew to be two of his favorite albums, Paul Simon’s Graceland followed by Still Crazy After All These Years and just danced and danced and acted like a lovesick fool. At some point Josh knocked on the door, concerned that I was having a party in my room and he wasn’t invited. From the look he gave me, I could tell he thought about bringing the white coats to take me away.

  By the time midnight rolled around, I was getting kind of depressed. Maybe it was the whole bottle of wine at the bottom of my stomach. I tried to be optimistic, knowing that at least he’d try and call me tomorrow, and it was just as I was getting into bed that the phone rang.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  An extremely long and alien looking phone number flashed on my call display.

  I stared at it fo
r a few beats before I bit the bullet and answered it.

  I hoped I’d sound cool.

  “Hello?” I croaked. “Vera speaking?”

  “Vera,” Mateo’s rich, beautiful voice came through the line.

  It was enough for my breath to hitch. Tears teased at my eyes, tingled my nose.

  “Mateo,” I said breathlessly.

  “Hi,” he said, sounding so warm, so close, despite our voices being bounced around the earth. “Sorry, am I too late to call you?”

  It was funny, his fluency had slipped up a little bit.

  “No, not at all,” I said. “I was up.”

  “Oh, good.”

  A thick silence filled the air and I found myself smiling to myself, unsure of what to say next.

  “Do you know what this reminds me of?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “When we did our business calls, back at Las Palabras.”

  I laughed lightly. “Well, sorta. We don’t have to follow any scripts.”

  “No, but I do have questions for you.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes. What are you wearing?”

  I chuckled. “What, are you serious?”

  He laughed. “Yes, but I’ll ask my other questions first.” I heard him sigh and his voice became lower, softer. “How are you, really? It is so good to hear your voice, to hear Vera.”

  Yup, I was still a sucker for the way he said my name. My lady bits tingled in response; they’d been deprived for too many days.

  “It’s good to hear you, too,” I told him. “I’m okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  “The only thing okay about me is the fact that you called…otherwise…” I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to admit to him, that I’d been nothing but lost and lonely since coming back from Spain.

  “If it helps, I am not okay,” he said. He was trying to keep his voice light but I could hear the gravity in it. Somewhere on his end, a car honked its horn. I imagined the city streets of Madrid filled with sunshine.

  “It doesn’t help but yet it does,” I admitted.

  I could almost hear him smile. “I understand. I…I don’t know. Things are not the same anymore. I feel like a foreigner in my own city, in my own house. I stare at Isabel and I can’t seem to understand what she’s saying. I go do my job and I feel like I quit a long time ago. The people on the streets, they aren’t familiar. The only constant is Chloe Ann. She stays still while the whole world spins.”

  I bit my lip. “I thought I was feeling that way because I came back to a different country.”

  “I think Las Palabras was a different country. And you and I, well, I told you I wanted a new universe. Yet, here I am back in the old one. I know I have…changed, I suppose, in some ways, and I’m not too sure if I want to go back to the person I was.”

  I exhaled, my heart melting with my breath. “That’s exactly how I feel.”

  “Then, I am sorry for both of us.”

  We fell quiet. It wasn’t awkward now. It felt comfortable, natural, just to hear each other breathing, to know we were alive. I heard what sounded like a bus zoom by.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “I am walking down Calle Toledo,” he said, not sounding out of breath at all.

  “How is your knee?”

  “Better,” he said. “Hurts in the morning, but that is all. As long as I stay away from the ball, I should be okay.” He sounded a bit dejected, as if playing soccer again had factored into his plans. I remembered how joyous he looked on the field, how confident and in control. He couldn’t have gotten that same feeling from co-owning a restaurant. Though we never talked about it, Mateo didn’t seem the slightest bit passionate about food or cuisine, aside from telling me what tasted like shit and what didn’t taste as much like shit.

  “Are you coming from the office?”

  ‘Si,” he said. “I’ve been spending a lot of time at work. I think my partner thinks I’m a bit crazy. I told him I was trying to make up for lost time. It’s just a tiny room in a building downtown, and I know he wants me to go work from home. But, I just can’t.”

  “Why?” I asked, though I had an inkling.

  “Because Isabel is there,” he said. “And I can’t stand to look at her.”

  My chest squeezed and I tried to take a deep breath. “Are you going to tell her?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It is the right thing to do, yes? I just need…more time. To think.”

  “About what?”

  “About my new universe. I’ve never been one to jump into things without thinking it through. Even with you, I spent a month weighing the pros and cons.”

  This was something new to me. “I see.”

  “There were only two cons.”

  I nodded to myself—I knew what they were. “Do you think she knows?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Things have been distant between us for a very long time. She goes out a lot to parties. Usually I go, but I have turned her down the other night. She didn’t like that. But no, I don’t think she suspects anything.”

  I don’t think she suspects anything.

  Shit just got real.

  “Vera?”

  “Yeah?” I whispered, feeling out of breath. “Sorry.”

  “Is it getting too much?”

  I rubbed my lips together. “Yes.”

  “Don’t feel bad,” he said. “You are not the one married.” He sighed, silence wrapping the line for a few beats. “We are both adults. If I could have chosen it any other way, I would have. But…I love you. And I don’t want to deny myself, or yourself, of that, no matter how selfish that might be.”

  “I know,” I said as the self-loathing tried to sink its dirty claws into me. He loved me. How could something so beautiful making me feel so ashamed?

  “You are still my Estrella,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” I was. And like the stars, I was unreachable, untouchable, oh so far away.

  At least, I thought.

  “Vera,” he said. Sometimes I think he just liked to say my name for fun, letting it roll off his tongue. “When can I see you again?”

  I nearly laughed. He said it as if we’d had our first date and were planning the next. “Mateo,” I said. “That’s not funny.”

  “I am not trying to be funny. I’m serious.”

  I had no idea what to say to that.

  “How about next month?”

  “As in August?” I asked, completely confused.

  “Yes,” he said. “You have some time before school starts, don’t you?”

  “With what money?”

  “I will fly you here.”

  “And where the hell would I stay?”

  “You don’t need to get upset, Vera.”

  “Well, I kind of am upset!” I said. “You’re being a tease.”

  “I am not being a tease,” he said, his voice gruff. “I told you I was serious and I am. Do you not take me at my word?”

  “And where would I stay?” I repeated. “In your house?”

  “I would get you a hotel room.”

  I laughed at the sincerity in his voice. “A hotel room. Perfect.”

  “I do not understand…”

  “I will not be your mistress, Mateo!” I shouted into the phone. “I’m not going to fly to Spain for a month and stay hidden in a hotel while you continuously cheat on your wife.”

  “But in Las Palabras…”

  “That was a different animal and you know it,” I maintained heatedly. “We knew better. What we did was wrong. What we did, I am sure will come back to haunt us in the end. But, please, I cannot willingly go and be your mistress. I can’t let you keep me hidden while you pretend to have this other life at the same time. I won’t do it.”

  And now is when the silence felt awkward, but my heart was beating so loudly, the blood in my head so hot, that I barely noticed it. So much time passed that I thought he hung up on me until
I heard a bird chirping in the background.

  Finally he said softly, “I am sorry, Vera. Very sorry. You’re right, about all of it. I guess…I’m not thinking properly. No, I’m not at all. It is just that I am so…blind, without you. I just want to feel like I did before. I’m desperate for you and I’m not making the right decisions. I am being a total asshole. Forgive me, please.”

  Ugh. I put my hand on my chest, pressing down. He sounded so fucking lost; he wasn’t like the Mateo I had known. Then again, I wasn’t the Vera I had known either.

  “It’s okay,” I tried to reassure him. “I forgive you. I just don’t know what to do either.”

  “I guess the only thing to do is….keep talking?”

  I leaned over and turned out the light, settling back under the covers. “I would love that.”

  “So,” he said after a pause. “What are you wearing?”

  “Vete a la mierda,” I swore at him in my best Spanish accent.

  “Go to the shit,” he commented happily. “I like that. I like your pronunciation, it is pretty good. How about saying it this way…”

  And so, a week after Las Palabras, Mateo taught me how to swear properly in Spanish until five in the morning, when the stars in the sky started to fade.

  Chapter 20

  Compared to the previous month, the month of July crawled by at a sloth’s pace. In some ways this was good since every day that passed was a day that took me further and further from the Spain version of Vera. It made the memories harder to recreate in detail, it made me forget conversations, forget myself. Every day brought me closer and closer to becoming the old Vera Miles, the one I didn’t want to go back to, so the slower the month went, the better it was.

  There was only one thing that kept me going throughout the days, and that was Mateo. Sure, I was enjoying the summer weather and the gorgeous beaches now that the rain had let up. I had gone to Calgary to see my father and Jude, and that was a nice little escape where my dad still spoiled me rotten. I got my job at Waves Coffee back, only I couldn’t get full-time, so I just picked up shifts when I could. I even briefly saw Jocelyn when she came to town, which ended up in a night of debauchery on Granville Street and me in tears because I’d had too much to drink. I couldn’t blame her for hurrying back to Saskatchewan after that.