I thought of Hector, but the image that came into my head was of Abril. She looked angry, talking on the phone while putting things inside an envelope, maybe a letter. That got me to my feet and pacing, eyes wide open. What if Olivia found my letter and killed Hector because of it? And what if after, she gave it to the police to deflect attention from herself? After all, he’d died mere yards from her front door too.
Giving the police the letter would bring her revenge full circle, wouldn’t it? God, what was I thinking? Sure, she was weird, but I couldn’t imagine Olivia killing. Then again, neither could I imagine anyone else having done it, and he was with her when he died. He had to have been because he sure hadn’t been with me.
At the thought, my heart began beating furiously. Was it a supernatural sign that Olivia was indeed involved? Or was I just imagining things? I mean, they’d been married for years and she hadn’t killed him before. Why now? Then again, I had to admit cheating with a woman who lived right downstairs seemed to me like a perfectly plausible reason for killing a man. Hell, I’d wanted to kill him just for breaking up with me on the eve of my birthday. And why else would she have killed him last night of all nights? It had to be because of the letter! That was the reason for that awful dream. I was responsible for his death because she had found the letter and done something about it. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
When someone dies, taken from you forever, the pain is bearable only if you can transform it into an insatiable appetite for knowing everything. How he died, where he was, what he said, and to whom he said it. You rethink every second and its possibilities, like a sleuth in a detective novel going over odds and likelihoods, time lines and probabilities, rummaging through the wreckage of the mind for the one detail with the potential to hold the story of what happened, the key to everything, within it.
I was no murder detective, but a few things were clear to me that Saturday evening, sitting in that red armchair watching day turn into night, my own birthday forgotten:
First, Hector was really dead. I couldn’t do anything to bring him back. No one could. Second, there was a very good possibility that he had not died of natural causes, given that he was in much better health than most men his age, which either meant that his wife had found out about our affair and had somehow ended his life, or that Coffee Park wasn’t nearly as safe as I’d imagined. Third, even this second scenario, that someone had tried to rob him and killed him in the process, made little sense. While he was not a rich man, Hector was a pragmatic one. If someone had asked for his wallet or for the gold pinkie ring he always wore in memory of his mother, he would have handed both over with a sardonic smile. They wouldn’t have needed to kill him or even hit him. And if he were in the park, that meant he’d been nowhere near his Saab, which he kept parked in front of my building unless he needed to go beyond his walking range of fifteen blocks. Carjacking wasn’t even a possibility.
Then there were the things I couldn’t figure out, but needed to. Like, why had he gone to the park on a rainy night? And why hadn’t his body been found on our side of the square? Oh my God, of course: He was meeting someone! (A hit man for his business rival Mitch Kaplan? It was ridiculous, of course, but I smiled thinking this was just the kind of thing Hector would have said to make me laugh if he’d been sitting next to me right then. He’d have said, “If we’re going to play this game, let’s play it well. Where’s that collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories I gave you? Best example of detecting you’ll ever find is right on your shelf ! ”)
That he’d been meeting someone was just an unsupported theory, but what I knew for sure was that if I could somehow find out why Hector had gone to the park, I’d be much closer to knowing how and why he died.
Another unresolved issue was that there was a letter, the one he’d taken, in the hands of God knew who. A mocking little letter that first one had been, clearly proving that I’d been having an affair with him and that things were not ending well between us. (This thought filled me with a terrible unease. Not only was it possible that I’d be exposed as his lover, but if that letter came to light, what was there to keep the police from thinking I’d had a reason to want him dead?) Thankfully, the other one, the nicer and blander “I wish you well” letter, was in my trash, where I’d thrown it after our fight.
I thought of the officer who interviewed me. Had it been my imagination or had he been all too willing to believe any one of us was guilty of hiding something? What would he think if he knew about the last time I’d seen or spoken to the “disease-t,” and what, exactly, we’d talked about? (He’d scowled when I answered his probing with a slow shake of my head and an, “Mmmmm, you know? I really couldn’t say, exactly.”)
Which was a big fat lie, of course. I remembered every word of my last conversation with Hector. Wait! The trash. I couldn’t leave the letter I’d thrown out there, where the police might search. I raced to the back door, wanting to keep the letter from others, but also hoping to touch one of the last things he’d touched, written on, to save it where I could use it to remember.
Except that the lid on my blue recycling bin was open, as if someone had rifled through it, the neat stack of old Siempre Mujer magazines I kept around for my clients scattered below and above the plastic milk jugs and water bottles. Could it have been the police? Who else would want to search through my trash? And where the hell were those damn letters—the one he’d taken and the one I’d thrown out?
As dusk began to settle in, I went from sad to frantic, visions of being whisked away to jail piercing my brain so intensely that I froze when I heard the knock coming from the other end of my apartment. Slowly, I went inside, closed the kitchen door, and walked to the living room to look through the peephole, convinced that the obnoxious policeman would be on the other side of my front door, holding the letter I had not found, ready to torture me with more questions and demanding to know why I’d concealed the true nature of my relationship with his victim.
But it was only Gustavo.
“Just heard,” he said. Then, “What are you doing? Turn on some lights. You’re spooking me.”
I tried to muster a smile to serve as a reply, but nothing came. I switched on the lights.
“I can’t believe it,” he went on. “What happened? Do you know? How bad did it look? Even Abril fainted when she heard that he might have been killed. Oh, and Iris, she won’t even talk about it in front of Henry, says he was pretty shook up when he heard.”
“Is Abril all right?”
“She’s fine. At least that’s what she said when I helped her up to her apartment, just before she slammed the door in my face,” he said, shaking his head, his face a frustrated scowl. “It’s fine if she doesn’t want to talk to me, but I’m worried about Henry.”
“He’ll be okay,” I said.
“Notice Ellie picked up all her stuff?”
“She did?”
“Yeah. Just now on my way in I picked up some trash the crowd left in front of the building and took it around the side to throw out. Her stuff isn’t there.”
I’d been so distraught looking for the letter that I hadn’t even noticed.
“I’m going to guess she didn’t pay you?” said Gustavo.
“I didn’t even see her. But that’s not strange with all the people around here. You should’ve seen it, Gustavo. It was a circus.”
Where was that damn letter?
“Well, at least she’s gone, huh? But look, I just wanted to see if you were all right.”
“I’m fine. It’s fine,” I said, feeling uncomfortable, as if I were usurping Olivia’s condolences and realizing that mistresses not only have to love in secret, they have to mourn in secret too.
“You know, I’m sorry I gave you a hard time this morning. About what you said.”
“What did I say?
“About Jorge?”
“Oh. Don’t worry about it.”
“You still want to say hello?”
This morning and what I’d wanted then a
lready felt a few lives removed.
“Sure, of course.”
Of course. Right after I found the stupid letter I’d thrown away, and figured out a way to find the one Hector had taken before anyone read it and guessed I was M.E.
“Just hello, right?” said Gustavo. “I mean, two tenants lost in one week. I figure you could use a friend.”
I nodded absently, unable to concentrate on what Gustavo was saying because an idea had sprung in my head: There was something Jorge, and only Jorge, and his godmother, could help me with, being the only man in the world who knew my secret, and the only person I knew who could take me where I could get the answers I now wanted (No! Needed.) and trust that they’d be true.
“You know, Gustavo? You’re right. I would like to see Jorge again.”
“That’s all I’ve been saying,” he said as if I’d just confessed to the crime he knew all along I’d committed. “All right, I’ll see what I can do. Right now, I’m going to make myself something to eat. Knock if you need anything, okay?”
I nodded and watched him until after he’d waved good-bye, his usually smiling mouth sad and elongated, as if his chin weighed so much it were pulling everything down. I kept watching him even after he’d turned to fish his keys out of his pocket, thinking about this old building of mine and how it would have to hold, comfort, and protect the three heartbroken souls that had somehow found their way to it and were taking refuge, alone yet together, under its roof that night.
Chapter 16
After Gustavo left, I closed the door behind me and leaned on it, once more turning off the lights, closing my eyes, and bracing myself for what lay ahead: a long night of thinking about all the death I hadn’t seen coming in this lifetime.
Then..
“Don’t be afraid.”
I heard it. Or maybe I just felt it. Imagined it?
Hector had said, “Don’t be afraid,” or rather “eh-freid.”
I stood, frozen in place. (Had it worked after all?)
“Hector?” I whispered.
But all was silent, and suddenly, I was afraid. Afraid of talking, moving, or even breathing.
God! I told you I was a horrible clairvoyant. When was the last time you heard of a clairvoyant scared of dead people? I slithered to the floor, listening for the longest time, until I gathered enough courage to get up and turn on the lights again. Had I really heard him?
“Hector? That you?” I whispered again, looking around me, afraid of what I might see and terrified of getting an answer. I was also afraid of not getting one because I knew me and I wouldn’t be able to breathe normally until I knew exactly what had happened to him and why. I had to see or hear him again, even if just once more. I had to know that he had gone peacefully to wherever it was he had gone to, to fight the notion of never, to say good-bye.
This need was so strong, it sent me crashing into the foyer closet as if propelled, opening old suitcases and boxes, almost emptying the entire space of its contents before I found what I was looking for: my great-great-grandmother’s journal of clairvoyance.
“I give up!” I said to it out loud, when I held it in my hands. “I give up, okay. Here I am, but I can’t do it alone.” I continued in a high-pitched quivering voice, declaring my intention of “turning on” my clairvoyance again and hoping it was like riding a bike, or like sex, something you never really forgot how to do, despite my failed attempts so far.
The journal was just a tattered old book, with none of the dignified air of family heirlooms, no faint smell of long-ago mystery, no sign of the sweetness of the sea air that misted the island where it was written and where the roots of my roots still lay, sewn by nature and draped around the trunk of a jagüey tree like an old woman’s shawl.
On the first page that wasn’t torn, or too faded to read, “Do not be afraid” appeared like the echo of my ghost’s thought in the form of my great-great-grandmother’s dainty handwriting.
The dead are living and the living are dead. Without the body to tend to, we express with transparency. Sound might be guttural or whispered, touch as heavy as shame, or so light as to seem imagined. Taste and smell are gone, and sight is compromised. Only their own desire to speak can bring them forth, so you, the clairvoyant, must use this. You must understand that the image you see is the one you remember, or the one conveyed to you, consciously or not, by the person you’re reading for. You are not seeing with your eyes. You are seeing with the eyes of the love that remains. The love of the living, and the desire of the dead. Use them to bring the dead angel in transition forward.
Angel in transition? Hector? I would’ve laughed out loud if I hadn’t been so damn frightened. But I was. I was run-out-of-and-back-into- apartamento-uno-screaming afraid. Makinga-cross-with-my-two-index-fingers-and-walking-around-reci ting-the-Holy-Father-prayer-over-and-over-again afraid.
So. Clairvoyance was like riding a bike.
And I’d just remembered how I’d almost broken my every limb the last time I rode it.
How all it had ever left me was death. And now it was doing it again. Not that Hector could ever be as important to me as my mother, but another person close to me had died, and I hadn’t had a clue.
I opened the journal again. “Use what you have at hand. Everything is a vehicle for messages if you decide it is.” But what did I have besides a dead ex-lover and the risk of being implicated in his death? I asked myself, looking around the room at my red corduroy armchair, my books, and my handmade collage of fashion photos on the wall, Coco Chanel’s red lips appearing to approve of a wet Kate Moss, lifting herself up and out of a pool in a black-and-white polka dot dress, like a mermaid in black boots.
What did I have besides this old book I now held, within its pages the memories of my great-great-grandmother, writing in it so carefully, of my grandmother Ana Cecilia talking to the dead in her kitchen, of my mother always feeling like less because she couldn’t see the future, and of myself, now possibly holding in my hands the answer to becoming who I was meant to be all along?
I stood up and headed for the armchair, still unsure that the book would be able to undo what years of neglect had done to my clairvoyance, but convinced that I had to try again if I was ever going to find out how Hector died and why.
Chapter 17
“He used to say my breath smelled of apples, you know,” Olivia said as she poured scalding hot water into two mismatched china teacups with the most stable and precise of pulses.
She was standing next to the coffee table where she’d set the cups, so that the sound the water made while falling with precision from so many inches above its target resembled a steaming, rushing waterfall that unnerved me.
I’d spent the last two days since Hector’s death holed up in my apartment, reading and rereading my great-great-grandmother’s journal, gathering the strength to come see Olivia, to put compassion before shame, and worry before fear. Compassion because I knew what it was like to lose the person your life revolved around. Shame that I didn’t have the dignity and the good sense to stay away from her like a good mistress, instead coming to give her my condolences on the loss of the very man I’d been nibbling from, behind her back, for months. Afraid she’d found the letter and knew everything, and too worried about the possible consequences to let pass the chance to know if she had.
“Yes?” she’d answered, wearing black ballet flats and a gray shift, the curled tendrils and ringlets I’d mocked, gone, her hair now parted in the middle and held within a tight bun at the nape of her neck. She looked younger, despite the brown-gray raccoon circles around her eyes betraying her lack of sleep.
“Sorry to disturb you. I just wanted to give you my condolences. To tell you I’m sorry . . . for your loss. Please let me know if you need anything. If I can be of help,” I finished, checking with myself to see if I’d gotten through all the sentences I’d rehearsed before coming up.
“You’re sorry.”
She knew.
“Of course,” I said, m
y heart beating violently.
She sighed as if relieved.
“You’re the first person to come up. Won’t you come in?”
She didn’t know, I realized, following her inside the apartment.
When she excused herself to go boil some water for the tea, I started inspecting everything in the apartment. It was a little crowded and obviously furnished with things bought for a much bigger house, little tables and chairs discreetly tucked and blended into nooks and corners everywhere like the pieces of an ill-fitting wardrobe someone had refused to part with. But, even with the clutter, the original wooden floors that looked scuffed and cheap in every other apartment in the building gleamed.
“Linseed oil,” she said then, as if I’d asked her about them, coming back into the living room with the teacups and napkins, then bustling back to the kitchen.
I looked around. Hector’s energy, his scent even, was so strong in that room, it was like a bomb’s expansive wave hitting me again and again and again.
“This is his little museum,” she said, shuffling back in with spoons and a porcelain bowl filled with coarse brown sugar. “He sits on his chair, puts on his headsets, and shuts it all out,” she continued, as unaware that she was talking about him in the present tense as she had to be about how seeing his things was affecting me.
When she started to head back toward the kitchen for who knows what, I thought I was home free. I needed those few seconds to blink back the tears threatening to undo me in front of her. But then she turned around as if she’d forgotten something.
“Please sit, wherever you feel most comfortable,” she said, and I could almost feel the knowledge of my affair with her husband hit her when she saw my face.
Shit. I turned away, focusing my gaze on the walnut bookcase that ran the length and width of the wall, every book, DVD, and vinyl record organized by genre and author.
The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho Page 12