“A rey muerto, rey puesto,” he said, which means something like “to a dead king, a king crowned,” and is often used to reproach the quick replacement of significant others.
“What’re you talking about? Don’t you leave without giving me an answer about Abril! Hector? Hector?”
“Don’t worry about meeee . . . is cahl-ming.”
Sure enough, someone knocked on the door, but this time, Hector told me exactly who it was before I opened it. I could no longer see him, but his voice dripped a mix of hopelessness and irony so thick it could’ve condensed into a cloud right there in my living room.
“Open the door, Merry Ella. Is your boyfriend.”
Chapter 25
Sure enough, there was Jorge when I opened the door, wearing dark green khakis and a loose-fitting screen-printed T-shirt that read: I DISAGREE WITH YOU, BUT I’M PRETTY SURE YOU’RE NOT HITLER.
“You went by the house!” he said in place of “hello.”
“Yep, and good thing I remembered the address because, otherwise, I wouldn’t have recognized it,” I said, waving him inside, my heart beating faster than when I realized Hector was still camping in my apartment.
“And? What’d you think?”
“What did I think? What did I think . . . mmm, let’s see—” I played, pretending I didn’t see that his face was all lit up in anticipation of what I’d finally say.
“Stop torturing me, woman, and tell me you loved it!” he said, taking me by the shoulders and mock shaking me.
“Torturing you? Ché, you have no idea what torturing is,” said Hector from wherever he’d faded to.
“Of course I did, you silly man. It’s beautiful,” I said to the guy with the pulse standing in the middle of my living room.
“It’s coming along, eh? I bought it right after—”
“You bought it? Wait? Is there a rich uncle I don’t know about?”
“The owners were going to lose it in the mortgage crisis, so I offered to buy it in a short sale. It was a good deal because it needed so much work.”
“That I remember,” I said.
“Whoooo is this guy?” said Hector.
“Wow, so you’re a homeowner now,” I said.
“Actually, I’m a restaurant owner. Can you believe the house has dual commercial and residential zoning? It’s because it’s so close to the Tower Theater.”
“Oh my God, that’s fantastic. I’m so happy for you,” I said, motioning for him to sit on the sofa, then sitting at my desk, so I’d be occupying the space between him and the windowsill behind me, which is where I’d last seen Hector sitting (floating?).
“I want to keep it feeling like a house, like you’re going to a friend’s home for dinner. So, every room will be a separate dining room with a different atmosphere, and . . .”
“Blah, blah-blah, blah-blah, blah-blah,” groused Hector.
“The porch will be one ambiance, the dining room another, the bedroom will look out onto the backyard and be more intimate, more romantic,” Jorge was saying.
“But where will you live?” I asked.
“That’s the beauty of it: I’m turning the detached garage into a great little tree-house apartment with a side entrance and a view of Calle Ocho.”
“Oooh, I could die, it’s so fan-taaaas-tic! Pero qué incredible, ché,” said Hector, loudly slurring his words, and even using Spanglish in protest, as if he were drunk instead of just dead to the world.
“Hoping to open by Halloween. You’ll have to come.”
“Of course! Oh, and thank you so much for the delicious food you sent last night. It was really amazing.”
“Yes, soooo dee-licious,” Hector said so close to my ear that I shot out of my seat as if my butt had been spanked into springing out like a jack-in-the-box’s.
“Thought you could use it. Gustavo told me, you know, about the police coming,” Jorge said, getting up and coming toward me as if to give me the bear hug that would finally do away with this new stiff civility, this nervous formality between us.
But when he touched me, I was so tense he had to step back, unaware that it was the sarcastic dead guy’s presence making me edgy and not the possibility of his touch.
“I’m really glad you came over,” I said, trying to erase the hurt look on his face.
“Really?” he asked. “I know I was a bit of a jerk the other day.”
“No, you weren’t. I understood. You needed closure.”
Jorge protested, but I couldn’t hear him because someone else was talking:
“Oh, for God’s sake, get a broom already,” griped Hector.
“You want some wine? Coffee?” I said, motioning him into the kitchen where I hoped Hector would have a bit of a hard time following us, and pouring him a glass of rioja.
Once in the kitchen, I got right to it, doing something I’d (stupidly) never done before in my relationships with men: speaking clearly upfront.
“Jorge, I am going to share what’s going on with me because I really need a friend.”
“I’m here.”
“Yes, but I need to know why.”
“Why what? Why I’m here?”
“Exactly. I need to know your motives, so no one gets hurt. So I don’t get hurt.”
He thought for a minute then started to laugh, shaking his head as if I were unbelievable.
“You really don’t know?”
I shook my head no, even as I heard Hector snorting and harrumphing from the living room that even he knew.
“You know, I’d been here over a decade by the time I met you, but I never felt I was here, never felt like I belonged, never wanted to do more than work just enough to send money to Cuba every month, have fun, live life. Even marrying Yuleidys was about proving to myself that I could settle down, live like normal people.”
“And you did.”
“And I did, but you’d changed me.”
“Don’t say that. We had an affair. It was not—”
“How do you know what it was not? I don’t,” he interrupted me. “Anyway, later, months later, I noticed the little changes. I noticed I wanted to do better, be better. I noticed I wanted to do all those things so I could come find you, show you.”
“You wanted to show me what I was missing, huh?” I said, making a joke, but feeling flattered in spite of myself.
“We have something, woman. You and me,” he said, smiling. “I don’t know what it is, but there’s something.”
“What you have is a wife.”
“Had.”
“He’s ly-iiiing!” wailed Hector from the living room.
“Have,” I said, afraid Jorge would prove Hector right and lie to me, ruining the good feeling I was starting to feel about him. “I just spoke to her today,” I said, pointing to the hammered gold wedding band he always wore now.
“This is my father’s wedding ring. He gave it to me before he died last Christmas.”
So he was the man I’d seen him cry over in my vision when Jorge had first come over last week.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“And the woman you saw today isn’t Yuleidys. Yuleidys went back three months after coming here.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“No, she didn’t like it here. Hated everything about it. The whole learning to drive thing, the learning English thing, the following rules she wasn’t used to thing, plus, she really missed her family, and, to top it off, it probably didn’t help to realize that she wasn’t really in love with me, and that I wasn’t really in love with her.”
“How horrible for you both,” I said, remembering how he’d tried to hide his excitement about her coming back then. “And what about all the money you saved to bring her?”
“To tell you the truth, I was so relieved when she decided to go, that I didn’t even care about the money. I knew almost right away that getting married and pulling her away from all she knew had been a big mistake. You know, Mariela, La Yuma isn’t for everybody.”
La Yuma. It had been so long since I’d heard the term. La Yuma is a mirage wearing an American dream costume. The only way to look at it is in reverse, as if through a mirror, it’s what los de alla (the ones over there) think coming over here is. Everyone wears designer jeans in La Yuma. They have huge houses, and cars, and even boats. They go on vacations and say whatever they want without consequences in La Yuma.
“No wonder you’ve grown up. More?” I asked, pouring him another glass of rioja when he nodded. “And so she left?”
“Yes, but by then I knew what made me happy: feeding people, having them over, watching them relax and enjoy themselves at my own place,” he said, swirling his wine before taking a swig.
“I do remember how much you liked to have people over. Still doing those crazy cook-ins at two in the morning? I could never understand how you guys could spend all night cooking at a restaurant, then get to the house of any one of you and cook for each other, with all that loud music, and pot, and wine, almost every night. I confess, that drove me crazy about you.”
“It was crazy, I’ll admit it. Maybe it was a phase. My new-immigrant-welcome-to-America phase. But then you broke up with me, and all I heard was your voice telling me how talented I was, and what a good cook I was, and how I could do anything I wanted to do, so, I decided to do something about it.”
“I’m impressed, but wait, so who was Miss Smarty-Pants at the house today?”
He looked at his feet as if he hadn’t heard me.
“You don’t have to say.”
“That’s Omayra. My . . . friend.”
“Your friend?”
“My friend. Ex. Girlfriend. Ex live-in ex-girlfriend, and now my finally moving-out girlfriend.”
“Ohhh.”
“She was almost done moving out when you came to the house. I left to give her space. How was I to know you’d go by? I thought you’d forgotten where it was, the way you stayed away all this time.”
“Well, you know, I imagined you were happily married. Didn’t want to intrude,” I said, realizing how much I’d cared about him, but also how much I’d wanted to believe happy marriages could exist.
Jorge placed his forearms on his knees, leaning toward me with wineglass still in hand, and smiled a wistful smile before saying, “I missed you, you know?”
“What you probably miss is your little girlfriend who just moved out. That’s what you miss,” I said, downing my wine and looking around for Hector, unable to keep from feeling how I was feeling, once again so close to Jorge. To a now unmarried Jorge sitting across from a woman who felt, for the first time in years, like she could really try to love an available man, this available man, for a change.
But Hector had apparently decided to be quiet now and stay in the living room, the denseness of his energy probably hard to move around.
“Nah, it was a long time coming. She’s a nice girl. Just not for me,” said Jorge.
“Right,” I said. “Still, glad to know you haven’t been lonely.”
“You were saying you needed a friend,” he said.
“I do,” I said, letting him change the subject.
“Okay?”
“I need to commit a small crime.”
“What?”
“I need to break into a neighbor’s apartment.”
“Why? What are you stealing?”
“Nothing. You remember Gustavo’s girlfriend, Abril?”
“Sure. Just saw her.”
“Where?”
“She was walking down the street with her son, just now. Why do you need to break into her apartment?”
“I think she might know something about Hector’s death.”
“Mariela, everything’s going to be okay. The police are going to come to the conclusion that you had nothing to do with it because it’s the truth.”
“And you’re that sure?”
“Of course. It’s not so easy to accuse someone of murder,” he said.
“No, I mean, you’re that sure that I didn’t do it.”
He looked straight into my eyes and said, “Never in a billion years.”
I could feel them now, the butterflies of possibility bringing Jorge closer to me and making me afraid in a good way.
“But,” he continued. “If you insist on breaking into her apartment, we’re going to have to hurry because it didn’t look like she was going to be out too long.”
Chapter 26
“Can I tell you just how much I wanted a remote-controlled car like this one when I was kid?” Jorge said, running his hand slowly over the top of one of Henry’s RCs, a dreamy look in his big brown eyes.
“No remote cars in Havana?”
“Woman, and here I thought you were Cuban! No, of course no remote-controlled toys in Havana, at least not for kids without family in exile with money to send one to them.”
“Okay, well, I promise to buy you one of those if you stand close to the door and be a good lookout like you promised.”
“I got you in, didn’t I?”
“That you did, and I thank you because I really didn’t want to take that key from Iris.”
We were inside Abril’s apartment, and as Jorge dutifully stood beside the front door with Henry’s car still in hand, I proceeded to look around for a diary, a letter, or a copy of any Gabriel García Márquez book with a sticker identifying it as having come from Del Tingo al Tango. I was also keeping an eye out for a belladonna plant or for leftover leaves, even though I knew Abril would never leave something with the ability to be even remotely dangerous lying around where Henry could find it.
I wanted to know if they’d been lovers. But more important, I felt, was finding proof of the depth of the relationship, if it existed. You see, if it had been a quick fling, then the only one with enough of a reason to kill him was Olivia. On the other hand, if the relationship had been long and intense, then maybe Abril had real motive. That said, I wondered exactly how intense a relationship can really be with a man who already has a wife he lives with and a mistress he sees regularly? And if it had been going on for a long time, how had I not known? Then again, maybe I hadn’t noticed in exactly the same way Olivia had failed to catch on about Hector and me. Maybe he’d just been that good of a liar. Or maybe, and a lot more likely, we’d all been that good at not seeing.
I did a mental inventory of things in my apartment that would be symbols of my relationship with Hector to someone who’d known him and scanned the living room for possible matches: a forgotten linen scarf, a classic novel, a blues jazz fusion CD.
Nothing. At first glance, Abril’s home was as unrevealing as Abril herself. The living room was sparsely decorated with a sofa, a couple of wooden rocking chairs that looked like inherited heirlooms belonging on a tropical balcony, a tube TV set, and three big plastic bins with Henry’s toys carefully sorted: one for cars and robots, another for games and puzzles, and what I guessed was the “everything else” bin with coloring books, crayons, and some old plush Beanie Babies that had obviously been smothered, kissed, cried into, hysterically thrown during tantrums over the years, and then rescued just in time to be preserved like honored members of the family, reminders for his grown-up self of who he really was, as reflected in who he’d really been.
Between the living room and the kitchen was a very small dining room with a square-shaped Formica table, three chairs, and a filing cabinet. I pulled at its top drawer, but it was locked, so I picked it with the errant bobby pin that manages to always be left behind in my hair. The drawer contained a few manila envelopes and a small pinkish-peach Capezio ballet flats shoe box full of papers: plane tickets, hospital records, and a copy of Henry’s birth certificate, as well as receipts for his baby formula, his clothes through the years, his orthopedic doctor bills, food, books, toys, glasses, immunizations, and a few school trip permission forms.
Among these, one receipt caught my attention. It was from a detective agency and identified the service rendered in a single word with capital let
ters: HENRY, as if he were a government agency and not a sweet boy with a smile so honest it could make you happy to be alive all by itself. Underneath his name, it read, CONTACT INFO RETRIEVAL.
I spread the contents of the box on the Formica tabletop and could almost see the invoices, corresponding receipts, and canceled checks drawing a southbound dotted line from New York City, where Henry was born, to his present life in Miami.
I opened one of the manila envelopes, and dozens of pictures of Henry fell out onto the table, almost covering the receipts. Together, pictures and receipts looked like the elements of a baby book someone had forgotten to make and made it clear to me that Abril had come back to Miami with the intention of bringing Henry’s father to justice, or at least to court, and had slowly and painstakingly prepared for the task, documenting her child’s life and the cost of the sacrifices she’d had to make along the way.
I wondered what Abril was really hoping to get from this man. Was it the child support owed her? Did she want a relationship with her son’s father? Or was she just trying to force him to hold Henry in his arms, teach him to throw a baseball, and call him “son”?
I began to put everything back as carefully as I could. How hard could it be to find a man? I thought looking at it all. That’s when it occurred to me that he was probably dead. It was the only way that all this paperwork wouldn’t have already led Abril to Henry’s father. Maybe he’d been rich and Abril was trying to build a posthumous case for Henry’s rightful inheritance or suing his estate for child support, which would explain all the receipts. Or maybe he was dead, but she didn’t know it yet. Maybe she’d have to wait until the next detective agency revealed it to her. The news would, of course, be delivered in the form of a receipt: Subject of search no longer at last known address. New address beyond this detective’s scope.
“You know, I think we should hurry,” said Jorge, opening the door a crack to peek out down the hall.
“I thought you said you saw her carrying a clothes hamper.”
The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho Page 21