Part of my job is, of course, helping people find information, so off to the history section I headed. I smoothed my hair as I went. I rounded the corner of the stacks and stopped. He sat at a table, its deep cherry hue gleaming like fine art in the morning light from the window. Several books were open in front of him, and he was copying something in a careful script on a pad of paper. His hair grew low on his forehead, and he had a full head of it combed straight back, dark and thick even though the lines on his face etched many years of living.
The air was quiet. The man stood and turned to the shelf on his left. His finger ran across the titles with the care of a connoisseur, as if he loved the sensation of the bindings more than the meanings of the words.
“May I help you?” My voice was loud in the stillness, and he turned quickly.
“Yes?” He bowed slightly and his eyebrows rose.
“I wondered if I could help you with anything.” Oh. He didn’t know who I was. “I’m the reference librarian.”
“Ah.” It was a soft, resonant voice. Our eyes linked together. He smiled at me, but his eyebrows, thick like his hair, drooped at their outside edges and his chocolate eyes did the same. “No, I have found what I need. But thank you.” His accent sounded familiar, with its non-English stresses and softening of consonants.
I nodded.
“You have a fine library. A good collection”
“Thank you. May I ask what you’re working on?”
He then showed me his interest: a book on genealogy, the old logs of fishing captains, a history of Gloucester. He explained that he was researching when some of his relatives had come to New England from Portugal—so I was right about that—and where they had lived in the area.
“I visited Portugal once,” I said as I looked out the window. It had been my first trip alone after James left this world nine years earlier, my first excursion after the trouble with that had blown over. “Here’s what I remember. I was inland in Belmonte, and the sun was intense. The hills were dry, covered with gray olive trees. Rocks pushed up out of the soil. But everyone was generous, they fed me, they wanted to practice their English.”
He nodded in understanding.
“Then I went to Porto on the coast. I ate mariscado and drank real port wine, not the sweet stuff you find here.”
“Yes, yes!” He shook his head in amazement. “I am from Porto!”
“You are?”
He nodded.
“I loved the market on the waterfront,” I said.
“Yes. My grandmother sold fish there. There is nothing like it here.”
“Then I went to the south. The blue and white tiles looked Arabic and the houses could have been Tunisian adobe. The beaches were empty, just beautiful. That’s what I remember.”
We stood there. We smiled at our separate memories, until a teenager slouched by. A tinny sound emitted from her earbuds and broke our bubble.
I cleared my throat. “How long have you been here?”
“We have been here for, let’s see, ten years.”
The “we” deposited a lead weight in my stomach.
“My son and his family, they are here too. But my wife is ill. She does not go out. So I work, and I do my studies here, and I play with my grandchildren.”
“I see.”
* * * *
Late that evening I sat on my porch with a glass of cognac. A breeze waved the scent of sweet peas past me like a letter from my childhood. Fernando Andrade was his name, he had told me, and then had asked me to join him in a coffee next door. When I told him mine was Eleanor, he called me Eleanora, in a musical five syllables, and I felt foreign and special. We talked over our coffees in the café for as long as I thought I could stretch my break. When he said he wanted to take me to eat mariscado in a Portuguese restaurant he knew in the next town, I didn’t ask why he didn’t have to be at home for dinner. We arranged to meet the following day.
After work the next afternoon, I changed my shoes and crossed over to the park, picking up the pace until I was at my power-walk speed. The air amid the greenery was mild. It smelled of summer: a strong, sweet flower, a distant sprinkler, the earth’s scent rising. I thought more about Fernando. I suddenly wanted to escape this life I had enclosed myself in: comfortable and unspeakably routine.
At home, I showered and then did not dress in my usual tailored clothes. As a sea breeze danced with the curtains, I put on a long maroon skirt and matching silk blouse. My hand was steady as I applied cologne to the backs of my ears, my wrists, my temples, and I could hear Mother saying, “Always put scent where you have a pulse.” I added a dab between my breasts for good measure, shaking my head at my foolishness. I pulled on tall leather boots from Lisbon, as old and comfortable as gloves and, parading in front of the mirror in my own private fashion show, I felt twenty-two, but my reflection showed a woman with silver hair on the path to old age.
“Well, you don’t look half bad, really,” I told my image, surprised at this feeling of anticipation. It had been a long time.
I was waiting on the porch when Fernando drove up in an older model Volvo, pristinely clean and maintained. He met me at the passenger door. When he turned to look at me, I saw raw red lines on one cheek.
“What happened?” I said, alarmed. They looked like scratches from something very sharp.
“Eleanora, it is my wife. She is schizophrenic, and became upset when I said I was leaving.” The pain was in his eyes again. “It is hard for her to stay on her medications. They are hard on her. She paces and sees demons. Sometimes she calls me the devil.”
“Oh. I didn’t know.” The delicious excitement I had felt about the outing agitated with fear of this new information.
He caught my eyes with his. “Don’t worry, she is with my daughter-in-law.”
I watched him and waited. I kept my hand at my side, and prevented it from stroking his other cheek.
He took a breath and let it out. “This has happened before, and it will happen again. Now, if you will come with me, it is time for dinner.”
At Casa do Mar, we ate small, pungent olives the color of night. We drank Dão wine. We feasted on mariscado’s succulent seafood, the tender squid in lulas guisadas, and paper-thin potato slices fried to a crisp. We didn’t only eat. He spoke to me of his years cutting stone, about his love for the permanence of gravestones. He said he would search for a pattern in the granite to match the deceased’s personality.
I told him about not being able to have babies, how I couldn’t bear to be around young children for many years. How, when I finally volunteered to help with the Girl Scouts in our town, I delighted in their energy and fresh approach to life.
We didn’t talk about his wife or James, about the near future or the current war. We rode the wave of the present as if the walls of the restaurant were the edges of the world and our only cares were here in front of us.
We ate slowly. We sipped our wine and asked for more. Finally the waiter cleared our plates. Fernando had joked with him in Portuguese throughout the evening, and now asked the waiter to bring something, but I didn’t understand what.
Two tiny cups of espresso appeared in front of us, and two small glasses of a clear liquid.
“Bica e bagaço!” He pronounced this with great satisfaction. “This is the finest coffee and our national liquor, bagaceiro. We finish all good meals this way.”
He took a sip of the coffee and lifted his glass to me. “Here’s to you, Eleanora.”
“And to you.”
A lilting Fado played in the background as the waiter set tables for the next day. We were the last diners to leave. Fernando pulled out my chair for me, and then offered me his arm. He smelled of smoke and wine and an old-world cologne, and the cloth of his shirt was smooth against muscle. Then, halfway to the door, his arms took mine and we were dancing. Slowly we moved to the melancholy Lusian folk song. I stood almost as tall as he, and when my cheek touched the wounds on his, he pulled me closer, and I felt like I�
�d been there all along.
* * * *
We began to see each other as often as we could. He cooked mariscado for me in my kitchen while I weeded my herb garden. He told me stories of his grandsons and I made him laugh with tales of my scouts. Once he told me that the only food his wife would eat now was Portuguese kale stew, which no one else in the family liked. We worked on his genealogy together and visited the former house of his great uncle down on the point. We drove north where we didn’t know anyone and walked on a beach arm in arm. We spent long hours in my bedroom, enjoying each other’s bodies and tracing the lines of our lives. We went dancing, although we drove into the city to do so.
“Are you happy, Eleanora?” he asked me one day as we sat in the garden at dusk. Iced tea cooled our hands. A gentle wind off the Atlantic swept the mosquitoes away.
I nodded. I didn’t tell him that at night, alone, I dreamed of freedom with him, of a future without his wife.
I asked him the same question.
“I am happy with you, my friend,” he said, clinking his glass with mine, but the pain never really left his eyes.
I saw them in late August near the medical building. She was gaunt and pale, with white streaks piercing her dark hair. A lit cigarette shook in her hand. Fernando looked grim. He held her elbow like he was trying to persuade her to go somewhere she didn’t want to go.
When I asked once why he didn’t place her in an institution where professionals could look after her, he told me, “It is my duty to care for her. I am her husband, after all.”
I looked sharply at him. “What about your duty to love? To me?”
He just shook his head and kissed my hand.
* * * *
On the last day of September, right before a fierce thunderstorm, he brought me an armful of red carnations. I watched him at my kitchen sink. In the darkening afternoon, he clipped the ends of the stems under running water and arranged each flower with care in a heavy glass vase. His stonecutter’s hands were as gentle with the blooms as they were when they touched me.
“I didn’t know men like you existed,” I said, addressing the compact strength of Fernando’s back.
He turned to me. “I am just me, not ‘men like me’,” he said. A tropical rain blew in and, as the gale beat the windows, we talked into the night. Our conversations sometimes now tasted bittersweet. We wove a cocoon of our passion and caring. We dared not look outside it.
* * * *
One day in late October Fernando did not show up for a date to go bicycling in the state park. He was always prompt, and called from his cell when he was to be late. I waited for an hour, and then went alone. I rode slowly on the path through brilliant leaves and the detritus of summer: sagging vines, ferns chilled into brittle tan ghosts, the treacherous red beauty of poison ivy. The light was slanting low as I rode home.
I couldn’t call him. I felt physically sick from worry and uncertainty. Had something happened to him? Had he fallen out of love with me? Was he just exhausted from leading a double life? I was as miserable as a teenager in my fretting, and as mad as one, too.
Walking home from work two days later I felt a hand on my shoulder as I passed the coffee shop.
“Elly.”
“Fernando!” I looked at him like he had been missing for a year. I couldn’t soak up enough of his skin, his thick hair, his sad eyes. “Where have you…”
He took my arm and said, “May I walk you home?”
I looked at him and nodded. As we walked, he was silent and gazed ahead of us, not at me. My heart began to feel a comradeship with the end of the season and the cold breath of winter.
We sat in the swing on my porch side by side until he finally spoke.
“I have decided to take your advice, Eleanora, and place my wife where she is safe.”
I felt the warmth from his arm against mine. We could finally make a life together, this man and I.
“I’m so glad, Fernando,” I said, reaching for his hand.
“Don’t be.” He shook his head. “I have found a residence for her. It is two days driving from here, and I will be living there with her.” His voice was of a gentle steel, but the edges of his mouth quavered. “We leave on Dia dos Mortos. On Saturday.”
“Why so far away?” I shivered. Sunlight, sparse in its autumn feebleness, lit up the blood-red blossoms of a chrysanthemum on the porch, but it didn’t warm me. “Why now?”
“I am sorry, Eleanora.” He put his arm around me and I leaned into his scent and his strength. I was sad to the bone and furious at once.
“Fernan,” I said after a long silence, turning my face to his. My heart raced. “You can’t leave me! I won’t let you.”
He stroked my cheek once, slowly, softly, then put his hand down. “I cannot help my life. I cannot abandon my obligations.”
I thought frantically. “Come by tomorrow. Please? Just one last time? I have the day off. We could…”
He put up a hand to stop me. “I will come in the afternoon. But only for a moment.”
I stared as he walked away.
* * * *
That night I couldn’t sleep. I tangled in my sheets, searching my crazed thoughts for some solution, some way to keep him with me. I wanted to cast my net over him and draw him toward me through the water of our lives, like an enchanted Azorean fisherwoman. Today was Wednesday. I couldn’t bear the thought that I would never see him again after tomorrow. I climbed out of bed and paced my house. My skin burned as if I were ill. I opened a window, but the north air chilled me and I slammed it shut. A full moon lit my garden, shimmering on the purple monkshood flowers and the dark red asters.
My heart rate slowed as I gazed outside. Maybe I could sleep now.
* * * *
Ghouls in spiderwebs leered at me as I walked into the Cape Ann Market when it opened at eight the next morning. I’d forgotten about Halloween. I tossed several bags of candy into my basket before picking up kale, onions, garlic, cilantro, and chicken stock. By ten o’clock my kitchen smelled like it was dinnertime, the air fragrant with sautéed alliums and greens. I went outside, pulled on gardening gloves, and filled a wheelbarrow with weeds and dead plants. I clipped a handful of leaves in the hardy section of my herb garden and added them to the stew.
The temperature dipped low with the sun as I sat on the porch swing in my parka that afternoon. The trick-or-treaters would need to wear PJs under their princess dresses and zombie costumes tonight. My eyes followed Fernando as he walked toward me, his head down.
We sat in silence. Fernando covered my hand with his. I looked into his sad eyes and squeezed.
“Here.” I stood and extended the handles of a small bag to him. “I made her some kale stew.”
Fernando grasped the bag. He rose, then embraced me. He made his way slowly down the steps.
“Até logo,” I called after him. I’ll see you soon.
He glanced back, shaking his head.
* * * *
I walked slowly through the cemetery late Saturday morning. Families sat in the cold on picnic cloths. A slender woman in black laid a mass of flowers on a grave then raised a glass of red wine to the headstone. Children played hide and seek. The sad All Soul’s Day festivities seemed to include almost the entire Portuguese community.
When I arrived home, I turned on the local news. Fernando’s picture flashed. My hand covered my mouth of its own accord. My ears throbbed. My feet felt numb. I leaned toward the screen.
“Local authorities are investigating the suspicious death of area man, Fernando Andrade.” The young newscaster looked into the camera and shook his head, eyebrows knit in TV sincerity. “We talked to his son, George.” The image switched to a tall man with Fernando’s hair and sad eyes. “We can’t think who would want to hurt him. My father was a good man, a husband, a father, a grandfather. He was about to move with my mother, who’s mentally ill, to a residence where she could receive the care she needs.” The camera switched back to the newsman. “Police are
looking into the origins of a soup that was apparently a gift to the family, and say they have identified a person of interest.”
The thin wail of a siren grew louder. I left the television and walked out back to sit by the stone Buddha that watched over my garden. I felt my cell phone in my pocket. The phone Fernando had called me on. My heart was an icy stone that chilled me from the inside out. He said he didn’t eat kale stew. As sirens grew near, I wondered what kind of granite would suit the personality of Fernando Andrade.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Gloria Alden’s short story “Cheating on Your Husband Can Get You Killed” won the Love is Murder contest and was in Crimespree Magazine. Her short story “The Professor’s Books” appeared in the Fish Tales anthology. Her first book, The Blue Rose will be published this year. Website: www.gloriaalden.com Blog: www.writerswhokill.blogspot.com
Mysti Berry has won awards for her fiction, screenplays, and technical writing. She earned an MFA from University of San Francisco and a Linguistics degree from UCSC. Mysti lives in San Francisco with her husband and is hard at work on her first crime novel.
Betsy Bitner hopes to write a full-length mystery some day. Unfortunately, she’s a slow runner, a slow reader and often slow on the uptake, so it’s no surprise that she’s also a slow writer. But she is a humor columnist and blogger. You can find her at www.betsybitner.comand www.lostintheadirondacks.com.
Warren Bull, a multiple award-winning author, was nominated for a 2012 Derringer award. He has more than forty short stories published. His novels Abraham Lincoln for the Defense, Heartland, Murder in the Moonlight available at http://www.warrenbull.com/kindle_editions.html and a short story collection, Murder Manhattan Style available at http://www.warrenbull.com/
Michelle Markey Butler holds a doctorate in English Literature specializing in direct address in medieval drama. She is the author of several academic articles as well as short stories, and is working on a handful of novels. After twenty-some years in Pittsburgh, she recently moved to Maryland, to which, curiously enough, her ancestors were transported from Ireland in 1688.
Fish Nets: The Second Guppy Anthology Page 23