When Tito Loved Clara

by Jon Michaud

  “You don't even know what you're saying. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.”

  “Tell me about him,” said Thomas. “Tell me anything you want. I had no idea he was that important to you.”

  “It's too late, Thomas. Way too late for that.”

  “Clara. It was just one mistake. I made one mistake.”

  “How many times did you sleep with her? Did you sleep with her only once?”

  “No.”

  “Then you made more than just one mistake, Thomas.”

  His tone finally changed. “Do you think you are ever going to be able to forgive me, Clara?”

  “Right now, I'm not in a position to forgive you anything. I've got to forgive myself for a few things first. That's why I could really use my husband at my side.”

  “I'm sorry,” he said. “It was over before you even learned about it—the day I came back from D.C.”

  “So you were with her!”

  “In New York, not in Washington. I broke it off with her as soon as I got back.”

  “Good for you,” she said sarcastically, not believing him for a moment. How did she know he wasn't actually in that woman's house right now?

  “Tell me what to do, Clara. What should I do? Is our marriage over? Should I give up on us? Do I need to find somewhere else to live?”

  “I can only answer your last question,” she said. “You need to find somewhere else to live.”

  That was how she'd left it before her trip to the Dominican Republic, and during her time away from New Jersey she had not been able to convince herself—nor had she allowed herself to be convinced by her mother—that she should take him back. As far as she could see, there were two reasons to reconcile: her desire to have a second child and her need for help in raising the first. Shining Star had her husband's sperm stored in one of their freezers, which took care of the first reason. She wasn't sure yet what to do about Guillermo. Certainly she would not prevent him from seeing his father, but beyond that, she was unwilling to forgive Thomas. She was done being nice.

  THE DAYS AT La Isabela were long. It was only her second trip back since she had graduated from college and her first since Guillermo was a baby. It was overdue. If she had waited much longer, her family would have written her off as a gringa, an Americanita: too good to remember where she had come from. She and Guillermo had flown in on New Year's Eve, and today, Three Kings' Day, was the last of their visit.

  Her mother's house was the center of the action, and within the house, the kitchen was the hub. It was just as she had imagined it on that afternoon when she'd spoken to her mother—when she'd learned that Yunis was coming back to New York. On a given day there might be half a dozen aunts and female cousins in there, laughing and talking. They came in—rubbing their eyes and stretching—to drink coffee and eat breakfast and talk and capture Gilly, who spent his time playing hide-and-seek and tag and watching Spanish-dubbed Disney movies on the DVD player in the living room, the language barrier no barrier for him. Periodically, he would come bombing back into the kitchen to drink a glass of juice or snatch a handful of potato chips. On this final morning, after the kisses and hugs of welcome, he was led into the living room, where there was still straw on the floor (left there the night before for the Kings' camels) and a clutch of small, wrapped packages. Gilly leapt upon them with delight, liberating them from their papers. They were cheap, well-intentioned gifts from her family: a paddle-and-ball game with an elastic that broke on its third use, a Hot Wheels knockoff, and a T-shirt that said SANTO DOMINGO. The paltriness of the gifts did not diminish his exultation as he touted every one around the room. Within five minutes, he'd run off with his cousins to play in the fields.

  Deysei came into the kitchen from her bedroom. Every time Clara saw her during the visit she had the same thought: It was all for the best. Deysei was tanned and slimmed down. In the tropical heat, she had dispatched her cornrows, overalls, and hoodies for cropped hair ironed flat once a week by her abuela, knee-length skirts and shorts and tank tops. Once the doctors had determined that the fetus would not survive, the birth had been induced and the baby delivered. Clara had spent the next few days trying to broker some kind of detente between her sister and niece, but every interaction ended up with shouting and tears. Finally, Yunis had been convinced to move back to Inwood, essentially to sublet her own sublet. Clara, without her husband at hand to help her manage a rambunctious kindergartner and a despondent high-school junior while also tending to her own problems, decided that drastic action was needed. She bought a ticket for Deysei to go to the Dominican Republic and live with her abuela. She simply resigned herself to the fact that she would always end up paying the tab on her family's screw-ups and brought out her credit card.

  What a crazy time it had been, she thought now, as she sat across the kitchen table from her niece. She could hardly believe she had come through it. In some ways, it had made her realize that the difficulties of the preceding year—Thomas losing his job and her own lost pregnancy—had been, relatively speaking, not so bad. Things could always get worse. She'd known that once but had forgotten it.

  Deysei had settled down and enrolled in a bilingual private school in Santo Domingo. One of her uncles ferried her to and fro every day on his commute into the capital. The school was strict. There was a dress code, a hair code, and a ban on iPods, video games, and cell phones. Deysei had resisted at first, but with surprising alacrity, she had entered the life of the school and surrendered her old habits. The benefits were evident. Her Spanish was much improved, she no longer slouched, her grades were good, and she had stopped talking about Raúl. During the week she was in La Isabela, Clara helped Deysei fill out her college applications, proofread her admissions essays, and went over the packages of information about scholar-ships and financial aid. There was a good chance of her getting most of her tuition waived at one of the SUNY schools—Purchase or Stony Brook.

  The other person who had settled down since Deysei's arrival was Clara's mother. Given a charge to manage, to fret over, to feed, she had risen to the occasion, providing stability and encouragement to her granddaughter. Somehow the extra generation that separated them allowed Clara's mother to parent fairly and Deysei to accord the proper respect to her grandmother. Perhaps it was also the more traditional society of the Dominican Republic asserting itself. During the week of their visit, Clara's mother was in full matriarch mode, orchestrating the preparation of food, catching Clara up on the familial gossip, giving her unsolicited advice on child rearing and sexual practices. Retirement had made her less severe if no less obstinate in the way she controlled things. Her mother had been planning to honor their visit by slaughtering and roasting a pig, but there had been no water for two days and so they had not been able to clean the animal. Like the presidential turkey, it had been given a holiday reprieve and was that morning cavorting in the mud in the pen behind her uncle's house. An array of other sundries were being prepared—less imposing in their presentation than a pig on a spit, but no less delicious. Her mother had brought in bottles of wine—an exorbitant gesture in the land of beer and rum. It was a gesture Clara would pay for indirectly with the check she would give her mother before leaving that afternoon.

  Clara took her place in the kitchen assembly line, slicing yucca, rolling dough, chopping garlic, laughing, and telling stories. As much as she had longed for her life in the suburbs, as much as she loved the tranquility of it, she had to admit that it lacked this communal vivaciousness. But, after a certain age, wasn't everything in life a trade-off? She had made her choices and it was too late to change her mind.

  IN THE AFTERNOON, her hands smelling of garlic and her clothes damp with steam from the rice pot, Clara walked up the drive to the town's main road. How different it was. When she was a girl, a motorized vehicle traveling along this road was an event. You came out of your house to see it—or you locked your door and hid in your house, depending on what kind of vehicle you thought it was.
Now the traffic was incessant. In among the jalopies and pickups, the new SUVs with their veneer of criminality, and the overcrowded minibuses, there were the flatulent mopeds, often carrying as many as three people on their sagging seats, backfiring as they navigated the craters in the semi-paved road. There was no visible reduction in traffic or noise because of the holiday. The tin-shack emporiums along this byway could not afford to close; many could not afford to lose a day's pay.

  Earlier in the week when Clara was on an errand to get some cooking oil for her mother, a distant cousin, Angel, had approached her and asked her for money. No preambles. No small talk. Just: “Hola, Clara. ¿Tienes dinero?” Just like that. She had offered the coins in her pocket—six pesos and change—but he'd snorted at her, saying he needed a hundred. She said she didn't have a hundred. For a moment, she thought there would be a scene. Angel had looked around and must have decided that there were too many people nearby. He nodded at her and melted back into the street.

  After that, she started varying the time of her daily trip into the town to buy the little treats and necessities that were expected of her—batteries, soap, cosmetics, and bottles of beer and rum. Sometimes she would bring one of her uncles with her, but today, her last in the country, she wanted to go alone. She made her rounds with no sign of Angel. On the way back, she stopped and bought apples. The individually wrapped red fruits were a seasonal treat—the Three Kings equivalent of an Easter egg, a memory from her childhood. She bought a dozen each day and distributed them among her cousins. They were Empire apples, available in any supermarket in America, but the context made them a delicacy and she relished eating them every afternoon. Apples never tasted so good. They tasted like gold.

  The apples helped everyone fend off hunger until the late after-noon, when food began to emerge from the kitchen. The uncles, who were drinking beneath the mango tree in the driveway, got out the folding tables and more chairs and paper plates and glasses. The music was turned up. It was hot, but bearable, and it did not look like it was going to rain. More rum was poured. Sodas for the kids. And then the food. First, there were pastelitos. Deysei carried a platter of them around the compound, into bedrooms and living rooms, through backyards, summoning everyone, letting them know that the feast was about to begin. Clara watched the members of her extended family assemble under the mango tree with their half-eaten pastelitos in their hands, the crescents of dough and meat like invitations. After that, a sequence of dishes: chicharrones, ropa vieja, tostones, yucca, bacalao, moro.

  While they were eating, Clara's cell phone rang. It was Yunis.

  “Yo!” she said. “Y'all having a fine time there without me?”

  “I'm eating a pastelito right now.”

  “I don't need to hear about that. You know what I'm eating?”

  “No.”

  “Lo mein leftover from yesterday. And you know what else?”

  “What?”

  “It's fucking snowing outside.”

  “Well, it's only about eighty here,” said Clara. “A little chilly, actually. I might need to put on a sweater.”

  “Shut up.” “So, how's the J-O-B going?” Clara asked. Yunis, unable to find an excon to support her, and no longer having a dependent child to use as leverage with the welfare office, had finally resorted to steady employment as a receptionist for a doctor on the Upper West Side.

  “It's all right. I got to tell you, Sis, this working for a living sucks. Dealing with people all day sucks. When I get home all I want to do is go to sleep.”

  “That means you're a grown-up now.”

  “Shit. Who needs that? How's my girl?”

  “She's good. You should see her. She's lost some weight.” The earliest indications of forgiveness had started to surface between Yunis and Deysei. There were speaking. A month ago that had seemed impossible.

  “OK. Pass the phone around so I can holla at everyone and then I got some big bochinche for you.”

  Her phone made the rounds of the gathering, and even Deysei spoke civil good wishes into it before it came back to Clara. She stood and walked away from the feast, as if she were heading back into the kitchen to get some food, but she turned at the last moment and headed between her mother's house and Tío Plinio's, walking toward the pen where the pigs were kept.

  “Tell me,” she said to Yunis.

  “You ain't never going to guess who was just here.”

  “Who?”

  “The police.”

  “The police?”

  “Yeah. They came here yesterday, looking for Raúl. They said they wanted to talk to him about that girl that got killed in the park. The jogger.”

  “What?”

  “That's right. The Cruzes moved her right before she got killed and Raúl worked on that move. He never told me that. Police just heard about this. They said he's a person of interest or some shit.”

  “Oh, my God. They think he killed her?”

  “They didn't say that. Alls they said was they wanted to talk to him.”

  “Do you think he could have done that?”

  “Before he fucked my daughter I would have said no. But now? Anything's possible. You live with someone for two years and you think you know them. You don't know anything.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Are you tripping, Sis? I told them I'd do anything I could to help them . I had a pretty good idea where Raúl might be hiding out and I called him up and acted like I wanted to make nice with him. Told him to come over today for a booty call. But he never made it up here to the apartment. The police were waiting downstairs and they arrested his ass right in front of the building.”

  “Holy shit, Yunis. Are you worried?”

  “About what?”

  “That he might come after you for setting him up.”

  “He's going to be in jail, Sis. Whatever he did, it's a second offense. He's going to be in there a long time. I ain't worried about nothing. But don't tell Deysei, you hear me?”

  “You're going to tell her?”

  “Not yet—but soon. There won't be anything she can say to me then.”

  “She's not talking about him so much these days.”

  “That's good. I should have kicked him out a long time ago.”

  “So, you got a new boyfriend, Yunis?”

  “Well . . .”

  “What? There's a new man in the Yuniverse?”

  “One of the patients at the office. Nice middleaged white guy. Electrician. Anyway, he's been giving me the signals.”

  “Has he done time?”

  “No.”

  “Yunis!”

  “What? You the only one who can go with a white guy?”

  WHEN THE FOOD had been eaten and the rum had been drunk, when darkness had fallen and the mosquitos had chased everyone indoors, Clara and Guillermo said their goodbyes, a half hour of hugs and tears and kisses and wishes for a safe journey and promises to come back soon. They got into the rental and drove back toward Santo Domingo, waving their hands out the windows and beeping the horn. Raúl was going to jail. The thought of it calmed her. Once they were on the road, Clara began eagerly anticipating the moment when she would open the door to their hotel room and feel the air-conditioning chill the sweat on her face and arms. Dwelling on this and not paying full attention to what she was doing, she missed her exit. She got off the highway and attempted to backtrack from the next exit but ended up on another major route out of the city. “Shit!” she said, and got off the second highway to try and turn around again. She pulled into a parking lot in front of a little restaurant to make the U-turn. It was barely more than a shack with a hand-painted sign. She recognized it right away. “Oh my God,” she said, and stopped the car.

  “OUR FATHER'S BEEN murdered.”

  The voice on the other end of the line was her half-brother's. She had not spoken to him in years.

  “Sorry?” she said. The call was so unexpected that she had the sensation that God was talking to her. She stood in the kitch
en of her Morningside Heights one-bedroom, listening. She was partially undressed. She and her new boyfriend, Thomas, had been making out on the couch in her living room. He was in there now, watching the movie they'd rented as a pretense for getting busy with each other.

  “He was killed last night, Clara, shot four times during a holdup of the store.” This was Efran talking, she reminded herself. Not God.

  It was too much for her to process. She focused on something smaller, something more manageable.

  “How did you find me?” Clara asked.

  “My friend's father works for the DMV. He looked you up.” There was silence for a moment. “Clara, Papi's dead.”

  She said nothing.

  Efran told her that there was going to be a wake in Inwood the next day and then they were going to fly the body back to the Dominican Republic to be buried in Dolores's home town, Higüey. The news of her father's murder filled her with guilt and remorse, triggered these emotions with such force that she felt compelled to take actions that would have seemed insane a day earlier. The following afternoon, she dressed in mourning black and went to the funeral home on Dyckman, just a few blocks from the store. There were a dozen people in the room with the closed coffin, and a murmur went through them when she entered. She looked at no one, walked straight to the casket, and kneeled, but she was not thinking about her father, not directly. She was thinking that she wasn't going to let Dolores prevent her from from paying the proper respect. She mimed a prayer and then let her hand rest on the flat surface of the coffin. When she stood up, Dolores was right behind her, looking haggard and deranged. Words of kindness from her step-mother in that moment might have gone a long way to healing the old wounds, but it was as if no time had passed, as if Clara was still a child newly abducted from the Dominican Republic.

  “Now you come. Your father dies heartbroken because he has not seen his daughter in years and now she dares show her face!” This was said loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. Without a word, Clara walked out of the funeral home and got on a train downtown.