No Witness But the Moon

by Suzanne Chazin

  He was long overdue.

  Chapter 30

  The lobby of Sunnycrest Manor had the look and feel of a preschool. There were snowmen cutouts on the windows and glittery handmade stars on the tile walls. The staff wore overly bright smiles and big name tags. But as soon as Vega left the lobby, there was no mistaking it was a nursing home. In the hallways and dayrooms, old people sat about in wheelchairs—some aware of their surroundings and some not. The air was overheated and smelled of canned soup, overcooked vegetables, and the faint but unmistakable odor of urine.

  Vega asked at the front desk and again at the nurse’s station until he found his way to a double room on the top floor with Martha Torres’s name on the door. He hadn’t seen Martha since his mother’s funeral almost two years ago. She seemed shell-shocked and barely coherent even back then. In the four years before Vega’s mother’s murder, she’d lost her husband, been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and buried her youngest child, Donna. Vega’s mother’s death must have seemed like the last blow.

  He had no idea what he’d find on his visit today.

  Martha was sitting alone in a wheelchair by the window. She was wearing baggy bright pink sweatpants and a matching hooded jacket. She’d never been a big woman, but the disease seemed to have compacted her even further. She inhabited her clothes the way a turtle might a shell—sinking deep into the folds and crevices. Vega inched into the room.

  “Doña Martha?” He used the respectful greeting, then added, “It’s me, Jimmy. Luisa’s son?” He wanted to bend down and kiss her but he didn’t know if she’d recognize him anymore and he didn’t want to frighten her.

  The blue skies of the morning had given way to clouds and a gray light washed across her face. Vega had expected to see fear or confusion but there was a blank sweetness to her features. No raisin ridges on her forehead. No commas by her lips, and only the softest crosshatch of crow’s feet by her eyes. It was as if the struggles of the world had slid from her shoulders and left her with only a vague but simple gratitude for the moment. Like Donna. That’s how Vega would always remember Freddy’s disabled sister.

  Martha slowly turned her face from the window. She smiled broadly and spread her arms like a child awaiting a hug. “You came. I knew you would come.”

  Vega hesitated. He had no idea he’d made such an impression on her all these years or that she’d been anticipating this visit. His mother and Martha were very close, of course. Even after Vega left the neighborhood, he was often dragged back for visits. But still, it surprised him that a woman who couldn’t recall what she’d done yesterday could reach across the chasm of years and remember him so fondly.

  He bent down and gave her a hug, afraid that he might crush her, but her grip was still surprisingly strong. She wrapped him tightly in her embrace. He caught a whiff of cologne—something vaguely musky that had gone out of fashion the same year men in the neighborhood stopped wearing qiana shirts. He felt a catch in his lungs. He knew that scent. Not from Martha. From his mother.

  His mother used to say that she and Martha met over a bag of dropped onions. That was the short version. The long one was more painful. Vega’s mother was barely seventeen when she left her tiny mountain village in Puerto Rico to come to New York. She didn’t speak a word of English. She was boarding with a stern aunt she barely knew. It was February. She didn’t have a good winter coat, boots, or any money to speak of. And nobody in New York had patience for some backwoods jíbaro.

  One day her aunt sent her to the local bodega to fetch a quart of milk, some onions, and a bag of rice. The milk carton was defective and started to leak. On the way home, the paper bag split. Milk, rice, and onions tumbled onto the slushy pavement. Vega’s mother started to cry, certain that her aunt would yell at her (and beat her, Vega suspected though his mother never liked to talk against the family). People passed by without giving Luisa Rosario a second glance. Only Martha stopped. She was twenty-four then—seven years his mother’s senior—and fluent in English, having lived in New York since she was thirteen. She not only helped Luisa salvage what she could, she marched her back to the store and harangued the owner into letting his mother have a new bag of rice and quart of milk (though Luisa always suspected Martha had ended up paying for it.) The two became fast friends after that. Their friendship never wavered for almost forty-five years.

  “Come. Sit down.” Martha patted the bed next to her. She grasped Vega’s hand in her own. Her palms were as soft as a baby’s skin. Her bob of steel wool hair had been pinned back from her face. “We must talk. We need to talk.”

  Her urgency surprised Vega. He took a seat on the bed. The room was hot. He stripped off his jacket and placed it beside him.

  “What would you like to talk about?”

  “We need Donna here first,” she said. “Is Donna in the kitchen?”

  Vega started to panic. He’d never been good with people who suffered from cognitive issues. Even as a cop. He wanted to do the right thing but he was never sure what that was. Did he play along? Did he tell Martha the truth that her daughter had died in a fall from their apartment window more than two years ago? He had no idea what the playbook for this sort of thing was. Clearly, some part of Martha’s brain still believed Donna was alive. Vega didn’t want to be the one to break it to her all over again.

  “We can talk without Donna,” Vega offered. Martha nodded, appeased for the moment. He felt relieved.

  She leaned forward as if someone might overhear them. “I know Donna can be difficult.” Martha patted Vega’s knee. “But you must not be angry with her. She doesn’t understand.”

  “I always liked Donna,” Vega insisted. “I used to give her candy when we were kids, remember?”

  “You and Jackie always used to steal it from her.”

  Vega stared at Martha, stunned. It wasn’t true! Bad enough that he had to deal with some witness telling the world that he’d shot an unarmed suspect point-blank. But now, his mother’s oldest friend was accusing him of stealing candy from a little girl with Down syndrome?

  Vega went to defend himself. Martha shook a finger at him. “You know what you did, yes? So does Luisa. That’s why she wants to talk to you.”

  Martha had told his mother this? Vega was dumbfounded.

  “I don’t know what you’re remembering. But I swear, I always tried to be nice to Donna.”

  Martha’s voice quaked. She was growing more agitated. “You need to say you’re sorry. You need to get your head right with God.”

  Ay, caray! This was not going well. Martha couldn’t know about the shooting. And yet she was talking like she did. “Okay. I’m sorry,” said Vega. He was sorry for so many things, he couldn’t even choose between them anymore.

  “Where is your sister? Where is she?”

  “My sister? Donna’s not—” And then it hit him. Martha was confusing Vega with Freddy. She had no idea who he was.

  He grasped what was happening, but it saddened him all the same. He wanted so much for Martha to remember him—or at least, to remember his mother. He noticed a photo album on a shelf above the television. He walked over and pointed to it.

  “May I look through this album?”

  Martha’s face had gone blank again. She smiled at Vega as if he’d just walked into the room for the first time, like there was a reset button in her head and it had just gone back to “start.”

  Vega pulled out the album and sat down next to Martha. He slowly turned the pages. The laminated inserts crackled like a cheap shower curtain. Inside were the usual yellowed assortment of communion shots, weddings, christenings, and holiday celebrations, the gray concrete symmetry of the Bronx contrasting sharply with the verdant chaotic hillsides of Puerto Rico. Some of the people in the pictures Vega recognized. Some, he didn’t. He picked out Martha as a young schoolteacher. He saw her brutish husband grimacing for the camera. Other pictures showed sweet Donna who never seemed to age, Freddy with his sober, serious expression, and Jackie who, even th
en, looked like she wanted to be somewhere else.

  Vega turned a page and ran his hand over a picture of his mother, looking firm-faced and impossibly young in a bright red dress. She was posed in front of a Christmas tree with a trim, good-looking, dark-skinned man. Vega’s father, Orlando. Vega was a toddler, flopped on his father’s shoulders, looking sleepy-eyed like he couldn’t wait to be poured into bed. Vega went to turn the page. Martha grabbed his hand to stop him. Something flashed across her face.

  “I remember the onions,” she whispered. “I remember. She cried when she dropped them in the snow.”

  Vega straightened. He stared at Martha. Her face, so blank a minute ago, flooded with light, like a piece of stained glass lit from behind. She knew who Vega was. She knew who his mother was. He swallowed back the dizzying sensation. The scent of her musk cologne. The picture of his mother in that red dress. The memory of those dropped onions. For one tiny moment, everything in the world was right again. His mother was here. With them. In this room. Alive.

  “That’s how you and Luisa met,” Vega said softly. He squeezed her hand. “You remember, Doña Martha. You remember.”

  Martha’s soft cheeks suddenly grew taut. Her mouth pressed in. “Luisa is dead.” Her eyes registered the moment like it had just happened.

  Vega nodded. “Yes. But she is still alive in us.”

  Martha dropped Vega’s hand. She looked suddenly distressed. “It was terrible. So terrible. She cared about him. How could he do that?”

  “Doña Martha, do you know who killed my mother?”

  “She trusted him. We all trusted him!”

  Vega thought about that love note he’d found in Spanish at his mother’s grave. My beloved. You are always my angel. Martha would have known who her mother’s lover was. They were too close not to have shared that. Could this be the man who killed her?

  The room felt hot and close. In the hallway, two orderlies rolled a heavy cart across the linoleum floor and discussed the Jets’ loss against the Dolphins. Vega felt like he was walking on a carpet of spun glass. Her memory was so fragile. The slightest misstep could fracture it.

  “Doña Martha, if you know who killed Luisa, please tell me,” said Vega. “She called you three hours before she died. Please try to remember. Anything at all. I beg you.”

  Martha drew back from him. She looked frightened by his intensity. He’d come on too strong. He tried to scale it back.

  “It’s okay,” Vega murmured. “Take your time. We can work through this slowly.” But already he felt something slipping from his grasp. The fade on a movie screen. Some synapse deep inside her brain had snapped again. On the other side of those neurons were forty-five years of memories with his mother that Vega wanted to connect to—none more desperately than those very last ones before she died. But they were already floating out to sea, a blurry point on the horizon.

  A nurse’s aide appeared in the doorway, a young black woman with a chirpy Caribbean accent. “Mrs. Torres?” she said brightly. “It’s time for your shower.”

  Vega turned his back on the aide and tried to get Martha’s attention. Her gaze had shifted to the window.

  “It’s like that sometimes, I’m afraid,” said the nurse’s aide. “They’re so alert one minute and the next, it just vanishes.”

  “Will it come back?”

  “Possibly. But when and where, no one knows.”

  “Is she lucid like that a lot?”

  “She doesn’t get many visitors so it’s hard to say. Her priest comes to visit regularly.”

  “Father Delgado?”

  “That’s him. He sees a lot of the old people here.”

  Vega rose from the edge of Martha’s bed. He kissed her on top of her head. She didn’t respond.

  “See you soon, Doña Martha.” She didn’t look like she’d even heard. The lines had smoothed out on her face. She was at peace again.

  Even if he wasn’t.

  Chapter 31

  Marcela felt shaky and queasy as she moved away from the warmth of Byron’s body and sat up on the edge of their bed. Damon was asleep on a cot in the corner, his little arms wrapped around his stuffed dog. A Metro North train rattled past, shaking the window frames. Damon barely stirred. His mouth was open, his eyelids fluttering from a dream. A good dream? Or a bad one? She hoped he was too young to process the last two days. She hoped by the time he was old enough to understand, the heartache and fear would be behind him—behind them all.

  I lost you and found you and then lost you again, Papi. . . . Marcela grieved this second death almost worse than the first. It had felt like a miracle to hear her father’s voice on the other end of her cell phone yesterday afternoon and to know he was alive. True, he was on the run and in a lot of trouble. But he’d devised a plan to get them out of this $8,000 debt, a plan that wouldn’t require any money at all. It gave Marcela hope. And then within hours, he was gone—truly gone—and she had no idea if it had to do with the money he’d borrowed, the DVD he’d asked her to retrieve from his apartment, or the worries he harbored in those final dark hours of his life.

  Marcela broke down and told Byron everything last night. About the borrowed money, about the phone calls and threats if they didn’t pay it back. She even showed him the DVD her father was convinced they could trade in place of the $8,000 for Yovanna’s life. She and Byron played the DVD on the old laptop computer Señora Adele had passed along to Marcela after Damon was born. They fast-forwarded through several hours of time-stamped security footage of people coming and going from her father’s apartment building. Men. Women. Teenagers. Old people. Some were carrying shopping bags and knapsacks. Some carried nothing at all. Since the camera was positioned high above the front doorway, most of what Marcela and Byron saw were hair and hats—all of it through a fisheye lens. All of the people looked so ordinary; Marcela had no idea why this video would be worth so much to anyone.

  Her father’s desperation told her otherwise. “When you get it, call me right away,” he’d told her yesterday. But when she called, his phone went to voice mail. She was now left wondering if this little silver disc could have saved him or whether the knowledge of it spelled his undoing.

  Byron was furious that Marcela had held so much back from him.

  “All of this misery happened because you brought your daughter here!” he shouted. “If she had stayed in Honduras, our family would be safe now! Your father would still be alive!”

  Marcela started to cry. “If I could take it back, I would!” How could she say such a thing? With Yovanna in the next room? Maybe Damon was asleep, but Yovanna most certainly was not.

  “If the gangster your father borrowed money from wants this video,” said Byron, “it’s because it shows a crime. If your father knew about it, then he was a witness. Maybe that’s why he’s dead. Just having this DVD in our apartment is dangerous. I don’t want it here!”

  “But nothing happens on the camera,” Marcela argued. “People are just walking in and out of the building.”

  “Then it wouldn’t be worth eight thousand dollars—maybe even your father’s life. But it is, Marcela. We should destroy it or we will be next.”

  “And if we destroy it, what do we have to repay the loan?”

  “Maybe we should take the video to the police,” he suggested.

  “The police don’t care about us,” said Marcela. “If we show them this video, they’ll just take it and tell us to lock our doors. They’ll only show up after somebody is hurt or dead to fill out the paperwork.”

  Around and around they went until they were both so spent, Marcela coaxed her half-asleep daughter onto her living room cot and they all went to bed.

  Now, in the dim morning light behind the lank, drawn curtains, Marcela threw back the covers on her side of the bed. It was stifling in the small room. The old radiators always sent out too much steam in winter. Still, she felt a sudden chill. She grabbed her robe and shifted her weight to get out of bed. The movement of her body made By
ron stir. He rubbed his eyes and sat up. They stared at each other a moment, hesitant to speak in case they woke up Damon sleeping in the corner or Yovanna in the living room.

  “Let me start breakfast,” said Marcela. “After church, we’ll figure out what to do.”

  In the living room, a slash of light angled its way through a broken slat in the blinds, illuminating the silver garland on the artificial tree in the corner. It shimmered with false promise. Their first Christmas together as a family. How long Marcela had dreamed of this! How hard it had turned out to be.

  Marcela’s eyes moved from the draped garland on the tree to the cot wedged up against it. Yovanna’s cot. The sheet and blanket were pulled back. The pillow was plumped.

  There was no Yovanna.

  Marcela stepped closer. The clear plastic two-drawer bin where Yovanna kept her clothes was empty. She opened the drawers even though she could see that there was nothing inside. She walked over to the front door. Her daughter’s blue backpack was missing from its hook along with Yovanna’s pink windbreaker. Her sneakers were absent from the mat.

  Marcela wandered the room as if Yovanna were simply hiding in plain sight. Maybe she’d gone out for something. Maybe she’d left a note. Marcela rounded the counter into the kitchen. The only sounds were the tap-tap-tap from the leaky faucet and the soft hum of the refrigerator. On the kitchen table, the manila envelope Marcela had taken from her father’s apartment lay open, a jumble of her childhood snapshots on top.

  The DVD was missing.

  Marcela walked back into the living room and opened the laptop. She pushed the eject button on the DVD slot. It was empty. She began opening drawers and cabinets. She felt under the couch cushions and beneath her daughter’s cot. She searched the shelf above the television. The DVD wasn’t in the apartment.