The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho (27 page)

“Well, he was wrong,” I told her. “The only way that would have been true is if you had been divorced. Otherwise, your assets were still half his assets.”

“That was Hector. Always thinking he was smarter than everybody else. That no one was smart enough to get him. Anyway, she told me she'd tried giving up, going about her life, dating the man downstairs . . . Gonzalo?”

“Gustavo.”

“Yes, Gustavo. She said Hector was very jealous. She said he told her he could see her future, bearing many sons of different fathers, all different colors like test-tube aberrations.”

“My God,” was all I could say. Could Hector really have said such horrible things?

“She said, ‘You want to know how much of a son of a bitch your husband is, lady?' I just held on to the phone, not saying a word. But she kept on screaming at me, said he promised her that if she broke up with Gustavo and slept with him one last time, he'd tell me about Henry.”

I thought, knowing Hector, that “one last time” had not been the extent of his plan, until he tired of her being more likely.

“She said she'd sue us both, assured me she'd already been to see a lawyer. She told me he'd pay for what he was doing to her son, that he wouldn't get away with it.”

“But she didn't see a lawyer,” I said. The threats had been about getting Hector to spend time with Henry, sure as any mother would be, that once he did, he'd love their son as much as she. It had been a good plan. But she'd completely miscalculated Hector's narcissism or his apparent lack of fatherly genes.

“Then she said something about how he was going to have to wait the entire night at the park because she was through playing his game,” said Olivia.

“The park!” I gasped, wondering if I'd been mistaken, if we'd all been mistaken: Hector, me, even the police in thinking it was the belladonna that had killed him instead of the furious mother of a child scorned too long.

“Yes. She told me that she'd agreed to see him in the park at eleven that night, but only because all she wanted was for her son to know himself loved by his father,” said Olivia, confirming my suspicions about Abril's motives. “But that now—hearing me ‘condescendingly' ask about her son's allergies as if I were asking about his diseases, as she put it, which I'm sure I did not do—she'd changed her mind. She said she was glad I knew it all now because if I stayed with him, I'd know who I was staying with and we could both rot in hell. How was her sleeping with my husband my fault, Mariela, tell me that?”

It wasn't. Abril had just exploded after years of impotence. Plus, I was sure Olivia underestimated how condescending she could sound. She didn't realize how her own shyness made her out to be the superior witch we'd all imagined.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I sat here like a stupid woman, remembering all the times he'd told me he would've given anything for a child of his own, and I knew: He never did. He never did, Mariela. All he really wanted to do was torture me. Bring me down. Manipulate me into turning a blind eye to his, to his women!” she said, looking at me, no doubt wanting to call Hector's women by another name, but remembering I'd been one of them and catching herself.

“It was all a game to him,” she continued. “By the time he came in that night from being with you, or with her, or whoever, I was consumed with rage. I couldn't think, or breathe, or even look at him.”

She looked consumed with rage now: Her eyes were stretched wide, as if struggling to free themselves of their sockets, her temples pulsing.

“He made fun of me, asked me what I was doing sitting in the dark with my mess all over the kitchen. He started picking at food, talking and talking, not noticing anything. Not noticing me. And I felt the hate of decades.
Do you know what that is? Do you know what that feels like?
My life, Mariela. He'd made it miserable for nothing. He didn't want a child. He didn't love me. He loved and wanted nothing but himself.”

“Olivia, please calm down. You don't look well.” I walked over to her, a little afraid I admit, and tried to get her to leave the chair where she'd sat, to come over to the bed.

“And then he saunters over to the counter and just rambles on, looks at the cutting table, at the leaves and lemons and the honey I had there to add in case a thicker consistency were needed, and says, ‘I'm going out again,' and then as if I were completely stupid, ‘Meeting with some bookstore people. Don't wait up.' And I looked at him and I saw it: the boy. I hadn't been able to put my finger on it, but there had been something about his face that had always seemed familiar to me. And that was it. For the first time, I wanted him gone. Away from me, from her, from all women. Away where he couldn't hurt anyone, and I . . .”

She looked at me for a few seconds, then turned away.

“You what,” I pressed.

Still, she was silent for a few long minutes.

“Sometime after the first decade of marriage, when you know him like you know your own face, you feel it, the bulk of the debris that has been accumulating, making a lump there, against your side. It's just as possible for you to love him as it is to hate him, the line between the two varying first from year to year, then from season to season, month to month, week to week, and finally, it happens frequently, quickly, scaring you.”

“What did you do, Olivia?” I whispered.

“I let it happen,” she choked out.

I didn't understand, but I waited.

“He kept tasting everything, making an even bigger mess, and I knew he'd stick his fingers into the belladonna resin I'd prepped in such a way as to maintain its effectiveness, bringing out the power of the alkaloids, its curative compounds, but also its most poisonous properties if ingested. I knew he would and I did nothing. Knowing he smoked, knowing he had respiratory issues.”

“What did that matter?”

“It's belladonna's insurance policy. It may or may not kill a person who swallows it. Many people are only able to get high on it. But it will almost certainly kill a smoker, or an asthmatic, if ingested. The alkaloids—”

“Oh my God. What did you do?”

“Nothing. I stood there, looking at him, hating him, watching him put his fingers into everything, watching him lie to me, again. After a few minutes, he turned a little pale, and I almost said something, but I couldn't speak. Even after he walked out, I wanted to run after him, but I couldn't move. I killed him. I killed him for me. I killed him for the little boy. I killed him. I killed him. I killed him . . .”

She kept repeating it as if she'd had all those “I killed him's” inside of her and needed to vomit them. Then she cried for a long time. I sat there with her until she dropped back onto the pillows from pure exhaustion and fell into a shaky, tortured sleep.

Then I got to work. I found her cleaning supplies. And I cleaned her apartment, wiping everything, trying to get rid of all her pain. It had been a second of hate, born of years of love. She hadn't planned it. And she was paying for it, wasn't she? Doing something about it was not my business, and it wouldn't bring Hector back, not that he wanted me to do something about it, quite the contrary, I reminded myself, my decision strengthening inside me.

I cleaned and thought and cleaned and thought, realizing he had loved her in his own way, and she'd loved him, and yet, this is how it ended.

I wondered how many marriages were that one hateful second away from a precipice they wouldn't be able to back away from. And here I'd thought my marriages had been dangerous. Well, I'd had no idea how bad they could've been, I thought.

A couple of hours later, I heard a noise and went in to check on her, finding her fully dressed with the clothes that had been on the chair.

“Where're you going? You're not strong enough.”

“Turning myself in.”

“Please don't.”

“I have to. I can't live like this, knowing—”

Had he known she was going to do this? He'd thought she was going to hurt herself, commit suicide. This was different. Should I let her turn herself in? But before I knew it, my heart spoke for me.

“You can't do it because Hector doesn't want you to.”

“What?”

“I . . . had a dream.”

“You had a dream?”

“Yes.” I swallowed.

“Please, don't patronize me.”

“I'm not, I swear. I actually came up to help you . . . to tell you something . . . you know, when I came up.”

She sat down on the bed then, and I decided to waste no time saying what I had to say.

“Olivia, last night, I had a dream,” I said, because who was to say it hadn't been a dream? “And I . . . in the dream, I spoke to Hector. He said he understood, that he forgives you. He said he loves you and wants you to live.”

She smirked.

“Did you even know Hector? He would never say that.”

“Well, he did. He said, asked me to tell you that, that you were his Olivia. That you'd always be his olive tree, that he wants—”

“What did you say?”

I knew what had made her eyes widen, what she needed me to repeat.

“That you are his olive tree.”

“Shut up! Stop it!” she said, seizing me by the shoulders and shaking me.

I assumed she meant talking, so I did, and after a few minutes of looking at every inch of my face, she let go of me.

“I'm telling you the truth,” I ventured.

Her eyes still trained on me, she sat on the chair again.

“Then tell me. The dream,” she said then.

So I told her, combining the good bits of Hector I'd been lucky to receive over the past two weeks into one dream, editing it in my mind, trying to give her a gift.

Because if Hector had given me gifts of passion, excitement, and culture while we'd been together, Olivia had given me a mirror in which to see myself and my life. And maybe she'd never be my friend. But she was, I decided that day, my sister. She had not intended his death. She'd made a mistake that she'd have to work her whole life to forgive herself for. But Hector was gone, while I could still save her.

In fact, the more I looked at her face alternately cry and light up as I told her some of the funny details of my weeks-long “dream,” the sharing of memory a reprieve for how desperately she must have been missing him all those weeks, I knew that she was worth saving. That I'd convince her, somehow, not to turn herself in, and that I would keep her secret.

Chapter 30

T
he black-and-white sign commissioned for placement at the entrance to Jorge's new restaurant almost got made spelling
M
ARIELA'S
in big bold letters, and beneath that, in smaller, cursive letters,
a bohemian community eatery
. Instead, high above the cement portico with the wooden beams rests a more appropriate sign, reading simply,
Sí
, which means “yes” in Spanish, but sounds like the word
see
in English. I didn't come up with it. Jorge did, and I love it. I love that it's about seeing, about saying yes to seeing, about seeing all that's around you and being aware, the awareness making you happier than you ever thought possible. I love how clearly he must see me to have come up with it. Lately, I've begun to see how much we really do love each other.

I look at the big plate in front of me. The small, round, dark gray cement tabletop has old tile pieces embedded here and there. The plate is made of white porcelain, but of an irregular round shape, somewhere between stone and glass.

There are seven thinly sliced pieces of cheese on one side of it: sheep's and goat's milk cheese, Jarlsberg, others I don't recognize. The other side of the plate is lined with quarter-moon avocado slices drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with smoked salt so coarse, I can see it without straining my eyes, its color the color of brown sugar. A small hand-painted bowl full of quince marmalade sits in the center of the plate, the delicate handle of a small silver spoon sticking out of it like a tongue about to lick its lips. This plate, the rustic baguette positioned nearby on a piece of wood, and the tall, clear glass bottle with lemon slices floating in water seem, at the moment, all I need to feel the most blessed of women.

The place has come to life, but as beautiful as each detail of it is to me, the most amazing thing about it is still the statue, the one Gustavo had begun with the intention of entering the East Little Havana Development Agency contest, but decided to give to Jorge as a “restaurant-warming” gift. The piece that had Gustavo's heartbreak embedded all over, and was even more beautiful for it. It is huge and has many curves and swirls of different sizes . . . the oxidized metal goes from the darkest chocolate browns in some places to mustard yellow, turquoise, and deep azure blue in others. For the occasion of today's opening, he has placed a thin piece of gauze the color of wet sand and the shape of a summer dress over it, and from a few feet away you can see it is a woman hugging a bundle to her breasts. It is a mother, the long curlicues of her rusty silver hair floating in the wind. Rather than positioned to welcome visitors as they come in, she appears to be walking in with them, as if coming home to someone. I long to touch and pray to her, if only as a symbol of us, women.

But not now. Now I sit, enjoying the cheese and the quince, watching Jorge beam as he welcomes the guests, searching for me with his eyes every once in a while and smiling, Gustavo at his side, everyone oohing and marveling at the simple, sophisticated beauty of everything.

And then I see her, as if the statue had made Gustavo's dream come true. Abril and Henry are crossing the street toward them, and I can't help thinking of Hector, waiting for her in the park, doubling over in pain, dying alone, the three women in his life mere yards away, all three furious at him.

But I shake the thought. His death wasn't Abril's fault, and I'm glad she came. I thought I wouldn't get a chance to say good-bye to Henry after the cleansing cyclone of events that had descended on our lives since that day I'd spent with Olivia. I couldn't believe almost a whole month had gone by since that morning that had turned into afternoon and then evening, the last leg of my scavenger hunt for the last of the missing pieces to the puzzle of Hector's life and marriage, his affairs, and his death.

First, Olivia had made me tell her my “dream” again, as if gathering strength from it. Then we'd gone over the details of what had really happened.

Hector had been trying to pick a fight with her that night, we decided, to intimidate her into not questioning where he was going at that late hour. That's why he had acted particularly obnoxious. After swigging back a mouthful of the belladonna mixture and pronouncing it a waste of money and time like all her “macrobiotic nonsense,” he'd left so quickly, she'd barely had a chance to react. She remembered thinking there was no point to anything: He would never change.

She'd woken around six in the morning and grown desperate when she realized Hector hadn't returned. She'd called his cell phone over and over, then called the police, and then began to call the hospitals after police told her he hadn't been gone long enough to file a report, her due diligence making her innocence more plausible in the eyes of the detectives investigating the case. Sometime around seven that morning, she'd heard the screaming and the rumble of people, and known, even before the officers knocked on her door.

“How come they didn't find the belladonna? Did you throw it away?”

“There was none to find. I discarded the bag it came in when I bought it and had been drying it in brown paper bags from the flower market. And whatever Hector didn't take, I rinsed away when cleaning the kitchen that night, knowing my remedy would never reach the boy, to judge from his mother's attitude that day. There was nothing left by the time they asked if they could look around.”

As she spoke, I remembered waking up early that morning, my birthday, cutting my hair, walking to Tinta in search of coffee, without a clue that the insistent thoughts of Hector popping into my head were more about his death than about our breakup.

“For a while they believed he'd been robbed, and I felt relieved that it had been a mugging, that I hadn't hurt him or failed to save him from himself, from me,” she said.

As we talked, she'd kept insisting that the only way to atone, to live with herself was to turn herself in.

“Wouldn't it be better if you did something worthwhile instead?”

“Like what?”

“How about you work things out with Abril? Make sure Henry is provided for, dedicate your life to coming up with new remedies that will help people, I don't know. What good would it do Hector for you to end up in jail, if that's even a possibility? You yourself said he left almost immediately after he took the belladonna. Had you not been so distraught, you would have warned him, wouldn't you?”

Which made her cry again, saying, “I really would have, Mariela. I was angry, but I could never really hurt him.”

Of course we both knew she
had
hurt him, that she'd wanted to, even if just for that one minute. All her life loving him despite everything, and in one moment, hate had overtaken her, defeating her.

I kept talking, figuring I had a good chance she'd listen. The fact that she hadn't turned herself in when they told her the results of the autopsy could only mean that she had been too scared or weak to do it. All I needed to do now was to give her a good reason not to do what, to her, was “the right thing.” Instead, I had to give her something else to do that would also be a right thing, a better thing than turn herself in that she could do to atone.

That's how papers were filed that would soon give Henry a new last name: Ferro, and some treasury bonds to go with it, as well as his father's entire rare book collection, and more money coming to him when the bookstore sold and Hector's estate was executed.

Olivia decided to move back to Argentina to be with her family, and Abril decided to move back to New York and do the same. At some point, she, and the rest of Coffee Park, had apparently decided to stop hating and fearing me, even though no one ever really found out exactly how and why Hector died.

Now Abril was going to start over in New York, away from this place that no longer held any real sway for her. She'd come over to tell me herself a few days ago and to thank me, refusing to answer my “For what?” or to get into details, as if all were understood and she trusted I too would forgive her, that I'd understand the spell of resentment and confusion she'd lived in all the time she'd known me.

“I'm going to New York!” said Henry now, trying to jump into my arms, orthopedic shoes and all, before I could make it all the way from my out-of-the-way table to the entrance where they stood.

“Yes, I know, darling. Are you excited?”

Henry smiled wide and nodded as if he were trying to get his head to come off.

“Remember what I told you.”

It was Gustavo, who had walked over, followed by Abril.

“To take good care of my mom?” said Henry.

“Yes. Take care of your mom and study hard,” said Gustavo.

“I always study hard. I study so hard that—”

He didn't get to finish the sentence—Gustavo was hugging him so hard.

“Hey, you're squashing me. Let go!”

“Sorry, little man,” said Gustavo.

“Not cool,” said Henry, smoothing his little guayabera.

“You're right, not cool. I'm sorry.”

“It's okay. Better than crying.”

“A man can cry and be a man, you know?”

“I know. I cry sometimes too,” said Henry. Then he whispered, “But not in front of
them,
” using his chin to gesture toward Abril and me.

Which made everyone smile.

Iris made her appearance just then, in a fabulous hot pink wraparound jersey dress and silver sequin high heels.

Soon, we'd sat to eat together, with Jorge coming over every few minutes with more food for us or a kiss for me, which made it impossible for anyone at the table to believe me when I said we were taking it slow, seeing how it went.

Looking at him, I remembered how he'd been sitting on my stoop a few days after that night in the park. Jorge had been waiting for me, he said, and heard noises in the empty apartment that had been Ellie's. The one I'd been avoiding and hadn't gotten around to renting, despite needing the money.

“Maybe we should check the apartment,” he'd said.

“You think Ellie could have sneaked in? To do what?”

“I don't know, but maybe we should check it out,” he insisted.

“All right, let me get my keys.”

And then I'd walked into some other landlord's rental apartment. Because every inch of
apartamento tres
was now clean.

“What happened here?” I said, looking at the half-used cleaning supplies I'd bought the morning of Hector's death, neatly arranged on the counter.

“You like? Iris said it just needed a little cleaning. Cool, huh?”

“Are you kidding? It's beyond cool. I can't believe you and Iris did all this by yourselves. I don't know what to say.”

“Gustavo helped.”

“This is amazing! I love you! And Gustavo and Iris,” I'd said, meaning it, feeling loved and grateful, and laughing when Jorge said, he'd prefer it if I loved just him, but would share with Gustavo and Iris for now.

It was the same feeling I had now, surrounded by these people I loved, letting myself almost float out of my body to look at the scene, to see myself being happy so that I'd never forget what it was like or that it was possible.

I also felt my mother close to me that night, a feeling that had become more frequent over the past month, and that I can only describe to you as a deep, all-encompassing well-being. It was so complete, this feeling, I didn't even need to call her to me or to speak to her to know her essence would always be with me, her adored child. And even though I didn't see myself making a career out of clairvoyance that night, I could see it being a part of my life again, could see helping people do what they didn't yet know how to do for themselves or were afraid to do, loving and being proud of what husband number one had once accused me of as if it were a bad thing, this “making nice with the tenants.” It was called community, and I loved being part of one.

And there we all were: Gustavo, Abril, Henry, Iris, and I, celebrating Jorge's restaurant, his dream come true, saying good-bye to Henry and Abril with love and warm hearts, eating, drinking, reminiscing, and laughing, feeling the bittersweet excitement of new beginnings, hoping and dreaming about the turns our lives would soon take, all of us enjoying this last chance to be together under the moonlit skies of Coffee Park.