The Woman She Was Read online

  “José, my asshole brother!”

  He hadn’t meant to raise his voice but he must have because the only other party in the restaurant, the family of the quinceañera, stopped mid-conversation and stared.

  “No! De veras?” Celia’s expression was one of disbelief, as he supposed his had been when he first realized who the letter was from.

  “After ten years of total silence! What the hell does he want?”

  “What did he say?” Celia laid her fork on the empty plate carefully, perhaps too carefully, and folded her hands out of sight.

  Lowering his voice, Luis muttered, “That he has two daughters. Which I suppose implies a wife. And—get this—he signed himself ‘Miami Joe.’”

  “Did he say why he was writing?”

  Luis’s broad, bony shoulders slumped. “The great ‘Miami Joe’ is coming for a visit. Apparently without his family.”

  He waited for Celia’s reaction. When it came he felt stupid for not having known in advance what it would be. Concealing her own feelings, she focused entirely on his. It was exactly what she did dozens of times a day when dealing with children in distress. She reached across the table and enclosed his large cold hands in her small warm ones.

  “What was between us was a long time ago, Luis. I am not the woman I was then,” she said firmly.

  Although unconvinced, Luis clung gratefully to her hand.

  THREE

  JOE LAGO, driving too fast, swerved the BMW into the drive with practised precision. He loped across a manicured lawn and rang the doorbell. After a long wait he heard the tap-tap of Vera’s high heels.

  For an instant he took the wide-open door for welcome, then it registered that his ex-wife’s posture was one of defiance. She was flaunting the fact that she could open the door as wide as she liked and he couldn’t enter—except by invitation, which he was unlikely to get.

  He felt a flutter of bewilderment that the same blue eyes that once had the power to attract him from across a crowded room now repelled him like an icy sea, and the small tilted nose he’d found so charming now made him want to slap her. But where would that get him? Joe Lago was a practical man whose pattern was to ignore the past and focus on what he wanted in the moment. He gave Vera his most engaging grin and got right to the point.

  “Hi, honey. I’m going to be away for the next few weeks, so I’d like to take the girls out for ice cream or something. It’s been quite a while and—”

  “No.”

  Of course it hadn’t worked. Countless times had he tried ignoring past conflict and acting as if they were on the best of terms. “Let bygones be bygones” worked well in business, but it had hardly ever worked with Vera. The more he let things slide, the more she elaborated on them until they filled her head and exploded in accusatory shrapnel. If he dodged, she only became more infuriated; understandable, since her intention was to do damage. His best ploy was to play dead, or at least act hurt.

  “Have a heart, Vera. You know I’ve been out of town. I really miss them.”

  “They don’t miss you.”

  It wasn’t the lie so much as the triumph in her voice that caused him to explode. “Bullshit!”

  “You can’t play father on a drop-in basis, Joe. We agreed—”

  “No! You and your fucking lawyer agreed—”

  The door closed in his face. For a minute he just stood there, imagining how easy it would be to kick the damned door down. Well, actually not all that easy—not in Gucci loafers. Screw it. He had never let her provoke him to violence before; no point in losing control now.

  He strode back to the car. Control was the issue, had been from the beginning. She’d been willing to share his bed, his name, and, of course, his money—but only on her terms. When he thought about it, it astonished him that from the start he had let her call the shots: whether to buy a house, where to buy it, whether to have children, when to have them, what his role as father should be, and now, apparently, whether he’d have any role at all. On the slim chance that she was watching, he turned and gave her the finger.

  But the faces peering out the picture window were those of Keri and Amy, his angel-blond daughters. Sheepishly he raised more fingers to convert the “up yours” insult into a wave. Keri, only four, lifted her tiny hand to wave back. Or so he thought but couldn’t be sure, for at that moment Vera pulled the girls away from the window.

  He got into the BMW and sat there filled with disgust—not for Vera but for himself. He had watched numerous acquaintances go through the same thing, allowing themselves to be pussy-whipped until they fell backwards into the pit of divorce, then flounder there for months or even years while being pelted with crap from the wife’s lawyer and, often as not, their own. Although Joe always made the appropriate sympathy noises, he privately considered it their own fault for not playing their cards right. Now he’d been dealt the same cards and, it was fairly obvious, had played them no better.

  It seemed incredible to Joe that his life had come to this. “A goddamned daisy-chain of clichés,” he muttered.

  As quick as the revulsion hit him, it disappeared. His strength was the ability to face things head-on, make fast decisions, and follow through. He was going to turn this around, not tomorrow, not next week, but right now. He had known all along he would have to do it and how it would have to be done. He had to put distance between himself and them—permanent distance. No more phone calls. No more stupid visitation games.

  “Walk away,” he told himself. “Just fucking walk away.”

  He could do it. Hell, he had walked away from Celia when he was more or less in love with her. He doubted he had ever loved Vera, although God knows he’d been hot for her. Every inch of her Barbie-doll body, from shiny hair to aerobics-perfected buttocks, had turned him on, and he had gone after her as if she were the best deal in town.

  She had hardly been that. But give himself credit; once he’d had it with her insatiable appetite for shopping combined with an all too satiable appetite for sex, and no appetite for it at all unless she’d been pre-sweetened with a gift or promises of extravagances to follow, he had shut her off. And she, of course, had shut him off. He had let her file for divorce, let her think it was all her idea. But he had done his homework. The game plan was perfected in his head before the lawyers were called in: assets tucked away where she couldn’t get at them, generous child support, and a generous lump sum for her in exchange for an ironclad agreement to not ask for more, ever. If he hadn’t got that she would have had him in court every other month just to maintain an element of control over him. He had outsmarted her and now she was using the last thing she had—the kids.

  He had a mental replay of Keri raising her tiny hand to wave and the wistful way she’d looked back over her shoulder as Vera pulled her away from the window. His gut twisted. Sure, they were little dolls, but the reality was that they were not his dolls, they were Vera’s, had been from birth. She was the one who chose their clothes, chose their toys, chose their friends. Hell, she even chose their language.

  “No Spanish,” she had decided when he agreed to pop for a full-time maid. “Miami is a divided city and it is not in the girls’ best interest to be taken for Latinas.”

  So they had got a Haitian housekeeper. Given their fair skin, they certainly would never be taken for Haitians. Half their blood might be Cuban but it didn’t show and never would. Vera would see to that.

  “American kids,” he muttered as he fumbled through his CD selection. He imagined the girls ten years from now, phoning him the way his friends’ kids phoned them, to ask for use of the car, or their own car, or money: price tags for affection that would become larger as they grew older.

  He dropped Buena Vista Social Club into the CD player and cranked the volume up as high as it would go. On impulse, he hit a button and all the car windows slid open. Cuban music blasted across the lawn and crashed against the side of his all-American ex-dream house like a fist.

  FOUR

  CELI
A stepped out of the shower and moved into her bedroom, leaving a trail of wet footprints across the worn tile floor. She stood towelling herself dry, considering the choices offered by her minimalist wardrobe while telling herself that she did not care enough about José Lago’s return to dress in any particular way.

  She had to go to work later, so could wear the white slacks and smock in which she felt most comfortable. But would that not seem as if she was advertising the fact that she was a doctor? On the other hand, not a dress, definitely not. Since her teens she had not been able to wear a skirt without attracting the admiring glances of men who felt compelled to let her know they thought she had nice legs. She cringed at the thought of José telling her she had a nice anything, especially in front of Luis.

  She absently wrapped the towel around herself, wandered into the kitchen, and poured a cup of coffee. Then, remembering that she was on evening shift and would be sipping coffee all night, poured it back into the dented aluminium pot. Celia did not particularly like being alone. She missed her niece during the weeks when she was away at school and more so during a home week like this when Liliana chose to join friends at a beach campismo.

  Still wearing only a towel, Celia went out onto the balcony. She sat down in one plastic chair and put her feet up on the other one. The sun, combined with a breeze off the ocean, felt wonderful on bare skin. She looked through the railing at the expanse of wind-ruffled water and listened to the rhythm of wavelets washing ashore across the street and four stories below.

  She chose not to think about José, whom she would soon see. Instead, she forced herself to recall the previous weekend with Luis. She had enjoyed being with him, both at the restaurant and later. He was so upset about José’s visit that she had gone out of her way to make the rest of the evening pleasant. Because predictability soothed Luis, she had tried to make their lovemaking just that, and knew as his body relaxed that she had succeeded. She had feigned tranquility too, but it had been hard to keep her mind off the hallucination—if a hallucination is what it was, and what other name could there be for an experience so clearly recalled that had no basis in reality? Only later, alone in the privacy of her own bedroom, had she gingerly reviewed the vision.

  It resembled one she had had a year earlier, in that it had not lasted more than a second or two. Perhaps the only reason she had retained both was because for those few seconds she had felt so sure of herself, so strong! Was her psyche reaching back into Cuba’s glorious revolutionary history in an attempt to claim some of its participants’ courage for herself? If so, she thought ruefully, it hadn’t been particularly successful, since the feeling had vanished along with the visions.

  She noticed that the towel had slid down, exposing her breasts to the sun, and hiked it up to cover skin that had already turned pink. Here on the small balcony of her apartment she saw how her mind had been playing tricks on her. Those things had not happened to her and may not have even happened to Sánchez—at least, not the way she had visioned them. The incidents were hallucinations, dreams, fantasies, or . . .

  “Whatever they are they are not me,” Celia said aloud, and mentally began to list all the reasons why not. She had never been into mysticism. She did not even care for the magic realism of such fine Latin American writers as Isabelle Allende and Gabriel García Marquéz. By temperament and training, she was a rational, scientific-minded person.

  Like the good doctor she knew herself to be, Celia prescribed what reason and intuition told her was the best regimen. She must not dwell on sensations that momentarily made her feel as if she had become Celia Sánchez or Celia Sánchez had become her or whatever was going on there. Yet she should try to remember, perhaps write down, the details of each episode. They were, after all, symptoms of something. Meanwhile, she should examine other aspects of her life that might be causing the mental aberrations. Was she under some stress that she was choosing to ignore?

  José’s imminent arrival popped into her head, but she waved it away as one might a mosquito. Even the most recent hallucination had occurred before Luis broke the news that his brother was returning. Naturally she had grieved when José walked out on her, and had it not been for Franci’s support she might well have failed her final medical school exams. But hers was not a profession nor was Cuba a culture that encouraged emotional self-indulgence. In recent years she could honestly say that she had rarely given her former fiancé a thought.

  Liliana, at sixteen, was more of a challenge now than she had been when she was a little girl, but Celia had not come up against any parenting issues that could be called stressful. She truly enjoyed Liliana’s vivacious personality and had confidence in her niece’s innate good sense—discounting, perhaps, her addiction to disco music. Their bond was strengthened by the fact that Liliana looked to Celia as a role model. Even before Liliana’s mother died, the child had declared that when she grew up she was not going to be a soldier like Mommy but a doctor like Tía Celia. No, Celia concluded, whatever this glitch in her psyche, it had nothing to do with Liliana.

  Work had certainly been difficult in recent months, not so much for the nature of it, which she loved, but because everyone was working longer hours. She knew that toward the end of a shift she simply did not have the same reserves of patience nor could she provide the same quality of counselling to her child patients, their parents, and members of the pediatric staff who looked to her for reassurance and guidance. Celia smiled with faint irony, wondering if her disturbing experiences might be rooted in something as trivial as insufficient sleep.

  Or in her relationship with Luis?

  Had Celia focused on that, she might have found, if not a causal factor, at least a facet of her life worth examining. But the instant the thought of Luis entered her head she sprang up and moved to the balcony doorway to check the living room clock. Aye Madre! He would be here any minute! As if conjured by the thought, Luis’s small grey Fiat rounded the corner a block away.

  In her bedroom, Celia snatched the first clothes that came to hand. She pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, slipped into sandals, and ran a brush through her hair. Moments later she heard, along with the sounds of everyday living from other apartments in the building, Luis’s footsteps coming along the hallway toward her door.

  She opened it on the first knock, and said, glancing at her watch, “I suppose you want to be there when he arrives. Shall we go then?”

  FIVE

  JOE could barely believe he was back in Cuba. But here he was, crossing heat-rippled tarmac over island soil as real as the dinky terminal where the Aerocaribe flight from Cancun had landed. As the bus shuttled passengers to the international terminal to clear immigration and customs, Joe wondered how much of what he had read was true. After the Soviets cut off aid and the Cuban economy hit rock bottom—which was where it was when he left—had the country really pulled itself up by the bootstraps? No mean trick, he conceded, when you have to start by creating the boots—or, in Cuba’s case, creating a tourist industry—from scratch. He could not imagine that white sand beaches, which in his youth had been enjoyed by Cubans and a sprinkling of fleshy Russians, now swarmed with foreign tourists. But he had seen the pictures. Would slick magazines like Islands and Conde Naste lie about a thing like that?

  Joe gave no credence to the US media’s endless stream of stories about supposed abuses of the 11 million Cubans who remained in their homeland; tales regularly trotted out to explain why 10 per cent of the Cuban population had immigrated to North America. Being one of the 10 per cent, he knew that most were like himself, people more interested in money than politics, simply looking for economic opportunities that didn’t exist or weren’t permitted on the island. Joe wasn’t skeptical by nature, but given the biased reportage about Cuba, common sense dictated that he go see for himself.

  He flipped his US passport open in front of the immigration official and waited to be hassled, but all she asked was where he would be staying and how long. He said he would be in Cuba a month and name
d the hotel he had written on his tourist card. He hoped neither was true. With luck he could check out business possibilities in half that time and expected to stay at his mother’s place. She hadn’t replied to his letter, but that was probably because he had sent it to Luis, who might not have shown it to her. Joe wasn’t worried. Mothers—at least Cuban mothers—didn’t know the meaning of rejection.

  The customs agent performed a perfunctory search of his luggage, and Joe passed through into the lobby. He found the Havanautos rental agency and waited with growing impatience for the clerk to do the paperwork. It was an annoyance to learn that the Audi he had reserved was not available. He was unapologetically offered a Korean-made Daewoo. Grumbling, he signed the form. Then there was a twenty-minute wait for credit card confirmation. As he waited for the endlessly redialed call to go through, he scanned the lobby. He saw no familiar face nor had he expected one. Even if Luis had a car, which was improbable, the fuel shortage could have prevented him from driving out to the airport. More likely he had chosen to ignore the visit. Not that it mattered. Joe never had waited for his older brother to open doors for him and wasn’t about to start now.

  Paperwork finally completed, he stepped out into the sweltering heat and looked across to where he was told the car was parked, beyond a row of cassia trees. The Cuban name for those trees came back to him: lluvia de oro. “Rain of gold” could not have been more appropriate, he thought as he paused to watch a shower of yellow blossoms shaken loose by a slight breeze. Then he saw her. She stood in the shade of a cassia tree talking to a man, oblivious to the blossoms drifting around them. Oblivious to him.

  From the back, he honestly didn’t recognize the tall man in grey polyester trousers and short-sleeved white shirt. But then, it wasn’t the man who magnetized his gaze. It was the one person he would never have expected to see here—or to see at all, for that matter. He had thought of Celia briefly on the flight over. He supposed she was married by now with two or three kids. She probably would have put on thirty pounds and switched to matronly skirts that bulged at the belly. It was not an image he cared to cultivate. The image he preferred, although he had blocked it too, was the one he was staring at fifty feet away: the same trim figure she’d had back in med school, clad in the same jeans and T-shirt. He almost expected that when she spotted him her face would darken with the same rage it had held the last time he saw her. But he was wrong about that too. As he drew near he realized that she had already seen him and, for whatever reason, was keeping her expression impassive.