The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho (12 page)

He had a point.

“I'm sure you'll get to talk it out. Henry adores you.”

“I know!”
He shook his head, as if to say, “Exactly.”

“And you know, maybe there's hope. I happen to know she was crying yesterday,
disimulando con Iris
that she didn't feel well, so at least you know she cares about you,” I said, trying to console him, and thinking,
Unlike a certain Argentinean jackass.

I didn't know what else to say, so I asked him if he was going to submit a sculpture for the East Little Havana Development Agency contest. This was its second year, and it had been a big deal the year before, with Romero Britto and Nereida Garcia Ferraz sponsoring a debut one-man show at the Miami Art Museum for the winner.

“I'm thinking about it. Kind of stuck for an idea. It would have to be something big, something that really says it all about Little Havana,” he said.

“You could make it about Coffee Park instead.”

“That's what Iris said, but it's Little Havana's grant, and I really don't want to stir up that kettle.”

“Ah, the life of an artist, right?”

“The life of a broke artist,” he said.

“Well, okay, but, you know what? Tonight, after I finish at the apartment, I'll go online and see if I find a few salvage stores willing to give you some extra material for a good cause, what do you say?”

“Que eres la mejor y la más completa,”
he said, which in Cuban means that I was the best.

“Okay, okay, no need to promote my greatness. I'm sure I'll be recognized when I'm dead like all the other greats.”

“Well, I'm going to find a tenant for you,” he said.

“An obsessive housekeeper, if possible, please. See you later,” I said, stepping out and waving good-bye to him with only the last three fingers of my right hand, the rest of my arms fully occupied with my purchases.

I walked back to my building, looking at my cell phone display—eight forty a.m.—and thinking of Hector. Again. Like an annoying alarm. Good thing I was going to be very busy with the apartment. No time to think about stuff that was over. In fact, I decided, I'd make sure to be inside my apartment or Ellie's at times when he might be home so that he wouldn't be able to catch so much as a glimpse of me. I'd ask Iris, or Abril, who had a really nice voice, to record my answering machine greeting to deny him the slightest sound of me. I'd block my Facebook profile. I'd close the Twitter account I didn't yet have, I'd . . .

As I turned the corner at Eighth toward my building, a swatch of green and white fiberglass in my peripheral view brought me back from my Mariela mojo–denying plans: two Miami-Dade patrol cars. There was also a lime-yellow rescue truck, other cars I couldn't identify, and it seemed as if people from all of Coffee Park were now standing around on my block, as if waiting for something.

I thought,
Henry!
and quickened my pace. The crowd seemed thickest in the area in front of my building. I saw Abril with her ponytail all frizzed up, wearing one of Iris's designs: a hot pink T-shirt cut up to resemble a Moroccan-scrolled iron window gate and jeans. She had a dazed expression on her face as she looked toward the park, while trying to restrain Henry from running off somewhere.

Iris! Was it Iris? I walked even faster, searching for her with my eyes. There was the lady who had the huge Virgin Mary on her front lawn, wearing a house robe and curlers. There were Carmita and Betty, the couple who lived right across the park from me, with their five-foot-tall Great Dane.

Then I saw Iris above the swarm of people, probably standing on a park bench. She seemed to be trying to see something over the crowd, and I exhaled, relieved. What the hell was going on? I ran toward her now, clinging to the paper bags I was carrying.

“Iris! Iris, what happened?” I asked, cutting through the gossiping busybodies.

I'll never forget the shaken expression on her face when she turned, steadying herself to come down from the bench and hurry toward me, oblivious to the throng threatening to push her this way and that. As she reached me, she clung to my arm and turned me in the opposite direction, toward the sidewalk, only then opening her mouth to speak. But before she could say a word, somebody barked, “Excuse me! Stand back, please,” and an obviously exasperated paramedic emerged from the crowd rolling a gurney right past us, taking it from sidewalk to street with a sharp thud, and toward the vehicle shaped like a small ice-cream truck.

“It's Hector Ferro, Mariela,” Iris finally managed to hiss into my ear. “He's dead.”

Chapter 14

T
he reason people go to psychics,
santeros,
psychologists, and spiritual consultants, the reason they pray with Buddhist monks, play Ouijas, pay to have their tarot decks, coffee cups, or tea leaves read, follow their horoscopes like gospel, get astral charts made, and try to decipher dreams, is to avoid regret.

Regret is worse than death. Because death, like shit, just happens, swift as a gunshot. But regret is a migraine: a pain that goes on and on and on without ever becoming urgent enough to warrant cutting off your own head, tempted as you might be.

My mother had a theory. She said that her generation, the first generation of Cubans exiled in Miami, aren't as angry as they are sad. That they act angry to forget they're sad they left the island, came here, and were never able to go back. She believed that no Miami Cuban over the age of fifty ever died of anything other than regret. Regret at having left, or at not having left in time, or at having left too soon. Regret of going to the wrong place, of not taking Pepito or Anita with them when they had a chance, not ever knowing if there was something they could've done differently. Regret that they'd never know if they'd have been strong enough to fight back, thinking the world would help them. It didn't.

They were so sure they'd be back soon, but weren't, having to settle instead into, and for, what was then an inhospitable swamp that humidity made as hazy as the dirt they pretended to have in their eyes so they could allow themselves a good cry for their beaten-black-and-blue island. Like me, they regret not having been able to see the future.

It's the chicken feed of clairvoyance, regret. Because you think if you know all the information, if you know that if you leave you'll never be able to go back (because even if you do, you'll be going back to a completely different place that just happens to be in the same location), you'll be able to escape second-guessing yourself. You think you'll be okay because in the end your mother will still be your mother. You don't know that she'll be changed. Loving you still, of course, but what you find out later is that her love now tastes different from all that time spent training to withstand distance, containing herself in order to live with impotence so strong, the phrase “so near and yet so far” was made for it. You think if you'd known all this, you'd be able to live with the results of your choices, never again wondering what would've happened if you'd never left.

Having been clairvoyant, I can understand why people think information is the antidote to regret. Maybe they think knowing will allow them to say, “I did all that I could do” or “Nothing I did was going to change that,” and that this will give them peace. It's as if they could deal with it all: death, loss, illness. But the prospect of the phrase, “If only I'd known”? No—that they cannot face.

The truth is people will do what they're going to do no matter what. The best clairvoyant in the world can tell them exactly what will happen, and they'll just rationalize it and do what they will.

Still, it helps to be prepared to rationalize, which I clearly wasn't on this day that had so suddenly morphed from being “the day after my lover cared so little about me that he found it appropriate to break up with me on the eve of my birthday” to “the day I saw my dead lover's body rolled out inside a black plastic bag.”

One minute he'd been telling me his neglect was just his way of writing it “in” the wall for me. The next, there was no wall, and he was rolling away on top of a gurney, his face covered from me, his eyes closed forever.

I sat there on my stoop, with my bag of cleaning supplies at my feet, looking out across the street at the crowd that seemed to cover the whole park square except for the area that had been cordoned off by police.

Someone was taking my blood pressure. Actually, there were two paramedics. I wasn't sure why two were needed when I was only one person. Had I fainted? To this day, I don't remember.

I tried to understand what was happening around me. Parked on the sidewalk, there were now two more Miami-Dade county police patrol cars. I recognized them because they were white with a green stripe. There was an ambulance, but the white vehicle resembling an ice-cream truck had left with Hector inside. From where I sat, I could see a plainclothes officer or technician taking pictures of the area at the far end of the square, where I guessed they'd found him.

There were a couple of TV station live trucks parked across the street. I remember someone asking if I wanted to go inside where it was cooler, but I don't remember who. People kept telling other people that I was the landlord, that the dead man was my tenant. That he'd been found lying under one of the benches in the square, soaking wet, wrapped in a trench coat and scarf, some blood covering his face. I heard people whispering, “Was he beaten?” “Was he mugged?” “Did he have a heart attack?” I turned my head looking for the person being asked, but invariably they'd be someone who didn't know better than to shrug their shoulders.

The dead man. How had he died? When? What had he been doing in the park?
Maybe he'd been upset and had a heart attack,
I thought, imagining him doubling over and feeling horrified at the thought before telling myself it just wasn't like Hector. Excess emotion did not seem like the thing to kill him, and I obviously had no longer been important enough to cause such a reaction. Or had I? All my screaming to get the fuck out? Still, he'd seemed fine to me when he left last night, and definitely healthy. He'd even taken the time to draw a smiley face on my letter!

The anger and hurt I'd felt the night before now seemed so small, so petty and unimportant, as I sat on that stoop praying for this to be a nightmare, begging God to bring him back to life so that I could hate him knowing he still existed. That it all wasn't so over, so final. But it was. He was dead. I would never see him or hear his voice again. Never touch him or put my finger on the line between his brows before kissing him, magically replacing the frown with a smile.

Just when I thought my chest could not compress any farther, the tears came, and, as if my tears had called him, a man walked over to me and introduced himself as an officer belonging to the Miami-Dade crime scene investigations unit. He had a navy blue rain jacket with yellow letters and navy blue pants, and I disliked him immediately. I could see others dressed like him interviewing other people. I disliked them too.

The officer, I forgot his name as he said it, squinted to read the message on my T-shirt denying him doughnuts, then raised an eyebrow and asked me my name. He asked other questions, or rather the same question asked in different ways: Had I seen anything? Did I know of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Hector?

Then he asked me if I'd been close to the deceased, pronouncing it “disease-t,” which reminded me of Hector and his terrible accent, and made me laugh, visualizing Hector as a trench-wearing, walking disease, which I'd sometimes thought he was. That was enough to get me laughing like a crazy person, kidnapped by my own nerves.

“Sorry, I'm so sorry,” I said, wiping the tears that, despite my laughter, continued to march down my face, like deranged mourners compelled to dance obscenely during a funeral procession. “It's a nervous reaction. I am, I mean, I was his landlord,” I said, ignoring the air-sucking way my stomach contracted again when I heard myself say “was.”

“Were you close to him and his wife, Mrs. Estevez?”

“No. No. Not really.”

“What can you tell me about him?”

“Nothing,” I said too quickly, shrugging my shoulders like a thirteen-year-old responding “I dunno” when asked, “Whose cigarettes are these?”

“Really?” he asked with new interest.

“I didn't know him well. Didn't know them well. At all. Didn't know them—”

“Right, but, they were your tenants for years. You must know something about them.”

“They have a bookstore.”

“Did they get along?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean did they get along.”

“I guess.”

“Did you?”

“Me?” I said, recognizing the creeping warmth of red on my face before it got there.

“Yeah, were you close to them? Did you ever drop in for dinner? That kind of thing.”

He waited.

“We got along. All of us. Them. They. Me. Us.”

“And they got along, you say?”

“I said I guessed.”

“Yes, you did. You did say you guessed,” he said, looking into my eyes with a new squint. “Do you know if he had any enemies, someone who wished him harm?”

I knew of one person who'd wished him harm last night.

“How did he die?” I asked.

“One of your neighbors found him in the park. There was blood on his forehead, probably a concussion. Could've happened if he fell over after cardiac arrest, but we can't be sure, so we're treating it as a suspicious death for now,” he said, more to himself than to me. Then he seemed to remember I was there, and added, “We don't really know yet. Could be any number of things.”

All this he said as importantly and unemotionally as a headwaiter reciting a new menu of house specialties.

“Not cardiac arrest,” I said, the image of him doubling over in pain doing an instant replay in my head.

“Why not?”

“He was, you know, he was healthy,” I said, trying not to cry as I thought of Hector trying to breathe, caught off guard for once. Had he realized he was dying? Had he had time to open his eyes in shock, unwilling? What had he been doing in the park? Oh God, maybe he'd gone to the park to think or to reread my letter without his wife asking what he was reading. Maybe he'd tripped on something and hit his head and died from the impact.

“Well, one never knows,” he said.

“And his wife?” I asked, thinking of Olivia, imagining her reaction when they told her and feeling sorrier for her than I'd ever felt during the time I'd seen fit to sleep with her husband under her very roof of sorts.

“She's catatonic, hasn't spoken.”

“Catatonic?” I said, wondering what What's-His-Face's notion of “catatonic” was, because I'd always thought Olivia had been born catatonic.

“Yes. Why? Do you have reason to believe she's responsible in any way?”

“What? No! I'm just asking if she's okay.”

I had asked sincerely, truly wanting to know if she was all right, thinking, and not for the first time, that there's this strange little connection “other women” have with the wives of their lovers. It's not necessarily jealousy, although there's always some of that, but more of a morbid curiosity mixed with imagined affinity, as if the wife were your sister from your father's first marriage whom you're not allowed to meet, but sometimes find yourself thinking you'd like to because you have someone in common, and probably the answer to many of each other's questions.

“Oh, well, she's as okay as can be expected. If you remember anything that can help us to rule out any foul play—”

I felt the laughter re-erupting immediately, my nerves threatening to abduct me for good.

“Again, sorry. So sorry,” I finished with a barely audible squeak, wishing he'd go away so I could get ahold of myself, think, or cry, or do whatever I was suddenly desperate to be alone to do.

But he stood there looking at me for a long time.

“I'm sorry for your loss,” he said. “Sometimes things like this just happen.”

I looked away.

“It's hard, I know,” he persisted. “This job, you know—believing in God helps.”

“No,” I said, anger surfacing as quickly as the laughter before it had. “Things like this don't just happen, and God has nothing to do with it,” I told him, thinking that if God had done this, he would've at least made it grand, a fucking global war, a tie-dyed red sea. Instead, this had happened: a cheap, artless theater production Hector would have derided.

“You seem angry,” he said.

“Of course I'm angry. My tenant . . . is dead.”

“Yes. I can see how much you cared about him,” said the officer now, looking at the space next to me, assessing its suitability as if planning to settle in.

Sure enough, he took some gum out of his left pant pocket, offered me some with a motion, accepted my refusal with another motion, pulled up his pant legs, and sat next to me on the stoop as if it were a throne. He smoothed back his prematurely balding jet-black hair and crossed his hands, leaning back to rest them right on his emerging beer belly, all the time chewing his gum and nodding slowly like he knew everything.

My heart sank. I wanted him to leave. I wanted to be alone to think about all I didn't understand. Like the death itself. Or the fact that it might have been a crime like a mugging.

Or that I had dreamed it, for once seeing something accurately before it actually happened, or maybe as it was happening.

“I can see you're distraught. I understand and, like I said, I'm sorry for your loss. I can also appreciate how worried you must be that some prowler may be lurking in your peaceful little neighborhood here, but I'm going to level with you about something, Mrs. Estevez. If this was murder, it doesn't look like the work of a prowler to me.”

“Miss,” I said because I felt stoned, drunk, and stupid, in addition to stunned. “And what do you mean?”

“Well, because of the vomit, the head trauma, and the fact that his wallet is missing, robbery is a possibility. But there's also the fact that he had no obvious reason to go to the park on a rainy night, and according to neighbors, never did, that the possible crime scene is surrounded by homes and businesses, yet nobody, including his own wife, or anyone else in your building, saw anything, despite the proximity of all your apartments to the crime scene.”