The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho (26 page)

“Padre no es el que engendra,”
I said in my most disgusted tone, half of a saying that means “father isn't he who engenders, but he who raises.”

He just shook his head, as if to himself.

“Stupid, I know. I know I did baaad.”

He didn't remember why he'd been in the park or how Olivia could have known about Henry. All he remembered was the hate in her eyes, and then, nothing. And I saw this now; it was all he cared about. Which made me realize the futility of wanting him to be a better person in death than he'd been in life. It just doesn't work that way. Like all egotistical philanderers, Hector had felt entitled to everything: the one loving wife that he loved back “in his own way” and the myriad dalliances, which were just that, the entertaining drama and variety he felt deserving of in the same way he felt deserving of good books, art, and music. You know, the other joys of life.

“Will you help me, Merry Ella? Will you . . . be . . . a friend? Help Olivia?” he pled again, as if to remind me that nothing mattered now that he was dead, that there was no use berating him for what was done.

“What can I possibly do?”

“Tell her. Tell her I'm ssssorry.”

Now there was something I was absolutely
not
going to do.

“How can I tell her that, Hector? You're dead!”

“Tell her. Merry Ella, I told you: I sink she wants . . . to hurt herself.”

I sighed, hoping he'd understand I'd try my best, but also that he'd be unable to see inside my mind and know there was no way in hell I was going to tell Olivia I'd been speaking with her dead ex-husband.

“Merry Ella?”

“Yes, Hector.”

“I want you . . . to forgive meee. For how . . . I was. I didn't
sink
about you. I'm ssorrry I hurt you so much,” he said, back “on” the floor, looking up at me with those eyes that seemed as alive as ever, the intensity of their gaze unchanged as he knelt in front of me, just like Eddie the psychic had said he would.

“It's okay, Hector. It's okay. You didn't hurt me that much. You didn't. And you gave me good things too.”

“Like what?” he asked, unbelieving but expecting an answer.

“Like love of life. You know, of... art, books, music. Good stuff, and—”

“You are beautiful, Merry Ella. You are . . . good. I can see that now,” he said, stressing every syllable, making a huge energetic effort to speak clearly. I could tell because with each word, his image became more and more like a Venetian fresco seeping into the plaster of the wall behind it, to be hidden from history for centuries. “Forgive meee?”

“I forgive you, Hector,” I said, wanting him to believe, to know, that he'd never be alone. “I know Olivia forgave you too. You know that, right?”

He started to sob again, doing that who-whoing thing he did.

“Hector?”

“Tell her. She was always. My Olivia. No, tell her she was my olive tree. Tell her that, please. And that I loved her.”

I believed him. He'd faded almost to nothing in order to muster the strength to say those words as clearly as he could, to make absolution and his love for Olivia his last intention.

So I let him go, letting go also of the diversion this whole mystery had provided, and that I was only now able to admit to myself I'd held on to, like a crutch, to help me deal with the loss of him in my life.

It had been much too long for him, this roaming of days, unable to go, unable to be here. It was time for him to rest, and for the two women he'd hurt the most to live.

When he'd gone, I was no longer cold and could hear the sounds of Coffee Park, fully awake and ready to face the day. I was ready too, and now that I knew what I had to do, there was no time to waste.

Chapter 29

“F
or months, I knew something was wrong, but when I'd asked him, he'd just grumbled some nonsense about the cost of the booths for the Miami Book Fair. I knew he was lying, but . . .”

Olivia was on her bed now, where I'd convinced her to lie after she'd finally answered my insistent knocking and opened the door, trembling and unstable from lack of food and sleep and peace.

She'd waved me away when I tried to cover her with the shabby floral comforter by her bed, but didn't object to my going into the kitchen in search of something for her to eat. Wasn't she afraid I'd find her belladonna? Or was she beyond caring?

Opening cabinet doors (and loudly banging them closed) in my quest for eatable food, I was tempted to search for it, as confirmation, but stopped myself. I already knew what I knew. Plus, I'd promised Hector I'd help Olivia, not come up here to do the police's job for them.

In the cabinets, I found cans: chickpeas, sweet corn, and white sardines in lemon. In the fridge, I discovered the last quarter of a red onion and some leftover shiitake mushrooms, which I chopped and threw, along with the contents of all three cans, into a ceramic bowl, followed by the last handful of feta cheese crumbles miraculously preserved inside the sturdy plastic supermarket container they'd been sold in.

There were no greens or fresh vegetables for a proper salad, so I doused what I had with some expensive extra virgin, cold-pressed, organic olive oil I found under the counter and sprinkled it all with Celtic sea salt that was thick and rough and almost as expensive as the olive oil.

I swirled my mix in the bowl until the oil coated everything, making it shiny and colorful. Then, not finding a proper (or a clean) tray, I put the salad of sorts atop a turquoise dinner plate and brought it into the bedroom for Olivia.

The room, like the rest of the house, was a complete mess. She'd obviously given up doing anything but the most basic things: going to the bathroom, drinking water, and bathing, maybe.

I placed the food on the night table next to her and started to pick up a little, noticing a small suitcase and a change of clothes on the chair by the window, but continuing to tidy up until I saw her eye the bowl a couple of times out of the corner of my eye.

“Here, let me help you,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed, taking the plate in one hand and holding the spoon up to her mouth with the other, very matter-of-factly, as if I did this every day.

After just a couple of mouthfuls, she shook her head, lips closed.

“You have to eat,” I said, wondering if I should ask Gustavo to help me take her to a hospital.

“I knew something was wrong. His mood, his absence even when he was here, but I thought whatever it was, whoever she was, would go away, like it always did. I decided to find a project. That always helped,” she said, looking intently at her hangnails, picking at them.

“A project?”

“A remedy, a recipe. I thought I'd help the boy. Henry. With his eyes.”

“The belladonna,” I said.

She looked at me then, surprised that I knew.

“I spent a lot of time reading about myopia. Some say that it isn't hereditary, but I found that with the very extreme cases, as in degenerative myopia, it is.”

“But Abril told you she doesn't have myopia.”

She looked away abruptly, fixating her gaze on the wall, and I knew that Hector had been right. She knew about Henry. But how?

After minutes of silence, I insisted: “The belladonna, didn't you know it was deadly?”

She breathed deeply, as if bracing herself, then motioned for me to give her the bowl again and took an enthusiastic spoonful or two of my concoction before speaking again, already looking better. God only knew when she'd eaten last.

“I wasn't going to have him ingest it. I was going to use it to dilate his pupils so that the secret ingredient in my remedy would work better,” she said, adding, “It's shiitake mushrooms,” after it was clear I wasn't very curious about naturopathy and wasn't going to ask her what it was.

She was all business now, energy coming to her from the act of speaking about something she knew.

“I was so meticulous. I worked for days to carefully extract liquid from the belladonna leaves I'd ordered, drying them until the remaining liquid turned an almost perfect consistency, like a resin. And this with leaves from a plant that's not even native. Well, I could have managed to grow it, but I didn't want to risk one of those sudden Miami weather changes rendering it unusable.”

“You said you ordered it? Where?” I asked, not knowing what she would say before she said it, but knowing that she was telling me the truth, getting that feeling of confirmation each time she dropped another detail on my lap.

“At Pedro's Pharmacy. They ordered it for me weeks ago,” she said as if I'd asked a stupid question, and I thought again how much like Hector she could be when it came to the little things.

“Who ordered for you—Pedro?” I asked.

When she shook her head no, I knew why they hadn't arrested her yet.

But before I tell you how I knew, let me shoot you a Polaroid picture of the hybrid nature of Coffee Park shops. Like the locksmith whose wife also bakes empanadas and makes
lulo
juice for lunch, as if his shop were a cafeteria, or the yoga studio where they also give massages and teach beading classes, and the pharmacy, of course, which functioned like a remedy store, stocking everything from ointments, to herbs, to imported tonics and leaves from every part of the world. In other words, our shops, they're, let's say, informal.

Then there were Pedro and Sarah.

Sarah had been the only other person who ever tended the register or processed special orders. I remembered how distracted she'd been toward the end of their relationship. And how I'd thought it was all the fighting with Pedro that made her forget to write down what you were buying, forget to make the order sheet with the duplicate that would have served as your receipt, forgetting also to put the cash inside the register, “distractedly” saving, I saw now, for her getaway.

Since it was a cash-only establishment, there was no credit card to track and, thanks to Sarah, no record of the order. But even though Sarah would have remembered a belladonna purchase, she wouldn't have told the police a thing. That is, if she'd been around to tell, which she hadn't been, having gone back home the very week of Hector's death, if I remembered Iris's account of it correctly.

I was sure the police had searched all the nearby pharmacies for orders of belladonna plants, leaves, or seeds, starting with Coffee Park's. But if Sarah had not written it down, I doubted Pedro would have thought to say anything other than “We would have had to order it, and I see no record of that on our special-order pad.” I wondered if, when double-checking for the police, even looking at Sarah's handwriting on that pad had made him miss her, and if in his sadness, he could have been less than concerned about helping the policeman or woman, who'd be, in any case, just another outsider to him, if not the outright law-enforcing enemy.

“So did you dilate Henry's eyes with the belladonna?” I prodded.

But Olivia just looked into her food for a while, then:

“Have you ever been in love, Mariela?”

“What do you mean? I mean . . . I guess, maybe,” I said, unsure of where she was going.

“You meet a man. A wonderful god of a man. He makes you laugh, he makes you think, he makes everything fascinating, exuberant, and wonderful. You're in love and you're loved and nothing else matters. And then, something terrible happens. You can't give him the one thing he says he wants the most: a child. And you watch this man be sad, so sad, that you offer to let him go, to go about his life without you, to find happiness somewhere else even though you know that the minute he's gone, your life will become as small and dark and airless as a crowded coat closet.”

She'd started trembling like she did the day she'd given me tea and returned my breakup letter, so I took the bowl she still held in her hands away from her and set it on the night table. Then I sat on the edge of the bed, took her hands in mine, and closing my eyes, I listened.

“But he wouldn't leave me. Can you imagine the sacrifice? He said I was his wife and we'd stay together. And then he kept his word: When there was trouble at the university with the economic crisis and my parents wouldn't help us, he didn't hesitate. He decided to come here, and he worked hard, and we bought the house, and later the bookstore. Then, just a bit before the whole mortgage mess a few years ago, he took charge again. He said, ‘Olivia, you're my home, and I am your home. We don't need these walls, this roof.' So we sold it and paid off the mortgage on the bookstore, which he placed in my name. He'd joke I could leave him penniless if I ever wanted to. But he knew I wouldn't. Never. No matter what.”

Her hands moved violently within mine, like those flashing vibrating gizmos they give you at franchise restaurants to alert you when your table is ready, but I held on.

“That was Hector on a good day,” she said, a lone tear rolling down her sunken left cheek and landing on my hand.

“And on bad ones?”

“On bad ones he'd be hurtful. Couldn't help making me feel inadequate, ugly, a silly hen. He'd tell me all my suspicions of infidelity were my own inferiority complex making me crazy. He'd say I needed professional help. Sometimes, I'd be reading or gardening in the balcony or cooking in the kitchen, and in he'd come and ask me how much we had saved up, and when I'd tell him, he'd say the amount wouldn't even begin to cover my psychiatric hospital costs the way I was going.”

I listened, knowing both Hectors were true Hectors.

“About a year ago, I told him about you.”

“About me?”

“I told him I knew all about you. I told him I didn't know if he was sleeping with you, but that if he hadn't, he would, and I promised him I'd leave him when he did. The next day he brought me a Spanish-language copy of Sylvia Plath's
The Bell Jar
. Told me to read it and decide if that was the life I wanted, because I sounded just like the crazy, suicidal woman in those pages. That I saw women everywhere, that I was delusional. He said that he didn't mind carrying one burden, but that my torturing him was just too much. Sometimes, he'd even convince me, make me apologize.”

I hugged her then, letting her cry on my shoulder, knowing, absolutely knowing, that she wasn't telling me everything, that things had been worse than she was sharing.

Someone else, someone not a woman, might ask why she hadn't just left him. But I knew the truth of us: If we could, we'd leave them all—the chronic bad boys, the frauds, the violent abusers, the unreliable, the lazy, the egotistical, the bad in bed, even the ones who pose as “good men” but have the relentless ability to turn every single happy moment into a day trip to the nearest latrine. We hang on, looking and feeling, and taking notes right on our hearts, until we manage to be able to breathe, to stand, to tell ourselves we're not crazy. That what we are is strong. And then, we leave.

Or we kill them. Was that the way it had happened? I still couldn't see Olivia poisoning Hector.

She was pushing me away now, dabbing at her eyes as she got up and walked to the bathroom, raising her shift to her waist with the door open, not caring that I could see her drop her panties and sit down to pee, still crying.

I busied myself propping up her sweaty pillows, until she came back and sat on the chair, right on top of the change of clothes someone—she, I assumed—had laid out.

“So I put together the remedy. When the belladonna tincture was ready, I called the boy's mother. She'd given me her number about a dozen times, always when she saw me with Hector. I'd always thought she was just friendly, if a bit irritating. Now I know it was her way of threatening him with telling me about the boy. But that day, I just told her what I was doing and asked her if Henry was allergic to anything.”

“Oh, God,” I gasped, seeing everything as she spoke, like watching a movie trailer after the movie has premiered, my clairvoyance no better than an old DVD when it came to Hector's mess.

“She said, ‘Do you know your husband is a son of a bitch?' I told her I knew no such thing. That calling her had been a bad idea. Because I knew. I knew what she was about to tell me, and I didn't want to hear about another betrayal. I even remember thinking I didn't want her to tell me because I'd have to move. And I didn't want to move again. Now, isn't that silly?” she said, smiling a forlorn half smile.

“And that's when she told you?”

“How Hector had seduced her and then refused to do anything but give her money for an abortion. How she'd been too scared and alone to know what to do. How she had planned to be proud, to call him when her son was president of the United States, only to hear him weep with remorse.”

That certainly felt like Abril.

“What changed her mind?” I asked.

“Her family, I think. They were asking questions, telling her she was being a bad mother. That a child needed to know who his father was. So she came back prepared to do God knows what. But we'd moved, sold the house.”

“You moved here.”

“Yes, and so did she when she found him, which didn't take long. There was, of course, the bookstore, which I'd all but stopped tending or even visiting as I got more involved with my work at the nature center. She told me the plan had been to let him see how wonderful Henry was, how smart, how much like him. She thought he'd change his mind without having to take him to court. But he didn't. Instead, she says, he pressured her to sleep with him. She told me he'd taunt her, telling her I would never leave him. That he had nothing, which is true because by then all we had was in my name, and that all she'd get would be a handout dictated by a court.”