The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho (8 page)

We opened all the windows to let a little fresh air circulate through the space and went down to my place.

“So Abril took the bus?” I asked Gustavo, unable to imagine anyone passing up a ride for Miami public transportation.

“I don't know. I'm not going to think about it, and Henry knows why,” he said.

“Because nobody can understand women,” said Henry very seriously upon hearing his cue.

After Gustavo had swallowed the black coffee I had made for him and gone back to work, Iris told me, “Even I don't understand that girl. You'd think she'd let herself be helped.”

“What do you mean?”

Iris gestured toward Henry, who was listening intently, so I turned my TV on to some cartoons for him and followed her into the kitchen so we could continue our shameless gossiping while I made sandwiches and more coffee for us, and some oatmeal for him.

“I think she's found Henry's father,” whispered Iris.

“When did she lose him?”

“I'm not sure. You know she used to live down here in Little Havana about eight years ago.”

“You mentioned it once.”

“She was eighteen or nineteen and living here with an aunt. Then she went to New York City to be near her family. They live in Washington Heights.”

“Is that where she met Henry's father?” I said, even as the answer came up from somewhere inside me, surprising me: no.

“That's what I thought. But Henry is seven and change, so you do the math.”

“She was pregnant when she left.”

“Exactly. And I think she came back because of him. To find him. Or to force him to take care of Henry.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well, first she moves in asking for a month to month lease and a discount because she's just here to resolve ‘an important family issue.' Then she begins to ask to use my printer to make copies, and every time I'm able to catch a peek, it's a legal-looking form, an application, or a copy of something official like a birth certificate or a medical record.”

“Maybe she's sick,” I said quietly, thinking about my mother.

“And she's always asking me to watch Henry or to get him onto the school bus because she has to go downtown at these ungodly early hours. Now, what does all that tell you?”

“Not much, Iris.”

“She's going to court!”

“Well, maybe not court, but you may be on to something. She may be going through a child support case process with the state attorney's office. It makes sense. She won't be able to get Medicaid to help with Henry's medical bills unless she has at least made an attempt to locate his father and have him pay child support. Maybe that's all it is.”

“Maybe, but get this, yesterday, she asks me to take care of Henry today because it's teacher-planning day and she didn't want to take him where she was going. So I ask her, ‘Where are you going?' and she sort of waves me off, saying that if all went well, everything would change, and that Henry was going to be a very happy boy. You know, you're right. I say she's either suing the bastard for child support or she had sued him before and the state just found him.”

“Well, I've had a few clients with the same problem, and it can take years for the child support enforcement division at the state attorney's office to locate a father, if that's what she's doing.”

Except it was Thursday. Last I'd heard, the child support enforcement division didn't see clients on Thursdays. Still, maybe Abril had found herself a badass Miami motherfucking lawyer, as my client Silvia would say, though I decided not to say so, asking instead: “So you think Henry's father is here in Miami and doesn't want to do the right thing?”

I was starting to get a strange, yet not altogether unfamiliar, feeling about all this, an uneasiness the source of which I couldn't quite locate inside my body.

“I think there's more to it. You know, Henry does have her last name,” she said, twisting a strawberry pink lock of hair with her right index finger and a blond one with her left.

“So what? You can give a child any last name you want, and you said yourself she got the money to go to nursing school, so maybe he
is
paying child support.”

“Maybe he's married and famous,” she said, ignoring me.

“That doesn't mean anything. If he's famous, all the more reason to avoid a scandal.”

“Maybe he refuses to give poor Henry his lousy last name and the child support he's entitled to,” finished Iris, as if finally articulating a theory she'd been working on for some time.

“Yeah, I can see that,” I said, surrendering. “Maybe Henry is Enrique Iglesias's love child. Or Luis Miguel's!”

“Hey, she's pretty enough and smart. Maybe it
is
Luis Miguel.”

“He doesn't have a house in Miami.”

“That you know of. And you don't need to own a house to run out on your wife, girlfriend, or whatever the guy has,” she said.

Well, didn't I know that much to be the truth?

“I'm telling you, Mariela, that girl is going through some big things, but she won't confide in anyone or ask for help beyond having me watch Henry every once in a while. Even poor Gustavo, who's completely gaga over her, she treats like a distant relative.”

“Well, he doesn't see her as a distant relative, I'll tell you that. I ran into her coming out of his apartment with Henry yesterday, and they all looked quite chummy, like a little family. It was cute, actually,” I said.

Iris remained silent for a moment.

“I miss my husband, Mariela,” she said finally.

“Oh, Iris. I'm sorry. Is it still hard?”

“No, no. After ten years, it's easier in a way. But once in a while, I just wish I could see him. Just one more time, you know?”

I lowered my eyes, because the force of Iris's desire was connecting with something deep inside me, and I didn't want to see or hear anything about anyone, not that I thought I still could after my failed experiment the night before.

My silence must've made her feel self-conscious about sharing because she changed the subject.

“Well, anyway, you're right about one thing: Gustavo's in love,” she said. “Serves him right. He was such a dog to that cute girl who used to come around looking for him. I forget her name.”

“Monica,” I said. “Remember that day I had to distract her so he could leave his apartment with that other one, the one with the blue hair.”

“That's right! What a crazy boy.”

“Who knows? Maybe he was just waiting for the right girl,” I said loyally.

“Yeah, sure,” said Iris with a smirk. “But enough about him. What're you doing on Saturday for your birthday?”

“Oh, I'll probably throw myself a party cleaning that filthy apartment upstairs,” I said, hoping to be at the St. Michel with Hector, getting rid of all the mess between us. Even if I was on my way out as his lover, I wanted to leave him wanting more, not relieved he'd gotten rid of me.

“You should do something fun. Whoever heard of cleaning on one's birthday?” she said, before hollering to Henry that they were leaving.

“Iris, tell Abril I'd be happy to help her find a good lawyer or some free legal aid. I've researched quite a few good programs for women waiting for child support to kick in.”

“I'll tell her, but, knowing her, she'll look at me like she doesn't know what I'm talking about. By the way, you know Fridays are Spam All Star nights at Hoy Como Ayer, so if you change your mind and decide to do something special for the eve of your birthday, you're welcome to join my friends and me tomorrow night. You know, start your celebration early with a little Cuban nostalgic funk,” she said, dancing a little and making me laugh at the sight of her strawberry-highlighted tresses slashing air to the rhythm of her hips.

“Do we have to leave now?” said Henry, running into the kitchen.

“Yes, sir, we do. Chop, chop.”

“But I don't want to chop!”

“Remember, a little dancing, a little fun, wouldn't kill anybody,” Iris said to me as she headed out.

“Promise to think about it,” I said, sincerely hoping I'd be otherwise engaged. Not that Hoy Como Ayer wasn't fun. The name meant “today as in the past,” and it was that perfect mix of nostalgia and hip vanguard that was at the center of its mystique. There was a certain sexy vibe emanating from the raw-gorgeous people singing loudly, laughing gaily, and dancing madly under the club lights and curious-lustful-envious gaze of the cigar-smoking, mojito- or rum-and-Coke-drinking, music-loving nondancers. You could engage with the energy of those around you as much as you wanted (which could lead to very interesting experiences), or retreat, losing yourself inside yourself, alone but not really, until you got your fill of whatever part of you had escaped you.

It was where Miamians went to listen to some of the best underground Cuban music in town, and I hadn't been there in what seemed like ages. Well, actually since just before Hector, during a New Year's Eve celebration, wearing a sweet little blue dress and glittery heels, realizing I was happy, and because of that, breaking up that very night with the one that got away. Except he didn't. I'd thrown Jorge back into the sea myself. Gave him back to his wife because I was afraid of loving him, of losing him, of suffering. That fear alone had been enough to propel me, headfirst instead of heart-first, into Hector's arms. And now, not even a year later, here I was again, on the losing end of... something.

After Iris left, I put on an old Julieta Venegas CD and tried to relax. The sound of her silvery voice filled the space with a song about those changes in yourself that you can't see, barely notice, until it hits you that something in you is different. Usually, just a few lines of any of Julieta's songs were enough to lull me into imagined happiness and well-being, but today the topic of this one made things worse. Today, the song seemed to bring the feeling of impending doom I'd had since yesterday to the foreground of my consciousness, troubling me, as if my fear of never knowing what it might have felt like to be truly loved were being confirmed with every verse.

I thought of Hector and our affair, trying to pinpoint what was making it so hard to leave him behind.

At first, it had been exciting, meeting him somewhere different every time. Sometimes we'd meet to talk. And even though I'd loved reading before him, he had taught me how to truly lose myself in the pleasure of a good book, how to peel it like a freshly ripened piece of fruit, releasing its juicy pulp.

“You can learn more about life from a good novel than from all the self-help books ever published put together,” he'd tell me.

“Oh, that's not true.”

“It's absolutely true.”

So he'd read to me. Esmeralda Santiago's
The Turkish Lover
and Julia Alvarez's
Saving the World,
Sandra Cisneros's
Loose Woman,
and Junot Díaz's
This Is How You Lose Her,
emphasizing a thousand and one lessons and seducing me in the process. And he'd hold me, and talk to me, and look at me, and want to know everything about me. So I'd tell him almost everything, and then listen to his voice as it sounded when his lips were warming the vicinity of my ears. And then, I'd choose to forget some more, his words the numbing agent allowing me to remember the man who came before him with a dulled, distant sadness, but without the angst of desperation.

Meanwhile, Olivia, his wife, kept to herself, rarely leaving her apartment except for the organic garden center where she was a volunteer of some sort, seldom answering a greeting, and making it easy for me to convince myself that what I was doing didn't matter, that my affair with Hector was just like the unexpected, fleeting joy of rereading a clever line one wrote long ago, buried among the important things in a diary no one else would ever read.

Of course it was all insanely sexy. Hector was a natural teacher, engaging me in fascinating conversations that mixed the intellectual and the sexual in ways that made me want to stay under his spell forever. He'd analyze me constantly as if I were a complex, rare, and precious firefly, and despite myself, I began to see myself differently through his eyes: light, flowing, sensuous, vibrating, and as alive as I'd ever been.

I didn't exactly forget he was married. The fact just appeared to fade a little more with every month that passed, and I began telling myself that maybe this delicious adventure was the work of one of God's Robin Hood–like helpers deciding that I deserved not to be the one being cheated on, at least this once. I'd settled. And now, here I was. Was it too late? Could I try to really love someone again? To be in a normal relationship capable of growing into something stable?

Where were these questions coming from? It wasn't just the argument I'd had with Hector that morning or the abruptness with which his passion had turned into indifference or thinking of Jorge again. It was these questions that didn't sound like me and couldn't be coming from me. Then again, after so many years of keeping my sixth sense on “off,” who the hell knew what the call for help of the real me sounded or felt like?

Most certainly not me.

Chapter 9

“I
'm telling you, forty is the new thirty,” said the enthusiastic cosmetics counter attendant at the Village of Merrick Park when I told him about my birthday the next day. “Just look at yourself. You should be a model for that magazine—what's it called? The one with all the gorgeous women who are forty, fifty, even sixty? Forget it, I can't remember the name, but this foundation I'm putting on you? It's featured on their latest cover, and you should be on it,” he said, opening his eyes wide as much to emphasize his point as to show off the flawless lash work.

“Hmm,” I answered, thinking that getting compliments from people who wanted to sell me things would sooner get me into bankruptcy court than on the cover of a national magazine. I'd come for the free makeup application, but now I was trapped inside this glitzy department store, feeling like a criminal for intending to walk away without buying even one of the overpriced things I couldn't afford now being used on my face.

“Now, while I finish, I want you to describe yourself on this contest form,” he said, handing me a small notepad with the brand's logo and a pink pen.

I hesitated.

“You could win an all-expense-paid cruise to the
Mediter-raneaaaaan,
” he cooed.

It was obviously important to him, so I took the notepad intending to fill it out. Except that trying to describe myself only made my eyes well up, threatening the three layers of “sun-kissed,” antioxidant bronzing powder he'd just applied to my face.

What had made me think that plastering my face with micro-bead this and age-defying that would make me feel wonderful about turning forty and facing the beginning of another decade with another breakup?

Because breaking up with Hector before he broke up with me is what I'd decided to do on that Friday morning, not two days after we'd been together at the St. Michel, and despite all my self-boasting about being a “successful” other woman.

I'd woken with three words on my brain:
enough—of—this
. What was I so afraid of? I had lost everything that truly mattered to me when I lost my mother. Did I die? No! I survived. And what was the worst that could happen to me really? Worst-case scenario, I'd have to buy a vibrator and learn how to use it properly. I wasn't the first, and I wouldn't be the last. And, who knew, maybe the makeup, doing something to look my best, would magically inject me with the confidence I was trying to drum up. Maybe it was just the signal I needed to alert Hector that something inside me was different. To let him (and me) know that he didn't really know me and that I was capable of changing for the better at a moment's notice. I wanted to make him wonder about all the little secrets I still held inside me. I might have been on my way out, but I still had to live mere steps from the man, and as Ellie would have said with her lame trashy-girl-imitating-ghetto-girl-to-be-cool slang, I didn't have to “go out like that.”

Still, every slap, pat, and brush of makeup just felt like having the word
failure
stamped onto my face.

“What's wrong, honey?” asked the makeup boy, startled by my tears. “Oh. No. No, no, no. We can't have that. People are going to think I'm torturing you or something. Come on.” He laughed. “Okay, I get it, you want me to do it for you, you tricky girl,” he said, hastily taking the notepad from me as I cried. Embarrassed, I tried to smile and hoped he wouldn't think I was crying because I didn't know how to write.

“There,” he said, handing it back to me after a couple of minutes. He'd filled in the blanks with:

I am ……………
lush and glamorous.

My three best features are ……………
1) my black, wavy hair, 2) the way my eyes close when I smile, like a Chinese manga doll's, 3) my curvy Rockette thighs.

What I love about myself is ……………
my smile. It's a little bit gummy and fabulous and makes me look like Julia Roberts.

I had to laugh.

“I can write good, right?”

“You know what? You really can. You also really want to sell some makeup.”

“Aw, don't say that. It's nothing but the truth. And now, when you win the cruise, you can take me as your date! The word
lush
is part of the new campaign, so it shows you're a good customer.”

“It shows I'm an arrogant customer.”

“Nooo, it shows you're confident, like our products. There it is. You see?” He turned me toward the mirror. “Julia Roberts.”

Well, I'll say this for him: I did look better in a weird, not-really-me kind of way. My eyes, shiny from the tears, were surrounded by someone else's dramatic lashes, and he'd made my lips soft, shimmery, and pin-up pouty. Still, if it were possible that I could remind anyone of Julia Roberts, it could only be of her in that teary scene in
Notting Hill
in which she tells Hugh Grant that she's “just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her,” and made me feel just as forlorn and ridiculous.

Because I
had
been just a girl, standing in front of not one, but, well, more than one boy, asking him (them) to love her, and yet here I was, about to turn forty alone, which either meant I was a girl who was pretty bad at asking to be loved or just a plain unlovable girl, and now I wasn't even that because looking at me from the other side of that mirror was someone who looked not a day less than the hard-lived middle-aged woman with no successes in her pocket, and no real skills, that she really was.

I bought the mascara and an overpriced, pinky-rose lipstick called “Kinda Sexy” from the makeup boy, and an hour later I was getting off the eight bus a few stops before I had to. Even in September, gray, rain-threatening days are so rare in Miami, I'd always found them comforting, romantic even, and perfect for a mind-clearing walk home. Plus, it would give me a chance to stop at the
frutería
to buy some fresh tomatoes and avocados for a salad.

Though their eyes never left my ass, the men loitering at the
frutería
seemed to approve of my new look, to judge by their up and down looks and their obsequious smiles. I rushed to pay, only to realize it had begun to rain, as I'd suspected. One of them opened the door for me, and I stood under the shop's whisper of an awning with him, choosing to get wet and ruin my makeup rather than go back into the
frutería
to be visually dissected. He asked my name, did I live in the area, and wasn't I cold, before realizing I wasn't about to answer any of his questions and giving up. Then he sprinted across the street and into a shop I'd never noticed before, despite probably passing it on my way home a million times.

The sign over the door read B
OTÁNICA
N
EGRA
F
RANCISCA
(which means “Francisca, the negress”). A
botánica
is where
santeros
and would-be
santeros
shop. And
Santería,
well, the easiest way to describe it is to say that it's as old as Christianity and blends (or tries to blend) Roman Catholic beliefs with traditional Afro-Cuban rituals and ways of seeing life and death, good and evil, love and hate. It's popular in Brazil and in Caribbean countries like the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.

You can buy folk medicine and remedies, religious candles, potions, charms, amulets, jewelry, statues of saints in every size, and other products the believing regard as the magical form of alternative medicine for whatever ails a life, from emptiness to jealousy, and from sadness to the mad, mad, mad desire for revenge.

Many
botánicas
look like a pack rat's garage and smell like incense. Most are unassuming, humble. They may have a “house doctor,” usually a self-proclaimed, all-knowing, remedy-prescribing, psychic-pharmacist-psychologist who offers consultations for a set fee of anywhere from a voluntary donation to sixty dollars.

Even before my “gift” manifested with puberty, I spent quite a lot of time visiting
santeros
in
botánicas
with my mother. I wasn't even in kindergarten when I learned to
despojarme,
which is to perform a rhythmic, furious shake of your arms above your head, back to front, to send the bad spirits away.

But this
botánica
didn't look like the others. Even through the rain, it looked to me like an opera stage, with bloodred velour curtains framing the scene made by the saints in the window, arms outstretched in mercy, like actors in a play. It was the kind of place that made you imagine an old gypsy with a crystal ball on her lap and as much makeup on her face as I had on mine.

It was raining hard now. I couldn't walk in the rain and the place was calling me. Walking in, the man who'd talked to me was nowhere to be seen. I heard the same jangle of bells as before and realized they had hypnotized me into coming in. Otherwise, how was I here, suddenly surrounded by big and small gesso saints on every corner and old metal storage shelves lined with small glass bottles holding fluorescent liquids and chalky powders? A redheaded woman in her fifties wearing jeans and a purple tank top asked if she could help me and waited for God knows how long. I say this because I don't remember what I answered. And I don't remember how long before I left. All I know is that the moment my two feet were inside, I heard a loud, otherworldly crack, a single jolt of thunder stabbing some nearby inch of earth with its sword of light, and it was as if I weren't there. As if all I could do was remember who I was and feel in my very veins the sorrow I'd come from.