When Tito Loved Clara (37 page)

“I don't care. Out!”

“I thought you said we wouldn't be disturbed,” the guy said to Aurora.

“Shut up and let's go,” she replied.

“Stupid fucking bitch.”

“Take it outside,” said Clara.

“Both of you.”

When they had gone, she stripped the bed—no condoms, no stains, thank goodness—and put the sheets in the hamper in the bathroom, taking care not to stand on the shattered glass. With the toilet brush, she swept the shards onto a week-old sports page Thomas had left draped over one of the towel rails. She carried the paper downstairs and wrapped it up in another sheet of newsprint before stuffing it into the garbage can, which was overflowing with chicken bones and plastic bottles. The party was not breaking up. There were people in every room, drinking and talking. The reggaeton had been replaced with merengue and a few people
were dancing in the living room. It was like trying to kill a Hydra. She went into the sunroom looking for Yunis, but it was empty save for the teenager at the computer, blasting away at the alien spaceships.

“Where's my sister?” she asked him.

“I dunno,” he replied without looking up from the game.

“Some girl came in looking for her. I think they went downstairs.”

“Christ,” said Clara. She walked back through the dining room, past the dancing couples, this time unplugging the stereo midsong. “This party is
over
!” she yelled in the direction of the living room. Standing in the kitchen at the top of the basement stairs, Clara heard a scream from below, a wordless cry, as if the house itself were wailing. It was her sister's voice. By the time Clara got to the bottom of the stairs, she could hear her niece: “No, Mami. No!” Clara dashed past the washing machine and dryer and entered the den in time to see something she did not completely comprehend at first, but something she would never be able to forget. Deysei and Guillermo were still sitting on the couch. Guillermo was trying to get off the couch, as if a giant spider was approaching him. Deysei, unable to move like Guillermo, was holding up her hands to fend off her mother's foot, which, encased in its white wedge-heeled shoe, was descending toward her. “No Mami!” she called again. Clara was too far away to do anything. She saw Yunis's foot go into her daughter's midsection like a pizza maker's fist going into a ball of dough. Deysei screamed.

Yunis lifted her foot to stomp Deysei again, but by this time, Clara was moving. She raced across the room and jumped on her sister's back. They rolled to the floor, Clara's head colliding with the base of the couch.

Yunis was standing up. “I'm going to kill her. I'm going to
kill
you. Fucking my boyfriend.”

“Stop it! Stop it!” shouted Clara, clutching at her sister.

“She's been fucking Raúl!”

“I know,” said Clara. She could hear Deysei crying now and, on top of it, Guillermo shrieking.

“You
know
and you didn't tell me?”

The ruckus had brought people down from the party, a half-dozen of them, coming into the room, Manny in front.

“Somebody call the police,” shouted Yunis. “They've got to arrest him. He's a goddamn rapist. I'll tell them where he lives.”

“Calm down,” said Clara.

“I'm
not
calming down. I ain't never going to calm down from this!”

Deysei was still on the couch, curled tightly, holding herself and moaning.

“We've got to get her to a hospital,” said Clara to Yunis.

“Yeah, so they can take that fucking thing out of her,” said Yunis.

T
HE HOSPITAL.
A
GAIN.

Hospitals were second only to airports in Clara's list of least-liked places. Just like airports, hospitals were venues for arrivals and departures, for beginnings and ends. A day that contained a visit to both could not be a good one.

The emergency room nurse sent them up to the triage section of the labor and delivery ward. There, Deysei was taken in as if she were going to give birth, the nurse asking lots of questions. Clara explained that her niece had been kicked in the stomach during a fight at a party. The nurse was unfazed, as if she heard this story every day. Very quickly, they had her undressed and into a smock, a fetal heartbeat monitor strapped to her stomach. The heartbeat was there,
beep-beep-beeping
away with comforting regularity. A doctor came in and performed an exam and then an ultrasound. The fetus was clearly visible on the screen, the spine like a row of little teeth, its still-forming limbs moving in that silent darkness.

“You are leaking amniotic fluid. Your bag of waters has been ruptured. There is no way for us to save this pregnancy,” the doctor said.

Deysei began to weep. She'd been holding it in the whole time—in the car, in the emergency room, and through the examination. Now she let her tears out. Seeing it, Clara began to cry, too.

“It's OK?” asked Guillermo. Clara had brought him along. Manny was supposed to be taking Yunis back to Inwood. Back to his place or somewhere else. She didn't care.

“No, Gilly, it's not OK.”

“Was the baby was hurt?” asked Guillermo.

“Yes,” said Clara.

And then Guillermo began to weep, too.

The second interview—a daylong series of introductions, meetings, and Q&As—had gone smoothly. It had been hospitable, collegial, with no third-degree, no surprise quizzes to test his knowledge of Anglo-American cataloging rules or the Dublin Core. The company, Susquehanna Serials, was headquartered in a glass building off the Dulles toll road in northern Virginia. About midway through the afternoon, as a personnel officer was going through various benefits packages, Thomas realized that the job was his. They would not be putting themselves through all of this—the expense of getting him down here, the hours of meetings, the discussion of salary—if they had not already decided that they liked him. Unless he spat on someone or made an off-color joke before leaving, he could expect a call in the next week telling him that he'd been hired. The recognition filled him with happiness and relief. It was not the perfect job, but it was a job and that would do for now. He was going to be a salesman. That's not what the position was called, but that is what it was. He would be pitching Susquehanna's databases to corporations, universities, and libraries in the New York area and providing follow-up support for existing customers. A certain amount of his salary would be based on commission; there was also the possibility of performance-related bonuses. The fact that he had worked with similar kinds of clients at BiblioFile—and the fact that one of Susquehanna's VPs was a former BiblioFile exec—seemed to please everyone. “We'll be in
touch soon,” the human resources manager said as they parted. “Real soon.”

A cab took him to the nearest Metro stop, where he got on a train to Bethesda. The job would require regular trips back to the D.C. area, which was not a bad thing—he'd be able to see his mother more often than he did now. As he rode in the back of the cab, he tried not to get too far ahead of himself. Employment would be a good thing, definitely. It would erase one set of concerns, but there was still all kinds of other shit going on—with Melissa, with Deysei, with Clara's fertility problems.

He got out of the cab and, before going into the Metro, he called his wife.

“Hi? Thomas?”

“Yes. What's up?” He could hear something frying in the back-ground. The radio. Guillermo saying something. The evening routine under way.

“Hold on, baby, I'm talking to Daddy,” Clara said to Guillermo. And then to him: “So, are you done? How did it go?”

“Really well, actually. I don't want to jinx it, but—”

“Don't jinx it!” said Clara. “That's so great. When will they let you know?”

“Soon. Maybe next week.”

“It was a long wait, Thomas, but totally worth it. OK, I don't want to count our eggs—”

“You mean our chickens.”

“Yes. So, are you going to take your mom out to celebrate?”

“I think I might,” he said. His mother was going to pick him up from the Bethesda station.

“Do you know what train you're going to be taking home tomorrow?”

“Not yet. I'll look at the timetable in the morning. Something in the afternoon, so I can spend a little time with my mom. So, how's everything there?”

“A little crazy, actually,” said Clara without hesitation.

“Really? Like what?”

“Well, you remember how I said my sister might be coming back from D.R.?”

“Yeah . . .”

“She's flying in tomorrow.”

“
Tomorrow
? What the hell happened?”

“She and my mother had a big fight and she stormed out of there this morning. She's staying with Plinio now. Tomorrow was the earliest flight she could get.” There was a long pause. “She's going to have to stay with us for a little while, Thomas.”

“Why? Doesn't she have an apartment?” he said. “Why can't she and Deysei move back there?”
That would solve a couple of problems,
he thought but didn't say.

“She sublet that apartment, remember?” said Clara. “The woman in there now is refusing to leave. I can't say I blame her.”

“Your sister is homeless?” he said. “What about Raúl? Can't she move back in with him?”

Here Clara paused. “No. God knows where Raúl's living now.”

“I don't get it. Why the hell is she coming back here so soon? Why's she giving up so quickly?”

“I don't know for sure, but I'd bet that she and the new boy-friend already burned through their little honeymoon period.”

“A boyfriend?
That
's why she moved?”

“Like I said, I don't know for sure, but based on her history, I wouldn't be too surprised. That's just how it goes with her.”

“Shit. And what about that inheritance? Didn't her grandfather leave her money or something?”

“There's a big legal battle over the estate. She might not see it for years. He had like ten kids with three different women and they all want their cut before Yunis gets hers. Anyway, it's not even that much, just a few thousand dollars.”

“So, she's homeless, heartbroken, and penniless, and now she's coming to live with us?”

“Yes.”

He collected his thoughts for a moment. “Speaking of boy-friends, did you talk to that Tito guy yet?”

Another pause. “No, not yet. Like I said, it's been a little crazy. I'll talk to him tomorrow.”

“Don't humor him, Clara. Don't get sentimental. Tell him how it is.”

“I will,” she said.

“I'll call you tomorrow when I know what train I'm on. Hug Gilly for me.”

The conversation wiped out all the good feelings he'd had after the interview. He boarded the train and stewed. This was one of those times when it seemed that every cliché about Latino immigrants was spot on, when every fear he'd had back when he'd first started dating Clara seemed to have been realized. He rued, if only for the duration of the journey to Bethesda, the fact that his marriage had brought him into such regular contact with these crazy Dominicans. Was that racist? Was that bigoted? He didn't know. He didn't care. All he knew was that this wasn't right. All he knew was that this kind of shit did not go on in his own extended family. All he knew was that he was now going to have not only his moody, pregnant teenage niece living under his roof but also his uncouth, loud-mouthed, and unstable sister-in-law. And all this would be happening while he and Clara were about to start IVF, which he'd gathered from the brochures the doctor had given them was a hormonal and emotional minefield. At this point he felt himself wishing he'd married into a nice, repressed family of New England WASPs; he found himself thinking that he should just ditch all of this and run off with Melissa. But he had not heard from Melissa in a couple of weeks—not since his visit with the flowers. She was
waiting him out, letting him make a decision. Right now it seemed like an easy decision to make.

H
IS MOTHER MET
him in downtown Bethesda and led him to a new restaurant. Thomas no longer tried to keep up with his hometown, with its unrestrained development and prosperity. It was like a childhood friend who'd married into money and suddenly started wearing designer clothes and driving a Bentley. You were still cordial with them, but whatever connection had been there was long gone. Every time he returned, the town where he'd grown up was less familiar to him. The one benefit of it was that his mother's house was now worth twenty times what she and Thomas's father had paid for it in the late sixties. His mother's financial security was not something Thomas worried about.

She looked well, his mother. Her dark brown hair had grown back nicely and a healthy color had returned to her skin. She was dressing with care once again. Gone were the sweats and the T-shirts of her chemo days. Here she was in a nice pair of gray slacks and navy blue shell, a silver necklace, and matching earrings. She still wore the lymphedema sleeve on her arm, but she was, overall, looking better than she had in a long time. It had been two years, he realized, with some amazement.

At dinner, she told him she was planning a trip, her first since the diagnosis: a cruise around the South Pacific. She showed Thomas the cruise brochure—Fiji, Tahiti, Bora Bora. The Gauguin experience. “Erin Siegert is going with me. You remember her? We went to Scandinavia together a few years ago to see the fjords.” (In the wake of her divorce from his father, Thomas's mother had established a substitute family, a network of women who lived nearby and looked after one another. Many of these women were either divorced or widowed. None had children living at home and most, like his mother, were retired from full-time employment in the federal government.) Thomas had to acknowledge
that the divorce had definitely been a good thing for his mother—and for his father, who had remarried his much younger mistress and retired to Albuquerque, where he could indulge in his stargazing undistracted by family responsibilities. From the rare e-mails his father sent, Thomas gathered that he had become a nocturnal, nonsocial animal. Still, looking at his own life through the lens of his parents', he was spooked by the thought of an existence like theirs, an existence apart from Clara and Guillermo. He did not want to find himself twenty-five years down the road plotting some bachelor vacation, some golf outing with a divorced pal, waiting for news of a heart condition or an enlarged prostate to come back from his primary care physician before confirming his itinerary.