Page 26 of After the Fire
“I need to call Susana,” I finally said, putting my head in my hands.
14
THE TALK
My whole life,I strived to be perfect. Or as close to perfect as I could get for Susana. My mother had a terrible accident when I was a child. My memories of her were very limited, and the only things IthoughtI remembered were possibly images I constructed myself from pictures. My father was unable to cope with what happened, so we moved into Susana’s home, the home she had shared with her husband and her children as she was raising them, and she helped my father raise us.
My brother was probably five or six when we moved, and he remembered a little bit more, although this was nothing we discussed openly.Nothingwas discussed openly in our family, I had come to notice. What I did remember were those early years in that big home, getting off the school bus and running right into the door, dropping our bags in the entryway, and heading directly to the kitchen to have an afternoon snack.
The house was huge—it seemed that way practically well into my twenties—with a large entryway that was heavily decorated with wood furniture, paintings, and gold-leaf frames lining the walls, almost no space in between them. At the center of the far wall, leaning against it, was a large oil painting, one of the only things my grandfather kept of his family—the rest was inherited or selected by Susana.
This was how she operated—she would suggest something, and then it would get done. Either by my grandfather or her children or her children’s children.
I started noticing her influence when I was in my early teens. We wore uniforms to school, but I noticed that I started paying more attention tohowI wore it. The shirt neatly tucked in, my hair always up in a tidy bun, my shoes always shined and buffed. I would walk into the house, walk up the stairs, and drop my bag on my desk chair, which was waiting for me to open it to tackle my homework.
I wanted to say that my life choices and the path I took to get where I was were really honed in on by her. I saw firsthand how much she sacrificed to raise my brother and me, even after she’d done it seven times with her own children. She welcomed us to her home and gave us everything we ever needed. Her social life was active, but I could count on one hand the number of times she was not home after we got back from school, even as my brother and I became more independent in our teen years.
All this to say—when something crossed Susana’s mind, it would get done. And I was not surprised now to have realized that everything I ever thought I’d chosen was guided and decided entirely by Susana. The biggest of these things was my professional career, one hundred percent influenced by her to honor her husband and follow in his brave steps.
Santiago walked me back to my hotel room and hovered by the door after the little episode at his grandparents’ house. Neither one of us had said a thing during the few blocks it took us to get back, but I could feel his tension, the realization that the man that his grandparents knew was the same manInever knew.
“Vee?” he said, lingering by the door, one of my hands holding it so that I wouldn’t close it on him. “I jus—”
“It’s okay, you don’t have to say anything. I don’t want your pity really.” But maybe I did want his pity, and maybe I did want his hugs and his warmth and his whispered words in my ear, calming me down. “I think I’m going to call Susana and see if I can figure this out. I definitely owe her a conversation. Thank you for walking me back. We’ll talk later.”
His shoulders relaxed, and his face looked almost defeated. Like he wanted to come in and hold me and whisper those words into my ear. Maybe he wanted to hold me and never let me go.
“Bye, Santiago.”
I closed the door and immediately headed for the dresser. I picked up my phone and turned it on, expecting the buzzing to be nonstop. But to my surprise, there were no new messages since I had last turned it on. There were a few emails in my inbox, but nothing urgent or even remotely relevant since I’d outlined specific actions to take on any pending work. Because I was going away on my honeymoon and on an extended break for more than a few days at a time, and I had wanted toenjoymyself. I huffed at the thought. How naïve.
If I was going to call Susana to ask her all the questions I had relating to my grandfather, I would probably have to plan out my argument, just like if I were preparing for a case. I needed to present her my hypothesis, the facts that backed that up, and then the conclusion. But she most likely would want to talk about me fleeing, humiliating her in front of all her friends and acquaintances, tainting the family name.
So I did what I always did when I needed to talk through something, and I called my best friend.
“You look like shit,” she said with a small smile on her lips. She was lying down on her side. “What happened?”
“Do you remember that photo I saw of my grandfather?” She nodded and waited for me to continue. “I got confirmation today that it is, in fact, my grandfather.”
She nodded her head and bit her lower lip. “Okay,” she said with a little reluctance. She scratched under one of her eyes and took a deep breath. “How did you confirm that?”
“Santiago’s grandparents.”
“What do they have to do with this whole thing?” she asked, not quite understanding what I was saying. “I mean, how are they related?”
“So apparently, Santiago’s grandfather and my grandfather went to law school together. And then he suddenly showed up here in the eighties. That’s about as much as they told me,” I added. “Oh, and he went by Enrique Aguirre here. Plain enough so that people wouldn’t recognize him, I guess.”
“Interesting,” she said, grabbing her phone and tapping furiously at the screen. “Enrique Aguirre, okay, got it.”
“What are you doing?”
“I reached out to a prosecutor in Córdoba, and he was looking into things for me, but they have all been dead ends. I’m assuming this changes things.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” I stared at my friend for a while, and we sat in silence, each of us behind a screen. “I think I need to talk to Susana.”
“Yeah, but can you wait until I can find more information? We should go in knowing everything.” This was a team effort, for sure. Even if she wasn’t with me, she was on my side.
“That makes sense.”
