Page 34 of After the Fire
“Here we are. This is what we have for him.” She handed me the two pieces of paper, the second one practically blank. The first one contained some of the things that I already knew: the address of his home, his date of birth and place of work. “He was here for a few months in 1988. This is everything under his name.”
“And how did you collect this data?” Santiago asked, looking at the pages before lifting his head to stare at the woman. “Was it a formal process or was it anecdotal?”
“Mostly anecdotal, I would say,” she replied confidently. “It was on a registration basis—people would become members at the center here, sign up for events or to volunteer. I will say, back in the eighties, we had a really engaged group of residents, so almost everyone around town is in the system.”
She looked at me and smiled softly. Her eyes were fixed on my face, looking for something there. “I’m sorry I can’t give you more information,” she added. “He was a good man, you know? Such a tragedy, what happened to him.”
I swallowed and turned to look at Santiago, his gaze fixed on me. The few people I had spoken to already mentioned similar things—such a tragedy. Was there more?
“Oh, I didn’t realize you knew him,” I responded. My thoughts were going a mile a minute. Maybe this woman held the key to really understand him and what happened.
“Not too much, no. He mostly kept to himself, but he was very generous with his time. He told me once that he was a corporate lawyer. He helped us when we registered the community center as a nonprofit organization. It was when I first started here, so I didn’t spend much time with him. He spent hours upon hours looking at all of our documentation and our books to make sure we had everything aligned.”
This. This was the man I thought I knew growing up. My family had painted him as an honorable man, a man that was dedicated to his job, his family. A man that would invest hours of his free time giving back to the community. This was the grandfather I never knew but always wished I did.
“Yeah, that’s what I heard from other people in town too.” The woman stood up and turned to her bulletin board and unpinned a copy of one of the newspaper articles. “I never met him; he died before I was born.”
“Is that why you’re in town? Looking for information about him?” she said, extending her hand and offering me the paper. “Here, you can keep it.”
I skimmed the article; in the middle, there was a blurry photo of the woman in front of me, three decades earlier in a ribbon cutting ceremony. It was the reopening of the community center, and my grandfather stood next to her, holding the giant scissors. The article mentioned him by name as instrumental in the new operations of the nonprofit, modernizing the way it was run and adding a few services that would benefit this sleepy tourist town. I felt Santiago’s hand on my back, sliding up and down my spine in a soothing motion.
“Actually, no. I’m here on vacation and just stumbled upon this.” Happenstance.
“I’m sorry I can’t be of more assistance.” She shrugged. “But if you have any questions, let me know. My door is always open, and this charming man right here knows where to find me.” She winked at him and smiled.
I thanked her, and we walked out hand in hand into the street. The rain had all but stopped now, and the town smelled like a summer shower. The wind was still blowing on the tall trees, the leaves shiny with leftover water.
“Vee—”
“You know what’s the weirdest thing in all of this? Your grandfather came to see me today, and he said almost the same thing as this woman,” I said quickly. My day had been so emotionally charged, it felt like this had happened days ago instead of just a few hours ago. “He died in such a tragic manner, and he was so generous with his time and helped so many people. And in a way, that is the man that I thought I knew. That is exactly who has been carefully constructed in the narrative that my family built of him throughout the decades. Like, to the point that I became a fucking lawyer because of this man. To honor his legacy and his name.”
The woman at the community center hadn’t been able to provide any additional information relating to my grandfather—as a matter of fact, I learned absolutely nothing new—but it made it all an inch more final. I could feel closure coming. I felt like I’d exhausted all my resources, and this was as much as I would learn about him, get to know him.
“But at the same time, it’s almost like he’s a walking contradiction. Because if he was such an honorable man, why was he caught embezzling funds? Or mingling with loan sharks? I just don’t get it.”
“Why are you trying to find these answers?” He looked at me. We were now standing right in front of the community center, the evening falling upon us and a few stars blinking in the night sky. The streetlamps casted a shadow on Santiago’s face, sharpening his features. “It’s a genuine question. I’m not trying to be—”
“I don’t know,” I interrupted. “I obviously never expected any of this to happen to me, but this whole thing is making me realize so many other things and…”
Would things have been different if I’d grown up knowing the truth?
I took a deep breath and looked up at him, and the next thing I knew, I was enveloped by Santiago’s warm arms, cocooned by his large body.
“I’m overwhelmed. I don’t know what to do anymore, Santiago,” I said in between sobs. “What should I do?” I could feel the tension in my shoulders and Santiago’s hand moving up and down my spine, this sudden level of intimacy that I wasn’t prepared to accept just yet.
I took a step back and cleared my throat, looking at him with my eyes full of unshed tears. He looked back at me with such a sweet smile, and I could tell that he wanted to say more, tell me what to do and what to think. But he didn’t. He kissed the top of my head and pulled me closer to him, our bodies flush, standing right outside the community center.
“I’m exhausted, really. Because up until this point, it felt like I had everything: the really great career, the perfect relationship, a really good family. I was content. Maybe nothappyhappy, but content, and that was pretty good considering the kinds of problems other people have,” I added.
“Victoria, what you choose to do with what you inherit is just that, a choice. You can’t expect that every single thing that has been handed to you, out of your control, is a mandate of some sort.” He shifted his position so that he could look me better in the eyes. “Just because your grandfather was an attorney, it doesn’t mean you have to be one, and just because your grandmother says you should marry doesn’t mean you should. I understand responsibility, you know I do, because I’m doing a job every day that makes me miserable, only because it makes my family happy. But it’s a choice that I make, every day. I choose.”His shoulders sagged, and he grabbed my hand.“You should choose too. You should write your own story.” I blinked. “Obviously who your family is and what they’ve done forges a path, but it’s a flexible journey, Vee, a journey where you choose your pace and the number of stops you take and which direction you go in.”
I tilted my head in response. My eyes started to water again, the tears threatening to fall at any minute. I had done a very bad job of keeping them at bay where Santiago was concerned.
“Remember when I told you that I almost didn’t show up that first day? I was aloneandlonely too. I was so homesick, I was this close”—he gestured with his thumb and index finger and smiled wide—“to calling my mom to come pick me up.”
“Yeah, but the difference between you and me is that your mom probably would have dropped everything and ran to pick you up, and I’ve been here what, two weeks, and I have yet to hear from my family. Cata doesn’t count, for obvious reasons. Today was the first time that someone asked me if I was okay, and even that was immediately followed by the fact that my grandmother is furious.”
I let that sink in. He huffed in frustration.
