Page 16 of After the Fire
My hands shook. My heart beat so hard it felt almost like I could hear it from outside my body. The image of my grandfather was burned in my brain, those stern, stoic eyes looking back at me as if he’d been physically in front of me.Maybe it’s your brain playing tricks on you again?
I grabbed my phone and did the only thing I could think of at that time. I texted Catalina, hoping she would be awake to answer my call. My phone buzzed immediately with an incoming video call.
“Are you hiding in the bathroom?” I asked. Her hair was up in a messy bun, and she was wearing her pajama top.
“Agustín is sleeping. I’m glad you texted because I’m getting more and more pissed at him when he sleeps.” She sat on the toilet and rubbed her belly absentmindedly. “I’m this close to waking him up and keeping him up. This pregnancy is making me unhinged.”
I laughed. Catalina and my brother met at one of my birthday parties. I was already dating Manuel by that time, so my parties ended up being a bunch of his friends and my brother and Cata. They hit it off immediately, and within the year they were living together, much to my grandmother’s chagrin. My brother was also an attorney but wasn’t as committed as I was, which was fine. He lived life differently, and clearly it was working out for him.
“What happened?” She interrupted my thoughts. “Do you need me to come get you?”
“The weirdest thing,” I said, trying to put my thoughts into words. I needed to speak to Susana, figure this out. Figure out the reasons why my grandfather was ever in this town. I didn’t remember my grandmother ever talking about this town or even having any ties to the province. But in order to speak to Susana, I would have to answer questions that I didn’t want to answer, questions I didn’t have an answer to. “Santiag—”
“I knew it!” She grinned. “I knew you were hanging out. God, I love this for you.”
“What are you talking about? There’s nothing to love.” I was lonely, and he was being kind. End of story. “He was just being nice, and he invited me over to his parents’ house and… That’s not the point.”
“To his parents’ house?” She scrunched up her nose. “You met his parents already?” She smiled playfully.
“Cata, stop.” I laughed. “Anyway, I was snooping around and found an amazing library filled to the brim with books. Ugh, it made me so jealous. So I was looking around, and then I saw, hanging on a wall, a framed photograph of someone who could be Santiago’s grandfather and guess who? Fucking Roberto. I swear to god, it was him. He looked almost identical to the photo of him that Susana has framed in the entryway.”
“What?” She furrowed her eyebrows. “Your grandfather?”
I nodded. “Yes, standing right next to Santiago’s grandfather. Like, what are the fucking odds?”
“Okay, I need a second to think,” she said. She knew all the details of my grandfather’s disappearance in the eighties. He was taken hostage for ransom; the hefty sum was paid, but he never came back. Thirty-some years later, it was obvious he wouldn’t return, but he was still desperately loved and honored in our home. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”Catalina hung up the phone, probably to start investigating things immediately. She was obsessed with knowing everything, and my grandfather’s story always piqued her interest. She was never able to find any information—it was like he just vanished off the face of the earth. Maybe I needed to approach this new information in steps, just like I had approached my life for the past fifteen years.
Yes, a plan.
First, sleep. Then, figure out what the hell was going on.
* * *
I tossed and turned all night, getting short periods of deep sleep that were interrupted by my brain running through all possible scenarios. As soon as I got off the phone with Cata, I checked my messages and was not pleasantly surprised to see that my grandmother was still calling me, leaving voicemails, and texting me. Manuel was still missing in action, not a peep or sound from him.
Susana kept using the same accusatory tone—and she was partly right. Ididwalk away from the biggest step I was ever going to take, both for me and for my family. A union of two powerful people that represented more than just the illusion of a happy ending, but also the joining of two families that would have a lot of power. I knew this. Susana knew this.
But I had walked away without saying a word and found refuge in this small, charming town that was slowly teaching me how to let go.
Her latest voicemail kept repeating in my head: “If you don’t come back immediately, you will deal with the consequences of my wrath. This is not a warning,estás avisada.”
You’ve been warned.
It was a threat. Definitely. And it angered me to no end that I never saw the red flags.Of anything. Not in my relationship with Manuel or in my relationship with Susana and the rest of my family.
I was resolved that I needed a plan. I needed to take steps to figure out what was happening to me, but being inside these walls was probably not helping me.
I went down the stairs to the hotel restaurant, asked the woman at the front for a coffee to go, and within fifteen minutes, I was making the short trek to Eagle’s Nest to sit down and think. The morning was clear, the sun was shining, and there was a sole cloud in the sky, drifting slowly away from the town and into the mountains. I could see, very far in the horizon, a set of dark gray clouds.
So for the second time in as many days, I found myself at Santiago’s clearing,hisspace, where he used to go to clear his head when things were bad.Think about next steps and think about figuring things out. Don’t think about him.
A few things were clear by this point: my relationship with Manuel was over, no doubt. He hadn’t contacted me at all, but Cata mentioned that he was playing the worried part back at home. This couldn’t be saved, and maybe I was okay with that. But I still needed some peace of mind, knowing that leaving was the right thing to do.
Smart women don’t believe the words people say. They believe the actions they see.
And the actions I saw were none. No actions at all. It was like he wanted to get out of our marriage and ran at the first chance he got. Maybe I wanted that, too, since I ran at the first chance I got?
And then there was Susana. And my grandfather. And my family. How would I deal with that? Because I couldn’t just walk away from my family. Susana sacrificed her life after her children were out of the house to raise my brother and me. Dedicated her life to us. And she never had it easy.
