Page 28 of After the Fire
What is happening?I called him to make peace, to get some closure, and instead I was reminded that I was alone and that the only thing I’d managed to do with my life was to turn myself into my grandmother.
I started pacing around the room because after this conversation, I couldn’t call my grandmother and apologize. I didn’t deserve any of it.
My breathing was heavy, my heart pounding fast in my chest, trying to make an escape. The only thing I could hear was my heartbeat inside my head. Adrenaline rushed through my veins.
“Oh my god,” I mumbled. “Calm down, crazy. Get it together.”
It was fine. I simply needed some time and space to sort everything out, but damn if this conversation hadn’t riled me up.
“Think,” I muttered to myself. “Calm down and think.”
I stood by the window, watching activity right outside the hotel starting to pick up. The streetlamps would soon be casting a golden glow on the diners walking to their destination, completely unaware of how my world was crumbling down.
The long silence brought up all of those feelings of inadequacy, feelings that I’d buried so deep I didn’t even know where to start looking. Clearly, I wasn’t good enough for Manuel, and obviously I wasn’t good for him. I had always had to work hard to be good enough for Susana, but should that be how I lived my life? Always trying to be better rather than being enough?
The knock on the door jolted me from my thoughts.
“Hey,” I said with an attempt of a smile on my face as I opened the door. “Did you forget something?”
He had the saddest smile on his face, his eyes lined with caution and pity.
“What happened? You’re looking at me with your pity eyes,” I said. “Just tell me, please. I’m not in the mood for anything else today.”
“Vee. Sit down.” He grabbed my hand as he made his way into my room and sat down on the small loveseat in the living area, tugging me to his side. “I went to the records office; I have some answers.”
15
THE TRUTH
He’s dead.Confirmed dead.
The expression on Santiago’s face mirrored the one that his grandparents had back in the house earlier that day.
For the past week, the only thing I had been able to do was add on more questions to my already confusing life. At least I had something that resembled closure in my relationship. Now the questions as they related to my grandfather’s disappearance kept adding up, and the answers we were able to start getting weren’t even scratching the surface.
“Dios.”Oh, my god. “I mean, I—”
“I know,” he replied, his eyes wide. “It’sliterallyunbelievable. Like, I can’t believe it.”
Turned out, this man, who everyone referred to as Enrique, showed up in town with essentially the clothes off his back and knocked on Santiago’s grandfather’s door. They knew each other from law school and had kept in contact, so he assumed—correctly—that Carlos would help him out. He set him up with a job at his firm. Although my grandfather was a corporate lawyer, he was able to help out in the small family firm. He lived right next door to him in a small house that was owned by one of their family members and only used during the summers, so they came to an agreement and rented it out to him for the remainder of the year.
He worked hard, apparently. Kept mostly to himself, choosing to live a private life in the town where everyone knew who he was. No one asked questions, but everyone knew who he was—Carlos’s friend from law school who was going through a rough patch with his family and needed time and space to sort things out.
Apparently, the townlovedhim. Like, adored the man. Even though he kept to himself, he was a generous citizen, donating his time to some of the local initiatives. Sometime in July or August of the year he moved to town, he was appointed to the board of the newly reopened community center, where he helped with some of the legal affairs and helped them set up their nonprofit status.
“Vee, on paper, he was an amazing man,” Santiago said. “I don’t get it.”
“Welcome to my life!” I said, a little too loudly for my taste. I had been pacing the floor of the room as Santiago told me all these things. I tried to find a spot to sit but couldn’t get comfortable. My skin itched, my heart hammering inside my chest. Essentially, everything I ever knew about this man had been a lie. A fabrication, but I wasn’t ready to point fingers just yet. Had he staged his own kidnapping? Is that what my grandmother still thought to this day? That he had been kidnapped? “So what happened to him?”
“He died in a fire. Apparently, his house caught fire in December of the year he moved here. It was ruled accidental, and the case was closed.”
“That doesn’t make any sense to me at all.” Why would he run away from his family with basically the clothes off his back and come to this town? Susana spoke so well of him, of how dedicated to her and their children he was. And he suddenly disappeared? I mean, the kidnapping story did make sense, right? He was a high-profile corporate lawyer, excelling in his career. With a dedicated wife and seven children, a very active social life, involved in the community.
It seemed almost like he plucked himself out of the city and moved here and continued living almost the same life, except without his family.
“Growing up, I felt like he was this larger-than-life figure in our family. I already told you this,” I said, standing by the window and looking out to see the stars starting to pop against the dusk sky. I was repeating myself now. I had told him this already, but it kept coming out the same way. “Susana always— and I mean always—speaks so highly of him. Everyone, really. I don’t understand.”
“Do you think there could be a reason why the stories are different? Maybe he faked his own kidnapping, and that’s the only thing that Susana knows?”
