The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos (28 page)

“The bracelet is mine,” said Luz. “I bought it for my mother.”

Consuelo tried to reason with her. “Luz, if Marta wears it, Lily will see it.”

“Irene stole it and I want it back,” Luz insisted.

Consuelo sighed again. “All right. Perhaps she won’t remember it. But if I give it to you, you must promise that you won’t
tell Lily where you got it.”

“If she notices it, I’ll say I bought it recently.” But as much as Luz loved Consuelo, envy and hatred got the better of her,
and she could not resist dealing Irene one last blow. That’s how Luz explains to herself now what she did then: as getting
even with Irene.

Lily lay on the bed reading a magazine, when Luz entered and said, “I want to show you something.” She pulled up the sleeve
of her blouse to display the bracelet.

“That’s nice,” said Lily.

Luz thought Lily was protecting Irene, that she had to be pretending not to remember what happened
before
the accident. Her promise to Consuelo flew out of her head. “Apparently your mother found it in your hand after the accident.”

“What accident?”

“When Irene drowned.” Luz could almost hear the whoosh of an ax cutting through the air, and a wicked thrill of delight danced
in her belly.

Lily’s eyes began to lose focus, her lips to drain of their color, her fingers to pick like birds at invisible bits of lint
on the bedcover.

And Luz was suddenly afraid. She had gone too far.

“Epa, I’m just kidding around,” she backpedaled furiously. “I bought it for my mother. She loves anything with Maria Lionza
on it.”

“Which shop?” The color was beginning to return to Lily’s lips.

“Oh, it was just a souvenir seller who had set up near the panadería,” said Luz, eager to step away from the precipice, to
reverse her betrayal of Consuelo, to erase the past few minutes.

“I’m sure she’ll love it, Luz,” said Lily.

The bracelet flashed shiny and bright against the palm of Luz’s hand. When she presented it to her mother, she had been so
pleased, just as Luz imagined she would be. But the satisfaction of finally seeing the bracelet on her mother’s wrist had
come at a cost. After she insisted on claiming the bracelet and demonstrated her disregard for the potential consequences
of such an act, Consuelo, whose love she coveted almost as much as her mother’s, had never looked at her in quite the same
way again; a crack had formed in the cup of her love for Luz.

As it turned out, and in spite of the bad beginning, Miguel Rojas was quite taken by Luz and went to ask Irene for her address.
Irene was persuaded to part with the information only after being bribed with a box of imported Swiss chocolates and first-rate
seats for the Gloria Gaynor concert at the Poliedro. But being one of those for whom out of sight is out of mind, he stuffed
the address in his wallet and forgot about it, until, a month after she graduated from high-school in Valencia and returned
to Tamanaco, he looked at the security camera feed from his executive office at the largest of his supermarkets and saw her
pushing a grocery cart down the cereal aisle. He dug frantically into the pockets of his wallet until he retrieved the address,
written on a page of notepaper that was frayed and yellowed with age but still legible. Then he went to the flower section
of the Supermercado Costa and filled his car to the brim with roses of all the colors available. Even Marta had been impressed.

“Now that is how a boy should treat the girl he loves,” she said.

Miguel Rojas courted Luz every day for a whole year. They never spoke of that day at the Hotel Macuto, and throughout their
courtship Miguel Rojas was the perfect gentleman, never forcing even a kiss. The first time they kissed, it had been Luz who
held him by the collar, pulled him toward her, and offered him her lips.

When she was admitted to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy, he was seated by her bedside when she awoke and her hospital
room was filled with roses. And a few months after that, exactly two years after her graduation from high school, he asked
her to marry him.

The year they married it was discovered that the surgeon who had performed the appendectomy had accidentally cut something
he shouldn’t have. Because of this, the peritoneal lining had looped around her right fallopian tube, causing cysting and
infection. The infection had spread throughout her abdominal cavity. Miguel flew Luz to a specialist in Miami who conducted
another exploratory laparoscopy and told her she would require more surgery, but he would not be able to give her any guarantees.
The Miami surgeon took the right ovary and tube, removed cysts from her womb and from the left ovary, cutting part of it away.
He noted that the left tube was damaged by scarring from the infection and decided to take everything out. Again, when she
awoke Miguel was by her side and the smell of roses suffused the air in the room. After he told her the news that she would
never be able to conceive, he held her tight against him while her tears soaked the front of his shirt. He told her it didn’t
matter.

Although she came to accept that no child would ever emerge from her womb, she could no longer bear the smell of roses. And
when Miguel made love to her, she often wept. After some time, he stopped making love to her and moved into the guest room
and she did not ask why.

A few days before their ninth anniversary, Miguel said he wanted a divorce.

“Because you want children?” she asked.

“No, Luz,” he said. “You know it isn’t that.”

“What then?”

“Luz, we don’t even sleep together anymore.”

“Pero te quiero.”

“You love me like you would a father or a brother, not a lover.”

When Luz tries to recall the exact reason she said yes when Miguel asked her to marry him, she cannot remember it. Could it
be that she had been merely flattered to be the beneficiary of the kind of attentions customarily bestowed on the beauteous
Lily? Or perhaps it was the awed expression on her own mother’s face when confronted with the fact that Luz was being wooed
by the Supermarket King of the country. Though she had grown to love him, he was right—it was akin to the love of a friend,
a father, a brother, a love without ardor. When she realized this, she felt like an impostor and was almost relieved that
the charade was over.

Even their divorce had been devoid of passion. Miguel gave her an enormous settlement that included the penthouse, stock in
TVista, sole custody of their beloved Japanese Spitz, Muchacha, and more cash than she could possibly spend in her lifetime.
She was free, she could do anything she wanted, she could rely upon him if she needed anything, he said. But after the divorce
was final, she found herself missing married life with a keen, sharp longing that sometimes made it difficult to breathe.
She missed the feeling of walking into a dinner party with her arm linked to one of the most powerful men in the room, and
the way other women’s heads would turn as they entered. She missed the warmth of his body next to hers when she woke up in
the morning. She missed being adored.

But did she miss Miguel himself? Was it love or loneliness that made her want him back?

She had tried dating, but was clumsy and awkward at it because the only person she had ever dated was Miguel Rojas, and even
then he had done all the work. Besides, she thought of herself as damaged goods; a woman who could not bear children, who
would want a woman like that? And then there was her wealth to factor into any romantic equation. At the back of her mind
was always the question of whether the man across the table from her at the restaurant was after her money. It was all too
difficult and not worth it, this search for a partner, the investment of her time, when she would probably find out in the
end that the guy was already married, or boring, or stingy, or weird. She hadn’t the energy to start all over again.

She took to waking at noon and moving from her bed to the divan in the TV room, where she would watch telenovelas all day
with Muchacha on her lap. She loved the way that in spite of all odds, in spite of the most exaggerated difficulties and tribulations,
and opposition from a whole cast of characters, the male protagonist was always a high-minded stud who would fight tooth and
nail, defeat his enemies, and win his woman in the end. She knew it was cliché and inevitable, but thrilled anyway when the
lovers ended up together at the end, passionately embracing, kissing and rolling about on luxurious outsize beds or on a blanket
under a flowering tree. Real life could rarely compete with that, and for this reason telenovelas had her vote. The heady
power of making everything come out impossibly right in the end is what motivated her to become a producer at TVista. The
station was happy for the fresh infusion of currency, always in short supply these days, and the union was successful. When
she insisted on editorial control, the executives readily conceded. It was not a foolish decision on their part, either, for
Luz had demonstrated time and again her capacity for choosing winners and staying on budget, steadily rising in their esteem,
her influence growing beyond even her own expectations. Where the business of telenovelas is concerned, she is the station’s
goose with golden eggs.

In terms of the present, it means she is in a position to help Carlos Alberto, whom she both loves and hates like a brother,
and who, in her opinion, has written some of the best telenovela material ever. In fact, it had been Luz’s idea to have Carlos
Alberto’s stories, which he had been selling for a pittance to the radio, adapted for television. And she can hardly wait
for his latest one,
Fantasmagórica,
about a tragic and beautiful woman who doesn’t know she is dead from drowning and haunts the living in their dreams, giving
them advice and altering the course of their lives. If Carlos Alberto knew that it was she who had made the calls to TVista,
first about having his radio scripts converted into telenovelas, and most recently regarding his documentary of Marialionceros,
he would be furious. And so, as much as she would like him to know of her munificence, he must never find out. So quaint and
proud he is, just like his sensitive but sexy male protagonists. She is not enamored with the fact that there is something
of Lily in all his heroines, evidence that year after year, no matter how fantastical his stories, his love for her is most
real.

She craves such a fairy-tale love in real life. But what she craves most is a belly like Lily’s, ripe with the fruit of passion.

Camped at the Quintanilla residence since the day Lily fell, Luz watches her with both fascination and distress. The distress
is amplified by the recent demise of Muchacha, who had taken the place of a child in her heart and whose absence is a raw
and throbbing wound. She had come home one evening from a producers meeting at TVista to find the little dog whimpering and
squirming in her wicker bed. Her hind legs had collapsed and trying to stand sent her tiny body into spasms of pain. Luz spent
the night weeping and dialing Miguel Rojas’s empty apartment, with Muchacha clasped against her breast, her little doggie
heart fluttering against her own.

“Brave girl, Muchacha, my beautiful little princess girl,” she murmured, hoping against hope that the veterinarian would have
a magic cure come morning. But the inexplicable nerve damage was grave and irreversible; there was no cure. And so she was
forced to look into her dog-baby’s eyes reassuringly while the sedative was administered before the lethal dose to stop the
heart. Now she can barely stand to be in her own apartment where reminders of Muchacha haunted nearly every room, which is
the real reason she continues to camp in her mother’s room at the Quintanilla’s.

“You should adopt a child,” Marta says. “God knows you have enough money to raise a football team of them.”

Luz says she will consider it. But the mere idea of initiating the process all on her own makes her feel tired and lost. Even
as she procrastinates, she knows time is passing her by and that if she doesn’t hurry up, she will end up adopting her grandchild,
rather than her child. Still, she would rather wait, she decides, until she finds the right lover, the right companion, the
right father for a child. For Luz it is all or nothing, just like in the telenovelas.