When Tito Loved Clara (41 page)

“I hear you had your own problem with the bitches,” said Raúl, looking at him with a kind of complicity. The anger of the previous moment seemed to have disappeared.

“What do you mean?” said Tito. He felt himself blushing and was glad that it was too dark for Raúl to see.

“Deysei told me you're sweet on her
tía.
”

Tito said nothing.

“Deysei told me you're in
love
with Clara.” Raúl laughed. “I give you props, man. She's fine. Deysei said you fucked Clara back in the day, so I give you props. But things is different now. You got to understand. She's out of your reach, my man. Don't you know that? She's married to a white dude. She got the house in the burbs. Dream on, my man.”

Tito said nothing. His eyes were tingling. He could smash the bottle across Raúl's face right now and get away. He held it, pondering.

“Gimme that,” said Raúl, reaching for the bottle. “It's not like I don't know what I'm talking about,” he said. “I know all about bitches think they better than you.”

Tito said nothing. “Like that one we moved. The teacher. Who the fuck she think she is with all that
art
in her house.”

Tito knew that Raúl was waiting for him to make some sound of agreement, to continue the complicity, but he was silent. He was thinking again of trying to get past him, of trying to leap over one of the benches.

“Yunis, she was getting like that—she wouldn't suck my dick. Just 'cause she got some inheritance money coming her way, she thinks she don't have to put out for me. She thinks I'm going to support her ass without letting me fuck her. She's lucky I didn't do nothing, not like the other one. That one, she really thought she was all
that.
I mean, she had it coming. You know what she said to me?”

“Who?”

“That white chick. The one I moved over to Vermilyea.”

“Vermilyea?”

“That's right.”

“Rebecca?” said Tito, taking a wild guess, but suddenly knowing he was right, suddenly putting it all together.

“Becca,” said Raúl. “That's right. How come you knew that?”

“What did she say?” said Tito trying to get him back on track. “What did she say that got you mad?”

“Man, you knew that? Becca. How did you know that?”

“What did she say to you?” asked Tito. “What did Becca say to you?”

“You know what she said? She said she don't date black guys. Can you believe that shit? How ignorant is that? Calling me black.”

Tito said nothing. He didn't know what to say. He was trembling. Raúl stood and stretched, holding the bottle high in the air. “I thought maybe that was why you were trying to find me. I thought maybe you'd figured it out. And I guess you did. That's why I thought I better come and talk to you. You know, I waited for her just up over there, had a little smoke and waited for her. I would have given her some. You know what's sweeter than young pussy? Young
white
pussy. Don't you think? You ever had some of that white pussy?”

“No,” said Tito.

“She started fighting with me. Wouldn't put out. I had to fight back. She had it coming to her. That's what I say. She had it coming to her. Just like you got it coming to you.”

Raúl's forearm slammed into Tito's chest, knocking him back over the railing. It was like something he'd done on the playground as a child with Clara, whirling around a metal pole, his feet over his head, momentarily free of gravity before landing safely, only this time there was nothing for him to land on, just open space and the water. It happened so fast that he was falling before he knew he'd been hit, dropping down into the darkness, the shock of Raúl's blow radiating through his chest. Plummeting toward the water below, he looked back up at the outcrop and did not see Raúl standing there. All he saw was the railing receding into the sky. His last thought before he hit the water was to wonder if he'd imagined the whole thing, to wonder if he would see Clara again—in this life or the next.

Each morning after breakfast, Clara drove the rented Nissan from the hotel in Santo Domingo out to La Isabela. Her mami didn't understand why her daughter and grandson were not staying in her newly constructed dream house, and Clara was tired of making excuses—that there was no air-conditioning, that Guillermo would be eaten alive by the mosquitoes, that she was concerned about the cleanliness of the water. Her real reason was much simpler: She wanted there to be a part of each day when she did not have to listen to her mother ask her about when she was going to take Thomas back. “Men can't help themselves,” she'd say. “You're not going to make another baby? Maybe he cheated because you weren't putting out enough.” Her mother had been asking her these questions for almost three months, by phone and now in person. For the sake of her sanity, Clara needed to be able to leave her mother's house every night.

Each morning, she drove through the capital, following the directions written by her Tío Plinio. Each morning, she followed the same directions, and each morning, she wound up taking a slightly different route through Santo Domingo to get to the highway that led to La Isabela. Some mornings they passed the gates of the presidential palace and some mornings they didn't; some mornings they passed the baseball stadium and some mornings they didn't.

Clara had never been familiar with the capital and even now she did not feel at ease in its noisy, shambolic streets. Its chief
association for her was with the abduction, and in order to stifle those unbidden memories, she deliberately drove away from the pedestrian shopping district where her father had purchased her new-world wardrobe, where he had set about making her the person she was today.

But she didn't dwell on those things. She had more recent problems to contend with. During the drives out to her mother's, she felt herself to be in recovery from the events of the late summer and early autumn: her husband's affair, the loss of Deysei's baby, the discovery of Tito's body, and the funeral. It was more than two months since she had learned about Tito's death while watching a local newscast the day after Deysei's release from the hospital. Hearing his name on the reporter's lips, she felt like the victim of a practical joke. It was not clear, the reporter said, whether the death was a murder or suicide, but Clara knew that it was the latter and that she was the cause.

Thomas had called her the next afternoon at work to offer his condolences and, no doubt, to use the situation to get back in her good graces.

“I'm here for you, Clara. Whatever you need,” he'd said.

“I really do need you now, Thomas,” she said.

“I'll be right there,” he said, and she imagined him standing up and walking toward the door of whatever friend's apartment he was staying in during this doghouse period.

“No,” said Clara. “No, no. Stay there. Don't you understand? Now, when I really need you, I can't trust you. Now, when I really need you, you're not here. I've got to figure all this out on my own.”

“You can't blame yourself,” he said.

“You don't even know what you're saying. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.”

“Tell me about him,” said Thomas. “Tell me anything you want. I had no idea he was that important to you.”

“It's too late, Thomas. Way too late for that.”

“Clara. It was just one mistake. I made
one
mistake.”

“How many times did you sleep with her? Did you sleep with her only once?”

“No.”

“Then you made more than just one mistake, Thomas.”

His tone finally changed. “Do you think you are ever going to be able to forgive me, Clara?”

“Right now, I'm not in a position to forgive you anything. I've got to forgive myself for a few things first. That's why I could really use my husband at my side.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “It was over before you even learned about it—the day I came back from D.C.”

“So you
were
with her!”

“In New York, not in Washington. I broke it off with her as soon as I got back.”

“Good for you,” she said sarcastically, not believing him for a moment. How did she know he wasn't actually in that woman's house right now?

“Tell me what to do, Clara. What should I do? Is our marriage over? Should I give up on us? Do I need to find somewhere else to live?”

“I can only answer your last question,” she said. “You need to find somewhere else to live.”

That was how she'd left it before her trip to the Dominican Republic, and during her time away from New Jersey she had not been able to convince herself—nor had she allowed herself to be convinced by her mother—that she should take him back. As far as she could see, there were two reasons to reconcile: her desire to have a second child and her need for help in raising the first. Shining Star had her husband's sperm stored in one of their freezers, which took care of the first reason. She wasn't sure yet what to do about Guillermo. Certainly she would not prevent him from seeing his
father, but beyond that, she was unwilling to forgive Thomas. She was done being nice.

T
HE DAYS AT
La Isabela were long. It was only her second trip back since she had graduated from college and her first since Guillermo was a baby. It was overdue. If she had waited much longer, her family would have written her off as a
gringa,
an Americanita: too good to remember where she had come from. She and Guillermo had flown in on New Year's Eve, and today, Three Kings' Day, was the last of their visit.

Her mother's house was the center of the action, and within the house, the kitchen was the hub. It was just as she had imagined it on that afternoon when she'd spoken to her mother—when she'd learned that Yunis was coming back to New York. On a given day there might be half a dozen aunts and female cousins in there, laughing and talking. They came in—rubbing their eyes and stretching—to drink coffee and eat breakfast and talk and capture Gilly, who spent his time playing hide-and-seek and tag and watching Spanish-dubbed Disney movies on the DVD player in the living room, the language barrier no barrier for him. Periodically, he would come bombing back into the kitchen to drink a glass of juice or snatch a handful of potato chips. On this final morning, after the kisses and hugs of welcome, he was led into the living room, where there was still straw on the floor (left there the night before for the Kings' camels) and a clutch of small, wrapped packages. Gilly leapt upon them with delight, liberating them from their papers. They were cheap, well-intentioned gifts from her family: a paddle-and-ball game with an elastic that broke on its third use, a Hot Wheels knockoff, and a T-shirt that said
SANTO DOMINGO
. The paltriness of the gifts did not diminish his exultation as he touted every one around the room. Within five minutes, he'd run off with his cousins to play in the fields.

Deysei came into the kitchen from her bedroom. Every time
Clara saw her during the visit she had the same thought: It was all for the best. Deysei was tanned and slimmed down. In the tropical heat, she had dispatched her cornrows, overalls, and hoodies for cropped hair ironed flat once a week by her
abuela,
knee-length skirts and shorts and tank tops. Once the doctors had determined that the fetus would not survive, the birth had been induced and the baby delivered. Clara had spent the next few days trying to broker some kind of detente between her sister and niece, but every interaction ended up with shouting and tears. Finally, Yunis had been convinced to move back to Inwood, essentially to sublet her own sublet. Clara, without her husband at hand to help her manage a rambunctious kindergartner and a despondent high-school junior while also tending to her own problems, decided that drastic action was needed. She bought a ticket for Deysei to go to the Dominican Republic and live with her
abuela.
She simply resigned herself to the fact that she would always end up paying the tab on her family's screw-ups and brought out her credit card.

What a crazy time it had been, she thought now, as she sat across the kitchen table from her niece. She could hardly believe she had come through it. In some ways, it had made her realize that the difficulties of the preceding year—Thomas losing his job and her own lost pregnancy—had been, relatively speaking, not so bad. Things could
always
get worse. She'd known that once but had forgotten it.

Deysei had settled down and enrolled in a bilingual private school in Santo Domingo. One of her uncles ferried her to and fro every day on his commute into the capital. The school was strict. There was a dress code, a hair code, and a ban on iPods, video games, and cell phones. Deysei had resisted at first, but with surprising alacrity, she had entered the life of the school and surrendered her old habits. The benefits were evident. Her Spanish was much improved, she no longer slouched, her grades were good, and she had stopped talking about Raúl. During the week she was in La Isabela, Clara helped Deysei fill out her college applications, proofread her admissions
essays, and went over the packages of information about scholar-ships and financial aid. There was a good chance of her getting most of her tuition waived at one of the SUNY schools—Purchase or Stony Brook.

The other person who had settled down since Deysei's arrival was Clara's mother. Given a charge to manage, to fret over, to feed, she had risen to the occasion, providing stability and encouragement to her granddaughter. Somehow the extra generation that separated them allowed Clara's mother to parent fairly and Deysei to accord the proper respect to her grandmother. Perhaps it was also the more traditional society of the Dominican Republic asserting itself. During the week of their visit, Clara's mother was in full matriarch mode, orchestrating the preparation of food, catching Clara up on the familial gossip, giving her unsolicited advice on child rearing and sexual practices. Retirement had made her less severe if no less obstinate in the way she controlled things. Her mother had been planning to honor their visit by slaughtering and roasting a pig, but there had been no water for two days and so they had not been able to clean the animal. Like the presidential turkey, it had been given a holiday reprieve and was that morning cavorting in the mud in the pen behind her uncle's house. An array of other sundries were being prepared—less imposing in their presentation than a pig on a spit, but no less delicious. Her mother had brought in bottles of wine—an exorbitant gesture in the land of beer and rum. It was a gesture Clara would pay for indirectly with the check she would give her mother before leaving that afternoon.