For a long moment nothing happened. From behind the door he could hear a cacophony of voices, shouts muffled and shrill. Then there were footsteps and a couple of women’s voices. The door opened a crack and a woman looked out. She wore green hospital scrubs and curlers in her hair.
“Sí?”
“Do you speak English?”
“Em, a little. Yes?”
She was a tía, she said, Oscar Cabrera’s sister. The hubbub behind her, which had abated when she opened the door, resumed. Rick could hear water running and dishes clinking and at least one baby crying and screaming.
He gave her a version of the pretext he’d given the woman at the beauty salon, that he was a journalist writing a story on the deaths of the Cabrera family. He didn’t explain why he was writing it, eighteen years later.
“No!” she suddenly said, waving a hand back and forth. “No! No talk about this!” She pushed the door closed.
Baffled, Rick rang the doorbell again. Had she misunderstood? The door opened again, just a crack.
“No, yo no quiero hablar! Por favor, vete! Déjanos en paz! Por favor, vaya lejos!”
Then she closed the door again.
He understood most of what she’d said. She didn’t want to talk. She wanted him to go away. Obviously something had gone very wrong in the translation between Spanish and English. He turned to leave and saw an elderly woman standing at the foot of the concrete steps.
“You want to talk about the Cabrera family,” she said. She was stooped, with steel-gray hair in a tight bun, a very wrinkled face. She must have been in her late eighties. “They won’t talk to you. Come with me.”
She told him she’d heard from someone who’d been at the beauty salon that he was asking about the family. She knew them, she said. Her name was Manuela Guzman and she knew them from church. She had also been the daughter’s piano teacher.
The woman invited him into her apartment, in the basement of a triple-decker across the street and down the block. It was a small but neatly kept space fragrant of recent cooking, of onions and garlic and wood fires, and dominated by a grand piano.
She beckoned him over to a large wing chair and sat next to him on a couch that was protected with plastic sheeting.
“The family, they will never talk about the accident,” she said in a near whisper. “But if you are writing something about them, I want to remember them for you the way they were, not what everyone says.”
“Thank you,” Rick said, uncomfortably. He didn’t like lying to this sincere and very kindly seeming old woman. “But why don’t they want to talk about it?”
“I will explain for you.”
“Okay, thanks.” He took out his reporter’s notebook to make it look as if he were taking notes for an article.
“Graciela was my piano student. She was so talented. A sweet girl she was. She was working, trying to learn Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ when she…”
She fell silent. He heard the faint ticking of a clock somewhere nearby.
“Tell me the story,” Rick said. He was still grappling with how everything fit together. Why was Pappas so interested in this accident that he repeatedly called Monica Kennedy at the Globe-and persistently called Lenny Hoffman as well?
“There is no story,” she shot back. “There is only sadness. Sadness and lies.”
“Lies,” Rick prompted.
“After they were killed, there was talk that Oscar was drunk.” She pantomimed drinking from a glass. Then she waved a hand dismissively and frowned. “But I know this is not true. He did not drink.”
“Then what happened?”
“Graciela was so excited about going to Santo Domingo with her mother to visit her abuela and abuelo. Oscar went to the airport to pick up his wife and daughter, but their flight was late… delayed. In the middle of the night they are driving through this Williams tunnel and then suddenly they were all killed.”
“But… Oscar wasn’t drunk.”
She held up a crooked finger. “Never.”
“And the car crashed. How?”
“But you see, nobody knows. There is only stories and rumor.”
“Such as?”
She shook her head.
“Was there, you know, grease on the pavement?” Rick asked. “Was there something wrong with the car? Something went wrong, that’s for sure.” Monica Kennedy’s article didn’t mention anything like that. Her notes indicated that she suspected drunk driving, but obviously that hadn’t panned out or it would have been in her story. “Don’t you think the newspaper would have reported something about this?”
“The newspapers didn’t know the truth. But when people say Oscar was drinking, I tell them I know better.”
“But I still don’t understand why the family won’t talk to me.”
She leaned forward and held up an index finger and bounced it in the air. “Because they get paid.”
“They get paid.”
“They got money. To buy their silence. To say nothing and ask nothing. So they live in their house on the money they got.”
“Money-from what? From whom?”
She frowned and shook her head. “Maybe even they don’t know. But no one will talk about what happened in the tunnel. No one will say the truth about what killed Graciela. I want to show you something. Please?”
Rick’s mind was reeling. Things were becoming murkier. Was the truth somehow concealed that night-and if so, was Pappas part of the concealment?
And Lenny Hoffman?
The old woman opened an armoire inside of which was an old TV and assorted other electronic components and then found a videotape cassette, which she put into a VCR. She fussed with a remote control, and the TV came on, blaring a Dr. Phil show. “Can you help me?” she said.
Rick came over and tried a couple more remote controls and eventually the video was playing on the TV screen.
“She’s the first one,” the woman said, taking one of the remote controls.
It was a tape of a piano recital, Rick realized, showing each of her students. It took place in what could have been a room in a church or school. Manuela Guzman, looking considerably younger and peppier, wearing a high-necked blue dress, with black hair in a bouffant, made some remarks to the audience members, who seemed to be mostly parents and family.
There was a round of applause and then an awkward girl in pigtails, dressed in a gauzy white dress with a big pink bow at the waist, came to the front of the room and sat down at the piano. She played energetically, moving her head a lot, emoting. Whatever piece she was playing she seemed to be playing it well. She made just a few mistakes. When she finished, there was enthusiastic applause, and she got up and bowed and curtsied again, but this time she gave a big gap-toothed smile.
Something about that smile, earnest and uncertain, achingly beautiful, made Rick’s throat tight. He turned and saw that tears were running down the old woman’s cheeks. There were tears on his own cheeks as well. She was smiling back at Graciela, and she hit the Pause button.
“When you write your article,” she said, “I want you to remember Graciela.”
“I will,” he said, and he cleared his throat because it was getting hoarse.
“This is sad about Graciela, isn’t it?”
Rick nodded. “It’s a tragedy. It’s unspeakably sad.”
“Tragedy, yes. It’s funny, he say the same thing when I show him this.”
“Who did?”
“Your father.”