Liliana, at sixteen, was more of a challenge now than she had been when she was a little girl, but Celia had not come up against any parenting issues that could be called stressful. She truly enjoyed Liliana’s vivacious personality and had confidence in her niece’s innate good sense—discounting, perhaps, her addiction to disco music. Their bond was strengthened by the fact that Liliana looked to Celia as a role model. Even before Liliana’s mother died, the child had declared that when she grew up she was not going to be a soldier like Mommy but a doctor like Tía Celia. No, Celia concluded, whatever this glitch in her psyche, it had nothing to do with Liliana.
Work had certainly been difficult in recent months, not so much for the nature of it, which she loved, but because everyone was working longer hours. She knew that toward the end of a shift she simply did not have the same reserves of patience nor could she provide the same quality of counselling to her child patients, their parents, and members of the pediatric staff who looked to her for reassurance and guidance. Celia smiled with faint irony, wondering if her disturbing experiences might be rooted in something as trivial as insufficient sleep.
Or in her relationship with Luis?
Had Celia focused on that, she might have found, if not a causal factor, at least a facet of her life worth examining. But the instant the thought of Luis entered her head she sprang up and moved to the balcony doorway to check the living room clock. Aye Madre! He would be here any minute! As if conjured by the thought, Luis’s small grey Fiat rounded the corner a block away.
In her bedroom, Celia snatched the first clothes that came to hand. She pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, slipped into sandals, and ran a brush through her hair. Moments later she heard, along with the sounds of everyday living from other apartments in the building, Luis’s footsteps coming along the hallway toward her door.
She opened it on the first knock, and said, glancing at her watch, “I suppose you want to be there when he arrives. Shall we go then?”
FIVE
JOE could barely believe he was back in Cuba. But here he was, crossing heat-rippled tarmac over island soil as real as the dinky terminal where the Aerocaribe flight from Cancun had landed. As the bus shuttled passengers to the international terminal to clear immigration and customs, Joe wondered how much of what he had read was true. After the Soviets cut off aid and the Cuban economy hit rock bottom—which was where it was when he left—had the country really pulled itself up by the bootstraps? No mean trick, he conceded, when you have to start by creating the boots—or, in Cuba’s case, creating a tourist industry—from scratch. He could not imagine that white sand beaches, which in his youth had been enjoyed by Cubans and a sprinkling of fleshy Russians, now swarmed with foreign tourists. But he had seen the pictures. Would slick magazines like Islands and Conde Naste lie about a thing like that?
Joe gave no credence to the US media’s endless stream of stories about supposed abuses of the 11 million Cubans who remained in their homeland; tales regularly trotted out to explain why 10 per cent of the Cuban population had immigrated to North America. Being one of the 10 per cent, he knew that most were like himself, people more interested in money than politics, simply looking for economic opportunities that didn’t exist or weren’t permitted on the island. Joe wasn’t skeptical by nature, but given the biased reportage about Cuba, common sense dictated that he go see for himself.
He flipped his US passport open in front of the immigration official and waited to be hassled, but all she asked was where he would be staying and how long. He said he would be in Cuba a month and named the hotel he had written on his tourist card. He hoped neither was true. With luck he could check out business possibilities in half that time and expected to stay at his mother’s place. She hadn’t replied to his letter, but that was probably because he had sent it to Luis, who might not have shown it to her. Joe wasn’t worried. Mothers—at least Cuban mothers—didn’t know the meaning of rejection.
The customs agent performed a perfunctory search of his luggage, and Joe passed through into the lobby. He found the Havanautos rental agency and waited with growing impatience for the clerk to do the paperwork. It was an annoyance to learn that the Audi he had reserved was not available. He was unapologetically offered a Korean-made Daewoo. Grumbling, he signed the form. Then there was a twenty-minute wait for credit card confirmation. As he waited for the endlessly redialed call to go through, he scanned the lobby. He saw no familiar face nor had he expected one. Even if Luis had a car, which was improbable, the fuel shortage could have prevented him from driving out to the airport. More likely he had chosen to ignore the visit. Not that it mattered. Joe never had waited for his older brother to open doors for him and wasn’t about to start now.
Paperwork finally completed, he stepped out into the sweltering heat and looked across to where he was told the car was parked, beyond a row of cassia trees. The Cuban name for those trees came back to him: lluvia de oro. “Rain of gold” could not have been more appropriate, he thought as he paused to watch a shower of yellow blossoms shaken loose by a slight breeze. Then he saw her. She stood in the shade of a cassia tree talking to a man, oblivious to the blossoms drifting around them. Oblivious to him.
From the back, he honestly didn’t recognize the tall man in grey polyester trousers and short-sleeved white shirt. But then, it wasn’t the man who magnetized his gaze. It was the one person he would never have expected to see here—or to see at all, for that matter. He had thought of Celia briefly on the flight over. He supposed she was married by now with two or three kids. She probably would have put on thirty pounds and switched to matronly skirts that bulged at the belly. It was not an image he cared to cultivate. The image he preferred, although he had blocked it too, was the one he was staring at fifty feet away: the same trim figure she’d had back in med school, clad in the same jeans and T-shirt. He almost expected that when she spotted him her face would darken with the same rage it had held the last time he saw her. But he was wrong about that too. As he drew near he realized that she had already seen him and, for whatever reason, was keeping her expression impassive.
Maybe the guy was her husband—but no, hell, it was his brother, Luis! The everything-is-black-or-white brother who had snarled at him when he was leaving that if he cared a whit for their mother he’d never try to contact them, to spare her painful reminders of having reared a gusano son. Joe knew it wasn’t true, but it had offered a convenient rationale for avoiding incessant pleadings for him to come home. The last thing he needed in those first years of near-daily humiliations was the suck of family pulling him back. He had considered re-establishing contact after the kids were born, but it was obvious that Vera’s determination to distance them from their Cuban heritage was an in-law war in the offing. Given how soon the marriage turned into a war within, he could think of no good reason to launch another, especially one where he’d be a hostage staked out in the middle and used as a shield against missiles launched from both sides.
Joe instantly saw that whatever his brother had been up to during their decade-long separation had put him on a fast track to middle age. The grey hair was why he hadn’t recognized him from the back, that and the way Luis’s broad shoulders had hollowed out and become slightly stooped. He might have known that once Luis stopped playing baseball he wouldn’t keep himself in shape. Joe had, of course: regular workouts being virtually obligatory in the medical supply business in order to project a healthy image. He was not entirely surprised that Luis had come to meet him, but Celia—why was she here? Maybe she wasn’t married? Or had been and was now divorced? Kids? Well, maybe that would be to his advantage. A protective barrier, so to speak. Even as Joe’s mind was scrabbling for ways to maintain a safe distance, his gaze never left her face and his feet carried him directly to her. Without so much as a glance at Luis, he dropped his bags and wrapped his arms around her. “Celia! You haven’t changed at all!”