No Witness But the Moon(44)

He was alone. Already the sky had darkened, closing like a curtain around his house. He’d always liked his own company before this. But as soon as Joy left, Vega felt jumpy and restless. The normal sounds of the house—the creak of the floorboards, the hum of the refrigerator—all felt magnified and predatory tonight. He stared out the sliding glass doors onto his deck. The world was a solid sheet of black that reflected his face back at him. He looked older and gaunter. He still hadn’t shaved. Could he really have aged in only twenty-four hours?

Food. He should eat. His stomach felt hollow but he had no appetite. He was afraid to get takeout right now. He was afraid some restaurant worker with a chip on his shoulder would recognize Vega and mess with his food. He searched the refrigerator for something that appealed to him but it was filled with Joy’s gluten-free, vegan crap. Tofu. Organic beets. Soy burgers. Kale. In the freezer, he found a frozen Stouffer’s Lasagna covered in ice crystals. He stuck it in the microwave then popped open a beer and drained it too quickly, feeling the slight buzz on an empty stomach.

Joy had left his mother’s photo albums open on the dining table. Vega began to close them and return them to their carton. One day, he’d put all these prints onto discs. There had to be hundreds of shots here. Weddings and christenings in the Bronx and Puerto Rico. He had dozens of relatives but they lived mainly in pictures scattered all over his mother’s apartment as a child, following Vega around like ghosts who didn’t age or did so only in giant leaps between mailings. His mother and grandmother, Abuelita Dolores, always had one foot here and one foot back on the island. Their gossip was just as likely to do with a cousin’s neighbor back in their mountain town of Barranquitas as it was one down the hall.

It wasn’t any different on his father’s side. Vega had three younger half sisters by his father, from two other women, all of them floating around somewhere in the New York area. His father was out there somewhere too, flawed and disappointing. That’s why Vega couldn’t look at family albums. They conjured up a longing for something he never knew he needed until those pictures reminded him that he did.

Vega closed one of the albums and began to heft it into the carton. An envelope tumbled out. Negatives, most likely. His mother loved to keep negatives so she could make copies of pictures for family back on the island. But it wasn’t negatives. It was a letter, penned in Spanish on loose-leaf notebook paper. It took up about three quarters of the page. The script was beautiful—and not his mother’s. It was addressed: Mi amado. My beloved. It was signed at the bottom: Eres mi ángel. You are my angel.

Mi amado. Eres mi ángel.

Vega smoothed the letter out on the dining table. Then he pulled his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans, opened the billfold, and located the note card he and Joy had found inside the cellophane bouquet of flowers on his mother’s grave earlier today. He laid the note card next to the letter.

The handwriting was identical.

An electric spark zipped through Vega. He picked up the letter and began to read it. He struggled a bit with the penmanship and syntax. Still, he could make out the gist of the words.

. . . Oh, how I struggle with our being apart. I grieve that it cannot be otherwise. Vega read the letter once, then twice. It was silly, frivolous stuff. It told him nothing about the letter writer or his mother. He searched the letter front and back for some sort of identification. He checked the envelope. He found nothing.

Who would write such a letter to his mother? Vega couldn’t recall ever writing a letter like that. Not to Adele. Not even to Wendy. He was too much of a cop. He hated to commit anything to paper that might come back to haunt him. Or maybe he just wasn’t romantic enough. Adele probably would agree.

Vega stared at the letter. So his mother had a secret lover. Someone who was still alive and knew her birthday. Someone who never came forward to introduce himself at her funeral. Was he married to someone else?

Vega knew one person it wasn’t: his father. Orlando Vega never wrote his mother so much as a child support check. He certainly never penned any love notes.

Then who?

The microwave dinged. Vega pulled out the soggy lasagna and slid the little container onto a plate. He grabbed a second beer and sat down at the table. He drained the beer but managed less than half the lasagna before throwing it in the trash. He couldn’t find his once-robust appetite. Even the fried pork fritters that had looked so good in that cuchifritos joint earlier today couldn’t tempt him now. He felt stripped of sensation, a vessel someone had forgotten to fill. A collection of liquor bottles sat in the far corner of the kitchen counter—bourbons and rums. He reached for one of the bourbons then put it back. It was too easy to go down that slippery slope.

What he needed was a distraction. He cleared the table, threw his plate and utensils in the dishwasher, and grabbed his guitar. His band had a club gig next week over in Broad Plains, but Vega couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to practice.

Television. He flicked the remote. An HBO comedy. A Knicks game. An action thriller . . .

The news. Co?o! He was being betrayed at every juncture. Ruben Tate-Rivera had leaked those stupid comments Vega had made at the shooting to the media. Someone in that demonstration today had posted YouTube footage of Vega trying to defend himself against that mob. The commissioner of the county police was looking grave and dismayed by all of it. Vega angrily shut off the TV. No matter what happened from this point forward, it would always be his fault. And why was that? He hadn’t been drunk or angry or reckless when he shot Ponce. This wasn’t personal. And okay, he’d made a judgment error. He’d had two freakin’ seconds to react. Two. He’d like to see how well anyone in that mob would fare in the same situation. Or Ruben Tate-Rivera. Or his commissioner. They’d wet their pants.