No Witness But the Moon(83)

Vega turned a page and ran his hand over a picture of his mother, looking firm-faced and impossibly young in a bright red dress. She was posed in front of a Christmas tree with a trim, good-looking, dark-skinned man. Vega’s father, Orlando. Vega was a toddler, flopped on his father’s shoulders, looking sleepy-eyed like he couldn’t wait to be poured into bed. Vega went to turn the page. Martha grabbed his hand to stop him. Something flashed across her face.

“I remember the onions,” she whispered. “I remember. She cried when she dropped them in the snow.”

Vega straightened. He stared at Martha. Her face, so blank a minute ago, flooded with light, like a piece of stained glass lit from behind. She knew who Vega was. She knew who his mother was. He swallowed back the dizzying sensation. The scent of her musk cologne. The picture of his mother in that red dress. The memory of those dropped onions. For one tiny moment, everything in the world was right again. His mother was here. With them. In this room. Alive.

“That’s how you and Luisa met,” Vega said softly. He squeezed her hand. “You remember, Do?a Martha. You remember.”

Martha’s soft cheeks suddenly grew taut. Her mouth pressed in. “Luisa is dead.” Her eyes registered the moment like it had just happened.

Vega nodded. “Yes. But she is still alive in us.”

Martha dropped Vega’s hand. She looked suddenly distressed. “It was terrible. So terrible. She cared about him. How could he do that?”

“Do?a Martha, do you know who killed my mother?”

“She trusted him. We all trusted him!”

Vega thought about that love note he’d found in Spanish at his mother’s grave. My beloved. You are always my angel. Martha would have known who her mother’s lover was. They were too close not to have shared that. Could this be the man who killed her?

The room felt hot and close. In the hallway, two orderlies rolled a heavy cart across the linoleum floor and discussed the Jets’ loss against the Dolphins. Vega felt like he was walking on a carpet of spun glass. Her memory was so fragile. The slightest misstep could fracture it.

“Do?a Martha, if you know who killed Luisa, please tell me,” said Vega. “She called you three hours before she died. Please try to remember. Anything at all. I beg you.”

Martha drew back from him. She looked frightened by his intensity. He’d come on too strong. He tried to scale it back.

“It’s okay,” Vega murmured. “Take your time. We can work through this slowly.” But already he felt something slipping from his grasp. The fade on a movie screen. Some synapse deep inside her brain had snapped again. On the other side of those neurons were forty-five years of memories with his mother that Vega wanted to connect to—none more desperately than those very last ones before she died. But they were already floating out to sea, a blurry point on the horizon.

A nurse’s aide appeared in the doorway, a young black woman with a chirpy Caribbean accent. “Mrs. Torres?” she said brightly. “It’s time for your shower.”

Vega turned his back on the aide and tried to get Martha’s attention. Her gaze had shifted to the window.

“It’s like that sometimes, I’m afraid,” said the nurse’s aide. “They’re so alert one minute and the next, it just vanishes.”

“Will it come back?”

“Possibly. But when and where, no one knows.”

“Is she lucid like that a lot?”

“She doesn’t get many visitors so it’s hard to say. Her priest comes to visit regularly.”

“Father Delgado?”

“That’s him. He sees a lot of the old people here.”

Vega rose from the edge of Martha’s bed. He kissed her on top of her head. She didn’t respond.

“See you soon, Do?a Martha.” She didn’t look like she’d even heard. The lines had smoothed out on her face. She was at peace again.

Even if he wasn’t.





Chapter 31


Marcela felt shaky and queasy as she moved away from the warmth of Byron’s body and sat up on the edge of their bed. Damon was asleep on a cot in the corner, his little arms wrapped around his stuffed dog. A Metro North train rattled past, shaking the window frames. Damon barely stirred. His mouth was open, his eyelids fluttering from a dream. A good dream? Or a bad one? She hoped he was too young to process the last two days. She hoped by the time he was old enough to understand, the heartache and fear would be behind him—behind them all.

I lost you and found you and then lost you again, Papi. . . . Marcela grieved this second death almost worse than the first. It had felt like a miracle to hear her father’s voice on the other end of her cell phone yesterday afternoon and to know he was alive. True, he was on the run and in a lot of trouble. But he’d devised a plan to get them out of this $8,000 debt, a plan that wouldn’t require any money at all. It gave Marcela hope. And then within hours, he was gone—truly gone—and she had no idea if it had to do with the money he’d borrowed, the DVD he’d asked her to retrieve from his apartment, or the worries he harbored in those final dark hours of his life.

Marcela broke down and told Byron everything last night. About the borrowed money, about the phone calls and threats if they didn’t pay it back. She even showed him the DVD her father was convinced they could trade in place of the $8,000 for Yovanna’s life. She and Byron played the DVD on the old laptop computer Se?ora Adele had passed along to Marcela after Damon was born. They fast-forwarded through several hours of time-stamped security footage of people coming and going from her father’s apartment building. Men. Women. Teenagers. Old people. Some were carrying shopping bags and knapsacks. Some carried nothing at all. Since the camera was positioned high above the front doorway, most of what Marcela and Byron saw were hair and hats—all of it through a fisheye lens. All of the people looked so ordinary; Marcela had no idea why this video would be worth so much to anyone.