The Winters(88)
When I saw her, however, I knew instantly that Louisa was our friend.
“My dear,” she said, her warm eyes taking in my face, her hand on my growing belly. “I am beyond happy to see you.”
By dinner Dani’s doubts had disappeared, and she happily resumed gossiping with her aunt, showing her pictures of Spain and the road trip to Positano on her new—private—Instagram account. The next morning, side by side on beach chairs, swathed in sunblock and sunglasses, my growing belly under a towel, Louisa and I watched, with a mix of pride and trepidation, as Dani and a friend turned heads in the shallow waves, as sixteen-year-old girls in tiny bikinis do. Some invisible magnet would always pull Dani towards another easily bored princess type, a Brit or an American, with excellent manners and casual disdain for the adults who spoiled her. Sometimes, once they figured out who she was, what she’d done, and what had been done to her, they’d either retreat or get way too close, forcing Dani to eventually cut them loose. She navigated these relationships with the savvy granted to those who’ve gone through hell and come out the other end not giving a damn what anyone thinks.
That night, waiting for Dani to join us for dinner, I asked Louisa something to which I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer.
“Do you think that he ever loved me?”
She squinted into the sunset. “He loved you as much as he was capable of loving anyone, I suppose.”
“That’s not very comforting.”
“It’s the truth.”
“What about Dani? Did he love her?”
“I don’t think so,” she lamented. Then she pointed to my belly. “But he’d have been monstrously in love with this one.”
“Old Dani might not have liked that,” I said.
“True,” Louisa said, tilting her glass towards me. “So here’s to big and small mercies.”
Before I became too pregnant to fly, or the weather turned cold, we returned to the Caymans. There was paperwork to do on the sale of the clubhouses, and bank transfers from the sale of the island, an inconceivable amount of money coming in from a numbered company out of Germany. Louisa posited the buyers were Russian or Chinese. Either way, they offered far above the asking price, making it impossible to turn their offer down.
* * *
? ? ?
Three weeks before the baby was due, I had an overwhelming desire to find my grandmother, who had sent my mother to live with her American father after the Cuban revolution left her with nothing. Dani, of course, came with me. We disembarked at the marina, where a car waited to take us to an apartment on the Malecón, one belonging to an old lover of Laureen’s. We took a walk through Old Havana. Down a narrow alley, with Dani stopping every ten feet to take a picture, I swear I saw him, Max, ducking into a doorway. He was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and had that familiar set to his mouth. I had a sudden sense that the buildings were closing in on me, the deep-set windows above looking like the hooded eyes of Asherley. But when the man stepped back out into the street, I saw that he was just a man, a tourist like us, exploring the square on a beautiful day. No matter how often the coast guard assured us that Max couldn’t have run out of gas that far out and survived, until there was a body, a part of me did not believe he was dead. I didn’t alarm Dani with this vision, but she sensed a change in my energy and found me a place to sit and something cold to drink.
That evening I had the dream again, the one in which I watch with terror as Rebekah leaves Max’s side to wade towards me in the bay. It’s dusk. Asherley is lit from within by a hundred yellow lamps. Dani swims nearby, oblivious in the shallow waves. Rebekah inches her face towards mine, seemingly to kiss me before she kills me, like she always does. She plunges me beneath the wave, and I fight her, like I always do. But this time it’s not Rebekah holding me down. It’s Max. And I am no longer a boneless reed, helpless and flailing. Now my body feels young and angry. I push to the surface with all my strength and some of Rebekah’s, too, for she is no longer my nemesis. She seems to form a part of me, has wrapped herself around my muscles and bones, Max no match for the two of us.
I woke up with that familiar catch in my throat, a longing, but not for the man who had almost killed me. Max had become two men to me, the one I met on my island, and the one who took me to live with him on his. That made it possible for me to mourn him, something that came easier than forgiveness, especially for myself. One day Dani would ask me why I’d been willing, at first, to keep Max’s secret about who that woman was who came to Asherley, and to help him move her beloved mother’s body. I only hoped they’d surface after Dani fell in love with someone who made her behave in ways she didn’t recognize in herself, so that when I told her, I would have done it for you, to keep your father out of jail, she’d understand. And while this would be true, I would have also done it for myself. I had tried to leave once, but as time passed, it had become impossible for me to imagine leaving Asherley again, or its lifelong comforts. I’d known poverty, the droning uncertainty of it all, and I could no longer go back to it. So I would have done anything to remain at Asherley, to be with Max, shuddering to think how close I had come to dying with his lies inside of me.
But these questions would come later. For now, I was happy to be sitting in Plaza de la Catedral with Dani, watching the sun pinken the sky, knowing my only job was to finish raising her not to be like that, like me. I didn’t know what lay ahead for us, or that the next day I would find my grandmother, and that she would put her hand on my belly and she would tell me she was sure I was having a girl, and that I’d see my own mother’s face in hers and I would finally be able to cry.