The Last Romantics(77)
Chapter 13
After we returned to Bexley from Miami, after we organized Joe’s memorial service and wrote thank-you notes and assured ourselves that Noni was okay—she was attending the grief support group, she was meeting regularly with her doctor, she was going to be okay—Caroline and I agreed to contact Luna. Our plan was to meet her—possibly in Miami, possibly bring her to Bexley—and give her the ring in person. We wanted to watch her open the blue velvet box and see for the first time the brilliant diamond that Joe had intended to place on her finger. It seemed important that Caroline and I be there to witness Luna’s reaction. To stand, in a way, in Joe’s place. I imagined the scene as well lit, cinematic, dramatic gasps and happy tears.
After that day in the restaurant, Renee wanted no part of it. She refused to discuss Luna Hernandez. Joe had died alone, Renee said. This was the truth, and it was all that mattered. This was what we, his sisters, had to live with.
Renee and Jonathan began to travel. Work, it appeared, was her antidote to grief. They went first to Chiapas, Mexico, where Renee volunteered at a rural medical clinic and Jonathan apprenticed with a seventy-four-year-old master carpenter who built intricately carved retablo altarpieces that stood taller than a man. Jonathan learned how to inlay mahogany, teak, and bone into oak, to bend the wood into fantastic and sacred shapes. At the clinic Renee conducted routine exams, set broken bones, and administered vaccines, but primarily she taught local doctors how to perform corneal-transplant surgery. Ocular surgery wasn’t her specialty—she worked with lungs and kidneys—but she’d received training in New York, and the procedure was fairly simple: cut, lift, slide, suture.
Renee’s patients arrived from distant, remote villages, on horseback, tractor, or foot. Causations varied: untreated infections, vitamin-A deficiency, trauma. But whether the patient was child or adult, female or male, the reaction to the bandage removal was always the same. The patient would blink, blink again, and reach out a hand to touch Renee’s face. The new eyes would fill with tears. Gracias. Gracias.
“I’m not sure when we’re coming back,” Renee said on a scratchy call from Mexico. “Some days the line at the clinic stretches so far I can’t see the end. The transplants—it’s like recycling. Tragic, intimate recycling.”
The idea of good arising from bad had always appealed to Renee. The senseless imbued with sense. After Joe it became for her an urgency. Luna she saw as a coward, possibly even a criminal. Nothing would be gained from meeting her, in Renee’s view, only regret.
Caroline and I believed otherwise. Why did Luna become our focus? Perhaps because we needed something to do. We could not return to the normalcy of our old lives, the stupid luxury of believing that Joe would always be there on the other end of a phone line. Luna gave us a focus, a distraction, but one that did not strike me as false. We were not hiding from anything; we were seeking.
Or perhaps it was the trace of what came later that prompted our search for Luna. A shiver of future knowledge that I did not understand, not yet. All I can say is that Caroline and I pursued Luna with a sense of unreasonable purpose. Luna was the answer to a question we did not yet know how to ask.
Day after day I called the Miami phone number given to me by Detective Henry, but it rang and rang. No answering machine, no voice mail, no Luna.
“No, we haven’t heard from her,” the detective said when I called him from New York. “She’s supposed to notify us before she leaves the state.” He paused. “But now that we’ve completed the investigation, I can’t devote any resources to finding her.”
I searched online with Google, visited Myspace and Bebo. The year was 2006, when an escape from the Internet was still entirely possible. The name Luna Hernandez gave me teenagers in Texas and Massachusetts, middle-aged women in Ohio and Arizona; none was the Luna from Joe’s Polaroid.
I called Revel Bar + Restaurant, but the hostess said that Luna Hernandez no longer worked there. How long had it been? I asked.
“Oh, two months?” she said. “Maybe three.” She didn’t know how to reach Luna, and no, she could not give out any personal numbers. “I need to go now, ma’am,” the woman said. “It’s a Saturday night.”
Caroline’s theory was that Luna’s inadvertent role in Joe’s death had provoked in her an inconsolable sadness. “She’s hiding,” Caroline said. “We have to go find her. Remember the Pause?”
In my apartment I was broiling a tuna melt in the toaster oven. In Caroline’s house in Hamden, she was picking the woody needles off a rosemary stalk for the chicken she would roast that night. Both of us with phones pinched between shoulder and ear.
“If someone had wanted to find Noni,” I said.
“They’d go to the gray house,” Caroline finished.
“Okay.” I straightened up. “I’ll go back.”
*
And so, three months after that first trip to Miami, I returned alone to search for Luna. I took a cab straight from the airport to the address that Detective Henry had given me. A short, squat apartment building, three stories high, each floor with a small, crowded balcony and windows lit from within. On the second floor, Luna’s floor, I saw slow movement behind a gauzy curtain.
I climbed the stairs and rang the bell. I carried my suitcase in one hand; the coat I had needed in New York was tied around my waist. It was early evening, overcast, the light low and colored the dull pink that in Miami seemed to infuse everything, all the time. Again I rang the bell, and this time a woman answered.