Have You Seen Luis Velez?(41)

Upon hearing his name, Raymond hurried out with the tea and cookies. As he did, he made a mental note to return Isabel’s chair to exactly the right spot at the table when this meeting was over.

Mrs. G turned her face up to Raymond.

“That’s right, isn’t it? You brought Isabel to my door.” Her voice was low and a little shaky, as if she might be right at the edge of tears again. “How did you do this, my young friend?”

“I just made a list of every Luis Velez in New York.”

“So did I. Not a written one, but I got the telephone listings. But I could never get my calls answered by the right one.”

“I didn’t call,” Raymond said, sitting down at the table with them. Picking up a cookie. He felt embarrassed for some reason. As if he wanted everyone to stop staring. But it was a foolish thought, because Isabel was gazing blankly through the curtained window, and Mrs. G couldn’t see him. “I went to each apartment in person.”

“To how many places?”

“I don’t remember exactly. If you only count the places where someone came to the door . . . I guess . . . six or seven.”

“By yourself you did this? You could have been robbed!”

Raymond laughed. “I have nothing for them to take.”

“Or hurt.”

An image filled his mind. Luis Velez with the buzzed-off hair and the soul patch. His face close to Raymond’s, the smell of onions on his breath. The desperate, helpless feeling of falling, and the thought that Luis might have been more meanly teasing Raymond than genuinely threatening him, and that Raymond’s fear might have been too extreme.

“I wasn’t, though,” he said.

The rest of the experience would stay with him and him only. Safe inside.

“I’m surprised that he found me,” Isabel interjected. “Because I took the kids and went to stay with my parents after Luis . . . after the shooting.”

“I got lucky,” Raymond said, when he was sure Isabel did not plan to say more. “I talked to this Luis Velez in the Bronx who told me about a newspaper article. So then I knew it was the Luis M. Velez on the Upper East Side, where nobody ever answered the door. I went there to leave a note, but while I was there I ran into a neighbor who knew where Isabel was.”

A silence fell. Nobody filled it.

“I brought your tea,” he added.

He placed the pot in front of Mrs. G’s place at the table. In case she wasn’t sure where it was. She had always seemed to find it in the past, though. Raymond suspected her hands could be guided by its heat.

“I still can’t believe you did that,” she said. “You did all of that for me?”

“Well . . . yeah. I mean, you were so miserable. Not knowing. But now I wonder if that was better. You know. The not knowing. If it’s a really terrible thing like this . . . was it better not to know?”

Mrs. G sighed deeply. Poured herself a cup of tea, placing her finger just inside the rim as a gauge.

“Right now it is very hard,” she said, “but I think in the long run I will tell you it is always best to know. In this moment I’m still caught up in the fact that you did this huge thing for me, and I can’t seem to get my words together to tell you how grateful I am. But I will. I promise you I will. My thoughts are all over the landscape. As to the question you asked me, Isabel. If I want to know more of the terrible details. I think I want—or actually need, really—for you to tell me that Luis did not suffer. But of course you can only do that if it’s true. I’m not asking you to lie to me just to make me feel the tiniest bit better. But also I want you to say what you can bear to say and not one word more. If you can’t bear to relive this, then don’t do it for me. Please.”

“The medical examiner said he was killed instantly,” Isabel said.

“All right, then. I am afraid this will have to be the small favor for which I attempt to be thankful.”



“Oh, you have a cat,” Isabel said after several minutes of sipping their tea in silence. “Luis didn’t tell me you had a cat.”

“She is new here,” Mrs. G said. “Where do you see her?”

She was speaking normally. Almost casually. But her voice had lost something, Raymond thought. It had lost its energy. Its unique brand of aliveness. It felt almost as though Mrs. G’s voice had lost Mrs. G, and was now existing on its own, without her.

“She just stuck her head out from under the couch. But then she took one look at me and went right back under again.”

“She was wild for part of her life. Not all of it, I don’t think. She does not behave like a cat who has never known people. But still she is quite wary. I’m not surprised that she would hide when a new person is at hand.”

“I don’t think I have to tell you that Luis adored you,” Isabel said, turning the conversation suddenly back around. Out of small-talk territory. “Because I know he was not a man who would make a secret of a thing like that.”

“The feeling was definitely mutual,” Mrs. G said in return. A tiny glimpse of her old self peeked out through those words.

Raymond heard himself let out a sigh of relief. Even though he would never in a million years have welcomed this outcome, he felt deeply relieved that Mrs. G had been right. That Luis really had loved her.