Have You Seen Luis Velez?(65)

He looked up to see a cab pull over to the curb for a sharply dressed businessman carrying an expensive leather briefcase. Raymond looked into the man’s face, and the man looked back at him, and Raymond wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t sure what they had done to draw this man’s attention. But he was standing only a few steps away, and it struck Raymond that he might have overheard their conversation.

“Take this one,” the man said, opening the back door of the cab and pointing into its back seat.

“But we might not have—”

Before he could even say the word “money,” the man reached out his right hand as if to shake hands with Raymond. Raymond thought it was an odd gesture—an odd moment to conduct a meeting ritual. But he reached in return and shook the man’s hand.

As soon as he did, he felt the folded bill. Felt it silently, invisibly pressed into his palm.

“Thank you,” Raymond said.

But he wasn’t sure if the man had heard. He was already gone, trotting into the street with his hand up to hail another cab.

“Good news,” he told Mrs. G, steering her toward the back seat of the taxi. “We can take a cab.”

“Oh, thank goodness. Turns out you have enough money after all?”

“Yeah. Turns out I do.”

“I can pay you back some of it.”

“Don’t worry about it. I just came into a little more money, that’s all. It’s taken care of.”



Raymond stuck his head into the hospital room and saw Isabel looking back at him, exhausted—nearly wounded, as if she had just survived a war—but beaming. In her arms was a tiny newborn, mostly wrapped in a blanket.

“Oh, he’s here!” Raymond said.

He noticed Mrs. G quicken her step at the news.

They walked into the hospital room together.

“I’m so glad you both came,” Isabel said. “There’s someone you need to meet. This is Ramon.”

Raymond stepped closer, leading Mrs. G along. He looked down into the face of the child at close range. He was . . . unbelievable. Unbelievably tiny. Unbelievably perfect. It was hard to take at face value that such a perfect little being could be real.

“Oh, he’s beautiful!”

“Describe him to me,” Mrs. G said.

“Okay. I’ll try. But I don’t think words will do him justice. But he has this little tuft of soft-looking dark hair, but only right on top of his head. And his little lips and ears are so perfectly shaped, I swear it hurts to look at them. And his skin is almost . . . like you could see through it, it’s so new and perfect. You can see the little veins under his cheeks, but just in a nice way. I mean, it’s good skin. It’s enough. It’s just so new.”

“Here,” Isabel said to Mrs. G. “Give me your hand.”

Mrs. G reached out carefully, and Isabel took the hand, and guided it to the top of Ramon’s soft hair. Mrs. G stroked the baby’s head slowly, her eyes closed, head cocked as if listening to faraway music. Then she very gently touched his cheeks and nose.

Raymond was watching her face, so he noticed the moment when everything changed. When the rapture fell away, and was replaced by . . . well, he wasn’t sure what. And he wasn’t sure why. But it wasn’t good. Somehow she had fallen into some kind of emotional pit in that moment.

Maybe she’s just really tired, he thought.

He helped her sit in one of the plastic chairs.

“So tell me what I missed at the trial,” Isabel said.

Raymond pulled himself up another chair, still staring at that tiny brand-new face. Realizing it was the closest he had come to seeing Luis Velez.

“Well, I missed a big part of the morning, too, of course,” he said, because Mrs. G seemed to be lost in another world. “But in the afternoon, they examined one of the witnesses. It was good, what he said. He made it really clear that he thought the defendant was lying about parts of the thing. He was very direct about that, even when it got him in a little trouble with the judge. He wasn’t supposed to give his opinion, but he did anyway. So at that point I was thinking it was going really well for the prosecution, but then at the very end of the cross-examination, the defense attorney just sort of turned it all around again.”

Isabel’s smile dropped away. “Yeah, they’ll do that,” she said. She turned her face to Mrs. G, who was staring in the direction of the wall. “And what did Raymond and I miss in the morning, Millie?”

Mrs. G turned her face back toward them as if waking from a deep sleep. “I’m sorry. What again?”

“What did I make Raymond miss in the morning?”

“Oh, not very much, I’d say. The first of the two witnesses. But she didn’t say anything very different from the second one. She was more shy about her observations. That was the main difference. If she had opinions about the whole thing, she kept them to herself.”

They sat quietly for a brief moment. Then Raymond heard a knock at the room’s open door. He turned around to see the young policewoman who had driven them to the hospital that morning. Though, looking back, Raymond thought that ride felt like a thing that had taken place weeks ago.

“May I come in?” she asked.

Raymond looked to Isabel to see if she still felt bristly about the officer’s presence. But her face looked open and soft.