All That Followed (28 page)

*   *   *

THE NEXT
absence was the hardest to admit. Eventually, I realized how much I missed Joni Garrett, despite his betrayal. He was the closest thing to a friend I’d had in a long while, and he’d become almost a grandfather to Elena. I had trusted him completely. With my friendship, with my daughter. With secrets I could barely admit to myself.

After the chaos surrounding Jos
é
Antonio’s death began to settle—after Robert Duarte disappeared back to the United States and after the four young men were sent off to prisons far away from Muriga—I was confronted with long empty spaces each afternoon that had previously been occupied by Joni. I wandered the streets with Elena, stopping alone for coffee or aimlessly walking the aisles of the Todo Todo.

It was in these empty midday hours that I understood exactly how much I had lost the moment Jos
é
Antonio was pulled into that car.

*   *   *

I FOUND
myself fixating on Elena to fill these empty spaces. I began to take her everywhere with me. Not just to the grocery store or to the hair salon but to the insurance agent for a meeting to discuss the life insurance policy Jos
é
Antonio had taken out when Elena was born. To doctor’s appointments in Bilbao, where the nephrologist who performed my transplant discussed hormone levels and dietary restrictions and life expectancies for transplanted organ recipients. To the funeral home, where I was informed that the Party office in Bilbao had paid for my husband’s burial through member contributions. Elena was with me at all of these places.

I spoke to her as I would speak to an adult, a peer. In the late hours of the night as she slept in front of the blinking television set, I would tell her about the way her father used to complain about Muriga, about her mother’s afternoon hike to the
refugio
at Aizkorri with her friend Morgan Duarte, about the three men that had come to me in a dream the night her father was kidnapped.

It wasn’t until this last year, six years after Jos
é
Antonio’s kidnapping, that I discovered the final absence, which had in fact preceded the other two: the loss of my terrorist kidney when Joni Garrett revealed the identity of my organ donor. Not I
ñ
aki Libano, the young man with the crooked nose who had killed a Spanish intelligence officer in Madrid in 1995. Not the militant nationalist who had been shot to death in his sister’s apartment in Mondrag
ó
n but, rather, a fourteen-year-old boy who had been killed in a senseless accident.

The next morning after waking to this realization, I registered Elena at San Jorge, where several of the women from my mother’s
mus
group had grandchildren attending. When I returned home without her—the first time since her father’s death—I set a pot of coffee on the stove and began to draft a letter to the Abarzuza boy.

54. JONI

With the bombing of the trains in Atocha yesterday morning, Muriga has again begun its old rituals of self-preservation. Just as it turned on the Abarzuza boy in the weeks after Jos
é
Antonio’s murder six years ago—dehumanizing him, scrambling to manufacture evidence that he wasn’t one of us, that he was an outsider all along—the town has changed its dialogue to set itself apart from the Basque terrorists that are purported to have detonated the explosives that tore apart four trains in Madrid. In the bars last night, I listened to Aznar’s speech and watched Estefana Torretxe and Santi Etxeverria nodding in agreement as he condemned the Basque independence movement. They spoke of the unidentified terrorists as “monstrous,” the bombing as “cowardly” or “shameless.” They spoke as if it were impossible to consider that this monstrous act might have been carried out by their sons, their nieces, their neighbors. Anything to distance themselves.

The reports began to come in this afternoon, just ahead of the general elections in two days. The Basque news anchors are now happily reporting that the attacks in Atocha are most likely the work of al-Qaeda in northern Africa, that four suspects have already been identified. I’ve tried to go about my day as usual, though even the students in my ninth-year English class have been whispering about them. After the final class of the day, I sequester myself in the small office that has been my second home for fifty years. A half hour later, there is a familiar knock on the pebbled glass of my office door, and then Juantxo’s toadlike face peeks anxiously into view.

“You’ve heard?” he asks.

“No,” I say, looking up from a stack of student essays about their approaching Easter vacations. “About the bombings?”

“Yes,” he says eagerly. “They’ve decided that it was the Arabs—that the ETA was not involved.”

I nod, not knowing what to say. Juantxo stands awkwardly in the open doorway, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

“This is wonderful news, isn’t it?” he says.

I guess that it is, though I think of the photographs I’d seen in the paper this morning, of the trains ripped open from the inside and of the woman’s shoe scattered in among the debris on the train platform, and wonder how anything about this could be considered wonderful news.

“We’re going out for a drink,” he said. “Lucinda and a couple of the secretaries. You’ll come?”

“No,” I say, and I tap a finger on the pile of papers on my desk. “Not tonight.”

“Sure,” he says, “of course,” and then he is gone.

When I close the door to my office an hour later, the sun has just begun to dip over the foothills of the Pyrenees to the west. I start toward the entryway, past the old broom closet that had been the American Robert Duarte’s office in the year of Jos
é
Antonio’s death. The office is empty, as it has been since the day Jos
é
Antonio’s body was recovered.

In a way I envied his ability to simply abandon Muriga. Morgan had left as soon as she had learned why her husband was taken into questioning by the police; while Robert was trying to deny the affair to Detective Castro at the Ertzaintza headquarters, she was packing three suitcases. She drove the Renault to the airport in Biarritz and was back at her parents’ house in Boise by the time Robert was let out of custody.

I visited the American the day before he was to leave. The apartment, which had never been tidy, now looked as if it had been ransacked—kitchen drawers were flung open, dishcloths and silverware spilling from their edges.

“So you’re leaving,” I said. “Just like that?”

Robert looked at me incredulously. He was folding winter jackets and stuffing them into the bottom of a cardboard box. For the first time he looked lost, bewildered.

“As opposed to what?” he said, in a way that seemed to hope I might have another answer for him.

“To staying, I suppose.”

“She’s my
wife
, Joni,” he said. “Or at least she was, anyway. I have to follow her. You of all people must understand that.”

*   *   *

THE AMERICAN
continued filling the cardboard box, unpinning the charcoal sketches that Morgan had left tacked to the wall of the living room, folding them hastily and stacking them on top of the winter jackets.

“Do you think I might keep this one?” I said. It was a roughly sketched portrait of a young girl, about three. She had dark curls that fell over her eyes, and in her hand she held a melting ice cream bar.

“It’s Mariana’s daughter, you know,” he said awkwardly.

“Yes, I know. Her name is Elena.”

“Anyway, sure. You can have it.”

I unpinned the paper from the wall, then carefully folded the portrait lengthwise and slid it into my briefcase.

“Do you think you can get her back?” I asked.

“Morgan? I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “I think so, but I don’t know.”

He paused for a moment, stood up from the box he had been packing as if he just now fully realized that I was in the room with him.

“And what about you, Joni?” he said. “Why are you staying here? Juantxo is going to replace you the next chance he gets.”

I looked down at my empty hands. They were pale and thin and broken down. In the brief time that I had known him, I had secretly admired the Euskaldun—his ability to drop in and be so accepted, then to just as easily leave it behind.

“It’s my home, I think. All my old ghosts are still here with me, keeping me company. They’ll never believe that,” I said, gesturing out the window toward the street below. “They’ll never believe that but it’s the truth.”

*   *   *

THE HALLS
of the old fortress are empty now—it’s my favorite time to be in San Jorge. I lock the heavy exterior door behind me, but instead of walking along the sidewalk that leads out to the faculty parking lot I follow one of the small paths the children have worn into the grass, dropping down into the empty moat that surrounds the ramparts of the fortress. I circle around the north side to where the gymnasium door has been cut into the thick limestone walls. The area around the doorway is littered with broken sunflower shells and snubbed-out cigarette butts, the wall scratched over with nationalist slogans. I retrieve a plastic lighter wedged between two blocks in the fortress wall, flick it a few times to warm my fingertips in its flame, and then return it to its hiding place. I’ve been noticing the group that huddles here during recesses. They’re a tough bunch, friends since
primaria
that are often being reprimanded for ditching class or for drinking beers in the lavatories, and I wonder if this lighter will be used to light cigarettes or to ignite bottles filled with gasoline.

I can remember Iker sitting in this same place with the D
í
az boy in the autumn before Jos
é
Antonio’s death. It is hard to recall them as they existed in that empty doorway, in the blue oxfords of the San Jorge uniform, laughing and conspiring as all young men do. Instead, it’s easier to remember them as Muriga does: as the flat, uncomprehending faces that were shown over and over on the news during their trial. I tap a cigarette from the pack and sit down on the cold stone of the threshold. There is still a bite to the spring air, but the sky is unnaturally clear.

I remember the story Nerea told me that afternoon as we lay in bed in the apartment above Martín’s grocery store, about hearing her father taken out this same door in 1937, about how the Falangist captain had fired a shot through her father’s forehead without warning, without ceremony.

I remember the saying I heard once, how the Basque Country’s history can be divided in half by the Civil War, and it occurs to me that perhaps that bullet has never stopped moving through our town. That it is still traveling through Muriga, striking one of us down every now and again.

Inevitably, I think about Nerea and our girl. I come back to the picture in the investigator’s report, of the police officer holding a tape measure out from the edge of the road to the place where the Peugeot had come to rest in the rocks at the sea’s edge.
Thirty-eight meters
, it had read.

I smoke the cigarette down to the filter and watch the lights begin to appear below as the sky darkens. In between drags my lips move silently, and it isn’t until I have finished the cigarette that I realize the word that they have been saying.

Txirimiri
, they say.

Tsk … tsk …
she had said, touching her lips to my fingertips so I could feel how little air escaped her mouth. The sound of a drop of water on a hot skillet, of a cup sliding from a saucer.
Tsk. Tsk.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

G
ABRIEL
U
RZA
received his MFA from the Ohio State University. His family is from the Basque region of Spain, where he lived for several years. His short fiction and essays have been published in
Riverteeth
,
Hobart
,
Erlea
,
The Kenyon Review
,
West Branch
,
Slate
, and other publications. He also has a degree in law from the University of Notre Dame and has spent several years as a public defender in Reno, Nevada. You can sign up for email updates
here
.

A
LL
T
HAT
F
OLLOWED.
Copyright © 2015 by Gabriel Urza. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

www.henryholt.com

Jacket design by Lucy Kim

Jacket photos; bus on fire © Awie Badenhorst/Alamy,

Basque village © Ainara Garcia Azpiazu/Getty Images,

sky © Peter Zelei/Getty Images

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Urza, Gabriel.

    All that followed : a novel / Gabriel Urza.

           pages cm

    ISBN 978-1-62779-243-1 (hardback)—ISBN 978-1-62779-244-8 (electronic book)

1.  Basques—Spain—Fiction.   2.  Murder—Investigation—Fiction.   I.  Title.

    PS3621.R93A55 2015

    813'.6—dc23

2014041150

First Edition: August 2015

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

e-ISBN 9781627792448