The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho (18 page)

When we got there, I scooted over to his side and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

“Take care of yourself,” he said then, and I thought,
Good.

He'd used the phrase people use to break up with each other these days. No wonder when a man tells me to take care of myself, what I hear in my head is “Fuck you.” So, good. He'd gotten the message. Asking him for help today had complicated nothing, unlike I'd feared.

I waved him good-bye and turned to go in, ignoring the magazines next to the entry gate and the people eating organic fare in the courtyard. I'd hoped to hop straight over to the new age section, but the back of a man in multipocketed khaki shorts prevented me from it. A professional-looking camera rested on his right shoulder, and a dark-haired woman in heavy makeup and a light orange shift stood beside him, effectively blocking me.

Then I saw who they were getting ready to interview. It was Mitchell Kaplan, the owner of the bookstore. The man Hector had hated with such passion. I'd often told him that he needed to get over Mitch. I'd muse that he sounded like the Joker in Batman, bemoaning the cool gadgets the other guy had, while dying of envy and the desire to get ahold of them for himself. Hector would always snort, snarl, and harrumph before telling me the comparison didn't deserve an answer. I knew better: He had a hard time with comebacks when truly flustered.

The reporter was saying, “Mitchell Kaplan is the founder of Miami's foremost literary haven, Books and Books, and of the Miami Book Fair International. He's agreed to chat with us today from his Coral Gables location about the state of publishing. How are you, Mitch?”

“Nice to see you again.”

“Tell us, how is Books and Books dealing with the ascent of the e-book and the fall of the brick-and-mortar bookstore?”

“Brick-and-mortar is out? We hadn't noticed,” he said, smiling.

I smiled too.

“In my world, it's in!” he continued. “I love the physical book, and I'm attached to the physical book, but I am also about those third places where people congregate to talk about the books, digital or not. Like right here. You think this is out?”

“Well, obviously you can't see it here,” said the reporter, waving around and noticing the place was packed, she the one “obviously” out of her depth in the rattling-the-interviewee department. “Care to share your secrets with us?”

“Well, we've always been a home for book lovers. Lately, we are working even harder to bring authors and readers together. We hold events almost every night in each of our four stores . . . and, just continuing to do what we do. I don't know that I'd call it a secret, but there it is.”

Oh, he was good. No wonder Hector had hated his guts so much. He'd turned the reporter's premise into one that allowed him to get his piece in and managed to sound humble doing it. Despicable.

“Good enough? You got everything you need?” he asked the reporter a few minutes later, handing the cameraman his lavalier and already focused on the people who'd assembled around me, curious.

“Yes, excellent, thank you,” said the reporter, frowning.

“And how are you?” he said to me. “I hope we weren't keeping you from the books.”

“Oh, no. Not at all. It was . . . interesting,” I said inanely, entranced by his easy smile, good hair, and huge blue eyes. I remember thinking, what would it be like to own your world? To walk around with the effortless knowledge that you are doing what you are supposed to be doing where you are supposed to be doing it? And just like that, I envied him, just like Hector had.

The excitement over, I headed for the occult section, and why not? Books had been my best friends in life, and they'd been Hector's. Maybe I could turn to them like he often had and they'd come through, I hoped, as I searched for the one that would speak to me. My great-great-nana's manual had been a start, but it had been three days of reading and rereading it, and I had yet to feel anything remotely resembling Hector's presence. No sense of peace or love upon connection, as I'd get when I first got my gift more than twenty-five years ago.

One thing was certain: In those twenty-five years, clairvoyance had gone mainstream. I'd thought my great-great-grandmother's diary was unique, but there in front of me were dozens of books showing how to concoct spells, how to “open to channel,” describing witches' commandments, Wiccan techniques, Celtic chants for talking to angels, and even voodoo strategies for the modern practitioner. There were also books about silence, gratitude, self-induced happiness, and self-love as psychic tools. I felt hopeful. Maybe I could reteach myself clairvoyance after all, get myself to that incredible feeling of loving the world again. And if I learned it right this time, maybe I could still help people, and help myself by ridding my days of all the garbage that regret, mourning, guilt, and self-loathing had stored in the garage of my life.

Last night, after seeing Jorge, and knowing we'd be meeting with a psychic today, I'd tried all the things prescribed by my great-great-grandmother in her journal. I'd lit candles, played music, prayed, visualized, and held the books Hector had given me during our time together because he'd imbued each one with intention, and they'd each inspired an emotion in me. Seeing them, I'd realized these bound clairvoyants had correctly predicted each curve and turn of our relationship. There was the beginning, desperate and sexy in
Love in the Time of Cholera
.
White Teeth
by Zadie Smith was funny and charming, delighting me in the most carefree way, like our middle. And there among them was
Chiquita,
which had predicted our ending, with help from Hector himself. But no Hector that I could feel, despite hours of running my hands over them, praying and wishing to communicate with him one last time.

Yet now, here, surrounded by books and the people who loved them enough to keep trying to sell them, I suddenly believed I'd reach Hector if I just kept at it. That I'd talk to him and find out what happened, and that once I did, I'd be protected from the police finding out I'd been the last person he'd seen and blaming me for his death. Then I'd be able to separate myself from this paranoid dread and mourn his death and the way things ended, maybe even find peace with the death of people I loved, with myself.

That afternoon among words, I understood that I couldn't leave things to someone else. That no psychic was going to magically appear and see what I couldn't see for myself. But the realization didn't weaken me, as it would have before. Instead, it made me hopeful that I could put myself back together, the woman and the clairvoyant, both made whole, united in some way.

I kept searching for more books pointing in that direction: going within, gratitude rituals, creating a psychic space, playing with images as a way to turn intuition on, and many other things that sounded to me like things everyone should do regularly, like a pedicure or a haircut. Natural things. Things that pointed to your being part of a whole, as opposed to some isolated freak by virtue of being able to see, feel, and hear what others appeared unable to.

A few minutes later, I'd chosen
Opening to Channel
by Sanaya Roman and Duane Packer,
How to Rule the World from Your Couch
by Laura Day, the classic
Life After Life
by Raymond A. Moody Jr., and, almost as an afterthought,
101 Ways to Jump-Start Your Intuition
by John Holland. They'd do for a start.

I took a taxi home, and when the cab neared the intersection of Twentieth Avenue and Calle Ocho, the corner where Hector had dropped me off just days ago, I paid and stood there, reliving that last afternoon we'd spent together, as the foreword in one of the books I'd just bought recommended. Then I walked the block or so to Del Tingo al Tango, feeling focused on my goal: connecting with Hector, understanding how he'd died and why, and making peace with his death, and with my not having seen it in time to prevent it.

His bookstore looked so beautiful, like a woman, lovely in her mourning, the
Cerrado Hasta Nuevo Aviso
(Closed Until Further Notice) sign like a Victorian locket around her shiny glass neck. Then I ran my hand over Del Tingo al Tango's doorknob, and the shift was immediate. Intense goose bumps shot from the inside of my right wrist to the inside of my right elbow until I withdrew my hand, my breath quick, listening, until I caught, if barely, the sound of a faraway radio blaring some Tito “El Bambino” song about forgiveness. Was it a message? If so, it was saying that my first order of business was forgiving Hector? Myself? My mom? Whoa, where had that come from?

I stayed a little longer waiting for another sign, then gave up and walked the rest of the way home, knowing that, my urgency be damned, my reeducation as a clairvoyant would take place at its own pace. And I could either walk away from my sight with nothing to show for all my suffering or stand fast, be right here when, and if, it returned.

Chapter 21

D
o you know what it's like to sleep with a dead man? To feel his presence underneath your sheets, but not his morning rise, the space between his legs not really there, except for the anger of impossibility pulsing through onto this realm from some level of him. But don't get me wrong. You will feel something when you're sleeping with a dead man, the urgency of his urge manifesting in unexpected ways. You might, for example, feel his essence, cool and pointing, poking, or trying to poke, the space between the fleshy part of your buttocks like a laser beam, or a narrow field of energy.

The reason for that is that you don't have to be alive to be delusional. I never gave Hector my ass when he was alive. What was making him think I'd do it now? Crazy man to death and beyond it, which goes to prove all you've heard at wakes and funerals is bullshit. Death does not make you a better, more aware, or more profound soul.

“Flaca?”
I heard the casual Argentinean term of endearment, which literally means “skinny one,” but kept my eyes and mouth closed.

“
Flaca?
I know you here.”

Shit.

Shit, shit, and shit.

“I know . . . I know you . . . meeee.”

I made myself still as a bar of soap, wanting to make sure I was really hearing what I thought I was hearing.

“I know you . . . hear me,” he said now, followed by something unintelligible.

“What?” I actually whispered back this time, realizing that even if he could guess I was listening, he couldn't know I was utterly unable to understand him. Can you imagine? My possibly murdered lover back from the dead, and I couldn't comprehend a word.

And then he was on me, like water when it feels solid because of the sheer amount of it, and the speed at which you're hitting it, or it's hitting you.

“You're choking me.”

“Don't
‘flaca'
me. Get off!”

It was like having a heart attack, this enormous pressuring weight crushing my chest. Did Hector want to kill me? Maybe he thought I'd killed him and was trying to pay me back by taking me with him. So I struggled, thrashing about like an evil green-faced teenager in dire need of an exorcism.

“Please, please, Mariela,” he said, though it sounded more like
Merry Ella
. “I need you . . . listen, please. I can't go.”

“Get off. Now!”

And off he went. I felt him go, or rather felt the big space in the place where there'd been an urgent energy.

“Wait!” I said after I'd caught my breath.

Nothing.

“Hector?”

“This better?” he muttered from somewhere in the vicinity of the far end of the hallway.

“Better,” I said after a few seconds.

“I did
somesing
bad.”

“You did, but it's better now, when you're not so close.”

“No . . . I did
somesing
bad.”

“What?”

Well, he didn't have to get snappy.

“Did you . . . do this? Did you . . . kill yourself?” I asked his soul or whatever other part of him was in the room, invisible to me.

He didn't answer in words I could hear, but I felt his answer, like a “harrumph,” as in, “Are you kidding me?”

“
Flaca
. . . I did
somesing
bad. So . . . so . . . soooorry . . .”

“Hector, I can hear you. I never thought I could, and I'm, and I'm sorry too. Listen, I'm sorry I wished you dead, I'm sorry for how I acted, and I'm so, so sorry you're gone,” I said, rushing my words for fear I'd lose him again, and overcome with emotion, amazement, and gratitude at being able to hear his voice.

“They're
caaahl-ming
.”

“Who's calming? Hector?”

“Going now.”

“No, wait, don't go. Tell me what happened. Who did this to you?” I asked, trying to hold on to him, wondering if I had lost my mind to think I could hear him when I couldn't possibly, not after so many years of strictly enforcing a “no ghosts allowed” policy on my life.

“For you,” he said.

“For me?” (He died for me? Because of me?)

“They're
caaahl . . . ming
.”

I was suddenly very afraid. So afraid, a little gasp escaped my throat when I heard two decisive thumps on my door.

I got out of bed, threw on my pink kimono, and rushed out of the bedroom to find that, unlike my bedroom, the living room was bright with blinding sunlight.

“Yes?” I asked the two police officers I'd never seen before. They weren't uniformed, but they showed me their badges and offered me business cards.

“Mariela Estevez?”

“Yes.”

“We'd like to ask you to accompany us down to the station.”

“Why?”

“There've been some new developments in the case of your tenant's death, and it would be convenient if you could come with us to help shed light on some of the new information.”

They were talking, but I wasn't listening. I was so nervous, I kept waiting for one of them to reach out, grab my wrist, handcuff me, and say I was under arrest for the murder of Hector Ferro.

“Can't we talk here? I'm not even dressed. Was just waking up.”

“We'd prefer it if you'd come down. You don't have to come now. You have our cards. Come down at your convenience, but it would help if you—”

“No, no, you know what? I don't have a car, and I don't leave the neighborhood much. I, I have no idea where this is,” I said, looking at the card. “If you'll just wait a few minutes so I can get dressed?”

I needed to know what had happened to Hector, didn't I? Well, apparently, here was my chance.

“What's going on? What's wrong? Mariela?”

It was Gustavo, leaving for work and finding the detectives blocking his view of me.

“I'm fine, Gustavo. But will you let Iris know that I'm going to the police station to answer some questions for these officers?”

“Why?”

“Not sure.”

“Then why are you going? Wait, are you arresting her?”

The detectives turned fully toward him now. One said, “Why would we be arresting her?” even as the other one said, “We're not arresting her, sir.”

“What's going on, Mariela?” he asked me, ignoring them and making it clear he didn't trust or believe them.

“Nothing, Gustavo. It's nothing. Don't worry. Just make sure Iris knows where I am, okay?” I said, giving him the card the detectives had given me.

I went inside to dress, trembling like a crumbling bridge. I felt like taking a shower, but was so nervous, my space so invaded, first by Hector and then by the police, that I couldn't think. Was this it? Did they really think I'd had something to do with this? How was I going to prove I'd been sleeping all night the night Hector died?

I threw on some jeans and a hoodie rescued from my heap of a hamper, all the time looking over my shoulders, expecting Hector to come back and tell me what he'd been trying to say. I thought it couldn't be a coincidence that I'd been able to hear him just before the police came for me.

When I stepped out, hobo bag slung over my shoulder, I knew this was the moment I'd been fearing since the night before his death. Gustavo was still standing in the foyer, arms crossed, watching the detectives like a gargoyle, while they stood their ground and glared right back at him.

“It's fine, Gustavo. Don't worry. Just call Iris,” I said, before following them into the unmarked car I imagined speeding off toward some corner of hell destined for people stupid enough to refuse seeing to such a level of blindness, that they manage to get themselves wrongly accused of the one thing they could never do.