The Sum of Our Days (31 page)

The young widow went from one hospital to the next, looking for her husband; she wasn't even sure where he could be found, but finally she was led to a cellar, no more than a cave in the earth, like those used for storing wine, where a corpse lay on a slab, barely covered by a sheet. Her first feeling was one of relief; she thought she had been the victim of a terrible mistake. That yellow, skeletal cadaver wearing a twisted expression of suffering did not remotely resemble the happy, full-of-life man who was her husband. But then the orderly who had showed her the way held the lamp close, and Juliette recognized Manoli. In the hours that followed, Juliette had to dredge up strength, find a cemetery plot, and bury her husband without ceremony. Afterward, she took her sons to a nearby plaza, and there amid the pigeons and the trees, she explained that they would not see their father again but that they would often feel him at their side; Manoli would always look after them. Achilleas was too young to understand the immensity of his loss, but Aristotelis was terrified. That same night Juliette awakened with a start, certain that she was being kissed. She felt soft lips, a warm breath, the tickle of her husband's beard. He had come to give her the farewell kiss he had not wanted to give before, when he was dying alone in the hospital. What she had told her children to console them was absolute truth: Manoli would look after his family.

T
HE TOWN OF
L
INDOS CLOSED RANKS
around the young widow and her children, but their embrace could not sustain her indefinitely. Juliette could not manage the restaurant alone, and since she couldn't find other work on the island, she decided that the moment had come to rejoin her family in California, where at least she could count on her parents' help. Life changed for the boys, who had been brought up free and secure, playing barefoot in the white streets of Lindos, where everyone knew them. Juliette found a modest apartment, part of a church project, and was hired by Book Passage. She had no more than moved in when her mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness, and after only a few months Juliette had to bury her. One year later her father died. There had been so much death around her that when she heard of a couple who were looking for a surrogate womb in which their child might grow, she offered hers without much thought, with the hope that the life within her would console her for so many losses, and give her warmth. I met Juliette when she was deformed by the pregnancy: swollen legs, blotches on her face, circles under her eyes . . . completely exhausted, but happy. She kept working in the bookstore until she was forced to stop by order of her physician; she spent the last weeks on a sofa, crushed by the weight of her belly. In fewer than four years Aristotelis and Achilleas had lost their father and two grandparents; their short lives were marked by death. They clung to their mother, the one person they had left, with the inevitable fear that she, too, might disappear. For that very reason it seemed strange to me that Juliette would run the risk of that pregnancy.

“And who will the parents of these twins be?” I asked her.

“I scarcely know them. The contact was made through a bereavement group I meet with every week, adults and children going through a period of pain. The group has helped us a lot; now Aristotelis and Achilleas understand that they are not the only ones who don't have a father.”

“The agreement with that couple was that you would have one baby, not two. Why should they get a bonus? Give them one baby and hand the other to me.”

Juliette burst out laughing, and explained that neither of them belonged to her; there were strict rules, even legal contracts, in regard to eggs, sperm, and paternity, so I couldn't take one of the twins for myself. A shame, but it wasn't the same as a litter of pups.

Juliette is the goddess Aphrodite, all sweetness and abundance: curves, breasts, kissable lips. Had I known her earlier, her image would have graced the cover of my book about food and love. It seemed normal that she and her two Greek boys, as we call her sons, would become a part of our family, and now when I count my grandchildren, I have to add two more. So the tribe is growing, this blest group in which happiness is multiplied and sorrow divided. The most prestigious private school in the county offered scholarships to Aristotelis and Achilleas, and by a stroke of luck, Juliette was able to rent a small house with a patio and garden in our neighborhood. Now all of us, Nico, Lori, Ernesto, Giulia, Juliette, and Willie and I, live within the radius of a few blocks, and the children can go from one house to another either on their bikes or walking. The family helped Juliette move, and while Nico was making some repairs, Lori was hanging pictures, and Willie was installing a grill, I was calling on Manoli to look after his own from the other side, just as he had promised with the posthumous kiss he gave Juliette in farewell.

One summer afternoon we were all sitting around the pool at our house watching Willie teach Achilleas to swim—he was afraid of the water but he was green with envy when he saw the other children splashing around—and I asked Juliette how she, such a maternal person, could carry two babies for nine months, give birth to them, and then that same day let them be taken away.

“They were never mine. They were in my body for a while, that was all. While I was carrying them I cared for them and loved them tenderly, but it wasn't the possessive love I feel for Aristotelis and Achilleas. I always knew we would be separated. When they were born, I held them for a moment in my arms. I kissed them and wished them good luck in life, and then I handed them to their parents, who immediately took them away. My breasts, heavy with milk, ached afterward, but not my heart. I was happy for that couple who so badly wanted children.”

“Would you do it again?”

“No. I'm nearly forty years old, and pregnancy takes a lot out of you. I would only do it for you, Isabel,” she told me.

“For me? God forbid! The last thing I want at my age is an infant.” I laughed.

“Then why did you ask if you could steal one of the twins for yourself?”

“It wasn't for me, it was for Lori.”

I
N MY MOTHER
'
S EYES
, Willie's best quality is that he is “well trained.” It would never have occurred to her to telephone Tío Ramón at the office to ask him to pick up sardines for dinner, or ask him to take off his shoes, climb on a chair, and go over the top of some piece of furniture with the feather duster, things that Willie does without a fuss. As for me, I think my husband's most admirable quality is his stubborn optimism. There is no way to sink Willie. I have a few times seen him on his knees, but he gets up, brushes off the dust, claps his hat on his head, and keeps going. He has had so many problems with his children that had I been in his place I would have been incurably depressed. It wasn't just Jennifer he suffered over; his two sons have lived dramatic lives owing to their addiction to drugs. Willie has always helped them, but with the passing of the years his hopes have been flagging; that is one reason he clings to Jason.

“Why are you the only one who learned something from me? All the others do is ask: give me, give me, give me,” Willie told him once.

“They feel entitled because they're your sons, but you don't owe me anything. You aren't my father but you've always looked after me. Why wouldn't I think what you tell me is important?” Jason replied.

“I'm proud of you,” Willie grunted, disguising a smile.

“That's not too difficult, Willie, your yardstick isn't very high.”

Jason adapted to New York, the most entertaining city in the world, where he is successful in his work; he has friends there and makes a living with his writing, and he has found the girl, “as reliable as Willie,” he was looking for. Judy graduated from Harvard, and writes on sex and relationships for the Internet and women's magazines. She has a Korean mother and North American father; she's beautiful, intelligent, and as fiercely independent as I am. She can't tolerate the idea that someone is supporting her, partly because she saw her mother—who barely speaks English—completely subjected by her father, who in due time left her for a younger woman. Judy had cured Jason of his vice of exploiting his drama as a way to seduce women. With the story of the girlfriend who left him for his sister-in-law, Jason had all the dates he wanted; he never lacked for a female shoulder, and a little more, when he sought consolation. With Judy that formula didn't work; she learned early to make her own way, and she is not a person to complain. She was sympathetic to what he had gone through, but that was not what had attracted her. When Jason met her she had been living with another man for four years, but she wasn't happy.

“Do you love him?” Jason asked her.

“I don't know.”

“If it's that difficult to answer that question, it's probably because you don't love him.”

“What do you know? You don't have any right to say that,” she replied indignantly.

They kissed, but Jason told her that they wouldn't even touch until she left the fellow because he wasn't inclined to be dumped another time. In less than a week she left the stupendous apartment where she was living—which seems to be the ultimate test of love in New York—and moved to a dark garret at some distance from the center of the city. A couple of years went by before the relationship jelled because Jason still didn't trust women in general and marriage in particular, since his parents, stepmothers, and stepfathers had been divorced one, two, even three times. One day Judy told him that she wasn't going to be made to pay for Sally's betrayal. That, plus the fact that she loved him even though he was resistant to making a commitment, brought a reaction. Finally he could let down his defenses and laugh about the past. Now from time to time he even communicates with Sally by e-mail. “I'm happy she's been with Celia for so long, that means that she didn't leave me on a whim. A lot of people were hurt but at least something good has come out of all this mess,” he told me.

According to Jason, Judy is the most decent person he knows, without the least affectation or malice. She is always surprised by the cruelty of the world because it would never occur to her to harm anyone. She adores animals. When they met she was walking abandoned dogs with the hope that someone would be attracted to them. At the time she was walking Toby, a pathetic animal that looked like a hairless mouse; he urinated uncontrollably and suffered attacks of epilepsy. He would lie on his back with four stiff paws in the air, foaming at the mouth. He was the fourth dog she'd taken care of, but there was no hope that anyone would ever fall in love with such a horror and take him home, so she took him to Jason, to keep him company as he wrote. In the end, they kept poor Toby.

For more than a year, Jason had been working for a men's magazine, one of those with full-color pages of lascivious girls with open lips and open legs, when he was given an assignment to cover the strange crime of a young man who had killed his best friend in the New Mexico desert, where they'd gone to camp. They were lost, and close to dying when one man asked the other to give him a merciful death, he didn't want to die of thirst . . . and his friend killed him with his knife. The circumstances were rather murky, but the judge determined that the murderer was temporarily insane from dehydration, and let him go with a minimal penalty. Jason's assignment was not an easy one because despite the notoriety of the crime; the details had not been spelled out during the trial, and neither the accused nor his friends and family would speak with him. He had to base his report on what he gathered at the site of the crime and the commentaries of rangers and police. Nevertheless, even with so little material, he gave his article the urgency and suspense of a detective novel. A week after the magazine hit the street, a publishing house contracted him to write a book on the case, and paid him an advance unusual for a new author. It was published with the title
Journal of the Dead.
Soon it fell into the hands of some film producers, and Jason sold the rights to the movie. Overnight he was on his way to becoming the next Truman Capote. He moved easily from journalism to literature, just as I had predicted the first time he showed me one of his stories, when he was eighteen and vegetating in Willie's house wrapped in a blanket and drinking beer at four in the afternoon. That was the period in which he didn't want to separate from the family and called our office at mid-afternoon to ask us what time we would be back home, and what were we going to fix him for dinner. Now he is the only one of our brood who doesn't need any help. With the money from the book and the movie, he decided to buy an apartment in Brooklyn. Judy suggested that they each pay half, and to the stupefaction of Jason and the rest of the family, she wrote a check for six figures. She had worked hard since she was a teenager, and she is frugal and knows how to invest her money. Jason won a prize with that girl, but she doesn't want to marry him until he stops smoking.

F
U AND
G
RACE HAD NOT ADOPTED
S
ABRINA
, it hadn't seemed crucial, but then Jennifer's old boyfriend got out of prison, where he'd been serving time, and made clear his intent to see his daughter. He had never agreed to have a blood test to prove his paternity, and in any case he had lost his rights as a father, but his voice on the telephone put them on the alert. The man wanted to have the little girl on weekends, something the mothers did not want at all because of his police record and a way of life that they had little confidence in. They decided that the moment had come to make the situation with Sabrina legal. That coincided with the death of Grace's seventy-five-year-old father, who had smoked his entire life; his lungs were destroyed and he had ended up in a hospital connected to a respirator. He lived in Oregon, the only state in the country where no one invokes the law when a terminally ill person chooses the moment he wants to die. Grace's father had figured that to go on living in that terrible condition would cost a fortune, and it wasn't worth it. He called his children, who gathered from around the country, and using his laptop explained that he had summoned them to tell them good-bye.