Hear No Evil

27

Jack had five hours to kill at Havana Airport. The first leg of his circuitous Miami-via-Cancun journey wasn’t scheduled to leave until dinnertime, so he found a seat at the restaurant and grabbed a demitasse of espresso, which made him only more restless. One more cup of this stuff, and he probably could swim home.

“More coffee?” the waitress asked.

“You don’t happen to have decaffeinated, do you?”

She laughed and walked away. Coffee without caffeine? That was apparently the Cuban equivalent of stopping in the middle of sex to do the laundry.

Stimulants or not, Jack’s anxiety level was up. Although Private Castillo had seemed truthful, Jack knew better than to accept at face value anything the Cuban government had to offer. His only shot at the whole truth was Lindsey herself. Was she having an affair with Lieutenant Johnson? Had they been together the night her husband was shot? It was up to Jack to get some straight answers out of his client. Or not. He’d defended plenty of accused murderers who had never told him the whole story. As a criminal defense lawyer, you dealt with it. The problem here, however, was that he wasn’t only a criminal defense lawyer. He was Brian’s biological father. And Jack wasn’t exactly keen on the idea of his own flesh and blood being raised by the woman who had murdered the boy’s adoptive father. As his friend Theo Knight had so aptly put it on day one, he was caught in his own zipper. Jack had to get the truth.

But first, he had to kill five hours.

He walked around the terminal, checked out the vending machines, and then found a bank of pay phones. In Cuba it was true that you never knew who was listening, but the risk of someone making any sense of Jack’s voicemail messages by eavesdropping on a pay phone seemed remote. Even so, he didn’t call his office. He checked only his personal messages at home, which usually consisted of Theo bitching about some bogus call the ref had made in last night’s Heat game or Abuela telling him about the nice Cuban checkout girl she’d met at Publix.

“You have one new message,” announced the robotic voice on the answering machine.

Jack got a pen and a scrap of paper to jot it down, then relaxed at the sound of Abuela’s recorded voice.

“Hola, mi vida.”

There was a long pause, but Jack was relieved to hear her start with a term of endearment. Before leaving Miami, he’d called and told her he was headed for Cuba, just so someone would know where he was. Of course, he couldn’t tell her why he was going to Cuba, which had only set her off all over again. She was sure that Jack was going back to Bejucal to stir up more scandal about his mother. She’d actually hung up on him.

“I’m sorry.” She said it in English, then switched to Spanish, so Jack knew that she had something important to say, something from the heart.

“I am so very sorry. I can’t expect you to understand this, so all I can do is ask you to forgive me.”

She sniffled, and Jack wished he could say something to her, but all he could do was listen to the message.

“When I sent your mother to Miami, lots of parents were sending their children away. The Catholic Church had the evacuation program-Pedro Pan. We’ve talked about that. Parents could send their children to live in freedom, and if all went well the family would hopefully reunite later. The important thing was to get the children out of the country before Castro and his rebels made it impossible to leave. I know that’s why you think I sent your mother to Miami, but I-my situation was different. I sent your mother away because…”

His grip tightened on the phone, as he had the foreboding sense that she was about to tell him something that she could say only to an answering machine, that she could never say in person.

Abuela’s voice faded, but Jack heard her say, “Because I was ashamed of her. She met that boy and-” She stopped herself, as if unable to say the word pregnant even after all these years. “-and I was ashamed of her.”

Jack closed his eyes and absorbed the recorded sounds of her painful sobbing. He had never seen Abuela cry, except tears of joy. In his mind’s eye, he could see her agony, and it tore him up inside.

She was trying to compose herself, but her aged voice still quaked. “I sent Ana Maria away, and I told her I never wanted to see her again. I didn’t mean it. I swear I didn’t mean it. But I said it. Out of my own pride I said it right to her face. Pride can be such an awful thing. Out of pride, I sinned against God and my own daughter. And now…and for that, God has punished me. I never saw her again.”

He could hear her weeping, and Jack’s eyes welled with tears. Once again, his birth-his mother’s death-had caused untold pain to someone he loved.

“You see, mi vida, it is not your fault she died. It was my fault. It was all my fault.”

Jack wanted to hold her and shake her at the same time. It was no one’s fault. Why must there always be someone to blame?

Abuela gathered her composure and said, “So, there was something I wanted to tell you. You asked about a sibling.”

Jack put his emotions in check. Abuela had moved beyond the mea culpa. She had something more to tell him. She drew a breath and said, “You should do this now, while you are in Havana. Please, if you get this message, I want you to do it. Go to Zapata and Calle twelve. Look for L thirty-seven. Then, you will have all the answers you need. Good-bye, mi vida. I love you.”

Jack stood motionless, the pay phone still in hand. “I love you, too,” he said, though he knew she wasn’t there.