Queen of Bones Read online

  “I see,” Sharon said. “All right then, you should go see your friend.”

  Juan rubbed his belly. “Let’s go eat something first. I’m starving.”

  He always was.

  “Limpieza!” A woman opened the door and entered, pushing a housekeeping cart. “I need to clean the room,” she announced.

  “Yes, we are just leaving,” Juan said.

  Sharon thought that was strange. Shouldn’t the cleaning lady have asked if it was okay to come in? Or at least knocked first? But Juan hadn’t complained, so Sharon didn’t dare to either. Maybe it was a Cuban thing. She didn’t want to be the ugly American. It would embarrass her husband and make her seem even more out of place here than she already was.

  3

  Following Juan

  They had breakfast at Cobijo Real, a small café on the first floor of the Meliá Cohiba. Sharon had a fruit salad and a tall glass of café con leche—Cuban-style coffee with milk. Juan ordered three fried eggs, two sausages, an orange juice and two shots of espresso. He ate quickly, not taking the time to chew his food. Sharon couldn’t help feeling a bit disgusted by his table manners, or lack thereof.

  She finished a juicy pineapple chunk and made a final decision not to go with Juan. It seemed intrusive after everything he had told her. She attempted to check her email on her cell phone, which, of course, didn’t work, but the hotel did have wired Internet service at its business center.

  “Why don’t I stay here and catch up on work while you go talk things over with your friend?” she suggested.

  Juan looked disappointed. “But I told Víctor you were coming.”

  “We could take him out to dinner tonight. After you . . . clear the air.”

  “If that is what you want.”

  Juan licked his fork and gulped down the last sip of his espresso.

  “I’m nervous now,” he whispered. “I wish we hadn’t come. I don’t feel safe here.”

  “Come on!” Sharon gestured toward the other tables, most of which were occupied by harmless-looking tourists in Hawaiian shirts, and the pretty Cuban waitresses walking around in black-and-white uniforms. “This is your country, your people. What could possibly happen to you?”

  “I don’t know. Something bad. My father used to say, ‘Something bad is always happening to someone, somewhere, all the time.’”

  “That’s silly,” Sharon said, laughing it off. “As long as it doesn’t happen to you, you shouldn’t worry. Havana is ten times safer than downtown Albuquerque. You’ll be fine. Now go visit your friend. You’ll feel better afterward.”

  When breakfast was over—and charged to their room, as they didn’t have any convertible currency yet—Juan kissed Sharon goodbye and went to the front desk for a map. A young woman was the only employee in sight.

  “Five CUCs,” she said, showing him a small map of Havana. “If you only have dollars, I can exchange them for you.”

  Reluctantly, he gave her $200 and received 174 CUCs in return.

  “There’s a ten percent penalty because you are changing American currency,” she explained, noticing Juan’s shock as he counted the bills. “And a three percent transaction charge.”

  Juan left with the map and a sense of having been “got at” by her. He felt himself regressing to his old life in Cuba and resenting the hell out of it. This was how it had always been—the consumer at the mercy of the provider, whether the provider was a store clerk, a waiter or a doctor. Why had he allowed the cleaning lady to boss them around that morning? They were paying in US dollars, for God’s sake! He was no longer an ordinary Cuban, but a tourist. He couldn’t forget that.

  Sharon located the business center, but the Internet connection there (at three CUCs per minute!) was so slow that she couldn’t even sign in to her Gmail account. Her cell phone appeared to be working now, though. She was able to call Albuquerque, where a very sleepy Meredith assured her in her squeakiest, least convincing voice that she had everything under control. Sharon then realized it was seven-thirty in the morning in New Mexico.

  Not wanting to spend three hours by herself at the hotel, she settled for Coppelia. It had mixed reviews in Yelp, but Cuban ice cream was worth a shot. When she returned to the lobby, Juan was on his way out. Sharon called out to him to let him know her plans. If he came back too soon and didn’t find her, he would probably panic. But Juan didn’t hear her. He left, and she ran after him.

  Sharon couldn’t tell when she began to deliberately follow him. But as he walked away and she kept on his tail, she realized what she was doing. And it was too late to go back. She wanted to know where his friend lived. She needed to see this man, to make sure that what Juan had told her was true. Then she would take an almendrón to Coppelia. Juan didn’t need to know anything about it.

  She tried to convince herself that it was a game, that she was just playing detective. She was also making sure Juan was okay, since he seemed so worried about his safety. But deep down, she knew these weren’t the real reasons she was tailing her husband. She didn’t trust him. Not enough, not even after their conversation. His bringing up Elsa hadn’t helped. She cringed as she recalled the way he had said “my girl.” The pride in his eyes. The sparks. She remembered a Cuban saying that he liked: “Donde hubo fuego, cenizas quedan.” Old flames die hard, indeed.

  At first, the walk was pleasant enough. The houses around the hotel were big, with well-kept front yards and lush gardens. The sidewalks were clean, the streets lined with trees. She saw not only almendrones but also new VWs, Renaults and the occasional Mercedes as they flew past fancy private restaurants named La Cocina Cubana and Tu Paladar. A soft, salty breeze came from the ocean.

  After twenty minutes, however, she found herself in a less appealing neighborhood. The single houses had been replaced by blocks of apartment buildings separated by narrow alleyways. Garbage spilled out of the dumpsters, and the traffic had slowed. There were fewer cars and more buses with people hanging off their doors. Instead of the ocean breeze, her lungs filled with exhaust fumes. They were leaving behind the Malecón area, which she assumed was the tourist zone, and entering real Havana.

  A man catcalled her, but she kept her gaze straight ahead and ignored him.

  A police car drove up and down the street, and Sharon wondered if this was a place where one had to “walk around with four eyes.” It wasn’t run-down or dirt poor, but still a long way from Meliá Cohiba’s spotless neighborhood. She was tired too. It had been months since she had walked this much, and at ten-fifteen, it was already getting hot.

  Juan consulted the map often and, to Sharon’s surprise, asked a woman for directions. He would never have done that in Albuquerque. Sharon was afraid he would notice her presence, but he didn’t look back even once. Finally, he stopped in front of a three-story building, the kind she would have described as “family friendly” and “vintage.” The open balconies of the second-floor apartments allowed an unobstructed, voyeuristic look into their dwellers’ lives.

  Sharon crossed the street. There was a park shaded by two big leafy flamboyán trees right in front of the building. She hid behind a flowering flamboyán and looked up. Music came from the apartment on the right. In the living room, a young man played the drums aggressively while another sang, repeating the same words over and over: “Ana ana bana.” A third musician shook a pair of maracas.

  A couple danced on the balcony. The woman moved her hips in perfect synchrony with the drums and maracas, following the beat. Ah, Sharon thought, that one knew how to move her colita!

  Juan stood in front of the building’s main door, which was closed, and rang a bell.

  In the other apartment, the one on the left, a tall woman sat alone near the balcony. Sharon couldn’t make out her face, but noted she was a skinny blonde in a red dress. There was a Marilyn Monroe poster on the wall behind her.

  The woman stood and left Sh
aron’s sight. Juan pushed open the door and closed it behind him.

  A moment later, the door opened again, and a young man left the building. He wore a backward baseball cap, and his left arm was covered in tattoos. He walked through the park, passing so close to Sharon that she could smell the strong sandalwood cologne he was wearing.

  She waited, holding her breath, and imagined Juan going upstairs. Was the blonde waiting for him? Not necessarily, she thought. Víctor could be one of the musicians. And there were two more floors. She couldn’t see what was happening in the apartments higher up. But she wasn’t surprised when she saw Juan against the background of the Marilyn poster.

  The blonde came into Sharon’s line of vision again, then closed the balcony door with what sounded like the firing of a single loud shot.

  4

  Ghosts on the Stair

  It took Juan every ounce of energy he had to go upstairs—one chipped, stained step at a time. His legs suddenly weighed a ton. His head buzzed, but at least the uncomfortable feeling of being watched had vanished. He had noticed it for the first time after leaving the hotel but hadn’t looked back. It was his past returning to haunt him, he thought. That past had faces, voices, smells. They began to reveal themselves to him as he climbed the stairs.

  He saw his father before him. El Chino Oscar, who looked more Chinese than Juan did, with his dark eyes and straight black hair. His father in the one-bedroom apartment they had shared until Juan left Cuba. His father, asking him, “Do you have to do it? Are you sure it’s what you want?” His face, prematurely wrinkled, so different from the face of the smiling young man in his wedding picture with an arm protectively wrapped around his wife’s shoulders. Juan used to study his mother’s features in the faded portrait: long brown hair, arched eyebrows, small mouth. He would scrutinize the white dress, the veil, the bouquet, and imagine what it would have been like to grow up with her. To have a mother, like everyone else.

  Even a stepmother would’ve been fine. Most of his friends had had one—or two. Or more, depending on their fathers’ habits. These women weren’t perfect; some were downright bitches, but they were better than no mom at all. After his wife’s sudden death when Juan was two, El Chino had sunk into a depression so deep he’d never totally recovered. He’d never even dated again, as far as Juan knew. He’d spent his life sitting under that wedding picture, pining for the woman he’d lost, until he’d finally been reunited with her. His first and only, Juan’s paternal grandmother used to say.

  Abuela. There she was, standing tall on the next step, still a striking presence at sixty-nine, the age she’d been last time Juan had seen her. He couldn’t wait to hug her again. But Abuela had good days and bad days, Víctor had told him. She suffered from acute chochería, an almost-affectionate term in the Cuban vernacular for Alzheimer’s. Would she recognize him? Juan hoped so.

  Abuela had taken, as best she could, his mother’s place. She would often bring Juan to her home on Zanja Street in the heart of Havana’s Chinatown. The old house had been full of Chinese dolls and lanterns; yellowish copies of the Kwong Wah Po, a weekly paper published in Chinese; and a floral smell that he wouldn’t know until many years later as opium. She was a Santería believer, a devotee of Oyá, and would leave offerings of fried eggplant and dark chocolate in the corners of the house or in the garden for the orisha. She also worshipped San Fancón, a syncretic deity of Chinese origin. The house now belonged to the Daughters of the Immaculate Heart, the nuns who had taken Abuela in. What had happened to the furniture, the family pictures, the knickknacks she had collected? Had they thrown it all away?

  Juan’s grandfather Choy Chiong was a native of the Zengcheng Village in Guangdong. He had come to Cuba in the early 1940s; opened a tren de lavado, a laundry business; changed his name to Ezequiel; and married María Antonia Muñoz, a tall, big-hipped, long-legged Cuban girl who had moved to Havana from the countryside a few years before. They’d had only one child, Oscar, who would become Juan’s father.

  Ezequiel had died when Juan was seven years old, but he still had a vivid memory of his grandfather: a small wrinkled, bright-eyed man who had looked even shorter next to his statuesque wife. Their silent devotion, Juan recalled, had at times resembled complicity. What secrets had they shared? Abuela was almost illiterate, but she had managed to learn a few phrases in Chinese to please her husband. He had never lost his accent and, when he got mad, which didn’t happen often, would unleash long tirades in broken Spanish. Abuela was more temperamental and never bit her tongue. Ah, the things she had said about Elsa! She had loathed her, and she had let it be known.

  The parade of imaginary ghosts went on. Now it was Elsa who stood in front of Juan, smiling, but with her pretty face turned the other way. She hadn’t been fond of Abuela either. It had pained Juan that the two most important women in his life couldn’t stand each other. Impulsive and opinionated, Elsa had once told Abuela that believing in the orishas was a thing of the past, a ridiculous superstition. After that, Abuela wouldn’t even talk to her.

  Elsa blocked Juan’s way, refusing to let him climb to the next step. Her eyes were deep set and green. Cat eyes, her friends had called them. They had always been shining with happiness or glee. Her curly hair, which she had cut a few weeks before he left, framed her face like a frizzy halo. “Mom used to complain that my hair clogged the shower drain,” she had said. “But now that I’ve cut it, she asks, ‘What are you clogging it with now?’” She had laughed that very Elsa laugh, carefree with a hint of sarcasm.

  And she had been bigmouthed. Unlike other girls, Elsa had had no qualms about using the word pinga, the vulgar term for penis. She had loved the fact that Juan’s had three black spots on the shaft. “It’s handmade,” she used to say, to his embarrassment.

  She had tended to get physical at times, for good and for bad. Juan remembered when she had insisted on making love in her own backyard, though her parents were home and could easily have caught them. She had been full of fire. Another time, because he had shown up late to a date—he had been with Rosita, his other girlfriend—she had pushed him against a wall with such force that he’d ended up with a concussion. She wasn’t above tangling with other girls either. In the tenth grade, she had been expelled from the Lenin Vocational School, an elite boarding school, after infamously beating the daylights out of a general’s daughter. After every fight, Elsa retreated into another realm, could barely breathe and forgot, or at least pretended to forget, what she had done.

  Juan thought again of his last night in Cuba. Why had his Elsa gone back on her promise to follow him? She had seemed so excited to go that time . . . He and Camilo had worked for twelve hours straight, putting the finishing touches on the raft. They hadn’t returned to the ISA. Juan had called Elsa’s house several times, but no one had answered. Still, he had assumed that everything was fine. If she had changed her mind about it, as she had before, she would have told him, wouldn’t she?

  After the three of them had initially agreed to leave, she had stalled their plans several times. First because she was afraid of an upcoming hurricane. Later because she felt dizzy and tired. (She was always feeling tired in those days, even though she didn’t need to pedal everywhere like most of their classmates.) The last time, her mother had gotten sick. The delays had made Camilo nervous. He feared that the Cuban government would stop the flow of rafters sooner than later, which indeed happened a week after they left. Still, sometimes Juan wished he had stayed that night. Unlike Camilo, he hadn’t been crazy about leaving the country. He had been crazy about Elsa, and he had lost her.

  Juan pushed her ghost out of the way. But he immediately wished he hadn’t, because Rosita, his second girlfriend, was waiting for him just past Elsa, looking hurt and dejected. She was caressing her big belly, though he didn’t know for sure if she had actually been pregnant, as she had assured him, or ever had his baby. If that was his baby. What did he really know?

&nb
sp; Like Víctor and Elsa, Rosita had been a theater student. Quiet and taller and thinner than the other girls, she had been saddled with a cruel nickname—the Bride of Frankenstein. She was an oddity in a class full of loud, proud, curvy divas in training. What was she doing there? Juan hadn’t paid much attention to her at school, so he couldn’t tell if she had “it” or not. ISA folks talked constantly about having “it,” whatever “it” was: talent, charisma, technique. Elsa lacked it, they all agreed, but she made up for it with looks and sandunga. Víctor had “it.” (Juan fully expected to hear that he was taking part in some big Cuban film, maybe a remake of Fresa y Chocolate.) He hadn’t asked Víctor what had happened to Rosita during their short phone conversations, but he would today.

  Poor Rosita, the girl who had smelled of mint and desperation. Juan had slept with her because she had insisted—throwing herself at him, chasing him all over campus, letting everyone know that she wanted him. What else was he supposed to do? He was a man. But they had met only three or four times at her house and a motel she had paid for. He had never said he would leave Elsa for her, and she had known he was spoken for.

  Abuela had liked Rosita because she was also a Santería believer, or rather had turned into one, probably to suck up to Abuela. But Juan had felt only pity for his on-the-side girlfriend and tried his best to keep her away from his home life. Besides, he hadn’t wanted Elsa finding out about her, and he had been clear about that. When Rosita had claimed to be pregnant with his child, he had demanded that she have an abortion and stopped seeing her. He had later felt guilty and wanted to apologize. He had been too harsh. But she was trying to trick him into marrying her, and that wasn’t going to happen.

  He remembered Rosita’s face, her pale skin and freckled nose—quite unusual in Cuba—and it suddenly occurred to him that she looked a little like Sharon. They were both thin and had auburn eyes, though Sharon was much prettier. It should have been the other way around—upon his meeting Sharon, she should have reminded him of Rosita. But he didn’t think of Rosita often. Her features appeared blurred, and she soon dissolved into the air, leaving no trace behind.