before, if he had left kids behind in Cuba, if he had enemies…?”
“He talked about a girlfriend that he had in Cuba. He was so overjoyed when the baby came along that I can’t imagine that he had any children before. I don’t believe he had any enemies either. Why would a poor electrician have any?”
“Your mother didn’t live anywhere near the accident. Do you know what your husband was doing in that part of town?”
“I’ve asked myself that a thousand times and never found an answer. I think that maybe he went to help out one of his friends… In those days, everyone had problems.”
“Anything else? Did you save anything of his?”
The lady hesitated:
“If you give it to me, I promise to get it back to you,” Maria added.
“Just a minute.”
It took her a few minutes to return and she brought out a small suitcase, the kind that no one uses anymore, rectangular, without wheels, and faded black.
“Here are all of his belongings. I have a box with our daughter’s things in it as well if you want it, but…”
“Did you ever ask to have your daughter’s DNA tested?”
“No, they’re too expensive, and they never found her so I didn’t think it was necessary.”
“True. We can wait. We’ll go ahead and test Ray’s. One last question. I noticed you never dropped the last name Lazo.”
“Well, it’s a relatively common name and the baby couldn’t know her own name because she was too young, but if she does look for me, it would be easier to find me if I kept the same last name, right? Anyway, Mauricio doesn’t ask me about that.”
As she was leaving, Maria was somewhat surprised when Gladys Elena gave her a kiss on the cheek very naturally.
“You’ll keep me up to date if there are any developments, right?”
“Of course.”
When she worked on homicides, the hardest part was always informing the family. The murder of a loved one was the worst thing that anyone could ever endure, or so she thought, but now she wasn’t so sure. Living more than twenty years looking for a lost daughter had to be an extremely heavy burden. She had seen it in the eyes of the young woman who still had traces of agony in her gaze.
Day 2—Tuesday, November 3, 2015
Maria arrived at her home in El Doral eager to cook. That was often the case when she was nervous or worried, but these days—even before Patrick had gone off to college—she seldom ate at home. That’s why she had looked for other ways to alleviate her stress, like going to the gym or having a couple glasses of wine. She glanced in the refrigerator and only found a yogurt, skim milk, some whole wheat bread, turkey, cheese, and some vegetables. The choices in the freezer and pantry weren’t much better. She was about to give up, but she wound up grabbing her wallet and car keys and headed off to the nearest Publix.
A couple hours later, the aroma of sofrito flooded her house. She immediately thought of her mother and smiled, holding back the tears. Even though she knew perfectly well how to make picadillo, she searched for the old cookbook by Nitza Villapol. When she opened it, she found a sheet of paper with a recipe for a spinach quiche in her mother’s unmistakable handwriting.
She sautéed the onion and pepper in the olive oil, threw in a can of tomato sauce and removed it from the stove. Then, just as she was seasoning the ground beef, an uncontrollable fit of crying overcame her. It happened like that at times, coming in waves, like the ones when she used to go to the beach and the sea was rough, and they made her feel like she was drowning. Maybe that was why she didn’t cook that often anymore… The smells unlocked her memories.
She poured herself a glass of Merlot and sat down to relax before finishing the picadillo. In recent years, she had thought a lot about her mother’s life. As the daughter of a physician-professor and a housewife, Maria Cristina Fernandez Oviedo had belonged to Havana’s upper middle class. She had studied at private schools, spent her summers at Varadero, and belonged to one of the most exclusive clubs in the capital. She was fifteen years old and dreamed of becoming a physician, like her father and grandfather, when Fidel Castro took over and her life changed in an instant.
Less than two years later, her parents decided to get her out of Cuba through the Peter Pan program, by which fourteen thousand Cuban children fled the country between 1960 and 1962. When she arrived in Miami, they sent Maria Cristina to a convent in San Antonio along with other children. The Church’s protection didn’t last long because shortly thereafter she turned eighteen—the age at which the program ended. The nuns didn’t throw her out in the street right away. She lived there a few more months until she put together some savings from her work, and she and some of the other girls who were in the same situation were able to rent an apartment. Since that time—except for a few months after Maria was born and until a few months before her death—Maria’s mother had always worked. She never got the chance to study medicine as she had dreamed of doing, but she did complete her nursing degree and became head nurse at the Intensive Care Unit at Baptist Hospital.
Her mother had seldom talked about what she had left behind on the Island. Maria now regretted not having asked her more about her life back in Cuba, especially about her grandfather. Her mother had never gotten the chance to see him again. Two months after she left, he died of a massive heart attack at the age of fifty-seven. Her grandmother joined them by way of one of the Freedom Flights in 1967, when she was only one year old, and since then she had practically raised Maria while her parents studied and worked. When her grandmother passed away in 1987, her mother held her tight and said over and over:
“I’m not going to die yet, I promise… I promise.”
She hadn’t understood her mother’s anguish until now, now that she felt that same sense of desolation, that feeling of being an orphan that came from her absence.
Thank God she still had her father! He had always been her hero, her role model. In recent years, however, she had come to appreciate her mother’s inner strength, her quiet demeanor, and at the same time her tenacity to resolve everything, to forge ahead, to keep the family together, and to instill values.
The buzz of her cell phone brought her back to reality. It was a message from her colleague David, telling her that he was close by if she wanted to go out for a drink. Instead, she invited him to come by and share some picadillo with her, which he gladly accepted.
She immediately put the ground beef into the skillet along with the raisins, olives, wine, and spices over a low heat. She did the same with the rice once the water had boiled. She set the timer for twenty-five minutes and went to take a shower.
When David rang the doorbell thirty minutes later, the table was set and dinner was on the stove. Dressed very plainly, and with her hair up in a ponytail and just a touch of makeup, Maria didn’t look like she was forty-nine. When she glanced at herself in the mirror, right before she opened the door, she thought to herself: I need to lose ten pounds. This damn curse of Cuban women who have such a big ass! And she smiled as she thought about her grandmother, a Spaniard, who used that word much more often than her father would have liked.
David and Maria had started
