He tried again, “Your mom,” he asked, “she’s okay?”
“Yes, she mostly stays in her bedroom. She thinks this winter will be her last, but she thought that ages ago, as you might recall.”
“Yes,” he said, “that’s why you first came back from boarding school to study here in La Frontera.”
“She’s lucky I don’t hold that against her.” Her eyes flashed angrily across his face, burning into his for but an instant.
He’d always wondered if they’d had the blessed fortune of marrying and bringing children into the world, what color their eyes would have turned out.
Reaching deep into his buried soul, he struggled to recapture the magic which had once flowed from within like the Holy Spirit. “Carolina,” he said, “I’ve never understood why you behaved the way you did. You knew how possessive I was, yet you tested me. As I’ve looked back over the years, I’ve always regretted my behavior, questioned my reactions and decisions. I’ve spent years replaying it all in my mind, our last moments together, the last time I saw you. I’ve wondered if I could have done something differently, something that might have saved us from this wretched life we have led.”
A single tear dropped gently from her bowed head onto the rug.
“Do you feel the same way I do?” he beseeched her, raising his hands in the air. “Do you wish things had worked out differently?”
Silence.
He waited for what seemed like yet another eternity, wondering if night had come and gone beyond the cloistered sanctum of those somber walls. Until, finally, she spoke.
“I’ve wondered too,” her voice trembled, “I’ve wondered what happened. I waited for you that night. You never came. I called. You never answered. I wrote. You never replied.” She paused to fight back the tears, salt on her lips. “I gave you everything. I gave you myself. I pledged you my love . . . and you promised . . . but you never showed up. You never came. You abandoned me.” Her voice crumbled as she began to sob, hunched over her knees.
He didn’t dare reach out to comfort her. Instead, he felt the surge of anger welling up inside of him, as always. He recalled the events of that Christmas Eve, and the fiasco that first tore them apart months before at her college dance. For years he had fought against that rage. He had tried his hardest to accept that it had led to his undoing. He had worked tirelessly to defeat the forces and internal demons that had conspired against his once promising future with Carolina.
He knew he was ultimately to blame for his decisions, regardless of Carolina’s actions. And he yearned to not revisit those tortured chambers of his memory. He yearned to begin again, anew, without unearthing all that had ravaged their love. But deep inside he knew—both Brother William and the Virgencita had counseled him—he had to come clean about his tortured feelings and the final actions that had destroyed their relationship in order to earn another chance at friendship, at something only God might prophesize for this stage of their lives.
“Why, Fulgencio?” she cried, looking straight into his eyes. “Why did you leave me after all that we had and all that we dreamt of together?”
He could hear the hard swallowing in her throat, see her delicate neck convulsing in anguish.
Uncontrollably, she screamed in tears, “Why?”
He felt her shriek pierce his heart like a knife as he fumbled to find the words he must reveal, “I came, Carolina,” he started. “I came that night . . . here to your father’s house. I had a dozen roses for you from Curiel’s Flower Shop,” he recalled, his eyes searching for meaning in the patterns of the rug. “I had a black velvet box with an engagement ring inside . . .”
She lifted her head toward him, her eyes still swallowing him whole.
“I wanted to surprise you. I came around the side to the kitchen door and there . . . I stopped to look for you in the window.” He glanced across the foyer toward the dining room where he had spied her dancing in another’s arms. The burning tide of rage threatened to rise again within him, but—unlike in the past—he managed to suppress it. “And I saw you, Carolina. I saw you dancing with another man. Just like the night of the dance at Incarnate Word. Just like I thought would never happen again.” He shook his head, dropping it mournfully into his hands.
Brother William had counseled him to go slowly in his explanations as to not come across like a madman, or worse yet, as someone unwilling to recognize his own shortcomings, someone eager to assign the blame to anything and anyone but himself.
Slowly, she reeled him in with a look that snagged the corner of his eye. She looked puzzled and horrified all at once, her lips twisted into a shocked and sickly smile. Her eyes turned to glass for a fleeting instant as she remembered the events of that evening.
“You idiot!” she exclaimed, jumping to her feet.
His eyes searched hers for a clue.
“That was my cousin I was dancing with, you fool! ”
Shocked, Fulgencio slapped his hand against his forehead in dismay, exclaiming, “What?”
“I couldn’t wait for you to meet him!”
“But he was a gringo I’d never seen before.” Fulgencio’s words fell haplessly from his downturned lips. “He wasn’t from around here. He couldn’t have been your cousin.”
“My mother’s sister and her family had come to visit from up north. I hadn’t seen him since we were little kids. Since we were both only children, we were like brother and sister. I can’t believe it. You’re even stupider and crazier than I ever thought you were.”
She didn’t know the half of it, he thought. Maybe now would not be the best time to tell her the rest of his pathetic excuse. She’d probably laugh at him and call the insane asylum to come drag him away in a straitjacket.
His heart sank into the muted plushness of the oriental rug as the clicking of her heels on the staircase faded upward into darkness. She had left him all alone without another word. The house fell silent yet again. And when no one came, he sheepishly tiptoed his way to the front door. It was dark outside as he exited, casting a final look over his shoulder but finding nothing in his wake. He could have sworn that for an instant someone had been standing there in the foyer, in the door to Mr. Mendelssohn’s den, watching him go, wallowing in resigned sadness. But in the absence of onlookers, he pulled the door delicately shut and shuffled morosely to his rusty pickup truck. It was cold beneath the starry blanket of night. And he wondered when he’d see Carolina again, if ever. He wondered if that had been Mr. Mendelssohn himself, watching him go from the doorway to his den, shaking his head in dismay.
What an idiot, indeed, he thought as he drove away. He shook his head in disgust. Her cousin! He had thrown his life away for her cousin! Because she was dancing with her helpless, innocent, gringito cousin! What in the world had been wrong with him? Idiot. Pendejo. Hijo de su chingada madre. Of course, he knew what it was, as much as he had not wanted to ever fully believe it. La maldición.