He shook his head, minimizing his role. “We’re all stronger than we imagine ourselves to be. You’ve taken the first step. Anyhow, you have your own allowance and can live on your own.”
“It’s not that, Manuel. It was partly because of Fran; I felt that he was holding me there. But it’s the family too. I don’t know if you can understand, Manuel, but life on a big estate is easy. It’s nice to feel you’re one of them, even though I knew they were putting up with me only for Samuel’s sake.” She watched the boy playing with Café. Manuel remembered Catarina’s distinction between her feelings for her sister-in-law and those for her nephew. “But there’s something different in that family, and it’s both terrible and fascinating. Everything flows along on the estate, life goes on, it’s serene and without surprises, and it was what I needed. Or at least that’s what I thought for a while.”
“And now?”
“I’m starting to think seriously about what you said about living away from the estate. My brother thinks it’s a good idea. Samuel could see the rest of his family, too, that way, and next year he’ll start school, and . . .”
“That’s wonderful,” he said, putting his other hand over hers. “But, Elisa, what I was trying to say the other day in the cemetery is that it’s your life. Yours and Samuel’s. Take all the time you need to think about what you want to do, and once you’ve decided, I’ll help. But it has to be your decision, not one made by the Mu?iz de Dávila family or by your brother or by me. It’s yours, Elisa.”
She nodded and smiled.
A DEATHLY FEAR OF LIGHTNING
Laura closed the book she’d been reading when she heard Nogueira start his car engine.
She’d listened for more than fifteen minutes through the half-open window behind her as her husband and older daughter talked on the porch. She hadn’t been able to hear everything, but there hadn’t been any silences. She’d even heard laughter. There was no reason to have expected him to come in to say goodbye before he left. For years the two had scorned that very French custom of elaborate leave-takings, so she’d have thought nothing of a wordless departure just a couple of weeks earlier. But tonight his uncommunicative manner aroused an ancient ache she thought she’d overcome. She got to her feet and left the book on the armchair. On her way out she smiled at the sight of her daughter Antía, who had yet again fallen asleep on the sofa despite her mother’s repeated urgings to go to bed.
Xulia was reading, leaning back on the swing that took up much of the porch. This had been her favorite place ever since her father had installed it when she was only four years old.
“Your father left already?” she asked, even though the answer was obvious. Only her van remained parked in front of the house.
Xulia looked up from her book and took her time answering. “Yes,” she replied, wondering what was going on with her mother. “Did you want to tell him something?”
Laura looked into the distance as she leaned against the porch railing. She didn’t reply, perhaps because she needed to ponder the answer. Did she in fact want to tell him something? She thought she detected a faint flash of light on the horizon, and she stood up straighter to study everything going on out there so far away. Or was it perhaps that she wanted him to say something to her?
“It’s not important,” she responded, her eyes still fixed on the distant line between earth and sky.
“I think it is,” replied her daughter, with the seriousness of which only a teenager is capable.
She was startled by the girl’s tone and turned to glance at her. She was almost certain she’d seen something in the distant sky.
“I heard you two talking,” she said, still closely watching the sky. “But now I think there’s a storm coming.”
Xulia gave her a condescending smile. She knew her mother well: an intelligent, capable woman, rational and self-possessed, who was nevertheless terrified of thunderstorms. She checked the weather forecast on her phone. “There’s no storm in the forecast, Mama.”
“I don’t care what the internet says,” Laura answered stubbornly. “We’d better go inside.”
Xulia contemplated the night sky, calm and sprinkled with stars. But she didn’t protest. She knew that it was a waste of time to try to argue with her mother when it came to storms.
Laura hated thunderstorms, and she also hated their effect on her. They drove waves of terror deep into her soul. That absurd panic merely intensified her irrational hatred of the storm and conferred upon it the identity of a living thing, a conscious, enraged creature and a deadly enemy. She didn’t believe in hunches, premonitions, or mystic signs. In the time since she’d married her policeman, she’d had to deal with all-too-justified anxiety when he was on night shifts. Early in their married life she’d stayed awake night after night imagining the worst: her husband dragged beneath a truck, run over by a car smashing through a checkpoint, shot by some criminal late at night or by one of those drug smugglers said to move tons of cocaine across Galicia in the course of a single night.
Her husband knew how to take care of himself, and he was no longer on active duty. He’d probably gone out for a drink with Manuel, and yet the fact he’d left without a word, as well as the storm she glimpsed in the distance, had reawakened an ancient fear lurking deep within. She lit the oven and kept a close eye on the inexorably advancing storm. Its lightning flashes threw the profiles of the hills into sharp relief against the sky.
Laura crossed the kitchen, silent and intent as she set out in a row the ingredients for the cake he liked so much.
“Are you making a cake now?” asked Xulia, looking up toward the kitchen clock where the hands pointed to 11:00 p.m.
The window that she’d left wide open so as to monitor the progress of the storm across the horizon was suddenly lit by a blinding lightning flash.
Xulia wasn’t surprised. She knew her mother’d had a sixth sense for storms since that time long ago when Laura’s father died at sea in a raging storm.
Laura didn’t answer her daughter. She began mixing the ingredients, but her mind was far away, focused on that terrible night.
Laura’s mother had waited at the port for hours, hoping to see the boat return. When night descended and the storm tore inland across the seacoast, a group of kind souls, all women, appealed to her and almost physically dragged her back home. Laura’s mother collapsed in tears the instant she stepped across the threshold. Terribly miserable, she huddled on the floor and moaned. “Now I know he’ll never come back.”
Her mother was now more than eighty years old. She lived alone and proud in that cottage by the port. She did her shopping, went to mass, and lit a votive candle every day before the photo of the husband who’d never returned, the image of that beloved face she couldn’t forget but Laura could hardly remember.
Once Laura asked her, “How did you know? How did you know Papa wouldn’t come back?”
“I knew it when I gave in and left the port without him. For years I cursed those women for persuading me. They forced me to betray my vow and return home, but I was to blame. I gave up and abandoned all hope. That’s why he never came back.”
Xulia silently watched her mother prepare the batter and put the cake into the oven. Xulia particularly noted Laura’s worried expression and the distraction with which she dried her hands with a dishcloth. Her movements were careful and deliberate but her anxiety was obvious. Laura peered vigilantly back and forth from an invisible chasm just in front of her to the roiling advance of a storm that now covered the horizon.
Xulia looked out when she heard another thunderclap in the distance.
“Give me a hand,” her mother said. “Your sister fell asleep on the sofa.”
“As usual,” Xulia commented.
“Turn down the covers, so I can put her to bed.”