Page 11 of One Year Ago in Spain
“Hello? Aracely? Th-this is Claire.”
“Claire?¡Ay, dios mío, algo terrible pasó! Matías y sus amigos estaban en la playa y hubo un accidente. La lancha—”
“Wait, what?” Claire gripped the armrest of the chair with white knuckles, completely lost in a rapid-fire conversation shehadto understand but couldn’t. “Slow down, please. My Spanish is really bad and I don’t—”
“There was an accident,” Aracely said in English, with the same beautiful, soft accent as Matías; it made Claire want to cry. “The guys…their speedboat crashed. Two of them…” Aracely choked back a sob. “Two are dead. Three in the hospital.”
“Matías?” Claire asked in barely a whisper.
“Matías…he’s in a coma. You must come. Now.”
Claire
The last-minute ticketto Madrid meant that Claire was crammed into a middle seat between a snorer who fell asleep the instant they took off and a teenager whose phone was clearly not on airplane mode, as it lit up every two seconds with new messages from his friends. However, it was a better seating situation than if she’d been next to the chatterbox one aisle back—clearly an oversharer who liked to interrogate those around her. Claire wouldn’t have been able to take it. She felt as if her personal armor had been punctured a million times, and now her heart and the rest of her insides were leaking through it like a sieve.
“Hello, everyone. This is your captain, Amanda Cheasequah, speaking. We’ve reached our cruising altitude of forty-one thousand feet so I’m going to turn off that seatbelt sign. Unfortunately, it does look like there will be some turbulence as we get closer to Spain, but I’ll keep you updated as we approach the storm. For now, sit back, relax, and enjoy our seven-hour, twenty-seven-minute flight.”
Claire squeezed her eyes shut.Turbulence as we get closer to Spain. That was an understatement if she’d ever heard one. Her entire future was on life support. Matías was on oxygen and a feeding tube. She was going to meet her boyfriend’s family but she didn’t know if they knew he’d been about to propose, andhow they felt about her abandoning her planned vacation with Matías at the last minute. And on top of that, she’d run out of the office in the middle of one of the biggest mergers her firm had ever handled, possibly cratering a career she’d toiled for and taken massive law school debt to build.
Seven hours and twenty-seven minutes. Claire had mapped Hospital Universitario La Paz from the Madrid airport, and thankfully, it was only sixteen minutes away when there wasn’t traffic. Still, with deplaning time and passport control and customs, that was over nine or ten hours until she could see Matías.
Ten hours too long.
Please, Matías, don’t leave me. Hold on. I’m coming.
Claire bit back a sob. The teenager next to her rolled his eyes. Claire normally would have said something, but she didn’t have the energy right now for insignificant fights.
Oh god, all those insignificant little fights she’d had with Matías…
She should have been more forgiving. What did it matter if he left water glasses all over the apartment because he would forget that he already had a cup and just grabbed another one from the cabinet? Why had she tried so hard to make him follow her organizational rules—things that made sense to her but might as well be arbitrary to anyone else?
Plastic wrap and foil should be lined up in the drawer with their openings facing to the right.
If there is a white tea towel on the oven handle, then the other towel should be a blue terry one because they have different levels of absorbency.
Also, towels don’t get washed with clothes because it encourages pilling.
Claire had never thought of herself as persnickety, but now that she started cataloging the myriad requirements of participating in her life, she wondered how Matías hadn’t run out the door screaming on day one.
Because he was a saint. He picked up her dry cleaning. He carried her to bed when her feet were too achy from being crammed into heels all day. He painted her body with colors he made himself from ground blackberries, rose petals, bee pollen, and honey, then kissed every inch of her clean and made love to her like she was a masterpiece.
I don’t deserve him,she thought.
He’d said he loved her because she was strong, and he’d been surrounded by strong women his entire life. But Claire wore armor because she’d lost her parents too young, and because she worked in a field still dominated by men who talked over everyone else since they were spoiled by an old guard who always listened to them.
Underneath the warrior’s clothing, though, Claire hid the raw, tender parts of herself. And they were exposed now, vulnerable to every terrible what-if she could imagine.
“Please God,” Claire whispered, tears streaming down her face. “Please let him live. I will do anything…just let Matías make it through.”
Claire
Nine Years Ago
“Congratulations, pumpkin!” Dadpulled Claire close to kiss her on the cheek, bumping her graduation cap off onto the grass.
Mom picked it up and beamed at it, then at Claire. “Oh, sweetheart, we’re so proud of you! Not only are you the first person in any part of our family to go to college, let alone graduate, but you’re also off to law school!” She re-pinned the cap onto Claire’s head and adjusted the tassel so it was on the left side now that she’d officially been through the graduation ceremony.
Claire wrapped her arms around both her mom and dad and brought them into a group hug. It had always been just the three of them. Jim and Sarah hadn’t been able to have kids of their own, so they’d taken Claire in as a foster child when she was two—her biological parents had died of drug overdoses—and as soon as it was possible, Jim and Sarah made it official and adopted Claire. They were all the family she’d ever remembered, and all the family she’d ever needed.
