Page 13 of One Year Ago in Spain
Claire emerged fromthe plane puffy-eyed and red-nosed. She headed straight to a restroom and splashed her face with cold water.
I look like crap,she thought of her reflection in the mirror. Her hair had frizzed in all directions, her skin had simultaneously dehydrated and broken out during the flight, and there were purple-gray circles beneath her eyes. And then, because her brain was a scramble of dread and anxiety, she wondered,Should I put on some makeup to meet Matías’s family? After all, she’d only talked to them a few times on Zoom, and this was her chance to make a first impression.
But then Claire glanced at her reflection again and actually laughed out loud, startling the poor woman at the sink next to her.
There was no fixing Claire’s appearance. She looked like crap because how the hellwouldsomeone look if their almost-fiancé was in a coma, with two of his friends in similar critical condition and two dead?
She gathered her bags and trudged out of the restroom. The airport bustled with travelers eager to be on vacation, or stridingpurposefully to business meetings, or chattering in excitement to be reunited with friends and family. In another life, Claire might have been one of them. But today, all she heard was a cacophony of Spanish airport announcements she didn’t understand, mixed with the noise of a version of humanity she couldn’t comprehend—one that was looking forward to what came next.
Because of her stop in the restroom, her entire flight beat her to passport control, and the lines wound back and forth, doubling onto themselves at least ten times. With shoulders slumped, Claire took her place at the back of the queue. The massive hall was hot and humid since it was summer, and unlike wasteful Americans, Europeans didn’t crank up their air-conditioning to high as soon as the thermometer reached seventy-two degrees. It must have been at least eighty-five in the room when all the sweating travelers were accounted for.
For once, though, Claire wasn’t in a rush to get out of the airport. She would stay here in passport control for days if it could somehow slow down time and unmake reality. How could Matías, who was bursting at the seams with energy and life, possibly be lying in a hospital bed, unconscious? How could someone like that be put on mute, their creativity and joy paused like a TV show, abandoned while the rest of the world continued?
But eventually she made it to the front of the line. Her photo was taken, her fingerprints scanned, and when the immigration officer asked the purpose of her visit, she just whispered, fighting back tears, “I’m going to see my boyfriend and his family,” and the officer nodded, stamped her passport, and waved her through.
She shuffled through customs and out into the Arrivals Hall. There, a sea of faces surged around her and Spanish hit her like a tidal wave. Gone were the flight attendant and pilotannouncements in both Spanish and English. Now it was only the language Claire had just started to study—and after six months, she was only on chapter 4 of her textbook because her job kept her too busy.
Claire’s heartbeat pulsed in her throat as she scanned the crowd for Matías’s sister, Aracely.Please let me remember what she looks like,Claire thought, because she suddenly couldn’t conjure an image of Aracely’s face in her head. She never imagined this was how she’d meet them in person for the first time.
There were drivers holding up iPads with names of the passengers they were picking up. Friends with balloons and ¡Bienvenidos! posters. Eager, wide-eyed people, bouncing on their toes and shouting as they spotted those they were searching for.
And then Claire saw them. A woman in her early thirties and a man about a decade younger, their expressions as gray and eyes as bloodshot as Claire’s. Aracely and Luis, Matías’s siblings, stood like somber statues in the middle of the animated Arrivals Hall.
“Hola,” Claire said when she reached them.
Aracely just reeled her into a tight, silent embrace. She was a soft, plump woman, and it was comforting, if only for a few seconds, to be in her arms.
“Thank you for picking me up,” Claire said after they’d pulled apart. “How is he?”
“Matías is…” Luis hesitated. “He is the same.”
Claire closed her eyes tightly for a moment. When she opened them, she found the courage to ask, “No improvement at all?”
Aracely bit her lip and shook her head. “You must prepare yourself to see him, because…” She started to cry and couldn’t continue.
Luis hugged his sister. He was only twenty-three, the baby of the family and still a little lanky from youth, but he had the same hair as Matías—thick black and wavy—and even though his eyes were deep brown and not liquid gold like his brother’s, they were the same shape, and the resemblance nearly made Claire dissolve into tears, too.
“Matías broke thirty-seven bones,” Luis said in a low voice. “They were going one hundred and eighty kilometers per hour when they crashed and flipped over. Matías is in many bandages. There are a lot of machines…I-I’m sorry, I don’t know what they are called in English.”
“It’s okay,” Claire said, not wanting to know yet.Thirty-seven bones. Coma. Speedboat accident with two of his friends dead.It was already too much to take in.
“How are Leo and Facu doing?” she asked.
“Still in Valencia, but also in an intensive care unit,” Aracely said, unburying her face from Luis’s chest. “They’re only a little better than Matías. We pray for them, too.”
“Come,” Luis said, putting his other arm around Claire protectively and steering her toward the airport exit. “Let us take you to Matías.”
Aracely
As Aracely drove,she stole glances at Claire in the rearview mirror. Matías’s girlfriend was quieter than Aracely had imagined, and smaller, too. He had described Claire as the quintessential take-charge American woman, someone who ran multinational billion-dollar deals by day and kept his life in order by night.
Good,Aracely had told him when he’d first begun dating Claire.You need someone like that.
It had always been Aracely who kept Matías on track when they were growing up, rather than the other way around, even though he was two years older. She had learned this very early, on her first day of primary school. Matías had proudly walked her to school, introduced her to her teacher, then left for his own class. But he’d left all his books and even pencils at home, so the day ended up a rotten one for him, and he’d gotten detention. Aracely had to stay late while he served out his punishment by cleaning the classroom.
Even that had taken longer than it should have because Matías kept getting exciting ideas for things to draw, and he would doodle on the whiteboard instead of making it pristine. Matías was artistic entropy personified, and he needed someone to contain him. Aracely ended up helping him put the roomback in order, and by the time they arrived home, it was two hours later than it ought to have been. She resolved from that day onward to make sure Matías had all his homework and school supplies before they left each morning.
They were a good pair like that. Matías’s looming presence on the playground meant Aracely was never bullied. And when she was older, it meant the boys in her grade were extra respectful of her because they knew that one stray, less-than-gentlemanly comment would result in being pounded by Matías after school.
