Page 39 of One Year Ago in Spain
“Are you okay?” Aracely asked. “Visiting hours are almost over.”
Guiltily, Claire looked at the clock on the hotel nightstand. It was 7p.m.She’d been gone from the hospital for five hours.
She lied. “I, uh, took a nap. I didn’t realize I’d sleep for that long.”
“Well, I’m sending Luis to pick you up in a little while,” Aracely said. “You’re coming over to my parents’ house for dinner. Mamá doesn’t want you alone right now, okay? You need people around you, and good food.”
Claire smiled sadly. Her first date with Matías had begun with him trying to prove to her how important good food was.
She didn’t know if she could handle his big family. Hers had been so small, just her and Jim and Sarah, and then they’d died and her family had been only herself.
Her fingers fluttered, and Claire frowned down at them. When had she started doing that?
“Dinner will do you good,” Aracely said. “I’m not giving you a choice. Luis will be at your hotel just after eight.”
“Okay.” Claire sighed, her fingers stilling. “I’ll be downstairs to meet him.”
—
When Claire andLuis arrived at the de León’s apartment in Parque de las Avenidas, Claire was surprised to find only Soledad, Armando, Aracely, and Abuela Gloria there.
“We thought maybe you’d prefer a quieter evening,” Aracely said as she embraced Claire at the front door.
“Thank you,” Claire said, holding her tightly despite the heat of the summer evening. She hadn’t realized how much she needed the hug, but after an afternoon spent with the disembodied soul of her boyfriend and then a helpful—but still unsettling—call with Professor Hong, it was a relief to be with people who operated within the bounds of “normalcy.”
Soledad, Armando, and Abuela Gloria hugged her, too, as she made her way into their apartment. Their home exuded warmth—dark wooden floors, fat armchairs and a patterned rug in the living room, and photos of Matías, Aracely, and Luis as kids. Claire swallowed a lump in her throat as she imagined Matías as a boy.
Of course, Matías’s brightly colored paintings also graced the walls.
There, above the television, hung a painting of doting mother and father tigers with their cubs, resting on dry grasslands. Among the cubs, though, was a baby zebra, but instead of black-and-white stripes, it was black and orange. Different, yet just like the rest of its family.
Out of habit, Claire turned to see if Matías was there beside her, watching for that moment when she found the delightful, incongruous detail in his work.
But he wasn’t there—neither the flesh-and-blood Matías nor his soul. Claire blinked back tears. She hadn’t realized how much she’d hoped he would appear here in his home until he didn’t.
“I asked Matías for a portrait of our family,” Soledad said. “That is what he gave me.” She laughed softly.
Claire nodded because she understood completely. Matías might look like any other human, just like everyone else, but his quintessence was something different. An orange-and-black zebra living among tigers.
“Mamá likes Matías to paint our family’s emotional milestones,” Aracely said as she pointed at another painting on the opposite wall, a portrait of baby Luis having his first bath. It must have been done when Matías was younger, because he would have been barely a teenager when Luis was born. The style was still identifiably Matías’s, though—realistic with a small hint of the sublime—although Claire could see how he hadn’t quite understood subtlety yet at that age. The water in the painting shimmered iridescent.
Luis stepped in front of the portrait. “Er, we don’t need to look at that one too carefully.”
Aracely snorted. “Luis doesn’t like us looking at his baby penis.”
“Es muy pequeño,” Soledad said. “And so cute.”
Even Abuela Gloria laughed.
Luis turned crimson.
Claire choked back a laugh because her basic Spanish was enough to understand. She spared Luis, though, and moved to the other side of the armchairs, to a watercolor of white houses on top of green cliffs, overlooking a deep blue ocean. “This one is different from the others I’ve seen.”
“That ismypainting,” Armando said. “Of the Canary Islands, where my grandparents are from. Where my mother grew up.”
Abuela Gloria beamed at the landscape.
“Armando, you’re an artist, too?” Claire asked.
