Such a Pretty Fiction: Chapter 13
This is the 13th chapter of my novel, Such a Pretty Fiction. Chapter 12 is here.
Her alarm went off. It was light. She’d slept in. She slid out of bed and walked to the bathroom. The door closed. The water started.
I thought about how I might undo what we’d done the night before. I needed something positive. Good news. I checked Nosotras. Four hundred women had logged on in the last twenty-four hours.
When she came out, she had dressed in the bathroom. I felt lecherous being naked under the covers.
I told her about the numbers.
“Great.” She picked up her backpack. “I’m going to breakfast.”
She went out. The sky was blue on the tiles across the courtyard. I sprang out of bed into the shower.
Breakfast was in chafing dishes on the marble bar. She sat with her back to the stairs on her computer. I made a plate and sat down across from her. She didn’t look up from the screen.
“What’s the plan for today?” I tried to sound easy.
“Nothing.” Her fingers clicked on the keys. “We’re done in Cusco. Next stop is supposed to be Puno, but no one’s returning my calls.”
Maybe that explained it. Maybe it wasn’t me, but her plans falling through. A flash of hope. I spoke without thinking.
“Ignoring the famous Soledad?”
She snapped her head up and glowered at me. It was the same look she’d given me the night before.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
Her jaw was set.
“You were right about the servers. Good call increasing the quota.” I heard in my own voice that I was grasping.
“I’m glad Candace could help you with that. How’s she doing, by the way? Did you sneak off and call her back last night?”
“Yes. Because she’s my boss. Not because she’s the love of my life. We dated for four years, but I ended it. It’s over.”
“If it’s over then why do you still have a heart by her name?”
“Who cares about a stupid heart? I didn’t even think to change it.”
She sat back and folded her arms across her chest, studying me. “When did you break it off?”
I hesitated. “Before I came to Chile.”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course. Why?” She asked like I was obligated to answer. I didn’t want to, but she was talking to me again. I needed to keep it going.
“There’s no easy answer. Because it was over.”
“There has to be some reason.”
“Fine. Fine!” I dropped my fork on the plate. “You want to know? Here’s the whole stupid story. She’s older than me. Nine years older than me. We met when I was twenty-seven. I had a job. She didn’t. She wanted to start a company. I agreed to help her and then I was working for her. It was great. Couldn’t be better. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, she started to get desperate for kids. Forty was coming up. Everything was about when we were going to have kids. When—”
“You don’t want kids?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe. One day. But she was desperate about it. Everything she did was about kids. ‘When are we going to get a house?’ ‘Where should our last vacation be before the baby?’ It was too much.”
“Men have it so easy.” She was mad again, burning at me through slitted eyes.
“That’s the same look Candace gives me when we talk about this.”
Her eyes blazed open.
“Men aren’t the same about kids,” I said. “We don’t want them like you want them. You’re sure about it. We’ve got to take a chance.”
“That’s the luxury. You don’t need an answer. In the end it’s not up to you.”
“I like to pretend that I have some role in the decision.”
“That’s exactly what it is. Pretending.”
It made me furious how much she sounded like Candace. The certainty that she was right, that my opinion didn’t matter, that I was just a thing to stand in the way of a woman.
“And you live together.” She recited it like a fact.
“What makes you say that?”
“You said you bought a house.”
“Oh. Yeah, we live together. Or we did. I didn’t have time to move out before I left. But I will.”
She tipped her head back and laughed. A high, bitter, angry laugh.
“Look,” I said. “Can we just focus on what we’re doing here? Four hundred women on Nosotras! We’re helping people.”
“Let me tell you a secret about Nosotras, Logan.” She leaned forward and put her elbows on the table. “It’s useless. Video calls? You think you’re helping people with video calls?” She laughed. “The ego on you. The ego it must take not to see it. If I wanted video calls, I’d use a real app. Not some third-rate wannabe.”
My mouth fell open. I couldn’t believe it. All the time I’d spent building Nosotras. Thinking I was making a difference.
“Well, then why ask for an app?” I sputtered. “Why waste my time?”
“Money,” she whispered. She leaned closer and said it again. Her lips wrapped around the word and she spit it at me. “Money.” There was a sadistic look in her eye. She enjoyed finally being able to tell me. “All the losers that got rich building apps think that apps are the answer. So I go and I stroke their egos, and I tell them how right they are, thank you so much for the idea, if only I’d been smart enough to see it. An app! Of course! Thank you! Nosotras is a publicity stunt. I put it on websites to get money to do real work. People in New York will see the pictures as they sip their lattes and say, ‘Finally! The twenty-first century reaches South America!’ And then they’ll send me money—” she drawled the word again, rubbing my face in it “—and I’ll give the money to Clara and Teresa and Veronica and to the women that actually need help.”
I stared at her. The delight in her eye, the wolfish grin. The girl in Iquitos. The woman crying on the ground. I thought I’d helped them. She’d used me.
“I’m going to Cúcuta.”
She sat up. The blow had landed. It was delicious. “Colombia?”
I nodded.
“When?”
“This afternoon. Red Cross contract. It’s not about money for them.”
Her face changed. The malice was gone. I saw the other Soledad and I wanted to take it back. She stood up.
“Good.” She shoved her laptop in her backpack. “Coward.”
She whirled away up the steps. Her coat hung forgotten on the back of the chair. Light flashed across the lobby as the glass door opened to the plaza.
I snatched her coat and ran after her. The light outside was blinding. I squinted around the plaza. She was there, hurrying down the street toward the Plaza de Armas. The high walls on either side of the road threw cold shadows onto the cobblestones, dark under the broad blue sky. It made her look small and insignificant, no one in particular on a day like any other. For me there was no on else.
She disappeared around the edge of the building. I ran. The road opened onto the Plaza de Armas. A taxi honked and raced by in front of me. She strode through the plaza. The buildings fell away and the sandy red bricks stretched out under her feet. To my left was the cathedral with its domes and crosses. Beyond it, the bell tower we had climbed the day before shot up like a spear. People milled around the fountain in the center of the square. She had almost reached it.
“Soledad!” I shouted. “Soledad!”
Heads turned. People all around her turned to look at me, but she walked on.
“Soledad!”
Cars moved carefully around the borders of the plaza, tires vibrating on the cobblestones. A taxi rank stretched along the far side. The drivers leaned against their cars in the sun, watching me. My feet slapped on the bricks.
“Soledad!” I caught up to her at last. “Soledad…” Water gurgled in the fountain ten feet away. I put my hand on her arm, bare below the t-shirt sleeve.
As soon as I touched her she spun around.
“You!” Her face was screwed up in frustration. Her eyes were wet. I took my hand away and stood looking at her, ready for what was coming. She started to say something but stopped, her mouth half open, her golden eyes burning. The sound of tires and the water in the fountain rose above the hum of people on the plaza.
“I brought your coat.” I held it out.
She looked at it in my hand. Her eyes came back to mine. Her shoulders rose and fell with deep breaths. Watching her face for a sign of softening, there was nothing. Her eyes stayed glittering and angry.
Then she furrowed her brow. She turned her head slightly, eyes still on mine, then tore them away and looked down the plaza toward the church. I heard it too. Someone shouted. Another person joined, then another, and suddenly it seemed as if everyone was shouting.
Following her gaze, I looked at the bell tower. Something shifted, wrong. I blinked in surprise. The tower had just tilted and begun to list to the right.
Soledad gasped. “Earthquake…”
As I watched the bell tower, the bricks of the plaza started to roil. They rose up like a wave of water, racing toward us, a rolling wave of red clay. As it swept across the plaza, people fell. The bricks bucked and swayed. The wave hit us.
It didn’t throw me into the air like I expected. I was just standing up and then I was on the ground. It was like the laws of physics no longer held. Bricks moved like water. The church tower swayed left and right, moving like a pendulum hanging up into the sky. A wall of noise roared all around us. At the top of the sound, bricks tinkled together like ice in a glass.
And suddenly it was over. The roar fell away, as if the air had been sucked out of the plaza. Water was no longer bubbling in the fountain. Car alarms screeched in the distance. A chorus of shouts and screams, of people wailing, rushed up to fill the void.
Soledad was on the bricks next to me. I reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you OK?” Her eyes were wide and her face was pale. The anger was gone.
She nodded.
We helped each other up. I took her in my arms and hugged her. She hugged me back. It had all been so petty.
She released me and took her coat out of my hand. “Come on.”
The plaza came back to life. People poured out of the churches where they’d been at Sunday mass. I followed Soledad as she became a doctor again. There were surprisingly few injuries. A cab driver had been knocked against his car. Blood ran down his face. He mopped at it with a handkerchief and waved us off. A woman with a child sat crying on the bricks, but she was fine. Everyone we approached seemed to just get up and walk away.
We found an old woman who couldn’t stand. Soledad spoke with her, feeling her legs and asking questions. An ambulance crept into the plaza, its siren off but the lights flashing.
I helped Soledad and the EMT move the woman onto a stretcher, just like we had done with the pregnant girl in Iquitos. We were working together again. By the time the ambulance pulled out of the plaza, the city was almost back to normal. A shopkeeper swept up broken glass. The fountain wasn’t running, but everything else was as it had been. Cars moved. Tourists took pictures of the cathedral. A woman in a bowler hat sold pictures with a llama.
With no one left to help, we went back to the hotel. We sat at a table in the bar. We looked at our phones. So far, only minor injuries. Cusco seemed intact. Information trickled in from the villages around the city. Soledad’s phone rang. She answered in Spanish and walked into the lobby.
When she came back she stood by the table. “That was Clara. She’s going to drive out to the communities. She wants me to come with her.”
“Great.” I stood up.
“I also called the airport. No flights have been canceled. Logan, you should go to Cúcuta.” Her voice was soft, not angry.
“What? I can’t leave now.”
“You need to go. Nosotras is fine without you.” I studied her face to see if she was mocking me. She wasn’t.
“I’m not ready to leave.”
“You can’t just quit doing what you do. You’re more use in Cúcuta than you are here. You know it’s true.”
“But… What about Viña del Mar? The conference? I could be there on Friday, and—”
“We’ll see. Maybe.”
She sat on the bed as I threw things into my backpack. I dawdled. I brushed my teeth, double checked under the bed, opened a pocket and rummaged around. I waited for her to say something. But she didn’t. She sat on the bed and stared out the window.
I couldn’t stall any longer. “That’s everything.”
She nodded and stood up. Our feet echoed on the stone as I followed her along the balcony. A siren sounded somewhere in the city.
The doorman held the glass door open. “Taxi?”
Soledad answered and the man raised two fingers at a cabbie waiting in the plaza. She stepped into the street. I stood next to her, the sun beating down on us. I tried one last time.
“I can stay. I don’t need Candace. I don’t need Cúcuta. I’m not ready to let go of this.”
“What exactly do you think this is, Logan?” She stared across the plaza. “You’ve known me for a week. We slept together. Is that what you mean? Is that all it takes? Seven days and three nights?”
The cab rolled toward us.
“We can have more than a week. Viña on Friday. After that…”
It pulled in front of us, three feet away, polished black paint gleaming in the sun. The driver got out and walked to the trunk. He opened it and stood there, waiting.
She turned toward me. Finally. Looked at me for the first time since we left the bar. I told myself to remember how her eyes were molten gold in the sun. She held my gaze for a moment, then broke off and gave me a hug. I put my head in her hair.
She released me, and I let her go.
“Stay safe,” she said, and she walked up the steps into the hotel.