She ushered him in, tongue-tied for a moment, perhaps from the need to suppress an urge to ask about his flight, or inquire about his health. She settled, finally, on “How have things been?”
Her English was infinitely better than his Spanish, so Adam didn’t even try. “Good,” he replied. “I’ve been taking a break from work, so I thought I owed you a visit.” The last time they’d met had been at Carlos’s funeral.
She led him into the living room and gestured toward a chair, then fetched a tray of pastries and a pot of coffee. Carlos had never found the courage to come out to Adelina, but Beatriz had known his secret long before her mother died. Adam had no idea what details of the old man’s life Carlos might have confided in her, but he’d exhausted all the willing informants who’d known the old man firsthand, and she’d responded so warmly to his emails that he’d had no qualms about attempting to revive their relationship for its own sake.
“How are the kids?” he asked.
Beatriz turned and gestured proudly toward a row of photographs on a bookcase behind her. “That’s Pilar at her graduation last year; she started at the hospital six months ago. Rodrigo’s in his final year of engineering.”
Adam smiled. “Carlos would have been over the moon.”
“Of course,” Beatriz agreed. “We teased him a lot once he started with the acting, but his heart was always with us. With you, and with us.”
Adam scanned the photographs and spotted a thirty-something Carlos in a suit, beside a much younger woman in a wedding dress.
“That’s you, isn’t it?” He pointed at the picture.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t make it.” He had no memory of Carlos leaving for the wedding, but it must have taken place a year or two before they’d moved to L.A.
Beatriz tutted. “You would have been welcome, Adam, but I knew how tight things were for you back then. We all knew what you’d done for my mother.”
Not enough to keep her alive, Adam thought, but that would be a cruel and pointless thing to say. And he hoped that Carlos had spared his sister’s children any of the old man’s poisonous talk of the windfall they’d missed out on.
Beatriz had her own idea of the wrongs that needed putting right. “Of course, she didn’t know, herself. She knew he had a friend who helped him out, but Carlos had to make it sound like you were rich, that you were loaning him the money and it was nothing to you. He should have told her the truth. If she’d thought of you as family, she wouldn’t have refused your help.”
Adam nodded uncomfortably, unsure just how graciously or otherwise the old man had handed over paycheck after paycheck for a woman who had no idea who he was. “That was a long time ago. I just want to meet your children and hear all your news.”
“Ah.” Beatriz grimaced apologetically. “I should warn you that Rodrigo’s bringing his boyfriend to lunch.”
“That’s no problem at all.” What twenty-year-old engineer wouldn’t want to show off the animatronic version of Great Uncle Movie Star’s lover to as many people as possible?
When Adam got back to the hotel it was late in the afternoon. He messaged Sandra, who replied that she was in a bar downtown having a great time and he was welcome to join her. Adam declined and lay down on the bed. The meal he’d just shared had been the most normal thing he’d experienced since his embodiment. He’d come within a hair’s breadth of convincing himself that there was a place for him here: That he could somehow insert himself into this family and survive on their affection alone, as if this one day’s hospitality and good-natured curiosity could be milked forever.
As the glow of borrowed domesticity faded, the tug of the past reasserted itself. He had to keep trying to assemble the pieces, as and when he found them. He took out his laptop and searched through archived social media posts, seeing if he could date Beatriz’s wedding. Pictures had a way of getting wildly mislabeled, or grabbed by bots and repurposed at random, so even when he had what looked like independent confirmation from four different guests, he didn’t quite trust the result, and he paid a small fee for access to the Salvadorian government’s records.
Beatriz had been married on March 4, 2018. Adam didn’t need to open the spreadsheet he was using to assemble his timeline for the gaps to know that the surrounding period would be sparsely annotated, save for one entry. Nathan Colman had been bludgeoned to death by an intruder on March 10 of the same year.
Carlos would hardly have flown in for the wedding and left the next day; the family would have expected him to stay for at least a couple of weeks. The old man would have been alone in New York, with no one to observe his comings and goings. He might even have had time to cross the country and return by bus, paying with cash, breaking the trip down into small stages, hitchhiking here and there, obfuscating the bigger picture as much as possible.
The dates proved nothing, of course. If Adam had been a juror in a trial with a case this flimsy, he would have laughed the prosecution out of court. He owed the old man the same standard of evidence.
Then again, in a trial the old man could have stood in the witness box and explained exactly what it was that he’d gone to so much trouble to hide.
The flight to L.A. wasn’t until six in the evening, but Sandra was too hungover to leave the hotel, and Adam had made no plans. So they sat in his room watching movies and ordering snacks from the kitchen, while Adam worked up the courage to ask
