His irritation flared. “It happened, Alicia. There’s a reason you were there that day, that you work for a Major League Baseball team, that you assigned an agent who negotiated the deal that brought me here. Call it kismet or divine intervention. I’d be loco to spit into that kind of existential wind.”
The elevator opened to a foyer where two doors sat on opposite sides of the short hallway, and he took a step toward the one numbered 26C.
She fumbled for the key in her purse. Once she’d extricated it, she handed it over with shaky hands. She was letting him do the honors. He unlocked the door, swung it open, picked up the bags, and walked in.
His eyes traveled from one side to the other before he was drawn to the large windows that gave him an unobstructed view of the harbor. He wouldn’t have thought to ask for a water view but was grateful she’d thought of that for him. Living on an island, he was surrounded by the sea and had missed it since he left. Here, he wouldn’t.
She asked in a small voice, “Do you like it?”
The tension between them evaporated as soon as he entered. He had a broad grin on his face when he said, “This is perfect.”
“Are the furnishings to your liking? I thought they might be a bit over-the-top, but I ended up leasing it as is.”
“I’ll see only the water.”
“I looked at dozens. I wanted the right place, and this seem to fit you. I figured anyone who lived on an island would appreciate its beauty.”
She sounded defensive, as if she was trying to convince herself that he liked the place. He glanced back to look at her. “You were right.”
His eyes went back to the scene outside the window.
The setting was tranquil, not so much from the wind-swept peaks or the ice chips floating upstream or the sailboats bobbing on the surface, but for some mysterious reason, it soothed the nerves and calmed the soul. He was mesmerized by the sparkling blue water just outside his door. He opened the slider and went onto the terrace, where the wind whipped at his hair. He brushed it back, his senses alert to the clean smell, the squawk of gulls flying overhead, the feel of the harbor breeze on his face. He could also feel her presence. She was close, closer than she’d come since he got to Boston. And he reveled in it for the briefest of moments before he reluctantly left the terrace, closing the door with a soft touch.
“It will be better in the summer when I can sit out and watch the activity. There will always be boats?”
“There will be.”
“Not fishing boats like in my village.”
“Camagüey is a fishing village?”
He’d never told her much about where he was from and she thought he lived more inland than on the coast. Of course, not wanting to get to know him personally, this was the first time she’d asked.
“I was born in a small fishing village in the province of Camagüey. It’s a little over thirty kilometers away and where my ancestors earned their living. I moved to the city of the same name when I joined the team. It is how I found a trusted captain to ferry me to Mexico without incidence. Vicente was the man you wired money to once I’d signed. I had to make it worth his while to take the risk.”
She’d wired the money as promised, ten-thousand dollars, the usual amount charged by traffickers. He’d insisted and she’d done as requested but had never asked why. She hadn’t asked a lot of things.
“How did you come to play for the Alfareros?”
“I would think you should know this with all the research you did.”
“It was all a bit confusing. Could you explain it.”
“In Cuba, players are assigned to their provincial league. There are no trades, so you play for them your whole career unless you are chosen for Super Liga, which I was. From there, I went to the national team, included as one of the senior-level players who go on to compete internationally. How you play has no bearing on whether you are tenured. You can be dropped at any time, for any reason.”
“Didn’t the federation do something new, throwing away tradition? Something about dispersal drafts and two separate halves to the season?”
“Yes. We’d never switched affiliations before, then all of a sudden there are drafts, and players are shuffled around, uniforms swapped at the season’s half-way point. I don’t know why they thought it would be an improvement. It wasn’t. I still felt Camagüey was home.”
“Your mother still lives in that village?”
“Yes. The house was handed down generation to generation. Up until recently, one could not sell on the market. The rules regarding real estate have been relaxed a bit over the last few years, but few of its citizens can afford to buy and sell.”
She glanced around the room. No wonder those that came here went a bit overboard.
“What does she do?”
“She doesn’t do anything, not in the sense you mean. Things are loosening up, but free enterprise is still new to us. It wasn’t very long ago that if you didn’t work for the state, you lived on a state-generated stipend. Today, many state-assigned jobs have been taken over and are now privately-owned businesses. There weren’t many jobs in the countryside, so we converted part of our house into an apartment and rented it out and then converted it to a casa particular. That would be similar to your bed-and-breakfasts. That is how we covered most expenses. It was not legal, but most found their ways around it.”
He shrugged out of his jacket, threw it on the back of a chair before going to stand by the window again.
“I think I would like to learn how to sail.”
“There are docks close by where you can store a
