Chapter 31 Catarina
CATARINA
The April wind was warm in Spain, warmer than Chicago and D.C., and it was quite pleasant. I hated that Jackie was right about the climate of Spain. And I hated that I always felt the need to separate from men who loved me.
Over the next week, I made another series of Skype calls and emails to the hospital, going over several patients I was transferring to other doctors. I avoided reading emails from Dustin. It was too painful to look at his words, and I knew they wouldn’t be friendly toward me.
After everything he had done, I repaid him by leaving. He didn’t have to know I had been thinking of him when I left.
Real life and love weren’t like Romeo and Juliet, where we should both kill ourselves to be with each other. As harsh as it maybe was, we needed to be realistic. If we were both in prison, we wouldn’t be together, would we?
Maybe I was cold-hearted, but to me, it seemed like the only solution.
During the next few weeks, I fell back into a routine with my family.
I was lucky that my mother and I understood each other on a deep level.
She loved her late husband as much as I loved him as a father.
As a result, she understood where my deep drive to be a doctor came from, and supported it whole-heartedly, even during high school when she had to take an extra job so that I wouldn’t have to take one, and could spend extra time studying.
So my mamá did not ask for any special explanation for everything that had happened.
I kept the ring on my finger, even though I hadn’t been in touch with Dustin.
I couldn’t stand to take it off. And my mom did not ask prodding questions about the melancholy she saw on my face some days.
Although I did overhear her a few times saying qué lástima todo que pasó to her sister when she thought I was out of earshot.
She knew the minimum she needed to know: that my visa had fallen through in spite of my marriage.
She especially didn’t ask if I was planning to get a divorcio, a word that seemed to carry a type of taboo in my house.
So I cooked and ate with my mother, sister, and aunt, helped around the house, and went job hunting during the day.
I applied for a job at a pharmacy. It was ironic that the hospital I wanted to apply to in Barcelona to practice medicine wanted me to have a Spanish certification when I had one of the best certifications in the world.
They needed to have some or other meeting about how to place me, and after a week or two of not hearing back from them, I took the job at the pharmacy.
One night, my family decided to have a ‘welcome Cat home’ dinner.
A lot of my old friends and family came, including my aunt on my dad’s side, who had been working on a project in France and flew in for the occasion.
I had been gone so long with no intention of coming back, and the entire family knew and respected my decision. After I took the job at the pharmacy, though, it seemed to register with them that I was going to stay here for the indefinite future.
It was a gorgeous night, one of the first in May. The weather was warm but not hot with a gentle breeze, and the sun was just setting over the mountains. I breathed in the fresh air on our patio as my mom’s mother, my only living grandparent said grace in Catalan as she sat next to me.
We ate paella (much better than what I made for Dustin, I must confess), cheap but delicious red wine flowed into our glasses, and I felt grateful to have a family to be able to fall back on in spite of how poorly everything had gone this year.
“So, Cata,” my grandmother said in Catalan. “Tell us about your adventures this year.”
The other voices at the table hushed, and I felt multiple eyes flit to the ring I realized I was unconsciously fiddling with.
“Well, aside from the problems I had with immigration, I had a good year. The patients I was with—”
“No,” my grandmother interrupted. “Tell us about your hombre.”
I swallowed down some food with wine and thought for a moment how to encapsulate Dustin LeBlanc in one sentence.
“Well,” I said. “His specialty was playing on ice, but in person, he seemed more like fire.”
Why did everything sound so much more poetic in Catalan than English?
My grandmother chuckled, her voice sounding hoarse. “That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Why not?”
“Well, he married you. You’re la reina de hielo. The queen of ice. Ever since your dad died. I knew it would take fire to burn through to your heart.”
I swallowed and felt my body turning hot. My grandmother barely commented on any of our lives, ever. So it was surprising to hear her being so direct with me.
But I couldn’t shake those words. Was I really the queen of ice? The thought that Dustin, if he were here, would back up my grandmother’s words and probably never let me hear the end of my new nickname, the queen of ice.
And then he would take me into bed and burn through me until he arrived at my core. A smile tugged at the corner of my lips before it turned upside down with the wave of sadness that was hitting me.
I didn’t want to really be in love with Dustin LeBlanc. But I was. And now, I was kicked out of the USA and had to live in Spain, I would have lost another. It was better to push him away before that love could root more deeply than it already had.
Maybe my grandmother was right about me.
I looked off into the distance of the Spanish sky. A few stars dotted the sky as the sun fell farther beyond the horizon. My family continued to speak at the table, but their voices blurred into one big inaudible soup and I was no longer at the table.
As I looked at the sky, I was eight years old again and my father had just died and I was devastated and in shock.
When my father passed, my mom’s mother, my abuela Marti had been the strongest one in our family.
In the weeks after my father’s death, she stayed in our house.
When I would hear my mom crying in bed at night, and I was feeling scared and small, she would come into my room and tell me not to worry, and that these were things of life that we don’t understand now, but we will someday mi amorcita, someday.
She would sometimes read me a story until I fell asleep.
After a year or so—I don’t remember exactly—my mother recovered emotionally. But I remember how much she needed Grandmother Marti.
My hands became clammy, and emotions I hadn’t felt in years—maybe even decades—came washing over me.
I snapped back to reality when Grandmother took a sip of wine and it launched her into a coughing fit.
“You okay, Abuela?”
“I’m fine. I just can’t drink like I used to.”
“You mean like last year, when you were eighty-eight?”
“Eighty-eight to eighty-nine was a big jump!”
She smiled, and everyone laughed. I felt her hand on my shoulder and she spoke so only I could hear. “Everything’s going to be okay, Cata. But just remember. Only the king of fire can handle the queen of the ice.”
I don’t think my grandmother had seen more than one hockey game in her life, and so she didn’t understand the significance of what she just said.
Or I was just reading into it way too much.
In that moment, my stomach sank.
I’d been here for weeks now, and aside from our goodbye phone call, we hadn’t talked. I hadn’t really given him any room to fight back.
Maybe he would. After all, he is with the queen of ice.
We talked late into the night, and it felt therapeutic to drink and chat knowing that I still had an identity here in Spain.
At one point after I went into the dining room for more wine, I pulled out my phone, my heart beating, and I did a Google search of Dustin’s team.
My heart beat fast when I saw there was an update from a game that had just been played. The first headline was not good.
Chicago Falls to Cougars, out of playoffs
A quick click on an article led me to see that there was a press conference that had been recorded. I excused myself from the table and went inside to grab my headphones and watch the conference on my laptop in my room.
The connection was a little grainy, but I was able to at least generally see and hear the video of the interview that had happened. It was from yesterday. Coach Slanch had just gotten up and now they invited up a few of the players. Dustin and Chip sat down with caps on, looking devastated.
Even just seeing him, I felt goosebumps roll over my skin.
One interviewer asked a question. “People are saying that the last shot from Baldwin to beat you tonight could have been the luckiest shot of all time. What do you say to that?”
Dustin’s voice seemed pained. “Overall, we played well tonight. There were a few situations we could have managed better, but we gave it our best shot. If there’s one thing I’ve learned this year, it’s that some things just aren’t meant to be. Luck plays a part in these games sometimes.”
My heart sank into my ribs. I wanted to reach out and touch him.
Chip answered, and then they both took a few more questions about the game until a reporter asked a different question.
“So, Dustin, what’s this rumor going around that your wife is your ex-wife already?”
Chip interjected, obviously agitated. “People, please. Questions about the game.”
“No, no, it’s alright,” Dustin said, clearing his throat. “Like I said, one of the things I’ve learned this year is that some things just aren’t mean to be. And you’ve got to try again, and start fresh.”
When I heard those words come out of his mouth, I think I stopped breathing for a moment.
Maybe I was reading too much into things, but I couldn’t help it. I felt those words reverberate through to my soul, and I knew he was talking directly to me.
And it set in that we were really over.
I headed back to the patio, where it was dark now.
“The ice queen is back!” I announced, a pit in my stomach. “Where’s the wine?”