Chapter 15 Claire
Claire
“Buenos días,” Claire said as she got into Luis’s car in the morning. The bags under his eyes were even grayer than the day before, and there was a huge silver travel mug of coffee in the cup holder. “Did you sleep at all last night?”
Luis shook his head. “I drove out to the beach house Matías and his friends had rented near Valencia so I could pick up his things.”
“Is it far?”
“Some would say so,” Luis said. “But I did some thinking, so…” He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t need to. Claire understood. A lot of times, having something to do was better than just lying in the dark with your fears.
“If the boating accident happened way out there,” Claire said, “why is Matías in the hospital in Madrid?”
“Because a high school classmate of my parents is a top doctor here,” Luis said. “She helped us get Matías airlifted to her hospital.”
“Lucky Matías,” Claire said, realizing as soon as the words came out that he wasn’t lucky at all. He was in a coma. He still might die.
“What about Leo and Facu?”
“They’re in the hospital in Valencia. Their dog and cat keep crying without them and won’t eat.”
Claire’s eyes welled up.
She couldn’t bring herself to ask about Carlos and Diego, the two who had already died. How were their wives handling the loss? And what about their children? Their daddies would never come home.
Luis grabbed a box of tissues from the dashboard and silently passed it to her.
They drove the rest of the way to the hospital without speaking, both lost in their own thoughts. When they’d parked in the garage, Claire opened the car door immediately, barely resisting the urge to sprint to the hospital building and throw herself over Matías’s unconscious body.
But Luis opened the trunk first, and Claire gasped at the familiar sight of Matías’s well-traveled suitcase, the edges frayed, the colorful baggage tag he’d designed while in art school, smudged with the dirt of age and international travel.
“I found something this morning that I think you should have,” Luis said. He unzipped the front pouch of the suitcase and pulled out what looked like a small diary with a plain black leather cover, but the sides of the pages were painted in brightly hued paisley.
“What is it?” Claire asked.
“I didn’t mean to pry,” Luis said, “but it was sitting out on the living room table in the house they rented, so I had to look inside to figure out if it belonged to Matías or one of the other guys. Once I saw your name, I didn’t read any more.”
Claire opened the journal.
A first entry was dated two weeks ago.
July 7th
Dear Claire,
I am going to ask you to marry me soon, so I am beginning a project. This diary will be a collection of love letters to you, doodles, and random thoughts about us.
Marriage is a big step, and I know our relationship has probably gone at a faster pace than you would have chosen if you were in charge. But I hope that our upcoming trip to Spain—when you meet my family and see where I grew up—will help you fill in whatever gaps you need resolved to say yes when I propose.
With that hope in mind, I am going to start writing in this diary now, and then I will give it to you as a gift on our wedding day.
It will not be full yet, but over the course of our life together, I am going to fill this journal and so many others because there will never be enough pages for you.
~M
“Oh, Matías,” Claire said softly. “You really are such a romantic.”
—
She nearly wept with relief at seeing Matías in the hospital bed; he was not dead or a ghost. For once, the hiss of the machines wasn’t sinister, but rather a reassurance. The oxygen cannula meant he was still breathing. The monitor measuring his pulse meant his heart was still beating. Even the feeding tube and the catheter signaled that his body was, generally, still working.
But because he had so many family members, the nurses had to limit the number of people who could be in Matías’s small room to three at a time. His parents, Armando and Soledad, had organized a rotational system to cycle visitors in and out. Claire, though, could stay in Matías’s room during all of visiting hours if she liked, because having his girlfriend near him would surely be a force for healing.
“This is your chair, corazón, ” Soledad said, leading Claire to the far side of Matías’s bed. “Everybody understands it is reserved for you, and no one will sit in it.”
“Gracias,” Claire said. “I appreciate you negotiating with the nurses for me to be here. But if I’m not here, someone else can sit—”
“Nonsense,” Soledad said. “This is your chair, and Matías will know that, even though he is unconscious. Nobody else will use this space. It is yours.”
Claire nodded. “Okay. Thank you.”
The wise don’t fight when a mother is doing something to protect her child.
Armando and Soledad’s rotational system, however, meant that Claire never had Matías alone, save for the two minutes between visitation shifts when one set of relatives went out and the next hadn’t yet come in. So most of the morning, Claire sat in the chair just watching Matías’s chest rise and fall slowly, while across from her, various family members took turns talking or reading to him in Spanish and looking at her with pity. She wished she could communicate with them beyond sad pantomimes.
If you wake up, Claire thought to Matías, I promise I’ll work harder at Spanish.
But then it occurred to her that “work harder” was a half-ass commitment. Matías had begun a notebook with plans to fill volumes of them during their lifetime. Claire could do better than “work hard” at Spanish.
Even if you don’t wake up, I will become fluent in Spanish, in your memory.
But god, I hope you wake up.
Later, Armando came in with a tiny, gray-haired lady pushing a walker. Her face was entirely composed of wrinkles, and when she gave Claire a small smile, her eyes disappeared completely within the deep folds of skin.
“Soy Abuela Gloria,” she said, pointing to herself.
Grandmother. Abuela was in one of the first Spanish vocabulary lists Claire had studied months ago. But she would have known the word anyway because Matías had a stack of letters from his beloved abuela, who wrote to him by hand every single week.
“Novia,” Claire said, indicating herself as Matías’s girlfriend. They hadn’t met on video calls before, because Abuela Gloria didn’t know how to use Zoom. She might not even own a computer. “Me llamo Claire.”
Abuela Gloria nodded and said in her small, sweet voice, “Ya lo sé. Matías me ha escrito mucho sobre ti.”
Armando helped his mother, who was ninety-two, into a chair and set her walker next to her, within reach. “She said she already knows who you are because Matías wrote a lot about you in his letters.”
Claire bit her lip. She hoped he’d said good things…and not mentioned her strict silverware organization system, or how she insisted that coasters be used on every surface even if it was a counter that could easily be wiped off, or how she “reset the living room” every night before bed by straightening the magazines, putting the remote controls inside the coffee table drawer, and refluffing the pillows so it looked like a furniture showroom.
But Abuela Gloria was no longer thinking of Claire. She was fully focused on her grandson, lying on the bed in front of her. “Aah, cielo mío…”
Armando sat next to her, took his mom’s hand, and said something low in Spanish.
She paused to consider it, then nodded.
“My mother used to sing to my kids all the time,” Armando said to Claire. “And since the doctor said that Matías might be able to hear us, I thought…” He choked up and couldn’t finish.
But his mom squeezed his hand, then took a deep breath and began to sing.
Her voice was rich and round, surprising from such a small, elderly woman who spoke barely louder than a whisper. Claire didn’t catch any of the words except Rosa de Madrid, but she could feel the melody—light and almost playful, like a song sung by an old Hollywood starlet.
When she finished, Armando wiped a tear from his eye, and Claire clapped quietly.
More subdued clapping came from the doorframe, which was now filled with a doctor and Soledad, and Aracely and Luis behind them. Claire hadn’t noticed the rest of the family come in, because she’d been so focused on watching Matías for any signs of waking during his abuela’s song (though his eyelashes did not so much as flutter).
The doctor and everyone else filed in. Apparently, the visitation limit didn’t apply when the doctor was present.
“Hello, you must be Matías’s girlfriend,” the doctor said in English with the calming smile of a professional who was used to talking to loved ones in difficult situations. “I am Liliana Rodriguez, the physician overseeing Matías’s care.”
“Thank you for all you’ve done for him,” Claire said, her voice shaking.
“We are trying our best. The truth is that Matías is in very bad shape.”
“He looks worse than yesterday,” Aracely said quietly.
“The team in Valencia managed to stop the internal bleeding in that first series of surgeries,” the doctor said. “But a lot of damage had already been done. Matías’s body is trying to heal itself, but I cannot guarantee that it will be able to, or that he will wake.”
Silence.
Soledad began to cry. Luis wrapped his arms around his mother.
Finally, Armando was the one brave enough to speak. “What about my son’s brain activity? In the hall, you said there was a spike?”
“Yes,” Dr. Rodriguez said. “Last night, around 9:25 p.m. , there was a sudden increase in Matías’s vital signs. Brain activity, heart rate, and respiration rate all increased for a short period of time.”
Claire sat taller in her seat. That was around the time the sun was beginning to set.
And when she had seen Matías’s ghost yesterday.
“How long did the spike in activity last?” she asked.
“About a minute,” the doctor said. “Then everything returned to baseline.”
A minute. That’s how long Claire’s conversation with Matías had been. Could the spike in his vitals somehow be related?
But then she shook her head. It was just a coincidence that her hallucination aligned with a momentary blip in Matías’s heart rate. Come on, Claire. You’re too rational—you’re a lawyer, for heaven’s sake—to be trying to draw tenuous connections like this.
Dr. Rodriguez checked all the monitors attached to Matías and reviewed the notes on his chart again. She stayed and answered his parents’ questions, although they switched to Spanish because they didn’t know most medical terms in English. Claire didn’t blame them, of course. She was grateful that they’d spoken in English until now.
While they were talking, Claire looked again at Matías’s partially shaved head, his bruised and scraped face. The stubble from before was getting bristly now; in a few days, it would be a scraggly beard. His beautiful eyes remained closed.
This both was and wasn’t her Matías.
Claire fumbled for the journal Luis had found in the rental house. She needed to touch Matías’s most recent thoughts, the last things he’d wanted her to know before this terrible turn of events. She opened the book to the mere handful of other entries.
July 10th
Dear Claire,
I can’t help but think of you today, because this is the day Romeo & Juliet met, at least according to that novel you love. Remember how—on our second date—you interrogated me about the types of books I read? It still makes me laugh, how horrified you were when you found out that I sometimes read three different novels at a time, and that I dog-ear the pages or splay the books out on a table instead of using bookmarks.
Anyway, here is a doodle of Juliet’s balcony, to commemorate July 10th.
~M
July 14th
Dear Claire,
You aren’t coming with me to Madrid.
I will not lie. I am disappointed. I wanted you to meet my family in person, especially my mom and dad, and my sweet abuelita, and my bossy sister, and my brilliant little brother. I wanted to introduce you to my best friends, who all grew up with me in the same neighborhood. And of course, I wanted to propose.
But maybe this is just the universe telling me it wasn’t supposed to work out this way, that there is something better in store.
So I will be patient. Because I think we are worth waiting for.
~M
July 17th
Dear Claire,
Today is my first full day in Madrid—most of yesterday was spent on the plane, so it does not count—and I miss you already.
I have been swarmed by my family, though, which has been a welcome distraction from missing you, and my mom and abuelita have stuffed me with enough food that I could probably survive hibernation through the summer.
There’s no time for hibernation, though, because tomorrow, I head out to the coast with my friends for La Aventura Loca . That’s what Carlos has dubbed our guys’ trip, ha-ha.
I wish you were here, churri!
~M
July 20th
Dear Claire,
Tomorrow, Carlos, Diego, Leo, Facu, and I are going to take a speedboat out onto the ocean. You would hate it, I think. Too fast, too reckless—especially the way that Diego drives—but it will be a lot of fun.
Yesterday, we went night diving. Everything was dark, Claire, darker than you can ever picture. When you are sixty feet deep in the ocean, it is astounding that there are no city lights, no stars, nothing to illuminate your way.
All we had were small, weak flashlights that allowed us to see the lobsters and the octopuses and the other nocturnal sea creatures that scurry out of rocks and swim among the coral. I wish you could have seen it! There is a whole other world beneath the surface, Claire. We exist above, in full light. But it’s like they live in an opposite dimension—underwater in pitch blackness. They cannot comprehend our existence, and it’s difficult to understand theirs.
We don’t even have adequate words to describe how octopuses move. They are like mercury, liquid yet solid, changeable from one instant to the next.
I have never seen anything more beautiful in my life, except for you.
~M