Chapter 31 Claire
Claire
Claire startled awake at the sound of her phone ringing. She had fallen asleep on her keyboard—when was that, 4:30 a.m. ? Five?—and for a moment, she didn’t know where she was, because waking up from a late night of work in a hotel room was par for the course for her job, and she could have been in any city, working on any deal.
But the second ring of her phone jolted her back to Madrid, 9:30 a.m.
Matías!
She lunged for her cell, barely glancing at the screen before answering. “Aracely?”
“It was not a heart attack.”
“Oh, thank god.” All the air in Claire’s lungs rushed out in a relieved gush. “So his heart is okay?”
“The CT scan looks fine, and they just did another EKG and that is also fine. They are going to continue to monitor him. Something caused stress on Matías’s heart. They don’t know what it was, but his heart is stable for now.”
It was me, Claire thought. I caused stress on his heart by kissing him.
But maybe it was just like the other times when she was with Matías’s soul, which raised the heart activity in the real Matías. It was just that the touching—the kissing—was too much stimulation, and it had crossed the line from good elevation to something that worried the doctors.
So she couldn’t touch him again.
Yet there was something else to consider, too. Matías’s soul was getting progressively more solid every time Claire met him.
It must be working. She was connecting with him, and it was strengthening his attachment to this world.
But now that she knew the physical part of Matías was stable at the hospital, Claire would need to find his soul and apologize for running out of the studio yesterday. She also needed to come up with an excuse for why they couldn’t touch.
“Claire, are you coming to the hospital?” Aracely asked. “My mother is asking about you.”
“I’m sorry, I just woke up,” Claire said. “There’s something I need to take care of this morning, but I promise I will be there later.”
—
Claire went back to the same café from yesterday, where Matías had appeared. She also sat at the same table on the patio. Sameness hadn’t worked at the drink kiosk, but Claire was running on fumes, and it was the best she could come up with.
A waitress came over, and Claire—who knew she had to practice speaking Spanish if she wanted to get better at it—took a deep breath and said slowly, “Buenos días. Un café con leche, por favor.”
“Vale,” the waitress said. “?Y algo para comer?”
Claire replayed the question in her head, parsing out the words. She got three out of four, and thankfully, they were the critical ones.
Y = and. Para = for. Comer = eat.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t literate enough yet to read the menu, and she didn’t want to order churros con chocolate because, try as she might, Vega’s description of Matías feeding them to her was too vivid for Claire to fend off before she’d had coffee. However, she had learned another trick from her language app—a lot of English words ending in -tion sounded almost the same in Spanish, except they ended in -ción.
“?Una recomendación?” Claire asked the waitress. “Una sorpresa, por favor.” A recommendation? A surprise, please.
The waitress smiled. “Okay,” she said, which needed no translation.
The coffee came a few minutes later, and Claire sipped it while looking out onto the sidewalks and the street, although she didn’t actually see any of it; her thoughts were on Matías.
What should she tell him about touching?
Maybe she could say that there was something in her past that made her shy? It was true, in a sense. After her parents died, Claire couldn’t stand to be hugged or for anyone to express affection for her. Love and strong arms were the purview of family, and since Jim and Sarah had been taken away from Claire, she didn’t want anyone else to taint the memory of their tenderness. It had taken all three years of law school for her to get over it, but finally, when she graduated, she’d felt sufficiently re-armored to go back out into the normal world. Her law school roommate had given her a hug that day, and Claire hadn’t felt like throwing up.
But while this was information she could share with her Matías—actually, he already knew it—it was a lot to drop on the other Matías, who was still quite new to her. Besides, no one wanted to be with someone who showed up to their second date (or fourth run-in) with all their baggage already opened and dumped across the floor, right? And the point of this was for Claire to get him to fall in love with her, so he would feel compelled to rejoin this reality to be with her, and then Matías would wake up.
Or was the goal to make him fall in love with her? That had been one of Professor Hong’s assumptions. But the professor had not anticipated that Claire’s spending time with Matías’s soul would make him more and more solid, to the point where Matías could throw her across his studio, pin her to a wall, and kiss her.
What if Claire didn’t have to make Matías fall all the way in love with her? What if she just had to spend enough time with him that their link grew stronger? After all, that seemed to have had beneficial results so far, other than the kiss, which was admittedly getting Claire hot just thinking about it. No wonder it had sent Matías’s heart into overdrive.
The waitress returned to the table with a steaming plate. “Migas,” she said, pointing at the dish.
Claire smiled. She knew migas—fried cubes of bread, chorizo, bacon, and garlic—because Matías had made it for her before.
“Delicioso, gracias,” Claire said as the plate was set in front of her.
“?Más café?” the waitress asked, gesturing at the empty coffee mug.
“Sí, uno más, por favor.”
Claire took a moment to savor the smell of her breakfast. There was nothing like a rich, hearty meal after a long night. For a lot of people, this would be hangover food. For Claire, it was post-working-till-5 a.m. food.
She moaned at the first bite and closed her eyes. The flavors melded on her tongue—rich meatiness and spice and garlic and olive oil—tossed together with the crunch of the croutons. Even though Claire had never been to Spain before, this food tasted like home. It was one of many things Matías cooked for her, and she missed it, missed him. She wanted to eat in slow motion, linger over every mouthful.
Her eyes flickered open. That’s it!
“I want to take it slow.”
That’s what she would tell Matías. She knew that if she said something like that, he would respect it. He was the kind of man who cared and listened.
The progression would be the opposite of how their relationship in New York had started, with impulsive, fiery love made on the law library floor. Claire hoped she would be enough of an enticement without that kind of physical passion. She hadn’t wanted to think about Vega, but the fact was, this version of Matías was coming off a breakup with his fiancée of fifteen years.
Hell, the Matías who had fallen in love with Claire in New York had been, too.
But I can’t touch him without risking his life, she thought. So I have no choice.
This would have to do.
As she finished eating her breakfast, she thought over the plan of telling Matías she liked him but needed to go slow physically. It wasn’t what she wanted —Claire would replay that kiss in the studio over and over in her mind for the rest of her life—but what she wanted even more was for her real, corporeal Matías to wake up and heal and be with her again.
“Okay,” she said as she polished off the last of the migas and drained her second coffee. “I’m ready. Lista. Let’s do this thing.”
She steeled herself with a calming breath, then pressed her fingers to her left palm.
Business continued as usual on the street. There was nobody she knew.
Claire frowned. She flexed and unflexed the fingers on both hands, then tried again, holding the pressure on her palm in place.
She sat like that for five entire minutes, scanning the sidewalk and the entrance to the café the entire time, to no avail.
Matías? she thought, trying the visualization technique that some of Yolanda and Jason’s art world friends swore by. (Lawyers usually didn’t believe that woo-woo stuff, but that was before Claire began dating her boyfriend’s soul.)
Still, no Matías.
Claire’s gaze darted around the tables nearby. There was an elderly gentleman reading a print newspaper. A couple of mothers chatting while rocking their babies’ strollers back and forth. A businesswoman in a suit, typing into her phone.
No one to judge Claire as she brought her open palm to her lips and kissed it…
She thought of Matías’ mouth, soft and hot at the same time, on hers.
Of his hands, roving over her bare skin.
Of the way their bodies crushed closer, as if they could never be near enough, as if there were a way to occupy the same space.
She let the kiss and the daydream linger for a long moment, like the feeling of sun on your skin after a summer day.
Then she opened her eyes, expectant.
There was no one there besides the people from before. And the old man with the newspaper was looking at her now in grandfatherly concern, his two bushy eyebrows raised.
“Shit,” Claire said. Why wasn’t it working? Matías had always appeared before when she pressed on that spot on her hand.
She stayed at the café for another hour, repeating the process of pushing on her palm. She tried pouring coins in. Cradling another cup of coffee. Stabbing at it with a pen she borrowed from the waitress.
But no Matías.
Finally, Claire had to give up so she could get to his bedside. If she couldn’t be with Matías’s wandering soul, then she needed to be with his stationary body.
Claire choked on the thought of him as just an unmoving mass of flesh and bones.
No, he’s more than that . So much more.
She threw down more money than she owed for the breakfast and hurried over to the hospital.
—
In hospitals, boring is good. After the terrible evening over Matías’s heart, it was a sad but welcome relief for Claire just to sit next to him.
Tía Juanita and Tío Victor rose from their places on the opposite side of the bed. They had been there for an hour, and Abuela Gloria had been there for an hour before that, singing to him; it was someone else’s turn now. Claire marveled at the dedication of the de León family. For every minute of visiting hours, there were people in this room, making sure Matías could feel their love and know that, on this side of consciousness, plenty of people cared and longed for him to return.
She had never had a big family. Claire didn’t even remember her biological parents, who’d died before she had memories that stuck. And then her new family had been small. Brimming with love, but just their little trio.
What would it have been like to grow up surrounded by so many relatives? To know that if you fell, so many hands were ready to pick you up again?
Traitor, Claire thought. She had been lucky to have Jim and Sarah. Some of the other kids in her foster home never got a permanent place to stay, let alone became adopted. They bounced from house to house, year after year, until they turned eighteen and were spit out into the world still completely alone.
At least Claire had had a family once.
Aracely and Soledad stepped into Matías’s room. Claire smiled upon seeing them.
Soledad did not smile back. “Where have you been?”
“I…I had to work late because of the time difference,” Claire said. “So I overslept. And then I had to take care of something before I could get here. I mentioned it to Aracely.”
Soledad dropped into her seat heavily, arms crossed. “You should not be working while you are here.”
“I know. But my job—”
“Americans are married to their jobs. But a job is not a life.”
Claire pursed her lips. She knew that. Everyone knew that. But she also loved her job—the excitement of working on deals that made headlines, the adrenaline spike of juggling so many expensive balls in the air at once and not dropping them, of knowing that without you, none of it would be happening. That you were the wizard behind the curtain.
It’s true that Americans were often workaholics to the detriment of other facets of their lives. But Claire also knew that she didn’t want the fantasy that so many others dreamed of—sitting around with nothing but leisure time. She would drive herself (and Matías) bonkers within a month if she didn’t have a high-intensity goal to work toward.
But Claire didn’t want Soledad and Aracely to think she was absent just because of work. They were the only family she had right now—even if she wasn’t officially part of them yet—and she needed them to understand that she was trying to help Matías.
Would they believe her?
She didn’t know. But she had to try.
“I’ve…been spending time with Matías’s soul,” Claire blurted. “Outside the hospital. That’s why I haven’t been here.”
Aracely and Soledad looked blankly at her.
Claire swallowed and tried again. “I think…his consciousness is detached. But he came to me at my hotel, and I’ve talked to him. So that’s why I haven’t been here. I feel like I need to spend time with Matías’s soul, to try to get him to reconnect with this reality—”
“Enough,” Soledad said. “I don’t want to hear such nonsense excuses.”
“But, I—”
Aracely shook her head. “This is a rough time for all of us, Claire. I know it’s hard, and I’m sorry. But if you want to help Matías, you have to get yourself together.”
“He is right here,” Soledad said. “Not a ghost at your hotel.”
Claire’s eyes stung. “I didn’t mean that he was a ghost. I’m not making this up—”
“Tomorrow morning,” Aracely said, giving Claire a sad look like she was sorry that Claire was losing her mind, “we are all going to a gathering to remember Carlos and Diego— el evento conmemorativo . They were like brothers to Matías. He was always at their homes, and they were always at ours. They have been around for as long as I can remember, and they were like brothers to me.”
Claire swiped at the tears threatening to spill over. It had been a long shot to tell Aracely and Soledad about Matías, but they hadn’t even given her a chance. They had written Claire off as easily as someone shrugs off the tall tales that little kids tell, and she felt more like an outsider than ever.
And yet Claire had to stay in their good graces. Soledad and Aracely controlled access to Matías.
“Evento conmemorativo tomorrow morning,” Claire repeated. “Of course. I’ll be there.”
“No,” Soledad said. “You will be here . In that chair.” She jabbed her finger where Claire sat.
“Oh.” Claire’s body shook as she tried to hold on to her pride while also bending to Soledad’s will. “Um, okay. I thought Aracely meant she wanted me to come to the evento conmemorativo, but of course I’ll stay with Matías.”
“He is your life,” Soledad said, shaking her head. “You were supposed to come to Spain with him. You stayed in New York for your job instead. But he was going to ask you to marry him. Did you know that, Claire?”
“I did…” In her shock at being scolded so harshly, Claire hadn’t been prepared to lie.
Aracely let out a tiny gasp. “You did? And you chose not to come?”
Claire looked down at the linoleum. “I made a mistake.”
“And you are still making mistakes,” Soledad said. “My Matías is here, suffering, every minute, every second. The rest of the family is here, every minute, every second, that we are allowed. But where are you? Working? Sleeping? Visiting an empty studio and looking for a ghost?”
“I—”
“I do not know what you are searching for, Claire,” Soledad said, “but it is not out there.”