Chapter 32 Claire
Claire
As soon as visiting hours were over, Claire fled the hospital and the watchful eyes of Soledad and Aracely. The de Leóns had not invited her over for dinner, even though her Spanish was decent enough after being immersed here for almost a week to understand—very generally—that they had been making plans among themselves.
Not that Claire would have wanted to go. She desperately wanted to be part of their family, but she also needed to get far, far away.
Oh, Matías, she thought. This was not how I wanted it to be the first time I met your family. I’m sorry for screwing it up. I’m trying really hard, though…
If only you were here to help me navigate all this. You could tell me what to do, and you could translate into proper Spanish because I feel like I’m missing nuances.
And there is so much you wanted to show me of your hometown, but now I’m here by myself. I don’t know what to do in my off-hours when I’m not with you.
I’m just…alone.
Four blocks after Claire left the hospital, Matías suddenly appeared by her side.
“Holy fuck!”
“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” Matías said.
“You…I…Never mind. I’m, um, fine,” she said while glancing at her hand.
Her fingers were curled up, the nails pressing hard into her palm.
So it had worked now, but not before. Why?
But Claire also didn’t care. She exhaled and let the tense muscles around her shoulders relax a little because Matías was here. His soul hadn’t disintegrated after she kissed him and left him on the sofa in his studio.
And his presence also meant she could do something other than get chastised by his family. She could help bring Matías back, for all of them.
“What were you doing at the hospital?” he asked, walking beside her as she headed toward the subway station.
“Um…I was visiting…a colleague. He fell ill.”
“Will he be okay?” Matías asked.
“I hope so.”
“Were those the phone calls you got in my studio and why you ran off?”
Claire bit her lip and nodded. Sure, why not? That was a reasonable explanation, even if it was based on the lie she’d just told.
“Good,” Matías said. “I mean, not good that your colleague isn’t well! I am very sorry to hear that. What I meant was I thought maybe you left yesterday because I kissed you and made it awkward…” He smiled shyly at her, and warm shivers tremored through Claire’s body because it was the same hopeful smile he’d given her on their first date in New York, when he’d showed up at the firm with dinner. Part of what made Matías so damned irresistible was the combination of his broad-shouldered ruggedness with his ever-buoyant, boyish charm. Even having been with him for almost a year, Claire still melted now, and it helped her shift from the hospital mode of being beaten down to the hope that there might be a future for Matías.
“It was a great kiss,” Claire said, blushing. “But…”
“Uh-oh.”
“I like you, Matías. A lot. And I want to get to know you more while we’re both still in Madrid, if that’s okay. I don’t want to wait until you move to New York. But I want to do it the old-fashioned way—a slow burn if you will.”
“So I can’t kiss you right now?” he asked. “Because the way the lamplight is hitting the angles on your face, it makes me want to paint you.”
Claire laughed. “That is a terrible line! Do you use that on all the women?”
Matías grinned. “I blame my English for the bad joke.”
“Your English is perfect.”
“Not when the jokes are bad. Then it’s a translation problem, for sure.”
Claire laughed again. God, it felt so good to do that, and with her favorite person, too.
“To answer your question,” she said, “I want to kiss you, but I prefer if we don’t. I think there’s something romantic about old movies, where the guy and the girl go on dates and fall for each other’s minds and personalities, rather than just their bodies. Where the women wear gloves and collars up to their chins, and no one touches until the very end of the film.”
She knew this was the opposite of how they had started, making love impulsively on the law library carpet. And the opposite of the very carnal relationship he’d had with Vega, if the painting in his studio was any indication.
But it was the only way she could think of to keep his interest while not breaking that tenuous connection from his in-between state to her reality.
“Hmm,” Matías said, running his hand through his hair, leaving the waves a mess. Just the way Claire loved it.
“I seem to recall,” Matías said, “that in those olden days, even seeing the back of a neck or the skin on ankles was scandalous. Maybe we don’t have to go quite that far? Because I do like you in that ponytail today.”
Claire’s hand instinctively went up to her hair and the nape of her neck.
He winked.
She felt her skin flush again.
“Fine,” Claire said. “But when you do fall for me, it better be for my mind first.”
“Deal,” Matías said. “And maybe then you’ll let me see your ankles?”
She snorted, then covered her mouth at the noise. “Pretend you didn’t hear that. So, uh, what are you doing right now?”
“Taking a beautiful woman to see Madrid at night, I hope.”
—
With the late sunsets of summer, the Palacio Real—the official residence of Spain’s royal family and the largest palace in Continental Europe—basked in soft evening light. There were some tourists here and there, but most must not have realized that although the interior of the palace was closed at this hour, the grounds surrounding it were open until 10 p.m.
“I can’t believe people actually live in a place this grand,” Claire said, admiring the columns and sculptures of the baroque palace.
“I hate to shatter your fantasy, then,” Matías said. “The Palacio Real is mostly used for ceremonial functions.”
Claire frowned. “But the sign at the front said it was the royal family’s home.”
“Official residence in Madrid,” Matías said. “But they rarely live in this city.”
“Ah. So many castles, so little time.”
Matías laughed. “I would not be upset to have that problem.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think you’d like owning so much real estate. Too much of a logistical headache. Think of the property maintenance and annual gardening fees for several castles. I mean, look at this place.” Claire swept her arm in an arc around her, at all the carefully manicured trees and hedges and flowers.
“You haven’t even seen the palace gardens yet,” Matías said.
“My point exactly! You’d need to employ an army of gardeners. Ugh, and if I start to contemplate the international tax implications—”
“Who looks at a palace and immediately wonders how much tax is owed?” Matías said, the corners of his eyes crinkled up in laughter.
Claire snorted again, and this time she didn’t bother trying to cover it up. “I can’t help it. I’m a lawyer through and through.”
Matías stopped in the middle of the plaza and just looked at her.
“What?” Claire said.
“Nothing.”
“No, really, what?” She glanced over her shoulder, but there was nothing there. He was definitely looking at her.
“You are very down-to-earth,” Matías said. “Different from most of my friends and…other people I know.”
Claire was pretty sure he was referring to Vega, who at this point in time for him would be a very recent ex-fiancée.
“I can’t help it,” Claire said. “I am who I am.”
“It’s not a bad thing!” Matías said. “I probably need more of it in my life. I am the kind of person who will forget the basics if I’m in the middle of painting. When I was young, my mother or my sister, Aracely, would knock on my door at mealtimes and I would be shocked to find out that ten hours had passed since the last time I ate. But now that I’m an adult, I can lose entire days if I am inside the flow of painting.”
Claire nodded but closed her eyes for a moment. Because she already knew this about him, and even though she was enjoying herself on this date, it was also painful because he didn’t know that they already knew each other, already loved each other, already had so many memories.
She already knew that Matías was brilliant and talented but absentminded with no sense of time. She would ask him to do something like take out the trash, and he would earnestly say “in a minute,” but then four hours later, it would still be overflowing while he was sketching out a new idea or picking out a new tune on his ukulele or playing a seventh game of online chess.
It had been driving her crazy the last few months. But here in Madrid, knowing that he might die, it was so clear that she had been the one who was wrong. Just like Claire couldn’t help being hyperorganized and having a brain that was mapped onto a calendar grid, Matías couldn’t help that he hurled himself into whatever he was doing. It’s what made him a beautiful, successful artist. But the same ability to leap into a deep pond of his imagination when painting also meant that he leaped into everything else as fully—chess, sketching, playing the ukulele—and small mundane concerns like trash sometimes got forgotten.
Every person had a price of admission. Claire had read that in a relationship advice book years ago but hadn’t understood it until now. The price of admission for being with Claire was putting up with her type-A need for control. The price of admission for being with Matías was accepting he could not be controlled.
She opened her eyes and smiled at him. “I don’t understand how you can forget to eat—because I literally write meals onto my calendar—but I like that you can be so into what you’re doing that it completely transcends basic needs.”
He smirked. “I don’t think my mom and sister would agree with your assessment of me, but thank you. That’s a very generous way of interpreting…me.”
“I think the world would be a better place if we all interpreted each other a little more generously.”
“Including ourselves,” Matías said.
They walked around the Palacio Real, through the wide-open plazas, and eventually made it to the Sabatini Gardens. Funny how it had originally been on Claire’s list of “things to do,” but it only happened when she didn’t plan for it. The sun was setting now, and a long reflecting pool mirrored the palace and the pastel sky like a deeply saturated watercolor. “It’s so beautiful,” Claire murmured, turning back and forth between the shimmering image in the reflecting pool and the actual Palacio Real and sky.
“This was one of the earliest scenes I painted when I was in grade school,” Matías said. “I didn’t know anything yet about mixing colors or technique, but I still remember how every brushstroke felt like magic, you know? At first, there was only blank white paper in front of me. But then I sketched out the shape of the palace and the long, rectangular pool and the silhouettes of the trees, and then I added paint—layers and layers of it until the paper was warped from the moisture and weight. It was a childish rendition of a Palacio Real sunset, but painting it was a pure experience.”
“Unfettered joy,” Claire said, thinking that that was also a perfect description for Matías himself.
“Well, that used to be my philosophy for what life should be,” he said as he started walking into the gardens. “But now I think that sometimes, guardrails are good.”
“Oh?” Claire followed him along the path.
“Yes. You cannot live in the pursuit of hedonism alone. You cannot run over everyone in your way and rearrange everyone else’s lives to suit your own.” He whacked lightly at a hedge. “There must be compromise.”
Vega, Claire thought.
“But joy and hedonism aren’t necessarily the same things,” she said. “I think you can shoot for unfettered joy while still being responsible.”
Matías thought that over as they continued deeper into the gardens toward a large fountain. “Perhaps you’re right. But it is like playing with fire. If you are going to do it, you should be sure to have some water nearby.”
Is that what I am? Claire thought. The water to his fire? Maybe he and Vega had both been flames, and two together eventually burned out of control. Maybe that was why, when Matías moved to New York, he had been drawn to someone as reined in as Claire.
I am an excitement killer, she thought. Awesome.
And yet it was the closest she’d come to a reason why someone like Matías would be with someone like her.
When the sun dipped below the horizon, Claire asked, “What are we going to do next?”
Matías wrinkled his forehead. “What do you mean?”
“You said you were going to show me Madrid at night. And now it’s dark; therefore, officially night.”
“Ah, excellent point. Well then, let’s see. Are you hungry?”
“No!”
She couldn’t let Matías take her to a restaurant. What would he do, eat ghost food while she ate real food? But even if he didn’t notice that he wasn’t actually eating, it wouldn’t escape his notice that she was only ordering enough food from the waiter for one person. She certainly wasn’t going to order an entire bottle of wine just for herself.
And oh god, even the moment of walking into the restaurant, if the host asked whether she was a party of one…
“That was very emphatic,” he said. “But are you sure? I thought I heard your stomach growling back by the hedge maze. We could stop for tapas.”
“I’m not hungry at all,” she lied.
No dinner. Absolutely not.
“Okay, if you’re not hungry,” he said, “have you ever seen flamenco?”
She shook her head.
“Perfect. I know the best theater.”
—
To make sure that Matías wouldn’t try to walk up to the box office, Claire insisted on buying the tickets on her phone, claiming she could charge them to her client as a business expense. (A lie, but Matías wouldn’t know that.) She bought two tickets, of course, to make sure that someone wouldn’t try to sit in the seat next to her and on top of Matías. But it was a single QR code for both, and when they walked in the theater doors, the usher just scanned her phone and waved her in; Matías, being invisible, obviously didn’t register.
The theater was quite intimate in size, and they found their seats easily.
“What do you know about flamenco?” Matías said.
She thought of his painting of the dancer in the ruffled red gown, dancing on the beach with seashells as castanets.
“It’s a passionate art form,” Claire said, remembering the focus and ardor of the face of the dancer in the painting. “The dresses are beautiful and part of the performance because the movementof the fabric contributes as much to the dance as the movement of the body. And rhythm is very important.”
“Muy bien,” Matías said. “I’m impressed. Are you sure you have never seen flamenco before? You describe it like a Spaniard.”
It’s only because I’ve been in love with a Spaniard for eleven months and one week, she thought. But who was counting?
Claire was. Because with Matías in the hospital, she suddenly understood that every hour, every day, every week mattered.
“Flamenco,” he said, “has a long history and many forms, but this kind, in the theater, is one of my favorites. It is like emotion rendered physically. The rhythm—from the castanets to the lightning-quick, stomping feet—is the beating heart. And each dance tells a story. Sometimes of strength, sometimes of love or sorrow, but always with deep spirit.”
Soon enough, the lights dimmed. For a minute, the stage was completely black and the audience silent.
Then a single guitar began to strum. The curtains parted. The spotlight turned on.
And a woman in a red dress swayed to the melody.
The audience breathed.
The next hour passed in a storm of swirling dresses, fiery footwork, and hot-blooded songs. There was a dance about jilted lovers and vengeance. A story about impoverished immigrants and the sacrifices they made for their children. A duet about a flower that fell in love with a fish, and the impossible rivers and mountains that separated them. Matías whispered the plots to her as they watched, and Claire sat on the edge of her seat the whole time.
For the final dance, a woman sauntered onstage in a dress designed to look like an hourglass, with grains of sand trailing from the bodice to the skirt and the train. “ Soy La Se?ora del Tiempo, ” she said.
“I am Lady Time,” Matías translated, his mouth so close to Claire’s ear that it sent goosebumps prickling across her skin.
“Y todos estáis a mi merced.”
“And everyone is at my mercy.”
Claire shivered again, but not from wanting. She noticed the dancer’s dark makeup and contouring, almost as if her face were meant to resemble a skull, or a mask of death.
“Please no,” Claire said to herself. But apparently, loudly enough because Matías asked, “Are you all right?”
“I…I don’t know if I can watch this one.”
“Okay. Do you want to go?” Matías, always willing to sacrifice himself for what Claire wanted, didn’t even ask her why.
She nodded and leaned down to gather the program, which she wanted to keep, and her purse, which she had set on the floor. But just as she was about to rise, a fog machine began to blanket the theater in mist, and all the other dancers from the troupe streamed onto the stage. A handful wore billowing black costumes and Xs painted over their eyes. The other half wore suits and dresses in all white.
The audience around them was rapt. And they completely surrounded Claire and Matías.
“We can’t leave now,” she said.
“Shh!” The man next to her scowled. The woman in front of her turned and glared.
Claire clutched her purse in her lap and hoped this wasn’t going to be a dance about dying.
But in the first few seconds, it became clear that it was. A projector cast a background of a cemetery on the left side of the stage, behind the black-clad dancers, shadows in the afterlife. Alternately, a colorful backdrop of nightlife in Madrid played behind the white-clad dancers, those who were still alive.
Claire expected the black shadows to chase the white souls, to grab them and tow them into the underworld. She wished she could reach over and hold Matías’s hand, his strong grip an assurance that as long as they were together, everything would be okay.
But they weren’t together, were they? Not really.
Onstage, the dead did not chase but instead danced with the dead, and the living danced with the living, each with their own impassioned style, but to the same song. They were like a black ocean on one side and a white one on the other, the bodies bending and curving into each other like waves. In a strange way, it reminded Claire of how, late at night in New York, Matías would sometimes pull her into the empty streets to dance, as fluid and carefree as the performers onstage.
But then Claire shoved the memory out of her mind. Because she could not think about the obvious analogy that followed—her, living, dancing with Matías, dead.
As if picking up on her exiled thought, though, some of the shadows began to dance slowly through the fog and took living people as their partners. The border between the black and white onstage started to blend into gray.
But even though those metaphorical souls were being coaxed into the afterlife, it was with an enthusiastic splendor as only flamenco could demonstrate, a new kind of duet that celebrated both the living and the departed.
The man next to Claire sniffled. But he wasn’t grieving; he was smiling as he wiped away a tear.
More and more dancers crossed the line from life to death, and as the souls crossed over into the land of shadows, the dancers dramatically ripped off their white costumes, revealing sleeker black ones underneath.
And still, they danced, and still, their movements were beautiful, possibly even more beautiful than when they were alive.
As the melody faded to only a single guitar, and then to nothing, the souls also danced as one, united in a final, coordinated stomp. The peace of death.
The dancers bowed together, and then the fog of the stage swallowed them whole.
The audience burst into raucous applause. Furious clapping. Whistling. Plenty of tears of awe.
Except for Claire. Claire, who had lost her parents in a car accident on a day that was supposed to be a celebration. Claire, who had a comatose boyfriend in the hospital, and his wandering soul beside her.
She understood the message the dancers were trying to convey—that death didn’t have to be sad. That Lady Time would come for everyone in the end, but you could make your life before that worth it, so that when your time was up, it felt less like you were being stolen from the world and more like you were dancing into the afterlife.
That probably was how Matías’s soul would do it. Matías certainly lived every minute to its exuberant fullest potential.
But what about the people who were left behind after their loved ones died? There was no waltzing to the funeral home, no flamenco dance of happiness on their graves. When Jim and Sarah had died, it had been a tragedy, plain and simple.
If Matías died…
“Can we get out of here?” Claire asked.
“Of course,” Matías said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t expect the show to be so philosophical. And with your friend in the hospital…I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. The show was incredible, really. I just—”
“Yeah.”
When they got outside, Claire gulped air like it could cleanse the grief and fear away. It didn’t; it wasn’t that simple. But after a few minutes of walking, she did feel a little better.
“How are you feeling?” Matías asked.
“I’m…okay,” she said. “Steadier now.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Maybe someday,” Claire said. “But not tonight.”
He nodded. “All right, then. Do you want to keep exploring Madrid? Or if that’s too much and you want to go back to the hotel, I understand.”
“No, let’s keep going.” She wasn’t ready to be alone again. And she also didn’t want to let go of Matías, especially with the imagery of souls dancing into the afterlife.