When he finished, he was tired. He leaned back and closed his eyes. The telling had exhausted him. Leena pulled up a blanket, and I told him to get some sleep. We’d talk more later.
He was asleep before I left the room. Leena met me outside the door. “He’s weak. Needs another day here.” She held her hands behind her back and rocked back and forth on her tiptoes. “Don’t you think a chocolate-filled croissant would be really good right now?”
I needed some time to process. “Be right back.”
* * *
The day passed and Zaul slept through most all of it. Late in the evening, after all the priests had shut the huge doors of the cathedral and gone to bed, Leena found me napping on my pew. She shook my foot. “Got a second?”
I sat up. “Sure.”
“Not to be overly pushy, but what’s your plan?”
A shrug. “He doesn’t want to go home. I can make him, but I’m not sure how long that’d stick or what it would accomplish. I can take him to the house in Costa Rica and let him recuperate, but that’s a constant reminder of where he’s messed up, of the ongoing tension with his folks, and there would be no one there but us. I think we’d get cabin fever once he got healthy. I can get a room at the hotel here, but once he got up and about, we’d run into the same problem. Not to mention that he’d be more likely to bump into some of his friends around here, which neither he nor we need. I can take him with me back to Bimini, but I think that would just reinforce the whole drug runner thing. Plus, I’m pretty sure I don’t need that, either.”
Leena sat next to me. “What about spending a few weeks in Valle Cruces? With us? We could add a bed to the chicken coop. You and Paulo could fix it up a bit. I’ve seen what you can do with wood. Maybe you could make it less…” She laughed. “Barn-like.”
“I paid you to help me find him. Not nurse him back to health.”
“I’m not asking you to pay us.”
“I know, I didn’t mean—”
“Zaul’s wounds are much deeper than his skin and bones. He’s a scared kid who has no idea who he is.”
She was right. I nodded. “You’re really perceptive.”
“I’m a woman.”
I smiled. “That you are.”
“When I was young, younger than Isabella, my father would walk me up in the mountains where he was tending to his coffee plants. Sometimes, he would come upon a plant that would not flourish. No matter what he did to it, it just produced no fruit. No coffee. So rather than just ripping it out by the root and throwing it off the mountain, he’d gingerly dig it up and transplant it to another place where the soil was different. Then, he’d stake it up with something stronger than itself, he’d water it, fertilize it, and give it a chance to put down roots someplace new. Sometimes a change of soil is all that’s needed.”
“With all deference to your father, a change in geography does not necessarily mean an improvement in circumstances. In my experience, problems have a tendency to follow you whether you’re in Boston, Miami, Bimini, or Nicaragua.”
She laid a towel across her lap, pulled a mango the size of a small football from her bag, and began peeling it, while the juice dripped off the knife and onto the towel. She offered me a slice, which I accepted. She then cut herself a slice and placed it in her mouth. She spoke with her mouth full. “In my experience, I usually run into some trouble when I let my experience dictate another’s.” She turned to me. “I don’t have the corner on the market, but I have known some pain in my life. And I see the same when I look in that kid’s eyes. His body will heal, but it’s his heart that’s in question.”
I smiled as she gave me another slice. I, too, spoke with my mouth full. “Did your father teach you all this?”
“Which part?” A sly smile. “The peeling part or the giving of unsolicited advice part?”
“The advice part.”
A single shake of her head as mango juice trailed from her lip to her chin. “Mom.”
“Smart woman.”
She pointed the knife at me. “She’d have liked you.”
“I highly doubt that.”
She laughed and stood. “So, it’s settled then?”
“I’m pretty sure you had it settled before we started talking, but just so I can feel like I had some say in this situation, I need to run it by Colin. I think he’ll agree—and I imagine you’ve already thought about that.”
“I have.”
“I know what I’d do if he were my son but he’s not, so in a very real sense, I’m stuck between Zaul on this end of the phone and Colin on the other.”
“If Colin is smart, he’ll see that you have more influence in Zaul’s life right now.”
“He’s pretty smart.”
“Evidently he’s pretty dumb if he’s the one that suckered you into the family business.”
“Well, yeah. There’s that.” I sat back, crossed my legs, and folded my hands over my knees. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Was it your mother who taught you this leading line of conversation, which not even the experts at Harvard ever mentioned to me?”
“You went to Harvard?”
“Graduated.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding.”
“So you’re smart?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘smart’ as much as ‘able to adapt.’”
“What’s your degree?”
“Finance. Followed by an MBA.”
Her jaw dropped. “You have that in your back pocket and you run drugs for a living?”
“Ran.”
“Whatever.”
“Yes.”
She considered this and then returned to my question. “You asked whether it was my mother or father.” She shook her head. “Neither one.”
“Who then?”
“Wasn’t a who. It was a what.”
“Well, what was the what?”
A hard-earned belly laugh. “Life. After we lost the plantation, I had control over very little, so I had to learn how to protect Isabella and myself and later Paulo when his wife died—the three of us. You learn by talking, asking questions. It doesn’t grant you control, but it does help eliminate and name the players who don’t have control over you from those that do.”
She walked toward the clinic and left me chewing on everything she said. I had two responses: First, I’d single-handedly created the circumstances that caused her to lose the plantation. As that realization settled in my gut, a pain rose beneath it unlike any I’d ever felt. Second, I liked watching her body language when she talked. There was a concert between what she said and how she said it. Maybe it was the way the Spanish language is spoken by those who are native to it, but it’s beautiful and mesmerizing. And, okay, maybe there was a third. Maybe I was self-aware enough to know that she was trying to convince me to do something I already wanted to do anyway.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The following morning, I helped Zaul out of the clinic, steadied him, and let him lean on me as we walked out into the sunlight. Paulo and Isabella sat in the front seat with the engine running. Incredulous, he stood staring at his dad’s truck. “How’d you—”