La Tía stood glowering at Evan, her nightgown rippling around her in the breeze. Then she turned and followed Aragón inside. The instant the door closed, the sound of their shouting carried outside. Rapid-fire Spanish, too fast for Evan to understand.
The others looked at him, unsure what to do.
After a few minutes, the door hinged open. La Tía skewered Evan with a glare. “Get in here.”
Not a request.
He went.
Slack-jawed and stupefied, the men parted for him as well. The house smelled of onion and cilantro, a pot simmering on the stove. Aragón was pacing around the ground floor like a raging bull, heat emanating off him. Muttering low to himself, sweeping his shiny black curls off his forehead again and again.
La Tía’s arms were crossed, head drawn back. Somehow, miraculously, she was wearing makeup. With her nut-brown skin and white hair, she was as imposing a figure as any Evan had encountered.
“You disrespect my sobrino,” she said. “On his land. In front of his men.”
“He disrespects himself.”
“You know nothing of our family. Nothing of our culture. Another arrogant gringo pendejo, sticking your nose into something you scarcely understand.”
“I understand that right now his image of his daughter is more important to him than she is.”
In the kitchen Aragón cursed and swept his arm, knocking the cast-iron pot off the burner, caldo de res splattering the wall. He slammed the heels of his hands onto the counter, shoulders pinching up into his neck, a pained guttural noise escaping him.
“His daughter—my granddaughter—has standards to live up to. A family name. This decision she made, it’s unconscionable. Those people, the Leones, are animales. And she chose to go to them. To be unsafe. To have relations before marriage. And above all the lying. To us. Putting lives at risk. Inviting them here, into Eden, to raid our very own community—”
“I don’t disagree.”
“And yet you dare to lay hands on her father?” La Tía came at Evan, jabbing a manicured finger. “He has every right to put you six feet in the earth! He should—”
“Stop!”
A low feminine voice from the top of the stairs, clear as glass, sharp as a scalpel.
La Tía halted.
Belicia stood at the landing, toplit by a recessed overhead. Despite the hour she was fully dressed. Evan imagined her up there hearing the commotion, pulling on her jeans, buttoning her blouse, brushing her hair by feel alone. Her bearing was erect, shoulders pulled back and down, the picture-perfect posture of a gymnast or a drill sergeant.
She reached for the railing, her fingers wavering over the wood before her palm cupped the top. She descended. In the full light, she was radiant.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, she halted, hand on the newel post. Her ghostly eyes took the measure of the room. She turned to La Tía, her angle only barely wrong. “Enough.”
La Tía said, “If you’d heard the tone this man took with—”
“I heard everything,” Belicia said.
“Then you have to know—”
“I don’t have to know anything. This is between me and my husband.” Those sightless eyes turned to Evan, and he could have sworn she saw him as well as anyone ever had, if not better. “And the Nowhere Man.”
La Tía’s mouth pursed, etched lines contracting. Then she dipped her chin deferentially and walked past Belicia and up the stairs. All this time, in violation of the First Commandment, Evan had assumed that La Tía was the materfamilias. He’d assumed wrong.
Belicia drifted into the living room and sat in the leather armchair Aragón had commanded a few nights before. She nodded at the couch, and Evan crossed the small room and sat. Aragón stayed in the kitchen, out of sight, his fuming palpable.
“Aragón,” she said quietly. And then, a touch louder, “Mi vida.”
Aragón flew into sight. “Don’t you dare try to talk me into accepting this. That child—your daughter—she had everything. Everything. She lived a perfect life!”
In the face of Aragón’s fury, Belicia’s calm demeanor was even more pronounced. “Behind these gates.”
“She had everything she could possibly want. Every freedom in the world. Every luxury. Wake up in the morning in a soft bed. Turn on a tap and fresh water pours out. Come downstairs, drink coffee with beans picked where? Kenya? The shaded pinche slopes of Guatemala? Shipped here. To our house. Our normal fancy house.” Aragón paced before her on the carpet, reminding Evan of Montesco’s caged lion. “How many bars of soap do we have under the sink? How many boxes of pasta in the pantry? You don’t know, do you? Neither do I. Because we don’t have to. Because we are living the actual dream.”
“Those are things,” Belicia said soothingly, as if to a child.
“Okay. What were her responsibilities? Her only job to better herself with school. To learn. To paint … or … or to play piano. To flourish. To be loved. No, not just loved—adored. Adored by us.”
“It’s not about—”
“Her chores? What—she took out the trash once a week just so we could think of something for her to do!” Aragón was shouting at his wife, Evan to the side, forgotten. “Think of the slums of Neza-Chalco-Izta, forty-five minutes by car from where you grew up. Eighty thousand people per square kilometer. Disease, starvation, drugs. No fresh water. Seven-year-old children raising their younger siblings. Dirt floors, living in sheds, cages no bigger than dog kennels.”
Belicia said, “Walk to school both ways in the snow—”
“Don’t you dare patronize me right now. At this moment—”
“Words, words, words,” Belicia said. “And talk. So much talk and not about anything that matters. That’s what men do, yes?”
“I am warning you, Belicia.…” Aragón’s voice trembled with rage, and in the set of his features Evan could see the fearsome man who’d built a worldwide criminal enterprise.
But Belicia continued, undeterred, “Aragón, mi vida, if you are half the man you tell everyone you are, you would close your mouth and listen to what you don’t know.”
But he blew right past her, resuming his tirade. “She could travel anywhere! Pick a man she loved. How many people, how many girls in the history of the world have been allowed such freedom? It was perfect here. She had paradise.”
Evan said, “Maybe that’s why she did it.”
Aragón stared at him, his mouth literally agape.
“I grew up like you,” Evan said. “We ground our way out. Maybe she had nowhere to grind. To learn about herself. The world. Maybe this is what she had to do to find her way to herself.”
“You don’t even know her.”
“Maybe not. But I’ve met her. And I’ve met Reymundo—”
“Don’t you speak that fucking name under my roof—”
“—and he’s a decent kid. Which says a lot, given where he came from.”
“You’re not a father. If you were, you’d understand that you have to be merciless in this world to be good.”
“You think I don’t know about being merciless?” Evan said quietly.
Aragón’s hands, clenched loosely at his sides, swayed. He stared at Evan, stooped, one shoulder higher, his complexion ruddy. He looked punch-drunk, unmoored.
“You also have to know when to be kind,” Belicia said to Aragón. “It’s the hardest thing a man can ever learn, and most of them never do.”
Aragón swung his head to his wife. Some of the heat had bled out of him, but his tone was still bitter. “What would you have me do?”
“Everything you need to know, you know already,” Belicia said. “It just comes down to if you’re going to listen.”
“I am listening, Belicia.”
“No,” she said. “You are shouting so you don’t have to.”
Aragón’s eyes were flared, lots of white, his face flushed as if he’d just finished a sprint. He looked on the verge of losing control, but his words came softly now, even gently. “Tell me, then,” he said. “What do you want me to understand?”
“You love that child more than anything on this earth,” Belicia said. “Including me.”
His face quavered.
“And she has broken your heart,” she continued. “A father’s love for a daughter. How strong is it? What’s she worth to you? Not as a thing to preserve but as your daughter? Our Anjelina? Beyond it all? Beneath her foolish choices and our reputation and what she has risked so blindly and callously? Do you love her down to the marrow?”
His mouth bunched. He moved his head very faintly. Up, down.
Somehow Belicia noted this.
“Then should God grant us the blessing of being with our girl again, the only thing to say to her is what you just said to me.” Belicia paused, wet her lips. “‘What do you want me to understand?’”
Aragón exhaled, truly exhaled, for what seemed the first time since Evan had entered the house. His muscles came loose, shoulders melting away from his ears, neck untensing. A landslide of movement, and yet he had barely budged.
And then he was sobbing. Great, wet, gasping sobs, shuddering his frame.
Evan had the sudden sense that he was observing something intimate, something he was not meant to see, and yet neither husband nor wife seemed embarrassed by his presence, and they did not ask him to leave.
Hand over his eyes, Aragón staggered forward like a blind bear.
“I know, mi vida.” Belicia held out her arms. “I know.”
He fell to his knees before her, collapsing into her, clutching around her midsection, face buried in her stomach.
And he wept.