As we travel to Quito on the morning bus, there are fires dissipating over the horizon. The fires of pacified protest. Nothing, other than this, has changed. Karen understands, without explanation, that I am going back to Manta, and not to Venezuela with her.
She leaves me an open-ended ticket she purchased for Margarita Island.
“In case you change your mind,” she says, a grin on her face as she climbs aboard the bus for the airport. I call her name, and she turns around to face me.
“If not,” she says, “the Señora will take good care of you. She will. Just promise me that if you’re not coming to Venezuela, you’ll go straight to Manta.”
“I will,” I say, taking her hand. “I want you to come back, soon. I want to help raise your child.”
She seems confused, but still squeezes my hand as if to assure me that we will do so, together.
“I’ll be back soon. This is something I have to do.”
∞
Back in Manta, there seems to be a certain solemnity about the place. Inés and Yolanda are not there. The Señora tells me she is lonely. Her daughters have gone to Quito to see about their visas that will allow them to be with their father in New York.
“Karen, she will not be back,” the Señora says to me in Spanish, “Unless it is many years from now. She is pregnant from a man who once lived here. Now he lives in Venezuela.
“Yes, she told me,” I say, to which she appears surprised.
The Señora demands I clean every bit of paint from the walls, ceiling and furniture of my old apartment, where I have painted additional renditions of Annabelle. After I do, she hands me another key. It is the key to Karen’s apartment.
“You can live there for as long as you want,” the Señora says. “I told the Señorita, Karen, that your father lived in the apartment beside hers. There is a door connecting them both. You can have them both, there is no one in either. No one to rent. She suggested that you live there now. But no more painting.”
“Thank you,” I say. “I understand, and I won’t be painting anymore.”
“I will be going soon to Quito, to be with my daughters and to see about a visa for New York, for myself. You will go to Venezuela to visit Karen, and to see her baby?”
“I have the sense that she will be back here,” I reply, “and much sooner than you think.”
∞
The Señora asks me a few days later, in an informal proposition, whether I am interested in marrying one of her daughters and moving to New York. I reply that, although her daughters are very beautiful, I won’t. I will be travelling, a short while after her return, with Karen and her child.
I carry my few possessions from my old apartment, and turn the key to the lock on my father’s door. Inside, the place is the same as mine. The only difference seems to be that the roof is accessible from a pull-down ladder hidden over the kitchen, a ladder I have never seen before.
As I sit on the roof later that night smoking unfiltered tobacco, I see a spectacular array of stars. The night is cold, and the beach seems somewhat illuminated by the intensity of the stars. I can see the spot where my father is buried, and the small cross protruding from the sand....
Tomorrow, I will go down to the beach and introduce myself to the family living on the boat with the stilts, the boat that now appears as though it is floating on the water. I will not explain to them that I have intentionally littered the bay with my paintings, throwing them in the mud. I will have conversations with them about anything else. I will swim with them at the beach nearby, while watching as the tide rolls in and my paintings are washed out to sea.
I spend a few minutes writing out an alternate ending to my recurring dream.
As I fall asleep there on the roof, I again sense Yelena in the closet. I open the closet door to reveal that she is inside. She is holding Annabelle, who is asleep. Both of them are dressed in blue. “Take her,” Yelena says upon seeing me, and I do. I hold Annabelle close, caressing her skin before kissing her forehead. I smell the sweetness of her skin, and I carefully remove her from the closet. I fall asleep in the dream, holding Annabelle in my arms.
The next evening I begin intentionally depriving myself of sleep, knowing that my recurring dream is over and that I will never again approach that same sensation, that same moment of overwhelming bliss, and because of that my reality, with the memory of that moment, is preferable to dreams; but I stay awake, drinking instant coffee and smoking a filterless cigarette, with the understanding that you can escape your dreams, but never for long.