Yesterday (Part One - Chapters 13 & 14)

CHAPTER 13

Adrian pulled away from Antonio violently and twirled in the wet sand of the beach. He stood up and faced Roman pushing him furiously with his sandy hands.

––What the hell is this, what have you done to me?

Román looked back at him with a penetrating and serious look.

––We didn't do anything to you, you just got carried away.

––I got carried away? –– Adrian yelled in anger ––. I don't remember anything!

––You must surrender yourself and finish the job –– said Roman impassively.

––You' re crazy if you think I'm gonna listen to you again, you son of a bitch!

Adrian stepped forward two steps and raised his arm threatening to punch him in the face, but Antonio grabbed him by the shoulders. Suddenly he could feel his fibrous, bare, sandy body rubbing against his, and he got nauseous. He got rid of his grip as best he could and ran away, blinded by the gagging until he fell to his knees and began to vomit in front of the seashore.

Bitter tears clouded his eyes and he felt totally lost and miserable. Alone, naked and trapped in that place with those two crazy strangers.

It was maybe five minutes. He approached the shore without turning around to look at his companions, for he needed to cleanse himself of all that filth. Anger did not allow him to look around, and as a suicidal man he entered the sea in defeat. The waves hit him cold and the thick, dark water didn't seem to clean him of anything. With his fingertips he skimmed the surface, and when the water reached his navel he plunged head first. He hoped that this cold blow would send him away in shock, as it had happened before, but it did not. As he pulled his head out of the water and looked to the horizon, he discovered in anguish that he was still there, trapped. He went back underwater and swam out to sea, didn't wanting to ever come back.

He swam until the brackish water poured into his nose and forced his head out to gasp. This time he did look to the shore. It was far away, and the contrast of the rear road lights turned everything in front black. He decided to return, much to his regret.

He decided that he would ask them for his clothes and hitchhike to Valencia. Once there, he' d stop all that nonsense and go back to Madrid. He didn't want to think about what had just happened and fiercely pushed those images away from him, they had to sink into his memory, imprisoned, downwards, into the dark...

He wouldn't talk to them, wouldn't let the anger that boiled inside him come out. Wouldn't give them that pleasure. They didn't deserve it.

He swam furiously and with his eyes closed, determined to be resolute when he arrived, worthy. He stepped on the ground and walked proudly to the shore.

There was nobody there.

His clothes were piled up a few yards away. He dressed up disconcerted and hurried away from the beach. Upon arriving at the asphalt parking lot he discovered with frustration that no one was there either. Just an abandoned shopping cart and countless lanterns lined up like an army in solitude. Lit for no one. He approached the road shivering and glanced to the right and left, struggling to control the anger that was poisoning his stomach and heart while tightening his fists.

No cars at all. Quiet. Electric grunts and the rumor of the sea in the background.

Several minutes passed, and as he was about to surrender and start walking he saw a truck lazily approaching from a distance. He lifted a determined finger and the driver stopped.

“A miracle”, he muttered to himself.

The burly truck driver was very kind to him, and without asking for an explanation he left him outside Valencia harbour. He knew he had a long walk ahead of him but decided that it would do him good.

It was three or four in the morning when he arrived in the hotel lobby, disheveled and exhausted. They looked at him from top to bottom at the reception desk, but fortunately the janitor showed up and recognized him and they gave him the key.

He went up to the room and straight into the bathroom. Avoiding looking in the mirror, he got in the shower with his clothes on. He furiously stripped himself naked under the warm water, let it run, and when he got out, still soaked, lay down on the bed. He tugged up the sheets and covered his eyes. He needed to sleep, get lost from all that.

He spent the next day in the dark locked up in his room, hoping that a new "rapture" would take him away. He didn't eat or drink or get out of bed except to the bathroom two or three times. He didn't want to think, he wanted to fall asleep and be ripped out of that place by a deep sleep. At one o'clock in the morning he turned on the lamp and, dazed, began to zap through the channels of the small TV in front of the bed. None of them would work, but the dull glow of the screen did him good. While he was eating the bag of nuts he took out of the minibar, he decided he would definitely return to Madrid on the first train leaving the next morning.

But not without one last visit.

The next morning he got into a taxi with his train ticket inside his pocket and gave Roman's address to the driver. Didn't want to waste time. He was going to go to that guy's house for the last time and make things very clear to him before losing sight of him forever. He needed to let off steam. Not knowing how, or what he would say, he simply spent his time gathering his strength, slowly letting out all the suppressed rage that had been consuming him since the previous night.

He was silent, staring at his hands, clenching his fists and reopening them tightly, letting his imagination run wild as the taxi walked through the busy streets of Valencia. A sunny Valencia. His hands squeezing his throat. People walking around. His fists punching his face. His teeth started to hurt. He relaxed. It was cloudy. But that didn't matter to him anymore.

The people he saw through the filthy cab windows were just blurred figures, the only thing that seemed firm to him were the buildings they left behind and the rage that erupted into flames from within. He looked up on the rooftops, wanted to see some sky before diving back into hell.

The taxi driver made him get off at the corner of the previous street with the excuse that it was a dead end and they would have to do a lot of turning. Adrian reluctantly paid him and got out of the cab. The damp heatstroke disoriented him for a moment. The roadway was blurred under his feet. He cursed himself and remembered that he should have had breakfast.

He was getting closer to number 15.

But something had changed.

The house was gone.

In its place was a plot of land surrounded by rusty grilles and a half-rotten wooden sign with a handwritten postal number. The lot seemed abandoned years ago. He peeped out. There were bushes, a hole in the middle covered in garbage and filth, stagnant water, but no sign of the house.

He stood there, bewildered, clinging to the bars and staring at the wasteland as his gaze emptied. He felt the blood throb in his temples and his stomach shrink. Helplessness turned to terror. A black hole.

Shocked, he let go of the trellis and staggered away, lost again, caught again in something that was beyond his understanding and testing his endurance. Humiliated and without the right of reply, a part of himself rebelled inside and fought against the impossible of his situation. He came across the coffee shop where he had been writing his last diary shortly before entering that house, but he looked away, he felt disgust at that memory, at the laughter of that afternoon, at how confident he had felt.

He hesitantly arrived on an avenue and nervously raised his hand to call for another taxi. Wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. To forget everything, just to recover the sense of reality.

CHAPTER 14

Laura waited patiently in her room. She finished packing her hand luggage and sat down on the bed waiting by the suitcase. Had a feeling Eva would call her any minute. She had been waiting for that precise moment for a long time. She sensed it shortly after she met Adrian, and she didn't often get her intuitions wrong.

She idolized her sister, though they rarely spoke to each other about feelings. Eva seemed to take that love for granted and that was enough for her. She didn't handle embarrassing situations well.

As a good elder sister, she gladly exercised her self-appointed protective role from afar, being prepared and ready to lend herself whenever Eva needed her, but keeping for herself everything else, since no one else seemed to care.

Eva was the star of the house, and Laura felt very comfortable about it, because all that enthusiasm she displayed allowed her to lead her life in a very discreet way, away from the scrutiny of others. Eva had been used to talking only about herself since she was a child, and she accepted Laura and her silences as normal.

She had a brother before Eva, but only for a short time. Jonah, her twin, whom she did not remember as he died when she was only three years old, was a blurred shadow in her memory, the cause of her father's continuous absences, the pills her mother took, and of a diffuse presence in her thoughts, someone to talk to intimately in idle times and whom she was not allowed to name in the presence of anyone, especially her mother.

Laura was fascinated by the joy of her arrival when Eva was born. They were only six years apart, but the joy she brought back to her family was reward enough. She became secretly obsessed with her safety and always watched her closely, mind-numbingly repeating that she would not be allowed to disappear, and with her all the fuss and distraction.

Before the birth of Eva everything had been silence in her house, and that is the only thing she kept from her childhood, a love for stillness, for squeezing out of simple things the little she needed to grow up. She accepted that second place proud of how happy her little sister was and satisfied with what she brought to her, pending as she was accustomed to by her plans, her fantasies, secretly happy for her small triumphs.

Laura spoiled her own intimacy with great zeal. No one knew much about her, and that made her feel safe. She was very intuitive, more than she liked to admit to herself, for she hated to draw attention to herself, and since she was little she had become accustomed to keeping quiet even when she usually ended up seeing the inevitability of her hunches, as she called them.

She had made it a point to inform herself discreetly about her gut feelings, and to use what was best for her about what she discovered in books and later on on the Internet; most of the times nonsense that had nothing to do with what she perceived. She was constantly amazed at how morbid people could become and how many stupid conspiracy theories were invented to make themselves important.

With time and practice, she discovered that mastering everything inside her could make her life much easier, and she simply let it flow, feeding it discreetly, but being careful not to be caught.

She was now certain that her special ability would finally become necessary. She just prayed that once all that was over her secret would stay between her and her sister. And she didn't want to have to face her mother's inquisitive look again, that suspicious look she felt on the back of her head every time she and her sister got lost to do something together.

There was a knock on the door. Their fate was set in motion.

––Laura –– it was her mother –– I need you to stay here looking after the house, I have to go to the Stanhope Clinic to finish preparing everything for when Adrian arrives in the mobile ICU from Valencia.

––OK.

Her mother glanced at the bed and noticed the small, cloth-lined suitcase.

––Are you going somewhere love? –– she asked, surprised.

––I assumed that Eva would need me –– she replied with polite kindness.

––Don't worry, I've got it under control. Stay here and see to it that your father gets to speak to Adrian's parents before we return, even if he needs to call the consul from wherever they are.

––Yes, Mom.

Laura knew not to argue with her mother when she was in "organiser mode". She took one last, inquisitive look at her to make sure she would obey and left her alone again, leaving the door open. A few minutes later she heard the front door close and the muffled noise of the car engine.

Martha left concerned, wandering off with her car through the urbanization. As she waited for the automatic barrier that separated her from the road to lift, she felt a small sting in her heart.

What had she done wrong with Laura?

She was proud of the values she had managed to transmit to Eva. She was strong, a born leader, and over the years she would become a wonderful lady in society, she was sure of it, but Laura...

Laura was determined to dress like a little nun.

Not that she had anything on them, by a long shot. But, in her heart, Martha was still a New Yorker, and all that Christian and rancid aftertaste of Madrid's high society was still in bad taste. It was as if they were constantly rubbing her with their moral superiority.

"At least she left her Gothic days behind," she comforted herself, adjusting her rear-view mirror.

Although in her dilemma she didn't know what she thought was worse, that her daughter was too modern, or that she ended up looking like an Amish. All in all, what worried her was that she was not aware that all that was taking her away from reality more and more every day.

In her opinion, the only thing she could achieve with this elusive behaviour was to look like an old maid in the eyes of everyone.

And she didn't want her daughter to end up alone.

Martha hated loneliness, and she didn't want it for her daughters.

But she no longer knew what to do with Laura. She wouldn't travel, didn't want clothes, didn't want to talk...

She didn't understand her, and over the years that blatant disconnection was becoming very uncomfortable for Martha, as there were days, like that one, when she couldn't help feeling that Laura was really the closest thing to having a stranger living at home.

A silent guest.

Laura sighed, got out of bed and went quietly down to the kitchen. She still had this strong feeling that she would soon be called, so she decided to take the small suitcase with her. She also felt that her father wouldn't show up at home. There were blurry images in her mind of all the events to come. She could see her father in the hospital, leaning against a doorway, not before.

Anyway, she couldn't get an annoying cloud off her head, a drowning sensation, something that made her feel remorseful and anxious. She felt imprisoned by her feelings. She took a deep breath. She wanted to stay optimistic, but that unsettling hunch paralyzed her. It was like racing, like someone had to pick up their gun and shoot so she could start running, and she had always disliked jolts.

A few minutes went by that felt eternal, she let herself go and got lost wandering through her memories. A flash of light woke her up from the trance and suddenly she knew for sure that something was very wrong. Eva should have called her by now. It was as if she had lost the rhythm, and the moment she was in did not fit the situation she had imagined. She had been waiting too long. She checked her phone. She could call, of course. But what if that altered the future?

"You're crazy," she said to herself, and unlocked her cell phone.

She looked up her sister's name on the recent calls and dialed.

Busy.