LITMIR.BIZ

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      “The clothing that he was wearing is in a sealed bag.”

      “Better yet, see if the family kept anything of his, maybe a hair brush.”

      “It’s been twenty-three years.”

      “You of all people shouldn’t be surprised by the things people save from their dead relatives.”

      She called Gladys Elena to make sure that she would be home and went directly to Hialeah. This time Gladys was alone and she opened the door herself.

      “Come in, come in… Excuse me a minute, I was just making coffee,” and she ran off into the kitchen.

      Unlike the previous visit, Maria took the opportunity to look at family photos. It struck her that the girl that she had met last time, who had a striking similarity to the sketch of the missing baby depicted as young woman now, looked like her father and not Gladys while the boy looked like her and like another young man in one of the photos.

      “That’s my brother, Raulito,” Gladys said when she saw Maria looking at the pictures.

      She didn’t comment on the similarities. After all, it was very subjective.

      “When did you remarry?” she asked in a friendly tone just before sipping her coffee.

      “Well, here’s how it all happened… Mauricio was the boyfriend that I had left in Cuba, and he came here two years later. Slowly we fell in love again and a year later, in ’95, we got married. Little Elena was born on December 19 of ’96. It’s incredible that she looks just like her sister… I mean, according to the sketch they did of her sister.”

      When they finished their coffee and sat face to face, Maria turned on the tape recorder, took out her notebook and pen, and began questioning her:

      “Where did you, Lazo, and your daughter live before the accident?”

      “In Little Havana. Let’s see, here’s almost all of the information.”

      She handed Maria a sheet with the address of where they lived in 1992, her mother’s address, the address where Lazo worked, names and phone numbers of neighbors and contact lists of their respective coworkers that they were still in touch with.

      “You’re making my work easy.”

      “It’s taken years…”

      “Just two or three more questions… What do you know of your late husband’s past?”

      “About Ray? Well, very little. He told me that he came on the Mariel Boatlift, that he was from Cardenas, and that he didn’t have any family here. But when he died, a long-lost uncle of his showed up and was very generous. He paid all the funeral costs even though the wake just amounted to a few of his friends from work. Ray was a good man. He always told me: This is the land of second chances and you’ve been mine. And he’d also go around saying: Fidel didn’t create the ‘new man’; you performed that miracle.

      “Do you know why he said that, if he had been married before, if he had left kids behind in Cuba, if he had enemies…?”

      “He talked about a girlfriend that he had in Cuba. He was so overjoyed when the baby came along that I can’t imagine that he had any children before. I don’t believe he had any enemies either. Why would a poor electrician have any?”

      “Your mother didn’t live anywhere near the accident. Do you know what your husband was doing in that part of town?”

      “I’ve asked myself that a thousand times and never found an answer. I think that maybe he went to help out one of his friends… In those days, everyone had problems.”

      “Anything else? Did you save anything of his?”

      The lady hesitated:

      “If you give it to me, I promise to get it back to you,” Maria added.

      “Just a minute.”

      It took her a few minutes to return and she brought out a small suitcase, the kind that no one uses anymore, rectangular, without wheels, and faded black.

      “Here are all of his belongings. I have a box with our daughter’s things in it as well if you want it, but…”

      “Did you ever ask to have your daughter’s DNA tested?”

      “No, they’re too expensive, and they never found her so I didn’t think it was necessary.”

      “True. We can wait. We’ll go ahead and test Ray’s. One last question. I noticed you never dropped the last name Lazo.”

      “Well, it’s a relatively common name and the baby couldn’t know her own name because she was too young, but if she does look for me, it would be easier to find me if I kept the same last name, right? Anyway, Mauricio doesn’t ask me about that.”

      As she was leaving, Maria was somewhat surprised when Gladys Elena gave her a kiss on the cheek very naturally.

      “You’ll keep me up to date if there are any developments, right?”

      “Of course.”

      When she worked on homicides, the hardest part was always informing the family. The murder of a loved one was the worst thing that anyone could ever endure, or so she thought, but now she wasn’t so sure. Living more than twenty years looking for a lost daughter had to be an extremely heavy burden. She had seen it in the eyes of the young woman who still had traces of agony in her gaze.

Chapter 5

      Day 2—Tuesday, November 3, 2015

      Maria arrived at her home in El Doral eager to cook. That was often the case when she was nervous or worried, but these days—even before Patrick had gone off to college—she seldom ate at home. That’s why she had looked for other ways to alleviate her stress, like going to the gym or having a couple glasses of wine. She glanced in the refrigerator and only found a yogurt, skim milk, some whole wheat bread, turkey, cheese, and some vegetables. The choices in the freezer and pantry weren’t much better. She was about to give up, but she wound up grabbing her wallet and car keys and headed off to the nearest Publix.

      A couple hours later, the aroma of sofrito flooded her house. She immediately thought of her mother and smiled, holding back the tears. Even though she knew perfectly well how to make picadillo, she searched for the old cookbook by Nitza Villapol. When she opened it, she found a sheet of paper with a recipe for a spinach quiche in her mother’s unmistakable handwriting.

      She sautéed the onion and pepper in the olive oil, threw in a can of tomato sauce and removed it from the stove. Then, just as she was seasoning the ground beef, an uncontrollable fit of crying overcame her. It happened like that at times, coming in waves, like the ones when she used to go to the beach and the sea was rough, and they made her feel like she was drowning. Maybe that was why she didn’t cook that often anymore… The smells unlocked her memories.

      She poured herself a glass of Merlot and sat down to relax before finishing the picadillo. In recent years, she had thought a lot about her mother’s life. As the daughter of a physician-professor and a housewife, Maria Cristina Fernandez Oviedo had belonged to Havana’s upper middle class. She had studied at private schools, spent her summers at Varadero, and belonged to one of the most exclusive clubs in the capital. She was fifteen years old and dreamed of becoming a physician, like her father and grandfather, when Fidel Castro took over and her life changed in an instant.

      Less than two years later, her parents decided to get her out of Cuba through the Peter Pan program, by which fourteen thousand Cuban children fled the country between 1960 and 1962. When she arrived in Miami, they sent Maria Cristina to a convent in San Antonio along with other children. The Church’s protection didn’t last long because shortly thereafter she turned eighteen—the age at which the program ended. The nuns didn’t throw her out in the street right away. She lived there a few more months until she put together

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