Page 48 of Every Step She Takes
When I don’t answer—when I can’t answer—Luzia turns to the mess on the tray. “I only wanted to talk about how you’re doing, and how you’re coping with everything.”
The only thing worse than leaving my place against the bookshelf is the idea of letting Luzia see me cry. “Here. Let me clean that up.” I hurry to the tray, bending over by her feet to conceal my tearstained face as I use the remaining napkins to dry up the spilled tea.
“Don’t worry about it,” she insists, but I keep trying to destroy the evidence of the mess.
“But it’s all my fault.”
Luzia’s wrinkled fingers brush the hair off my forehead, like they used to when I was a kid. “None of it is your fault,” she whispers.
And I do let Luzia see me cry. But only a little.
“You stopped answering my calls,” she says, and she lets me see her cry too. “I only wanted to know what you’ve been up to, menina.”
I couldn’t answer those phone calls back then, and I can’t explain to Luzia now that all I have to show for the last twenty years is three passports completely filled with stamps; a series of nonprofit jobs I always quit after a year; a series of women I fell in and out of love with; an entire life that can be easily packed into a single suitcase; no home, no roots, no purpose.
I can’t tell Luzia that despite her best efforts, I did turn out like my parents.
Cycling through women like my dad; living life on the surface, like my mom.
I’m still kneeling in front of her as Luzia’s fingers move softly through my hair.
“I know we can’t go back,” she says after another stretch of my heavy silence.
“I know we can’t pick up where we left off when you were eighteen like nothing has changed.
I know you must be angry with me for staying by your father’s side after what he did, and I deserve your anger.
But I would like to maybe… have a relationship again?
” She’s treading so carefully, her words come out like a question.
“If that’s something you might want too? ”
I don’t know what I want. That is, and always has been, my primary problem.
“But what if I… what if I sell the company?” I ask her.
“You can do that,” she says simply. “But that has nothing to do with this .” She presses her open palm to her heart, then presses it to mine, like she’s connecting a string between us.
“If you want to sneak away from this place right now, you can. If you want to sell the company and the vineyards and never talk to me again, you can do that too. But menina, if you’d let me, I’d very much like to earn back your trust. Your friendship. ”
“Damn, Luzia!” I sniffle as a new wave of tears overwhelms me. “What the hell? I leave for two decades and you go get all emotionally intelligent on me?”
She gives me a soft smile. “Not everything here stayed the same.”
I wish I had the right words for Luzia, the right way to tell her thank you, and I’m sorry, and I forgive you.
I wish I could be as articulate as she is and tell her what she meant to me back then, and what this conversation means to me right now.
But the words fail me, and all I do is sit on the ground in front of her like a small kid.
“I like her, by the way.”
“You like who?”
“ Who? Maelys,” Luzia tsks. “The redhead. The girl whose been sleeping in your bed the past two nights.”
“Redhead? I don’t know any redheads.”
Luzia violently ruffles my hair. “You can’t hide anything from me.”
“Ouch!” I yank my head away from her grasp, but she keeps a hand on my shoulder and doesn’t allow me to pull away too much.
“It makes me so happy, menina,” Luzia says with a watery smile, “to see you so happy.”
And when Luzia Ferreira bends over and kisses the crown of my head, I am thirty-eight and discovering that maybe there are small ways I can still rewrite my history.
The last time I walked away from one of my father’s vineyards, I planned to never return.
This time, as the tour group passes through the black gate and walks out onto the dirt road, I know my return is as inevitable as my father’s funeral in less than two weeks.
I won’t be able to run away from it all, or repress it, or distract myself from it for much longer.
Today, the Camino will take us inland, and we won’t return to the coast at all in the next five days.
In five days, we’ll be in Santiago, and I will have to decide what to do with Quinta Costa. With my life.
“Don’t be angry,” Sadie says as we walk down the road side by side, “but I did take one memento from Emo Mal’s bedroom.”
She pulls something out of her raincoat. “Peanut!” I involuntarily scream. I grab the elephant from her outstretched hands.
“I know your life is too nomadic for the entire collection,” she teases, “but I figured you could make room in your bag for one forlorn Beanie Baby.”
I press the soft elephant to my cheek, his trunk near my ear. “What’s that, Peanut? You only agreed to come because you want to watch Sadie— Mr. Peanut !” I gasp. “You perv!”
Sadie swats my arm. “Don’t corrupt the innocent elephant like you corrupted me.”
“You’ve loved being corrupted by me.”
She blushes at that. I only have five more days of watching those rosy splotches bloom across her face. “No, seriously. Thank you, Sadie.” I hold the elephant to my heart so she knows I’m being sincere.
Sadie smiles in return, and I lean over to kiss that sweet smile, forgetting about Inez and Ari and the entire tour group that’s spread out around us. Forgetting that in five days, we’ll be in Santiago, and whatever this thing is with Sadie—practice or not—will be over.