“Is thirty-seven old these days?”
“It is when you’re twenty-two.”
He smiles. “See. My first Beatriz secret.”
“My age is hardly a secret.”
“Perhaps. But it is something about you, one more piece to the puzzle. Besides, I have a feeling you’re an old soul at twenty-two.”
“I don’t think you can live through a revolution and lay much claim to innocence afterward,” I agree.
“No, I suppose you can’t. War has a way of sanding down your virtue.”
“You fought in Europe, didn’t you?”
He nods, his expression more guarded than before.
“So you know then.”
“Yes,” he replies.
It’s different going to a place and fighting, seeing the destruction men can wreak all around you, and then returning home, to the sanctuary of a country that will likely never descend into such madness. Harder to live it in your favorite haunts, to watch death touch your friends and family. And still, war is war and misery comes to all men, natives and foreigners alike.
“It’s hard talking to people who haven’t lived it, who haven’t seen the things you’ve seen, who don’t understand.”
He nods.
“What was it like? Going to war? You were a pilot, right?”
“It was like nothing life had ever prepared me for. It was terrifying the first few times I went up in the air. The first time I shot a plane down, knew I’d killed a man . . .” His voice drifts off for a moment. “I didn’t think you could get used to a thing like that.
“After a while, though, you do get used to it. You know each time you go up that you may die, but you make peace with it, I suppose, learn to adjust to sitting next to a man in the bar one day, knowing he probably won’t come home the next. And then it’s all over, and miraculously, you didn’t die, and you go home.
“Everyone wants to thank you for your service, and they call you a hero, and you struggle to find where you fit in this world again.”
Our gazes lock.
“You go to balls, and parties, and drink champagne, and dance with pretty girls, but there’s always a piece of you back there, amid the bombs, thinking of the lives you could have saved, but didn’t, the sons, husbands, and fathers that should have come home, but didn’t. And you begin to wonder why you were saved when all those good men weren’t, if there’s some reason for your life, something you’re meant to do to pay back the debt you owe. It eats at you, over and over again, and it’s hard to get those thoughts out of your head. It’s hard to find people who understand.”
Do I really even stand a chance?
It was so much easier to discount him as just another Palm Beach playboy, more style than substance, more privilege than responsibility, but the truth of it is in front of me, swimming in those blue eyes that are clearly in another time, in another place, haunted by images he can’t erase, sounds that wake him in a cold sweat throughout the night.
I still hear the firing squads in La Cabaña executing Cubans with terrifying precision, still smell the stench of death, damp, and filth in the hellhole of a prison; the noise of the crowd cheering and jeering as men were condemned to death in the stadium wakes me in the middle of the night. It’s the sound of fear that lives with me now, the refrain of uncertainty: a whirring engine as a plane takes flight, a body hitting the ground, a car screeching away.
“I’m sorry,” I reply, knowing how little comfort the words offer.
“I know.”
Silence descends, a prick of discomfort filling me, the sensation that he has indeed uncovered another one of my secrets—a real one—the pain beneath the diamond smile.
“They’re not staring anymore,” I comment, struggling to fill the silence with something innocuous and impersonal. Something safe.
“Who?”
“The rest of the party.”
There’s that smile again. “I didn’t notice.”
The song ends and he stills.
It feels unnatural to stop, to pull away from this man.
“Thanks for the dance,” he says, his tone formal compared to the intimacies we shared moments ago, the veneer returned once more.
Which version of him does his fiancée know and love? The man with ghosts in his eyes or the composed one standing before me now?
There’s faint pressure at my elbow, and I don’t have to look to know Eduardo is standing at my side. The evidence is etched all over Nick’s expression.
Nick inclines his head, not offering any words for Eduardo, a glance passing between them over my head. Seeing them together like this, I am struck by the sensation that Eduardo is a boy, whereas Nick Preston is a man.
And then Nick is gone, walking away from me once more, all broad-shouldered, long-limbed grace.
Eduardo hands me the champagne flute. My fingers tremble as I grasp the stem.
“I almost feel sorry for the man,” he comments.
My gaze follows Nick’s retreating back until the party swallows him up and he disappears completely.
“Why?”
“You’ll break his heart eventually,” Eduardo predicts.
“I highly doubt that.”
If I had a heart left to lose, I’d fear he’d eventually break mine.
chapter four
Through the grapevine, word spreads that Nick Preston has left Palm Beach for Washington D.C., garnering political capital in preparation for the upcoming election in November. Weeks pass, the season insufferably dull in his absence. His pretty little fiancée remains behind, our paths crossing at a distance throughout the social whirl even if we do not speak. She is shepherded around Palm Beach by a host of Prestons and Davieses; her own prestigious surname is enough to elevate her to a distinct social stratum from the sphere I inhabit.
Eduardo shows up on my doorstep one February afternoon, orchids in hand.
I shake my head at the sight of my favorite flowers, a smile playing at my lips; his reduced circumstances notwithstanding, Eduardo always did have style down to an art form.
“Come for a drive with me,” he says when he greets me.
The flowers are likely more of a bribe than an attempt at romance, and if he thinks I can be bought with a pretty pair of orchids, he’s sorely mistaken. Then again, the possibility of getting into mischief—and Eduardo always guarantees mischief—is far more entertaining than my alternative plans for the day: reading fashion magazines on the couch next to Isabel and listening to my mother bemoan our lack of prospects. That she’s said little of the gossip surrounding my dance with Nick Preston speaks to how much our fortunes have fallen; even my mother realizes how far out of reach he is.