Bulletproof Vest by Maria Venegas

Author:Maria Venegas
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781429944168
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

17

THE MUSEUM

FIVE YEARS LATER, I return to visit him. I fly to Chicago, and from there I drive down to Valparaíso with Roselia and my mother. By then, my mother is spending most of her time in Valparaíso with my grandmother. We stop off in Real de Catorce on the way, an old silver mining town that Martin and I had talked about visiting, though we had never gotten around to it. After I’d been in New York for a year, I had found us a one-bedroom apartment, and for yet another year I had waited for him. But something always seemed to come up with his band—they were recording another album or doing one more tour. I finally called him and told him I had booked a flight to Chicago for the weekend and needed to speak with him.

“About what?” he asked.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Really, I just need to speak with you in person. That’s all.” I could have said, “It’s been two fucking years.” I could have said, “My feelings have changed.” I could have said any number of things, but back then I was unable to articulate something I could barely admit to myself.

The next day, while I was gathering my things at work and getting ready to go home, he came through the glass doors of the showroom and walked right up to my desk.

“Don’t do this,” he said before I had a chance to say anything. But it was already done. Two years was not such a long time, though it was long enough.

That same summer I received a phone call from one of Abigail’s friends. After spending a year in New York, Abigail had returned to Maine to find that the gallery owner still hadn’t finalized his divorce. He was having second thoughts, had started pushing her away. The last time I had talked to Abigail, she had been sitting on the edge of her bed, and though she could see the sun was shining, she could not muster the energy to go outside.

“I feel numb, I feel numb, I just feel so numb,” she kept saying, aware of how wrong it was: that her sister had just had a baby, that she was now an aunt, and that she didn’t care—she didn’t feel anything at all.

I had suggested she consider going off the meds. That perhaps they were impeding her ability to feel. Besides, she wasn’t so much depressed as she was heartbroken, and if that coward was having second thoughts, so be it. Eventually, she’d find someone who would truly appreciate her. But she didn’t want anyone else, she only wanted the man she had been building her life around for the past two years. She called me a few days later and was in better spirits, said she had gone to see a psychiatrist who had lowered her dosage. Then, about two weeks after that, I got the call.

“Oh, Maria, I don’t know how to say this,” her friend said. “But Abigail is dead.

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