She had planned to leave her heart somewhere in New York, somewhere between the back alleyway of a restaurant and a shared Marlboro Red. A safe place to tuck it away before a long and grueling journey she was still in denial of. Headphones in, falling in and out of sleep, quiet and playful games utilized to cloud the looming confirmation of her grandfather's death that could only be sealed with first hand sight.
After the wake, eyes burning the reality into memory, quiet steps traced the familiar path from stairs to landing, hallway to entrance of the one room in the house that would stand as a mausoleum. The only room that would go untouched from now on, a small office that from a child's perspective had seemed like a mansion's private heart but now looked no bigger than a broom closet and bathroom stitched together. Finger tips dragged along the rich mahogany desk, remembering barely being able to peer at his face over its edge, hiding beneath it to terrify him when he sat down, sitting at it and pretending to be even a fraction as important as he felt to her always, during tropical nights of summer vacations.
To an adolescent Carmen, he was the omnipotent ruler of every inch of land and sea, the king of kings - king of her king, evident in the way his laughter boomed throughout the house commanding fear and respect and adoration all in a single swoop. She sat in the large leather chair that still felt like a king's throne although she was now fully grown, palms to the wood, hands slid apart, feeling the distance as it grew, spread like a disease, a plague drifting their lives apart from one another. Her cheek pressed to the center of his desk as fingers reached opposite ends, the weight of their metaphorical disconnect climbing up to keep her half laying on what felt like driftwood in the middle of a dark, vast ocean.
It would remain untouched, dusty and forgotten. A shame she promised to remedy every return trip to the island. Carmen would sneak in here and light a cigar as she was doing now, maybe the same one and remember Andre Luis Moreno. His broken English and her stunted Spanish forming a whole wrapped in smiles and laughter and small notepad drawings to fill in the spaces that their initial language barriers couldn't manage. Pictures she found as she puffed, careful not to inhale - "Das not how ju smoke it", he told her the first time she'd choked on it - still lining the inside of a drawer. Her grandmother would know she'd been in here, she'd have to with the way the smell carried through the door's cracks and weaved itself into the threads of borrowed black dress when she would reappear from nowhere in particular. She hoped that it might indulge her Nana in the feeling that he was still around, lingering like the smoke in the house, the same way it did for her as she sat in his office, trying to remember what it felt like to crawl into his lap.
The reminder, like a red string on forefinger, came with the sound of Luz Maria's voice praising a handsome Benjamin Huxable just outside the door, their voices filling the hallway. Let go.
"They really fucking love each other, huh,"