Giles Blunt - Breaking Lorca

Viera beamed. “You will be our guest. Your presence alone will honour us.”

Sunday broke fair-a crisp, clear day with fleets of white clouds chasing each other over the trees, a sharp wind gusting out of the north. Victor was glad of his windbreaker.

“Have more potato salad,” Helen Viera urged him.

“Oh, no, thank you. It was wonderful, but I assure you I am quite stuffed.”

“Nonsense.” She dropped a large dollop onto his paper plate. “We’ll just have to lug it home anyway.”

“You’re very kind. I seem to be eating everything in sight.”

They were sitting on a blanket spread out on the bank of a small pond. Behind them, the newly seeded Great Lawn was an oval of pale emerald. A hill across the pond was guarded by a miniature castle topped with a fairytale turret. A spot for lovers, Victor thought.

“Another ham roll?”

“Oh, no. I couldn’t.”

“Men. You always say no when you mean yes.”

“Don’t force him to eat, Helen.” Lorca was sitting under a tree, peeling bark from a stick. She didn’t look at them when she spoke. She bent over the stick, shoulders hunched, her hair falling over her face.

“I’m hardly forcing him,” Helen said.

“Believe me,” Victor put in, “I don’t have to be forced. This is the best meal I’ve had since I came to New York.”

“See? He likes it.” Mrs. Viera, who looked a tired thirty, spoke in the hyper-dramatic tones of a twelve-year-old.

Lorca stood up, brushing twigs from her jeans. She walked down to the edge of the water. Victor was still afraid that she would recognize him-some catch in his voice, perhaps even his smell-and suddenly know with certainty what he had done to her. She had barely glanced at him for the past hour, but he was still afraid.

“Finishing off the food, I see.” Mike Viera was coming toward them from the washrooms.

“I gave him the last of the potato salad,” his wife said, snapping a Tupperware lid shut. “Lorca didn’t like it.”

Viera was wearing jeans and a green striped polo shirt, and looked ten years younger than he did in his lawyer suit. He snatched up a Frisbee and yelled to his sister, “Lorca! Catch!”

She turned from the pond just in time for the Frisbee to catch her in the chest. Victor expected an angry outburst, but she just retrieved it from the mud and tossed it back without a word. The Frisbee cruised toward her brother in a perfect arc. Viera threw it back. “We used to play for hours when we were kids,” he said to Victor. “Flying saucers, she used to call it. Never wanted to stop.” The Frisbee sailed over a low-hanging branch into his hand. “Let’s move away from the water. Come on, Ignacio.”

Victor had not played at anything since he was a boy. The game of catch seemed foolish. And he had a faint sense of rudeness that Helen Viera was not invited to join in. She sat alone on the plaid blanket, reading a novel by Danielle Steel.

He was completely uncoordinated at first. He threw the plastic disc too hard; it soared over Lorca’s head and she had to run after it. Then, in a single motion, she swung around and sent it curving toward her brother. Viera was businesslike, dispatching the toy toward Victor’s grasp with the neatness of a fact.

As the game progressed, Victor became more skilful. It even became easy. If only speech were this easy, he thought. If only trust and friendship could be so natural.

“This was a good idea,” he called to Viera. “To bring this thing along.”

“For a picnic, a Frisbee is essential. You didn’t know this?”

Viera whipped it straight and level, chest-high to Victor. Then Victor launched it into a graceful tilting flight to Lorca. She had only to take one step, a short leap, to pluck it out of the air. In that swift, clean motion she looked perfect, Victor thought. Undamaged.

“You two continue,” Viera said. “I am fat and middle-aged and require my rest.”

“Lazy!” Lorca yelled after him. “Lazy old man!” She stamped her foot in a comical way. Then she spoke to Victor for the first time that day. “You’ve had enough too, I suppose. You want to join the little old man? The senior citizen?”

Victor shook his head, holding out his hand for the Frisbee. With a flick of her wrist, Lorca sent the bright plastic disc whizzing into his palm. As they played on, his technique continued to improve. He could now place the Frisbee pretty much where he wanted to. Yes, he thought, I’m like a normal person now. I’m doing a normal thing.

Despite the cool breeze, he worked up a sweat. Several times he thought surely Lorca would have had enough, but they played on and on. How could this leaping, graceful girl be the hunched and bitter woman of an hour ago?

The clouds arranged themselves into high-banked columns of cumulus that now and then hid the sun. Victor and Lorca played in shade then sun, shade then sun. It got windier, it got colder, but they played on, Lorca silent and serious, Victor sometimes shouting “Good throw!” or “Sorry!”

No one would ever know what I did to this woman, he thought. She may even come to like me. Is this what being good feels like? This ease, this freedom, is this how the brave feel every minute, every hour? With me, of course, it is a performance, and all performances have their final curtain.

“It was the same when we were children,” Viera said when they joined him and his wife on the blanket. “Lorca never wanted to stop. She would have played in the pitch-dark.”

“Why not?” Lorca said, accepting a plastic cup of lemonade from Helen. “They make ones that shine in the dark, you know. They are called-I forget the word for it, this shining.”

“Phosphorescent.”

“Phosphorescent.” The word came out with a slight whistle, and she covered her mouth with her hand.

“We should get that tooth fixed,” her brother said. “It makes you look like a street person.”

The tip of her tongue probed at the tooth. She turned away and stared at the water. “I am cold now.”

“Because you’re sweating,” Helen said. “I told you to bring a jacket. Tell her she’s foolish, Ignacio.”

Victor said nothing. At the mention of Lorca’s injury, shame had coiled itself around his chest. He could hardly breathe.

They didn’t stay long after that. The plates and napkins were thrown in the trash, the Thermos and blanket packed away.

“This is the happiest I’ve seen her,” Viera said as they headed back across the park toward Fifth Avenue, “the happiest since she came here. This is how she used to be, Ignacio. So easy and free. Not this anger all the time, this rage.”

Lorca had been walking ahead of them, but she stopped at the edge of the park drive, where cyclists and roller skaters whooshed by. She said, “I think I would like those, the Rollerblades. I would like to try that sometime.”

“You would fall and break your head,” Viera teased her.

“I would not. Helen, you want to learn?”

Viera’s wife looked surprised that she had been addressed. She stammered a little. “Gosh, I don’t know. Skating is for children, isn’t it?”

“It’s not a crime. Grown men and women are still in part children.”

“Oh, that’s a lot of hogwash. I don’t believe that for one second.”

But Lorca did not hear. In a swift change of expression, her mouth opened-the broken tooth a sudden black triangle. She was staring beyond Helen’s shoulder at something on the road.

Victor followed her gaze.

Coming up the hill, lumbering amid the throngs of skaters and bicyclists, was a green Jeep Grand Cherokee. The windows were tinted, the driver and passengers nothing more than dark shapes. A terrible trembling shook Victor in the knees. It’s going to stop, he thought. It’s going to stop and Sergeant Tito will jump out and arrest me.