Marcelo in the Real World Read online

  We are both looking at Aurora. She steps out of the car, waves at us, takes a few steps toward us, and then stops. Now she is attempting to remove strands of sticky gum from the bottom of her white-soled shoes.

  “What if doing God’s will hurts the people we love?”

  “Ooof!” She takes a deep breath and there is a look of strength on her face, as if, beneath her goofy demeanor, there is someone who can elicit fear when necessary. “Look at me.” I look at her. She says, “Trust in Him. He will know how to use whatever hurt results for His own ends. Is there more you want to tell me?”

  “No,” I say.

  “How will you know what to do?”

  “The rabbi helped me. And…”

  “And?”

  I remember the conversation Jasmine and I had in the cafeteria. “The right note sounds right and the wrong note sounds wrong.”

  “Ha!” she says. “Look.” She opens the book by Abraham Joshua Heschel, flips through the pages, and reads. “Our effort is but a counterpoint in the music of His will.”

  “What if we don’t hear the music?” I say.

  “That’s what faith is, isn’t it? Following the music when we don’t hear it.”

  She squeezes my arm and smiles at me. Then Rabbi Heschel nods at Aurora that we are finally done.

  CHAPTER 27

  The second trip to Jerry García’s office is easier than the first. Now I know which way is east and which is west. It is early morning but already there are people waiting for him. I find a chair and sit down by myself. I didn’t tell anyone at the law firm where I was going. I was out yesterday. They will assume I am out again today.

  When he opens the door to let a young woman out, Jerry García sees me. He says something in Spanish to an elderly man and then he asks me in.

  “Would you like to sit down?”

  “No.” I take my backpack off.

  “Marcelo.” He makes a motion for me to stop looking in the backpack. “You found something that will help Ixtel.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you have thought through all the consequences.”

  “I have.”

  “You’re sure about this. I’m not forcing you to do anything. This is something you decided to do on your own. You can walk out of this office right now without any problems or hurt feelings. You understand?”

  “I understand.” I look straight at him. “I found a memo from the head of quality control to the president of Vidromek, telling him that the windshields were defective.” “I know.”

  “You know?”

  “I knew a memo with the results of the tests had to be there. It is standard procedure for the test results to be sent to the president by the head of quality control. But when other law firms asked for the memo, the answer came back that it was lost.”

  “I have it here.”

  “Don’t give me anything. I want to be able to say that you never gave me anything. Just give me a clue. Something that will let them know I know of the memo’s existence. You said it was a memo from the head of quality control to the president of Vidromek. What is the date of the memo?”

  I read: “June 21, 2005.”

  “Okay.”

  I put the memo in the backpack and get ready to leave.

  “What’s going to happen to you?”

  “I will go to a public school for my senior year. No more Paterson. No more training the ponies.”

  “That will be hard.”

  “Yes. It can be done. What will happen to Arturo?”

  “Why? Would you like something to happen to him? You’re not doing this because you’re angry with him or something?”

  “No. I am sure that is not why I am doing this.”

  “Not that I care. I mean, you can have whatever reasons you want. Listen, I’m going to try to work this out so that the least possible harm comes to you and your father. But I make no guarantees. It depends on your father, on whether he wants to play ball with me or not. If he wants to play hardball then I’ll do the same. But I gotta tell you, I would like to cream the living daylights out of Stephen Holmes and his a-hole son, what’s his name?”

  “Wendell.” I remember the telephone conversation with Yolanda on my first day of work, ages ago, it seems.

  “Little shits. I’ll try to control myself. Hey, I just thought of something. I have to go see the Sisters later this week—I have to get them to sign some legal papers. Would you like to come?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Two hours. That’s all it’ll take. I’ll call you at the law firm just in case you can go.” He offers me his hand and I take it.

  Outside of Jerry García’s office, I take a long breath. The memory of Hidden Lake comes to me, its waters green and quiet and deep.

  CHAPTER 28

  I am gathering files from Wendell’s office. Juliet wants me to find them and then copy them. I came in late, after the first mail run, and successfully avoided seeing Jasmine.

  Wendell stands in front of me. His face is fiery red.

  “Ever screwed anyone, Gump?”

  It is none of Wendell’s business, but I go ahead and answer him anyway. “No.”

  “Well, you screwed us royally. By us I mean all of us at Sandoval and Holmes, you included.”

  I do not respond.

  “This guy Jerry García calls my father this morning and says he wants a June 21, 2005, document from the head of quality control to the president of Vidromek. Now how would he know about that memo?”

  I can see Jerry García and Stephen Holmes talking to each other, each in their respective offices—Stephen Holmes thinking that Jerry García is no one to be concerned about and then suddenly snapping to attention. Then I imagine Jerry García in those law school poker games and everyone thinking he’s a dummy until he lays down his cards. I don’t answer.

  “I’ll tell you how he knows.” Out of his back pocket he takes out a piece of paper. He opens it in front of me and I recognize it as the Vidromek memo. “Guess where I found this? When this guy García called, I knew it had to be you. All I had to do was look in your backpack and there it was.”

  I realize I left my backpack in Robert Steely’s office where I have been sitting. “That is private.”

  “You want to know what is private? This memo is private. Where did you get it?”

  “I found it in the Vidromek files when you gave me the first assignment,” I lie. But I enjoy watching Wendell look scared. He thinks it is his fault the memo ended up in the general files. As much as I don’t know what to feel about Jasmine, I am glad that Wendell does not suspect her.

  “This guy Jerry García is a lightweight. My father will swat him away with a little money. What we worry about is the big law firms once they find out we have settled with someone. They’ll know we are vulnerable and they will hit us full force.”

  “It was not right to hide the memo.”

  “What the hell do you know? Huh? Look at this.” He points to the second name in the memo: Lic. Jorge Baltazar. “The ‘Lic’ stands for Licenciado, the Spanish word for lawyer. On my father’s advice, all correspondence and memos to the president of the company go through this guy—probably some kid who files papers all day, but a lawyer nevertheless. All the memos to the president had to be addressed to him as well. You know why he did that?”

  I shake my head no.

  “No, I didn’t think so. That’s why, when someone like you is given directions for an assignment, you are supposed to follow them. The system with the lawyer was set up so that the documents could be protected by attorney-client privilege. Do you know what that is?”

  Again I shake my head no.

  “A document protected by the attorney-client privilege does not have to be shown to the other side when they ask for it in litigation. The law allows this in order to let an attorney and his client communicate freely. Now let me spell it out for you. This memo did not have to be given to Jerry García or anyone else. The rules of civil procedure all
owed us to keep it. Yeah, maybe there was a copy of it in the general files. But I had another copy in a file of all documents that we were not giving out because they were protected by the attorney-client privilege.”

  For a few moments I think that perhaps I made a mistake in going to see Jerry García. I try to grasp on to anything Wendell said so I can respond. “But…you say…this privilege is to protect the communication between an attorney and his client…but…here there was no communication…The attorney did not communicate anything. The memo was from the engineer to the president of the company.” Then I see a ray of clarity. “The arrangement Stephen Holmes created was a way to evade the rule.”

  “You are one misguided retard,” Wendell says.

  Is it possible that this is the Wendell that I wanted as a friend? Was all this inside of him all this time? I feel his hatred toward me. I think that Wendell has so much to lose, maybe more than I do. Maybe he will lose his car and the boat and even the women.

  “What world do you live in? You are an idiot. An imbecile.”

  I smile.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I think it is funny that in your anger you are treating me like a normal person. There is nothing that you are not telling me that you would not tell someone who was normal by your definition.”

  Wendell grabs the skin on the back of his neck and pulls it. “Oh, hell. What do I care? I got three more weeks left of this crap and then I’m out. Your father wants to talk to you.”

  I stand up.

  “Did you think about the bond when you found the memo?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you went ahead and gave it to Jerry García? Why? Why did you do it?”

  “I found the picture of the girl that Jerry García is the lawyer for. Her name is Ixtel.”

  “The girl.” I can see Wendell remembering the picture of Ixtel in his mind and perhaps throwing the picture in the trash. For a moment I believe that he wants to agree with me that what I did was right. But he is not able. “Well, you did what you did,” he says, exhaling. “Now you have to pay the bill.”

  “Pay the bill.”

  “The bill. We are all going to pay the bill for what you did. How big the bill will be remains to be seen. They’re all in there trying to figure out how to keep the bill as small as possible, but there will be a bill. But I’m thinking, what will be your bill? Oh, sure, you won’t get to go to your school for the retarded like you wanted, but…I don’t know, that doesn’t strike me as enough, compared to what the rest of us might lose. So I thought that maybe I should send your mother a copy of that little note from Jasmine. What do you think?”

  I know he is waiting for me to show fear. And it is there, the fear. I fear Aurora’s hurt if she sees the letter. But it is not hard for me to hide my fear, and so I walk away without any expression on my face.

  I go to Arturo’s office. He continues looking at the papers on his desk as I stand in front of him.

  After what seems like a long time, he looks up. “I just got off the phone with Jerry García,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s agreed to disappear.”

  I start to open and close my hands but then I stop myself.

  “Of course”—Arturo is sitting straight on his leather chair, his eyes unblinking, fixed on me—“he now wants seventy-five thousand dollars. ‘We all have to live,’ as he says. Do you know what you have done?” His voice begins to tremble.

  “Yes.”

  “When he first called Stephen, García didn’t say anything about you. He just asked for the June 21, 2005, memo. Wendell figured out it was you.”

  “You knew the memo existed.”

  “I know everything that happens in this law firm. Stephen and I do not keep secrets from each other.”

  I hear reproach in my father’s voice. Unlike Stephen Holmes, his own son does keep secrets from him. Then again, Arturo also has secrets. I look around his office and imagine Arturo and Jasmine that night of the Christmas party and wonder where they had sexual intercourse and how. Something that feels very heavy descends and settles in me, settles everywhere in the room. I reach inside my pocket and touch Jasmine’s letter. I want to take it out and throw it at Arturo, but I stop.

  “Do you have anything to say?” he is asking.

  “No,” I say.

  “I know you think we were doing something wrong in keeping that memo from García. I’m sorry about the girl. But we were doing what the law allowed us to do. We were representing our client zealously, using all reasonable arguments in support of its case. There is a reasonable argument that a document, once it is reviewed by counsel, comes under the protection of the attorney-client privilege. We are entitled to use that argument on our client’s behalf. And the memo itself does not prove liability. The engineer that wrote it could have been wrong, or maybe he had a gripe against his boss and wanted to get even, or it could be that the windshields are not being properly installed and the people that do the installation are at fault and not Vidromek. You…you…you just took it upon yourself to decide what was right and what was wrong. Who the hell gave you authority to do that?” He stops. “Why didn’t you come talk to me?”

  “What would Arturo have done?”

  “We would have talked about it. I would have told you how the law works. Maybe we could have made a personal donation to this place where the girl lives. Didn’t you trust me?”

  I don’t know what to say. Why didn’t I come to him when I found the picture of Ixtel? I felt doubts inside of me. “If I had come to you, would you have given Jerry García what he asked?”

  “No. Absolutely not. That would be admitting that Vidromek was responsible.”

  “But you were willing to give the man at the fitness club what he asked. You said to him that you would convince Vidromek to pay in return for a little bonus. Why is he different than Jerry García? Why are his clients different than Ixtel? What is the little bonus that makes such a difference?”

  I see on his face the look of momentary shock. It is as if my father suddenly discovered that I had a brain. “Dammit, Marcelo! The world is not all black and white. There are rules you know nothing about. Rules I need to follow in order to survive. Those are the rules of this game I play, the system I live by! The system that puts food on the table and lets you live in a damn tree house and go to a special private school.” He raises his voice and stands up all at the same time. “And those are the rules you were supposed to live by this summer. You did not! You were given an assignment and did not follow it. Do you know what you did?”

  “I know,” I say. “I knew what could happen to all of us. Marcelo did not succeed in following the rules of the real world. He knows. He will spend the next year at Oak Ridge High. He knows. He knows. He knew that would happen before he talked to Jerry García. He thought it all through. All that would happen. And still he did it. And still he would do it again.”

  And now he is silent. I see his hands open and shut, the way mine do when I cannot find words for what I want to say. I wait and wait and then he says, “You know what? There’s only a few weeks left in the summer. Why don’t we end this summer job at the end of the week. Use the next two days to finish up what you’re doing. Then you can use the rest of the summer to get ready for Oak Ridge. Get the books you’ll be using. Get some help to bring you up to speed.”

  He sits back on his chair and bends his head to look at the document in front of him.

  I turn around and take two steps toward the door. I stop. I feel Jasmine’s letter folded in my shirt pocket. I remember Rabbi Heschel’s words. Trust in Him. He will know how to use whatever hurt results for His own ends. And so I turn around, walk toward the edge of his desk, and extend my hand with Jasmine’s letter to him.

  “What is it?” he asks before taking it.

  “Wendell gave me this. He called it the ‘gift of truth.’ I think you should have it.”

  He takes it from my hand. I wait for him to begin re
ading it before I leave.

  CHAPTER 29

  We get off the interstate when we see the signs for Lawrence. As we wind our way through the streets, I begin to see more and more signs in Spanish—storefronts, restaurants. The beat of Latin music fills the air. The people’s skins are brown and black. We stop in front of a three-story green building. All the windows are open and from the top floor, I see a white curtain float out into the street like a flag.

  “Here we are,” Jerry says. “That’s the place.”

  We get out of the car and walk to the door. Now I have this sense of embarrassment. What will I say to Ixtel? Why am I here? Through the screen door I hear someone crying. Jerry García rings the bell and a few moments later, the door opens.

  “Gerónimo!” a woman’s voice says. “Come in, come in.”

  It is a large woman with wiry white hair who immediately reminds me of a darker and bulkier version of Rabbi Heschel.

  “And this is Marcelo?”

  “I brought some things,” Jerry tells her as he heads back to his car.

  “I bring you lemonade.” The woman grabs my hand and pulls me inside. Before I know what is happening, she embraces me and holds me tight against her soft, large body. “Thank you for all you done,” I hear her say. “My name is Sister Juana. I speak in bad English to you, okay?”

  “Yes,” I manage to say. I am out of breath from the embrace. She takes me down the hall in the direction of the crying.

  “Let’s go in here,” Sister Juana says. We turn into a doorway opposite the room where the crying is coming from. The room we enter is half-full of metal folding chairs. At one end of the room, a television set has been moved to the side and there is a table covered with a white tablecloth embroidered with blue, orange, pink, and green flowers. A cross stands in the middle of the table and a candle in a red glass next to it. “On Sunday we say Mass here,” she says.

  “You are a priest,” I say. Immediately I realize that there are no women priests.

  “No, not priest. Díos mío, no!” She laughs. “Padre Antonio comes on Sundays to say Mass. Sit, please.”