Chapter 22

“Come on Ana. Let's go.”

Gilberto calls for his wife.

“Come on darling. You look just fine.”

His wife looks at him like as if he’s a mad man.

“What do you mean by fine. I think I look stunning.”

“ oh! Yes. Absolutely. You look absolutely stunning. So stop fussing about your make up and get in the car.”

Nana is exhausted by the drama unfolding before her.

“ Ana, if you don’t get in the car right at this moment, I swear I’ll walk my way to the fare.”

The woman walks towards them with an exasperated expression.

“ You both are going to be the death of me.”

The engine roars to life as the car makes it's way to the new year fare.

“ Look for Jon. He must be tired of waiting for us. Xavier must have driven him crazy.”

The man parks the car at some distance and the family walk their way into the fare.

Ana keeps stealing kisses from her husband.

“You are irresistible.” She says , giggling.

Jon waits for them near a toy shop. A teddy smiles at them notoriously , peeping through Xavier’s arms.

Gilberto lifts him up.

“ Gilberto.” Nana beckons her son.

“ You and Ana get on the ride. Me and Jon will take Xavi to eat some Cotton Candy.”

“Sure.”

He puts a hand in his pocket and pretends to have forgotten his wallet at home.

“ I must go back and look for it, Nana. There’s not much you can do at a fare without the money.”

Xavi tugs onto her mother’s hand and pulls her towards the ice cream stall. Jon follows them.

Nana nods in Gilberto’s direction urging him to carry on.

Gilberto gets into the car and drives towards the opposite direction of the house. He parks the car near a mansion.

A young woman beckons him to come inside.

“My love. I’ve been waiting for you so long. It feels as if a decade has passed by.”

She plants a kiss on his chest. She sits in his lap on the sofa.

“ I don’t have much time.”

“ When do you ever have time? You are always rushing. But not today. Today I want you all by myself.”

She kisses him. He kisses her back.

She continues teasing him, touching him , loving him.

And then she quietly slips a pill into his mouth.

Time passes by like a dream. And by the time he wakes up, it’s already morning. Alison sleeps naked next to him. His lies end here. He knows. But what waited for him back home was way more horrid than he would have ever expected.

The horror that he faced on that day still gives him goose pimples when he thinks about it. He is old now, from inside he is way more older than he actually is in reality. Because that day he aged fifteen years more.

He returned home to his beautiful wife Ana, packed and ready to go. He made no excuses, it would have only worsened the situation. And not one person dared to stop her. Any other woman would have taken it, but not Ana. She left him that morning. Alone and crying on the cold floor. He could go back to whoever he wanted.

A day after he received the news of his wife’s death. Accident they called it. But who would no better than him? It was in fact a murder.

But he survived through the time. His existence was his punishment. And there was no way he was getting out of it that easy.

Years passed, he quit dealing drugs and shifted away from Nana's. Xavier had to be brought up better than he had intended to before. He failed his wife once but he refused to fail her again.

One day a little girl ended up in front of Gilberto's convenient store. She could hardly speak at all. She just ran her way from one corner to another. And she laughed. She laughed a lot. Mostly at Xavier.

He waited for her parents to come searching for their little girl. But they never did. And so Gilberto kept her. He named her Audrey, because on the later years she gave him the strength to live. She serenaded him with her laughter and made the days easier.

Xavier and Audrey smoothened the scars but nothing could obliterate the memories that gagged him in his dreams. The memories of love. The memories of happiness. The memories of murder.

Till he had Ana, he rarely thought about the barbarity that breathed inside him. He was so engrossed in loving his wife, lying to her and then fabricating even more lies in order to make the prior ones more believable or sometimes to avoid getting caught. He never could really make time to spare his thoughts to all that had happened in the past.

Specially to what he and Jon had executed in their teenage life. Though it wasn’t as much about him as much as it was about Jon.

He vividly remembers that evening. Nana was sick and put to rest under heavy medication. Jon had been away since the morning. And as the sun set, Gilberto started getting anxious about his whereabouts. Just as he was contemplating over should he risk leaving Nana alone and look for his friend, Jon’s car pulled into the driveway.

Gilberto waited for Jon to come in. After whole half of an hour later when he didn’t, Gilberto made his way towards his friend. Jon sat at the foot of the car. His shirt smeared with blood, smoking a cigarette as if it was the most casual thing in the world. He looked up to face Gilberto.

“ What did you do?” Gilberto asked. Panicked as anyone would be.

“ Tell me you asshole. What the fuck did you do? “

But Jon sat there smoking.

“ Jon. This is not funny. You need to tell me what happened. Only then I can help you mate. Did you get into a fight? Did you kill someone? Did you shot someone Jon ?”

Jon laughed at his friend. He laughed and laughed until the tears came. And then he laughed some more.

“You won’t believe it.” He said.

And then he went ahead to open the trunk of his car, in which laid the cadaver of Pablo Rodriguez.

Gilberto stood over the dead body of his father, at a loss of words. Then he pated Jon’s shoulder and said.

“ Let’s bury him till it’s still dark outside.”

But Jon had other plans.

“ We don’t need to bury him.”

He said.

They took Pablo’s body to a large open ground. Jon made a call to a guy name Danny.

Danny arrived at sight an hour later, with two men by his side. They unloaded heavy cans from the car and asked Jon and Gilberto to step back. Then they poured the liquid over the dead body until it burned and melted away.

“ Is it acid?” Gilberto asked.

But Jon was too busy staring as Pablo melted away like glass. Good riddance.

“ What if they sell you?” he asked Jon, this time in a louder voice.

“ It’s their job Gilberto. What is the point of a job like that if people can’t trust you. They don’t sell people out. It’s bad for business. And plus the kind of people they deal with. They’ll get skinned to death.

They drove back home. Nana was sound asleep.

“ Nothing happened.” Jon said.

“Nothing happened.” Gilberto repeated.

A monstrous thing was done that night. But they didn’t feel guilty. Pablo was gone. Life was already better. It is from this point onwards that the most unexplainable things were to happen. Things they thought they didn’t deserve. Things they brought on to themselves. Because karma only sees what is done as wrong or right, and not the intention behind it. Things that we send around, comes back to us. Often in ways we never would have anticipated. However, had Jon and Gilberto known what the future held after the crime they committed, they still wouldn’t take any of it back. In fact if only they could do it twenty times more they would do so in a heartbeat.