All the time in the world - [on going home]

            We did not fight.  Nothing was wrong.  Life in Miami with Carla was good.  But the realities of American life for a Cuban exile didn't always seem so real, in particular to me.  Miami, a city on the fringe of Latin America, where my native language of Spanish is almost the first language of the city, is a place where two profoundly different cultures co-exist, with no understanding of each other.  A place where the myths of Cuba helped convince me to make this trip to find out what was taken away from me. 

            The flight was quick, despite the Nassau detour.

            Perhaps it was presumptuous of me to assume that finding where I've come from would be easy.   I began the journey with so little information, since my birth records were destroyed.   I just began to speak to people who I'd been vaguely told could provide me with information by my adopted family in Miami.  It wasn't much.  There were places I was told that I should not go.  There were things I should and should not do.  I ignored all of this.  I proceeded through blind ignorance.  Leads led to blind alleys, which turned up nothing.

            Back at the hotel I came to dread my wife's evening phone calls not because it was full of news about my life back in Miami, people she's seen, things that required my attention, but because of her questions that would inevitably deal with what I had been doing.  And my inevitable answer which she had heard the evening before.  And perhaps more than this, it was Carla's uneasy suggestions that I come back home, which were more difficult to respond to.  Instead, I grew more determined.  I planned tomorrow as if today had not happened.

            A chance encounter with the wife of my Overton neighbor, Laura, whom I did not tell of my plans to come here, changed all that.  At first I wondered, was I being followed?  Why was Laura in Cuba?  In all of the years that Carla and I lived next to her, she seemed disinterested in her homeland.  She flaunted her American citizenship. 

            On the phone that evening, I asked Carla if she mentioned anything about this trip to Laura.  She said she didn’t seem to remember.  Carla always didn't seem to remember things, even important things sometimes.

            I began to see Laura all over the city.  In places that I should not have seen her, I began to wonder why.

            Late one evening, when the air was warm and soft, even at midnight, the glass doors had been left open onto the hotel terrace overlooking the bay, she came out, and sat down next to me.  She slowly told me the reason for her journey to Cuba.  She told me that that it was she I was looking for.  The neighbor I had known as a child, the neighbor who watched me grew through her tears, and frustration.  The neighbor who was my mother.