Chapter 10
On Saturday morning, I woke up early to a very quiet house. Iván was considerate in the mornings if I was asleep; he minimized his bumping and stamping, and for someone as large as he was, he moved very quietly. But I liked hearing him and knowing that he was in the apartment.
This was too quiet. I flung myself out of bed and collected the supplies I would need for the day: rags, paper towels, buckets, sponges, the vacuum, mops, every cleaning product in the apartment, and I planned to stop along the way to pick up more. I was scrubbing the new house today from top to bottom to get it ready for us to move in. Through the magic of a seven-day close, electronic signatures, and a big pile of money, it was officially Iván’s.
Six hours later, I had done the upstairs. I lay on the newly clean floor, exhausted. I had started at the ceilings and worked my way down. I had tried to start at the attic, but when I pulled down the door in the hallway about four spiders fell down on me, so that had been it for me up there.
“El baño,” I said. “Limpiar el baño.” I had been listening to a language learning app while I cleaned that promised to teach you Spanish in 90 seconds or something like that. “La casa es suegro.” I felt like I was getting better already.
Iván and I had talked numerous times, in English for the most part. His flight had been ok and he was feeling good, too. He showed me around his parents’ house, walking with his phone held in front of him. He made me meet his mom and dad on a video chat too, which was extremely awkward. We kept nodding and smiling and talking over each other, then simultaneously stopping and apologizing, until Iván took the phone back, sure that we were now all best friends. I sent him pictures of the locksmith changing the locks and another shot of the new keys in my hand so he would relax about that.
Every time we hung up or I got a message or a picture from him, I got the throat pomelo. The holiday season was just really rough for people.
I kept busy when I got back to the apartment in San Francisco, too, by packing up most of the kitchen. Finally, I got so tired that I had to stop for the day. I took a shower to wash the layers of dirt off my body, then I wandered around the apartment for a while. Iván and I didn’t do much in the way of big nights out—dinner or a movie was an occasion for me and he seemed to have vanquished the need for the retinue. But I was feeling restless, and kind of strange. I walked into Iván’s room and looked at his bed, remembering how I had curled up next to him, the feeling of his arm around me.
I had changed the sheets since he’d lain sick in them, but the bed still was all Iván. I crawled in and this time I curled up with his pillow. I felt a little better.
Sunday was another big day of cleaning, this time the ground floor of the new house. La cocina, la sala, el borrego, el comedor. Iván was at his grandma’s for the day, so I got another video tour and met a thousand relatives, some of whom spoke no English and made me redouble my efforts to pick it up on my end. El horno, el grillo, el lavaplatos, la nevera.
Fatigada. That’s what I was. At the end of the day I had a headache and I went right back to Iván’s bed. Sola.
Monday morning Benji and I went to our big show at the planetarium, and before our extra-fun meeting with the plumber, we went back to his house to regroup and have lunch with Joana. I had asked him in the car on the way to the planetarium how the weekend had gone.
“Was your dad home?” I casually threw out.
“No, I don’t know where he was. My mom didn’t say anything about him.”
“Yeah? What did you guys do?”
“She was on the phone all the time or working on her laptop and I did Blazer,” he said. “Joana left good stuff for me to eat.” It made my heart ache to hear him, the poor little guy. I was extra huggy and lovey as we walked into the planetarium from the parking lot until he said, “Ugh, Maura! Quit touching me!”
Now we pulled down his street with him explaining to me what the deal was with Pluto. He had a lot to say on the subject.
“Is that my mom’s car in the driveway?” Benji leaned forward in the seat. “Why is she home now?”
I had no idea.
“Oh,” Undine said when we walked in, and the corners of her mouth turned down. “Why aren’t you in school?”
“He’s on vacation for the holidays,” I explained, my hand on Benji’s shoulder.
“Well, actually that’s great, because I didn’t remember where the school was to go get him,” Undine said. She turned to her son. “Guess what? We’re leaving for Atlanta!”
“Today?” Benji asked.
“Go pack,” his mother told him, and looked back down at her phone.
Yelling “Yay! Yay!” he pounded up the stairs.
Undine glanced up at me, and I waited. This could go very poorly if she knew that I had anything to do with the disappearance of Mr. Dorset. Suddenly she broke into a huge smile that didn’t move a muscle around her eyes or in her forehead. She leaped forward and hugged me in a bruising grip. I hadn’t felt so uncomfortable since I’d last seen her husband.
“You’re a deep one,” she told me, her cheek crushed against mine. Her perfume was overwhelming, gag-inducing. In such close proximity to her, it burned my nose. She finally let me go.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said carefully.
“I didn’t think you were planning to help me. But getting Mr. Dorset arrested? It was genius. How did you know about the coke in his car?”
My mouth fell open. “The coke?”
She laughed. “Ok, you can play dumb! Possession with intent is no joke, on top of the drunk driving. He blew a .21, the moron. He had been out drinking all afternoon, I’ve been told.” She laughed again. “He had gotten fired that day for harassing a junior associate.” She tilted her head, studying me. “Was that why you turned him in? Because he was playing around on you?”
She was his wife! I was almost too stunned to speak. “Where is Mr. Dorset now?”
“Out on bail. He didn’t come back here! You haven’t seen him either?” She smiled happily. “Really, Maura, I can’t thank you enough.” She held out an envelope to me. I just stared at it. “Here! Take it!”
My hand didn’t move. “What is that?”
“Call it your Christmas bonus.” Undine winked at me. “I owe you, sister.”
“I can’t take that, Mrs. Dorset. I didn’t…” Well, I had called the police, but not because I was trying to help her in some weird scheming way. “I can’t take that.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Playing the long game? You remind me a lot of myself, Maura. Impressive.”
No, nauseating. “I’m going to help Benji pack,” I said, edging toward the stairs.
“Oh, I meant to ask. Can you come with us?”
“To Atlanta?”
She nodded. “I have a lot to do and it’s so hard to keep track of Benji. The airplane…”
Oh, glory. I doubted she had ever kept track of him for one single moment in her life. She just didn’t want to deal with him at all.
“I’m sorry, I can’t go with you.”
Undine sighed. “Well, I guess he can stay with my mom once we get there.”
“I think he would really like that,” I encouraged her, and she shrugged. I hoped that she would decide that ditching him with his grandma, whom he loved, was the way to go.
Benji was enthusiastically throwing things into a bag. “Buddy, I don’t think you need your mask and snorkel, right?” I took everything out and started folding, instead of making clothes balls as he had been doing. “Are you excited to see your family?”
“Yes!” He was dancing. I’d never seen him so happy.
“Hey, why don’t you send an email to your grandma, or give her a call and let her know that you’re coming? Maybe she can talk to your mom about letting you stay over.”
He got even more excited. “She makes pancakes in different shapes! And there are bugs the size of golf balls outside her house!”
“Very cool,” I told him. He sounded like the 10-year-old that he was.
It wasn’t too much longer that Undine was yelling up the stairs that it was time to go. “Bye,” Benji said briefly, and ran out into the hall, dragging his suitcase.
I had a Christmas present for him, but I had thought I had another few days to give it to him. “Ok, bye, Benji.” I followed him out of the bedroom and watched him bump down the stairs with his bag. My eyes were filling up and I blinked quickly.
Halfway down the stairs he dropped the suitcase, ran back up to me, and threw his arms around my waist. “Merry Christmas, Maura.”
“Merry Christmas, buddy.” I held him tight and a tear dripped onto his head.
When the whirlwind that was Undine was gone, taking Benji with her, I went into the kitchen to find Joana. She was taking down the decorations we had just put up and looked at me guiltily. “I figured with Benji gone—”
I waved my hand and shook my head, sinking down in a chair. “No, it’s ok. It was a little makeshift, anyway. Give me a minute and then I’ll help you.”
“You ok?” she asked, looking at me curiously.
“Yeah,” I sighed. “I guess.”
“Lonely without your big guy?”
“Benji?”
“Maura! I meant Iván!”
“No, don’t be silly. Oh, look at this. It’s so cute.” I showed her a picture of Iván with his nephew. “Isn’t he adorable? They look so much alike!”
She smiled at the picture. “Very handsome, both of them.”
I flipped through more pictures he had sent me. “What happened here today with Mrs. Dorset? What was the hurry to get out of town?”
“I have no idea,” Joana told me. “She scared the shit out of me, coming home in the middle of the day. She just said they were leaving and I had to get the suitcases out.”
“She told me Mr. Dorset got fired and is out on bail. He had drugs in his car when the police stopped him.”
She pursed her lips. “I don’t doubt it, with these people. I’m certainly not going to spend an extra minute around here just in case he comes back. And if he got fired, we might be looking for other jobs.” She frowned, thinking. “Although, I always got the feeling that she’s the real moneymaker.”
I put the phone away and rested my chin in my hand. Then that got to feel a little heavy, so I rested my head on the table for a second.
“Maura?”
I jerked up. “Sorry. I’m tired. I need to go meet the plumber at Iván’s house.”
“Have some lunch first,” Joana urged me.
I shook my head. “No thanks. I’m going to sound like Benji, but I’m not very hungry. What time should I come to Ana Lívia’s on Christmas?”
“As early as you want,” she told me. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
I nodded. “See you in a couple days.”
The plumber was generally impressed with the state of the pipes. He also liked the tilework, and in his business, he had seen a lot of bathrooms. After talking to him for a while, I tried to start cleaning the pool house (la piscina), with the idea that I’d also do the little apartment over the garage (el garaje), but suddenly I felt so tired I could barely keep my eyes open. I drove slowly and carefully over to San Francisco and dragged myself up the stairs to the 16th floor. By the time I got to the apartment, I was kind of crying.
I pulled myself together. I didn’t feel great—so what? The world wasn’t going to stop spinning. Benji and Iván were both gone. Yeah, people had left before, but I thought there was a good possibility that both of them would come back. They both had strong ties to the community, and Iván was employed. He also had a foreign passport and usually carried large amounts of cash. If they were being considered for bail, Benji was definitely the safer bet.
They would come back. I would just rest a little and when I got up I’d feel better, and finish packing the kitchen. I went without thinking to the master bedroom and fell immediately asleep.
I woke up to my phone and blearily hit it like I had done to my old alarm clock years ago. “Hello? Hello?”
“Maura? Why haven’t you been answering? What’s the matter?” Iván sounded upset.
I looked at the clock. Seven pm California time meant…oh, I was tired. I pulled myself together. It meant four in the morning in Spain.
“Nothing’s the matter,” I told him, but had to stop talking when a fit of coughing overcame me.
“You got sick,” he said flatly. “You got what I had.”
“I’m fine,” I told him again. “I was just taking a nap. Hey, what are you doing up so early?”
There was silence on the line for a moment. “I had trouble sleeping. Time change.”
I rubbed my aching head and tried to remember the good news I had been meaning to tell him. Oh, yeah. “Guess what? I had a plumber come out and check the pipes. Everything looks great. I’ll forward his report when I get it. Now you don’t have to worry.”
There was another big silence.
“Iván?”
“I’m here,” he said finally. “Thank you for having that done. But I wish I was there. I don’t like you being sick, all by yourself.”
“It’s not a big deal,” I assured him. “I can take care of myself. I just need to sleep a little.”
“Do you have a fever?”
“Probably not,” I hedged.
“Did you have dinner?”
“I’m getting up to eat now,” I lied. We talked a little more. I finally got off the phone with him and lay flat on my back, wishing that every part of my body would stop aching. I had a fleeting thought about getting some water and some medicine to take down the fever I was sure I had, but then I closed my eyes and fell back asleep.
∞
“Joana?”
“Maura? You sound awful!”
“I’m sorry to call you on Christmas, but I’m not going to be able to come. I don’t feel very well and I don’t want to get anyone sick.”
“Oh, that’s too bad! Poor baby. Do you want me to come over later? I can bring you a plate, a ton of leftovers. We always have too much.”
“No thank you,” I mumbled. I didn’t have much of an appetite. Not for food, or for leaving the bed. I had been hunkered down for the last 48 hours, dragging myself to get some of the medicine I’d bought for Iván and this morning, forcing myself into the shower. I sat on the floor and let the water run over me.
“I’ll call you later,” Joana said.
“I just need to sleep. Merry Christmas.”
Honestly, I’d had some pretty crappy holidays. There was the time it was literally crappy, when a boy in the house I was living in had, um, gastric distress in the toilet, then decided that he would make the situation more interesting by flushing his socks down there too. There was gastric distress coming out from under the bathroom door. Some dripped from the light fixture onto the dining room table below.
There was the time I had moved into a new placement early on the morning of December 25th with a very cranky social worker who would clearly rather have been home with her own kids. That year I got two presents: a red pencil and a roll of tape, used.
Maybe my worst Christmas had been when I was eight and didn’t believe in Santa, at all, but an older girl in the house convinced me that he was real and he would come and bring me a baby doll, which I really wanted. Then when he didn’t, she had told me that Santa didn’t love me. No one loved me. There were days I still dreamed about finding that girl and running her down with a monster truck.
This Christmas was right up there. I thought that maybe I had been sicker in my life, but I couldn’t really remember when. I thought that I had been lonelier, too. But loneliness wasn’t something that was easily measured. I just knew that right now, I felt bad. Really, really bad. Merry F-ing Christmas.
I had been talking to Iván on and off, speaking in my heartiest voice and trying to convince him not to worry and to have fun on his vacation.
“I’m coming home soon,” he had assured me when we last spoke.
“Have a great time with your family! Feliz navidad,” I told him. When we had hung up, I cried like an absolute idiot. I missed everybody. I thought that Mikey might call me because of the holiday, so I kept waking up from dreams in which the phone was ringing but I had missed it, or my voice wouldn’t work to say hello. Then I started to think that maybe he wasn’t calling me because something had happened to him. If it had, somewhere in Mexico, no one would ever know. I would never know, I would just wonder for my whole life. I cried harder.
I woke up to drag myself around the apartment some. I drank a glass of water, spilling it on my shirt when my hands shook and thinking I would freeze to death. I watched a little TV, or tried to, but it hurt my eyes. I literally crawled back into bed, huddled in a miserable lump, hoping that when I woke up again, either Christmas would be over or I’d be dead. I wasn’t sure which one I was truly wanted more.
I jerked awake. There was someone in the apartment. Someone was touching my forehead, brushing hair out of my face. I opened my eyes to a man sitting on the edge of the bed, his lips pursed in concern, his beautiful brown eyes serious.
“Iván?” I croaked. “What are you doing here?” I stared at him. “Where’s your beard?”
The corsair was gone. But he was so incredibly handsome without it, even in my miserable state, he practically took my breath away.
“I shaved,” he said. “I came home.”
I was struggling to sit up but then abandoned the effort. “I feel better,” I told him, and tried to smile. My lips were so dry that the bottom one split. “What day is it?”
“Oh, Maura. Ok, I need to…I’m trying to think of what you did for me. I’m getting you something to eat and tea to drink. Stay there.” He pressed his hand to my cheek. He didn’t need to worry; I wasn’t going anywhere.
After I ate the kind of strange eggs he made and drank the hot tea, and another glass of water, I did feel better, no lie this time. Iván was trying to finger-comb the tangles out of my hair. I hadn’t done anything after my shower—had it been the day before?—and my hair was in knots. “How was your flight? Did you have a good time?” I asked him.
“Everything was fine. It was nice to see everyone.” He paused, and then said, almost angrily, “There are all kinds of programs to help people who are afraid to fly.”
“I don’t know if I’m afraid to fly.”
“Well, we’re going to try it!”
“Why are you so upset?”
He didn’t answer, but got up and came back with the brush from my bathroom. “I’m sorry I’m in your room,” I told him. I started to comb out of my hair. My arms got tired and I put the brush down in my lap, sighing. I had too much hair.
“You’re fine in here,” he told me. He took the brush from me and started gently working on the tangles. “Sit up so I can get the back.”
I did, and leaned forward a little, and ended up resting my head on his chest. He put the brush down and wrapped his arms around me. “Joder, Maura, ¿por qué no me dijiste…why didn’t you tell me how sick you were? Me cago en la mar, you’re burning up.”
“Did you just say something very gross about the ocean?” I felt his laughter rumbling through both of us. “I listened to the Spanish app a lot,” I explained.
“You should have told me.” He rubbed my back. “Can I get you anything else?”
No, I was good. I had exactly everything I needed.
Iván was astonished at the amount of packing I had done, and pretty mad that I had done it at all. “It was supposed to be a nice surprise so you don’t have to pay the movers so much,” I told him the next day when he asked me about the stacked boxes.
“I didn’t want you to be to be here slaving away. I thought you would have a vacation from work, too.” Well, he probably wasn’t going to be impressed by the clean house, then. He stopped himself. “Thank you. But we’re going to let the movers do the rest. If we can get out of here by December thirtieth, they will let me out of the lease and give the apartment to someone else. What do you think? Will you feel up to it?”
“Of course!” Easy to say when I was still lounging in bed. “It won’t take me very long to get my stuff together.”
“You don’t have very much,” he said, frowning.
I made a little motion with my shoulder. At one point, all my belongings had traveled with me in a garbage bag. I had definitely stepped up from that.
Iván was back at the pool, working with the swimmers a lot more since they had more time over the university vacation. He stopped by the new house one day on his way home and, as I suspected, was not happy that I had cleaned it. Grateful, but not happy.
“It’s only fair,” I told him. “I don’t want to be taking advantage…”
He raised his eyebrows and just looked at me, so I cut that out that line of argument.
Our moving day was crazy. It turned out that Iván had a drawerful of medals, from everywhere, including the Olympics. He just kept them tangled up in a drawer. The mover who found them went crazy and everyone came running to look. I packed that box myself. He also had more clothing than a department store and the movers went back and forth, back and forth out of his closet with wardrobe boxes. They were pleasantly surprised by my lack of crap.
Right as they were rolling down the door of the truck, I remembered. “Mikey!”
Iván turned, startled. “What about him?”
“His boxes are in the storage area.”
“Maura, maybe we could leave them. The building manager will toss them for us.”
I stared at him. “I can’t believe you just said that.”
“He was willing to leave it all and go to Mexico. Why would we have to carry his boxes around with us?”
“Fine,” I told him, glaring. “I’ll get them myself. Go ahead and leave with the movers and I’ll get a car over later.” He put his hand on my arm but I pulled it away, stomping ahead of him as he told the big truck to wait, that we had a few more boxes.
The storage area was down a narrow flight of stairs. I felt my heart start to beat harder. I fumbled with the key in the lock.
“Maura? I’ll do this. Go back upstairs,” Iván told me.
I ignored him. This was my brother’s mess, and I was going to do it myself.
It was cold in the storage room and dark. A small aisle was lined with chain link cells packed with people’s extra furniture, skis, cardboard boxes. All the fencing reminded me of visiting Mikey in jail. But it was just so close in here. The ceiling was too low and everything was so confining with the towering piles of stuff. The aisle between the storage units was too constricted. My chest was constricting, too. I dropped the keys and couldn’t find the right one to put into the padlock on the gate to get Mikey’s boxes.
“Hey!” Iván’s hands came down on my shoulder. “Go upstairs, now.”
I had to hold on to the chain links to pull myself along the aisle. When I got outside, I sat down on the front step of the building and took some deep breaths. Oh, glory. It was just as bad as ever.
Iván came up carrying two boxes and directed one of the movers where to go to find the rest. He sat down next to me. “Ok?”
“Fine. Sorry.”
“Let’s go to the car and meet them over at the house.”
We were both quiet as we merged onto the bridge. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for getting all that and storing it for me.”
He nodded, looking at the road.
I figured I should be honest with him. “I told you that after the first year, they didn’t keep Mikey and me placed together, right?”
He nodded again.
“So, it was because he got in a big fight. It was because of me.”
“What happened?”
Oh, this was hard to say. “We were new in the house. There were already two kids there, a boy and a girl, older than Mikey. They told us that they wanted to play hide and seek. The girl said she knew a good place. She took me down to the basement and showed me a box, like soldiers used to have. A little footlocker.” I could hear a whistle in my breathing and tried to calm myself down. Better just to tell him. It wasn’t a big deal. “I didn’t want to get in, but I wanted her to like me and I wanted to play the game. It was small…”
I stopped for a moment and looked out the window, watching the wires holding up the bridge span flash by. “I barely fit inside, even though I was pretty little. I had to curl up with my face on my knees, and she had to sit on the lid to get it closed. It pressed into my back. Then I heard her lock the box, a click from the outside, very faint.” I wiped off my face. “I couldn’t hear anything else through the box and it was totally dark. I couldn’t breathe very well.”
“Maura.” His voice was very deep.
“I don’t know how long I was in there. It was a few hours, at least. I was trying to scream but I couldn’t get a big breath, and no one could hear me inside the box in the basement anyway. Mikey was going crazy, I guess. The other kids told him that I had left, run away, but he knew I wouldn’t leave him. He tore the house apart trying to find me and got into a fight with the bigger boy and the dad too, when he tried to stop them. A physical fight. Finally, the girl admitted where I was. I wasn’t doing so well.”
I tasted a little tang of blood and made myself stop biting my lip. “After a while, I guess they took me to the hospital but I don’t remember. But they took Mikey away. He was only trying to help me, but no one would listen. That was why they put him in a new placement and it was a really bad one.” I blew out a long, quiet breath. “Anyway, that’s why I get scared. I start thinking that I can feel the box pressing on my back and that there’s not enough air.”
A funny noise came out of my chest, like a sob. I cleared my throat. “That’s the story of why I freak out,” I told him. “It happened a long time ago, but I’m still not over it. Maybe I won’t ever be, but I feel like it’s getting a little better. I went in the parking garage and I was on a crowded bus and it was all right.” Oh, glory. That sounded so pathetic.
Iván just reached over and took my hand. Even though with his skills as a driver he probably should have kept both hands on the wheel, I held onto it.