Chapter 12
When I got home from Benji’s later that night, Iván wasn’t there yet, so I put away the leftovers that Joana sent along for him and took a shower to get the pool off myself. Iván swore that the chemicals were good for your skin, but they didn’t appear to be great for blonde hair, and I couldn’t seem to get used to a swim cap.
When I got out, I saw that I had a message from Anouk. It was the first I had heard from her in weeks. I had been trying to get in touch, but the studio was still closed, and she hadn’t started her winter session of classes yet. For someone who needed money, this really wasn’t a good tack to take.
I called her back. “Anouk? Where are you?”
“I’m on my way home. Back to California.” I could hear the radio blaring in the background and the wind rushing. She was in her car.
“Where have you been? Why haven’t you answered me?”
Anouk still didn’t answer me. “Listen, can you come by the studio tomorrow?” she asked instead.
“Well, sure. As far as I know, I still work for you. Is that right?”
“Of course. Have you been practicing?”
No. “Some. A little,” I clarified. I had danced on New Year’s Eve, so that counted for something. Whenever I thought of that night, I felt my heart start to race.
“Get ready for a workout, then.” She sounded almost gleeful.
“Ok, I’ll see you tomorrow.” I wondered what she had been up to.
I heard the front door close and came down quickly. “Hey!” I couldn’t really stop myself. I ran over and put my arms around him.
“This is a nice way to come home. What have I done to deserve it?”
“Everything,” I told him. “Thank you for everything you did with Benji. Thank you for everything.”
“I like him,” Iván told me. He settled his chin on my head. “He’s a nice kid.”
“He is a nice kid.” I probably could have stood there forever, but I wanted him to eat. I heated up Joana’s excellent fish stew and told him about hearing from Anouk, and about Benji explaining to me where baby geese came from. He laughed so hard at Benji’s sex ed that he almost spit out the stew. Iván told me about the swimmers on the team and how they were all doing, and about a difference of opinion he had with the head coach, Christos. It sounded like a serious difference of opinion.
“You always remember that he’s your boss, right?” I asked him cautiously.
“We’re co-workers.”
“Yes, but he’s the head coach, and you’re the assistant.”
“I have more experience than he does.”
I was getting exasperated. “Yes, as a swimmer, you do. But as a coach, he does.”
“Sure, but…”
“He’s also older than you are.” I cleared my throat. “Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo.”
Iván stared at me. “What?”
I put another helping of stew into his bowl. “I remember someone telling me that to speak a language well, you have to have the sayings.” And I had been reading the Spanish proverb book a lot.
“Do you know what you just said?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Mostly.” Iván laughed until he wiped tears from his eyes, then he leaned over the table and kissed me. On the lips.
I went down to Dance by Anouk right after my morning class the next day. The Tibetan bowl store had closed down before Christmas and Anouk’s new tenant was moving in. I watched for a while with narrowed eyes. Oh, glory.
“Anouk?” I yelled, yanking open the studio door. “Did you really rent the shop to a guy selling spiders?”
“He had the security deposit. In cash.” She put down her cigarette. “How about a hug and a ‘Happy New Year?’”
I gave her both. “But really, spiders?”
“He assures me they’re properly caged,” she said.
“Wait, they’re in cages?” That meant bars. I felt pretty sure that spiders could get through bars.
“Housed, whatever!” Anouk got mad and forgot about her French accent. “God damn it, did you hear me say that he had the security deposit?”
“Sorry, sorry. Ok, tell me what you’ve been doing! Where did you go?”
“I had to try to get the money somehow. So I went to Vegas.”
“Oh, Anouk…”
“It was either that or the ponies. I did make some back.”
“How much do you owe now?” I asked, and held my breath.
“Only fifty-eight thousand!”
Only fifty-eight thousand. “Ok, well, it sounds like you had a real run of luck.”
“I sure did. I also cleared up the IRS thing.”
I narrowed my eyes. “How did you do that?”
Anouk waved her hand. “Don’t worry about it! Listen, the best part is, I also have a potential investor.”
I stared at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I met someone who wants to invest in the studio. In Dance by Anouk. He has some money he wants to put somewhere, and I’m certainly willing to take it.”
I pulled my lip with my teeth. “Anouk, that sounds a little…weird. Where did you meet this investor? What do you know about him?”
“I met him at a casino. I’m not sure what he does, but he has a lot of cash. He wants to put some into the studio but be a silent partner. Well, the money would come from some kind of company, not from him directly.”
Alarm bells were clanging wildly in my head. “That sounds even weirder. How many people want to put money in dance studios? I mean, as an investment, it’s a pretty poor one.”
“I resent that, Maura.”
“Anouk, you know that you barely make a living off this. Some guy is just going to give you fifty-eight thousand—”
“Try a hundred thousand. Can you believe it?”
I nearly fainted. “No. No, I can’t believe it. Anouk, this sounds bad, like he’s trying to launder some money, maybe. Hang on, you haven’t signed anything, have you? Or taken any money from him?”
“I just made him show it to me. The money.”
“He showed you one hundred thousand dollars in cash? This is insane! Anouk—”
“It’s my fucking business, Maura, and I want to save it. I made a little mistake with my gambling and Toby is going to give me a chance to fix it.”
She wouldn’t talk to me about it anymore, not another word. I kept trying until she turned up some music, very loudly, and walked out of the room. “Start practicing!” she hollered over her shoulder. “Discussion over!”
I did start to practice, and found myself to be pretty out of shape. After a while I gave up, too preoccupied by what she had told me to focus on dance. I went into the office and we put together fliers and an email blast to start the winter session a few weeks late.
As I was leaving the studio for the day, I stopped. “You know I’m only concerned because I care, right?” I asked Anouk.
“Oui, I know.” She blew a smoke ring. “I wouldn’t get involved with Toby if I thought there was another option. I did the best I could at the tables, I raised the rent on the spider guy, I tried to get the delinquent accounts to pay up, and I applied for the second mortgage. Toby is as good as I’m going to get, or I’m going to lose the building. If that happens, I’m done. I’ll never find another space here in town.”
I nodded. “I understand. This just makes me very, very worried. Have you talked to your accountant?”
“She definitely flew the coup. I heard she’s in Micronesia.”
Oh, glory.
Iván picked me up and we drove to get Benji at school to go to San Francisco.
“You seem preoccupied,” he mentioned.
“I think Anouk is getting herself in trouble,” I blurted out. I told him the long story of Anouk, her gambling, her debt, and now Toby, the guy with 100 thousand dollars in a briefcase.
“You should quit. Immediately,” he said. “She’s messing around with criminals. The gambling was bad enough.”
“No, I can’t quit.”
“There are other dance studios.”
“Iván, I’ve known her for five years. She’s my friend, too. I’m not going to quit and leave her when she needs me.”
“She doesn’t need you. She has her friend Toby now.”
“All the more reason for me to stay and get her out of this mess,” I told him, annoyed.
He was clearly pissed at me too, which did not lead to a very congenial atmosphere on our way to the city with Benji. The bad feelings were disguised by Benji’s excitement and happiness at meeting the Blazer guys, but I was not feeling any cheerier. I couldn’t believe that Anouk had gotten herself into such a mess, and then further, that Iván thought I should just ditch her. What if I ever did something dumb? Would he want to take off and leave me hanging, like he was telling me to do to Anouk? I thought about it. Really, he had been pushing me to ditch Mikey, too. He had wanted to throw away his stuff. In the end, though, Iván himself had carried Mikey’s boxes to the moving truck, and they were all stacked in his garage. I sighed.
My mood was not brightened when we parked and I looked at the building directory in the lobby. I learned that the game developers’ office was on the 31st and 32nd floors.
“Are you kidding me?” I asked, looking at Iván.
“I'm sorry.” He held up his hands. “I didn’t even think about it.”
“No, why would you? It’s so stupid to have this problem.” I was furious, but with myself. Was I going to cause a scene? Show Benji how to be a coward? Hike up 31 floors?
“Maura, come on!” Benji pulled my hand. “Come on!” I looked at the door that led to the stairs, then I let him lead me.
“I’m going to go up in the elevator with you guys,” I announced. My voice only shook a little.
“Are you sure?” Iván asked. He may have been mad at me, but he still cared.
“I have to do it sometime,” I told him. Maybe today would be the day.
Benji pressed the up button. We all watched the number on the screen above one of the elevators get lower and lower. My pulse pounded harder and harder.
A few people gathered, waiting to go up with us. The doors opened but Iván held out his arm. “Sorry, this is for the three of us only.”
“What are you talking about?” one of the tech guys asked, angrily pulling back the hood of his sweatshirt. “You can’t have an elevator to yourself. Do you know who I work for?”
Iván turned to him. “I don’t really care.” His voice was very deep, and I was reminded of how big he was as he leaned a little over the other guy. “Take another elevator. Maura, Ben.” He gestured for us to step in.
The three of us got on. “Those people are mad,” I said. My voice sounded like someone else.
“They’ll get over it.”
Benji pushed the button and the doors slid closed, and I started to shake. Iván held out his arms and I grabbed on to him, closing my eyes and trying not to faint. The elevator was new and smooth but I could feel us start to go up. My head was throbbing along to the beat of my heart, which I thought was going to pound out of my tightly constricted chest.
“Is Maura ok?” Benji’s voice sounded like it was coming from far away.
“She’s afraid,” Iván told him.
I wasn’t afraid; I was starting to lose my mind to utter, black terror. I couldn’t get a breath. I felt Benji put his arms around me, hugging my back. I fought to calm myself down. He didn’t deserve a nanny in the loony bin.
Ding. The movement of the elevator stopped and faintly, I heard the sound of the doors opening. “Let’s go,” Iván said to me, and since my legs weren’t really working, he kind of picked me up around my waist and carried me.
“Maura?” I opened my eyes to Benji’s face, about an inch from my own.
“Are we here?” I whispered.
“We’re here.”
I peeled my head off Iván and saw that we were, in fact off the elevator, in a nice-looking lobby with a receptionist staring at us very curiously. I felt dizzy and a little confused.
“We’re here to see Siarheij and Chalermchai,” Iván told the receptionist. He maneuvered me over to a chair, which was fortunate because I wasn’t quite up to standing. But I had done it. I had gone up in an elevator, 31 floors. I hadn’t ever been so high in a building.
I recognized Siarheij, one of the Blazer creators, as the guy I had sat next to at the dinner with Iván’s retinue so long ago, the one who had passed out or gone to sleep and never spoken to me. Awake and sober, he was a lot nicer. He showed us all around the giant office, pointing out the different teams of people working on the games. He talked to Benji how things went from an idea to a reality, a long, complicated process. He also drew our attention to the aquarium wall, the indoor forest, the special cafeteria with the chef making made-to-order sushi, and the nap room. Their office was something else.
Benji was fascinated and asked a million questions. Iván kept asking things too, about the expenses, about their next project, about a ton of other things as well. I just drifted along, feeling proud of myself but already dreading the trip down, and trying to make my heart stop thumping like a scared rabbit’s.
“Iván!” Another guy came up to say hello. They didn’t have offices, and he had been swinging around in a chair made of rope, suspended from the ceiling.
“Chalermchai.” They shook hands. “Maura and Ben, this is the co-founder of the company.”
“I know,” Benji said, his eyes huge. “I’m a big fan.” The man shook his hand too.
“We’re always glad to have you stop in,” Chalermchai told Iván.
“Why?” Benji asked him.
“Iván was one of our earliest investors. I’m glad we could pay it off for you, man.”
I turned to Iván in stunned surprise. I had looked up this company and I knew how much it was worth. The game Blazer wasn’t their only success, it was one of a line of them.
Iván smiled. “I’m glad, too. Let’s show Ben the playroom.”
“The playroom?” I managed to ask. And it was, in fact, an indoor playground, with a ball pit, rings to hang from, and adult-sized slides and swings.
“Can I play?” Benji asked, and Chalermchai nodded.
“Go to town, man.”
Benji acted more like a kid on this adult playground than he did on the ones in his neighborhood. Finally, I roused myself to tell him that it was time to go. He was red-faced and panting, and beaming.
“This was the best day ever,” he kept saying. “This is where I want to work when I grow up. Maura, did you see all the fish?”
I thought I was going to throw up as we waited for the elevator. “You came up and it was all right,” Iván said to me.
“I’ll be fine,” I said hoarsely. The numbers showed the elevator getting closer.
“Why are you afraid?” Benji asked me.
“I just am. Everyone’s afraid of something. Like how you get freaked out crossing the street,” I said.
“But that makes sense, because a car could come and hit us like that boy at my school. This is just an elevator. Unless, are you thinking it will fall?”
“That’s enough, Ben,” Iván said.
I just held out my arms to Benji. “Come here, buddy. I need a little moral support.” Physical, too. I could lean on him so I didn’t fall down.
Instead, I leaned on Iván. He held the both of us upright until we got to the lobby.
“It wasn’t that bad,” I told him. “We’re down, right?”
“You’re as white as a ghost.” He was looking at me with a very worried face. “Are you going to faint?”
“Not anymore.”
We took a moment to sit in a coffeeshop nearby to calm down a little bit. It had been an extremely exciting day for everyone. Maybe, even, a little too much excitement. Iván had his usual massive espresso, but I went for herbal tea. The one called “Relaxe.”
Benji fell asleep in the car on the way home and I did, too.
∞
“I have an idea.”
“Yes?” I was holding swatches of woven shades up to the windows. Iván wanted me to pick them, and I wanted to get it right because to buy shades for the whole downstairs was way more money than Robin’s old car had cost. “Is this too rustic for you?”
“I like it. But get whatever you think is best. Do you want to hear my idea?”
I put down the swatches. “Yes. What is your big idea?”
“I remember you talking about going to Santa Monica as a kid and how you liked it.”
“Yeah. That was a fun day.” I remembered the rides and the treats at the pier. Seeing the ocean.
“What if we go to Santa Cruz this weekend after my Saturday practice? This is going to be my last time to go for a while, with the meets, and with my parents coming.”
“Really? We could just go?” I started to get excited. I loved going new places, and for a California native, I hadn’t seen very much of the state besides what was visible from the I-5.
“Sure we can go. Why not? We can stay there for the day, or for the night at a hotel, if you want to stay over. We could leave early in the morning on Sunday for me to get back for swim practice.”
Stay the night together in a hotel. Me and Iván.
He looked at me. “Stop biting your lip, this isn’t some kind of seduction thing.” He laughed, but it sounded angry.
“Iván, I’m sorry.”
He shook his head, but got up from the table and put his dishes in the sink.
“No, I’m really sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” I held up my hand when he turned to me, looking concerned. “Stop. Don’t say anything nice.”
“I was going to say that you have jam on your cheek.”
“Really?” He nodded and handed me a napkin and I wiped my face. I tried to think of what I wanted to say. “Any other woman, in the whole world, would throw herself at you. They probably already have.” I eyed him, and he wasn’t disagreeing. “Is that why you’re interested in me? Because I’m the opposite of literally every other female on the planet?”
“I’m interested in you because of you. Thank you, also, for building up my ego.”
“Iván.” All of a sudden I choked up, like the idiot I was. He had suggested something fun and nice, and I had ruined it by reading something into it, and now he was angry. I knew this was going to happen. He was tired of me. He was already sick of how ridiculous I was. I wished New Year’s Eve had never happened. I took a step back.
“I’m angry at myself, Maura.”
I stared at him, not understanding. “For what?”
He kind of threw up his hands. “Because, yes, there have been a lot of women. I never even thought twice about it, all the stupid lines, speaking in Spanish to them, the smoldering looks, using so many tricks of the trade. And now, to think of doing those kinds of things with you, I just feel…foolish. I feel stupid.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how to proceed.”
“Can we please just do what we’ve been doing?” Iván was quiet, watching me. “I don’t know how to explain this to you.” I thought for a second. “It’s almost like, for a long time I’ve been waiting for someone to pull the rug out from under me. I thought I couldn’t ever depend on anyone, not ever. Not Robin, and as much as I always wanted to, not Mikey, either.” That was hard to admit. “I know I love Mikey, but I couldn’t ever trust him. If I needed someone, I really needed someone, I wouldn’t know who to call. Now I feel like I have you. Like if things went really bad, and I didn’t have anywhere to go, or I was hungry, or someone hurt me, I could call you. You’d be there.” I rubbed the tears off my face with the napkin I was holding. “Can we just keep going like that? Iván, I need you. I really need you. That’s not enough, but…”
“Can I hug you now?”
“Yes, please.” I took a long, shuddering breath as his arms went around me.
I watched Iván’s practice on Saturday morning and then we drove south to Santa Cruz, taking the scenic way down Highway 1. The California coast on this sunny January morning was practically the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. I loved looking at the ocean, endless and blue.
“I have a surprise,” Iván told me.
“Yes?”
“Look in my wallet,” he instructed, and I did.
“You carry way too much cash. What if you got pickpocketed? Or mugged?”
“Look in the little pocket.”
I pulled out the white card. His handsome, smiling face looked up at me from it. “Iván! You’re a licensed driver!”
“I passed on the first try,” he bragged, then added, “The second time I went.”
“I’m very proud. And very glad that I don’t have to worry about you getting arrested.”
“Remember when you found out that I didn’t have a license? You were worried, even back then.”
“Well, yes,” I said. “I didn’t want anything to happen to you, a visitor to our country.”
He glanced over, eyebrows raised.
“Maybe I liked you, a little,” I admitted.
“Even then, you found me irresistible,” he said, smiling.
“It was your humility that attracted me.”
His laughter filled the car.
“No, you can’t park there,” I told him when we got to Santa Cruz. I pointed. “See the sign?”
Iván never bothered with parking rules. “We won’t be here that long.”
“They’ll tow. What would you do then?”
“I’ve never been towed in my life,” he said, but we drove out onto the pier and parked there instead.
“Look! Is that a seal? Or a sea lion?” I leaned over the railing and to look at the water.
Iván looked too, and suddenly barked so loudly that I almost fell in. The animal looked up.
“Seal,” he said confidently.
I was laughing so hard that I had to hang onto the rail for a minute. “That’s how you identify animals? By calling to them in their native languages?”
“Don’t be silly.” He put his arm around me. “I can only speak seal.”
The boardwalk wasn’t too crowded, even on this nice day. A lot of people were staring at Iván, either recognizing him or just thinking he had to be an actor or model because no other human would be so good-looking. But no one was bothering him. He bought us both wristbands and we looked at all the rides. “Which one to you want to go on first?” I was ridiculously excited.
He smiled at me. “You pick.”
I picked the old roller coaster, the wooden one I had seen in movies. “Do you like roller coasters?” I asked as we waited in line.
“Sure. I haven’t been on one in a long time.”
“Me, neither.” We heard the sounds of clanking, followed by screams. “But I loved them when I was a kid. I was just barely tall enough to get on.”
“You went just the once?”
I nodded. “It was after my mom’s funeral. I mean, it wasn’t much of a funeral, since she was practically indigent. A caseworker felt really bad for me and Mikey, because our mom had died and we hadn’t seen each other in so long. She emptied out her own wallet to take us on the rides and buy us cotton candy. It was really, really nice of her. It was such a strange day, when I look back on it. I saw the ocean for the first time. I kept thinking I should miss my mom…” I shook myself. “That’s enough of that! Not exactly appropriate for a fun day out.”
Iván was silent. I considered for a moment. “You know, I can’t think why I never went back when I was older and could take myself.” And why I hadn’t ever come to Santa Cruz before, either? It seemed like I had always been too busy, with Robin, with Mikey, with jobs, with school. “You know what I’d really like to do? I’d like to go to Yosemite. And Lake Tahoe. And Joshua Tree, and Hearst Castle.” I paused. “There are really a lot of places I’d like to go just in California.”
“If you can fly, we can go to even more places, all over.”
He always said “we.” “Maybe I can fly. I went in the elevator.”
“You did.” He kissed my forehead.
The roller coaster was so fun, so, so fun! I screamed my head off as we went up and down and around. As it clanked to a stop I looked at Iván. He had been very quiet.
“Hey, are you all right?” I looked closer. He looked a little green.
“Fine,” he bit out. “I just want to sit for a minute.”
We slowly walked down the ramp back to the boardwalk. “Why don’t you sit here, and I’ll get you some water?” I directed him to a table and he eased himself down on the bench. He really looked close to puking. I came back with a water bottle and he took a tiny sip.
“I’m better. It’s fine.” He rubbed his forehead.
“Did you ever get sick like that before?” I asked him.
“Never in my life. We would ride all day, the one that went in a corkscrew…” He trailed off and took another small sip.
“Maybe it’s better not to talk about it. Want to walk a little?”
Iván nodded. I put his arm around my shoulders so he could lean on me if he needed to. His color got better as we walked in the ocean breeze.
“I think you start getting more motion sickness as you get older,” I commented.
His head snapped up and he looked horrified. “Are you saying that I’m old? Maura, you kick a man when he’s down.”
I laughed. “You have a few good years yet. Oh, look!” I pointed at another ride, a little swing that went forward and back a few inches while suspended about a foot off the ground. A gaggle of toddlers was getting strapped into it by their parents. “Maybe you could go on that one. Oh, no, sorry, there’s a height limit. You’re too tall.”
“Ha ha.” He looked a little mournful, so I went on my tiptoes and kissed his cheek and rubbed my face against his.
“I like you, even though you’re too tall. And old,” I told him.
“I like you, even though you’re cruel to a sick senior citizen.”
We went instead on the slow-moving chairs suspended high above the boardwalk, looking out across the ocean and up to the mountains. I put my head on Iván’s shoulder and felt so full of happiness that it was hard to keep it in.