Chapter 9
Dylan drove again, and Iván started a long conversation with him about some of the swimmers he was coaching. Julia was quiet at first, but then she started chiming in with questions and suggestions. She seemed very knowledgeable about coaching.
“You don’t swim, right, Maura?” Dylan asked.
“No,” I said.
“She’s learning,” Iván told him. “I’m an excellent teacher.”
“Of course you are, you conceited ass,” Dylan told him. “What sports did you play when you were a kid?” he directed at me.
“I danced,” I said, looking out the window.
“You did? I didn’t know that. What kind of dance?” Iván asked me.
“Anything anyone would teach me. Ballet, mostly, but I’ve done everything. It was hard to keep it up, but I always tried to find a studio and convince them to take me.” On scholarship. “Now I work at Dance by Anouk,” I explained to Dylan and Julia. “After I work there, before I go to class or to Benji’s, I practice, and on Fridays Anouk gives me a lesson.” I reminded myself to tell Iván about her financial situation.
“I can imagine you as a ballerina,” Julia told me. “You’re so beautiful, and so regal in how you carry yourself.”
“Thank you,” I said quietly.
“That’s how you’re so strong,” Iván commented. “I wondered.”
“Also working out with Benji.” I laughed. “When I drag him out and force him.”
“We’re going to teach him to swim,” Iván said, and took my hand.
“I bet your mom was good at doing those big ballet hair buns for you,” Julia laughed. “My mom had serious skills with making a giant knot to fit under my swim cap.”
I nodded and made a non-committal noise.
“Do your parents still live in Los Angeles?” she asked.
“No.”
“They retired somewhere? That’s nice. My mom was talking about Florida until she heard about the baby,” Julia said. “Where do people go to retire out here? Arizona? The weather is already so beautiful.”
I was freezing, but whatever. “Um, I’m not sure where people retire. I guess I’ll figure that out when I get there. My mom is still in LA, in a way. She died when I was nine.” Iván’s hand tightened on mine.
“Maura, I’m so sorry,” Julia said, her voice breaking a little. “I keep saying the wrong things to you.”
“It’s ok. Really, Julia, it is.” I heard her sniffing a little, so I tried to explain more. “I didn’t know her. I hadn’t lived with her since I was six. She wasn’t a good mom.” I handed her a napkin from my purse.
“Thank you. I’m sorry, I’m sorry I’m crying, too. I’m all hormoned up,” Julia said. She blew her nose.
“It’s really ok.”
She sniffled. “Are you close with your dad?”
“Um, no. My dad is in Pelican Bay. The penitentiary. At least, I think he’s still there.” And I thought he was my dad, but there were some questions.
There was a silence in the car. That’s how it usually got when people heard about me and my background.
“Parents can suck,” Dylan said suddenly. “We’re going to be good,” he told his wife.
“Get off at this exit,” Iván directed him, leaning forward and tapping him on the shoulder.
I looked around, realizing where we were. “Are we going to look at the house?”
“I thought they would want to take a tour.”
“Isn’t there an open house today? I don’t know if I want to see all the other people who want to buy it,” I told him. “Well, I guess if anyone really bugs me, I’ll just shiv them, like I learned from my father.”
There was another silence. Then Iván and Dylan started to laugh, really loud. Julia turned and smiled at me.
There were no other cars on the quiet street when we pulled up. “Wow, I guess this listing wasn’t as popular as the agent thought it would be,” I mentioned. Then I got excited. “Iván, maybe that means you have a better chance at getting it! But people must have rocks in their heads not to want it. It’s the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen,” I told Julia.
Iván led the way up the steps, with Dylan and Julia trailing behind us. “Let’s go in,” Iván said. He pushed open the door.
“Hey, this is a little weird,” I told him, tugging on his arm. “There’s no one here.”
We walked into the living room and he flipped on the lights.
“The open house must have been cancelled. Iván, I know rules don’t bother you too much, but we can’t be in someone else’s house.”
“Yes, that’s true,” he answered. “I’m so glad that it’s our house, then.”
I stopped dead. “What?”
He nodded. “The real estate agent called me last night to tell me they accepted the offer. It’s ours.”
I ran across the room and leaped on him like a lemur, throwing my arms around his neck.
“Are you happy?” he murmured into my ear.
It wasn’t my house, even. “Yes,” I choked out. “Yes.” I was bawling more than Julia.
We showed them the rest of the house when I calmed down, and then I couldn’t stop talking about how great it was. I was much better than the real estate agent. I pointed out all the special features, like the California Faience tiles, the hiding place in the master bedroom under the bookshelf that flipped up, the old niches for telephones.
“My mom will want to hang crosses in them,” Iván said about the niches. “We can take them down when she leaves, like I do in my apartment in Madrid. Remember that apartment, McKenzie? You and Julia liked the terrace.” Dylan suddenly looked furious and Julia turned bright red. Iván laughed like a maniac.
“I can still drive him crazy,” he said to Julia.
“Your time is coming, Marrero,” Dylan growled.
“I’d say it’s already here,” Julia said softly, and when I looked at her in question, she smiled and went on her tiptoes to kiss her husband.
We continued the tour outside in the cold. Northern California was Alaska to me.
“I had to waive inspections to put in a competitive offer, according to the agent, so I’m worried about the plumbing,” Iván mentioned to Dylan.
“Did you know about this obsession of his with pipes?” I asked Julia. I was feeling a lot friendlier to her. It helped that Iván was holding my hand as I said it.
“Dylan had a thing about roofing,” she told me.
We drove them down to the airport and said goodbye. We spent the way home planning, deciding about furniture, colors, plants. The outside of the house looked a little neglected and needed some landscaping and paint.
“Maybe a red door,” Iván suggested, “like at Ana Lívia’s house.”
He remembered that I had liked it at the Thanksgiving party. “I can start doing things over Christmas vacation while you’re in Spain.” He was going home, but I was working full days with Benji when his school ended until the Dorsets went away to Hawaii. Iván had wanted me to go with him, but I needed to work, and I refused to let him buy me a plane ticket anyway. There was also the minor problem of me going on a plane for 11 hours, when I still couldn’t go in the elevator.
Iván frowned. “I don’t want you there alone until we change the locks.”
“You remember that I lived at Mikey’s, right? You don’t even want to know about some of the places I lived as a kid. Your new house is in a very safe neighborhood. I have my stun gun, too.”
“And your shiv.”
“Always,” I told him.
We spent the rest of the day studying and writing. I only had two finals and a paper, but Iván had three and the same essay as I had due for our literature class, which he hated. Toward the end of the night I noticed him coughing.
“Here.” I handed him a mug of tea with honey.
“Thank you. Me pica…I mean, sorry. My throat bothers me." He looked tired. When he was lapsing into Spanish without thinking about it, I knew he was done.
“Go to bed,” I told him. “We have all day tomorrow to work.” He touched a hand across my cheek and left, yawning.
I tried to study for a while longer, but I spent most of my time on the new house, making lists of repairs we needed to make, furniture for different rooms, dates of the flea markets I liked. The first thing I needed to do was hire a plumber to go over everything and give us a written report on the pipes to ease Iván’s mind about that. It was extremely exciting.
I was up before Iván the next morning and made breakfast, not as good as Julia’s, but things I knew he liked. When he didn’t come out after a while, I knocked.
Iván was sprawled, shirtless, across the bed. “I’m feeling sick,” he said in a raspy voice.
I felt his forehead. “I think you have a fever. Can you eat something?”
“I just want to sleep a little.” He turned on his side.
I brought him some more tea, then ran to the drugstore. He didn’t even have a thermometer.
“Yep, one hundred one,” I told him, looking at the tiny screen when I got back. “Here.” I spent the day dosing him with drugstore medicine and some of the herbal pills Anouk swore by. He ate a little toast, then slept more.
“How am I going to take these tests?” he asked me that evening, tired and pale and still feverish. His first exam was the next morning.
I was nervous for him as well. “You studied all along, right? And you’ve kept up with the reading. We’ll medicate you and you’ll be fine.” I hoped.
I drove him over the next morning and he put the seat all the way down to sleep. I waited outside for the three hours, finishing my paper for Aesthetic Lit.
Iván looked dreadful when he came out. I handed him a thermos of soup and he leaned on me.
“I feel like shit,” he said tiredly. “The exam was awful. I failed, I’m sure.”
“Let’s go home.”
“You don’t have to work?” he asked.
“I will later, with Benji. Anouk closed up shop for a while.” She had suddenly announced an unplanned vacation until the new year. She’d told me that everything was fine, she just needed some “headspace.” And 75 thousand bucks.
Iván slept the whole way back to San Francisco and I set him up with more soup, more pills, more liquids before I left. I smoothed my hand over his forehead, feeling his fever. “Call me if you need me,” I told him. If he wasn’t better by the morning, we were going to the doctor. I had gotten him an appointment at the student health services.
He managed a smile and said something under his breath in Spanish.
“Sleep, and I’ll be home soon.” I bent and kissed his head. Sick people always made me feel all maternal.
I ran down the stairs and slowed when I realized that I had parked in the garage. I had been so preoccupied with getting Iván to and from his exam that I had driven in and out without really thinking about it. It wasn’t so bad down there, anyway. Pretty airy. I eyed the elevator. No, I still wasn’t ready for that one.
Benji and I played baseball, our version of it, and I let him do extra homework as a special treat.
“Yay!” he said, looking happily at the screen filled with math problems. We both worked quietly together, but he was a lot cheerier about it than I was.
“Joana, I’m not going to need that room at your cousin’s house,” I told her over dinner. “I hope I didn’t mess him up.”
“No, because I never told him you were interested. I know you a little bit, miss. Can you tell me why you were suddenly wanting to move away from Iván?”
When she put it that way, it sounded just terrible.
“I don’t want to move away from Iván.” I didn’t, not to Sacramento, or Los Angeles, or anywhere else. I gave myself a stern finger wag, internally so Benji and Joana wouldn’t think I was crazy. I would move where it would be best for Mikey and me. That was what I would do. “I just started feeling like I was taking advantage of him.”
“Aren’t you the one who helps him with that homework?”
“He doesn’t really need me. He’s so smart, Joana. It’s not even his native language, and he’s amazing.”
“But you go over everything and fix the small things, right? Lord knows how hard it is to write in another language. I always make little mistakes.”
“Well, yes, I do that.”
“And you make the grocery lists, and help cook the meals, and you organized a schedule for him, didn’t you? So that he would stop being late to work all the time.”
“He could do all that on his own. Anyway, it’s not very much.”
“I’m sure that’s not all you do! Maura, listen to me. I’m telling you that you contribute too. Ok? Enough. Eat your dinner.” She pointed at my plate.
“Joana, you act like my grandma does to me when I visit. You act like Maura does to me!” Benji said.
“Bossy and annoying?” I asked him, and he laughed, showing us a mouthful of black bean stew. “Keep your mouth closed and swallow!”
I texted Iván a few times, trying not to bother him or wake him up, but wanting to make sure that he was ok. He answered eventually that he had gotten up and eaten the dinner I left in the oven and was feeling better. He was working on the essay for Aesthetic Lit, which he had a few choice words about, in two languages. He seemed to be on the mend some.
But the next day his fever was back up, and I dragged him over to the nurse practitioner at student health. The nurse diagnosed a virus and said to do exactly the same things we were doing, and told us good luck on our finals. We both had exams later that morning Afterwards, I thought I had done ok; Iván was less positive.
“I couldn’t keep awake,” he told me, leaning the chair back in the car.
I checked the time. I would barely make it to drop him off in San Francisco then head back over to Benji’s. I was going to cut it close, and I sped back and forth across the bridge.
And I got a ticket doing it, a wonderful addition to my day. Due to my familial and personal experience with the police, I was so nervous when she pulled me over that I thought she was going to arrest me for suspicion of something else. I got to Benji’s sweaty and anxious. It was raining, so we did what one of my foster parents had termed “calisthenics” in his bedroom: jumping jacks and push-ups and sit-ups. Even though I tried to make it a fun game like we were soldiers in training, Benji hated it and wouldn’t speak to me. It was a fun evening.
It got even better when Mr. Dorset’s sleek silver car pulled up the driveway early, before I had a chance to leave. Benji saw me looking out the window at the driveway.
“Is that my dad?” he asked me, and I nodded.
“Do you want to go down and say hello?”
He shrugged, and I didn’t push it. I wasn’t actually sure if they had any communication, verbal or otherwise, during the week (the only person I knew Benji talked to from his family was his grandma—she was a huge emailer). I figured that maybe the three of them had to speak to each other on the weekends when Joana and I weren’t there, but there was no assurance of that, either. Dylan had said that sometimes parents could suck. Benji’s sure did.
“Maura?” Joana stood at the bedroom door, looking a little nervous. “Mr. Dorset would like to talk to you.”
I stood slowly, my heart sinking. “Ok. Benji, I’m going to say goodbye now. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Bye,” he said, without turning his head. He was still mad about the calisthenics.
“What does he want?” I said quietly to Joana as we went down the main stairs.
“I don’t know. He just asked me to come get you. I’ll be close by.”
Mr. Dorset was in his study, his favorite haunt. There was a big drink set before him on the table but the TV wasn’t on like the last time I had been in there. He had the lights turned down and the room was gloomy and cold in the half-darkness.
“Come in, come in,” he told me, and patted the couch next to him. I took the chair facing him instead.
“Hi, Mr. Dorset. Did you want to talk to me about your son?”
“Who, Benjamin?” Did he have another one? “No, no, Maura. I wanted to talk about you. I haven’t seen you in so long. How are you doing?”
He was drunk. I’d been around it enough to recognize the overly-precise way he was pronouncing his words so that he wouldn’t slur them, the careful enunciation so nothing would give him away.
It gave him away. “I’m fine, thank you, Mr. Dorset.”
“I love it when you call me that. It means something, what people call you. It’s a sign of respect, basic respect. You know what? The people at my office call me by my first name. It’s part of the corporate culture. It’s supposed to make us feel less formal, open the communication.” He picked up his drink and some sloshed out, but he got it successfully to his mouth for a big swallow. “You know what it made me feel like when I heard my subordinates call me by my first name? It made me feel like putting my foot up someone’s ass.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” I resolved to never say his name again, in any way, shape, or form.
“Maura. Tell me your last name again.”
“Sutherland.” He had hired me, the idiot. I had worked for him for more than three years.
“Miss Sutherland. I like it. Remember the old days, when people called each other ‘Mr.’ and ‘Miss?’ Those were good times. I would have had a cute little secretary just like you, and no one would have said shit if I pulled up her skirt and screwed her over my desk.”
“What?” I gasped out.
“Instead I have a junior associate, and she’s a real cold bitch. What about you, Miss Sutherland? Are you a cold bitch? Or would you like to screw over the desk?”
“Mr…I have to go now. I’m expected at home.”
“Oh, your boyfriend. He’s waiting for you, right?”
“Yes.”
He was staring at my breasts. I had a fleeting thought of Robin, of him doing exactly the same thing, instead of looking in my eyes.
He was on his feet and coming around to my chair before I really registered what had happened. “Miss Sutherland, what do you think about screwing?”
I got up from the chair but he was rapidly cornering me. “Stop. Stop now.” If I screamed, Joana would come. Then he would probably fire her, too, not just me. Benji. If I screamed, he might come too.
“I don’t want to stop. I’m tired of stopping.”
He was close enough that I could smell his disgusting breath in the chilly air. “Get back. I’m not interested in…this,” I told him. I wasn’t afraid. I was furious. How dare he? How dare he, with his son in the bedroom above us? I was going to kill this little SOB.
Mr. Dorset leaned forward and reached for my breast and I hit him in the stomach as hard as I could. At the last second he shied away, but I still nailed him. Mikey had taught me how to gut punch, and he had taught me well. Mr. Dorset fell back and knocked into the chair I had been sitting in, tipping it over.
The door flew open a second after the crash and Joana charged into the study with a ceramic nonstick wok raised over her head.
She stopped and stared at our employer, curled up on the floor, coughing. Her eyes widened. Both of us booked out of the study and she shut the door behind us. She locked the door to the kitchen and we looked at each other.
“I hit him!” I gasped.
“Damn, Maura! I didn’t know you had it in you! That’s my girl.” Joana patted me on the shoulder proudly.
“Joana, I’m going to get fired!”
“Are you? Or are you going to call the police and report an assault? He doesn’t know, does he?”
I sat down in a kitchen chair. “I should call the police on him, the bastard.”
“You should.” She handed me the phone and I looked at it.
“What about Benji?”
She sat down in the chair across from me. “He’d be better off without that piece of shit in his life.”
"How would it be for him without me in his life?" Or for me, without him?
Both of us turned our heads when we heard the front door slam, then a moment later, the car tires squealing out of the driveway. “Now I am going to call the police,” I said. “He’s driving drunk.”
I didn’t stay to find out what happened after I reported Mr. Dorset for drunk driving, leaving out what had happened in the study. Joana was there in the house with Benji, and she said she would let me know how it all shook out. I got in Iván’s car and drove back to the city, parked in the garage, and very, very wearily climbed up to the 16th floor.
The apartment was quiet and dark. I took off my shoes and went to check on Iván. He was sleeping completely everywhere in the bed, spread out with all four of his long limbs reaching in different directions. I carefully felt his forehead. A little warm, but not too bad.
I sat on the edge of the bed, watching him. Then very slowly and cautiously, I laid down next to him. I needed a little comfort. I just needed Iván. I curled with my back to him and rested my head on his bicep.
Iván mumbled something and turned on his side, spooning me, his arm around my waist. “Hola,” he murmured. He was still asleep, and I wondered briefly who he thought he was talking to. I let myself stay there with him for more than an hour, drinking up the reassurance of his warmth against my back and of the weight of his arm across me, until he turned over, still asleep. Then very quietly, I got up and went into my own room.
∞
“I wish you could come. I wish you were coming.”
I wished I were coming too. I imagined spending the holiday with Iván and his parents, his brother and his wife and nephew, their cousins and aunts and uncles. “You’ll have a great time with your family. Your nephew.” Practically his entire suitcase was filled with presents for him.
Iván was looking at me, his forehead furrowed. “You’ll be at with Joana at Ana Lívia’s house on Christmas, right?”
Our exams were over and we were officially on break, but I was spending most of the next week at Benji’s. I had told Iván about Mr. Dorset drunk driving, but not about the other part. “I’ll be fine. You’ll be back soon.” He had to be for the swim season. He’d been going to meets right along, but they were gearing up for some important ones in January and February with the championship in March. “Try to sleep on the plane, ok? You still don’t look good.”
“I look amazing,” he corrected me.
I started laughing. “You still look sick, you dork. Sleep on the plane so your mom won’t be upset when she sees you.”
“I’ll call you.” He kissed both my cheeks, then hugged me. I buried my face in his shirt found myself clinging to him. I made myself disengage.
“Have fun!” I said, and smiled. I watched him go through security, then turn and stop to wave to me before disappearing into the terminal.
There was a huge, grapefruit-sized lump in my throat. More like a pomelo. It was all to do with Christmas, and families, and missing my brother. That was my problem. I didn’t want to be alone in San Francisco for the holiday, I wanted to be somewhere with Mikey, I told myself. Although really, most of our Christmases together hadn’t been exactly storybook. I’d always decorated a tree, and made a big dinner, but it hadn’t ever turned out like I imagined. Mostly Robin had gotten high and Mikey had joined him, then there had been a lot of dishes to do.
I didn’t want to be standing in the airport crying either, so I left and drove the car slowly over to the East Bay. That made the third place I didn’t want to be. Things were decidedly strange at Benji’s house. Mr. Dorset hadn’t been seen since the drunk driving incident and Mrs. Dorset was acting oddly too, according to Joana, coming and going at different times and having people over a lot that Joana didn’t recognize. Benji didn’t notice anything different, but he stayed in his room and he never saw either of them until the weekends anyway. Tomorrow was Saturday and I was nervous for him.
I had big plans for us for the upcoming week. We were going to cool museums, hiking in Marin County, visiting the planetarium for an amazing show about Jupiter, meeting plumbers, and packing. The last two were, perhaps, less interesting. Iván wanted to hire movers to pack, but I thought it was silly. I could easily box up most of the apartment at no cost to him. And Benji would be more than happy to help. Not really, but he would if I tempted him with computer games. In other news, Iván was planning to surprise him with a meeting with the Blazer creators when he got back. Benji was going to flip out when that happened.
A huge plane flew over the car as I went up Highway 101. Maybe it was Iván’s. The lump came back. Christmas was rough for a lot of people. There was a lot of depression around the holidays. But there was no reason to get all worked up about it.
I drove and parked in front of the Dorsets’ house to observe the bus drop-off. As far as I knew, Benji hadn’t had another problem with the bully kid. I kept checking in with the school, just to make sure they knew I hadn’t forgotten. There were eyes on them. Blue ones. Mine.
“Happy Christmas vacation!” I greeted Benji. “Are you excited? Two weeks with no school!”
He shrugged. “I’m excited to go see my grandma.”
I held the umbrella over both of us as we walked to the house. “Is that where you’re going? I thought you were going to Maui.”
“No, my mom told Joana we’re going to see my grandma in Georgia. We’re leaving on Christmas Eve.” He started to get excited. “My uncle lives there with my aunt and I have five cousins! They have a horse we ride!”
“Wow, that sounds great! How fun!”
We walked into the kitchen where Joana had made some delicious little chocolate balls called brigadeiros. Both Benji and I put about 10 into our mouths. “I have a great idea,” I said around the chocolate. Joana rolled her eyes and gave us both glasses of milk. “Let’s decorate the house for the holidays!” You couldn’t tell it was the season based on the Dorsets’ décor. “Or maybe it would be better to just do the kitchen since we mostly hang out here.” And since his parents never entered there, they would never know.
We spent the afternoon in the kitchen with Joana. We made snowflakes out of paper for the windows and I cut a branch from a tree in the yard (in the back of the tree near the fence, where I hoped no one would notice) and we made ornaments to hang on it. Joana taught us Christmas carols in Portuguese and Benji never once mentioned playing Blazer or doing homework. We had fun together, the three of us.
I only thought of Iván one or two times. One or two million.