∞
There were two messages from Iván on Tuesday night.
“Maura, it’s me, Iván. Maybe you just didn’t feel like going to class. Text me if you get a chance.”
Then, a few hours later, “Maura, will you call me back? It’s Iván, again.”
I put the phone away from my ear and started to lean back on Mikey’s couch before I remembered how dirty it was. I stood up and resumed pacing.
I had been at the studio that morning with Anouk, who was paying me by giving me a dance lesson, when the special ringtone sounded that made me run outside to take the call. I always took these calls.
“I have to go,” I told Anouk when I came back in.
“Right now? Shit, no, we just started!” I heard a lot more New Jersey than France in her voice when she was angry, like now.
I had pulled on a shirt over my leotard. “I have to go. I’ll see you Friday. Sorry, thanks.”
Mikey wasn’t at his apartment. That meant that there were a few places I was sure that he wasn’t: here at home, and according to that call I had gotten from his parole officer, he wasn’t going in to work, either. I had known when he didn’t complain about his boss over dinner on Saturday that something was wrong. Mikey never missed a chance to badmouth that guy. I should have pressed him harder about what was happening at work.
I had gone in to talk to the parole officer in person after his phone call, to plead Mikey’s case, to try to get him a little more time and maybe some leniency. The PO wasn’t a bad person, but he did have a job to do. No time, no leniency. Then I had gone down to the autobody shop to find out what had happened there, and they told me that Mikey hadn’t been in for two weeks. They had cut him a break and not notified his PO immediately. They were also decent guys, and I thanked them. It had been a good place for Mikey to work, but now he had totally screwed it up. I went then to Benji’s, and acted so weird and distracted that both he and Joana got worried. It was very sweet. “You didn’t eat your dinner,” Benji had said. “You have to eat well for your health, Maura! Proper nutrition is very important for women in their mid-twenties.” I had hugged him for that, and he had permitted it.
“Let Michael know that he needs to get in touch with me,” the PO had said. “Immediately.” But I couldn’t tell him that if I couldn’t find him. After leaving Benji, I had gone to all the bars where Mikey usually hung out, the pool hall, and when it opened late, the nasty strip club I knew he liked. I couldn’t think of where else I could go. Where could he be?
I looked at the phone in my hand. “I’ll be back in class on Thursday,” I wrote to Iván. “Just had to deal with some family stuff.”
It was just a moment before it rang. He was calling me now.
“Hi,” I answered. “Did you need my help with something? What happened in class?”
“Not too much,” he said. “Your voice sounds strange. Is everything ok?”
I bit down on my lip. Why was this guy the one person calling me? Where was my brother? Or Robin? “Why do you care?” I asked, and my voice sounded strangely bitter. “I just missed one class. Are you my parole officer or something?”
There was a silence. “Not at all.”
That made me feel terrible. I rubbed my eyes. He was calling me, and he was the only one. “Iván, I’m sorry. I’ve had kind of a bad day.”
“Can you tell me—”
“No,” I interrupted him. “I don’t want to talk about it, I’m sorry. Thank you for asking, though.” Outside the window an ambulance and a police car went past, sirens wailing. I had a test tomorrow in my Auditing class. Shit. Why was I worrying about that now, when Mikey was missing?
“Where are you?” Iván asked.
“I’m at my brother’s apartment. I’m going home now.”
“How are you getting there?”
I sighed. “The bus.” I wasn’t looking forward to it this late at night in this neighborhood, but I had used up all my available cash on taxis and cars trying to find Mikey, and on my stupid new clothes. What a waste—what had I been thinking to spend money like that on things to wear?
“Listen, I’m out driving around,” Iván was saying. “Can I give you a ride?”
Another siren went by the window, so loud it sounded like it was in the room with me. I waited for the noise to die down. “You don’t have to do that.”
“It would be easy. Give me your address so I can put it in the car.”
I thought about taking the two buses home. “Are you sure? Are you sure it’s not too much trouble?”
He told me it wasn’t any trouble at all, and I said I would watch for him. When his sparkling new car pulled up the street at about a hundred miles per hour, I ran down the filthy stairs and jumped inside. “Go!” I told him, and locked the doors. I was glad now that he drove like he was in a racecar.
“Were you going to walk around here?” Iván asked, glancing from side to side, his gaze seeming to linger on the fight currently happening on the sidewalk.
I didn’t feel like I needed to mention that I already had been walking around there, going from bar to bar and to the um, gentleman’s club with the broken neon sign on the corner. I just shrugged. “It’s ok during the daytime.”
“And you were taking the bus now? At night?”
“I do all the time.” He went right through a red light. “Woah! Iván, you have to stop for the red!”
“I don’t think your brother would like you taking the bus at night. Does he know?”
“What happened in class today?” I asked him, cutting off this line of questioning. I was sure that Mikey had never thought twice about how I was getting home after visiting him. He knew I could handle it myself.
Iván glanced over at me and was silent for a moment. “Nothing really happened,” he said finally. “A woman tried to get into an argument with the professor about Nietzsche. It was ridiculous.”
I loved how he said his Rs. I tried to do it too. “R-r-r-ridiculous.”
He looked over at me again, and laughed. “You can’t trill the Rs?”
“I never had to, before. Why was it ridiculous?”
“The woman didn’t know what she was talking about. She hadn’t read any Nietzsche, obviously. We’re starting the next book, The House of Mirth. It looks terrible.”
“No,” I said, and leaned toward him. “It’s a beautiful book. I love it.” I told him more about the plot, then I said, “I cried when I read it in high school, and last year, when I read it again, I cried even more. I get it more now. The heroine feels like she’s trapped, and she’s trying to do the right things for her future, but also trying also be happy in the present, and then, at the end—no, I’m not going to tell you the end. But I understand her.”
“You made me want to read it,” he said. We drove, right through a stop sign and onto the freeway where Iván went faster than all the other cars while driving in the far-right lane. He passed someone on the shoulder.
“Oh, God!” I kind of yelled. I closed my eyes briefly, but it was worse to not see what was coming. Like my imminent death. “Iván, do you have a driver’s license?”
“Not from California, no.”
“What about from somewhere else?”
He jammed on the brakes as we came up on traffic at the end of the freeway off-ramp. “Not really, no. Not at all.”
“You can’t drive, then! Ok, seriously, you have to stop.” He did. We were in the left lane of a four-lane road. “No, pull over to the side and stop!” When we were idling up on the curb, I asked him if he would please change places with me. He thought it was hilarious.
“I’ve been driving since I was thirteen!” he protested, as I moved the seat up so I could reach the pedals.
“That may be true, but seriously, you can’t drive here without a license. You could get arrested!” That made me think of Mikey. I drew in a breath and took out my phone to check for a message from him. Nothing. We started back down the street, much, much more slowly with me at th
e wheel.
“What’s wrong with your brother? Or is it someone else in your family?” Iván asked me quietly.
“I don’t have any other family,” I heard myself admit. “He’s it. He’s in a little trouble and I’ve been trying to find him. It’s really his business, not mine, and I shouldn’t be telling you. I’m sorry.”
“That’s ok.” We rode the rest of the way to my apartment in silence. Robin and I lived in an illegal in-law unit behind an illegally-divided house on a street that had seen better days, but I was happy to get there. It was home. I pulled over to the curb and stopped, wheels in the street, not on the sidewalk. We got out and Iván came to stand next to me under the streetlight.
“Thank you for coming to get me. It made my night a lot easier,” I told him. “Iván, please, please drive home slowly and carefully. And tomorrow, will you check about how to get a license? I think, um, maybe you could start with drivers’ ed?”
Iván reached out and ran his fingers down my cheek. “I’ll drive very, very slowly and carefully. You don’t need to worry about me also, Maura.”
I took a small step back. “I’m not.”
“Or maybe I like it that you care enough to be concerned,” he said. “But I’ll try not to give you anything else to worry about.”
He leaned down toward me and I looked up into his warm, brown eyes. I felt like I was being drawn toward him. It was like the time first I went to the beach when I was nine at the Santa Monica pier. The water had tugged at my ankles as it went out, beckoning me into the ocean. Alluring and inexorable.
I felt the pull, so I took another step back. “Goodnight, Iván.”
“Goodnight, Maura.”
Chapter 4
The apartment was totally quiet when I let myself in. Robin didn’t often go out at night without me and I wondered where he was. I had been trying to get in touch with him since I heard from the parole officer about Mikey, but he hadn’t answered me.
There were dishes on the table and in the sink, towels on the bathroom floor, the bed was unmade, and clothes were strewn around the room. I picked up and cleaned up, then sat down on the couch with my phone in my hand in case Mikey called. I thought I might close my eyes, just for a little while, even though I still needed to study for my test. It felt like the day had been 40 hours long already. I didn’t think about Iván. I kept my mind away from how he had looked at me under the street lamp. We could have…
I wasn’t going to behave that way. I wasn’t going to treat Robin like that. We had our issues, maybe, but we were together, a couple. I couldn’t act that way, any way, with Iván. We could be friends, maybe. I could be his tutor. That was it.
I was physically exhausted but my mind was racing. I got out Robin’s old laptop and started to read about penalties for parole violations and how to fight them. I wondered how we were going to afford a good lawyer to do it. If Mikey didn’t get in touch soon, we were in real trouble. We might already be. I rubbed my temples.
Then, without really thinking about it, I typed in “Extremadura Spain” and started to read about that. It looked beautiful there, and so, so different. Next I read about swimming freestyle and butterfly, which looked to be Iván’s favorite strokes. I watched videos of him winning and losing. He reminded me of a fish, or a dolphin. He looked like he belonged in the water, and even when he was serious, like when they showed him right before a race, he always looked like he was having fun.
I watched him with another swimmer, Dylan something. They were best friends as well as rivals in the pool and there were a lot of articles and some video interviews with them. Iván laughed through all of them but Dylan, Dylan McKenzie was his name, was a lot quieter and almost withdrawn. It was funny to see the contrast between them. That Dylan was not bad looking, but he had nothing on Iván. And it was Iván’s personality that made him so attractive, really. He just drew you right in. I could understand why so many women—
That was like a bucket of cold water in my face. I typed in “Iván Marrero girlfriend” just to further convince myself of the absolute implausibility of anything I had been imagining. I spent a long time looking at these pictures.
The front door closed and Robin came into the apartment. I heard him rooting around in the kitchen, opening and closing the refrigerator.
“Hey,” I called. “I’m home. Are you hungry?”
The noises stopped and Robin came into the living room. “Maura. No, I ate.”
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“Out with Vincenzo and Todd.”
We had been together long enough for me to know when he was lying, but I let it go. He squatted in front of me on the floor, that familiar face, the familiar cowlick in his hair, the familiar Robin. I patted his shoulder. “Did you get my messages? I was trying to get in touch with you.” Maybe he would have been able to help me look for Mikey. It was a longshot that he would have been of any benefit, but maybe.
“I forgot my phone,” he explained. He didn’t ask why I had needed him.
I smiled. Classic Robin. This was real; it made sense. We had been together practically forever and would continue the same way, until death did us part. My feeling of contentment slipped a little. Until the day we died, this was what my life would be like.
“Let’s go,” Robin said, sliding his hands down over my breasts and pinching my nipples. I winced, but let him take my hands and pull me to my feet.
This was real. Everything else was just moondust and silliness. Robin led me into the bedroom and I took off my clothes, thinking that I would have to pick up his in the morning. I thought about what I was going to study afterwards, and as soon as Robin fell asleep, I went and sat at the kitchen table and opened my books.
Mikey called me in the middle of the night. I heard my phone vibrating on the nightstand and rolled quietly out of bed to answer it in the kitchen, shutting the door behind me.
“Michael? Mikey? Where are you?”
“Maura?” He was yelling. “I can’t hear you very well. I’m in San Diego.”
“What? What are you doing there? You know you’re not supposed to leave—”
“We’re heading down to Tijuana.”
“What?” It came out a lot louder than I meant it to. “Mexico? Are you kidding?”
“I can’t hear you that well.”
“Your parole officer called me today, Mikey! You’re already in a lot of trouble. Come back now, before it gets worse!”
The silence was so long that I thought we had lost the connection. Or he had hung up. “No,” Mikey said finally. “I’m not coming back.”
“Please! Michael, please!”
“I don’t want to live like that anymore, under someone’s thumb.”
“We can figure it out. Mikey, think rationally. I’ll help you. I’m going to help you!”
“Sorry, Maura.”
“No, listen—”
“I’ll get in touch with you when I can. Someday.”
“Wait, where are you going exactly? Do you have any money? Your cell phone won’t work in Mexico. How will I call you? Mikey? Hello?”
This time there was no answer. I sat at the kitchen table, typing quickly, sending him messages about going to the embassy or consulate if he had a problem, what the value of a peso was compared to a dollar, tips about drinking the water. Anything I could think of that would help him. There was no response. Finally, I just wrote, “I love you.” Then I spent the next few hours staring at the phone and again trying to study for the test I had the next day. Now it was just later that morning. The test that I had been planning to study for that afternoon, instead of running all around the East Bay hunting for my brother, who had left me and gone. He was gone. The words seemed to get blurry on the page of my textbook.
“Maura.”
“Yes.”
“Maura. What are you doing?” Robin asked me.
I picked up my head slightly from the table and my hand shot to the back of my neck as a shaft of pain went t
hrough it. Daylight poured in through the kitchen window. “I fell asleep,” I commented unnecessarily, my head down as I rubbed my neck. With my other hand I felt along a giant crease on my face from where I had laid my head on the edge of my textbook. Mikey. Oh, glory. What was I going to do about Mikey? “Robin,” I started to say, to explain to him that my brother was gone.
“You remember my mom.”
My head jerked up. “Oh. Cynthia.”
Robin’s mom stood next to him, looking down at me. How long they had watched me sleep, I had no idea. That she’d been planning to visit us from Orange County, I also hadn’t known. I stood up, realizing that I was wearing one of Robin’s t-shirts, and it was very short. “I didn’t realize you were coming to visit. Robin, I wish you had said something. Can I get you some coffee?” I needed some. Immediately.
Cynthia turned and looked up at her son. “She doesn’t know?”
“Know what?” I asked.
“You didn’t know that she was coming. My dad is here too. They’re staying in San Francisco,” Robin explained. He put his arm around his mother and she adjusted her cardigan.
I looked at him curiously. “Is that where you were yesterday? With your parents?”
“Are you keeping tabs?” Cynthia asked. “He’s an adult.”
He was, kind of. “Robin can do what he wants, of course,” I said, trying to smile at her. I started to back out of the room, pulling my shirt down in the front.
“Oh, Maura.” Robin’s dad, Brandon, joined his wife and son. Now there were three people fully dressed, yet I was still in my undies. Brandon narrowed his eyes, his gaze running up and down my legs.
“I’m going to go change,” I announced. “I’ll just be a moment.”
“My parents are taking us out to breakfast.” His mom shot him a look. “Me. They’re taking me out.”
I knew they hated me. Robin had always tried to pretend that it was my imagination, but Cynthia may as well have hired a skywriter. Robin followed me now as I continued to back out, with me smiling and nodding like an idiot at his parents while they frowned at me.
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