Lost to Light

by Jamie Bennett

  Which, incidentally, I had heard again last night on the street, several of them. I was very ready to move out of Mikey’s apartment.

  “Hi!” I said when I got in the car, and then I saw the back seat. There was a floral arrangement as large as Birnam Wood. I looked at the puny bouquet in my hand.

  “I didn’t know what to bring,” Iván said. “I guess we both thought of flowers.”

  “It looks like you thought of the whole store,” I told him. “They’re very nice. I’m glad you did.” I put my flowers on the floor by my feet and decided just to tack myself onto his.

  Joana’s daughter, Ana Lívia, had a very cute house, with a yard perfectly maintained and flowering plants on the porch. “This is so nice!” I told Iván admiringly. “Don’t you think so?”

  “Small,” he commented.

  “Homey,” I corrected. “I love how she painted the door red. It invites you in.”

  Joana was thrilled to see me and Iván got surrounded. It turned out he spoke some Portuguese, which immediately endeared him to the older crowd. His lovely smile and easygoing way did it for everyone else. He was a major hit. It wasn’t too long before he was heading up the street to the school field for a game of soccer.

  “You’re all right here?” he asked before he left, tossing a ball from hand to hand. He palmed it and held it over my head.

  “Fine,” I said. “Joana’s letting me help them in the kitchen but she’s watching me like a hawk.”

  He laughed, drawing the eyes of about ten different women. “Até logo, minha flor,” he told me.

  “Glory, Iván, I’m having a hard enough time with Spanish.”

  He laughed again and tapped me on the head with the ball.

  I wandered into the kitchen, avoiding the curious stares of the women who had been admiring Iván. Joana handed me an apron.

  “Start cleaning the shrimp,” she directed, pointing at the sink. The kitchen was small and packed with people. And everything smelled absolutely delicious. My stomach growled.

  I picked up the colander. Joana stood next to me, expertly dicing tomatoes. She nudged me with her hip. “He seems nice.”

  “He is.”

  “And handsome.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  She bumped me with her hip again. “So? Is he the one?”

  “The one? Robin and I just broke up!”

  She made a dismissive sound. “From everything you told me about that man, it was a lucky thing for you.”

  “Joana! He wasn’t so bad.”

  “‘Not so bad’ isn’t what you look for in a husband.”

  I lowered my voice. “I thought I might be pregnant. By Robin.”

  Her knife blade stopped flashing through the red tomatoes. “And?”

  “No. I’m not. I took about twenty tests to make sure, and I got my period yesterday. I think it was just all the stress.”

  “Another lucky thing for you.” She resumed chopping.

  I shrugged. I had felt decidedly odd when I saw all the negative signs coming up on the pregnancy test sticks. I should have been totally relieved, but I wasn’t. “Sure.”

  “Think if you had a baby with that man,” she scolded. “Maura! It would have been a disaster.”

  “It’s good that I’m not,” I said firmly. “But…I would like to have a baby. Someday, I guess.” Someone who I could love as much as I wanted, and who would love me back the same way.

  Joana stopped chopping again and put her arm around me. “You will. Like you said, someday. First, finish school and then meet the right person.”

  I nodded. Someday.

  “Do you know how to get the poop out?” she asked me, pointing to the shrimp.

  “Please tell me that’s a joke.”

  She shook her head. “Let me show you. And I just had a wonderful idea. Next week you and Benji are starting cooking lessons.”

  The dinner was loud and crowded and fun. Iván had been right—the house was really small, especially with the large number of Thanksgiving guests. But I had also been right, because it was homey and cozy, too. Iván talked and laughed with everyone but I mostly just listened and enjoyed being there. I decided I would have a lot of babies. I would make my own huge, fun, loving family.

  “What are you thinking about?” Iván asked me, bending close to my ear so I could hear him.

  “Babies. I want to have a bunch of babies,” I answered without thinking. “At least four.”

  He reeled back. “What?”

  I laughed. “Not at this exact moment! But I want to have a lot of kids, I think. I’ll take really good care of them. Maybe we won’t have a ton of material stuff, depending on my job, but they’ll always have me.” I nodded.

  “And your husband,” Iván added. “It usually takes two to make a baby.”

  “Oh, yeah, maybe I’ll be married,” I said. “I don’t have to be. I just want to take care of my kids, not a husband too!” I laughed a little. Iván just nodded. “Your in-laws always hate you, though. And it seems like most marriages, or relationships or whatever, fail after a while. Blood is the tie that lasts forever. Like me and Mikey.”

  Iván nodded again, slowly. “My parents have been married for almost forty years. My dad brings my mom a box of candy every Friday.”

  “That’s sweet!”

  “On Saturday mornings my brother and I were never supposed to disturb them. We had to go downstairs and turn up the TV very loud. It was a long time before we figured out what they were doing.”

  “Still sweet, but less so.” I grimaced. “I guess.”

  “I’m saying that something like that is possible.”

  “Maybe. You haven’t found it,” I told him.

  “I never looked for forever.”

  I turned back to my plate and was reminded of the toothbrushes. In my mind, the quantity of toothbrushes in his drawer had grown to a massive number. A Mount Everest-size pile of toothbrushes.

  “My friend Dylan is very happy. He and his wife are coming out here soon. You can meet them.” The guy on his other side said something, and Iván turned to answer him. That would be the Dylan he had raced, the one from all the videos online. It would be good to meet someone Iván considered a friend. I had been less than impressed with his acquaintances.

  “You’re going to have to roll me out of here,” I told Iván as we helped clean up. “I ate too much.”

  “As far as I can tell with my experience of American Thanksgivings, that’s the point. Good thing we’re swimming tomorrow,” he answered.

  I groaned a little. The dance studio was closed for the week and Anouk had gone to greener gambling pastures in Nevada. I would go swimming, if only to get the exercise I was missing with the lack of dance.

  Joana pushed a huge amount of leftovers on us, which I told Iván he would have to keep. “My refrigerator is going out,” I explained in the car on the way home. “It would be a shame for all this to go to waste.”

  He signaled, a new thing for him, and made a right-hand turn. He hadn’t slowed or stopped but I considered the signaling to be progress. “Have you found a new place to go?” he asked me.

  “I’ve looked at a million. Which, by the way, is just about what everything costs.” I sighed. Rent in the Bay Area was nuts. “I just need something for a few more months until I graduate. Then I’ll move away, to someplace cheaper.”

  “Oh? I didn’t know this plan.” His hands moved on the wheel, gripping it.

  “Well, if Mikey isn’t here, then…I guess I was thinking I’d try to move wherever he was. I’m betting he’ll end up in Los Angeles. It’s what’s most familiar to him.”

  “If he doesn’t go back to prison.”

  I shifted. “We’ll have to see.”

  “I’m moving,” Iván announced.

  “You are? Where?”

  “I’m buying a house in the East Bay. Closer to the school, to work. An easier commute.”

  “Wow, really?”

  “Yes. W
ill you help me look at them?”

  “Sure, that would be fun. It’s so exciting! You get to pick where you want to really put down roots. Like your parents.”

  He nodded. “In the meantime, since you only need a place for a short time, why don’t you live with me?”

  I was so taken aback that I couldn’t answer for a moment. “With you? In San Francisco?”

  “Well, I hope to have a house soon, and then you can come live in the East Bay with me if you want. Anyway, I’m driving over here all the time, so we could go together. Maybe you could even get used to the elevator.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Consider it.”

  “I’ll definitely consider it. Thank you, very much.” I paused. “I would want to help with the rent. Or the mortgage payment.”

  “Maura! Don’t be silly.” He reached over and squeezed my knee, but he left his hand there. “I don’t expect anything from you. All right?”

  His hand felt nice, warm and secure. I held still so he’d leave it where it was, but when we came to a left turn (again, he signaled), he picked it back up.

  “I assume from what you said at dinner that you didn’t you get along with that man’s parents,” Iván said. He refused to say Robin’s name. “Why?”

  I sighed. “A lot of reasons. They thought I had lured him—”

  Iván swore loudly in Spanish. I didn’t understand the exact meaning, but I got the gist.

  “Ok, I know what you think of how we got together. Anyway, his mom thought I had tricked him some way into being with me. I had cast some kind of spell over him.” I snorted. “She also thought I was, I guess, inferior to them. Robin told her about my background.” I studied the gas station prices on the corner as we waited at the light. “My dad was not in the picture. My mom had a lot of issues. Substance abuse issues. I don’t remember her too much, but Mikey does. He won’t talk about her. They took us away because she neglected us. There were other problems, too.” I played with my purse strap. “Anyway, Cynthia, Robin’s mom, didn’t like that. Then I had a little issue when they were visiting one time and that was the nail in the coffin.”

  “An issue?”

  “It wasn’t a big deal. I had a panic attack. Robin was just playing but he wouldn’t let me go, and my face was covered and I couldn’t breathe. He freaked out and called 911 and they took me to the hospital. Oh, glory, the bills from that.” I rubbed my forehead, remembering. “His parents thought I was unstable. As well as not good enough for their son.”

  “Their perverted son,” Iván ground out.

  “Iván, please.”

  “So that’s why no elevators? No parking garages, no face under the water?”

  “I’m doing that now.”

  “You are.” He smiled a little at me. “That’s when you got frightened of things like that?”

  “It was a little before.” I didn’t look at him.

  “How about airplanes?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never tried. Coming here to the Bay Area is the farthest I’ve ever traveled from Los Angeles, and we drove in Robin’s car. It died, though,” I sighed.

  “My grandma never left Cáceres. She lived in the same house she was born in.”

  “See? I’m like your grandma. Kind of.” I shrugged. “I’d like to travel. I’d like to be able to handle it.”

  “Maybe you can. Maybe you just have to try it. Like the water.”

  “Maybe I’ll end up back in the hospital with Cynthia screaming that I should be locked up.” I looked at him. “That was a joke.”

  “It wasn’t funny,” he said grimly.

  “I have to laugh at myself, Iván. Otherwise, I’ll just dwell. There’s no purpose in hanging onto the past and your problems. They only drag you back down. You always have to move forward. Let go and move on. Like I did with Robin, and my apartment.”

  “And Mikey?”

  My head whipped to stare at him. “I’ll never let go of him. He’s all I have. If anything, the whole Robin situation just made that clearer. He’ll come back, and we’ll move somewhere I can afford, or I’ll join him in LA. It will all work out and we’ll be together.” I nodded, very sure. “You don’t know how we operate. You’ll see.”

  “I hope that’s true.”

  “I know it’s true.” I looked back out the window as we got on the freeway. I shook off a little sliver of doubt.

  Chapter 7

  “Real wood floors. Original to the house. The roof is slate, if you can believe it.” The real estate agent messed with the lock box some more then yanked the key free.

  “How about the pipes?” Iván asked. Pipes were his obsession. We’d looked at a bunch of houses so far and he’d asked about the pipes specifically each time. I elbowed him in the ribs and rolled my eyes.

  The agent looked at the papers in her hand. “Updated about three years ago. Of course, you’ll find out more if you chose to do an inspection.”

  Deciding that it really was the best option, I had moved into Iván’s apartment the weekend after Thanksgiving. It had been the day after a guy was shot on the street in front of Mikey’s apartment. Iván had read about it in the news and absolutely flipped out, and I hadn’t been too calm myself, either.

  He made several huge guys from the swim team help us and it took about three seconds to clear out Mikey’s apartment of anything worth keeping, like my flea market lamp that I loved, and we headed into San Francisco. I put Mikey’s things in the storage unit in the basement of Iván’s building. Well, he put them there for me.

  It was definitely weird, living together. Being roommates, I meant. Our schedules generally meshed, except that I knew he was staying late around campus in order to drive me home from Benji’s at night. He said it was a good thing, because he was studying for finals, and it kept him from going out with the friends I didn’t like. That made me sound like a controlling shrew, until he admitted that he had realized that he didn’t really like them much, either.

  We were really apart most of the day, so even though we lived together—I meant, we were roommates—we didn’t see each other a whole lot more. We did still have a class together. And Iván had a habit of popping up sometimes, like waiting for me after class to say hello or to give me a ride to Benji’s. Lately I had started to do the same for him. I had brought him a disgusting giant espresso that morning, and when he walked out of the lecture hall and saw me leaning against the wall with the cup, he had been ridiculously happy. It made me happy, too.

  Now we looked around the entryway of this latest listing, as the real estate agent called the homes we toured. The house was really big my standards, and by Iván’s, it wasn’t tiny. “Five bedrooms and an office upstairs. The pool you wanted, and a pool house out back.” The agent skimmed down the listing. “In-law unit above the garage. Remodeled kitchen when they did the pipes that you asked about. Family room off the kitchen, butler’s pantry, library. This one is going to go fast.”

  We wandered through the house, not saying much. I felt excitement growing in my stomach. If I could, I would have bought it. I loved it. I just loved it. You could have a family here. You could put down roots here. It just felt like a home.

  At one point Iván had taken my hand, and I squeezed it and smiled at him.

  “Te gusta. You like this one,” he stated.

  “What do you think?” I asked cautiously. “You’ll be the one buying it. For a billion dollars.”

  “That’s your accounting background talking.” He smiled at me. “I love it. I think it’s perfect.”

  The real estate agent got excited too. “Do you want to put in an offer?”

  Iván nodded. “Let’s go back to your office and figure it out. Maura, I’ll drop you at Benji’s on the way.”

  We weren’t too far from where they lived. I was bouncing a little as Iván drove me over.

  “Are you that happy about the house?” he asked.

  “Yes! It’s so silly, because it isn’t mine, but I think it
’s perfect too. It has everything on your list.”

  “And everything on yours.” He had forced me to make my own dream house list when we sat down to figure out his must-haves.

  “Maybe someday I’ll find a place like that for me, too. Right now, I’ll just enjoy yours.” I smiled at him but he kept his eyes on the road.

  “If we can get the deal done fast, maybe you’ll be living there. There’s room for my parents to visit and stay for a while if they want. I’d like for you to meet them.”

  “Really? Remember that I don’t do that well with parents.”

  “You will with my parents, because they’re not…” He lapsed into a long string of cursing in Spanish. I shouldn’t have brought that up. Anything to do with Robin pissed him off to no end.

  He pulled up to the curb in front of Benji’s and stopped. “I’m going to be a while with the agent,” Iván told me, “so I’ll pick you up here.”

  “Ok, thanks. I like it when you pick me up,” I admitted.

  “Yeah?”

  “I mean, I know if you say it, you’ll be there.” Maybe a little late, but always there. “It’s nice.” I was feeling so over-the-top happy. Probably it was the house that had done it. “Hey, I was thinking, would you give Benji swim lessons? I feel like after your unparalleled success with me, you might be ready to take on another client. Seriously, I think it would be great for him to learn. Good for his asthma and his confidence.”

  “I’d be happy to. We can bring him to the pool any afternoon you want.”

  “Thanks, Iván.”

  “You’re an unparalleled success, huh?”

  “I might even be ready to go on tour,” I bragged.

  “Yes, the swimming tour is definitely something for us to consider for your future.” We both started laughing.

  The school bus turned the corner of the street and pulled to a stop. Kids started to slowly descend the steps. “There he is, the little guy,” I said as Benji stepped down from the bus. As we watched, hands from behind him connected hard with the middle of his back and he went sprawling onto the sidewalk, backpack flying over his head.