by Hester Young
He’ll be so good with our daughter. He’s already so good with Micky.
I don’t know how I found him, if it was dumb luck or a gift from the cosmos, but somehow, as we travel along this winding desert road together, I feel a sense of immense contentment. I’m achy, sluggish, and thirsty, but this is where I want to be. Even when he breaks out the Dixie Chicks CD and, God help us all, tries to sing along.
I don’t remember falling asleep, but the next thing I know, Noah’s tapping my thigh. “Charlie,” he murmurs. “Wake up, baby.”
My eyes flicker open. “Unh?”
Outside, I see the border crossing, customs agents moving leisurely about, pausing to speak with drivers. A traffic light indicates whether vehicles should proceed or stop for inspection. SONOYTA, the sign says.
“We’re here,” Noah tells me. “This is Mexico.”
PART III
Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, Mexico
Ten
The Vista Azul proves to be a fairly nice establishment, clean and bright, the walls of its lobby a piercing turquoise color that almost justifies the hotel’s misleading moniker. When Noah has determined that it meets his safety requirements, we proceed to the check-in counter. One thing is quickly apparent to me: at two hundred dollars a night, there’s no way Jasmine could afford this place. Either Pam is wrong about the drug angle, or Ruben was the one financing these stolen visits. I try to imagine Jasmine standing in this lobby, anticipating a weekend with her lover. Did she worry about McCullough’s finding out, I wonder, or was secrecy half the fun?
After receiving the key to our room, Noah asks the girl at the desk about the hotel bar. She directs us to a corridor on our right in surprisingly good English. “The Cantina del Mar is open until three,” she informs us, as if I, in my current state, might possibly be boozing until three a.m.
“Do you know if Ruben Ramos is working there today?” I ask. There’s no reason the hotel staff would have any knowledge of the bartenders’ schedules, but she’s young and pretty with big pouty lips, and I’ve seen enough of Jasmine’s taste in men to guess that Ruben is probably no slouch himself. Attractive people have a way of noticing each other.
Sure enough, the girl’s eyes widen at his name, and she laughs, almost involuntarily. “Ruben? He could be here today. He works many Saturdays.”
I reach for Noah’s hand and give it an excited squeeze. This wasn’t all in my head. I did it. I found Micky’s dad. We don’t even bother stopping by our hotel room; without any discussion, we head for the restaurant.
The Cantina del Mar looks like every Tex-Mex chain restaurant I have ever seen. Somehow I expected something other than sombreros and clusters of chili peppers hanging from the walls. This can’t be authentically Mexican, can it? But as I observe the dozens of red-faced tourists, mainly American, I understand the business decision to give the people what they want. Which is, from the looks of things, hamburgers and colorful alcoholic beverages. I remember Micky saying that Ruben gave her little umbrellas, and indeed, they’re everywhere, their toothpick handles laden with orange slices and maraschino cherries, topping off every cocktail.
An old man with a shock of white hair comes to seat us, but I politely decline, explaining that I’ve come to speak with Ruben Ramos about an urgent matter.
The old man leans over and touches my belly. “Ah, you have something belong to Ruben, I think,” he says in heavily accented English, and when I turn to him, thoroughly horrified by the insinuation, he cackles with delight. “I joking you! Only joking!” He points at the bar. “There is your man, okay?” He gives me a friendly pat on the shoulder and then takes off, still chuckling over his little jest.
I scan the bar, my gaze skipping past a bald man and a world-weary woman and settling on their young male coworker. My eyebrows rise. Ruben Ramos. Well, then.
He has dark, shaggy hair to his chin, just enough scruff to be sexy, and dimples that he’s not afraid to use. In a white collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up, he comes off as both casual and effortlessly handsome, and if his forehead is dotted with perspiration from working all day in the heat, well . . . let’s just say it’s not a bad look for him. I have to give Jasmine props. Though far from my type, the man is beautiful. He looks like a surfer or a frat boy, all fun and games and debauched merriment, the antithesis of McCullough’s blue-eyed intensity.
I watch Ruben hand a drink to a dyed-blond woman in her fifties, watch his flirty smile, the way he laughs at something she says—something not nearly as amusing as he’s making it out to be, I’d warrant—and responds with a cheeky remark of his own. Unsurprisingly, she tips him very, very well.
“Looks like he’s got his own fan club,” Noah says, and only then do I see the row of young women on the left side of the bar. A group of sloppy-drunk twentysomethings, the women giggle uproariously at one another and vie for Ruben’s attention in ways they probably wouldn’t want shared on YouTube.
“Ruuu-ben!” a brunette slurs. “I need a straaaw. Can you get me another straaaw?”
“I need ice!” her friend calls. “I’m, like, so hot. Can you bring me ice? Oh my God, I just want to melt ice all over my body.”
“Ooh, yes!” a third woman agrees. “Come melt ice all over our bodies, Ruben! That is totally how I want to spend my afternoon.”
The three laugh outrageously as he presents them with a straw, a cup of ice, and a smile far more good-natured than their behavior merits. “Ladies,” he says, managing to look as though their antics are charming and amusing, not an embarrassment to women everywhere. The moment he turns his back to them, though, his expression becomes one of fatigue. He must get this a lot.
“What do you think?” I ask Noah, fidgeting. “Should we just—go talk to him? Maybe we should wait. He looks busy.” The thought of trying to hold a conversation with this man is making me light-headed. Those dimples are lethal, and I don’t do well with hotties.
“I’ll handle it,” Noah says, approaching the bar. I follow behind him, trying not to look like an awkward teenage girl hiding behind her father.
Ruben spots us immediately, only too happy to get away from his intoxicated groupies. “What can I get you, sir?” he asks Noah in a voice that seems to caress the English language. The man belongs on a soap opera or the cover of a romance novel, not here, living, breathing, smoldering away in the flesh. Poor Jasmine. Of course Ruben was her weakness, the one she could never quite move beyond. They were young when they met. He was the father of her child. And just look at him.
“Ruben Ramos, right?” Noah says, and Ruben looks a bit thrown when he hears his name. “Listen, what time are you off work? We need a word with you.”
“A word . . . ?”
“It’s about Jasmine,” Noah tells him.
I assess Ruben’s reaction to the name. Though his eyes register recognition, he seems more worried about Noah than the woman he’s purportedly been involved with for months.
“You are . . . Jasmine’s friend?” He studies Noah, hesitant, and I realize he’s afraid he’s about to get his ass kicked. A legit fear, I guess, for someone in the business of screwing girls with boyfriends.
“I’m Charlie.” I step forward. “I’m Jasmine’s sister, and that’s my boyfriend, Noah. When can we talk to you? It’s very important.”
“Sister,” Ruben says, relieved. “Okay. She never tells me she has a sister.” He calls to the female bartender. “Rosario! Voy a tomar un descanso.” Without warning, he leaps up over the bar and joins us, suddenly so close that I can smell him, an unsettling mixture of cologne and man-sweat. “Sit down, mama,” he tells me. “We can talk right now.”
• • •
THOUGH I’M NOT EXACTLY looking forward to the conversation with Ruben, my nerves turn into indignation when Noah dismisses me from the scene. “Go call Pam,” he whispers in my ear. “Let her know who we found.”
&nbs
p; “What?” I stare at him. “Now?” I’m tempted to object, to insist that Noah be the one to call her, but I don’t particularly want to be left alone with Ruben, either. Sulking, I plod off to make the phone call, which, being international, proves a pain in the butt. It takes a good fifteen minutes to inform my cellular service provider that I am in Mexico, enable international calls, and work out the correct sequence of digits necessary to dial the United States.
Back at Cantina del Mar, I find the men hunched together at a table in the corner, each nursing a bottle of beer. From the outside, they look like buddies, just a couple of dudes drinking stoically together while their girlfriends are off shopping or getting pedicures. For a strange, flickering instant, I yearn for a different reality, a world in which I know Jasmine, spend time with her, a world in which our children celebrate birthdays and holidays together, Keegan and Micky growing up the tightest of cousins.
“There you are,” Noah says when I plop down in the empty seat beside him. “I was startin’ to wonder.”
Ruben stares at the beer in his hand, scarcely moving. Not upset, not angry, not displaying any emotion other than frozen bewilderment. I know then, without asking, that Noah has told him about Jasmine. What I initially mistook for calm and companionable drinking is actually shock.
“I’m sorry.” I stare at the splintered edge of the wooden tabletop. “We were hoping you already knew.”
“No.” Ruben takes a long drink from his bottle—Tecate, some cheap Mexican brand—and continues to stare at the table. “She didn’t call me awhile. I was thinking . . . she is busy. Or her boyfriend is around. I never thought that she is dead.”
“Was it unusual for her not to call?”
“No. We only meet together . . . sometimes. And I can’t call her because, pues, the boyfriend.”
“Right,” I say, nodding. “He’s a pretty jealous guy, huh?”
“Yes. He looks in her phone to see the numbers that call. She uses the phone of her mother and we do Skype.” Ruben’s English is faltering as he struggles to comprehend what’s happened. “This is . . . very crazy. Jasmine is always a girl . . . very alive.”
I glance at Noah, trying to get a sense of what they’ve already talked about, if he’s brought up Micky yet. I highly doubt it. Asking probing questions and bringing up thorny issues isn’t really Noah’s bag, and in this case, his instincts are probably right. We should let Ruben talk a bit longer about Jasmine before springing Micky on him. No need to appear disrespectful.
“So, Ruben,” I begin, looking for a safe warm-up question, “how did you and Jasmine meet? I never heard the whole story.”
“I was on a summer program at the University of Arizona,” he says, fingers playing with a piece of his floppy hair. “A business course. This was seven years ago.” He rubs the back of his neck with one hand, and I get the sense that this memory isn’t a particularly happy one for him. “We go on some dates, and then . . . pues. She gets pregnant.” He glances at me, and I can see him wanting to make a good impression on Jasmine’s sister. “I wanted to stay with her, but my visa expired. And my parents, they wanted me home. They don’t want me to marry an American.”
I get the feeling Ruben comes from a pretty well-off family if he dabbled in university courses in the US and his parents were advising against a legitimate path to American citizenship. “So you guys just lost touch after that?” I ask.
“I saw her sometimes,” he says quickly. “In Nogales or here, in Rocky Point. I met the baby.” He seems to think he should get points for bothering to meet his own offspring, and I have to bite the inside of my cheeks to keep from giving him a piece of my mind. “Please understand. I was a student at Tecnológico de Monterrey. The distance was big. Jasmine and I, we both meet other people.”
“Looks like your paths crossed again, though, huh,” Noah says.
Ruben gives a long sigh and takes another drink of beer. “Two years ago, I have a big fight with my parents. I’m upset how they try to control me with their money, you know? So I come here, to Puerto Peñasco. It’s a good place to find work when you speak English. And I like the life here. The beach, the parties.”
The girls, I add mentally.
“So did you contact Jasmine?” I ask, although I’m certain he didn’t. Some men like a few obstacles in their relationships, can handle challenges like geographical distance and a kid. Ruben is not that man. If Jasmine resurfaced in his life, I’m pretty sure it’s because she fought her way back in.
“I was not thinking about Jasmine when I came back,” Ruben admits. “We don’t talk for so long. But then she visited Puerto Peñasco with her friends in November and we . . .”
“Bumped into each other?” Noah supplies, which strikes me as quite the euphemism.
“Yes. A happy accident.”
“She did tell you about the boyfriend, right?” Though his tone is mild, Noah can’t quite mask his feelings about infidelity. I cringe inwardly. We need to be empathetic, not to come across as Judgey McJudgerson, Chief Inspector of Moral Virtues.
Ruben doesn’t appear particularly fazed by the subject of Jasmine’s boyfriend, however. “I think the boyfriend is not a big problem,” he says. “A man who can’t make his woman happy, he will not keep her. I make her more happy than her boyfriend, then okay, it is her choice, right?”
For a second, his golden-brown eyes search mine, daring me to imagine just how happy he is capable of making women. I drop my gaze, disgusted and yet blushing fiercely. Her choice indeed. Ruben’s version of feminism, I take it. Every woman deserves the freedom to choose . . . to sleep with him.
“We have fun, me and Jazz.” Ruben turns to Noah now, seeking manly understanding. “This was all we are looking for together. Just fun.”
For “fun” I substitute the word “sex” and have a pretty good idea of what this relationship meant to Ruben.
“Jazz always was a party girl,” I say, and shoot him a knowing smile, as if I knew her, as if she confided in me about all their antics. “She would try anything once.”
He laughs, a little nervous about what I might be referring to.
“You guys used Rohypnol together, right?”
Noah kicks me gently under the table, and his message is unmistakable. Shut the hell up. Don’t ruin this for us. I realize that I’m not playing by the safety rules that Pam laid down for us, and I’m probably putting Ruben on the defensive, but the presence of those pills in Jasmine’s apartment has been bothering me.
“Rohypnol?” Ruben’s eyes dart from my face to Noah’s. “I don’t know what that is.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Noah says, swiftly steering us back on course. “We mostly wanted to talk with you about Micky. We heard you saw her a few times.”
“Oh.” Ruben looks uncomfortable at the mention of his daughter. “Yes. That was maybe not a good idea, but Jasmine wanted us to meet.”
She was hoping you’d fall in love with your daughter, I think. Hoping Micky could reel you in, even though Jasmine never could. I want to both hug and slap Jasmine for her folly. Ten minutes with Ruben has shown me what wishful thinking this was. The guy would never sacrifice his own pleasure for someone else’s benefit, and that’s half of parenting in a nutshell.
“Expecting you to be a father to Micky after all these years is a little silly,” I say, trying to get on his good side. “It doesn’t sound like Jasmine really thought that through.”
Ruben jumps on this, grateful for an out. “No, she doesn’t think. It can confuse a child, you know? I said I will meet her, but Jazz has to promise not to tell Micky I’m her father. I always know Jasmine and I, this is not forever, and Micky is only a pequeñita, a little girl. Bad for her to have a father who comes and disappears again.”
“Good call,” I say, and I’m not being facetious. Micky will have enough daddy issues as she grows up without throwing blatant rejecti
on at age six into the mix. “So . . . did Noah tell you why we’re here?”
“He tells me Jasmine is dead.” Ruben swallows. “That someone shoot her.”
“Right. She’s dead, and so is her mother. We’re trying to figure out who will become Micky’s legal guardian.” I place my hands upon the table, forcing myself to look at him.
His eyes widen. “Me? Hey, no, no. Micky is a good kid, but my life is not for a child. Too crazy, these hours, and . . . sometimes I’m not home. I can’t give her . . . estabilidad.”
“No, of course not,” I agree, and the rush of relief is enormous. The more distance we can put between this guy and Micky, the better. “We’ll find a home in Arizona for her. We just wanted to make sure you were okay with that. Since you’re her father.”
“Do it,” he says quickly. “You can take her. You two are . . . good people. I can see.”
“You’ll need to give up your parental rights,” Noah says, tired of my beating around the bush.
“We’ll be contacting a lawyer to figure out the exact process,” I say, “but we wanted to make sure that, conceptually at least, you’re okay with that. With giving her up.”
“Sure.” Ruben nods vigorously. “I’m okay. This is . . . the best thing for Micky.” He grabs a pen from his pocket and scribbles a series of numbers on a napkin. “You get these papers and you fax me at Vista Azul, okay? I know a girl at the desk. Anything you need, I can do.”
I don’t know whether to rejoice or cry at how willing he is to sign away his daughter. Noah reaches for my hand, sensing my surge of emotion, but his attempt to offer comfort is undercut by an ugly flash of honesty from Ruben.
