one hot summer

by carolina garcia aguilera

  Wait, I thought. I’m pregnant. I can’t hide that.

  I left the office and crossed the street as though walking in a fog. Once inside my car, I sat behind the wheel for about a full minute until I was composed enough to drive.

  I looked out at the windshield wipers. Amazingly, there was no ticket tucked under there, even though I hadn’t filled the meter.

  Well, it was about time I caught a break.

  [35]

  First things first. After I left the doctor’s office, I drove straight to the nearest Eckerd’s to get my prescription filled. I was so shaken that I felt cold, and I shivered. My hands shook so much that it was hard to drive; still, my survival skills took over, and I managed to avoid getting into an accident. I felt myself shift into autopilot, as though I barely inhabited my body. I was able to go through the motions of living, but through it all I felt a cool, serene sense of detachment.

  There was a full-length mirror just outside the drugstore. I stopped, surprised to see that I looked normal despite all my inner turmoil. I couldn’t understand how that could be. My world had been turned inside out, but there was no visible evidence for me to see.

  “We’re really backed up,” said the pharmacist, a middle-aged man in thick glasses. “It’s going to take about two hours to take care of this. You really should have had your doctor phone it in in advance.”

  All the tears I had held back in the face of Dr. Macia finally came out. I stood there, my head dropped down to my chest. I must have looked sufficiently pathetic, because the pharmacist looked around in dismay.

  “Wait there,” he said. “I’ll take care of you right away.”

  Five minutes later I paid cash for the prescription. I clutched the precious white paper bag and asked for directions to the ladies’ room. I hobbled to the back of the store, locked myself in a bathroom stall, and applied the prescription unguent to myself. I felt relief almost immediately—so much that I forgave Dr. Macia for being brusque with me.

  I was able to walk out to the car without wincing in pain, a definite improvement. I started up the Escalade and headed instinctively for Dinner Key Marina; once there, I drove east, toward the docks. I parked in the same restricted space as I had a few weeks before, got out, and seated myself on the same bench where Luther had professed his love for me.

  I looked out over the water, hoping it would restore some sense of peace to my spirit. It was only midmorning, and not as hot as the afternoon I met Luther, but I knew it was only a matter of time until waves of heat would emanate from the sidewalks.

  Listening to the water lapping against the hulls of the boats, I felt myself calming down. Dozens of pelicans perched haughtily on the channel markers, preening themselves in the ocean spray. They must have already had breakfast because they showed no interest in the schools of fish skimming the water’s surface, their silver scales flashing in the bright sun. Seagulls squawked as they flew past, swooping in formation, heading out to sea. I watched a couple of men working on a boat, scraping barnacles from its side and rinsing off the hull. Some people were fishing, and from somewhere nearby a transistor radio sent tinny music across the morning quiet to where I sat.

  I could have stayed there for hours, just taking it all in, but I had to deal with my problems. I remembered Dr. Macia talking about the Pill’s failure rate. I was a believer in statistics, but I never really believed the law of averages applied to me. When Ariel and I decided to start a family, I simply stopped taking the Pill and got pregnant a month later. There wasn’t anything complicated about it, or anything that required much thought. As long as I took the Pill, I assumed, I wouldn’t get pregnant. The moment I stopped, I had. And in all the years I had taken the Pill, I had never even missed a single dose.

  During the past six weeks I had been engaging in a lot more sex than usual, but that shouldn’t have been a problem for the Pill. It was designed to protect against pregnancy whether a woman had sex once a month or several times a day. Ariel was obviously capable of fathering a child, and Luther was very virile, but it shouldn’t have mattered.

  I bit my lip and reached out to either side to hold on to the bench as a wave of anxiety washed over me. I didn’t know who the father of my baby was. It was a fifty-fifty possibility either way. I had had sex with Luther and Ariel about the same number of times during the time in which I’d conceived. Unless I submitted them and the baby to DNA testing—and, believe me, I didn’t see that happening—it wasn’t likely that I would ever know. I realized I was going to spend the rest of my life watching the child, looking for traits that might identify who the father was.

  Terminating the pregnancy was out of the question. I may not have been a churchgoing, confession-making, Communion-taking Catholic, but I didn’t believe in abortion. I realized that I was selective about which of the sacraments I followed, and I had seriously messed around with the Ten Commandments, but abortion was an act I simply couldn’t ever commit. I may have been somewhat of a lapsed Catholic, but I wasn’t so far removed from the Church’s teachings that I could abort a child. Like it or not, he or she was part of me now.

  It was starting to get hot, and a sheen of perspiration appeared on my forehead. I looked at my watch and was surprised to see that an hour had passed since I sat down. So far I hadn’t figured anything out, or thought things through. All I had done was feel sorry for myself, and run over the increasingly familiar ground of my predicament. I had to snap out of it because I was going to have to be very careful about what I did next.

  The fact that I was pregnant wasn’t really sinking in; it was like a persistent knocking at the door that I couldn’t bring myself to answer. I didn’t feel pregnant, nor had I exhibited any of the symptoms of my condition. I ran my hand over my belly, which felt as flat as before. My breasts weren’t sore, and I hadn’t experienced any morning sickness. I had been tired lately—exhausted, really—but that was a natural consequence of the stressful and duplicitous life I had been leading.

  I had to accept the fact that I was going to be a mother again. A baby. I hadn’t planned it, so I had a hard time understanding and accepting it. I knew how my mind worked, and I wasn’t about to refuse the gift of at least a short period of denial.

  I stretched and yawned, closing my eyes to the sun. And, in that moment, I realized something. I didn’t know how, I didn’t know why, but I suddenly understood that my getting pregnant hadn’t been an accident. I knew that I didn’t belong in that tiny fraction of women who get pregnant while on the Pill. I couldn’t say why I was so sure of this, but I would have bet everything I had that it was true. I needed to know what had gone wrong, and how I had ended up this way. I needed something concrete before I could make any decisions.

  The batch of pills I was taking when I conceived might have been defective. I wondered if that was possible, and how I could find out about it. There was no way the drug manufacturers were going to admit that there might be something wrong with their product, especially once they learned that I was a lawyer. They would hide behind statistics, and invoke that small possibility that the Pill can fail. They could even call Dr. Kennedy as a witness, and have him state under oath that he’d quoted me the insignificant failure rate for birth control

  pills. No, contacting the manufacturer would get me nowhere.

  I stared at the pelicans, as though one of them was going to fly over and give me some insight. They were no help; they were getting ready to go fishing, and were flapping their wings in anticipation.

  I remembered waking up this morning. I had thought I had tough decisions to make. Sorting out my marital and professional lives, it turned out, was easy in comparison to dealing with this child. I could have hung my head. I was pregnant and didn’t know who the father was. It felt like divine retribution for the way I’d been carrying on, and the Catholic inside me said I had gotten what I deserved.

  Once, years ago, I had gone to Dallas to take a deposition for a case and stayed in one of the chain hotels that caters
to business travelers. The window of my room faced a giant billboard that lit up during the night. There was no ignoring it, and I could close my eyes and see it in vivid detail years later. It depicted a giant sperm, its head pointing up toward heaven, its wiggling tail pointing downward. The caption read: “Pregnant? Don’t know who the father is?” It turned out to be an advertisement for a company that provided DNA tests to determine the paternity of children. I had found the image sad and depressing, and hated to think about a world in which such a service would even be necessary. But now it made a lot more sense.

  I felt like a teenager who’d been fooling around with two guys and had gotten caught. It was a terrible feeling, and I burned with shame. I was a professional, married woman, the mother of a toddler. This was the kind of thing that happened to someone else, not me.

  God, I thought about Ariel finding out. And Mamá. And even Marti, and my eyes filled with tears when I wondered what he would think of me when he was old enough to understand.

  I decided two things: I was going to stop putting myself down, and I was going to figure out what had gone wrong. Then I could move on and deal with the situation.

  Because, like it or not, that was what I was going to have to do.

  [36]

  Arms outstretched to greet me, Rodrigo came out from behind the counter at the Calle Ocho branch of Santos Pharmacies.

  “Margarita,” he said in his raspy voice. “It’s very, very good to see you.”

  It was a little strange to be hugged by Rodrigo, since his face came up to my midsection. Somehow he always managed to make sure his head ended up between my breasts. When I was a teenager I thought he was a dirty old man, but I had since realized that this was simply how he greeted women—especially young and pretty ones. Anyway, he was in his eighties and there was no point lecturing him on the fine points of political correctness.

  Rodrigo was a skinny, wizened old man, a widower whose wife had died almost fifty years ago; he had loved his Zoraida so much, the story went, that he never even looked at another woman after she died. He had no children, and he had unofficially adopted us Santos children as his own. My brothers and male cousins all adored him, especially when we were adolescents, because he was a never-ending source of seriously dirty jokes.

  Save for when I was away at college, I couldn’t recall a time in my life when I went more than a few weeks without seeing Rodrigo. He had worked for my family back in Havana, at the Santos pharmacy on the corner of Galiano and San Rafael. When Fidel Castro came to power and the stores were nationalized, Rodrigo went into exile with my family. At one point he even lived with my grandparents while he was studying for the exam to validate his pharmacist’s license in America. The minute the ink was dry on the license, Rodrigo was back behind the counter of a Santos drugstore.

  “Hola, Rodrigo. Cómo estás?” I hugged him back, feeling his skinny body through the folds of his heavy white cotton pharmacist’s smock. With his tiny, wiry build, he reminded me of a jockey.

  “Bien, bien, muchachita.” Rodrigo stepped back, squinting, with his head tipped back to take a good look at me. “You are as beautiful as ever.”

  “How’s Perrita?” I asked, referring to his constant companion, a mangy mutt he found in the alley behind the store after locking up late one night about a dozen years ago.

  Perrita was a mix of breeds, so everyone always said her mother must have had one hell of a Saturday night many years ago. She barely weighed twenty pounds, with dark brown fur and white splotches, and she was missing her right eye, her left ear, and most of her tail. She walked with a strange kind of gait, tilting to one side like a sailor trying to keep his balance on the deck of a ship during a storm. Perrita was clearly a dog with a colorful past. She went everywhere with Rodrigo, and spent many of her days sleeping in a well-worn armchair behind the pharmacy counter, never more than a few feet away from him. Normally, no one would have objected to Perrita accompanying Rodrigo to work, but in the last year or so she had developed a very unattractive trait—she farted constantly, and the smell of gas circulated around the store, borne on drafts from the air-conditioning. It was actually pretty funny to watch the expression on a customer’s face who caught a whiff of one of Perrita’s farts, then looked around suspiciously to locate the culprit.

  The cause of the problem was obvious to everyone. In all the years he’d had her, Rodrigo fed Perrita only Cuban food. It wasn’t the easiest to digest, and now that the dog was getting old, it was wreaking havoc on her intestines. Everyone at the pharmacy had, at one time or another, tried to give Perrita Purina Dog Chow or some other brand suitable for older dogs. But Rodrigo wouldn’t hear of it, claiming that she was a Cuban dog with Cuban taste—and that she should never be fed gringo dog food made from the carcasses of dead horses.

  No one dared speculate aloud what might happen to Rodrigo when Perrita passed away, since she was so important to him and had been in his life for so long. No one knew how old she was; there was no way even to guess how much more time she had. Until the sad day when she would pass away, the other employees and the customers would just have to deal with her noxious gas.

  Rodrigo beamed, his nut-brown face glowing with pride and affection. “Perrita is great, really fine. And Marti?”

  I smiled. Obviously, Rodrigo felt we were discussing our respective children. For him, the gaseous Perrita was certainly on the same level as the little boy Marti.

  “He’s growing fast,” I said. “Soon he’ll be starting playschool.”

  “Time for another, eh?” Rodrigo said, actually winking at me. His eyes went straight to my belly, and I decided to stop making excuses for him. He was a dirty old man. I moved a little to avert his stare. Rodrigo was undeterred. “A little sister for Marti, maybe?”

  “You think so?” I asked, surprised by the coincidence of his comment—not to mention his open appraisal of my body. I knew he meant no harm, and was a trusted family friend, but he had been a widower for far too long.

  “Sí. Yes, yes.”

  And, if it were possible for someone nut-colored to blush, Rodrigo’s face turned bright red. He dipped his head, muttering to himself, and stepped away to rearrange some of the condoms displayed in front of the prescription counter. His hands shook slightly, and all of a sudden he seemed to realize that he was fiddling around with male contraceptives in front of me, which sent him into a minor spasm of coughing, pretending he hadn’t been rearranging condoms and, finally, rearranging the condoms again. This shifty behavior was totally out of character for Rodrigo. He had always seemed like part of our family and, as our pharmacist, he knew about many of our private affairs. Believe me, someone who fills your prescriptions knows a lot about you.

  I stared at Rodrigo, suddenly suspicious. I had come to ask him about birth control pills, and now he was obviously hiding something from me.

  “Rodrigo, what’s going on?” I asked him, moving between him and the counter so he had no escape from me. “Tell me—why are you acting this way? Is there something you want to tell me?”

  The old man didn’t answer. Instead, he moved over a few feet and pretended to be absorbed in the row of thermometers next to the condoms. He knew something I didn’t. The lawyer inside me bared her teeth.

  “Rodrigo—” I began.

  “Listen, Margarita, I have a lot of prescriptions to fill,” he said nervously. “So, if you will excuse me, I have to go.”

  He got on his tiptoes to kiss me good-bye. I had to think fast, or I wouldn’t get anything from him.

  “Rodrigo, I have a huge favor to ask.” I gave him my most winning smile and slid my hand into his. I put my other hand on my belly and rubbed it, then leaned over and whispered into his ear. “Lately I’ve been putting on weight. Not much, just a few pounds, but my clothes are getting tight. I want to do something about it.”

  Now Rodrigo broke out in a huge smile of relief. The man’s face was like an open book, embarrassingly easy to read. As soon as I saw his reaction to wh
at I had told him, I felt cold inside.

  “Remember after Marti was born, when I was having trouble losing the weight I gained during my pregnancy?” I asked. His smile disappeared. “You gave me some diet pills, some really strong ones. I lost the weight fast.”

  Rodrigo’s smile dropped. “Yes, I remember. I gave you Phen/Fen.” He shook his head. “That’s off the market now. Some women had heart trouble when they took that. Their valves didn’t work right. Some women died, and there were really big lawsuits. Millions and millions of dollars.”

  “I heard about that,” I told him. “But there’s been new information that maybe Phen/Fen wasn’t responsible for the deaths. I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject, and I’ve never believed those pills were really dangerous.”

  “Margarita, I don’t know,” he said, troubled.

  “Rodrigo, you kept some of those pills, right?” I pressed him. “You didn’t send them all back, or destroy them, did you?”

  Rodrigo pulled his hand from mine. “Margarita, why are you asking me about the Phen/Fen?” he asked. “I’ve known you for a long time, and I can tell when you want something from me.”

  I leaned over him. “If you have any of those pills left, I want them,” I said. “They worked so well for me before, and I want to take them again. There’s nothing wrong with my heart. Those pills won’t do anything to me except help me lose weight.”

  A horrified look came over Rodrigo’s face; he rubbed his hands against his smock, suddenly agitated.

  “No, you can’t do that!” he exclaimed. “Margarita, you can’t take any diet pills!”

  I knew it. He was hiding something from me.

  “Why not?” I asked him. “They really work, and I want to lose the extra pounds. I’ve been exercising, but it doesn’t seem to be making any difference. So why not take them?”