Swim Back to Me (17 page)

He came back into the open area and stopped abruptly. Looking hard at Carolee, he said, “He hasn’t been to see his mother in a month. Did you know that? A month!” He stared for a long moment and then headed down a corridor and unlocked another door.

Alejandro shrugged, a kind of exaggerated, helpless, what-are-you-going-to-do? shrug, and she shrugged back. A moment later, his dad returned carrying a cup sealed in a plastic bag and a little foil envelope that looked like a condom. “Come on, genius,” he said to Alejandro. “Show her the bathroom.”

The toilet was the handicapped kind, extra high, and there was a huge bottle of pink soap mounted to the wall. When she was finished she had to hand the cup to Dr. Mitchell and watch as he carried it away.

At the reception desk, Alejandro had taken a seat and was eating foil-wrapped chocolates from a glass bowl, unwrapping them and popping them into his mouth one after another. She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. She thought of the way his mom had leapt from her chair when he first appeared, and she wondered if Mrs. Mitchell sat there every night, in the same spot, waiting for him. Carolee’s mom sort of did that, but with her it was a ratty mustard velour couch and a box of wine. Classy, the last guy Carolee dated had said when they stopped by one evening. Then: Hey, I’m only kidding. But whatever, he was pretty much of an asshole, and she dumped him a week or two later. Which had its benefits, since not having sex meant a lot fewer UTIs. How she’d gotten this one, she didn’t know. It was her dead car. Or maybe it started with the UTI and the dead car followed from that.

“Chica,”
Alejandro whispered. His phone was in his palm; she was half aware he’d been texting someone.

“What.”

“You wanna go by the mall after? The guys are still there.”

She stared at him, Alejandro with his hair in his eyes, his shoulders swamped by a baggy black T-shirt. He looked clueless: ready to forget the last two hours and power on.

She said, “Are you serious?”

His eyes widened. “I thought you were interested. You can play, Gordo has an extra gun.”

“Do you not understand how mad I am? You don’t just kidnap people.”

He sighed and looked away. “I know.” He reached into the bowl of chocolates and fingered through them as if there were a particular one he wanted to find. “I didn’t think you’d go if I told you.”

“You were right about that. You should keep your family shit to yourself.”

“What? I wanted to help you.”

“Right, and crawling up your dad’s ass was just—a side thing.”

He pushed his hair away from his face and seemed even younger, his mustache a series of faint lines made with a tiny paintbrush. “It ain’t a big deal. He just don’t like how I live.”

“Alejandro, stop talking like that! You blew your cover, how dumb do you think I am?”

His face colored. “Not as dumb as me.”

“How dumb are you?”

“Pretty fuckin’ dumb.”

“Well, that’s one true thing you’ve said. What’s with the cholo act, anyway?”

He kept his eyes on her for another moment and then looked away again. She wanted to walk out of there. She could hear his father pulling open a drawer, sliding stuff around like he was searching for something, trying to help her … and still, she was tempted to walk out right now.

Alejandro Chavez. Alejandro Chavez who was really Alejandro Mitchell, rich and only half white, which meant an extra advantage because you got to check a minority box on ethnicity questionnaires. He’d had everything, and where had he ended up? Working a shit job, driving a shit car, playing war games late at night in a shit shopping mall. What a waste.

She heard a sniff and looked up. He was staring down at the desk, eyes wide like he was trying to keep tears from falling. She said, “Oh, come on.”

He shook his head and cupped his hands over his eyes.

“What?”

He bowed his head farther and pressed his palms to his face. His shoulders began to shake, and she realized he wasn’t faking. She hurried across the room and crouched next to him.

“Alejandro, please.”

He shook his head.

“Your dad’ll be out here any second. What’s wrong, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Something is.”

He looked up with his eyes streaming. “I fuckin’
hate
him.”

She tried to think of something to say, but somehow she was remembering David Connell again, that weird dinner with his family, and how his older sister was there, visiting from wherever she was in school, so there were too many of them to sit at the kitchen table and they had to eat in the dining room, with its heavy velvet chairs. Maybe because of the atmosphere, the talk was slow and painful, with each topic squeezed dry before anyone was willing to let it go. Near the end of the meal, David started saying he should take Carolee home, it was getting late, and suddenly his dad stood up, pulled his keys from his pocket, and tossed them to David, saying, “Take my car if you want—it’s roomier.” Thinking back, Carolee had a total blank in her mind about what happened next, how the goodbyes went, which car they took, any of it. What his dad said, though: that she remembered. Maybe that was why she’d broken up with David—not the wealth itself but the way his dad more or less offered her up to him, like she was some random trinket he’d acquired somewhere, a little more of the plenty he used to prove what a good father he was.

Carolee looked at Alejandro. “Of course you hate him—he’s a dick.”

Alejandro stared at her.

“What?” she said.

He pulled up the neck of his T-shirt and wiped his eyes. “Did you just call my pops a dick?”

“He isn’t one?”

“Say it again.”

“Dick.”

“Say ‘Your dad is a dick.’ ”

From the end of the hallway came the sound of water running and the lid of a hinged wastepaper basket swinging up. Alejandro grabbed his phone; Carolee jumped to her feet and moved away from the desk.

His dad appeared, heading past the reception area toward his office. “What are you doing?” he said to Alejandro over his shoulder. “You can’t sit there.”

She had an infection—but she already knew that. She had an infection but she was in luck because he had an antibiotic in his office, and he gave her six tablets in a blister pack, to be taken twice a day for three days. “Don’t stop just because you feel better,” he said gruffly, and she thought, I know, I’m not stupid, and then felt a tremendous pity for Alejandro, to be this man’s son.

They retraced their steps, down the pebbled stairway, through the lobby, out to the car.

Dr. Mitchell said, “Where do you live?”

Alejandro waved him off. “I can take her.”

“Where,” Dr. Mitchell repeated. “Do you live.”

He drove out to the freeway, past David Connell’s street, through a neighborhood of large old houses where she’d been to parties when she was younger—children’s birthday parties with petting zoos brought in for entertainment, sweet sixteen parties with special themes:
Carnaval!
Hollywood in the thirties! She always had her mom drop her off a block away, so no one would see their car.

In the Mercedes they sped south, the heater blowing, no one saying a word. Her exit came up, and she directed Dr. Mitchell to her apartment. He didn’t even turn around when she said thank you. “See you at work,” she told Alejandro.

She was on the sidewalk when Dr. Mitchell powered down the passenger window. He leaned across and spoke to her. “Excuse my son. He should be seeing you in.”

Fury rose up in her, and she said, “Actually, he’s being polite. He’s being a gentleman, pretending we aren’t fucking. Come on, babe, you’re coming in with me, aren’t you?”

Dr. Mitchell’s eyes widened ever so slightly.

Alejandro got out of the car, grinned uncertainly, shut the door behind him. He came and stood in front of her. “Are we making out?” he whispered.

She rolled her eyes at him and then took each of his forearms and pulled them around her. At the curb the Mercedes idled, and she pulled Alejandro closer and waited, willing the car to leave. She wanted to keep hating him—Dr. Mitchell—but it was fading, and she found herself thinking that they all, all three of them, knew one thing: that wanting to be gone was one thing, but going was another.

For SJH

Dwell Time

H
e was late, which wasn’t like him. Laura kept her eye on the clock as she moved around the kitchen, unpacking groceries, starting dinner. Her first husband had been late all the time, and early on with Matt she had arrived at restaurants and been amazed to see him there ahead of her; had even been taken by surprise, still choosing her outfit, when he showed up at her front door at precisely the time he’d said he would. He joked that she had the divorce equivalent of PTSD and needed cognitive restructuring. “Am I Adam?” he would say. “No. So there’s no reason to think I’ll behave like Adam.”

It was forty-five minutes now—only forty-five minutes, but still. She looked at the face of her cell phone to make sure she hadn’t missed a call, then tried calling him again for good measure. There would be an explanation: an unavoidable delay combined with a cell phone breakdown. “I’d’ve stopped at a pay phone,” he might say, “but I couldn’t find one. What ever happened to pay phones?”

It was a Monday, which meant tonight it was just the two of them and her girls—his kids were with their mother. Laura was making enchiladas, a good compromise in the complicated culinary calculus of this family: simple enough that she wouldn’t feel she was making nicer meals for her kids than for his, but also sure to please them, or at least Charlotte, who in all foods preferred things folded or rolled to things lying flat on a plate.

Once the baking dish was in the oven she made her way upstairs. Charlotte was in her room, and Trina wasn’t due for another five or ten minutes. Laura wandered into the master bedroom, took off her shoes, and looked at the bed. Neither she nor Matt had bothered with it this morning, and the bedclothes were invitingly messy, coaxing her to lie down for five minutes. But no, she was too jittery—she’d be up again in thirty seconds. Where was he?

“Mom?” Charlotte called from behind her closed door.

Laura went back to the hallway. “Yes?”

The door opened, and Charlotte poked her head out, her waist-length hair in a different style from the one she’d worn not an hour earlier: her waves straightened by the plug-in hair iron she’d requested for Christmas, her part moved from the side of her head to the center. She was thirteen, newly involved with the mirror. “What?” she said to Laura, running her hand down the smooth length of her hair.

“What what?” Laura said. “Didn’t you call me?”

Charlotte stared for another moment, a dreamy expression on her face, and then shrugged and closed the door.

Back in the kitchen, Laura checked the landline again: still no messages. She called his office again and again got his voice mail. She heard a car in the driveway and hurried to the window, but it was just Trina, being dropped off; she watched as Trina climbed out and went to the trunk for her backpack. This house was in the middle of nowhere, five miles from downtown Auburn, near the end of a long road bounded on both sides by orchards. It was a nice house, and it had made far more sense for Laura and the girls to come here than it would have for Matt and his three kids to cram into her little post-divorce cottage, but there were times—like now, as she peered into the darkness—when she wished she’d pushed for a new place for the new big bunch of them. Somewhere with neighbors. Somewhere in town.

Trina came in, dumped her things on the kitchen floor, and shrugged her bomber jacket on top of them. “I’m starving,” she said as she opened the pantry door. Over her tiny, barely developed frame she was wearing an even tinier black T-shirt. She was fifteen, but in her tight top and heavy makeup she looked like a ten-year-old who wanted to pass for twenty-one. Hand in a bag of potato chips, she turned to Laura and said, “I need better eyeliner.”

“Hello to you, too.”

“Mom, I’m serious. You buy department store stuff for yourself and Walgreens crap for me. It’s like, do you
want
me to look like a ho?” Sometimes she waited for a response, but tonight she just headed off, calling, “Where’s Matt, anyway?” as she disappeared.

“I don’t know,” Laura said. She was alone in the kitchen, neither child within hearing distance. She said, “I don’t know, I don’t know,
I don’t know.
”

The room smelled of tomato and melted cheese. She turned off the oven and cracked the door. Maybe he’d gone for a drive (he wouldn’t do that) and his new Jeep had broken down (it was three months old) and he was out of cell phone range and couldn’t call.

Had he mentioned an evening meeting? She knew he hadn’t. She’d spoken to him in the middle of the afternoon as she sat waiting in her car for Charlotte, nothing to do but call and bother him.

“You’re not bothering me,” he said. “I’m glad you called, actually. I’ve been trying to remember, I know you’ll know this: Who was that guy in that movie, you know, the one about the people, who lived in the place—”

“Stop,” she said with a laugh. “I’m not that bad.”

And they said bye, see you at home, and now he was over an hour and a half late.

I ran into an old friend and we got to talking. I lost track of time …

He didn’t, ever. So, an accident: she pictured smashed front ends, engine fires, holes in the guardrail. She imagined a fire truck pulled over at the side of the road, firefighters walking up and down in their black coats, draping blankets over the dead.

To stop herself she summoned the girls. At the table she talked so she wouldn’t seem worried, then fell into silence as they barely picked at their food.

Trina laid down her fork with a clank. “These enchiladas are disgusting. They’re soupy.”

“I think they’re good,” Charlotte said. “But I’m not really hungry.”

“Why,” Trina said, “do we always have to have Mexican? I don’t even like it.”

“You don’t?” Laura said.

“No.”

Charlotte put her napkin next to her plate. “You like fish tacos.”

Trina made a face at Charlotte and carried her plate to the sink. Laura watched as she stood there, her back to the room, shoulder blades like little fins. She wheeled around and said, “I think it’s rude that he hasn’t called you.”

“Maybe his phone died,” Laura said.

“Then he should borrow one,” Trina said. “Duh.”

Charlotte cleared her plate, and both girls went to do homework. Laura scraped their uneaten enchiladas into the garbage. Matt didn’t like it that she let them complain about her cooking, but what was she supposed to do, say they had to like everything? He was a stricter parent than she in just about every way. His kids had firm bedtimes, and so now hers did, too, fairness being the number one rule in every self-help book about stepfamilies and blending. “Blending?” Trina had said. “What are we, ingredients?” But it was an apt enough metaphor. And a tough enough task. Two adults, five children, and twenty-one relationships. A few days before the wedding—ten months ago now, they were coming up on their first anniversary—he had said out of the blue that of Laura’s two he thought the marriage and all it entailed would be harder on Charlotte. She’d adored him for that. Not because he was right—though she believed he was—but because he had thought about it. He was such a funny combination: orderly, precise, even a little controlling about certain things … but also remarkably intuitive.

By nine-thirty dread had invaded her body. She went upstairs and waited while Charlotte brushed her teeth, then she turned off the light and sat on the edge of Charlotte’s bed.

“Mom?”

“Hmmm?”

“Do you think he went out for barbecue?”

Charlotte was referring to a conversation they’d all had a week or so ago—Matt, Laura, and all five kids—when Matt said he’d been craving hickory-smoked ribs, pulled pork sandwiches, mashed yams.

Laura kissed Charlotte’s forehead and pulled the blanket to her chin. “Maybe so.”

In the master bedroom, heart pounding, she called his partners at Sierra Mountain and Gravel, but they were both so concerned that she ended up trying to reassure them. Next she tried the company secretary, who said he hadn’t mentioned anything out of the ordinary. His cousin Frank—his closest friend—didn’t answer.

She went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. There were bits of dried spit at the corners of her mouth, and her pulse was wild. She turned on the shower and tried to cry, but she was too terrified.

Early on, she’d told him in passing that it was scary dating him. Puzzled, he asked why, and she said: “Because I like you.” She had by then lost Adam, lost their family life, and she lost the girls every few days to the inexorable tides of joint custody. Matt was toned and fit, but he was well over fifty: behind the thick ropes of his triceps, over his sculpted pecs, his skin was soft and starting to droop. He took cholesterol-lowering drugs and would probably have knee surgery in the next few years. Now, standing in the bathroom, she imagined that tender body of his, that body she loved: bleeding by the side of the road somewhere. She wanted to fling herself on it, shield it from harm.

Downstairs, she found Trina on the family room couch, binders and books open all around her. She’d gotten her hair cut very short just before the wedding, but it was growing out, and she’d pulled it into stubby pigtails.

Laura stood there for a moment and then went to the kitchen for her purse. When she came back, Trina was on her feet, hands planted on her slender hips. “Have you called Kevin?”

Kevin was Matt’s son, his oldest. Laura shook her head. “I don’t want to worry them.”

“Yeah, but what if Matt called them?”

“I’m going to drive around a little. Obviously if he calls or comes home, call my cell.”

The night was freezing, the moon little more than a sliver in the blue-black sky. There were clouds in the east, in the direction of the mountains. She climbed into her car and started the engine, shivering a little as she waited for it to warm up. Sometimes, after work, he went running at the regional park, but never without telling her beforehand. Still, that’s where she went first, eyes scanning the parking area before she turned around and headed toward town, with a detour past the company on the off chance he was still there. The parking lot was empty, though, the office dark. Out back, great mounds of rock lay in the moonlight like giant, slumbering animals.