Love & Lies: Marisol's Story (5 page)

“There goes the professor,” Gio said, still looking at her and not me. “Going into Starbucks to refuel after a long morning of dazzling the masses.”

“She’s got a laptop with her. I bet she writes in there.”

Gio shook his head and turned back to his lunch. “I never understood how people could work out in public like that. It seems so show-offy.”

I kept looking at the coffee shop door through which she’d disappeared. “‘Show-offy’ is not a word. Besides, writing is a lonely occupation. Some people need the stimulation of being in a public place to write—there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Maybe. But noon on Saturday at Starbucks? That place is busier than Fenway Park right now. I could never work with all that noise.”

“Well, not everybody is like you, Gio.”

I kept looking out the window until I realized Gio was watching me watch the Starbucks door. “Any sign of her?” he said.

My cheeks warmed again. “No.” I forked up some chicken and forced my gaze to remain inside the restaurant. “I was just thinking that I never see anybody writing at the Mug. Even though it has that whole T. S. Eliot thing going for it.”

“I bet it doesn’t have Wi-Fi, though,” Gio said.

“Well, that’s true, but you don’t need Internet access to write.”

“Are you kidding? When you’re stuck, you gotta go check your e-mail!”

“I just play Solitaire. Seriously, the four months I’ve worked at the Mug wouldn’t you think I’d have seen
somebody
hanging around writing? It’s more atmospheric than Starbucks. I think it’s weird.”

“Maybe you could start a trend.”

“That would mean spending more time there than I already do. Which could happen if Birdie becomes any more annoying to live with than he already is.”

“I remember Birdie. You live with him? How did that happen?”

“Just because you and Birdie didn’t hit it off doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with him. He’s been my best friend since forever. It’s just that he keeps picking up homeless puppies
on the sidewalk, and the latest one is a two-hundred pound guy. I am not amused.”

Gio sat back in his chair and sipped his tea. “Not a little jealous, are we?”

“Of those two? I don’t think so.” I could see that it might sound like that, but I wasn’t.
And I would really not be jealous at all if only I had a girlfriend!

Gio let the topic drop. After a minute he got up to go to the bathroom, and while he was gone I indulged my desire to stare out the window. Olivia might have left already, of course, but surely I would have caught a glimpse of that pink blouse out of the corner of my eye. Somehow I felt she was still inside, working intently.

When Gio got back, we divided the bill and paid the waiter. Out on the street I had to forcibly plant my eyes on Gio so they wouldn’t drift across the street.

“Well,” Gio said, looking a little uncomfortable, like he had when he’d first walked into the classroom and seen me sitting there. “I should get going. I want to check out a couple of used-book stores in downtown Boston this afternoon.”

“Right. I guess I’ll go home and try to do some writing this afternoon. I work the six to midnight shift at the Mug tonight.”

“You could get a cup of coffee at Starbucks first,” he said, testing a smile.

I narrowed my eyes and gave him a soft punch on the arm. “You think you’re so smart, don’t you?” Our eyes met and he looked away.

“Okay,” he said, and the discomfort level multiplied between the two of us. We’d been fine at lunch, but saying
good-bye is awkward when you don’t know what you mean to the other person, or what you’re allowed to mean to them. “So, I’ll see you next week.”

“Yes, you will,” I said. Then, as he finally turned to leave, I called him back. “Gio?” Feeling reckless, I ran up and gave him a hug. “I’m really glad to see you again.”

His shoulder muscles tightened under my grip, and he did not return the hug. He pulled his head back and looked at me.

“I’m glad to see you again too, Marisol. But, you know, things are still kind of . . . weird. I mean, maybe you shouldn’t . . . do this.”

I leaped back as if he’d told me he had bird flu or something.

“Right! Sorry! I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you didn’t mean; that’s why I don’t think you should touch me. At least not now. Not right away. I’m still kind of susceptible—”

“Sure. I got it,” I said, nodding vigorously. “You’re right. Duh, I’m dumb.”

“I just don’t want to . . . I was so screwed up last spring. I don’t want to feel like that again.” He couldn’t look at me.

“Yeah, of course. Anyway, okay, see you later!” I waved at him and turned around, walking in a direction I didn’t want to go, away from Starbucks and the possibility of seeing Olivia Frost, because I couldn’t let him see me chasing her like that. Crap. How could I have forgotten how loaded a touch was to Gio? I was wrecking everything again.
Get away from him,
I said to myself.
Get away fast.

L
UCKILY
, B
IRDIE WAS OUT
when I got home, and he’d taken the dog, too, so the place was as quiet as it was likely to get. On the T coming back to the apartment I’d decided to file Gio’s unsettling good-bye into some nether portion of my brain to be dealt with later. It was a technique I’d had success with before; sometimes I seemed to lose the most disturbing files altogether. If I was going to get any writing done that afternoon, I’d have to access the excitement I’d felt in Olivia Frost’s class. I told myself that if anybody could write a novel in eight weeks, surely it was gifted-and-talented me.

Olivia had said to find the names for the characters in the exercise first. They should be names that had resonance for the writer and were meaningful in some subtle way the reader might pick up on too. I’d been sitting across from a young Hispanic mother on the train, and I’d watched her tuck a blanket around her sleeping baby—tenderly, but also efficiently, as though she’d been doing this sort of thing for more than just a few months. She gave me the idea for my two characters and what they might be talking about. They weren’t the characters I wanted to write a novel about—but I
didn’t know who those characters were yet or what the novel was going to be about. I thought maybe doing the exercise would help me figure that out.

So, I decided that one character would be based on my mother—my adoptive mother, Helen, that is. And the other would be based on my biological mother, whom I’d never met and about whom I knew little except that she was Puerto Rican and had been a teenager when I was born. For a while I’d written long letters to her, even though there was no place to send them. It was just a way of making her up in my mind and talking to her. I hadn’t written a letter to her in months, but because I’d thought about her for so long, I was pretty sure I could come up with something for her to say.

The name I decided to use for my adoptive mother in the exercise was Dorothy, for obvious reasons. Birdie had called her that behind her back for years because of her out-of-fashion bowl-shaped haircut, which had been made famous by some Olympic figure skater named Dorothy Hamill back in the Dark Ages. I also liked the allusion to that girl lost in Oz, not that I intended to do some big analogy with tin men and scarecrows or anything. It was more that my mother, raised to be a socialite but never fulfilling that shallow promise, had always seemed a little bit lost, too, not quite at home anyplace. The name Dorothy was just significant enough.

I had no idea what to name my unknown mother. I didn’t know her real name; my adoptive mom had never met her, and the records were sealed until I turned twenty-one. Of course, I’d always wondered what she was like, so I wanted a name
that would encompass my imaginings. I had an old book of baby names that I’d taken from my mother’s office when Birdie was trying to come up with monikers for his new pets. It was so ragged it had probably been around since before my own birth. In the back there were lists of names popular in other languages. I went to the Hispanic pages and made a list of possibilities.

Alida


Amelia


Beatriz


Betina


Carmen


Catalina


Cecilia


Chela


Evita


Genoveva


Graciana


Juanita


Lolita


Lucita


Luz


Margarita


Martina


Mercedes


Nuela


Paloma


Rosita


Sofia


Solana


Trella


Ynez


Ysabel


I stared at the list. Which name defined the woman I imagined? Probably not Paloma or Lolita, much as I liked the associations they carried. The teenager who handed me over to a nurse was probably not wearing bright red lipstick and flirting with every old guy in sight. At least that was not the way I thought of her. I crossed those names off the list.

Evita wouldn’t work either, as its associations were already too strong. I liked the
M
names a lot, but they also seemed to have confusing connections. Margarita was that tasty lime drink Mom made in the summertime; Martina was the lesbian tennis player; Mercedes was the übercar my Yankee grandparents drove to the country club where they played tennis and drank Margaritas.

Sofia sounded beautiful, but soft—surely, my mother would not be soft. Luz, I knew, meant light in Spanish. Was that the association I wanted? Not really. When I imagined my mother, she stood in the shadows, partly hidden. And she was probably more dark than light. After all, she’d given away her child.

The name I kept coming back to was Carmen. It sounded like caramel, that smooth brown sweetness so perfect with a tart apple. I knew there was also a famous opera by that name, but I didn’t know anything about it, so I went online
to do some research. It turned out that in the original story of
Carmen,
the heroine was a Gypsy girl killed by her jealous lover. The beautiful, mysterious woman loved her freedom and would not commit to any one man, even though it meant her death. I was definitely on the right track here for exotic mother material.

So, Carmen and Dorothy were my characters. This naming stuff was fun.

Now for their secrets. Of course, I thought I knew most of my mother’s secrets, which I supposed would be Dorothy’s, too. Her unhappiness with the social world she grew up in. Her rift with her parents when she married Dad. Her disappointment at not being able to have children of her own. The miracle, at age forty-two, of having a Puerto Rican infant deposited into her arms for safekeeping. Mom had never been shy about telling me these tales, and I felt certain I could bring to life the character of forty-two-year-old Dorothy based on what I knew.

The harder character to imagine was Carmen. I decided, first of all, to make her eighteen, my age, an age at which I could not even imagine having a child to raise. We were alike in that way, young Carmen and me. But who was she really, besides a pregnant teenager, very likely without many resources, maybe without a man or even a mother to help her out? Who was my Carmen? I took some notes on the possibilities.

I had discarded several false starts on a conversation between the two when I heard a key turning in the lock. Damn, he was back.

“Hello!” Birdie shouted. “Are you home?” Noodles started barking and pushed open the door to my room with her nose, then padded in.

“Hey, Noody,” I said. “Did your lazy daddy finally take you for a walk?” I had to admit the pooch was pretty sweet, although the size of her feet seemed to be an omen that the poodle part of the combo planned to overshadow the pug part, and in the future Noodles the puggle would require even more space in the apartment than she did now.

“We’re back!” Birdie said, sticking his head into my room. “Are you working?”

“I
was,
” I said pointedly.

“Well, since you’re stopped now anyway, would you mind giving us a hand carrying some of Damon’s stuff up here?” He squinted his eyes and smiled his I-know-I’m-a-bad-boy smile.

“
What
?”

Birdie slipped through the door and closed it behind him. “Shhh! I don’t want him to think you don’t want him here.”

“I
don’t
want him here. I told you that.” Noodles leaped onto my lap and knocked two pens and a notebook to the floor.

“Marisol, he doesn’t have any choice. His roommate is terrible!”

“Of course he has a choice. He can complain to someone at the college. He can dump the roommate’s stuff out in the hall. He can trade roommates. He can get his
own
apartment. Whatever. But he cannot live here!”

The patented pout. “But I like him. And we’re just getting to be friends. If you let him stay, he’ll help me walk the dog.”

“You mean, he’ll help
me
walk the dog, don’t you?”

“And he’ll pay a third of the rent and the utilities—that’ll help out!”

“Your mother pays your half,” I complained. I knew I shouldn’t start arguing with Birdie—it showed weakness, and he would take advantage of it.

“But it’ll help
you
!” he said. “You can barely squeak by on your Mug salary and what Helen slips you on the side.”

“Birdie, why do you like this guy so much?”

“Are you kidding? He’s adorable!”

“He’s weird. He’s afraid of the cat. And he hardly even speaks to me.”

“That’s your fault—you haven’t made any effort with him. Besides, I thought you didn’t want him to talk to you—it would disturb your genius-at-work thing.” Birdie picked up my thesaurus in one hand to use as a weight for his bicep curls. His other arm reached for my bedside table lamp.

“Stop! You’re not in the gym, Mr. Universe. That lamp is breakable.”