Next Time You See Me (20 page)

“Why right here?” I touched the faded lavender dahlia.

“Ana chose that spot.”

“But why?”

“Who knows? She was sixteen.”

“Mac, you won’t go back there, will you?”

A shadow seemed to darken his face; but the shades were drawn on our bedroom window and if the sun had shifted, we didn’t see it.

“I love you,” I said, my finger tracing its way from his collarbone up his throat to land on his lips.

He kissed my fingertip. “I love you, too.”

After that we held each other in silence and gradually drifted off to sleep.

M
ac and my mother cooked dinner together, moving like shifting puzzle pieces in the galley kitchen, while I hung out in the living area with Ben. Seated on the floor with a big pad of paper and fat washable markers scattered atop the coffee table, I drew stick figures in various poses and Ben scribbled in what I called creative background but was really just filling in empty space. After we stuck our two favorites to the fridge with magnets, I began to see how what I had already started calling the White Palace would incrementally become disordered enough to feel like home.

Whoever had prepared the condo for us had been thorough enough to have provided not just the crib but a high chair. Ben loved the little white sheep dancing across the blue background of the cushioned seat and kept twisting to get a better look, thereby dripping bits of mashed potatoes onto the rug.

“Oh, he’s making a mess,” Mom fussed, a guest in a stranger’s home.

“At least it’s white,” I said.

Mac laughed. “Maybe we should stick to an all-white diet so we don’t stain anything.”

“Let’s see,” Mom thought aloud, “potatoes, cauliflower, egg whites, cream of wheat, oatmeal—”

“Vanilla ice cream,” I added. “Marshmallows, whipped cream, milk, rice, cheese.”

“White bread,” Mac jumped in, “fish, mayonnaise, scallops, tofu, yogurt.”

“It could be done,” Mom said, glancing around. “But let’s not.”

“I think we could just go on and on here at the White Palace, couldn’t we?” I reached for Mac’s hand across the table. “It would be kind of simple.”

Mac smiled, but it was forced. “Ben’s going to grow up; he’ll have to go to school.”

“We could homeschool.”

“Karin, you’re too impatient,” Mom said. “I can’t imagine you educating a child hour by hour, day by day, month by month. It isn’t realistic.”

“But if we had to—”

“They’re going to find Ana,” Mac said, “and put an end to this. Don’t worry.
They will
.” He was trying so hard to convince himself that he sent a tremor of uncertainty through me.

“She could elude the DEA and the Mexican police for years.” Mom looked from me to Mac. “Couldn’t she? It’s been done before.”

That was true: Ana was tough and wily. “She has a vast support system,” I said.

“But that’s her weakness,” Mac argued. “There’s so much money involved, and drugs, and people more addicted to those drugs than they are to serving Ana. Someone’s going to turn her in—it’s just a matter of who and when.”

“As long as it isn’t
you
,” I said, squeezing his hand.

He squeezed my hand in return, and any uncertainty I felt about him vanished. Ana was the wild card, not Mac; he would have to be crazy to return to that perilous place, even for the sake of his child. Diego was an adult, after all, and he had grown up in his mother’s world; he would know how to defend himself. The more I considered it, carrying the thought with me that night as I lay in bed (unable to sleep thanks to our midday nap), the more confident I became that if Diego was half the man his father was, and if he possessed half the cunning of his mother, he would be just fine.

Eventually, lulled by the sound of Mac’s rhythmic breathing beside me and the sensation that we were at last together and if not safe then safe enough, I fell deeply, contentedly asleep.

And I dreamed of them: Mac and Diego, father and son, as they might have been twenty years ago had they known of each other’s existence. A white man of Irish descent and his half-Mexican little boy, walking hand in hand on a beach that morphed into a carousel that morphed into a classroom, into a tree house, into a canoe, into a swim in the shallow water of the beach where it all began—talking, laughing, playing the way any father and son did just because they were pleased to be together.

Then the man and the boy rested together on a towel on the sand.

The man kissed the boy on his forehead, wishing him sweet dreams.

And I felt the kiss on my own forehead, and heard the man faintly whisper, “Good-bye.”

Chapter 16

I
woke up with a start, my heart pounding, my skin clammy, and kicked off the thick duvet. The room was pitch dark. A glance at the clock told me that it was just past five
A.M.
Breathing deeply, calming myself, I looked around and saw that Mac wasn’t there. He must have gotten up to nurse his conflict about Diego again; as I pulled on my robe and found my slippers, I knew that’s why I had been dreaming about them: Mac had not completely made up his mind.

As I came down the stairs I saw him stretched out on the couch, huddled under a blanket. But as I got closer, something was different; the body shape was wrong, too curvy, and I was sure Mac had never worn a pair of fuchsia socks in his life.

I grabbed the bottom edge of the blanket and flung it off.

“Karin . . . what time is it?” Jasmine was suddenly awake and disoriented.

“What are you doing here?”

She rubbed her eyes. Took a breath. “He didn’t tell you?”

“Where is he?”

She looked at her watch. “By now he’s halfway to Mexico.”

“Fuck!”

“You wanna wake your kid and your mother with that?”

“Why are you here?”

“Diego called him—”

“When? I didn’t hear his phone ring.”

“Late afternoon. Maybe he had his phone on vibrate or something. He got a message from Diego saying he was in deep shit and when he tried to call back, he couldn’t get through. Then he called me. He needed the car.”

My brain turned over the hours since she had left us here; she should have been back in New York long before we went to bed. Before Mac snuck away.

“So you never left the area? You waited so he could sneak out in the middle of the night?”

She didn’t answer, which
was
the answer. Once again they had colluded, dividing our family, sending Mac head-on into danger. I didn’t know who I was angrier at.

“Is he working for you guys again?”

“Listen, he was gonna go back to Mexico anyway. I guess when he heard that message it made up his mind. He was really upset, he—”

I picked up a beige and white couch pillow and flung it at her head.

“So now
he’ll
get killed! And we’re right back where we started!”

“You don’t know that.”

“It would have been better to send
anyone
other than him! Ana knows him—they all know him.”

“Yeah, but they don’t know he was working for us.”

“You don’t think they figured that out by now? She sent flowers again—she threatened us.”

She sighed—another nonverbal answer.

“Get out.”

“Karin, it’s still dark. I don’t have a car. I can’t—”

“
Get out
.” I threw another pillow. This time, she ducked.

“All right.”

She got up and shoved her feet into her cowboy boots. Grabbed her coat from where she had flung it over a chair and made it through the front door as a third pillow sailed at her.

Just then, Ben issued his morning cry.

Mom called out from her room, “Karin?”

And my cell phone rang.

Thinking, hoping, it would be Mac—calling to recant his determination to save a grown man he hardly knew; his single-minded, self-destructive impulse to do the right thing at all costs even when the costs were so high—I ran to my purse, dumped its contents onto the living room floor, and rooted for the phone. Flipped it open to see who it was.

Unknown caller. That pitiless cipher.

My mind flashed back to the peaceful summer morning almost six months ago, the innocent beginning of a pivotal day when the phone rang—and an unforeseen door opened onto a realm of terrible danger.

I stared at the phone, still thick-headed from the dream, distraught over Mac’s departure, angry at Jasmine and bewildered once again about the true tenor of her friendship. Shaking. Trying to understand exactly what was happening. Who I should talk to. What I should do.

I didn’t want to answer it.

But that was not an option.

“Hello?”

“
Karin
—”

“Billy?”

“What the hell?”

“Excuse me?”

“Jazz just called me. Told me you gave her an earful. She’s doing her job—you remember what that’s like?”

“There are other ways to go about it, Billy. For example: sending someone else to Mexico. For example:
not
colluding with my husband behind my back.”

“You’ve got to understand—”

“That Mac’s guilt about Diego was a really good handle to get him back into the game?”

“Not exactly—”

“I’m not stupid; I know how it works.”

“He has a unique role—”

“
He’s a walking target.
”

“Just the word that he’s back is going to draw her out. They’ll get her before she can sneeze.”

“You’re deluded, you know that?”

“You’re too emotional, Karin. You always have been.”

“Just how well do you think you know me, Billy? I mean,
really
? Because you’re close to Mac you think you know me?”

“I know you well enough. I know you think your own way and do what you want.”

“As opposed to abandoning my humanity and becoming a job? Like you, Billy? How old are you—forty-five? Single, no kids . . . I’ve never even seen you with a girlfriend until Jasmine.”

“You’re hitting below the belt there.”

“But you don’t understand how much is at stake when someone has a family. When he loves people who love him. When there’s a young child whose whole existence, his entire life, will be damaged irreparably because he never knew his father.”

“You describing Ben or Diego? Because I’ll tell you, in Mac’s head, you’d be talking about both of them. He made an impossible choice. He gambled he could slip in and out, help Diego, get back to Ben.”

“But it’s not Atlantic City—it’s Russian roulette with a bullet in more than one chamber. If I never see him again—”

“Cut it out, Karin.”

“If I never seen him again I’ll hold you and Jasmine—”

“I said cut it out. You want to know what you accomplished just now? You made Jasmine feel like the world’s biggest piece of shit—”

“She feels nothing. She’s an agent twenty-four/seven—”

“You’re wrong. She’s a woman with feelings and
I love her
. And now she’s on her way to Mexico to get Mac back
for you
because she’s even more pigheaded than you are if that’s actually possible.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what I say, Karin.
I mean what I say
.”

“Who are you talking to?” Mom came down the stairs, holding Ben in one arm and the banister in her opposite hand. She looked halfway between sleepy and alarmed.

“That was Billy. He hung up on me.” The cell phone in my hand felt radioactive. Actually hot. I dropped it into my purse and then item by item put everything else back in, my mind spinning. What had I done?

Mom put Ben down and he tottered over to the television set, on a low stand facing the couch, and pressed every button until it came on. I picked him up and kissed his cheek. Found a cartoon and positioned him on the couch.

“I have to go out,” I told my mother, who was standing at the kitchen sink, filling the kettle.

“Now?”

Flipping through the pages of the blue binder on the counter, I found the number for a taxi service. Dialed.

“I need a cab to pick me up at Shore Haven in Brewster as soon as possible,” I told the dispatcher.

“Going to?”

“Where’s the nearest airport?”

“That’d be Hyannis. Matter of fact, we just ran someone over there from Shore Haven.”

Jasmine
.

“Can someone come right now?”

“About fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll be ready.”

I hung up the kitchen phone to find Mom staring at me. “Here we go again,” she said. “You do realize you have a child?”

“How could you ask me that?”

“Where’s Mac?”

“Mexico.”

She looked stunned and immediately tears gathered in her eyes. She shook her head and said to herself, “No, I will not.” And then to me: “Do what you have to, Karin. Ben and I will be fine.”

B
y the time my taxi pulled around the rotary in front of the small, single-story airport, nearly an hour had been lost since Jasmine left the condo—since I had forced her to leave. Half a dozen cars were parked at meters directly in front of the airport but otherwise the place felt deserted at not yet seven o’clock on a frigid winter morning. I pushed through the glass doors into a large reception area with a few ticketing counters for small airlines, seats clustered together for waiting passengers, and a home-style coffee shop off to the right. The air inside was warmer than outside, but only just.

Two middle-aged women in turtlenecks and navy-blue blazers with airline pins on their lapels chatted behind one of the counters; both were white with short puffy hair, but one’s was dyed red while the other had let hers go gray. They were the only people around. I rushed over to them.

“Excuse me, have any flights just left?”

“Where you going, honey?” Gray asked me.

“I’m looking for a friend—” Calling Jasmine my friend felt half truth and half lie, a discrepancy that pained me; I still hardly knew who she was but I was clear on one thing: My vehemence toward her had been a misfire. “—who probably got here about half an hour ago. She’s about thirty, Hispanic, with long hair, very pretty.”

“Oh, sure—cute gal. Flew out to Boston.”

My forehead grew damp despite the cold. “When did she leave?”

“That’d be me,” Red said, walking out from behind the counter and positioning herself behind a different airline’s counter twenty feet away. She typed daintily on her computer’s keyboard and tapped the screen with a long fingernail until she found the flight she sought. “Went out on the six twenty-five to Logan.”

I glanced at a digital clock on the wall midway behind both counters: six forty-seven.

“When does it arrive?”

“Seven-forty.”

“Is there another flight out to Logan?”

Both women looked it up on their airlines.

“Not until eleven-fifty,” Red said.

“That beats me at twelve noon.”

“Could you find something out for me, please? On all the airlines flying out of Logan this morning, are there any flights to Mexico?”

“Where?” Gray asked.

I didn’t know exactly where La Huacana was but maybe they could help me. “It’s a small town in southwest Mexico . . . La Huacana. Can you find out what the major airports are near there?”

Keyboards clacked and then Red answered: “Okay, well, you’ve got flights out of Logan to Morelia and Guadalajara, but not too many, and nothing direct. Still, there’s availability and you
could
get there today if you really wanted to. Maybe not today but tonight—it’s a long trip with waits at each connection.”

“What I wouldn’t give to be in Mexico right now,” Gray said.

“You and me both.” Red smiled. “If you’d like to book a connecting flight from here to Logan to one of those airports, we can certainly help you.”

“I’m not sure—thank you.” I offered the ladies a smile, or something I thought was a smile but may have been more of a grimace based on the way Gray’s eyebrows shot up. Then I went to sit in the waiting area and think this through.

Jasmine would be landing in less than an hour. By the time I could get to Logan airport, if she was still determined to go to Mexico—and if I was stubborn by the foot, she was stubborn by the yard—she would be long gone. I wasn’t even sure if she’d be flying into Morelia or Guadalajara or someplace else. If she connected with one of the DEA surveillance planes, she could land almost anywhere. I took two deep breaths, tried to slow my pulse. And then dialed Fred Miller at the DEA in the hope he started his day very early.

He didn’t.

I tried reaching Hyo, Fred’s partner, but he also wasn’t in yet.

Finally I wandered into the coffee shop where I was one of two customers; the other was a man wearing a blue jumpsuit with
Bill
embroidered under one shoulder. His fingernails were etched in grease and as he drank his coffee and finished his Danish, his eyes kept flitting to his watch.

I sat at a small round table and ordered coffee, eggs, and toast. But I couldn’t eat much. I felt disoriented, thwarted. What, exactly, was my plan? My mother’s words began to ring in my mind:
You do realize you have a child?

I had a child, a beloved son, Ben. Just as I once had a beloved daughter, Cece. Having a child was nothing to take for granted; their very existence was a fragile sprout. Cece’s had been destroyed so easily. I remembered the last time I saw her, a quick kiss and hug before handing her back to Jackson; how I’d tossed off “See you guys tonight” and then headed out to work, not imagining that I would never see either one of them again.