Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub
Ben follows Gaby’s gaze, watching them. Then he looks at her, wearing such a wistful expression that she knows what he’s thinking:
That was us. We were them.
She expects him to say something about it, but he doesn’t.
He just pours more wine into her glass, and then his own, and they sip in thoughtful silence.
Driving up Cherry Street, Alex is still thinking about Mr. Griffith when it happens.
Again.
As she passes number 58, the Queen Anne Victorian where Carmen grew up, and where his mother had still lived—and died—after they were married, she sees him.
Carmen.
It isn’t her imagination, and it isn’t the first time she’s spotted him standing on that porch lately. The house was empty for years, but it’s not anymore. There are lights on now, and cars in the driveway, and . . .
And that’s Carmen, standing right there by the front door.
Her breath catches in her throat. She turns to watch him, and the car swerves, nearly hitting the curb. She slams on the brakes, shaken.
But when she glances back again, he’s gone.
Maybe it
was
her imagination.
Maybe it was Carmen’s ghost.
But it’s not Carmen himself. It can’t be, because he’s been gone for a long time. Years. He’s never coming back.
Alex takes a deep breath, blows it out slowly, hands clenched on the wheel as she drives the remaining distance to her own house.
Mrs. Toomey, her across-the-street neighbor, waves from her porch rocker as Alex slows to pull into the driveway. The elderly woman is a fixture there at this time of year, reading the paper, dozing, or just “keeping an eye on things,” as she put it a while back, on a day Alex was forced to venture across the street after the mailman delivered an envelope addressed to Hester Toomey, 45 Cherry Street, to her own mailbox.
“Keeping an eye on what?” Alex had asked the woman, wearing the same bright smile she reserves for pain-in-the-ass patients who ask too many questions.
“Oh, you know . . . the birds, the trees, the flowers. Mother Nature in all her glory.”
Yeah, right. Alex has always been grateful the nosy old lady isn’t spry enough to go snooping around other people’s houses or looking into windows.
Though she does sometimes wonder whether Hester Toomey may have seen Carmen’s ghost, too. Sometimes she’s tempted to stop and ask, but she never does.
Today, as always, she waves back at the woman and pulls the car into the garage, quickly turning off the engine and pressing the remote that lowers the door behind her.
For a moment she allows herself to sit there with her head tilted back and eyes closed, absorbing the silence. It’s been a long day, capped off by waiting until a late afternoon patient suffering from chest pains could be transported to the hospital via ambulance.
Then her eyes snap open and she leans forward to open the glove compartment. Time to get a move on.
She removes the orange prescription bottle and carries it into the house, along with groceries she bought on the way home.
She drops the bags on the kitchen counter, stepping around bowls of cat food and milk she left out earlier for Gato. As usual, he left most of it.
“Hey, Mr. Finicky,” she calls. “Where are you?”
No reply from the cat. Probably napping on the sofa. Must be nice, Alex thinks, heading straight upstairs with the bottle of Viagra.
In the master bedroom, with its low ceilings that follow the slope of the roofline, she opens a bureau drawer still filled with Carmen’s neatly paired socks. Reaching all the way to the back, she tucks the prescription bottle inside, then closes the drawer.
She won’t be needing it for another few weeks or so—not until she’s ovulating again.
Even then—maybe she won’t need it. Maybe Carlos will change his mind about her.
Over my dead body . . .
Yeah, he probably won’t change his mind.
Whatever.
If he still isn’t interested when her time comes, she’ll slip a couple of pills into his supper. That’s sure to take care of any . . . lack of desire on his part. There are certain biological urges even the strongest-willed man cannot deny when enhanced with medication.
The technique worked well enough with the others who were—like Carlos—all too eager to get physical with her on the first night, but reluctant on subsequent occasions.
Jerks. They should have been nicer to her. Then maybe she’d have been nicer to them.
Alex sits on the bed and quickly unlaces her rubber-soled shoes, fighting the urge to sink back against the pillows. If she allows herself to do that, she’ll probably fall asleep and snooze right through tomorrow morning.
But that wouldn’t be a good idea. It’s been almost twenty-four hours since she last visited the basement room to tend to her guest. Carlos needs to keep his strength up.
She strips off her scrubs, throws on a tank top and shorts, and takes the ponytail holder out of her brown hair, shaking it so that it falls past her bare shoulders. Looking into the mirror on the back of the closet door, she likes what she sees.
She’s not a conventional beauty. Her nose is a little too wide, her lips a bit too thin, and her eyes, albeit a deep shade of blue, are set too close together. There are wrinkles now, too, new ones every day around her eyes and mouth.
But Carmen always thought she was attractive. So did other men, before and after he came along. She never had any problem getting dates. That’s not why she turned to InTune.
Her reasons are purely practical. She needs to find men with specific genetic characteristics. They aren’t Carmen, but they’re as close as she can get. With their help, she can recapture what she lost.
She’s already created a new persona on InTune and gone back to browsing profiles in search of her next candidate, just in case it doesn’t work out with Carlos.
On the way back downstairs, she passes the front door and checks, as always, to make sure it’s unlocked.
Just in case . . .
Yes. Unlocked. Good.
In the kitchen, she goes through the grocery bags. She quickly makes a turkey sandwich, heats a bowl of canned soup, pours soda into a tall glass with ice. There. He’ll like this.
She puts the soda bottle back into the fridge, opening and closing the door a little too carelessly. One of the magnets drops off, releasing a sheaf of crayoned drawings. As Alex picks them all up, the memories seep in as always.
Carmen.
Dante.
She loads the meal onto a tray, grabs a flashlight, and heads down the basement stairs.
Same old routine: set down the tray, move the books, pull the latch that swings the shelf forward to reveal the door, open the door.
Another month of this, at least, lies before her.
But soon—soon!—he’ll be gone, and she’ll have her baby boy again. Maybe then she’ll turn the basement space into a nice playroom.
Or maybe she’ll sell the house, move away, get a fresh start somewhere . . .
Down south, or in Mexico, or the Caribbean or South America, even . . .
Carmen had family there, on his late father’s side. He used to talk about visiting them one day, maybe even going back for a year or two.
“I want to show my son his roots,” he would say. “He should know where he comes from, since—well, since my side of the family is all the roots he has.”
He will know
, Alex promises Carmen now.
I’ll take him there. I’ll show him. I’ll make sure he knows about his father . . .
His father.
But his father won’t be—
No! Don’t think that way. The details don’t matter
.
Alex pulls the door open, picks up the flashlight and shines the beam into the room.
Carlos is lying on the bed.
“Hey, sleepyhead,” Alex calls softly. “Time to wake up. I brought your supper.”
Huddled under the blanket, he doesn’t move.
“Carlos,” she calls.
Nothing.
Maybe he’s still pretending to be someone else. Fine. She’ll play along.
“Nick! Nick?”
Still, no response. Keeping the flashlight beam trained on the bed, she takes a step into the room, wondering if it’s a trick. He pulled this crap once before.
“Nick?”
Nothing.
Is he going to pounce on her when she comes close enough?
She inches toward the bed, keeping a cautious distance. He doesn’t move.
“Nick. Last call for supper.”
No response.
She shrugs. She’s not falling for this again.
“Fine. Go ahead and be that—” She breaks off, seeing the blood.
It’s not easy to say good-bye . . . even the second time.
Peter’s words resonate in Ben’s head as he tucks his credit card into the bill folder and hands it back to the waiter.
“I don’t know why you won’t let me split it with you,” Gaby says, wallet still in hand.
He rolls his eyes and says to the ceiling,
“Como coco.”
“You sound like Abuela. Only she never called
me
coconut-headed. Jaz was the stubborn one. And so was she.”
Ben grins, remembering Gaby’s tiny—no more than five feet tall—but tough grandmother. She had a soft spot for her motherless granddaughter, but not much of one for anyone else. That included him. Gaby had hoped she’d like him from the start because he was a fellow Puerto Rican, unlike her former boyfriend, to whom Abuela continued to refer as the
Guebon
.
“At least she doesn’t have a derogatory name for you,” Gaby told Ben when her grandmother failed to warm up to him immediately. “That’s a good sign.”
She was right. Eventually—before their wedding day—Abuela came around.
At the reception, she came up to Ben and cupped his cheek in her withered hand. He asked her to dance.
She shook her head. “I can’t dance anymore. I just want to say something to you.”
“What is it?”
She pointed to Gaby, across the room laughing with her cousins.
“Cuidala.”
Take care of her.
“Don’t worry, Abuela. I will. I promise . . .”
Ben pulls out his phone to check the time. It’s late—but not too late.
“I’ll tell you what,” he says impulsively. “I’ll let you buy us an after-dinner drink. Will that make you feel better?”
She looks taken aback. “Okay. Sure. Where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere.”
Just not home, alone, again.
“You can decide.”
The waiter reappears with the bill folder. Ben busies himself adding in the tip, slaps the folder closed, and pockets his credit card.
“Ready?” he asks Gaby.
“Ready.”
Out on the street, she points. “I know a nice place off Gansevoort.”
“Great. Let’s go.”
As they walk, Ben fights the urge to take her hand. This isn’t a date. They’re not together like that. They’re just . . .
Saying good-bye? Is that really what this is?
Peter is right. It’s not easy. The more time he spends with her, the more he wants to suggest that they give it another try.
But that shouldn’t come from him. It should come from her. And that’s about as likely as—
“Oh, no! It’s gone.”
“What?”
“The place I was taking you—it’s right over there, but . . .” She points at a small building with a metal security gate covering the entrance of the first-floor business. “I guess it’s closed.”
“We can go someplace else.”
“We can.”
They look around.
“Or,” she says, and then stops, shaking her head.
“Or what?”
“I was going to say we can just get in a cab and you can come up to my apartment . . . you know, to get your box of stuff. But you probably don’t want to—”
“No, I do. That’s a good idea. We can do that. Let’s do that.”
He turns and raises his arm to flag a passing cab, smiling to himself.
Damn him.
Damn Carlos Diaz—Nick Santana—whoever the hell he is.
Damn him for slitting his wrists with a shard of broken glass that came from a vase Carmen brought home on their first Valentine’s Day after they were married.
On that day, the vase had held a dozen roses. Yellow ones, because pink and red, he said, were too cliché.
Alex was thrilled—until she bragged about it the next morning to one of the nurses at the hospital.
“Yellow roses are bad luck!” the woman exclaimed. “Don’t you know that?”
Alex did not. A chill ran through her.
“You have to get rid of them,” her coworker urged. “Before something terrible happens.”
She’d gone home and plucked one thorny stem after another from the vase, feeding each one head first into the garbage disposal. She cried, listening to the grinding blades turning the velvety golden petals into pulp.
Carmen didn’t even notice the roses were gone. He was working late, working all the time back then. Only came home to shower and sleep for a few hours.
She knew he sometimes went to visit his mother, who at first was friendly toward her. But her mother-in-law kept her distance as time marched on. It was hard to believe that she was even the same woman Alex—as a new bride—had believed might become the mother she’d always wanted.
“She hates me,” she’d tell Carmen.
“She doesn’t hate you. That’s crazy. You’re just paranoid.”
Crazy . . . Paranoid . . . Imagining things . . .
She was so sick of hearing those accusations, had been hearing them all her life from people she believed really cared about her, people she’d even thought might adopt her and become her family.
Now she was hearing those things from her own husband.
Carmen didn’t mean it that way, though. He’d never been fully aware of certain things in her past. Her juvenile records had been sealed, and there was no reason for him to know. If she told him, she might lose him, and she had already lost so many people.
“You won’t lose me,” Carmen promised whenever she grew insecure. “Don’t worry. You have me forever. I love you. I’m not going anywhere.”