Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub
“Thank you,” Gaby manages to say. “Do you know where he is, by any chance? We . . . lost each other.”
“No, he said he’d come by the chair but he never did. I didn’t realize you were here, too. What a madhouse, huh? Well, I’ve got to get back. It was good seeing you.”
“You, too.”
“I hope you and Ben find each other again.”
Gaby hurries away with Stella’s last words resonating in her head.
“Ben!”
For a moment, hearing a female voice calling his name, he somehow believes it’s Gaby. He looks up, expecting to see her . . .
But it’s Alex striding toward him, carrying a couple of plastic bottles.
“Sorry that took so long,” she says. “There was a long line at the stand. Here you go.”
She hands him one of the bottles, filled with neon green liquid that isn’t water.
“Gatorade. It’ll help restore your electrolytes. Better than water. I’m a nurse,” she adds once again, irritating him.
He’s too thirsty not to drink the Gatorade. He opens it, takes a swig, and then, remembering the Advil, reaches into his pocket.
“What are you doing?” Alex almost sounds alarmed.
“Taking these. I have a headache.” He holds out the brown pills in his hand to show her. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I thought . . . I don’t know.” She shrugs. “Come on. We can start walking to my car while you drink that. I’m parked kind of far away.”
“I’m going to take the bus.”
He expects her to protest, but she doesn’t.
“Okay,” she says. “It’s in the same direction. We can walk together. Just drink up. It’ll make you feel better.”
He sips as they walk. But after a few minutes, instead of feeling better, he feels worse.
He no longer wants to take the bus. Or, for that matter, the subway.
He tries to tell her but he can’t seem to form words.
He’ll probably feel better if he can just get out of this crushing heat.
“It’s okay,” she says. “Almost there. Come on.”
The sunlight glares unbearably, blurring his vision, and although she keeps talking to him, her voice seems far away.
“It’s okay, Ben. Here’s the car. Get in.” She opens the front passenger door for him. He fumbles, nearly falls.
“You’re okay. Sit down. You look terrible.”
I feel terrible,
he tries to say, but his mouth refuses to form the words.
He hears someone calling his name: “Ben! Ben!”
He tries to focus, but everything is fuzzy.
He can hear Alex talking, far away. Another voice rumbling. She’s talking to someone.
Then the car door slams. Slams again. He feels her hand against his forehead. “Heat stroke. I’ll turn on the air-conditioning. We’ll be home in half an hour. Just lean back and close your eyes . . .”
Gaby is ten minutes into the long walk back down Park Drive toward the shuttle stop when her cell phone rings.
Probably Jaz. She called this morning, wanting to talk about Gaby’s upcoming date to the beach with Ben. She didn’t know, of course, that it had all fallen apart last night.
Gaby didn’t pick up the call. Nor did she answer the text Jaz sent a little later.
Now she pulls her phone from her pocket, checks the number, and sees that it isn’t her cousin after all. The number is Unknown.
“Hello?”
There’s a pause. Then: “Gabriela?”
“Yes?”
“Yeah, it’s Shakey. Are you still here?”
She stops walking. “Why?”
“I know you said not to bother callin’ if Ben turned up, but—”
“He’s there?”
“Nah, not here. And I wouldn’ta called you except—”
“What’s going on, Shakey?”
“Maybe nothing. But . . . something don’t seem right. You might want to come back up here.”
Back on Cherry Street, Alex takes the garage door remote from the console. As she slows the car, preparing to pull into the driveway, she notices Mrs. Toomey on the porch across the street, as usual. This time she has a visitor.
Hoping the nosy old biddy won’t be able to tell she isn’t alone in the car, Alex pulls into the driveway as the garage door slowly rises. Once inside, she closes the garage and turns off the car engine.
“Home, sweet home,” she announces.
No response.
She reaches over, worried, and feels for a pulse on the side of his neck, in the hollow between his ear and jawbone. It’s there, thank goodness.
“I can’t lose you again,” she whispers to him, and allows her fingertips to stroke his cheek, relishing the texture of dark stubbly beard growth. “I’ve been waiting so long . . .”
He doesn’t flinch. Ah, but that’s good. She wasn’t sure the sedative would be strong enough in a nonalcoholic drink, so she’d spiked the Gatorade with twice the usual dose. That did the trick, and then some.
He was out cold, slumped over in the seat, before she even pulled out of the parking lot, and never stirred as she drove north instead of south, all the way here.
She feels inside the pockets of his shorts, looking for his wallet and phone.
The wallet is there. Not the phone.
She’d thought he might have been lying about losing it, but maybe he wasn’t. That’s good.
Now all she has to do is wait for him to wake up. The basement room is already prepared for a new occupant, but she won’t have to resort to that this time. Not with her soul mate. He won’t try to get away . . .
Or will he?
Remembering his skittishness back on the beach, she tells herself he was just out of sorts because of the heat, and too little sleep last night, and the trauma of having lost his phone . . .
His phone.
Her initial reaction, when he mentioned that he’d lost it, had been dismay. She’s always used her visitors’ phones to cancel their InTune Accounts and send e-mails on their behalf, to ensure that no one would notice they were missing. That’s not going to be possible this time.
But then this time it won’t be necessary.
As soon as he understands just how much they have in common and realizes that together they can reclaim everything they’ve lost, he’ll forget his old life and everything and everyone in it.
She only hopes he’ll grasp the truth right away. Any delay could be . . . uncomfortable, to say the least.
She climbs out of the car, closes the door, locks the car, and pockets the garage remote along with his wallet. She long ago disabled the emergency release lever designed to open the wide door from the inside in case of a lost keypad or power failure.
Inside the house, she closes the door leading to the garage and slides the bolt she installed last year. Now if her guest happens to wake up anytime soon—which isn’t likely—he’ll be locked in the windowless garage.
Humming their song, “Livin’ on a Prayer,” she steps into the kitchen and stops short. Something smells terrible. What the . . . ?
Oh. The cat food and milk. It must have spoiled in the heat.
“Gato! You naughty boy. You didn’t finish your breakfast!” she calls, opening the creaky utility cupboard to take out a fresh can of food.
Poised, she listens for the cat to come running. But apparently it’s too muggy for him to move. With a sigh, Alex opens the can, dumps the contents into a bowl, and puts the bowl on the floor.
She opens the fridge, takes out the milk, closes it again a bit too carelessly, causing a sheaf of crayon drawings and magnets to drop to the floor. She picks them up, taking the time to glance through the stick figure drawings again, thinking of Dante, of Carmen, of their dream house . . .
Abruptly replacing the pictures on the fridge door, she walks through the first floor straightening knickknacks, adjusting throw pillows, aligning scatter rugs. She wants everything to look just perfect now that he’s home at last.
Home . . .
At last . . .
Wait a minute.
“Gato!” she calls abruptly, remembering. “Gato, come here! Come here, kitty-kitty-kitty!”
Now she hears a distant meow, coming from upstairs.
Okay. That’s good. He’s already up there. It’ll be easier that way.
“Where are you, kitty?” she calls as she stealthily climbs the steps. “Hmm? Where are you hiding?”
He’s in Dante’s room, as usual. She forgot and left the door open again.
“At least you didn’t knock over his beautiful buildings, did you, kitty-kitty?” she croons, sidestepping the cobweb-shrouded Lego construction and scooping the cat off the bed, cradling him against her pounding heart.
Carmen’s voice echoes in her head.
Some things just don’t feel right until . . .
“That might be true,” Alex says aloud. “But this can’t wait till sundown. I’m doing it for your sake.”
She carries the cat into the bathroom, puts him into the linen closet, and quickly closes the door.
Angry meows come from inside.
“I’m sorry, kitty. Really, I am.”
She briskly sets the rubber plug into the tub drain, turns on the tap and starts to fill it with water. Only the hot—which is turned up nice and extra hot, courtesy of the ancient plumbing. It’ll be faster that way. Scalding versus drowning: more painful, perhaps, but probably over more quickly.
Standing in front of the mirror, humming the song her foster mother had taught her years ago in a gingerbread cottage—the song about the doomed Señor Don Gato—she methodically rolls up her sleeves, anticipating a struggle. He’s not a large cat, but he’s strong. And terribly fearful of water.
Most cats are, Alex recalls the foster mother telling her long ago. Funny—she can no longer even remember the woman’s name, and she was so sure she’d wind up becoming her mother.
“Why are they afraid, ma’am?” Alex asked the woman, trying to be helpful and polite, still hoping she’d be adopted.
“Because they sense that water is dangerous to them.”
“Why is it dangerous?”
“Because they aren’t good swimmers.”
“So they’ll drown if someone puts them into the water, then?”
“Why would you ask such a thing?”
Sleeves in place, Alex turns away from the mirror. The tub is full enough, but not too full. Good. She doesn’t want water sloshing everywhere, making a mess. She turns off the tap, still humming.
In the song, Señor Don Gato falls off a roof and breaks—well, just about everything there is to break. His knee, his ribs, his whiskers, and even . . .
“What’s a solar plexus, ma’am?” Alex asked her foster mom as she sat stroking one of the woman’s many kittens on her lap.
“It’s in the stomach.”
“And if a cat breaks it, he’ll die? Like Don Gato?”
“Why are you asking me these terrible questions?”
“No reason.” Alex thoughtfully rubbed the kitten’s belly, wondering where, exactly, the solar plexus was.
“Be gentle with the kitty,” her foster mother cautioned her.
“I am,” Alex said, and she was—that time. While the woman was watching.
It wasn’t until later—after she’d learned that she wouldn’t be adopted, and would be moving back to a group home—that she found out exactly what would happen to a kitten with a broken solar plexus. A broken everything.
Without the roar of running water, her humming sounds a little hollow in the bathroom.
Maybe she’s just sad about what she has to do. But it’s the only way. He’s allergic to cats.
She stops humming.
“It’s him or you, Don Gato.”
She reaches for the linen closet doorknob.
She listens for an answering meow but instead hears something else.
The doorbell?
Frowning, she walks to the head of the stairs. Below, she can see the silhouette of a visitor standing on the other side of the frosted window in the unlocked front door.
In the small room adjacent to the Lost and Found, Gaby finds Shakey and Junie Cordero, another old lifeguard friend she hasn’t seen in a few years.
“Gaby! I’d know you anywhere. You look exactly like you did when we first met!”
She says the same thing to him, but it isn’t true. In the old days, Junie was the self-proclaimed “short, dark, and handsome” ladies’ man. Now he has a bit of a paunch protruding through his orange T-shirt, and every last strand of his wavy dark hair has disappeared. He tells her that he’d decided last winter that he might as well shave what little hadn’t fallen out.
“I’m getting old, Gaby.” He shakes his bald head.
“We all are, Junie.”
From Shakey: a choice hand gesture accompanied by a grumpy, “Hey! Speak for yourselves.”
Having concluded the niceties—and not-so-niceties—portion of the conversation, Gaby asks them what’s going on.
“It pro’ly nothin’,” Shakey tells her. “But it’s weird.”
“It’s about Ben?”
“Yeah. Did you talk to him?”
“When?”
“Before he left.”
“Why?”
“Go on. You tell her,” Shakey says to Junie.
“I was planning on it, Shake.”
“Well, you weren’t saying nothing.”
“Because you were.”
“Well now I’m not. So start talkin’.”
Junie turns to Gaby. “Okay. So I don’t want to upset you, but—”
“Come on. What’s going on?”
“I was getting ready to leave, you know, cutting across public parking, heading out toward the guards’ lot, and I caught sight of Ben. I haven’t seen him since last summer, but I recognized him right away. Ben, he always looks the same. Like you.”
She nods, tense.
“Plus, I knew he was around today because Stella Kaplan mentioned it and I was expecting to see him. But I didn’t. Until I got to the parking lot. And there he was. I don’t know how to say this, Gaby . . . I mean, Stella told me you guys are still together, doing great and all that, so it’s not like I thought he was up to something . . .”
Gaby swallows, realizing where this is headed. “You saw him with someone else,” she says. “Another woman. Is that it?”
Junie and Shakey look at each other.
“That’s not really ‘it,’ ” Shakey tells her.
“I mean, that’s not why I was concerned,” Junie says, and adds, “Should I be?”
“The thing is . . .” Should she tell them she and Ben are divorced?
Not yet. If seeing Ben with another woman isn’t the reason they called her back here, then what is?
“Why did you think there was a problem, Junie, when you saw Ben?”
“Because he looked like he was about to keel over. I mean, I probably wouldn’t have batted an eye if he were a real party guy like—” He breaks off to shoot an accusatory look at Shakey.
“Me? What’d I do?”
“What
didn’t
you do?” Junie shoots back.
“I done a whole lot of nothing exciting since I had that heart—”
“Anyway,” Junie cuts him off, “I never seen Ben like that. And it’s the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday, you know what I mean? I thought maybe he was having a freak heart attack or something.”
“Like me,” Shakey puts in. “I had a—”
“Yeah, only yours wasn’t a freak heart attack. Ben is young and healthy.”
“What, I’m old and unhealthy?”
“Pretty much. But we’re not talking about you, remember?”
Gaby’s own heart is racing. Whatever she was expecting . . . it wasn’t this.
Again, Junie gets back to his account: “So I went running over there, you know, as Ben and this lady were getting into this car—a black BMW. He was so out of it he didn’t even hear me or see me. He was in the passenger’s seat, and so I asked this woman what was going on—I told her I was a friend of his. And she tried to tell me he was fine. Said he’d just had too much sun or some bullshit like that.”
“No sun today,” Shakey contributes, shaking his do-ragged head.
“I asked her who she was and where they were going, and she told me that it was none of my business. And then she slammed the car door in my face and drove off so fast I couldn’t even get the plate,” Junie adds indignantly. “Believe me, I tried. Maybe I overstepped my bounds, but Bennie’s a friend of mine and I didn’t like what I saw. I came back here and mentioned it to Shakey, and he said you were looking for him, and we figured we’d better let you know.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“So then . . . did you know what was going on?” Shakey asks. “With Ben and that bitch?”
Gaby shakes her head uneasily. “No.”
“Who was she?”
“I think I know.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out Ben’s phone, noticing that the battery is running low. Clicking on the link for the InTune site, she opens his profile and clicks on the photo of the woman he was meeting.
She holds out the phone, showing the headshot to Junie. “Is this her?”
“Oh, yeah. That’s her. So you know her, then? Listen, I’m sorry I called her a bitch. I just didn’t like—”
“I don’t know her,” Gaby cuts in.
“Then who is she?”
Time to cut to the chase. “She’s Ben’s date.”
When no one answers the bell on the second ring, Ivy reaches out to knock on the door.
This is ridiculous.
She knows Mrs. Rodriguez is home. She and Heather Toomey watched her pull the BMW into the garage not ten minutes ago, as they sat on the porch sipping the lemonade Heather offered after she hung up the phone with her boyfriend.
Her boyfriend, the cop.
If he weren’t a cop, Heather probably would have picked up her story where she’d left off before the call was interrupted.
“You were telling me that the local kids told stories about how strangely Carmen’s wife behaved after he left,” she prodded Heather when she returned.
“I know, but . . . I shouldn’t have been talking about her,” Heather said, much to Ivy’s frustration. “They were just rumors. Silly things kids say. You know how it is.”
“I know, but . . . can’t you tell me?”
Heather shook her head. “I can’t.”
“Did your boyfriend tell you not to?”
“Pretty much. He reminded me that we have to live here, and it’s probably not a good idea to go around talking about the neighbors to strangers. Not that you’re a stranger.”