Then Came You (34 page)

“You want people,” I said, remembering my conversation with Kimmie; my dream of being a mysterious benefactor.

“A village,” Bettina agreed. “You know, ‘it takes a village’? So I thought . . . I mean, it’s probably crazy. You agreed to sell an egg, it’s not like you wanted to be a mother.”

I interrupted. “Can I see her?”

“She’s sleeping,” said Bettina. I thought this was a refusal until she added, “Take your shoes off and come with me.”

I did, then followed her as she led me down a hall and eased open a paneled door with a tiny embroidered pillow on a pink silk ribbon that read
dream time
hanging from the cut-glass doorknob. “Her name is Rory,” said Bettina, and eased the door open.

The nursery was lovely, all cream and pale pink and celery green. A white-noise machine broadcast the sound of waves and seagulls from one corner; a humidifier purred in another. Bet-tina tiptoed over the carpet to a crib in the center of the room . . . and there, in the center, with a pink blanket pulled up to her chin, lay the baby. She was sleeping on her back, her head turned to the side, arms stretched above her head like she was signaling a touchdown.

“Oh,” I sighed. She had a few wisps of blond hair, eyebrows like gold, and a dimple in the cheek that I could see. The same dimple I had; the one I’d inherited from my father.

T
he thing about bad decisions is that they don’t feel like bad decisions when you’re making them. They feel like the obvious choice, the of-course-that-makes-sense move. They feel, somehow, inevitable.

After I left the apartment, I took a cab to Newark Airport, went to the United kiosk, and printed out my ticket for Paris. I endured the pat-down at security, walked to the gate, and spent an hour browsing in the duty-free shop, long enough for the security cameras to get some good shots of me. Then, bending over my purse, exclaiming as though I’d left something—my wallet! my passport!—at home, I walked briskly back down the hallway, out of the airport, into the gray afternoon. It wasn’t like it was my baby, I told myself as I walked. Not really. True, it was Marcus’s sperm, but Marcus’s sperm had also made Tommy and Trey and Bettina, and it wasn’t like I was close with any of them.
Not mine, not mine, not mine,
I thought, climbing on board a bus.

The bus took me into Manhattan to the Port Authority, which was noisy and crowded, smelling of fast food and urine and bus exhaust. Buses were pulling in from Dallas and Kansas City, from Topeka and Toledo, from Pittsburgh and Tallahassee and all points in between. Fresh-faced girls with bags over their
shoulders and their best boots on their feet were stepping into the terminal, getting their first look at New York City, planning how they’d conquer it without thinking for an instant that they’d fail; that, someday, they might find themselves forty-three years old, with a stranger’s face and all of their bright plans in ruin.

Marcus kept cash at home, five thousand dollars in a box in the safe. I’d helped myself to all of it and zipped it into the various pockets of my wallet and purse. Another bus took me to Philadelphia, and a train brought me to that city’s airport, where I picked up a ticket at the US Air counter and caught a late flight to Puerto Vallarta. When we landed, I bought a bus ticket for thirty pesos to Sayulita, a forty-five minute ride away. Sayulita, according to the Internet, was a little fishing village now famous for its surfing and its yoga, a place where you could still find a cheap place to stay, eat fresh fruit and hand-made tortillas, and sip
batidas
by the beach. It looked pretty in the pictures that my handheld pulled up. Pretty, and a good place to hide. My rudimentary Spanish, a lot of gesturing, and a fistful of pesos got me a
casita
for a month—one room, with a kitchenette in the corner and mosquito netting around the bed. There was a toilet inside and a shower, with half-height wooden walls, attached to the side of the house, underneath an orange tree.
Lemon trees in the backyard,
I heard my mother say. I could remember the feel of her hand in my hair, the warmth of her body in bed next to me.
When the sun goes down you can watch the surfers.

I lay my bag down on the bed. I was back to where I’d started. Take away the banana and the banyan trees, the sound of the waves, the tortilla truck that made its way up the cobblestones every morning, edging past the street dogs and the chickens, and I could have been back in West Hollywood, eighteen and broke, with no idea of what to do next.

I’d bought a few things at a market near the airport: a cotton wrap, a bathing suit, big sunglasses, a canvas tote bag that
said
VISIT MEXICO
in curvy red letters, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. In my cottage, I put my clothes on the wire hangers some other visitor had left behind, set my toiletries on the little table underneath a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe next to the sink, pulled on the swimsuit, wrapped the pareo around my waist, slid a pair of two-dollar rubber flip-flops on my feet, looped my tote bag over my shoulder, and walked into town.

In a market that opened onto the street I bought a net bag and filled it with eggs, cheese, tortillas, mangos, an avocado, a sun-warmed tomato that felt ripe and heavy in my hand, bottled water, and sunscreen. I walked home slowly, doing a lap around the village square. There was a church in one corner, a stained-glass Madonna with downcast eyes in its window. Across the way was a yoga studio, and sitting on benches, or on the curbstones that divided the street from the green, were the men that I knew I’d find, the ones with shabby clothes and sly expressions who lived in any resort town by the sea, the men who’d find the tourists what they wanted.
Missy, hey, missy, you want smoke? Pretty lady, you want to party?

There were three
farmacias
that I passed on my rounds. I went inside to the smallest one. An ancient man, brown and gnarled as a walnut, stood behind the counter, sadly polishing his glasses. I put my hands against my temples, then laid them on my heart.
“Dolor. Muy malo. No . . .”
Shit. What was Spanish for
sleep
?
“No dormir. Ayúdame.”
At first, he pulled a bottle of some over-the-counter remedy off the shelf and held it out to me, a question on his face. I shook my head, then opened my wallet, letting him see the credit cards, the fat stack of pesos. “
Más fuerte. El dolor, muy malo.
I lost . . .” I made my arms into a cradle, rocking an invisible infant. The man looked up at me, then held up one stubby finger.
“Un momento, señora.”
Then he shuffled behind the counter and came back with an unmarked brown prescription bottle, into which he solemnly tapped thirty
pills from a white envelope in his hand. “For the sleeping,” he said. “Very strong, so
cuidado
.” I nodded, paid him, and slipped the bottle into my pocket. Now I had what I needed: sunshine, sand and waves, food and water, a bed to sleep in, a town where no one would know me, and something to still the voice in my head that shrilled and mewled like a petulant teenager’s:
I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.

I’d wake up in the morning with the sunrise. The way the roosters crowed in the cobbled streets, it was hard to sleep later than that. I’d fry an egg, slide it onto a tortilla, add a few slices of avocado and tomato, a sprinkle of salt, and take it onto my porch to eat. I’d wash the pan and my plate, pull on my swimsuit, take my tote bag, my sunscreen, and the towel that I’d hung on a tree branch to dry, and walk to the beach, a wide curve of golden sand that sloped gently toward the water. There, I’d rent a lounge chair for five pesos a day. There were bars where the beach joined the sidewalk, places that sold beer and bottled water and hand-patted tortillas filled with whatever you wanted for lunch. I’d leave my bag on the chair, slip my key, on a length of twine, around my wrist, and swim out into the clear green water. Sometimes I’d swim out even farther, until the people on the beach were no bigger than colored dots. More often, I’d flip onto my back and lie there, borne up by the gentle waves, staring into the sun.

As the weeks unspooled, I got to know people’s faces, if not their names: the surfing instructors who’d paddle their long-boards past me; the young woman with the gold incisor who worked at the café where I’d order my juice or enchiladas; the man, missing most of the fingers on his left hand, who rented the beach chairs; the little girl with glossy black pigtails who followed him with a tiny rake to smooth the sand. My own hair started growing in, dark at the roots, with a few springy strands of gray. I kept it braided, tucked up underneath my hat, and I
wore sunglasses that covered my face from my eyebrows to my cheeks.

One day my after-lunch ramble took me to a hotel lobby. There were a few decent-size hotels in Sayulita, inexpensive places that catered to kids from Europe on their gap year, backpackers and free spirits and families who’d decided that bare-bones quarters with shared bathrooms was a fair exchange for the gorgeous beaches, the fresh fruit, the quaint streets with their little shops and the men who’d sit in the square at night, playing sad love songs on their guitars. The hotels had computers, usually an elderly desktop perched on top of a folding table in the lobby, where you could rent time online.

I’d ditched my iPhone in the ladies’ room at the airport in Philadelphia, sliding it into a trash can without a second look, even though I’d felt a momentary pang about the leather cover, monogrammed, soft as butter. Now I brushed my salt-water-stiffened hair off my cheeks and thumped the keys on a wheezing, overheating Dell, logging into my e-mail for the first time since I’d left, opening a screen so I could Google my name.

There it was. First, a column in the
Post
about how I’d missed the funeral. Then, three days later, the story I knew someone would find eventually. It was in the
Daily News,
illustrated with my mug shot, from when I was twenty-three, and another picture of me as a teenager, at a party, in a
Flashdance
-style sweatshirt, ripped at the shoulder. “Runaway Bride Was Bigamist.”

“Here we go,” I muttered, and clicked on the link.
India Bishop, the new wife-turned-widow of recently deceased financier Marcus Croft, who raised eyebrows across the city after she was a no-show at her husband’s funeral on Friday, changed her name when she moved to Hollywood as a teenager. No surprise: it’s a move many young aspiring actresses make. But when Bishop filled out the paperwork that would legally turn her from Samantha Marie Stavros to India Bishop, she never mentioned that she’d been married as a
teenager, and that she’d never obtained a divorce. Bishop, 43 (not the 38 she’s been claiming), a public-relations executive, was wed in 1985 to David Carter, a substitute drama teacher at New London High School in New London, Connecticut, who was more than fifteen years’ Bishop’s senior at the time. “It was a major scandal,” said Andrea LeBlanc, a classmate of Bishop’s. “We all figured she was pregnant, but, if she was, she wasn’t showing by graduation . . . and, by August, she was gone.”

Bishop left New London and moved to Hollywood, where she worked odd jobs and was eventually arrested in a round-up of women who were working as waitresses at a party and charged with prostitution (she was eventually released, and the charges were dropped). Two years later, she was hired at JMS Public Relations under her new name.

I gripped the edges of the table, my stomach clenching, thinking that if there was any consolation to be found, it was that Marcus had died before he’d found out the truth—that I’d filed papers, but David, it seemed, had never signed them and, even decades after the fact, I had still been married to David Carter when Marcus and I had said our vows. I forced my eyes back to the screen, scanning to the bottom to read the story’s final line.
Reached in his New London home, David Carter declined to comment.

I bent my head, imagining the story being zapped around the city, landing with a cheery little chirp in the inboxes of everyone I knew. I pictured Bettina’s smirk. Then I forced myself to look at my inbox. There were dozens of e-mails from Annie—the last one, under “subject,” read
PLEASE CALL ME! I’M WORRIED!
Another few dozen from Leslie at the clinic, saying basically the same thing. Bettina had written:
Where Are You?
More spam, more reporters; a note from my saleslady at Saks, who, apparently unaware of the changes in my life, wrote to say that the new Jimmy Choo open-toed leather lace-up booties had arrived
and were available in dark brown and black, and she would hold a pair in both colors until she heard from me. Finally there was one more e-mail from Bettina. Nothing in the subject line, just a picture of a baby with dark eyes and a jaunty pink beret over her head. “It’s a girl,” she’d written. Nothing more.

I logged out, picked up my bag, and walked into the sunshine.
Hey, lady, hey, lady,
the men on the square crooned. Back at my
casita,
I shucked off my swimsuit and stood under the water from the outdoor shower until it went from tepid to cold. I didn’t bother drying off. I lay naked underneath the single sheet, with mosquitoes whining against the netting, until the sun went down, and slept until almost noon the next day . . . and when I woke up, I knew where to go, and what to do when I got there.