Love Her Madly (18 page)

“Where am I?” I asked in English. Before I could try again in Spanish, the nurse rushed out of the room. She returned with a handsome doctor in his midthirties. He addressed me in English.

“Hello, I'm Dr. Bayer. You're in a hospital. Do you remember your name?”

“American?” I rasped. My lips, when I explored them with my tongue, were broken and cracked, and the parts that were intact felt like plastic. The nurse offered me a sweet, fruity fluid through a straw.

“I'm American, yes. You're in a hospital in San Jose. Do you remember your name?”

“Gloria Roebuck. My friend, where is she?”

He looked at the nurse, who shot him a “no idea” look.

“We'll check on that,” he said.

“We came together.” I insisted. “Cynthia Williams. A blond girl. My age.”

Dr. Bayer stared at me with concern, but no understanding manifested on his face. The painful thought that I had imagined her in the truck cab with me snaked across my mind. Had she really not been rescued?

“If she's not here, you have to find her. She was with me, on the island. Some men took her. She's out there all alone.”

Based on how my luck was going, I expected the doctor to ignore me or sedate me, but instead, he came closer, interested. “Your friend is also an American?”

This small display of understanding almost made me break down, but I was finally getting somewhere.

“Yes. We're students. We went to that island, the haunted one near Playa Tortuga, with some local guys, Hector and Marco.” I paused, since the doctor had produced a pad and began taking notes. “There were noises, like gunshots, and they spooked our friends, and it was just the two of us alone, and then these men came, and my friend . . . I tried to make her come with me, but she wouldn't. The men, they took her.”

The memory of her expression at the moment when she told me to go appeared from within my memory, as perfect as a Polaroid. Everything that had hurt me that night, and all that I'd suffered was dwarfed by the helpless confusion I suddenly felt. It occurred to me that there was a chance I would never get to ask her why.

The thought broke me.

I lost it.

I was sedated.

When I awoke, I was confronted with a plate of chicken, rice, and beans, and the first of many cops.

You know the rest.

Part II

What Happened After

Seven Years Later

CHAPTER EIGHT

Glo

The coffee mug slipped from my wet hand as I rinsed it, shattering a dish resting beneath it in the sink with a jarring crash. I reached instinctively for the broken plate, as if my quick intervention might somehow undo the damage. My sudsy fingers fumbled across the razor-sharp edge of cornflower-blue porcelain, and I jerked my hand back with a yelp. I looked down and watched a stream of crimson rush across my palm. There was a crescent-shaped gash across my finger just above my wedding band, long but shallow. I thrust the digit under the faucet and cringed as a deeper pain ran up my arm.

“Everything okay?” Raj's voice rolled in sleepily from the living room.

“There's been a casualty. A bread plate. I think we're down to five.”
Not too bad
, I thought, wincing as I applied pressure with a paper towel. Only three dishes of that size lost in the three years we'd been married. As long as we didn't plan to throw any dinner parties, we'd be good for another two years at least.

“You're bleeding,” he observed, looking up from his phone as I crossed through the room. He rose, preceding me on my way to the bathroom.

“Let Dr. Raj get you a Band-Aid.”

The bathroom was still steamy from my shower. He set
aside the tampons that I had forgotten to stash underneath the counter, and in their place, snapped open the first aid kit. In a few days, I would need to go to the pharmacy for another month of birth control, a task I was reluctant to do. The previous night, as my pelvic muscles twisted like taffy, we discussed it again. Or I discussed it, and Raj gazed out the window with a look of studious consideration, humoring me. I knew his position. There was no reason to rush into starting a family. He'd only just gotten his theater company on its feet, and while he brought in a respectable amount of money through his jobs as an actor and voice-over artist, playing a know-it-all beaver on a show aimed toward preliterate children, my salary was by far the more regular. Why not wait until we established ourselves a little more comfortably?

Because the timing was as good as it would ever be. Before we got hitched, we wisely had the whole “kids or no kids” talk and had decisively pointed our compass toward the horizon that read “Kids: at least one, not too many.” Now we were three years married, seven years as a couple, and Raj's paternal appetite had apparently dissolved into the ether. I sensed that if I was foolish enough to wait for him to feel really,
really
ready, it would be long after my eggs had become pocked and dusty, tucked away in the dark like a forgotten string of freshwater pearls.

He excised a Band-Aid from its wrapper and pressed it against the cut. I flinched.

“Sorry. Okay?”

I nodded. He carefully wrapped the Band-Aid around my finger, making it snug, but not so tight that it would begin to purple and ache. Then he kissed it. All of this care, this kindness, came so naturally to him. It was as if every moment he was flaunting his ideal qualities as a father, perpetually acing auditions for a job he claimed not to want yet.

“You have blood on your blouse. Maybe that's good for court? Sends a strong message?”

“No court today. Just meetings.” I removed my blouse and pulled out the stain remover, dabbing it on the mark. I looked up to see my husband giving me wolf eyes.

“Morning meetings?” he asked.

“Did you perhaps miss the huge box of tampons on the counter?” I watched the mischievous glow fade from his features at the reference to my meddlesome uterus. He balled up the bandage's wrapper and kissed me behind the ear.

“Drats.”

“It's not a permanent condition,” I reminded him, standing up a little straighter. His eyes lingered on my body as he slipped out the door. I did love the way he looked at me. He was around stunningly beautiful actresses on a daily basis, but not once did I ever see him give any of them what I thought of as
my
look. There was only one other person who had ever made his eyes shine like that, and she was long gone.

My eyes slipped down to the small makeup case where I kept my only souvenir of Cyn, her silver necklace with the star shaped charm. She'd been wearing it the morning we met at orientation, and I'd coveted it even then. Now that it was mine, I never wore it, but sometimes, in late January when my thoughts were inevitably pulled back to that cove, I would take it out and look at it. Sometimes I would shed a tear or two for the girl who had vanished from the planet without a trace.

The Costa Rican police didn't find much to help clear up the mystery. While I had been lying dead to the world in my hospital bed, it had stormed for hours, washing away all the footprints and scattering anything else that might have passed as evidence. The most monumental discovery was a handful of fresh bullet casings and a nearly empty diesel fuel tank. No one knew what exactly to make of it, but an FBI guy let it slip to my dad that the US government had been tracking drug-smuggling submarines in those waters for some time. They hadn't found
one yet, and didn't want to alert the public that they were nosing around, lest word get back to their targets. The logical presumption was that the brothers had the misfortune of crossing paths with the smugglers, and died for it. Cyn likely suffered a similar fate. But I knew it had to be worse. It was always worse for women.

My parents, doing what Cyn's parents should have been doing if they hadn't checked out of her life, kept pressing for further investigation but were categorically shut down. The message we received was that discovering the exact details surrounding the death of one American student wasn't worth endangering a massive smuggling sting. Cyn was just gone. Everyone was very sorry. That was it.

Before I made it out the front door, Raj pulled me close, his fingers lingering to caress the tender skin around my collar. “I miss you,” he said breathily. I wondered for a moment if our anniversary had passed without my noticing, or my birthday; he wasn't usually so ardent on a random workday morning.

“The weekend's almost here,” I said consolingly, even though it didn't mean much of a break for us. Raj had recently landed his first-ever major role in a Broadway show, playing the dashing, if naive, doctor in a British parlor comedy called
The Queen's Keys
. The show was getting great reviews, and it was wonderful for his career. The additional money it brought in was like a steady rain falling on parched land; we'd needed it for so long that it would take a while to make a difference, but we were grateful. The real price we paid was in our time together. My office hours clashed with his night- and weekend-performance schedule, and then there was his theater company gobbling up not only all his available free time, but his mental and emotional energy. I often felt like a single woman, perpetually dining alone in front of the television or playing the third wheel on nights out with our couple friends. I missed him. I missed us. I wondered,
often, what
us
would look like in five years' time if nothing changed.

Feeling lonely is an astoundingly dumb reason to have a child
, my rational mind chided as I stepped out of our building into the cold, damp air of early spring. My finger began to throb, and I pulled my coat tighter, crossing against the Don't Walk sign to the sunny side of the street. The trees on our block in Astoria, Queens, were still bare of buds. The naked branches reached hopefully past the brick buildings toward the sky, as if imploring the heavens for a warm respite after the long, bitter winter.

If I was honest with myself, I could admit that my desire for a baby was less about a burning hunger for a tiny bundle of joy and more a reaction to the sense that I was fading into the background of Raj's frenetic life. I was lonelier than I had been in a very long time, and I felt his rejection of the very idea of a child as further proof that his notion of our future was possibly less everlasting than my own. The thought made me so sad, and I didn't know whether it was real or just my insecurities rising like the phoenix any time I wasn't the focus of Raj's limelight. The truth was, all I really needed was for him to call my bluff and say “Sure, let's try!” With that sense of permanence in my back pocket, I could wait another year, or five.

I rounded the corner and was smacked with a blast of icy wind that blew right through my wool coat, making me shiver.
You chose this place
, I reminded myself for the thousandth time. And despite the perils of winter, I really loved New York. It had saved us.

The last thing I expected upon touching down on American soil after Costa Rica was for Raj to come to me. The world seemed to me so horrible a place that I all but expected Raj to disappear from my life entirely, just as Cyn had done. But he didn't. He appeared at my parents' front door, ashen and ex
hausted, speaking words of love, and as firmly as I turned him down and turned him away, he didn't give up.

With Cyn's words about Raj's true feelings echoing in my head, I set him on a task that I thought would put an end to all his nonsense about loving me. He hadn't been at the island, so Cyn's death was to him, still nebulous. Once he was forced to acknowledge that the girl he really loved was gone, I was certain his tune would change.

The task was to go back to our dorm and gather up Cyn's possessions. To me, who was afraid to set foot back on campus, it seemed an impossible ordeal, like something out of a Greek myth. I couldn't imagine climbing those steps and passing under the familiar threshold strung with white Christmas lights. I couldn't bear the thought of seeing all her things; her clothes, her shoes, her seventeen pairs of sunglasses, none of it ever to be touched by her again.

But the school wanted all of our stuff out, so I sent Raj to take care of it with my dad. I expected the task to undo him. As he sorted through her belongings on the all-weather carpet, he would have time to think, and time to let go of her piece by glittery piece. With her passing a reality, he would acknowledge that he had to let me go, too, because how could he ever look at me without thinking of her? I expected a break up call from campus, and stayed within earshot of the phone all day, blackening the eyes of all the models in my mother's
Health & Fitness
magazine as I waited for news of the end.

But that hadn't happened. He'd returned that night with my father, hauling a carful of my things that would be dumped into storage, unbrowsed by me. I wasn't ready.

He looked as drained as I'd ever seen him as he came into my childhood room, collapsing onto a bedspread that was marred with the battle scars of one hundred sloppy manicures.

“It's done,” he said, slipping something into my hand. It
was the silver star necklace. “I saw it hanging on her lava lamp. I couldn't give it to the Goodwill. She'd have wanted you to have it.”

I squeezed it in my fist until the spires of the star poked deep into the meat of my palms.

“If you don't want it, you can maybe find a way to send it to her sister.”

I nodded, unable to speak. We both knew I'd keep it. I was her sister, too.

“How bad was it?”

He sighed, and I saw a sheen appear on his clear, dark eyes. “Your dad kept it light. We listened to a lot of sports radio while we worked.”

He smiled at me, and I saw what it was costing him to keep it together. I pulled him into my arms, and held him close. He didn't cry, but I could almost feel the sadness in his body like a layer of varnish on his bones.

“What did you keep for yourself?” I asked after a long time had passed.

He sat up, and looking deeply into my face, took the fist that held the necklace and kissed it lightly. The bandages had come off, and there were scars, light pink like birthday frosting, webbing my flesh. “You, I hope.”

We knew that we would leave Florida. Our plans were so amorphous at that point that our decision between New York and California was decided by the flip of a Sacajawea dollar coin. We trusted her intrepid spirit to guide us with care, and heads meant New York City.

Raj grinned and kissed the carved metal face of our talisman. “Awesome. Hot dogs, every day.”

Not even Sacajawea could secure us a soft landing in the Empire State, driving up as we had in the dead of winter in a jittery U-Haul, our newly purchased thrift store furniture do-si-
do-ing noisily behind us all the way up I-95. My parents were understandably chagrined about me putting my education on hold and moving to a neighborhood in Brooklyn with a terrifying reputation, but they were also desperate. I saw in their eyes that the new me, the gloomy, nihilistic zombie that sat at the table masked as their daughter, was even more frightening to them. For a chance at getting the real me back, they would trade anything, including their peace of mind.

We rented our first apartment in Bed-Stuy sight unseen, except for a couple of shady pictures posted on Craigslist. We liked it because it was in Brooklyn, which we heard was cool, and because it had those three-sided bay windows like the house on
The Cosby Show
. It also helped that the landlord didn't care about credit checks or a verifiable rent history. He just wanted a big deposit. We sent a check and prayed that someone would meet us to hand over a key.

The night before we set eyes on our new home, we stopped at a fleabag motel in Jersey called the Swan. The bearded receptionist sat slumped behind a heavy plastic safety window watching television; a shelf of liquor, smokes, and condoms lined the wall behind him. Our room featured a double bed pressed disconcertingly close to a heart-shaped Jacuzzi, ringed with a mossy fur of soap scum. Raj sat up half the night, peering out the window at every sound, worried that someone might commandeer the U-Haul that contained our empire.

Raj's parents weren't as understanding about him leaving school. His father stopped speaking to him, and while his mother was slightly more conciliatory, it was months before she would speak my name. I was “She” or “Your girlfriend,” or, when she was being cruel, “The invalid.” I think that after what happened, she viewed Cyn and me interchangeably, a pair of equally bad influences on her charming second son, who came so close to doing as she, her husband, and her eldest son had
done: gotten that precious medical degree. Raj would never be a doctor, but at least he looked the part enough to play one onstage. For me, it was enough that he could apply a decent Band-Aid.