Swim Back to Me (16 page)

“Where are we?” she said.

“Atherton.”

“Why are we in Atherton?”

The light turned green, and he made a left and passed through a giant stone gate. Now they were somewhere residential, but quiet, wealthy, spread-out residential, with smaller closed gates at driveways every hundred yards or so and, way back from the gates, the smudgy outlines of giant houses. Atherton was where the rich people lived, the richest people, richer even than the kids Carolee had gone to school with in Palo Alto. Atherton kids went to private schools. They drove brand-new cars and walked in gilded groups through the pricey Stanford Shopping Center, where Carolee had her first job, cashiering at a gourmet hot dog stand. In those days, Carolee’s richest friend was Tamara Bevin, and she said her parents had chosen Palo Alto over Atherton or Woodside because they wanted her and her brother to learn about the real world. Carolee and her mom lived in the thin strip of south Palo Alto that ran between El Camino and the railroad tracks, where the houses were small and close together and you could hear shouts many nights, and cars roaring up and down the streets—and she knew that was about as real as Palo Alto ever got.

Alejandro stopped at a driveway. He reached up to his sun visor, and the gate swung inward.

“What the fuck?” Carolee said.

“Mi casa.”

The car crunched over gravel and slowed as a huge white cake of a house came into view, with pillars and a covered entryway, and a massive double door flanked by glowing lanterns. He cut the engine, and they looked at each other.

She said, “You live here.”

“My mommy and daddy do. Come on, I gotta make a stop.”

Inside the house it was dark, though there was a light on somewhere near the back, so dim it might be nothing more than a night-light. He moved fast, and she picked up her pace and trailed him through an enormous living room, twice the size of her entire apartment, and through a corridor that led to a vast kitchen, with stoves and ovens and sinks and refrigerators at one end and couches and easy chairs and a huge flat-screen TV at the other, where a small, dark-haired woman sat watching some show with the sound off, her tiny body enveloped by a splashily flowered robe, white with giant red and orange flowers that gleamed in the near dark.

“Sandro,” she said, leaping to her feet and switching on a lamp.
“Madre de dios.”

“Mami.”
He crossed the room and kissed her cheeks.

Her hands fluttered from her face to his face to the pockets of her robe. Her skin was a darker olive than his, her eyes deeply black and ringed with shadows.

“Sandro, you almost gave me a heart attack. What’s wrong, what is it?”

He said something to her in Spanish, and they went back and forth, speaking rapidly. Alejandro gestured at Carolee, and the woman came over and held out her hand. She was maybe 4′11″, and she had tiny, almost nonexistent breasts; she could have passed for a child if it weren’t for the blurriness of her aging face.

“You are most welcome,” she said. “How do you do? I am Alejandro’s mother.”

Carolee took the hand, which was cold and soft and seemed to slip from her grasp the moment she touched it. Was she the maid? No, she wasn’t the maid, and Alejandro was not the person he pretended to be. All these months Carolee had assumed he was from the Latino part of Redwood City, near the taquerías and bodegas. He obviously
wanted
people to assume it, with his cholo talk.

“Carolee,” the woman said. “In Spanish we have Carolina. Are you for Carolina?”

Carolee shook her head. She’d been named for her mom’s parents, Carol and Lee. It was embarrassing, she never told anyone.

“You work at the photocopy shop?”

“She’s the queen there,” Alejandro cut in, speaking in perfect, unaccented English. “The queen of photocopies and expedited shipping services.”

Carolee felt her face grow warm, but he turned to his mom and said, “¿
Dónde está Papi
?”

She gestured at the ceiling, and he left the room, his footsteps sounding on a flight of stairs.

Carolee looked at his mom. She used to know how to deal with people like this, rich and in every way out of her league; she got through school dealing with them, charming them, making sure she was
that nice girl Carolee
to all the parents she encountered because that was how she got to go places. “Mrs. Chavez,” she said. “I’m sorry to intrude.”

Alejandro’s mom smiled. “It’s Mitchell—Chavez is my maiden name. My son borrows it because he does not like Mitchell. But please, call me Raquel.”

“Raquel,” Carolee said. She repeated the apology, explaining about her dead car, but all she could think was what a liar Alejandro was. He’d faked this Latino homeboy thing and he’d changed his name to go with it? She was going to kill him. Her days of protecting him from the other guys at work, trying to sand the edges off their teasing? Over.

His mom was waiting.

“He was giving me a ride home,” Carolee said, “and then suddenly we were here. I don’t know why we stopped.”

His mom’s arched eyebrows went up. “For medicine. He didn’t tell you?”

“Medicine?”

“He has a soft heart. He always has.”

Carolee forced herself to smile, but things were going from bad to worse. What did Alejandro think he was going to do, dig up some old pills from an infection he’d had? He was a liar, and he was out of his mind.

She had to pee like crazy, and she looked around, wondering where the bathroom might be. Bathrooms. The sitting area was full of furniture, everything covered with flowers, gold tassels, big silk buttons. Even the lampshades were flowered, and the lamp bases were painted with ladies holding parasols.

“May I use the bathroom?” she asked. “The restroom?”

Alejandro’s mom showed her the way, reaching into a small pink-and-gold room and turning on a light. When she was gone Carolee closed the door. It hurt, and then it hurt a lot more as she finished. There were tiny linen hand towels, ironed, and rather than use one she dried her hands on her pants. She thought of a boy she dated in high school, from a rich family in Crescent Park, and remembered going home with him for dinner one night: soon after they arrived the boy’s mom suggested he show her
the restroom
so she could
freshen up
. She didn’t know what that meant, freshen up, but she figured she must look dirty, so in the bathroom she took a small fringed cloth—terry, not as fancy as this one—and wetted it thoroughly to scrub her face, realizing only afterward that it was a hand towel and not a washcloth. “They sound very la-di-da,” her mom said when she got home and described the evening. Carolee had liked the boy: David Connell, with his straight dark hair and his voice that still cracked sometimes. He ran track; she met him after practice most afternoons, and they made out behind the tennis courts until it was time for him to go into the gym to shower. She remembered loving his intense sweat smell, the damp of his shirt. But after that dinner with his family she broke up with him, saying she needed more time to study. It was a good excuse: it was junior year, everyone was working like crazy. No one had to know the truth, which was that it made her too nervous, the threat of being found out.

It was after one a.m. She decided that when she got back to the kitchen she’d excuse herself to Mrs. Mitchell, call a taxi, and just eat the fare, thirty bucks, forty, whatever it would be. Alejandro she would deal with later.

But when she returned she found not just Mrs. Mitchell but also Alejandro and a short, stocky white man with thick eyeglasses, standing there in blue pajamas and a bathrobe, looking recently awoken and very disgruntled. Someone had turned on the room lights, and it was bright now, almost like a stage set.

“Dees ees her, dees ees Carolee,” Alejandro said, diving back into the accent. He came and put his hand behind her elbow. “You OK, lady? You wanna sit down?”

She glared at him. “I’m fine. I need to get home, I’m going to call a taxi.”

“No, no.
Mi padre
is gonna help you.”

“Now listen—” the man said, casting a furious look at Alejandro’s mom.

“ ‘My father,’ ” Mrs. Mitchell said.

“My father,” Alejandro said, switching now to the low, robotic tone of an automated phone system. “My father. Is going. To help you.”

His father was going to help her. His father was going to help her because … he was a doctor.
You’re a doctor now?
she’d said to Alejandro, mocking him. Would she have believed him if he’d said,
No, but my dad is?
He’d set her up, brought her here to expose her prejudice. Her assumptions. He was showing her.

Or was he? She looked at the three of them, Alejandro and his beautiful Latina mother and his angry white father. She didn’t think so. She didn’t know what he was up to, but his eyes were brighter, his stance was straighter, his whole being was focused in a way she’d never seen before.

“I’m going to call a taxi,” she said. “What’s the address here?”

“
Chica
, no,” he cried. “I ain’t lettin’ you pay for no taxi. You the boss lady.”

“That’s
enough,
” his dad said.

But Alejandro ignored him and headed off toward the dark end of the kitchen, leaving the three of them just standing there. His dad gave his mom a furious glare, and, as if in response, she turned from him and called to Alejandro, “What are you looking for? I wish I’d known you were coming, I would have put some Limonata on ice.”

Carolee saw a cluster of family photos on a table halfway across the room. They were mostly too far away to see clearly, except for a large one of a much younger Dr. Mitchell—still with a full head of hair, his face partly masked by a pair of aviator sunglasses—holding a small boy in a swimming pool, both of them lit up with delight, the boy with his arms wrapped tight around the man’s neck.

Alejandro came back with two beers. He handed one to Carolee and twisted off the cap of the other, leaning his head back for a long gulp.

“You’re drinking,” his dad said.

“Believe it or not, I can have a beer.”

“Not in this house.”

Mrs. Mitchell pulled a tissue from her pocket and dabbed at her eyes. “Robert,” she said to her husband. “Please, I am begging.”

Dr. Mitchell flushed. Under his eyes were pads of flesh the size of Carolee’s baby toes.

Alejandro said, “You always told me I could come to you for help.”

Dr. Mitchell turned and walked a few steps away. Watching from behind, Carolee saw how tense he was, his shoulders rising and then dropping heavily as he exhaled. He turned to her and said, “What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry?”

“With your urinary tract. What are you experiencing?”

Heat filled her face as she explained her symptoms. She was furious at Alejandro for putting her through this, but she stayed on her best behavior, voice calm and polite, careful not to give offense. Dr. Mitchell said it sounded like a UTI but she’d need to be tested, and she said, “They’re kind of chronic. I’m pretty sure. I don’t want to trouble you, I can call my doctor in the morning, that’s what I was planning.”

“Why don’t you write a prescription,” Mrs. Mitchell said to her husband. “Sandro can drive her to the twenty-four-hour Walgreens, everyone is happy.”

“Uh-uh,” Alejandro said quickly, shaking his head. “Papi don’t work like that. He got principles, he need to give her a pee-pee test first.”

The room went so silent Carolee could hear a clock ticking somewhere, and outside, in a backyard she knew would be vast, some small night animal passing with a rustle of disturbed branches through a shrub.

Dr. and Mrs. Mitchell remained mute, staring at each other with what Carolee took to be easily revived hatred.

“Es complicado,”
Alejandro said happily.

They rode in Dr. Mitchell’s Mercedes, Carolee and Alejandro both in the backseat like kids. The streets were dark and deserted. Dr. Mitchell drove with his hands at exactly ten and two o’clock. Alejandro was quiet, and out of the corner of her eye Carolee saw him picking at his cuticles. Saying goodbye to his mom, he had bowed his head and let her kiss him over and over again.

Dr. Mitchell’s office was in Palo Alto, in a medical complex about four blocks from where David Connell’s family had lived—maybe still lived. Carolee had no idea what had happened to him, besides the obvious. Everyone had gone to college except her.

It used to bug her, but it didn’t anymore. Growing up, she’d always thought she’d go to college, and her mom sure thought it: Carolee was going to make her proud, reverse the family history by
not
getting pregnant in high school,
not
dropping out before graduation,
not
getting married and divorced in just eleven months. Carolee was going to go to college and maybe even graduate school … but she broke her arm at the first volleyball game of her senior year, and after that everything went to shit. She had a cast over her elbow, so she couldn’t do her homework, couldn’t write her applications, couldn’t work the cash register at her job, and when spring came and everyone else was figuring out where they were heading for the next great thing, she had nowhere to go and no money to get there. The first year or two were hardest—she tried community college classes, hopped from one bad job to another, found some other losers to hang out with until she realized two of the guys were dealing meth—but things fell into place after that. Her mom said there was no shame in scaling back your plans, and most of the time Carolee believed her. Or tried to.

At the exterior door Dr. Mitchell flipped through the keys on his ring, and she shivered as she waited. He looked over at Alejandro. “Your friend is cold. Where are your manners?”

Alejandro looked as if he’d been struck, the sting of surprise making him go still for a moment. He shrugged off his peacoat and handed it to her, and though she didn’t want it—a rough wool thing with chipped plastic buttons—she draped it over her shoulders and avoided looking at either of them.

Inside, Dr. Mitchell led the way up a flight of stairs made of pebbled driveway concrete. He unlocked his suite and began flipping light switches, first in a small waiting room, then in an open area with a reception desk and file cabinets and a long counter with computers, and finally in his office, with its fancy furniture and large framed picture of Mrs. Mitchell on the wall, a beautiful twenty-five or thirty years old, with perfect golden skin and masses of black hair, but sad eyes, even then.