When Tito Loved Clara (11 page)

“No problem,” said Tito, and held the door open for her.

H
E EXPECTED TO
have to contrive ways of running into her in the lobby, or the deli, or the subway. He imagined these encounters, played them out in moment-by-moment detail in his mind—
Oh, hi. Sure, I'd love to come in
—and then, with the rapidity of a plot being advanced in a porno movie, he was taking off her clothes.

All of that was wiped away the next night, however, when she knocked on his father's door. Tito, thinking it was a tenant looking for a package, answered. Tamsin wore a pair of denim cutoffs and a T-shirt with the word
RICE
across the front. It would be a week before he learned that Rice was the name of the college she'd gone to and not her favorite football player—or food.

“Hey,” she said. “Sorry to bother you, but I was just wondering: Is the park safe?”

He stood in the doorway, next to the pile of signed-for packages, trying to minimize her view of the inside of his parents' apartment while simultaneously scoping her out. She had a heart-shaped face, reddish-brown hair, and sensitive skin that bruised easily—her arms were covered in black and blue marks from the move. On her neck and biceps there were large, jagged freckles, like pencil shavings. She looked slim but athletic, tensile. Tito could see that she was not wearing anything underneath her T-shirt.

“Ah, you know . . .” he started off, hesitant to tell her that a girl had been murdered in the park earlier in the year—a white college student. Not only that, but a white college student who had been a Cruz Brothers client. Rebecca Waverly was her name. Tito hadn't been involved in the move, but he'd monitored the coverage of her murder closely—as had everyone at work. The Cruz brothers sent flowers to the funeral. Attracted by cheap rents and an express subway line, so many people moved to the neighborhood without knowing anything about it. Tamsin was still looking at him, waiting for an answer. “I've never had any problems,” he said, finally.

“So you think it would be OK for me to go jogging in there?”

“Yes,” he said. “Only I wouldn't go in there at night.”

“Right. Sure. And the playground? For Wyatt?”

“I played there as a kid,” he said. “He'll be fine. Just not at night.”

“That's good to know. And thanks again for helping us yesterday. I'm not sure what we would have done without you.”

“It's nothing,” he said. If his parents had been away, he would have invited her in, but they were eating in the kitchen and he knew they hated to have their meals disturbed. His mother was crazy about it. And besides, Tito could tell from the way Tamsin kept looking over her shoulder that she was worried about leaving Wyatt alone upstairs.

“Well, see you around,” she said.

A
FEW DAYS
later, a package came for her. It was DHL, not the usual FedEx or UPS. He took it up to her in the evening, knocking on the door.

“Oh, hi!” she said. Today she was wearing capri pants and a halter top, her hair held back from her face by black barrettes. The bruises on her arms were yellowing.
Naughty Neighbor Next Door,
he thought.

“This came for you,” he said. “It looks important.”

“Oh, it's probably from my husband,” she said.

“Husband?” he asked before he could stop himself. He'd taken care to notice that she didn't wear a ring.

“Yeah,” she said. “He lives in Peru. We're kind of separated right now. You want to come in?”

The scene was so familiar to him that he hardly registered the chaos of the apartment: Moving cartons everywhere, many opened. Half-assembled IKEA furniture. A pizza box with a pair of crusty crescents amid the crumbs and oil stains. It took him a moment to notice that some of the cartons had been shifted into a fortification in the back of the living room. The boy's head appeared from the space behind the wall of boxes.

“Is that your castle?” Tito asked.

“It's my station,” said the kid.

“What kind of station?” Tito asked. “A radio station?”

“No!” said Wyatt. “Train station!”

Tito walked across the room and peered behind the line of boxes. An oval of wooden track was laid out on the floor. Wyatt was pulling a long, multicolored procession of cars around it.

“You like trains?” he asked.

“Yes!” said Wyatt.

“
Like
is an understatement,” said Tamsin. “What did we do all day yesterday, kiddo?”

“Rode subway trains!” he said.

“Cool,” said Tito looking around at the mess. He turned to Tamsin. “You need a hand with anything?”

“That's OK. You've already helped us a lot.”

“What about that AC? Aren't you kind of hot in here?”

“Well . . . yeah. That would be great.”

He installed the window unit, propping it on the windowsill outside with a can of soup the gay guys had left in one of the cabinets, screwing the accordion wings into the seams of the window to hold it in place. Then he assembled a bookcase, furtively scoping out her stuff, trying to learn more about her. That was when he noticed the framed diploma from Rice University on the floor. Meanwhile, Tamsin was emptying boxes, putting things away, clearing a space around the couch. After a while she disappeared and returned with two bottles of beer.

Wyatt had come out from behind his fortifications and stood in the flow of cool air from the Fedders. “Wa!” He said. “That's nice.”

Tito twisted the top off his bottle. “So, is your husband Peruvian?” he asked as nonchalantly as he could.

“Oh—no,” she said. “An all-American boy from South Dakota. He's an epidemiologist.”

“A dimelo-what?” said Tito.

A giggle escaped her. “He studies infectious diseases,” she said. “Pandemics, plagues, that kind of thing.”

“Like that chicken flu everybody keeps talking about?”

“Yes. Like that. We lived in the jungle—in the Amazon basin—for a year. His research took a lot longer than he expected, though maybe he was just lying to me when he said it would only take six months.” She rolled her eyes. Tito thought it was a gesture she might have made in the company of a girlfriend.

“Must have been hard,” he said.

“It was. Harder than I expected, anyway. I used to think of myself as intrepid, a risk taker. I lived by myself in Houston and
backpacked around Europe after college, but having a kid changes everything. Stuff that wouldn't have been a big deal when I was single suddenly seemed impossible. I just couldn't handle it anymore—the weird superstitions, the goddamn insects, the fear of disease, having to boil the water, nobody speaking English.”

Tito laughed.

“What's so funny?”

“Sounds like the Dominican Republic,” he said.

W
EDNESDAY, HIS MIDWEEK
day off work, Tito was lying in bed half awake with his hand down his boxers, passively playing with himself, thinking about the word
rice.
His mother knocked and immediately entered the room.

“
La muchacha esta aquí.
”

“What
muchacha
?”

“The new one. She just moved in. The one you've been sniffing around.”

“Tamsin?”

“
Sí
. Tom-
seen.
”

“She's here?”

“
Sí.
I don't know why you're wasting your time on her when you could have had Jasmina.”

“Forget Jasmina, Mami. I know you liked her, but it's over.”

“I know it's over. Her mother still calls me sometimes. Jasmina's down in D.R. right now with her new man.”

“Good for her,” said Tito. “Tell Tamsin I'll be right out.”

He waited until his mother left before getting out of bed and putting on a pair of jeans to hide his middling hardon. He found a clean T-shirt and messed with his hair. Barefoot and euphoric, he went out to meet her.

She was sitting on the sofa in the living room, wearing more clothing than he'd seen on her since she moved in: a knee-length skirt with a matching jacket and a white blouse. She looked like
the star of a different movie altogether.
Classroom Confessions.
His mother was waiting silently with her but got up once he entered the room.

“What's the matter?” he asked, because it was clear from her fret-ful expression that something was.

“I'm supposed to be at work in an hour, but the woman who said she was going to look after Wyatt today just called and said she got another job—a full-time job—and that she wasn't coming.”

“That's terrible!” he said.

“I don't know what to do. Today is my first day of summer classes. I'm supposed to be teaching English Comp to a bunch of eighteen-year-olds. I have to be there. I mean, what am I going to do? I can't bring Wyatt.”

“I could look after him,” said Tito.

“Really? You could? I thought maybe you might know someone who wouldn't mind, but, well—you! That would be so great. I mean, don't you have a job? Sorry, I didn't mean it to sound that way.”

“It's my day off. Just give me five minutes. I'll be right up.”

“Wow. You don't know how much this means to me,” she said.

“It's OK,” he said.

Upstairs, she was hurrying around the apartment while Wyatt watched cartoons. Tito got sucked into the vortex of her motion. She showed him where every kid thing was: the juice boxes, the snacks, the aloescented wipes, the changes of clothes. “There's just one thing you need to be really careful about. I mean, in addition to crossing the street and letting him pet dogs and all those things I'm sure you already know. The thing is, he's allergic to nuts—especially peanuts. A peanut could kill him.”

“
Kill
him?”

“Yes. That's why, if you guys go out, you should take snacks with you. Everything in the kitchen is safe for him. There are no nuts here.”

He was going to make a joke, but held back.

“If you buy anything, you've got to read the ingredients. Even if it says it was made in a facility that processes nuts you can't let him have it. OK?”

“Got it. No nuts.”

“Here's my cell phone number if you need to reach me. I should be back around four. Really, I can't thank you enough.” She squeezed his biceps and then reached for her fancy leather briefcase, which was on a pile of boxes.

Through all of this, Wyatt was sitting on the couch, mesmerized by SpongeBob. His mother kissed him and said. “Tito is going to look after you today. You be good for him. You hear me, big guy?”

“That's a 10-4, Mommy,” he said.

Once Tito was sure she was gone and before the cartoons hit their next commercial break, he did a little snooping. The place was a wreck, though Wyatt's room was starting to come together. Everything in Tamsin's room was still in boxes, bubble wrap, or furniture pads, except for the bed, which he had helped her assemble. What he really wanted to see was a photograph of the husband, but he couldn't find any photographs at all, except for a single framed portrait of Wyatt as a baby. Unsatisfied, he next looked for the DHL boxes. He had brought up three of them in the week since she'd moved in. He wanted to know what was being sent with such urgency between two people who were “sort of separated.” Divorce papers, he hoped. He found the boxes, but they left him none the wiser—they were collapsed and leaning against the garbage can in the kitchen. A few days later, he would put them out on the curb with the recycling.

He ambled back into the living room. “So, Wyatt,” he said, hitting the open palm of one hand against the closed fist of the other. “What do you feel like doing today?”

“Can we ride trains?”

“Sure.”

“I love to ride trains. There were no trains in the jungle.”

“Then let's go.”

He made the kid pee and threw some snacks and a change of clothes into the backpack. At the Dyckman Street station, they caught the A. The rush hour was over and they had the first car almost completely to themselves. Wyatt stood at the train's front window as it barreled down its tube. He hopped with joy as it entered the stations headlong and braked to a stop. “Wa!” he said. “Wa!” and Tito wondered where he'd gotten that expression of joy. Maybe it was something he picked up in Peru, though it sounded more Asian to him than South American.

That was how they spent the afternoon, underground, like motormen, at the front of trains. Wyatt's appetite for it was surpassing and required no contribution from Tito. At one point, he picked up a copy of the
Daily News
and read while the train traveled to the ends of the city, going through stations he'd never heard of—Zerega Avenue, Intervale Avenue, Briarwood—into parts of the outer boroughs he knew only from the eleven o'clock news. Wyatt pretended to be driving an out-of-control train. “Get back! I can't stop this thing. We're all going to
die
!”

Riding back uptown later that afternoon, Tito felt bedraggled, hungover. What time was it? Was it even light outside? At 145th Street, the conductor announced that there was a “sick passenger” on the train, and Tito had the sense that he might be trapped down there for the rest of his life.

“How did someone get sick on the train?” Wyatt asked.

“I don't know,” said Tito, but already he'd learned that answer was unsatisfactory to this five-year-old.

“Do they have a sore throat?”

“Maybe,” said Tito. “But I think it might be more serious than that.”

“Like what?” said Wyatt, genuinely intrigued. “Like malaria?”

“
Malaria
?” said Tito.

“Yeah. I had to take malaria medicine in Peru.” He pronounced it
Pru.

“But you didn't get sick, did you?”

“No. I got lots of mosquito bites but none from No Fleas.”

“No Fleas?”

“That's the kind of mosquito that gives you malaria. No Fleas mosquito.”