Stay with Me

by Sandra Rodriguez Barron

  “Just seltzer,” I said weakly.

  “Bad food?”

  I shook my head, “Something is wrong with me, Tai. I don’t know, I think something’s wrong. I just had some kind of weird flashback.” When the nausea let up, I straightened up and moved away from the dumpster. I sat down on the cement ledge attached to the next building. I folded my arms and looked up at the sky. I was cold suddenly. I desperately wished Julia were with me. Taina hugged me, and the smell of her perfume triggered a violent spasm deep in my stomach, and I threw up. Taina rubbed my back through it. When I was done, she ran back to let Adrian know what happened and that we were leaving.

  When I felt better we walked back to her apartment arm-in-arm through the city, not a taxi to be found. Taina’s posture was straight and her stride brisk. The high heels of her boots clicked on the pavement and echoed against the buildings. “So what’s going on?” she said. “What did you mean, ‘I’m having flashbacks’?”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw her turn her head to look at me. I took a deep breath. “I don’t think I have an actual illness. I think it’s something else.” I cleared my throat. “My theory is that I’m having drug-induced flashbacks. I . . . I experimented with some crazy stuff in college.”

  She laughed. “Drug-induced? YOU?”

  “I’m thinking that maybe it’s affecting me now. Somehow.”

  Taina slowed down to a stop. She turned to look at me and raised an eyebrow. “Okay. How crazy? Are we talking a little too much pot or like, acid?”

  I scrunched up my face and said, “Neither.”

  “What then?”

  “I don’t know.” I took a deep breath. “Sophomore year I dated this girl named June Jones. We were lab partners in a botany class. Her family owns a pharmaceutical company. They had a piece of land where her father went on weekends to ride his horses. It was like, the size of Nebraska, but in upstate New York. June kept her own greenhouse and she was a plant connoisseur. Grew hothouse flowers and rare orchids and other things you only hear about if you’re hard core into plants.”

  “Oh boy.”

  “Yup. Magic mushrooms, opium poppies, cannabis, coca—grew ’em just because she could. Anyway, there was a group of rare, illegal tropical plants that I’d only seen in textbooks, the ones nobody knows about. I don’t know how she got them, but like I said, she liked experimenting with hybrids and rare varieties. She had succeeded in cultivating this vine that looked like a pumpkin plant, but the fruit was round and had a husk over it, like corn. The strangest part was when you opened the fruit, it had these glistening blue seeds inside. When the first fruit appeared, June made a big ceremony of it. We scraped the kernels, then we dried and crushed them. She said they were sacred to the Mayans and she showed me all these books with hieroglyphics that showed stick figures smoking this stuff.”

  “How on earth did she convince you to smoke anything? That’s so unlike you. I couldn’t even get you to try NoDoz when you needed to pull an all-nighter during midterms.”

  “Well, first of all, it’s not an opiate. It doesn’t affect your nervous system, your heart, or your brain.”

  “Then what does it do?”

  I cleared my throat. “It’s an aphrodisiac.”

  “Really . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Does it work?”

  “Oh man. Oh man.” I shook my head. “Oh man oh man.”

  “Really,” she said again. “Interesting. So . . . like Viagra?”

  “Times a thousand. It’s unbelievable. I thought I was going to . . .”

  “Enough.”

  “Kaboom!”

  Taina put her hands over hear ears. “La la la la la.”

  We passed a group of women in high heel boots who appeared to be hookers. I didn’t want them to think we were looking for some action, so I lowered my voice. “To this day, just the sight of a corn husk gets me . . .” I gave an exaggerated shudder.

  Taina made a face. “If you’re going to subject me to this torture you can at least tell me what it’s called.”

  “I have a degree in plant biology and to this day I can’t figure out what the hell that plant was.”

  Taina huffed, “You’re lucky you’re not dead, you moron. You’ve always refused to eat anything complex, foreign, spicy, processed, anything that might have hormones or MSG or pesticides—so you go and smoke up some mystery herb with Patty Hearst?”

  “The only reason I agreed to try it is because June knew that I’m a sucker for instruments, especially if they’re antique.”

  “Did she have an antique pipe or something?”

  I point a finger at her. “You know me well, my dear. Exactly. She brought out this magnificent Egyptian hookah. It was almost as tall as you are, gorgeous, with a silver framework. The pipe was like, a zillion years old, and it had witnessed just about every important event in Egypt’s history. It was going on loan from her father to the Metropolitan Museum the following week. June suggested we take it for a test ride, become a part of Egyptian history, with a Mayan twist. And we did.”

  “I don’t see how it would be affecting you now. That was what, ten years ago?”

  “What else could it be?” I practically shouted. “I don’t have the flu or an infection anywhere. I haven’t hit my head or used any other drugs—if that even counts. But what else could explain flashbacks?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve never heard of an aphrodisiac giving anyone flashbacks, especially a decade later.” She paused. “In fact, that’s the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard, David. You could be having a minor stroke,” she said, her voice rising a bit. She faced me and put her gloved hands on my shoulders. “Maybe we should go to the ER. Like right now.”

  I laughed and waved a hand. “It’s not a stroke, for God’s sake. Look at my face.” I pushed my tongue up under my lip, rolled my eyes around, curled my hands up under my armpits and made monkey sounds. A prostitute walking past us did a double take. “I couldn’t do this if I’d had a stroke, right?” I said. “Look at my face. No drooping. And look at my eyes,” I looked up and down, side to side. “Here, let’s step into the light. How do my pupils look?”

  A car beeped at us, and when we looked up, it was Adrian in a taxi, and he had the driver pull over. “You okay?” he asked, and Taina and I leaned in.

  “It’s that same headache I’ve had all day, bro,” I said. “I just need to get some sleep.” Adrian said he was off to another party. Did Taina want to come? He had his arms around a woman I didn’t recognize. He didn’t bother to introduce her to us. “We’ll pass,” Taina said quietly, stepping back from the car. It pulled away. I watched her profile as she stood, staring into the empty space where the taxi had been. We went home.

  Self-revelation must have been in the air that night, because Taina showed me her infamous “bunker.” It was a room that was, among other more serious issues, a thorn in the heart of Taina’s marriage to Doug. Taina was a severe insomniac who required solitude and militaristic level of discipline in her bedtime routine. Originally a guest room, the “bunker” was an oasis of muted colors and blank walls; equipped only with a bed and a table upon which sat implements in the service of sleep: a silk eye mask, ear plugs, a warming bag, a water carafe and glass. “I’m trying to manage my insomnia without using drugs,” she said with emphasis on the last word. “Insomnia is a permanent condition that requires a long-term plan. So I have these strict rituals; I have trained myself.”

  “But why do you insist on sleeping alone?” I dared. “Does Doug snore?”

  “That’s the least of it. It’s about foster care, David. I shared a room with an older girl who woke up several times a night, screaming. She would run into the closet and curl up on the floor and scream and scream that her eyes were burning. Twenty-five years later, I still hear her screaming every night, in the closet. My body still anticipates the alarm. If there’s anyone snoring, moving, or coughing, it’s guaranteed to obliterate my chances of getting a good night’s rest. But this
room is safe. And most nights, I sleep.”

  Foster care was where our childhood stories diverged: I was adopted almost immediately by the same parents who fostered me, whereas Taina and Raymond spent time with several different caregivers before they were adopted. Poor Raymond had been adopted and then returned when he was six—after the family changed their mind. All I could do was kiss my sister on the forehead and wish her sweet dreams. She put one hand on my shoulder. “Davie,” she said, “you should see a doctor. That flashback thing is spooky.”

  “I will,” I said. “I have a physical scheduled for next month. And Tai? You should see someone about those nightmares. A little girl with burning eyes? Sheesh. That’s creepy.”

  I was drifting off when Taina’s phone, sitting in its charging cradle, vibrated and cast a ray of green light across the table. I looked at the display. It was her husband, Doug. “Miss you so much,” he texted. I tapped a reply: “David here. sleeping over. working on her. patience.” and hit “send.” Now it was me hearing distressed voices in the dark. I lay awake staring up beyond the skylight, at the charcoal New York City sky, which never seemed to darken enough to be called night. I closed my eyes and tried to think about the Yankees and the Giants. Anything but the complexities of Taina and Doug’s marriage, which made me think of Julia, of course. Of the parallels between the two situations: one person skittish, one person steady. I finally fell asleep, but a few hours later a noise woke me up. I sat up, trying to shake off a bad dream. I was soaked in sweat and relieved to be awake. This time it was my phone, and I panicked when I remembered Tai’s issues with sleeping and noise. I fetched it out of the pocket of my pants, which were on the floor. Doug again. He texted, “let’s talk soon.” I took a moment to collect myself and I replied, “meet me at grand central at 5 tonight.” I tossed the phone back and rolled over. I fell back into a dreamless sleep.

  Morning seemed to wash the world clean. We lay around reading the Times and talking. Adrian had come in at 4:30 and slept on the couch. We didn’t ask any questions. He was the first to get up, even made the coffee. Taina went out and came back with bagels. I didn’t tell her that I had made plans to meet Doug, but I told Adrian. Later, we called Holly in Florida but she couldn’t really talk because she was watching her kids at a pool party. Ray, who lives in Arizona, works at a restaurant, and you can’t reach him until late in the day on Sunday.

  At one o’clock, we got out of the house and walked around the park. By four, Adrian had to head to the airport. Taina walked me to Grand Central Station. “Bye, Davie,” she said. “Hang in there. You and Julia will figure it out.” I wanted to say the same about her and her husband, but couldn’t remember his name. My brother-in-law. Her husband. What’s-his-name. What was his name?

  The moment I saw him, twenty minutes later, it came to me. “Doug!” I exclaimed with a flood of relief, already exhausted by my mind’s fruitless swirling around the missing name. He was wearing a Yankees jacket and baseball hat. I gave him the thumbs-up on the gear.

  “Sorry about last night, man, I didn’t mean to invade your privacy. I was sleeping in her room—er, your room, the master bedroom,” I said then shook my head, because it was coming out all wrong. “The room that’s not her ‘bunker,’ ” I said, making air quotes. He nodded appreciatively. “Man I was having the worst nightmare,” I said. “I was sweating and trying to get away, and then the phone rang and I thought, thank you! Your timing was perfect. You saved my ass.”

  “I’m a detective,” he said putting his hands out. “Just doing my job.”

  “A psychic cop, eh, Dougie? Maybe you should get your own reality show.” I meant it too. He looked more like an actor than a cop. Tall with thick, dark hair and the pale blue eyes of a Siberian husky.

  He laughed. “I’d never run out of stories.”

  “Anyway, I didn’t mean to intrude. Tai left her phone there in the charger by the nightstand. Adrian was in town for a concert and I wanted to tell you that we had a talk with her, several actually, over the weekend, about you and her and all of us, the relationship failures, and who knows, maybe we got through to her a bit. She’s so stubborn, you know.”

  Doug sat down, exhaled loudly. I sat next to him. He looked at me. “Being in love with your sister is so exhausting,” he said weakly. He smelled like cigarette smoke and coffee, which never ceased to amaze me. I’d never quite gotten used to Doug’s new cop persona. He used to reek of expensive cologne back in his stockbroker days, back when he insisted on being called Douglas. “I would never do anything to hurt her,” he began. “You know that, right? She concocted this drama so she’ll never have to worry about me leaving her. It’s ridiculous.” He looked up at me. “What I should do?”

  “I don’t know, man. But if we keep doing the same thing we’ll get the same result. She needs more therapy; we ALL need therapy . . . we . . .”

  “You need to find out what the fuck happened.”

  I bristled. “What happened?”

  “The storm. The boat.”

  “Something besides that,” I said, with a dry chuckle. “That’s Pandora’s Box. We don’t go there. You know that.”

  He crossed his arms and sat back. “But the thing is, someone has to have the guts to open that stinking box in order to empty it.” He knitted his eyebrows. “For God’s sake, keeping it locked up only increases its power. It traps hope. It forbids peace.”

  “Forbids peace?” I echoed. “You’re being dramatic.”

  “Listen. Adrian is convinced that your parents were a bunch of baby killers. But in my professional opinion, he’s wrong. And David, believe me, I’ve read all the clippings and the police reports. I think your families died in the hurricane, that’s why no one claimed you. End of story. Sad? Sure. But there’s no intention to harm. Just a tragedy.”

  “Not gonna happen,” I said, brushing some lint off my coat. “We can’t risk sending Ray back to the bottle.”

  He slapped his hands on his lap. “Well then, let it drag on. And Jim Beam will always be there. Waiting.”

  I looked into the crowds of people rushing past to board their trains. Doug nodded, shook my hand. “I have to run. It’s always good seeing you, man. I just want to let you know that if you ever want to pursue that big scary thing, let me know, I can help.” He smiled and pointed at the back of his hand. “I may not have the starfish on my hand, but I got your back.”

  “Good to know, bud.”

  “And by the way, David, my message to Taina—I was just drunk.” He gave me a slow slap on the shoulder and said, “See ya.” I turned and watched him hurry down the hall, back toward the Lexington Avenue exit. I wanted to say, hey, let’s catch a game soon, but I didn’t. Of course he wasn’t drunk the previous night. He rarely drinks. We both know that he was cold sober and texting Taina at three in the morning out of pure anguish.

  “David!” When I turned I saw that Doug was walking back toward me, with a finger up in the air as if he had just remembered something. “I’m just curious, David, what was your nightmare about? The one I woke you up from last night.”

  I shrugged. “Oh, just stupid stuff,” I said, waving a hand, but he stood there, looking at me intently. “Why do you ask?”

  “You know why my wife won’t share a bed with anyone? Do you really know?”

  I turned away, focused on the people boarding the train to the Bronx. “The screaming girl.”

  Doug nodded. “And you know what happens to Taina when she has this recurring nightmare?”

  “She wakes up?”

  “She pees the bed. That’s why she sleeps alone, David. She’s an adult bed wetter. And you know what else?”

  I put a hand out. “Ah, man, Doug. This is none of my business. Please.”

  He ignored me. “There’s nothing wrong with her bladder. Whatever is making her pee herself lives in here.” He pointed at his temple. Then he slapped me on the shoulder, looked me in the eye, and said, “When you’re ready I’ll help you open Pandora’s Box
.” Then he disappeared into the crowd.

  I hopped the Metro North train to New Haven. Instead of dealing with the thoughts and emotions elicited by my conversation with Doug, I shut them out. At least for a while. I listened to bits of conversation from the passengers around me. A group of women behind me had been prattling on for a while when suddenly one of them said, “If I were ever to become a stalker, Adrian Vega is who I would stalk.” The other woman moaned and another disagreed, and the conversation alternated between talk of who was “stalk worthy” and commentary about diapers and preschool. I turned to look at them and was surprised to see that they weren’t young like the ones we had met at the restaurant. I texted Adrian, “random MILFs discussing your ‘hotness’ on train.”

  From the airport, he texted, “gets old.”

  “Riiiight,” I typed back, since I don’t think he’s showing any signs of limelight weariness.

  The train stopped and picked up passengers in Westport and my thoughts turned to my ex-girlfriend, June Jones, who, last I heard, got a doctorate in botany and was doing research in the Amazon on a big government grant. I thought it might be a good idea to write to her to ask her the name of the plant with the blue seeds. Why not? It was worth looking into. And if they turned out not to be the cause of my episodes, then I might even consider using them for recreational purposes again. I felt my optimism rising, quite literally, at the thought of such an adventure. But with whom? I no longer had a girlfriend.

  Across from me, a stunning Asian chick straight out of an anime cartoon was checking me out. She had a nose ring, and she was wrapped in an explosion of pink faux fur. We smiled at each other and played the eye game for a bit and then I grew bored. Ah, women. The past, the present, and the possible. I put my head back. For now, I was happy just knowing I could still catch a girl’s eye. But I really didn’t want to take action. After all, it wasn’t like I didn’t love Julia anymore. I did.

  I had a good idea of where Julia was right now: in her old bedroom at her mom’s house, lying in her girlhood bed. I circled her bed in my mind, around and around, I watched her from every angle, from behind the canopied bed and from behind the white, gold-edged furniture and through slats of the closet doors. I was still floored at how much I had yearned for her when I felt sick. If she was my so-called emotional anchor then why couldn’t I commit to her? What was wrong with me, that I couldn’t find the courage to show a little faith in love? Could Doug have been right? Were we stunted by the mystery of our origins?