Stay with Me

by Sandra Rodriguez Barron

  Chapter 9

  Holly’s husband, Erick, was a stoic man who got alarmingly more attractive with age. He was an excellent provider and Holly was very proud to be married to him. She hated the old clichés about pilots, but now and then she worried about the thousand-mile rule. To keep herself in shape, Holly taught aerobics at the local gym. It also gave her the energy she needed to keep up with the kids. They lived in Lighthouse Point, a community of pink houses in various scales just outside Fort Lauderdale.

  Holly’s parents showered her with rewards for being such a good sister to their natural-born child, Audra, who was five years older than Holly and had cerebral palsy. She had saved the family from an existence that would have been isolated. By being athletic, popular, bold, and willing to take Audra under her wing, Holly enabled Audra to move in circles she would never have otherwise experienced. Everyone knew they were a package deal. If anything, Holly taught everyone in high school to be respectful to the mentally disabled. Being Audra’s sister had given her a lifetime of self-assurance, a nurturing spirit, and had awakened her sense of responsibility. She loved watching out for Audra and knew early on that her calling was to be a mom.

  Initially, Holly had a little problem with the timing of Julia’s proposal for a gathering in August because she wanted another baby. Her husband, on the other hand, was done. Erick had already scheduled a vasectomy in early September. The gate to parenthood was closing, and she had to figure out a way to sneak under it. The truth was that Holly didn’t just want a fourth child, she wanted a daughter, first and foremost, and secondly, she needed to spawn a child that actually looked like her, with dark eyes and black hair, medium skin—rather than the red-headed, blue-eyed, long-boned, freckled copies of Erick. This meant that if she were to spawn another Erick clone, then she would want a fifth, or a sixth or however many it took to get her brown-eyed, brown-haired, warm-skinned girl. But Erick said they already had one more child than he wanted. Holly was appalled that he would say that, but he said it’s just honest. It had crossed her mind to stop the birth control pills and just say oops. But Erick knew his wife was capable of a little trickery to get her way. So when he said he had made the earliest possible appointment with his doctor for a vasectomy, she had a fit; she cried and cried, but he said it was all set. Holly felt horrible about her hesitance to agree to the sibling gathering, but this was an absolute emergency. The next few months would be her last chance to steal sperm from her husband. After all, September was only six menstrual cycles away, and it had taken her an average of eight months of trying, per child, to get pregnant. According to her calculations, she would be ovulating during the trip, and she didn’t have enough of a margin. On the other hand, it would be so great to catch a break from her hectic family life, absolutely lovely to get out of South Florida during the most oppressive weeks of summer. The contrast between the two places was so stark. New England, with its cool, rocky coast and forested hills, was the polar opposite of hot, flat, and crazy South Florida.

  When Holly was nineteen, she visited David in Connecticut. He took her to Chatfield Hollow State Park. Holly remembered visiting a covered bridge, painted a rich shade of red, in the spring. It was as if she could hear the trees groaning with the surge of energy of the sun and warm air. Holly stood on the bank of this stream and listened to the water tumbling over those dark, smooth rocks. There was a strong smell of water and moss and wet earth. The smell of nature’s sex. She got a sense then that she was born to be a mother, that she felt most in-sync with the world when she was a part of this process. She loved being pregnant, loved nursing, loved raising kids. And because she cherished her family so much, she was devastated for David, and felt a deep sense of mourning for the loss of the family he’d never have.

  Erick’s doctor had a cancellation just a few days after Erick had made his decision. A few hours later, despite her tears and pleas, Erick got a vasectomy, and Holly’s hopes to have more children were dashed with a single snip. But when Erick returned home and plopped down on the couch with a bag of ice on his crotch, Holly informed him that he would have to nurse himself back to health, make lunch and host the kids’ afternoon playdate. She slammed the door behind her for emphasis. On her way to the car, through the wooden fence of the backyard, she heard her middle son report to his two brothers, “Guys! I think she kicked him in the nuts!”

  Holly jumped into her minivan and headed to Miami. She walked into the Tarpon Tattoo and asked for Carlos, an old and dear friend from high school. Carlos had been anticipating this appointment for years. Wiping away tears, Holly instructed Carlos to make three tiny starfishes floating over the appendages of the main starfish, symbolizing her three boys. As Carlos’s needle pierced her skin, she began to bawl, so he stopped, thinking that she couldn’t endure the pain.

  “I’ve had three babies, Carlos,” she said. “Two natural, one C-section. Plus I had my tonsils and an appendix removed,” she said, pointing to the site of those organs. “I’ve been carved up more than a pumpkin on Halloween. I can handle pain.” When she explained why she was crying, her friend asked how many babies it would take to fill the void, and why, exactly, a brown-eyed girl might end her longing. She didn’t have an answer.

  So Holly got her starfish tattoo, which did double duty as a connection to her siblings and symbol of protest against Erick’s vasectomy. The first person she called was Raymond. The skin on her hand was still burning when she reached him at work. “I did it,” she said. “I look like a soccer mom turned bar fly, but I love it. I can’t stop looking at it, Ray. I feel connected, like I’m officially part of a secret family. I wish I had had it done years ago. I know how much the tattoos mean to you, kid. I’m so sorry it took me this long to understand. But I get it . . . I totally get it.”

  Raymond believed that he was Cuban. At least, that’s what he chose to tell people. He had admitted to Holly that he wanted to dissociate himself with the plight of Mexicans in his home state, not wanting to shoulder their particular brand of prejudice. “I got enough crap to deal with without taking on illegal immigration,” he once told Taina. “I don’t like the theory that we were Dominican, either. That could make us illegal aliens. That’s scary. What if they revoked our citizenship and sent us back to a place we don’t remember? I could say I’m Puerto Rican and avoid citizenship issues entirely, but then there’s always East Coast prejudice. As far as I can tell, Cubans are at the top of the Latino food chain. They’re golden the minute they set foot in the U.S., so if no one knows for sure where we’re from, why not be Cuban? It’s more glamorous anyway. Copacabana and cigars and mambo and all that.”

  Ray had been adopted by a Germanic-looking couple who had given him an idyllic childhood right up until Ray turned sixteen. His father left his mother for an aspiring ballerina, moved to Mexico City, and never came back. Last Ray heard, his father and the new wife were running a dance school in Puebla. Ray began to drink heavily. At first, he drank tequila just to be ironic—a manly nod to his father’s newfound freedom. But as his father’s absence grew longer, he lost his sense of humor about it. He grew more and more depressed. He became a chronic overeater and he drank more and more as memories of his first adoptive family returned. That family had kept him for a year, but the older son in the family had not adjusted to life with the new sibling. Ray was sent back into foster care at age seven. The next year, those foster parents decided to adopt him. The new couple was focused entirely on him. It hadn’t been an easy transition, but it worked. So when his graduation ceremony came and went with no sign of his father, Ray almost drank himself to death. Ray’s mother called Taina from the emergency room to tell her that Ray was getting his stomach pumped. Taina’s parents had generously arranged for Taina and Holly to fly to Arizona to be at his side at the hospital. At Ray’s bedside, Taina had come up with the idea of a tattoo as a substitute for DNA. “It’s a symbol that we belong to each other,” she had promised. At the time, Holly’s parents had forbidden her to get the tattoo, jus
t as Erick had strongly objected later on. Still, Holly had experimented with the idea by having it sketched in henna several times. It was the kind of thing you have to be sure about, she thought; you ought to really want a tattoo to get it in such a visible place. The other four siblings had immediately gone to tattoo parlors that very week, without asking permission, and had each had a starfish tattooed on the tops of their hands, in green ink. The symbolism behind the gesture was powerful. According to Raymond, he regained control of his life the very same day that he got the tattoo. He quit drinking, but started up again at age twenty-one, when he was old enough to get into bars legally, a privilege he couldn’t resist exercising. He fell back into a destructive pattern of binge drinking for two more years, until he went cold turkey again. Holly had always felt a little guilty about being the holdout, and since then Adrian had repeatedly challenged her commitment to their sense of family. But she didn’t want to appear to be caving to peer pressure, or doing it to appease her pain-in-the-ass brother; she had come to the decision all on her own. Sadly, it had taken David becoming ill to get her to seriously consider it. The final blow was the loss of the opportunity to have a daughter, a closer genetic manifestation of life’s spiraling staircase to immortality.

  Chapter 10

  The five toddlers’ outfits were released by the authorities to Taina’s parents in 1989. Taina’s dress had been white linen, size 2T. It was a curious and unique dress, hand-embroidered with yellow ducks that tumbled from the pockets and then landed on their feet and scattered across the fine yellow piping of the hem. On the seat of the dress, one little duck has its little tail feathers sticking up in the air. Finery with a sense of humor. One-of-a-kind.

  The craftsmanship of the dress was what inspired Taina to study textile design. Taina and her mother, Natasha, had examined that dress with the care of forensic scientists. Taina became knowledgeable about fabrics and makers of children’s clothing in an effort to discover something about herself through the history of the dress. She consulted experts and a psychic or two about the nature of the fabric, the design, style, and crafting, but she knew very little to this day about where it came from. There was a tag, in English: “Lilly Pad Designs. Cotton linen. Handwash. Warm iron as needed.” There had been a small company in Boston specializing in children’s clothing called Lilly Pad Designs, but it had closed in 1985. The owner, Lilly Patterson, was deceased.

  The dress takes thirty minutes to iron, Taina timed it herself. The high-maintenance quality of the dress, she decided, was evidence of her early exposure to beauty and good taste despite whatever calamities marked her infancy. She eventually came to feel that she was born in that outfit, that nothing before mattered because her life was a single continuum from then on. The dress had given her a life, a passion, a focus. After attending NYU, Taina found work in the New York garment district, for a prestigious fabric designer. There, she created a unique fabric theme, called “Caribbean Lagoon,” a line of rich cottons and linens that evoked a tropical vacation. Even her abstract patterns, such as argyle, implied a life of white wicker on terraces overlooking swaying palms and a turquoise sea, lemons and pineapples and poolside gardens of hibiscus and birds of paradise. The designs had sold to a label that catered to the Palm Beach country-club set. Her parents were her biggest fans, and as soon as the temperature hit seventy in New York, they went to work wearing absurdly bright outfits made out of her “Lagoon” fabrics.

  The week before David’s surgery, Taina had been on her way to work when she spotted Doug a half-block behind her. She knew that Doug had seen her too. She felt detected. This encounter had been prophesied the night before by Holly, a.k.a. Big Mouth. Holly had taken it upon herself to inform Doug about David’s illness. “Be ready, Taina” she had warned. “You know how Doug loves to be a hero, and he’s still very much in love with you.”

  Taina felt Doug’s eyes on her back. She darted into the yawning mouth of a church. In the dim light, she made a sharp left and sunk her knees into the pads of a kneeler, pulling up the hood of her raincoat and bowing her head before a row of candles glowing softly in the shadowy darkness. Doug passed behind her, and when she turned to look at him, she could see him scanning to the left and right. She heard the size-thirteen shoes clicking distinctly across the marble despite the din of tourists’ voices, each step carrying him deeper into the gloom of the church. She dashed out the door and exited to the street. Once at a safe distance, she bought coffee and a bottle of water from a cart and headed back to the office.

  But Doug was already waiting for Taina in her studio. He was fingering the bolts of fabric that she had left on her work table, a cream-colored, textured raw silk that, based on orders alone, was destined to become all the rage next season for brides, flower girls, first communions, and bat mitzvahs. He looked up at her, then back at the bolt of fabric, which looked like a small, pearly mummy, aglow under the wash of soft track lighting. Doug said, “Lucky you. You work with beauty every day.” Taina reached past him and yanked the bolt of fabric away. She placed it on a shelf, feeling his eyes on her backside. She was anxious to get to work. If she had any chance at all of being able to take time off to be with David, she would have to work twelve- and fourteen-hour days in the weeks ahead.

  “Doug,” she cleared her throat, put her hands on her hips, and said, “let’s cut to the chase. David is going to be fine.”

  Doug folded his hands in front of him. “Taina,” he said softly, “it’s a grade-four primary brain tumor. You know what the doctors call this type of tumor amongst themselves? They call it ‘the terminator.’ Your brother is dying and he doesn’t have much time.” Doug sighed. “He called me. He said that he thinks it’s time. You know.” He reached over and tapped the top of her hand. Taina pulled it away, as if he had touched her with a burning cigarette. “The boss is watching me.” She pointed at the clock on the wall.

  “I’m going to help you, Taina. I’ve already started.”

  “Help me?”

  “Help David. Help you. He knows what it would mean to know. To give you your life back.”

  “I don’t want my life back,” she said. “You can keep it.”

  “Let this be my final gift to David. And to you. We don’t have to tell the others. If they don’t want to know, that’s their business. But you—you ought to know. It’s the only way . . .”

  “The only way for what? For us to get back together?”

  “Yeah,” he said, relieved. “It’s my last hope.”

  Taina shook her head. She made a cutting gesture with her hand. “We’re done, Doug.” She plopped into her chair, then swiveled her body around on the stool to face her computer.

  He left. Her hand was shaking as she turned back around to reach for the water bottle she had been sipping, but it was gone. She looked out the window and saw Doug walking in the opposite direction, three levels down, on the sidewalk. One arm hung beside him as he walked. In the other, he carried something close to his body.

  Taina had met Doug while walking her dog near her parents’ house on the Upper East Side. Doug had been a stockbroker, the only son of a couple who lived in the same row of brownstones as her parents. He always wore expensive cologne and dark overcoats that in retrospect Taina had thought of as a kind of yuppie super-hero cape. He was tall and bulky, busy, sporty, manly. His voice had the rich, sonorous chime of a grandfather clock. He could figure out a waiter’s tip in seconds, pick up the bill, and say, “Let’s get out of here,” as if she needed to be rescued from a five-star restaurant. At first, he courted her in the old-fashioned way, by opening car doors and taking her to expensive restaurants. But there wasn’t enough chemistry there to take things up a notch. She certainly wasn’t going to sleep with someone she only liked. Besides, she had this paranoia about Caucasian men. Did he think she was easy because her skin was bronze? Five dates and all she gave him were kisses on the cheek and awkward hugs. She knew he would tire of it eventually, and he did. He stopped calling and she let it
be. She didn’t see him again for a year. Then she walked into a hospital room after a neighbor had been assaulted and had her car stolen, there was Doug with his mother. Doug’s eyes popped out when he saw her walk in. Everyone wanted to help the neighbor get her life back to normal, and so by the end of the visit, the bed-ridden woman had assigned them all some kind of a task. Doug and Taina volunteered to make a three-hour drive upstate to fetch a vehicle borrowed from the victim’s elderly aunt. After three hours in a car together, they relaxed. Doug took her hand and said, “I want to get to know you for real this time.” Then he said, “I’m gonna have to kiss you, just to take the edge off.” So they kissed good and hard right there in front of the neighbor’s mother’s house, and Taina saw the old aunt peel back the curtain to see why they were still in her driveway. They knew that they couldn’t start up their boring formality again. So instead, they walked the dog, ordered Chinese, and played board games. He killed her at Monopoly, but she won at Scrabble. Soon they had found a new, strangely sexy, endearing comfort zone. There were six more low-budget weekday dates before they moved to Sunday afternoons. They went bowling, to the museum, on a long bike ride, to a dog obedience-school graduation ceremony, and to a Cajun cooking class.

  Two months passed before they promoted each other back to Friday and Saturday nights. He took her sailing on his parents’ boat. They had so much fun that they forgot the time. They ended up having to sleep on Block Island. By then they were all worked up from a whole day’s worth of kissing and pressing themselves against each other, drunk with a combination of white wine, lust, and all that sunshine. Taina opened up then, quite literally, and experienced what became one of her all-time favorite life moments: falling in love surrounded by inky, starlit darkness.

  They made love three times that night. Then they headed back to the boat before dawn. They jumped into the cold water, and, shivering, wrapped each other in towels and had coffee and watched the sun come up. “This is so much better than those stiff dates we had,” Doug said.