Stay with Me

by Sandra Rodriguez Barron

  “Of course it is. We had sex.”

  “It’s not because of the sex,” he said, in a gentle scolding tone. “Hell, I had sex last week and I didn’t feel like this.” He instantly regretted what he had said. “It was just—” he said helplessly. “Err. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

  She looked away. “I knew it. I knew it.”

  “What I was trying to say . . .” He fell to his knees and looked up at her. “Is that I’m really enjoying getting to know you. I want to see you again tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. Okay?”

  She looked at him sideways. “That depends on whether you plan to continue shagging people while you’re ‘getting to know me’ better.”

  He laughed. “No. That’s the point. I’ve been ‘unhappily shagging.’ I will unhappily shag no more.”

  So they continued to date in a way that felt natural and friendly and fun, and eventually they added some conventional stuff now and then. She took him on a few of her business trips. He was so leading and confident that his reaction to their separations always amazed her: “What? I’m not going to see you for a whole week?” Or if he had a big power meeting at work, he’d give her all the credit for getting him though it. “I get to see your face at night, so I can put up with anything during the day.” Then he would give her that look.

  The next phase of their courtship was the meeting of the families. They proceeded with caution, formality having been established as the undisputable enemy of their relationship.

  Fast-forward a year. Doug’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer the same day that his dad is named president of a global charitable foundation. It soon became impossible for Doug’s father to shoulder his wife’s illness, so Taina and Doug stepped in, watching over her and taking her to chemotherapy appointments. His mother had always been polite with Taina, but after that, she adored her. For Taina’s birthday, she gave her a white gold and diamond heart locket from Tiffany’s. There was an anniversary party for the parents that year, and with secret joy, Taina basked in the admiration and gratitude of the family’s friends and extended relatives for being such a great support to the family. She had never been happier; and Doug began to talk about marriage.

  A month later, Doug’s mother reached the stage of baldness. She was throwing up in the next room, when Doug held up a ring and asked Taina to be his wife. The timing and location of his marriage proposal was perfect, given their aversion to tradition. Taina said, “Of course,” and they went into the rancid-smelling bathroom to give his mom the good news. The woman’s skin went from green to pink in ten seconds, and she had named her grandchildren and great-grandchildren before she even made it out of the bathroom. Months went by and she went into remission. Life went back to normal, but the family was fatigued so the wedding was put on hold. Then, bad news. Doug got fired from his high-power job on Wall Street for “underperforming.” He had spent too much time caring for his mother. He had a flurry of lunches with other firms, but Taina could see that he was deeply affected. His heart wasn’t in it anymore.

  Doug and Taina got married in a small ceremony attended by only twenty guests. Holly was the only sibling missing, since she was in her thirty-fifth week of pregnancy and on mandatory bed rest with her second child. Shortly after the wedding, Doug announced that he would never set foot on Wall Street or in corporate America again. For a while, after having talked to Erick, he toyed with the idea of becoming a pilot. Law school was a little closer to the mark but he just couldn’t get himself to apply. Several sessions with a career counselor led him back to his childhood dream of being a homicide detective. He had abandoned the dream because his parents had vehemently discouraged it. He knew he had to start at the bottom, as a beat cop; and the idea of it utterly electrified him. Six months later, he began training at the police academy. They had to give up their apartment, and move to more modest quarters.

  Technically, Taina was in favor of his “unconventional” new career, but in reality, the change rattled her to the core. She had been toying with the idea of a professional transition herself. She had done well in drawing and painting and college, and felt that she could be a “real” artist as well as a designer. She attended a lecture on the subject of Latinos in the arts, where they discussed the dangers of assimilation into mainstream American culture, using mutually understood terms like “othering” and “post-identity.” In these circles, the worst kind of self-betrayal by an artist of color was to produce work that was culturally anonymous. Taina sat through it, looking every bit Latina, with her bronze skin and black hair pulled back shiny and flat like a salsa dancer, but everything they talked about was foreign to her. Inside, Taina felt as white as a Swiss milkmaid; and this, she feared, was a basic failure of integrity. She felt like a fraud culturally, artistically, and perhaps most grievous of all: emotionally.

  Taina’s own personal anxiety just heightened the tensions at home about Doug’s career change. He was a person whose very identity was undergoing transformation too, but rather than make Taina feel closer to him, it felt like she’d hitched up with someone just as confused as she was. One day, they were having lunch in the city on a Saturday, when his mobile phone rang. He was in the restroom so Taina answered. It was a woman. Taina asked the caller how she knew Doug. The caller said that they had met at the police academy, that they were friends and had plans to meet for lunch the following Monday.

  When Doug returned to the table, Taina simply looked at him and said, “So I hear you’re dating again.”

  Doug pulled his head back. “Huh?”

  She picked up the phone and held it up. “Katie called.”

  He blinked twice, licked his lips. “Yeah?”

  “She filled me in.”

  “Filled you in on what? We just went to a few happy hours together after training,” he said with a strained voice.

  “You’re cheating on me, aren’t you?”

  “Taina,” he begged. “You’re my life, baby. You have absolutely no reason to be jealous. Trust me.”

  “You slept with her,” she said flatly. “I can tell.”

  “Look at me,” he said, pointing at his own eyes. “No. I did not cheat and I never will.”

  “That’s what they all say,” she said in a zombie-like voice. And when she got up from her chair, Doug saw that she had wet herself.

  Doug made several grandiose attempts to reassure her. He sent huge bunches of roses to her at work, an embarrassment. What else could two dozen roses mean, really?

  She “forgave” him eventually, but back came the dreaded formality, a way to punish him or keep him at arm’s length. They went back to the peck on the cheek at the end of the night, only this time she expected to be treated like a diva. She even made him buy her silk roses from a street vendor in front of all his work friends, really tacky ones with wax dewdrops on their fake petals, which she tossed in the garbage on the way home.

  Taina began to talk about Adrian a lot. Adrian this, Adrian that. She played his music constantly, had his lyrics memorized, even though she didn’t speak Spanish. She began to throw Spanish words around and act Latina, as if to make Doug feel the same disorientation he had felt when he switched from a stockbroker to a policeman. Their relationship was out of the corral again, bucking and running off into the hills. In the meantime, Doug had never been happier at work: he was already a star at the NYPD, and his new line of work fulfilled him like never before. In an unfortunate coincidence, and through absolutely no fault of his own, he was assigned to work with an unusual number of women. He was put on a big case that required frequent contact with a renowned criminal profiler, a very attractive blonde who looked like she had stepped out of her own TV show. His partner? A woman. His immediate boss? A woman.

  “Do you work at the NYPD or at Victoria’s Secret?” David had joked. But Taina didn’t think it was so funny. She couldn’t adjust to his new life, his new persona, his new vocabulary and street accent, even his new happiness was confusin
g. Then he made the colossal mistake of revealing an extremely intimate fact about their marriage to a coworker (Taina overheard him on the phone with someone, probably the dreaded Katie, saying that Taina was “a raging insomniac”). Worst of all, he let it slip that she had begun sleeping in the other room. Outraged, Taina changed the locks and kicked him out for good. She went to see a divorce lawyer that same week. Doug’s next move was to visit Taina’s mother at her office at the university. Natasha Brighton had experienced her daughter’s ups and downs and didn’t hesitate to help him, although she made him promise to keep her contribution a secret. She had handed Doug two files: one labeled “news clippings” and another labeled “adoption file.”

  Doug never once considered that Taina didn’t love him, nor did he believe that she could possibly love Adrian. Adrian’s name came up after every argument they had ever had; he represented some kind of emotional refuge for her, an excuse to focus her energy elsewhere. It was true that Doug had betrayed their marital secrets but only after her insecurities had really gone berserk. Later, he had consulted with a trusted colleague who knew a great deal about the psychology of traumatized children. Taina, he was told, was being manipulated by fears so deep and so old that even she didn’t recognize them as imaginary anymore.

  When David was diagnosed with brain cancer, Doug had been saddened and shocked like everyone else. But his first concern was for his wife. If David died, Taina might never recover emotionally, she might lose trust in life itself. And the psychologist at work had been spot-on about David’s reaction to his own illness. He predicted that David would suddenly want to resolve the mystery of his origins, so Doug wasn’t a bit surprised; in fact, he was ready, with research in hand, when David e-mailed him a message two weeks after his diagnosis. The message contained just a few lines confirming his desire to proceed with the search; a message with the words “Ready to open Pandora’s Box” written in the subject line.

  Chapter 11

  David was scheduled to have surgery at six in the morning, and the surgery would last six to eight hours. His doctor wanted him to check in the afternoon before, so they could monitor his every breath. David shooed his parents and Julia out in the late afternoon, told them to go home and get some rest. They decided to drive back to Connecticut, have some supper, sleep in real beds, and get up at 3 a.m. to be back at the hospital by 5 a.m., a full hour before he went into surgery. Julia was to spend the night with the O’Farrells, so they could ride in together. After that, the plan was for the O’Farrells to stay in Taina’s guest room and on to a hotel if David’s hospitalization lasted more than a week.

  On the night before the surgery, Marcia and Julia hung out together in their bathrobes. They watched the celebrity gossip channel because suddenly everything else on TV seemed dark and depressing. Everything reminded them that David was all alone in the hospital with “that thing,” as Marcia called it, growing in his head. Julia was in the kitchen pouring boiling water for tea when she heard the crackle of what could only be the pages of a photo album being turned in the next room.

  “Would you mind grabbing my glasses, hun? I think I left them on the counter.”

  Julia brought the specs out on a tray with the hot tea, and they curled up on the couch together, looking at photo albums. They laughed at David’s pictures when he was a young boy and commented on his evolution through adulthood. “Paul and I have always suspected that he was older than they said,” Marcia said. “The growth chart they used was based on Caucasian standards. I think they underestimated the age to the children’s advantage, to make them more attractive for adoption. We all know that the younger they are, the better their chances are of being adopted. In fact, this just came up the other day, when we told Dr. Levine about how we had gone about testing the validity of David’s memory flashes. We think that David was small for his age, plus he was speech-delayed. He might have been close to four when he was found, which would explain how he could remember so much. It would mean that he crossed into a kind of maturity, where his memories were being linked to language.”

  In the meantime, Julia was doing the math, remembering David’s argument that he was too young for marriage. “That means that he might be up to two years older than he thinks,” she said, amazed. “He’s probably actually my age, thirty-four or even older . . .”

  Marcia smiled a little and shook her head. “That’s right. He’s not the spring chicken he pretends to be.”

  She turned the page and there he was on Holly’s wedding day, looking like a feral cat that had been dragged out of the woods and bathed, perfumed, and dressed in a tux. “Look at my boy,” intoned Marcia. “He’s miserable in every picture where he’s had to dress up.” She held up a photo of David making his first communion. “He’s scowling in every picture. I could have killed him. And look, he looks exactly like that at Holly’s wedding, only taller.” She chuckled softly and shook her head.

  Julia sighed. “You can’t force him into anything. Even if it’s for his own good.”

  Marcia eyed Julia over the top of the spectacles, but said nothing. She turned the page and they skipped over the ceremony photos, to get to the reception where she knew they would find pictures of a jolly and relaxed David, his tie off, shirt unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up. There was a photo of the siblings lined up: David in the middle, his arms around Taina, Holly, and Adrian. “Ray was the one who couldn’t get time off work,” Julia recalled.

  Marcia said, “Paul and I wish that we had tried harder to gather them when they were kids. All of them—not just Adrian, who was always David’s first choice. I don’t think any of us parents realized how much they needed each other. Heck, I don’t think we imagined that we would ever need each other as parents. I’ve talked to Natasha more in the last month than I have in my whole life.” She pressed a hand on Julia’s, to demonstrate the next comment was on the side. “I had no idea Taina had had so many emotional issues as a child. I guess we got lucky with David.”

  “So how do you feel about David pursuing his biological roots, Marcia? Has he talked to you about it? He seems to be getting more serious about searching. You know, after he gets better.”

  Marcia looked back toward the hall, as if David could overhear. She turned back to Julia, who saw her for the first time in her life; really saw Marcia. Her skin was lacking in freckles or any markings but was deeply lined at the forehead and between her nose and mouth. Her eyes were hazel, with flecks of a thousand shades of yellow, brown, and green. Irish eyes.

  “I told him it was okay with me,” she said.

  “No, I mean how does it make you feel? I guess I want to know that it’s not hurting you.”

  Marcia’s eyes grew large. “Why that’s the sweetest thing I . . .” She paused. “When David was small, I definitely would have felt threatened. But that time came and went.” She looked down. They were quiet for a moment, each lost in thought. After a few minutes, Marcia pointed to one of the photographs in the album and said, “Oh, this reminds me—a little something I remembered when I was reading a journal I kept after we adopted David.”

  “Tell me,” Julia said, leaning forward.

  “Well, it was the week before Palm Sunday and my mother was hosting a gathering of church ladies. They were in charge of making the palm crosses for the weekend masses. They were also supposed to be watching David while I ran out to do some errands. Well, the ladies got to chatting, and when they finally remembered to check on David, he had gotten into a bag of palm leaves. He had twisted all the palms into perfect crosses, you know how there is this certain way they wind the palm into an ‘X’ pattern around the center to hold it together? David had made forty or so of these, and kept doing it without looking up at them, like someone working an assembly line. We asked ourselves, where the heck would he have learned to do that?”

  “In a very Catholic household.”

  “Yes, but think about it. Even children of extremely devout Catholics are taught to make these what, one once a year, righ
t? He would have had to make an awful lot of them to have that kind of muscle memory.”

  “So you think maybe they lived in the fold of the church?”

  “Something like that. And another thing. In my mother’s journal, a habit I was terrible at keeping up, I did write down that David once called for ‘Miguel.’ ”

  “Miguel,” Julia whispered.

  “He had a high fever when he was around seven or so. I came into his room and he was saying ‘Miguel’ over and over. I don’t remember it, but it’s written there in the diary. The adoption agency asked me to keep the journal during the first year that we had adopted David. But like I said, I was terrible at keeping it up. I wish I had more to contribute.” She closed the photo album and turned to look at Julia. “I hope you kids do find something, even if it only serves as an interesting distraction from this awful cross that he’s bearing.” She clasped her hands together. “Ohhh,” she sighed. “How I wish you two had married before all this.” She shook her head. “You could’ve been the one to save his soul.”

  Julia shook her head a little bit. “Me?”

  Marcia zipped the gold cross that hung by a chain back and forward across her chest as she spoke. “It says in the Catechism, ‘the unbelieving husband is consecrated through his wife.’ I looked it up because I’m worried. Even in light of this crisis, he refuses to accept Jesus into his life. And who can help him now? Your relationship ended and he won’t lift a finger to save his own soul. He won’t even admit he has one,” she said wearily.

  Chapter 12

  David

  There was video and audio track documenting my surgery. In it, one can see that the anesthesiologist’s machines were beeping unperturbed. The EEG display proves that I was in a state of complete electro-cerebral silence. My head had been sawed open by the surgeon who did the prep work. Dr. Levine stepped in only to do the actual tumor removal. He muttered quietly to his assistant without looking up. The motion of his fingers was tiny and delicate, like an artist painting with his finest brush, he went over the same spot again and again. I read a profile about him in a magazine where he describes what goes on in his head during those grueling surgeries. He hopes that the scraping doesn’t rob the patient of any major abilities, like speaking. The tiniest miscalculation on his part could trigger a hemorrhage or leave the patient mute. In the last day or two, he has undoubtedly spent hours in front of a computer viewing a three-dimensional diagram of my brain, plotting his every move. He can’t just yank the thing out because it’s wired to my brain, and so he must decide which vessels are feeding healthy brain tissue and which are feeding the tumor. All the while he knows that he won’t get it all, that glioblastoma multiforme always leaves behind invisible seedlings, offspring left to fulfill the deadly mission of the parent.