Then Came You

by Jennifer Weiner

  Marcus kept cash at home, five thousand dollars in a box in the safe. I’d helped myself to all of it and zipped it into the various pockets of my wallet and purse. Another bus took me to Philadelphia, and a train brought me to that city’s airport, where I picked up a ticket at the US Air counter and caught a late flight to Puerto Vallarta. When we landed, I bought a bus ticket for thirty pesos to Sayulita, a forty-five minute ride away. Sayulita, according to the Internet, was a little fishing village now famous for its surfing and its yoga, a place where you could still find a cheap place to stay, eat fresh fruit and handmade tortillas, and sip batidas by the beach. It looked pretty in the pictures that my handheld pulled up. Pretty, and a good place to hide. My rudimentary Spanish, a lot of gesturing, and a fistful of pesos got me a casita for a month — one room, with a kitchenette in the corner and mosquito netting around the bed. There was a toilet inside and a shower, with half-height wooden walls, attached to the side of the house, underneath an orange tree. Lemon trees in the backyard, I heard my mother say. I could remember the feel of her hand in my hair, the warmth of her body in bed next to me. When the sun goes down you can watch the surfers.

  I lay my bag down on the bed. I was back to where I’d started. Take away the banana and the banyan trees, the sound of the waves, the tortilla truck that made its way up the cobblestones every morning, edging past the street dogs and the chickens, and I could have been back in West Hollywood, eighteen and broke, with no idea of what to do next.

  I’d bought a few things at a market near the airport: a cotton wrap, a bathing suit, big sunglasses, a canvas tote bag that said VISIT MEXICO in curvy red letters, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. In my cottage, I put my clothes on the wire hangers some other visitor had left behind, set my toiletries on the little table underneath a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe next to the sink, pulled on the swimsuit, wrapped the pareo around my waist, slid a pair of two-dollar rubber flipflops on my feet, looped my tote bag over my shoulder, and walked into town.

  In a market that opened onto the street I bought a net bag and filled it with eggs, cheese, tortillas, mangos, an avocado, a sun-warmed tomato that felt ripe and heavy in my hand, bottled water, and sunscreen. I walked home slowly, doing a lap around the village square. There was a church in one corner, a stained-glass Madonna with downcast eyes in its window. Across the way was a yoga studio, and sitting on benches, or on the curbstones that divided the street from the green, were the men that I knew I’d find, the ones with shabby clothes and sly expressions who lived in any resort town by the sea, the men who’d find the tourists what they wanted. Missy, hey, missy, you want smoke? Pretty lady, you want to party?

  There were three farmacias that I passed on my rounds. I went inside to the smallest one. An ancient man, brown and gnarled as a walnut, stood behind the counter, sadly polishing his glasses. I put my hands against my temples, then laid them on my heart. “Dolor. Muy malo. No. .” Shit. What was Spanish for sleep? “No dormir. Ayúdame.” At first, he pulled a bottle of some over-the-counter remedy off the shelf and held it out to me, a question on his face. I shook my head, then opened my wallet, letting him see the credit cards, the fat stack of pesos. “Más fuerte. El dolor, muy malo. I lost. .” I made my arms into a cradle, rocking an invisible infant. The man looked up at me, then held up one stubby finger. “Un momento, señora.” Then he shuffled behind the counter and came back with an unmarked brown prescription bottle, into which he solemnly tapped thirty pills from a white envelope in his hand. “For the sleeping,” he said. “Very strong, so cuidado.” I nodded, paid him, and slipped the bottle into my pocket. Now I had what I needed: sunshine, sand and waves, food and water, a bed to sleep in, a town where no one would know me, and something to still the voice in my head that shrilled and mewled like a petulant teenager’s: I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.

  I’d wake up in the morning with the sunrise. The way the roosters crowed in the cobbled streets, it was hard to sleep later than that. I’d fry an egg, slide it onto a tortilla, add a few slices of avocado and tomato, a sprinkle of salt, and take it onto my porch to eat. I’d wash the pan and my plate, pull on my swimsuit, take my tote bag, my sunscreen, and the towel that I’d hung on a tree branch to dry, and walk to the beach, a wide curve of golden sand that sloped gently toward the water. There, I’d rent a lounge chair for five pesos a day. There were bars where the beach joined the sidewalk, places that sold beer and bottled water and hand-patted tortillas filled with whatever you wanted for lunch. I’d leave my bag on the chair, slip my key, on a length of twine, around my wrist, and swim out into the clear green water. Sometimes I’d swim out even farther, until the people on the beach were no bigger than colored dots. More often, I’d flip onto my back and lie there, borne up by the gentle waves, staring into the sun.

  As the weeks unspooled, I got to know people’s faces, if not their names: the surfing instructors who’d paddle their long-boards past me; the young woman with the gold incisor who worked at the café where I’d order my juice or enchiladas; the man, missing most of the fingers on his left hand, who rented the beach chairs; the little girl with glossy black pigtails who followed him with a tiny rake to smooth the sand. My own hair started growing in, dark at the roots, with a few springy strands of gray. I kept it braided, tucked up underneath my hat, and I wore sunglasses that covered my face from my eyebrows to my cheeks.

  One day my after-lunch ramble took me to a hotel lobby. There were a few decent-size hotels in Sayulita, inexpensive places that catered to kids from Europe on their gap year, backpackers and free spirits and families who’d decided that bare-bones quarters with shared bathrooms was a fair exchange for the gorgeous beaches, the fresh fruit, the quaint streets with their little shops and the men who’d sit in the square at night, playing sad love songs on their guitars. The hotels had computers, usually an elderly desktop perched on top of a folding table in the lobby, where you could rent time online.

  I’d ditched my iPhone in the ladies’ room at the airport in Philadelphia, sliding it into a trash can without a second look, even though I’d felt a momentary pang about the leather cover, monogrammed, soft as butter. Now I brushed my salt-water-stiffened hair off my cheeks and thumped the keys on a wheezing, overheating Dell, logging into my e-mail for the first time since I’d left, opening a screen so I could Google my name.

  There it was. First, a column in the Post about how I’d missed the funeral. Then, three days later, the story I knew someone would find eventually. It was in the Daily News, illustrated with my mug shot, from when I was twenty-three, and another picture of me as a teenager, at a party, in a Flashdance-style sweatshirt, ripped at the shoulder. “Runaway Bride Was Bigamist.”

  “Here we go,” I muttered, and clicked on the link. India Bishop, the new wife-turned-widow of recently deceased financier Marcus Croft, who raised eyebrows across the city after she was a no-show at her husband’s funeral on Friday, changed her name when she moved to Hollywood as a teenager. No surprise: it’s a move many young aspiring actresses make. But when Bishop filled out the paperwork that would legally turn her from Samantha Marie Stavros to India Bishop, she never mentioned that she’d been married as a teenager, and that she’d never obtained a divorce. Bishop, 43 (not the 38 she’s been claiming), a public-relations executive, was wed in 1985 to David Carter, a substitute drama teacher at New London High School in New London, Connecticut, who was more than fifteen years’ Bishop’s senior at the time. “It was a major scandal,” said Andrea LeBlanc, a classmate of Bishop’s. “We all figured she was pregnant, but, if she was, she wasn’t showing by graduation. . and, by August, she was gone.”

  Bishop left New London and moved to Hollywood, where she worked odd jobs and was eventually arrested in a round-up of women who were working as waitresses at a party and charged with prostitution (she was eventually released, and the charges were dropped). Two years later, she was hired at JMS Public Relations under her new name.

  I gripped the edges of the table, my s
tomach clenching, thinking that if there was any consolation to be found, it was that Marcus had died before he’d found out the truth — that I’d filed papers, but David, it seemed, had never signed them and, even decades after the fact, I had still been married to David Carter when Marcus and I had said our vows. I forced my eyes back to the screen, scanning to the bottom to read the story’s final line. Reached in his New London home, David Carter declined to comment.

  I bent my head, imagining the story being zapped around the city, landing with a cheery little chirp in the inboxes of everyone I knew. I pictured Bettina’s smirk. Then I forced myself to look at my inbox. There were dozens of e-mails from Annie — the last one, under “subject,” read PLEASE CALL ME! I’M WORRIED! Another few dozen from Leslie at the clinic, saying basically the same thing. Bettina had written: Where Are You? More spam, more reporters; a note from my saleslady at Saks, who, apparently unaware of the changes in my life, wrote to say that the new Jimmy Choo open-toed leather lace-up booties had arrived and were available in dark brown and black, and she would hold a pair in both colors until she heard from me. Finally there was one more e-mail from Bettina. Nothing in the subject line, just a picture of a baby with dark eyes and a jaunty pink beret over her head. “It’s a girl,” she’d written. Nothing more.

  I logged out, picked up my bag, and walked into the sunshine. Hey, lady, hey, lady, the men on the square crooned. Back at my casita, I shucked off my swimsuit and stood under the water from the outdoor shower until it went from tepid to cold. I didn’t bother drying off. I lay naked underneath the single sheet, with mosquitoes whining against the netting, until the sun went down, and slept until almost noon the next day. . and when I woke up, I knew where to go, and what to do when I got there.

  BETTINA

  By July, things had calmed down enough that I felt able to leave the apartment for a while. Annie was staying two days and one night each week, Tia was on duty every night Monday through Friday, and Jules, who I thought I’d never see again after our uncomfortable introduction, had surprised me by calling the week after we’d met and volunteering to babysit. “I don’t know much about kids,” she said, looking as terrified as I must have been the first time I gave her Rory to hold.

  “It’s not hard,” I’d said. She’d handled the baby like she was made of glass, exclaiming over her every sigh and coo. The first Sunday I’d stayed with her. The second time I’d left her with bottles of breast milk and my cell-phone number and gotten on the subway to spend an evening with Darren for the first time since Rory’s arrival. Unbeknownst to him, I had an agenda: I wanted to get drunk, and then, as my old roommate would have put it, I wanted to get laid. I wanted to behave like a regular twenty-four-year-old, a woman with no vision past her own eyelashes, no plans beyond the next day, and no responsibilities beyond her own job.

  Darren lived in Chelsea, in a building with an elevator but no doorman and disconcertingly narrow hallways. His apartment had, as I could have predicted, a flat-screen TV as its main piece of furniture, but other than that, it was surprisingly un-repulsive. There was an indigo-and-orange vintage poster for Orangina on the kitchen wall and a big leather couch in the living/dining room. There was no space for a kitchen table, but Darren had lined up three wood-and-metal stools in front of the narrow breakfast bar. When I arrived, he was unpacking a bag full of Chinese take-out boxes. There was fried rice and egg rolls, chicken lo mein and spicy prawns. I filled my plate, and we sat together on the couch.

  “So?” asked Darren. “How’s motherhood?” He was barefoot in his chinos, wearing a T-shirt advertising some band I’d never heard of, and his horrible glasses. He needed a haircut. . but, to me, he’d never looked cuter.

  “It’s interesting,” I said carefully. I understood the problem, the situation I was in. When Darren and I had started spending time together, I was single and unencumbered. Now I had a baby. The fact that the baby was not technically mine did not, in the end, matter much. I was a woman with a child, and that did not make me more desirable than I’d been when we’d met.

  “Any word from India?” he asked.

  I shook my head. The truth was, I wasn’t looking for my disappearing stepmother too hard. With Annie and Jules and Tia in and out of the apartment, with the baby doing baby-like things that are probably boring to everyone in the world except for the people to whom the baby belongs—She smiled! She almost rolled over! She’s holding up her head! — I felt interested, engaged, needed in a way I didn’t think I’d never been needed in my life, and if, sometimes, I was so tired it was all I could do to keep from dozing off in the tub, if I missed my colleagues at Kohler’s, if I missed my freedom, it seemed a reasonable trade-off for a life I liked much better than the one I’d had. I had a tribe, a crew, friends in Annie and Tia and Jules. The baby, too, had grown on me. I’d even started posting cute pictures on my Facebook page.

  “So what do you think will happen?” Darren asked.

  “I don’t know.” In truth, I thought that what would happen had happened already: Rory had been born, I’d brought her home, and now I would raise her. But, for Darren’s sake, I was willing to play along with the idea that things could still change. “I could put her up for adoption. I could sell her on eBay. Billionaire’s baby. I bet I could get a nice price.”

  “I don’t think,” Darren said, “that eBay’s allowed to traffic in actual people.”

  I looked at him hopefully. “Craigslist?”

  He shook his head. I pushed a single sesame noodle around the edge of my plate, where it had already completed half a dozen laps, like it was training for a noodle marathon. Since my father’s death, I’d lost eleven pounds. I was a grown-up, I told myself to shake off the memories of my dad. I was a grown woman with a college degree and a job I could return to, a baby I was caring for, maybe even a boyfriend, and so what if my life wasn’t perfect? Whose life was? Lots of people missed their parents, plenty of people had it worse. Jules had told me only the barest contours of her story, and that was plenty for me to be horrified. Still, I couldn’t keep from imagining it: my dad, walking through my bedroom door the way he had when I was little and had bad dreams. He’d bring me a glass of water, escort me to and from the bathroom, then sit with me, watching over me, my canopied bed creaking under his weight, until I fell asleep again.

  “I can’t figure out why they picked me,” I said. “Why me, and not Trey and Marissa?” They had a baby, they had baby stuff, they had a nanny already, not to mention an apartment that was big enough to accommodate another. My father had bought them the place as a wedding gift.

  “Maybe your father thought they had their hands full,” Darren offered. I nodded, wondering if that was it, or if maybe he thought that a new baby wouldn’t be as well loved as Trey and Marissa’s own daughter. “Or maybe India was the one who picked you.”

  I winced. “Doubt it. We didn’t get along.”

  He used his chopsticks to help himself to more prawns. “Yes, I sensed that when you came to have her investigated.”

  My cheeks flushed. “I wasn’t wrong about India.”

  “You weren’t wrong about her past,” Darren said. “I just wonder if maybe she’d changed. Anyhow,” he said hastily as I opened my mouth to tell him that, clearly, India hadn’t changed a bit, that she was a user and a gold digger who’d killed my father and abandoned her child and more or less ruined my life. “Is the food okay? You’re not eating.”

  I popped a snow pea in my mouth. “It’s fine.”

  “If you want my opinion, I think India made the right choice with you.”

  “You think I’m the maternal type?” That, at least, would explain why he’d never done more than kiss me.

  “I think,” he said, “they probably wanted the baby to have all the advantages that you guys had. Which means…”

  “Money,” I concluded.

  “Not just money. Living in New York City. Being exposed to things. Art, theater…”

  “The homeless guy I sa
w pooping in a trash can in the subway station this morning…”

  “No kidding,” said Darren. “Your subway station has one of those guys, too?”

  I looked around his kitchen. There was a coffee machine, a stainless-steel blender, a gallon-size container of protein powder beside it, and a toaster oven in the corner, but no liquor. I needed liquor. Booze was part of my plan. I wanted to be a party girl, laughing, half naked, letting a stranger slurp tequila out of my belly button without thinking about germs or disease. I wanted to be naked, skin to skin, with this boy I liked. “Do you have anything to drink?”

  He swung open the refrigerator. “We’ve got water, light beer, orange juice. .” He gave the plastic container a swish, then held it up to the light, squinting, before opening the top to take a sniff. “Maybe not orange juice.”

  “I mean, drink drink.” I slid off my stool and started going through his cabinets. The first one held only three dinner-size plates, two cereal bowls, two glasses, and two mismatched coffee mugs. The second featured an assortment of canned soups and pasta. I held one up. “Beefaroni?”

  “Don’t knock it,” he said.

  The third cupboard yielded a bottle of whiskey. I took one of his two glasses, pried a few cubes out of an ancient, ice-crusted metal tray I found in the freezer, poured myself a shot, and gulped it down.

  My eyes watered, and I felt my face turn red. “Whoa.” I filled my glass again as Darren watched, frowning.

  I sipped my second drink, and took off my shoes, and pulled my hair out of its headband, shaking it free. “Are you worried about me?”

  “Should I be?”

  I gave my hair another shake and downed my second shot. The mouth of the whiskey bottle clanked against the lip of the glass as I poured a refill. Darren put his hand over mine.