When Tito Loved Clara

by Jon Michaud

  “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.”

  “Your father tell you that?”

  “Yeah. I've still got the medicine in my backpack. It's right there, in the pocket.” He pointed at one of the zippers on the bag.

  Tito opened it and took out an orange pharmacy bottle with a cluster of white pills on the bottom.

  “You think the sick person can use my malaria medicine? They can have it. My mom said I can't get malaria in New York.”

  “That's really nice of you, Wyatt. But I don't think they have malaria.”

  Tito stood and looked down the train. A police officer and two EMS workers were walking up the platform. The emergency seemed to have passed. Moments later, the doors closed and the train departed the station.

  TAMSIN WAS ALREADY home when they got back.

  “Oh, there you are,” she said, opening the door. “I was starting to get worried. Where were you guys?”

  “On the train!” said Wyatt, jumping into his mother's embrace.

  “I should have known. Hi, honey,” she said, squeezing the kid. Tito wanted to lean in and kiss her, as if they were married, but he held back. That was la otra vida, he reminded himself.

  “How did it go?” he asked her.

  Tamsin shook her head. “It's going to be tough. Most of my students can barely write their names.” She put down Wyatt and went into the bedroom, returning with her purse. From its maw, she pulled three twenties. “I was going to pay that woman ten dollars an hour, so here you go. I really can't thank you enough.” She extended her hand to him, proffering the cash.

  Tito wanted to cry. He'd been thinking that maybe they could all get takeout and eat dinner together. “No, really. You don't need to pay me,” he said, holding up his hand.

  “I didn't know my lease included a babysitting service. You sure?”

  “Anytime I'm not working. Really. He's a great kid. I'll be happy to look after Wyatt next week, if you need me to. Maybe we can ride the Metro-North for a change.”

  “Yeah!” said Wyatt. “A commuter train.”

  WEDNESDAYS FOR THE next few weeks, Tito took the kid on every train he could think of. They rode the Metro-North from Spuyten Duyvil into Grand Central. From Penn Station, they took the LIRR double-deckers out to Babylon and back. They went to Hoboken for lunch on the PATH and took the New Jersey Transit out to Montclair, a town he sometimes dreamed of living in. On the return trip, they'd dis
embarked on a platform opposite a high-speed Acela train, the supreme being in Wyatt's railroad pantheon. Its long sloping nose was shaped like the front of a supersonic jet, but the vents on the side of the engine made it look more like a huge metal shark. Before Tito could stop him, Wyatt dashed into the train's open door. Tito chased him through the empty first-class cabin, finally catching him in the café car, which was also deserted. They sat in a booth and pretended they were on their way to Boston, Wyatt sucking down his juice box and Tito glancing through an out-of-town newspaper someone had left behind. Finally, a conductor came and shooed them off.

  Tamsin was cagey with him, hot and cold, though she never again offered him money for spending time with Wyatt. He did not think her so innocent that she didn't suspect his ulterior motives and he hoped she was doing more than just using him for convenient babysitting and handyman help—hoped, but feared the worst. After the first week she'd asked him to watch Wyatt for a little longer when she got home from work while she went out for a run. He didn't mind. He sat on the couch with the kid, one eye on the cartoons and the other on Tamsin's bedroom door as she changed. The door opened and she came out wearing a pair of expensive-looking run-ning shoes, a thin and very short pair of running shorts, and a tank top. Titillation at the Track. He and Wyatt went out to the Emerson Playground, where they waited for her return. The dream life never seemed more real than those minutes when he was with the other parents. When Tamsin came back from her runs, she was slick with sweat and the muscles on her legs twitched.

  She was driven, lonely, and he soon learned, more than a little neurotic. Watching her open her mail became a favorite spectacle. She opened everything she received, even the junk mail. Not only did she open it, but she read it, scanning through the credit-card solicitations, environmental newsletters, and pleas for money from the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association. When she had read them, she tore the pages into pieces—half, then half again, then again and again until it was too thick to tear. She tore the paper with vitriol and panache. It was a performance. Then she spread the pieces among the three garbage cans in the apartment.

  “What?” she asked, as Tito stared.

  “I've never seen anyone do that.”

  “I had my identity stolen,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. The bitch ruined my credit for years.”

  “She got your credit card numbers?” said Tito.

  “More than that,” said Tamsin. “Bank accounts, voting records. Everything. She was a professional con artist. I was one of six or seven identities she used. And you know where she found the information about me?”

  “On the Internet?”

  “In the garbage.”

  “Why don't you get a shredder?”

  “I like tearing things up,” she said.

  HIS PARENTS' ANNIVERSARY was coming up and, as usual, they were planning a trip to celebrate. This year they were going to Santo Domingo for a week. Tito had taken the time off work to look after the building. On the morning of his parents' departure, suitcases were arrayed in the living room like the skyline of a small city: three slabs of vinyl stuffed with the bounty of New York, destined for his cousins, aunts, uncles, and their miscellaneous mistresses, moochers, and hangers-on. It was nothing fancy—tube socks, blue jeans, clock radios, disposable cameras, and Teflon frying pans—but his parents would be greeted like astronauts returning from a moon shot. And while they were away, he could pretend that the apartment was his own uptown bachelor pad.

  His parents were the only people he knew who still got dressed up to fly. His father wore the old-guy summer formals: a linen suit and a Panama hat. Meanwhile, his mother, with her pressed white blouse, her knotted yellow scarf, and her sunglasses, looked like a Latina Jackie O. “You never know who you're going to run into on the plane,” she said.

  “Yes you do,” Tito replied. “On this plane you're going to run into a bunch of Dominican hicks and their noisyass kids.” But he knew his parents had to dress the part they played when they returned to Santo Domingo: the cosmopolitan couple of means. What everyone back in D.R. didn't know was that most people in America looked like slobs when they traveled. They wore sweat-pants and shoes with Velcro closures. Tito had even seen teenagers getting on planes in their pajamas.

  His father went over everything with him one more time. Here were the keys, the numbers to call at the management company, the schedule for the garbage pickup, as if Tito had not been putting out the garbage since he was seven. He said, “Yes, Papi,” and drove them to the airport.

  At the check-in, he waited in line with them to make sure they didn't get any grief for the size of their bags. Then he walked with them to the security gate, where they endured the solemn humiliations of the terrorist age. Before she followed his father through the metal detector, his mother said, “Listen to me, mijo, you've got to stop this foolishness with the blanquita. You hear me?”

  “What blanquita?” he asked.

  “Tamsin,” she said.

  “Oh, don't worry about that, Mami, that's nothing,” he said and kissed her.

  “You stop it, now, hear? You're wasting your time. You're looking for something she can't give you. I don't know why you couldn't work things out with Jasmina last year. Tu eres un hombre incompleto,” she said, and went through the metal detector.

  Tito drove home thinking about his mother's parting words. Un hombre incompleto. An incomplete man. An unfinished man. He had to give it to her. Nobody could slay him with a sentence the way she could. But no matter what his mother said, Jasmina had been wrong for him, spoiled and shallow.

  Home from the airport, he went to the closet and took down a box he had not opened in years. He shifted the furniture around in his room and spent the afternoon assembling the box's contents. He had barely finished when the knock came at the door. It was Tamsin and Wyatt.

  “Are they gone?” whispered Tamsin, looking into the apartment.

  “Yes,” said Tito, whispering, too, for no good reason.

  Wyatt rushed through the door. “Where is it? Where is it?” he asked.

  “He's been asking all day,” said Tamsin. “I wanted to be sure your parents had left before we came over.”

  Wyatt was no longer in view. “Here it is! Here it is!” he called from Tito's room.

  “Come on in and see,” Tito said, closing the door behind her.

  There it was: his old Lionel O Gauge Super Chief with two coaches and the observation car at the back on a figure 8 layout with a station house and a trestle bridge.

  “Can you turn it on? Pleeeease?”

  “Sure,” said Tito. “The switch is over here.”

  An old tenant had given him the train set many years before when her son went to college. Tito set it up in his room and for a week—it was winter, there was nothing else to do—he played with it (if watching a toy train go around and around could really be called playing). Looking to expand the layout, he went to a hobby shop in the Bronx to buy some more track, but once he saw the price, he felt like an idiot. It would take him a month to save enough to extend his line by a couple of feet, a year to buy another car for his train. He went home, put the train back in its box, and stowed it in a closet, where it had remained until that morning.

  And now he was glad he'd kept it. Wyatt was on his hands and knees prowling around the chugging, smoke-emitting locomotive like a giant cat. “Mommy, Mommy,” he said. “You see it? You see it? There's a signal crossing.”

  “Yes, sweetheart. I see it.”

  “It's cool, right, Mommy?”

  “Very cool,” said Tamsin, smiling at Tito.

  “Do you have any more passenger cars, Tío?”

  “No,” said Tito. “Each sold separately.”

  “You can still collect them all?”

  “Yes. But batteries are not included,” he said, and they both laughed. “So, you guys hungry?” asked Tito. “My mom left me a ton of food.”

  “Starving, actually,” sai
d Tamsin.

  Tito started to set the table and became suddenly indignant that none of his parents' plates or cutlery matched. They had been acquired, over the years, from the odds and ends that people left behind when they moved out of their apartments, and they reflected the subtle changes in generational taste. Some forks had four tines, some had three; some knives were serrated, some weren't; some plates had a floral border, some had gold trim. It was as if their wedding registry had been at a flea market. He turned the gas on to warm up the soup. There was also rice and beans and some bacalao. Wyatt didn't want to come to the table, but they showed him that if he left the bedroom door open, he could see the train as it made part of its circuit.

  “So, can you still look after him tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” said Tito. “I've got a surprise for him.”

  “What?” said Tamsin. Wyatt wasn't listening to them; he was spellbound by the train.

  Tito said, “M-O-N-O-R-A-I-L.”

  “No way. Where?”

  “Newark Airport. I saw it today when I was dropping my parents off.”

  “He's going to freak out.”

  “It'll be great,” said Tito.

  “How are you going to get out there?”

  “I've got the car. You said you had a booster, right?”

  “Yes. I don't think it's unpacked yet, but I'll find it.”

  They ate for a time in silence. Finally, Wyatt said, “Mommy? You see it? It's picking up passengers at the station. It's the express.”

  “I see it, sweetie.”

  “Mommy, can we stay here tonight?” Wyatt had gotten off his chair and was drifting in the direction of the bedroom watching the train. He'd eaten next to nothing. Tito looked at her with an expression indicating that he would not have any objections to them staying.

  “No, sweetie, we should go home.”

  “Please!”

  “You're going to spend the day with Tito tomorrow.”