Love Her Madly Page 16

  My parents, doing what Cyn’s parents should have been doing if they hadn’t checked out of her life, kept pressing for further investigation but were categorically shut down. The message we received was that discovering the exact details surrounding the death of one American student wasn’t worth endangering a massive smuggling sting. Cyn was just gone. Everyone was very sorry. That was it.

  Before I made it out the front door, Raj pulled me close, his fingers lingering to caress the tender skin around my collar. “I miss you,” he said breathily. I wondered for a moment if our anniversary had passed without my noticing, or my birthday; he wasn’t usually so ardent on a random workday morning.

  “The weekend’s almost here,” I said consolingly, even though it didn’t mean much of a break for us. Raj had recently landed his first-ever major role in a Broadway show, playing the dashing, if naive, doctor in a British parlor comedy called The Queen’s Keys. The show was getting great reviews, and it was wonderful for his career. The additional money it brought in was like a steady rain falling on parched land; we’d needed it for so long that it would take a while to make a difference, but we were grateful. The real price we paid was in our time together. My office hours clashed with his night- and weekend-performance schedule, and then there was his theater company gobbling up not only all his available free time, but his mental and emotional energy. I often felt like a single woman, perpetually dining alone in front of the television or playing the third wheel on nights out with our couple friends. I missed him. I missed us. I wondered, often, what us would look like in five years’ time if nothing changed.

  Feeling lonely is an astoundingly dumb reason to have a child, my rational mind chided as I stepped out of our building into the cold, damp air of early spring. My finger began to throb, and I pulled my coat tighter, crossing against the Don’t Walk sign to the sunny side of the street. The trees on our block in Astoria, Queens, were still bare of buds. The naked branches reached hopefully past the brick buildings toward the sky, as if imploring the heavens for a warm respite after the long, bitter winter.

  If I was honest with myself, I could admit that my desire for a baby was less about a burning hunger for a tiny bundle of joy and more a reaction to the sense that I was fading into the background of Raj’s frenetic life. I was lonelier than I had been in a very long time, and I felt his rejection of the very idea of a child as further proof that his notion of our future was possibly less everlasting than my own. The thought made me so sad, and I didn’t know whether it was real or just my insecurities rising like the phoenix any time I wasn’t the focus of Raj’s limelight. The truth was, all I really needed was for him to call my bluff and say “Sure, let’s try!” With that sense of permanence in my back pocket, I could wait another year, or five.

  I rounded the corner and was smacked with a blast of icy wind that blew right through my wool coat, making me shiver. You chose this place, I reminded myself for the thousandth time. And despite the perils of winter, I really loved New York. It had saved us.

  The last thing I expected upon touching down on American soil after Costa Rica was for Raj to come to me. The world seemed to me so horrible a place that I all but expected Raj to disappear from my life entirely, just as Cyn had done. But he didn’t. He appeared at my parents’ front door, ashen and exhausted, speaking words of love, and as firmly as I turned him down and turned him away, he didn’t give up.

  With Cyn’s words about Raj’s true feelings echoing in my head, I set him on a task that I thought would put an end to all his nonsense about loving me. He hadn’t been at the island, so Cyn’s death was to him, still nebulous. Once he was forced to acknowledge that the girl he really loved was gone, I was certain his tune would change.

  The task was to go back to our dorm and gather up Cyn’s possessions. To me, who was afraid to set foot back on campus, it seemed an impossible ordeal, like something out of a Greek myth. I couldn’t imagine climbing those steps and passing under the familiar threshold strung with white Christmas lights. I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing all her things; her clothes, her shoes, her seventeen pairs of sunglasses, none of it ever to be touched by her again.

  But the school wanted all of our stuff out, so I sent Raj to take care of it with my dad. I expected the task to undo him. As he sorted through her belongings on the all-weather carpet, he would have time to think, and time to let go of her piece by glittery piece. With her passing a reality, he would acknowledge that he had to let me go, too, because how could he ever look at me without thinking of her? I expected a break up call from campus, and stayed within earshot of the phone all day, blackening the eyes of all the models in my mother’s Health & Fitness magazine as I waited for news of the end.

  But that hadn’t happened. He’d returned that night with my father, hauling a carful of my things that would be dumped into storage, unbrowsed by me. I wasn’t ready.

  He looked as drained as I’d ever seen him as he came into my childhood room, collapsing onto a bedspread that was marred with the battle scars of one hundred sloppy manicures.

  “It’s done,” he said, slipping something into my hand. It was the silver star necklace. “I saw it hanging on her lava lamp. I couldn’t give it to the Goodwill. She’d have wanted you to have it.”

  I squeezed it in my fist until the spires of the star poked deep into the meat of my palms.

  “If you don’t want it, you can maybe find a way to send it to her sister.”

  I nodded, unable to speak. We both knew I’d keep it. I was her sister, too.

  “How bad was it?”

  He sighed, and I saw a sheen appear on his clear, dark eyes. “Your dad kept it light. We listened to a lot of sports radio while we worked.”

  He smiled at me, and I saw what it was costing him to keep it together. I pulled him into my arms, and held him close. He didn’t cry, but I could almost feel the sadness in his body like a layer of varnish on his bones.

  “What did you keep for yourself?” I asked after a long time had passed.

  He sat up, and looking deeply into my face, took the fist that held the necklace and kissed it lightly. The bandages had come off, and there were scars, light pink like birthday frosting, webbing my flesh. “You, I hope.”

  We knew that we would leave Florida. Our plans were so amorphous at that point that our decision between New York and California was decided by the flip of a Sacajawea dollar coin. We trusted her intrepid spirit to guide us with care, and heads meant New York City.

  Raj grinned and kissed the carved metal face of our talisman. “Awesome. Hot dogs, every day.”

  Not even Sacajawea could secure us a soft landing in the Empire State, driving up as we had in the dead of winter in a jittery U-Haul, our newly purchased thrift store furniture do-si-do-ing noisily behind us all the way up I-95. My parents were understandably chagrined about me putting my education on hold and moving to a neighborhood in Brooklyn with a terrifying reputation, but they were also desperate. I saw in their eyes that the new me, the gloomy, nihilistic zombie that sat at the table masked as their daughter, was even more frightening to them. For a chance at getting the real me back, they would trade anything, including their peace of mind.

  We rented our first apartment in Bed-Stuy sight unseen, except for a couple of shady pictures posted on Craigslist. We liked it because it was in Brooklyn, which we heard was cool, and because it had those three-sided bay windows like the house on The Cosby Show. It also helped that the landlord didn’t care about credit checks or a verifiable rent history. He just wanted a big deposit. We sent a check and prayed that someone would meet us to hand over a key.

  The night before we set eyes on our new home, we stopped at a fleabag motel in Jersey called the Swan. The bearded receptionist sat slumped behind a heavy plastic safety window watching television; a shelf of liquor, smokes, and condoms lined the wall behind him. Our room featured a double bed pressed disconcertin
gly close to a heart-shaped Jacuzzi, ringed with a mossy fur of soap scum. Raj sat up half the night, peering out the window at every sound, worried that someone might commandeer the U-Haul that contained our empire.

  Raj’s parents weren’t as understanding about him leaving school. His father stopped speaking to him, and while his mother was slightly more conciliatory, it was months before she would speak my name. I was “She” or “Your girlfriend,” or, when she was being cruel, “The invalid.” I think that after what happened, she viewed Cyn and me interchangeably, a pair of equally bad influences on her charming second son, who came so close to doing as she, her husband, and her eldest son had done: gotten that precious medical degree. Raj would never be a doctor, but at least he looked the part enough to play one onstage. For me, it was enough that he could apply a decent Band-Aid.

  Once we married, our relationship with his parents improved, though it remained strained. As time trudged onward and Raj failed to tire of me, I could see them making efforts not to be outwardly judgmental, and by the time they visited our current apartment in Queens, they were able to disguise their chagrin with relative success. Our place isn’t a palace, but it’s a real find for the price, with a dedicated office for Raj and a view of the Triborough Bridge. His father had walked through the space, grimacing with each step, as if he were, at that moment, macerating glass. His mother opened a closet, expecting to find another bedroom, and an errant broom handle tipped out and hit her in the eye. But they didn’t actually criticize the place, or Raj’s life choices. That was really an improvement, especially because they had just taken the train in from Long Island, where Raj’s older brother had recently purchased a vacation house, flush with money after being named “North Carolina’s Best Dermatologist,” two years running, by Southern Health magazine.

  As we shivered through that first achingly cold winter in Brooklyn, we were acting on faith, hoping that by drastically changing our location, we might be able to put Costa Rica and all that it symbolized behind us. We naively thought that the world would accommodate our plan for a fresh start, but in New York, my phone never stopped ringing. Every television network had a talking head afflicted with the insatiable desire to rehash the minutiae of our disaster. There was even discussion of a TV movie. The idea of speaking publicly about Cyn made me sick, but the money the networks offered was nigh irresistible. I admit, I would have done it. We were totally broke. Problem was, the networks always wanted both of us: me and Raj together. Raj flatly refused, standing firm even as we stared down the barrel of two sets of tuition bills and astonishingly high rent for that decrepit studio in Bed-Stuy.

  I cried all the time those first few months. I cried when rats left droppings across our pillows. I cried when the only job I could find was a minimum-wage retail gig at a children’s clothing store called Rag Tag! I cried, secretly, when Raj was accepted into the Actors Studio, thinking that he would soon be leaving my sorry ass behind for some glamorous, bubbly actress. I was a mess. My depression, so impenetrable that it made my Big U episode look like a mild case of the blues, made me miserable to be around. But Raj, my closest, dearest person, somehow caught the brunt of all my agita, and like an enchanted circus juggler, picked it up, tossed it into the air, and handed something wonderful back to me each and every day. I never realized he had such an optimistic streak, but he kept promising me things would get better, and eventually they did.

  The darkness faded, replaced by intense moments of discovery and new delights. We watched the sunrise, drinking forties on rooftops with new friends. We strolled hand in hand for hours, strafing the streets of Manhattan, filling our eyes, ears, and noses with a kaleidoscope of stimuli that would later color our dreams. We frequented cheap taquerias, became slaves to Chinatown’s dumpling alleys, and haunted the grimiest happy hour bars on the Lower East Side, lavishing our laundry quarters on the jukebox. Hardly anyone knew our story or suspected that we were ever temporarily famous. I grew grateful that Raj had the foresight to turn down the TV money. I liked just being Glo and Raj, without the inglorious past.

  As Raj began his conservatory program, I decided it was time to get my own act together. I figured out the minimum credits I needed to complete my BA and signed up for night school. I was done with being a perpetual undergrad, and classwork gave me something to focus on while Raj was away nights, rehearsing. Raj pulled in some cash doing administrative work at his school, and inveterate student that he was, audited directing courses on the side. We didn’t buy anything, ever, other than food, booze, and my textbooks, but we were happy. My night school classes were cake compared to Tiny U, and my graduating GPA was sky-high. I didn’t take a break to celebrate, though. My sights were fixed on law school. With my wacky transcript, I knew I’d need to ace the LSAT to get accepted anywhere.

  Raj took one look at my encyclopedic LSAT study manual and paled. “Honey, you don’t have to do this,” he’d whispered, as if I’d volunteered to have my arm removed and replaced with a shovel. But I did want to do it. I knew I wasn’t the most analytic person by nature, but I was methodical and could process a lot of information. I thought it might even be a way for me to do some good in the world.

  “Is this because of her?” he’d asked one night as I struggled, near tears, with the logic games in the practice drills. Before Costa Rica, I’d never mentioned the possibility of a law career, so I understood why Raj might think that it was a reaction to my being, for a short time, a suspected criminal. But my true reasons were less romantic and more practical. Raj’s income showed no promise of ever being steady, and our debt was massive and growing. Something my dad said after receiving my lawyer Nocomment’s first invoice had also stuck in my head: “This asshole charges like his goddamn minutes are gilded in platinum.” I’d seen firsthand what Nocomment could do. I was smarter. I was sure as hell better with people. I could swing this lawyer thing, no problem. I could be the one to save us and make it up to Raj for the many times he’d saved me.

  But I didn’t become a big-money corporate lawyer. I became a justice-seeking lawyer, prosecuting shifty business owners for the State of New York. It wasn’t sexy, nor was it what I’d planned, but for getting a late start on a career, I thought I was doing pretty well. Certainly, I had days that left me questioning whether there were any honest people left in the world, or if my work was making any difference, but even those days were okay, because I’d get to go home to Raj. Those, of course, were the days when I still saw him in the evenings. Now most nights, I struggled to stay awake late enough to spend an hour with him when he returned. I usually didn’t make it.

  I emerged from the subway near my office and headed toward the deli. As I took a place in line, I told myself that I was there just for coffee but knew full well that I would be walking out with a fresh pack of cigarettes. They helped soothe my cramps, and as it appeared that breeding would not be in the cards for the coming month, I saw nothing wrong with indulging myself. Raj disapproved of my casual habit; vocally, and at length. It had begun in law school for the simple, stupid reason that the smokers in my class seemed to be the cool kids. And it reminded me of Cyn. I missed her, and in a way, I still wanted to be where she’d want to be, going so far as to view potential new friends through the lens of her imagined approval.

  Raj wouldn’t be home when I returned. Like a bloodhound, he could always sniff out the days I’d had a cigarette or four, and then the sanctimonious lecture would commence. I could shower after the gym post-work, and he’d be none the wiser. I knew that sneaking smokes was a particularly pathetic form of passive aggression, but no one ever gets everything they want in this world, so why should Raj? A few cigarettes was no big deal, and if he wanted me to quit completely, well, he knew what would motivate me.

  I ordered my coffee and my smokes. As I opened my purse, I felt a strange tickle at the back of my neck and turned my head to look out the store’s front window. There was nothing immediately remarkable. A bus was maki
ng a tremendous racket as it rose up on its hydraulics, doors closing as it pulled away from the curb. My eye dragged along its windows, idly, until my attention snagged taut like a fishing line, caught by the uncanny familiarity of one passenger, her profile distinct among the throng.

  Nope, I thought, because this happened regularly. Thinking of smokes had made me think of Cyn, so now my subconscious sought to “find” her for me. Any blonde, any female for that matter, could be pegged, scanned, analyzed, and dismissed in this pathological game that my mind so adored. It always ended the same. Not Cyn.

  But the woman in profile, she rattled me. The set of her jaw as she looked down, studying something in her lap, the light-colored hair tucked behind a distinctive swirl of ear. The lips, pursed in serious thought. I knew that face.

  I leaned over the counter, suddenly desperate to catch another glimpse of the now-vanished woman seated at the bus window. The clerk looked at me strangely and repeated the price of my order. A man behind me coughed impatiently.

  Mechanically, I grabbed a bill from my wallet and thrust it forward. The clerk repeated the total, and I realized I was offering only a fiver. Not enough. Flush with a sudden sweat, I seized a twenty and slapped it on the counter. The clerk took an eternity to make change, which I shoved in a disordered handful into my purse before rushing out onto the windy street.