crossing my arms against my chest.
“Mental illness? Substance abuse?” She sat back, skinny legs crossed, staring at me.
“Google?” I answered back.
“If anyone in your family had an issue with substance abuse,” she said sweetly, “I think that’s something you might have mentioned before donating an egg.”
She was right, of course. She was right, and I’d been wrong. “I needed the money,” I said, dropping my eyes and wishing, once more, for Kimmie.
“For what?”
“For my dad.” My eyes were stinging. “To get him into rehab. Which didn’t work, as I’m sure you already know.”
“You shouldn’t have lied.”
“I didn’t lie. Nobody at the clinic ever asked.”
“Well, don’t you think it was something you should have mentioned?” Her voice was getting louder. I got to my feet.
“Did you bring me up here just to insult me? Because I could have just stayed at work and had my boss do that.”
She surprised me by changing the subject. “Where do you work?”
“Steinman Cox. I’m a junior analyst.”
“That sounds interesting.”
“Yeah,” I said sourly. “It’s spectacular.”
She sighed, finally looking her age. “I’m sorry I was provoking you,” she said. “This whole thing’s just very new.”
“So why did you want to meet me? Because it sounds like you know all the important stuff already.”
“I just wanted to see you in person. To meet you, before I asked.”
“Asked what?”
She shifted on the couch, recrossing her legs. “This is probably going to sound crazy,” she said, “but I want to know if you want to be. . involved, somehow.”
I blinked at her. “Involved?”
“Like… oh, I don’t know. An aunt, or a friend of the family.” She looked at me, her eyes wide, an expression that was almost pleading on her face. “My dad’s gone. .” She paused, then cleared her throat. “My dad’s gone, and my stepmother took off, and good riddance, as far as I’m concerned, but this baby’s got me as a parent, and I don’t know what I’m doing. So I thought…”
“You want people,” I said, remembering my conversation with Kimmie; my dream of being a mysterious benefactor.
“A village,” Bettina agreed. “You know, ‘it takes a village’? So I thought. . I mean, it’s probably crazy. You agreed to sell an egg, it’s not like you wanted to be a mother.”
I interrupted. “Can I see her?”
“She’s sleeping,” said Bettina. I thought this was a refusal until she added, “Take your shoes off and come with me.”
I did, then followed her as she led me down a hall and eased open a paneled door with a tiny embroidered pillow on a pink silk ribbon that read
The nursery was lovely, all cream and pale pink and celery green. A white-noise machine broadcast the sound of waves and seagulls from one corner; a humidifier purred in another. Bettina tiptoed over the carpet to a crib in the center of the room. . and there, in the center, with a pink blanket pulled up to her chin, lay the baby. She was sleeping on her back, her head turned to the side, arms stretched above her head like she was signaling a touchdown.
“Oh,” I sighed. She had a few wisps of blond hair, eyebrows like gold, and a dimple in the cheek that I could see. The same dimple I had; the one I’d inherited from my father.
The thing about bad decisions is that they don’t feel like bad decisions when you’re making them. They feel like the obvious choice, the of-course-that-makes-sense move. They feel, somehow, inevitable.
After I left the apartment, I took a cab to Newark Airport, went to the United kiosk, and printed out my ticket for Paris. I endured the pat-down at security, walked to the gate, and spent an hour browsing in the duty-free shop, long enough for the security cameras to get some good shots of me. Then, bending over my purse, exclaiming as though I’d left something — my wallet! my passport! — at home, I walked briskly back down the hallway, out of the airport, into the gray afternoon. It wasn’t like it was my baby, I told myself as I walked. Not really. True, it was Marcus’s sperm, but Marcus’s sperm had also made Tommy and Trey and Bettina, and it wasn’t like I was close with any of them.
The bus took me into Manhattan to the Port Authority, which was noisy and crowded, smelling of fast food and urine and bus exhaust. Buses were pulling in from Dallas and Kansas City, from Topeka and Toledo, from Pittsburgh and Tallahassee and all points in between. Fresh-faced girls with bags over their shoulders and their best boots on their feet were stepping into the terminal, getting their first look at New York City, planning how they’d conquer it without thinking for an instant that they’d fail; that, someday, they might find themselves forty-three years old, with a stranger’s face and all of their bright plans in ruin.
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
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.
