Then Came You

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. Ayudame.” 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. “Mas 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, senora.” 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 cafe 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 stomach 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.