“I was going to see my folks for a few days. I told them I’d—”
“You’ve got two weeks off. You’ll have time.”
People straggled in and out of the lobby. People she recognized. What if Marnie came down just now? Lucy didn’t want to prolong the discussion.
“We fly out tomorrow afternoon,” he said buoyantly. If he picked up on her hesitance he didn’t show it, and that, like so many things, seemed strange to her. “Go get packed. Do you want me to pick you up tomorrow or meet you at the airport?”
“Meet me at the airport,” she blurted. “I’m totally out of your way.”
“Great.” He kissed her. “Let’s meet at noon. I’ll call you with the gate number.”
She watched him go with an urgent feeling of relief. She wondered if she was going with him to Mexico for a week just to get him out of there.
DANIEL DID SOMETHING he promised himself he would not do. Late Saturday morning he drove to her apartment building. It wasn’t enough to hangaround spying on her any longer. He needed toget over himself and actually talk to her. He needed to find a way to warn her. He’d been in a state of anxious alert since he’d returned from India, but in the last twenty-four hours he’d been haunted—dreaming of her in the bare hour he slept and gripped by panic the rest of the time. He wasn’t sure whether it was his experience at the cemetery that woke him up or some strange premonition in his dream, but the idea of waiting another moment to see her seemed unbearable. He found her name by apartment number 4D and pressed the intercom button. A familiar voice answered, but it wasn’t hers.
“Is Lucy there?” he asked.
“No. Who is this?” it asked.
“This is . . . ah . . .” He felt desperate. “Is this Marnie?”
“Yes. Who is this?” she asked again.
“It is Daniel. Grey. From Hopewood.” He felt stupid shouting into the intercom. “You probably don’t remember me, but—”
“Oh, I remember you all right. You’re in the lobby? What are you doing here?” Her voice was something less than friendly.
“I was hoping to see Lucy.”
“What are you talking about?” Marnie was strident, impatient, even through the fuzzy speaker. “Aren’t you two sauntering off to Mexico together? Lucy left for the airport an hour ago to meet you.”
“I’m sorry?” His mind froze. He was polite if nothing else.
“I thought you were taking her to Mexico.”
“Mexico? I was taking her? What do you mean?”
“She went to meet you! That’s what she said. I don’t understand what you are doing here. Are you really Daniel Grey, or is this some lame-ass prank?”
The churn of dread began somewhere in his lower intestine. “Can I come up and talk to you? Would you rather come down?”
“I’ll come down,” she said.
He watched the elevator fetch her on the fourth floor and bring her down. He didn’t want a mystery. He didn’t like to have Lucy far away where he couldn’t find her.
“It really is you,” Marnie said when the elevator doors parted. She was openly surprised. “Over here,” she said. She led him to a tired-looking couch at the back of the lobby. She studied him for a moment before she sat down. “You don’t look all that different,” she said. “I’d say you look about exactly the same.”
“What do you mean?”
“Lucy keeps talking about how different you are now, how she could barely recognize you.”
The churn spread upward and down. Had she spotted him when he thought he was being invisible? Or was it something else? “When did she say she saw me?”
Marnie stared at him as though he was an imbecile and shook her head at him slowly. “All the time. Last weekend. The weekend before. Yesterday. You guys go out all the time.”
“And she said I was taking her to Mexico?”
“Yes.”
He realized that underneath her haughtiness, Marnie was spooked, too.
“And she’s gone?”
“She’s gone.”
“You’re sure.”
“I know she packed and went someplace.” Marnie’s face was still hard, but she wanted to trust him. “She could have lied about who she went with. She could have lied to me about the whole thing.” Under the peaked eyebrows, her eyes reminded him of when she had been Sophia’s mother.
“But she said it was me, Daniel Grey, from high school?”
“Yes. Are you his evil twin or something? Because I don’t know how this is a surprise to you. According to her, she has been going to every expensive restaurant in the state of Virginia with Daniel Grey from high school.”
He shook his head. “I’m not a twin. If there’s evil here, I don’t think it’s me.” He needed to think. “Did she say exactly where she was going in Mexico?”
“A place on the Pacific. Ixtapa? Is that a place? I think she said they were flying to Ixtapa.” She was intuitive enough to sense the depth of his concern. “You’re going to Mexico? Right now?”
“As soon as I can get there.”
“If she’s not with you, who is she with?”
“That’s what I need to figure out. You don’t have any other information? Name of a hotel or anything?”
“Sorry, no. She packed two bathing suits. She’s going to the beach. That’s all she said.”
“Would you give me her cell phone number?”
“Yes, but I don’t think it will help. She said she wouldn’t have service there.” She told him the number, and he put it in his phone anyway.
“Okay. Thanks, Marnie,” he said, feeling a moment of tenderness for her.
“You know, Daniel.”
“What?” He was already halfway across the lobby.
“In high school, I never understood. Why didn’t you love her then?”
He walked back to Marnie and looked straight in her eyes. “I did love her. I’ve loved her from the first time I saw her.”
IXTAPA, MEXICO, 2009
DANIEL GOT ON a flight out of Dulles bound for Mexico City that night and a connection to Ixtapa Zihuatanejo that landed midday on Sunday. He couldn’t so much as read the newspaper on the flight. His fingers crawled and his knees bounced and his mind spun as he tried to figure out how this had happened. He suspected he was most likely walking into a trap. And in that case he guessed that the person he hated would probably be happier to see him than the person he loved. That was a bitter pill, but he had to go. There was nothing else he could do.
He felt as though he was trying to solve a problem with too many variables. How had Joaquim found Sophia? If someone was helping him, as Ben had suggested, then who was it and why? And what kind of memory did this person have? Or had Joaquim somehow gained the capacity to recognize people on his own?
By whatever means Joaquim had found her, he had probably discovered Daniel’s proximity and also his remoteness, and thinking of that made Daniel feel stupid. Why had he stayed away so long? What, besides cowardice, was the point of that, exactly? Was he bowing to her fear or to his? By staying away, even while knowing what he knew, he left Sophia open to these weird machinations.
And this troubling thought ushered in the second category of variables. How had Joaquim been able to pass himself off to her as Daniel? What powers of persuasion could he have used to get her to believe that? And moreover, how had he gotten anywhere with it? Daniel, who’d loved her all her life, had sent her running for the doors, and Joaquim, who’d been nothing but brutal to her, somehow got to take her on vacation to Mexico. Daniel hadn’t been able to make her believe anything, and somehow Joaquim had convinced her of . . . God only knew what. Maybe they were having a lovely and romantic time together. Maybe Daniel didn’t know anything of human nature at all. “Fuck,” he muttered to himself.
Joaquim wouldn’t hurt her. Not yet, at least. That was the single benefit to Joaquim’s pretense. As long as he was Daniel, he wasn’t going to hurt her. When the real Daniel showed up, though, it would all be blown
open.
The heat of the sun on his back as he walked off the plane in Ixtapa pressed on him like a weight. He stood in a snaking line of spring-breakers, already pink and drinking tequila out of paper cups. He was grim from his face down to the dark winter clothes he hadn’t taken time to change out of. He was trying to think of something to say in his eighteenth-century Castilian to the customs official to get him to the front of the line.
It was impossible getting anything done in a town full of half-drunk tourists. Nobody else was in a hurry. It took him an hour and a half to rent a car. He was on the edge of giving up, but he knew he’d want it later. Slow down, he kept reminding himself. He’s not going to hurt her. Not yet.
Once in town, it didn’t take him long to find her. It wasn’t a huge town, and there were only a handful of luxury hotels. If he had doubted whether it was a setup, whether Joaquim wanted to be found, he needed to look no further than the name he used to check them in to the Ixtapa Grand Imperial: Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Grey. Granted, Daniel was a little funny about his name, but still. It pissed him off.
The original, actual, and true Daniel waited in the lobby. He used the time to study the layout of the building until at last he saw a face he knew. It wasn’t the one he wanted, but it was clarifying. And though he’d known who the imposter would be, it shook him anyway. The man from the Lakers game with the near-courtside seats and the good haircut and the rotted soul was more disturbing in person. There was something so deeply corrupt about his soul that it made him difficult for Daniel to recognize in the usual way, but Daniel knew it was him, and the passage of time didn’t really make the feeling of revulsion less. This was the thing he hoped against and feared, but here it was.
“Do you sell cigarettes here?” he overheard Joaquim ask the concierge. Joaquim didn’t bother to speak Spanish.
The man pointed him to the shop around the corner.
“You don’t sell them here? Are you kidding me?”
“No, I’m sorry, sir. Just outside.”
Joaquim strode out the door, and Daniel went up to the desk. “Mr. Grey’s room, please,” he asked in Spanish.
“I can’t give you the room number, sir,” the young man said politely. “But I can connect you.”
“Yes, that’s fine.” He watched long enough to see the room number he punched in.
The attendant said a few words into the phone and put the line on hold. “Mrs. Grey is there, sir, but Mr. Grey is not.”
He shook his head dismissively. “I’ll call back later.”
As soon as the attendant turned his head, Daniel took the stairs. He ran up six flights. It was hot in this place. If there was any air-conditioning, it was relegated to the rooms. He found room 632 and knocked.
“Yes?” He heard a tentative voice from inside the room, a voice he knew.
“Uh, room service,” he said. If it had been a different day, he wouldn’t have been able to say it with a straight face.
He fidgeted miserably as he waited for her to come to the door. Please open it, he thought. There wasn’t much time.
What was she going to think when she saw him? For the first time in a long time he had the sense that he was walking into his life as opposed to just hanging around by the front door. That is, if she let him in. He hoped his face would not be completely unwelcome.
SHE WAS SITTING on the bed in a bathrobe with her arms around her knees. Daniel wanted her to keep the windows closed and the air conditioner laboring at full capacity, but he had gone out, thankfully, so she’d taken a fast shower, opened the big old-fashioned casement windows, and brought the breeze in from the sea.
She’d gotten through one night of this, but she wasn’t sure she could get through six more. She couldn’t sleep with him. Her nerves recoiled at the thought of having sex with him, and she literally couldn’t fall asleep with her body next to his. They’d gotten in late the night before, and she had been far too agitated to sleep. She dozed off, finally, reading in a chair, and was startled awake long before the sun rose. As much as she blamed herself, it didn’t change the way she felt. She’d made stupid excuses—she had her period, she was a heavy bleeder, cramps, and so on—stuff you said to put a man on his heels, possibly permanently. She was burning this thing down by now, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t sleep with him.
And he was frustrated, of course. You didn’t take a girl to Mexico to have her sleep in a chair with her book. He didn’t do anything hurtful, but still she felt strangely watchful around him. She sensed a volatility not far under his skin that she’d never picked up on in high school. He went out to buy cigarettes and she felt relieved, even just to have a couple of minutes to herself. She had a fantasy of sneaking out of the hotel and heading home. God, what was the matter with her? What would Constance say? How had it come to this?
I’m sorry, Constance. I tried to keep my mind open to him, I really did. But I don’t think he can make me happy.
Maybe there was some mercy in this if she looked at it the right way. Before he’d found her, her life was at an impasse. She couldn’t move forward without him. She thought she’d never get over him. But now that she was with him, she knew she could. Now that she was with him, her old romantic notions seemed ridiculous to her. She had more than gotten over him, in spite of the fact that she was stuck in a hotel room in Mexico with him for the next six days. She could eagerly and with a big dose of relief picture life without him. She was sorry to Constance and Sophia for not taking up her legacy, but she couldn’t. As promising as this bold new world had once seemed, it was a disappointment. And maybe that was for the best. She could finally recommit herself to the old one without looking back.
When she heard footsteps outside the door, her heart sank. She didn’t want him back so soon. She was surprised that he would knock.
“Yes?”
“Room service.”
She hadn’t ordered anything. Had he ordered something? She was frankly relieved as she walked to the door. She wouldn’t open it for Daniel in her robe, but she wasn’t afraid of room service.
She expected a stranger with a tray, and she could not take in what she actually saw. She looked at him and looked away and looked at him again.
“Oh my God.”
“Hey,” he said nervously, looking behind him, down the hall, and then back at her.
“Daniel,” she whispered. He was an apparition, but he was also sweating and fidgeting and leaving dusty footprints on the dark rug.
“Do you remember me?”
“Oh my God.” Her mind grabbed at different things. Had he somehow changed again? Got into yet another body? Got his old body back? How did it work? What was possible? But she saw his eyes and his chin and his shoulders and his shoes and his neck and his collar and his hands and she knew he was not, absolutely not, the same person as the one who left to buy cigarettes. Oh my God. It was him.
“I’m sorry to barge in on your vacation like this, but will you come with me?”
“Where?”
“Away from here.”
He looked as though he was going to jump out of his skin. She understood that she had to hurry. “Just . . . like this?” She glanced down at her robe.
“Okay.”
“Right now?” Her heart was ready to explode, her same old romantic heart.
There was the ding of the elevator reaching their floor.
“Right now.”
She stepped quickly out of the room and he closed the door quietly. The elevator was down the hall, but you could hear the doors open. He took her hand, and she followed him, barefoot. They turned two corners. She heard footsteps not far behind and a keycard unlocking a room, probably hers. He stopped at a door just before the stairwell. He opened it and pulled her in. He closed it behind him. It was some kind of utility closet. He was able to lock it from inside.
They stood in the dark, and she tried to catch her breath. She realized they were still holding hands.
“Are we running away from
the guy I came here with?” she whispered.
“Yes. Do you mind?”
“No.”
“Good.” He stood close, and she could hear them both breathing hard. “I’m sorry to be so surprising,” he murmured.
She laughed. It was a strange sound to her own ears, as if she had never laughed before in her life. “You have no idea.”
He smiled at her outburst but widened his eyes as though she had better be quiet.
The throb of her heart went up into her throat and down to the bottom of her pelvis. The idea that that other person she’d come here with was the same as Daniel was just so preposterous that she felt sorry for herself for trying to think it was so.
“I can’t believe you are here,” she whispered. “Are you really here? Are you still alive? Am I imagining you?” She’d stopped laughing, and now there were tears dropping out of her eyes.
“I think I’m really here.”
HE WANTED TO put his hands on her, but he stopped himself. He had lost faith in himself. Last time he had followed his impulses off a cliff. He didn’t want to make the same mistake again. He was as old as a rock, and like a rock, he couldn’t read her tears and he didn’t know anything about love anymore.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes. I’m happy to see you.” He watched her face, which was open and brave, and it made his chest hurt. Maybe he did know a little bit about love.
“Even after what happened last time?”
“That wasn’t your fault. That was mine.”
“No, it wasn’t.” His look was vehement.
There were two sets of footsteps outside the door. Joaquim’s voice was shouting at a man who was answering in quiet Spanish. “I’m sorry, sir, but we can’t help you with that,” the quieter voice was saying. “You’ll have to contact the police if you think something is amiss.”