Girl in the Rearview Mirror Page 5

  “Ew, Daddy, stop!” Amabel squirmed, and her milk tipped over and poured into her lap.

  Marina sighed at the ceiling.

  “I’ll get her,” I said.

  As Amabel and I headed to the bathroom, I saw Philip set his hand on Marina’s shoulder. She stiffened at his touch.

  I sat Amabel on the counter and wiped her legs with wet paper towels. She grabbed a tampon from a basket, peeled the wrapper back, and tugged at the string. “What’s this?”

  “That’s for when you’re older.”

  “But what’s it for?”

  “Much older,” I said.

  She stuck her lip out, pouting, but seemed comforted by the routine adult refusal to explain. In the pink lights, the blush I’d applied to her cheeks that afternoon was pronounced against her fair skin. Her hair still held traces of cornstarch.

  “Carry me,” she commanded. She wrapped her arms around my neck and rested her head on my shoulder. I kissed the part in her hair.

  When we got back to the table Philip and Marina were already standing, Marina rolling lavender oil over her wrist. Seeing Amabel, they both hoisted their lips into smiles. Neither quite looked at me.

  At their car, as I buckled Amabel into her seat, Philip watched me in the rearview. Our eyes met, and he shook his head sharply. A warning. Don’t ask. Marina had her phone out and didn’t stop texting as she said good night.

  Their taillights glowed away into the purple twilight.

  Now it had been nearly two days, and I hadn’t told anyone about Iris.

  6

  The commercial began with a still image: a close-up of the Senator’s face, looking secretive, eyes slanted away, lips pressed together. A gravelly male voiceover said, “Senator Martin likes to call himself ‘your Senator.’ But how hard is he really working for you?”

  Cut to a clip of the Senator on a golf course, shouting over the wind, “Three times a week when I can get away with it.” The last four words echoed for a few seconds.

  A stock image of a businessman boarding a jet filled the screen. The voiceover resumed. The Senator had spent over 200,000 taxpayer dollars on charter flights, and taken six weeks of vacation, including two at a luxury resort in Hawaii. “How did he get there? Charter flight, of course.”

  Back to the unflattering portrait. “Senator Martin: too good for first class. Not good enough for Arizona.”

  This ad was relatively kind. Another, in Spanish, accused the Senator of discriminating against Latinos—he’d supported the controversial S.B. 1070, which allowed police to demand papers for any (or no) reason.

  The Senator’s challenger, Marco Gonzales, emphasized his Latino heritage. His peppy blue yard signs read, Let’s Go With Marco! A University of Arizona law school alum and the son of a popular minister, he had an appealing backstory. His grandparents had come to the U.S. with nothing and climbed into the middle class—shining examples of successful immigrants. Marco was interesting and fresh, with a broad potential base, and the Senator was nervous. His own ads highlighted his experience. Showed him, sleeves rolled up, pointing at an audience. Shaking hands with President Bush (Senior—no one spoke of Junior). Montages of the Martin family waving under a shower of balloons after his last victory. Tradition, he promised. Integrity. Family values. Your Senator!

  The night after my dinner with the Martins, I went over to Bryant’s place and found him lying on the couch, takeout pizza perfuming the room. His condo had gorgeous bones: high lofted ceilings, living room flowing into a concrete-and-stainless kitchen. But the furnishings were thoughtless bachelor standbys: vast leather sectional, TVs mounted on every wall.

  Bryant railed against Gonzales.

  “Is it the new ad?” I asked.

  “That cheap shot?” he scoffed. “Gonzales is digging for dirt. He’s obsessed with the university land. It’s old news, but he’s going to bring it up at the town hall.”

  I kneaded his calves. My official position on the land deal was neutral; privately, I hated how it made Philip look, but I didn’t agree with the righteous anger the Senator, Bryant, even Marina were piling on him.

  Last winter, Philip bought several hundred acres west of Phoenix. They weren’t worth much, but he was betting that sooner or later the city would swell out that way. He made that sort of purchase routinely, parcels of land here and there, some slated for immediate development, others held until the value rose. But this particular lot didn’t sit as long as he expected. Instead, in the spring, the university bought it, announcing plans to develop a campus for green technologies.

  Philip profited enormously from the sale. He swore it was dumb luck. But it was hard to believe it was a coincidence. Senator Martin, after all, was a major donor to the university, Philip a powerful alumnus. For weeks after the deal was announced, local papers wrote grumbling editorials. There was no hard evidence of wrongdoing, but the whiff of corruption was unmistakable.

  Now, Gonzales’s team was working to spin the land sale into something bigger, a pattern of privilege. “The conspiracy theory,” Bryant called it, dismissive but furious. I knew he blamed Philip for making a badly timed mess.

  “I wouldn’t worry,” I said. “I don’t think people are paying attention.”

  “That’s because you adore them,” he said testily. “You don’t realize the climate we’re in. The public doesn’t trust powerful people. They think wealth is a sign of bad character or something. It’s sick.”

  I dug my thumbs into his thighs. “I pay attention.”

  “I’m sorry. I know you do. I’m just tense. It’s getting to me. I shouldn’t let it.” His eyes were red and hazy. Lately, every morning he dissolved a vitamin C tablet in water; at night he chewed antacids like candy. Sometimes he winced when he talked about work, as though the pressure were a vise tightening around his chest.

  I’d never realized how grinding a campaign was on the inside, the torrent of judgment and scrutiny over every little thing. At the beginning of the summer, Bryant himself had been swept up in controversy, accused of racism when asked why, as a Latino, he didn’t support Marco; he’d replied that he considered himself more than just Latino.

  Just Latino. People were disgusted.

  After his public flogging, I’d gone over to his place, found him nursing a bottle of bourbon, scrolling through photos of his childhood trips to Colombia. He told me about the food; the sojourns to the beach; his grandmother’s Christmas tradition of setting up a model village complete with rivers and trees and animals. And people were treating him like a few words negated his whole life!

  My job, until the election, was to be the calm one, the cheerful one. So tonight, though I’d wanted to tell him about Iris, and the strange man in Philip’s office, I decided to keep it to myself. He didn’t need the extra worry.

  I ran my thumb over his anklebone, thinking up a new topic. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, I’m studying for the GRE.”

  “That’s big news.” Bryant gestured for me to pass his drink. “I’ve been wondering what you planned to do . . . you know, long term. What do you want to study?”

  I shrugged. “I’m still deciding. Maybe art history, or even education. It might be fun to be a teacher.”

  “You’re certainly good with kids.” He squeezed my arm affectionately.

  I sighed, suddenly melancholy at the idea of a life away from the Martins. “I can’t believe Ammy will start kindergarten in the fall.”

  “Time flies,” Bryant said.

  “I used to think they might have another kid.” In fact, I’d vividly imagined it. Picking Amabel up from school, an infant sleeping in a car seat. I’d make Ammy a snack and she’d tell me about her day.

  Bryant laughed. “I think not.” He sounded certain.

  “It’s not impossible,” I said, annoyed.

  “Well, they’re on a certain track now, aren’t they? Six years goes by fast. That’s where their minds are now. Trust me, no more babies.” Seeing my face, he laughed again. “Sorry
to disappoint you.” He swung his legs off my lap. “Let’s go to bed. I’ve got an early flight to D.C.”

  We met at the Senator’s birthday party, about a year and a half ago. Marina had had the idea that a dinner party would be cozier than a restaurant. But the intimate guest list ballooned into thirty, forty heads, and she hired a half dozen staff to help out.

  Guests began arriving shortly before sunset, and rooms filled with conversation and the smell of wine and salty food. The sky was putting on its show, right on schedule, yellow and orange and pink, and even the sophisticated company couldn’t resist drifting over to the windows and touching the glass with awed fingertips.

  The Senator arrived last, to applause, and his abashed response was convincing. (Really he knew exactly how many people were coming, and exactly who.)

  Ammy and I kept out of sight, watching movies in the playroom. After she went to bed, I snuck downstairs for a bottle of water. The kitchen was sealed off with tapestries hanging over the open doorway, Japanese-style. I ducked in. The staff were busily cleaning a mountain of dishes. I retrieved an orange and the water and hurried back out, still new enough to working for the Martins that I was afraid of breaking protocol. Slipping through the tapestries, I collided with a man in a suit, my water bottle releasing a jet that splashed spectacularly across the floor.

  As I apologized, he laughed and took me by the wrists. “My fault entirely,” he said. He was young, with a dancer’s compact, energetic body sheathed in a simple black suit.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I was just grabbing water. I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  “What are you interrupting?”

  “The party?”

  He leaned forward as he spoke, a tall man’s habit, though he wasn’t tall. “I can’t think of a party that wouldn’t want you to interrupt it.”

  The line made me groan, which made him smile.

  “We’d better mop this up.” He ducked into the kitchen and came out with a towel. He touched the hem of my skirt. “Silk? Did it get splashed?”

  I laughed again. “Are you going to clean me up, too?”

  “Don’t mock. I attend these things for a living. I know how to deal with every kind of stain. You wouldn’t believe how messy those tiny appetizers can get.”

  “Thanks, but it’ll be fine. My company is usually messier than me. Since she’s three.”

  “Ah. You must be Amabel’s new nanny.”

  “Do you know the family?” I asked.

  “You could say that. I’ve worked for Jim for . . . oh, eight years now, I guess. Bryant.” He had a nice handshake, dry and cool.

  “Finn.”

  “Very nice to meet you.” His eyes lingered on mine.

  Under the focus of his attention, I felt sloppy. I’d pulled my hair back into a ponytail and my lipstick had faded ages ago.

  “I should go. I’m supposed to be watching Ammy.”

  “Ammy,” he repeated. “I like that. I’ve never heard it before.”

  I nodded and turned down the hallway with more decisiveness than I really felt. The noise of the party entered my ears again. Jazz music, a woman singing in French, the Senator’s booming voice reaching a punchline, and the braying reception.

  Bryant tracked down my number and called the next day. Dating him was exotically formal, very by the book: first dinner and drinks, then a movie, sleeping together on the third date, a gravelly old record on the sound system and martinis on the nightstands. I knew instinctively to dress up, rolling sheer tights over my legs and curling my hair. I knew to let him make the moves, to wait for his call or text, though I could always count on it.

  Early on, he gave me his official autobiography: father in sales, mother at home; older brother and younger sister, both now married; a childhood outside Los Angeles; a vacation house in Flagstaff; four years at Princeton, two interning in D.C. before he started with the Senator.

  His openness startled me. I was used to keeping my past past, revealing as little as possible. It didn’t occur to me to mention to Bryant that my name was actually Natalie—I wore Finn comfortably by then; it was my name. Mentioning Natalie would only lead to questions.

  I never meant to lie. That is, I never wanted to. At first, I gave him only the barest details, all true. I was from a suburb of Chicago. My parents had divorced, and both remarried. I had two younger brothers.

  But he pressed for more. I had to tell him something. And the drab reality wasn’t an option. My mom worked as a nurse’s assistant. My stepdad was in tech support. They married late, when I was thirteen, and had my brothers one after the other, as if rushing to redeem a coupon before the expiration date. We lived on the border of a nice town, a calculated snatch at the school district. Our rented ranch had been built in the sixties and updated with the worst of every decade since. My mom’s life had so thoroughly rerouted to accommodate Ted and my brothers, I felt like a hitchhiker along for the ride. We were already drifting apart, and then I got into some trouble. Everyone was relieved when I went to Indiana to stay with my dad. Then I moved to Arizona, and the break between us ossified.

  We still talked on the phone every few Sundays, my mom directing the conversations as formally as a pollster armed with a clipboard. After we covered the weather, we moved on to their updates. My stepdad played sand volleyball on weekends. Caleb and Kyle were occupied with an assortment of sports and study groups and music lessons. I imagined my mom kept them busy, hoping to prevent another bad teenage experience.

  We were polite, but the call never managed to be pleasant. It didn’t sour so much as stale. When I hung up, I was wrung out, like the spent orange husks heaped on Bryant’s counter after he made his morning juice. For a few hours afterward, I felt uneasy, like I was being sucked back into my old life, like I hadn’t left Natalie safely behind.

  How could I explain any of that to Bryant, when everything about him was perfect? His family could have been in a catalog, with their ski holidays and summer reunions where everyone gathered on the porch for a photograph, their raucous games of Ping-Pong in the sprawling “cabin” in Flagstaff, and the nights around the dinner table, everyone chiming in on inside jokes and stories of this prank or that trip.

  So I lied.

  I said that my mother was a designer and my stepdad was a lawyer. I showed him a photograph of a big, Swiss-style house, cream with crisscrossing brown beams, a brick chimney running up the middle like a nose, a leafy maple out front. In the photo, I stood under the tree, dressed in shorts and a borrowed linen blouse, holding a cocktail glass in both hands. I was sixteen. My hair was the dull color it had been, my face gleaming in the heat.

  Bryant had laughed and said I looked like the gardener. He probably thought it was a strange picture to keep. It was the only one I had of myself alone with the house.

  I rarely spoke about my past, trying to limit my lies, but I knew with a mix of triumph and unease that Bryant believed my life was like his.

  Now and then, I thought he might be suspicious. The first time he saw my apartment, for instance, shabby and in a fringe neighborhood. But he assumed that I was too stubborn to take money from my parents. To my shame, he said he admired that.

  Our relationship accelerated. We spent a weekend in Flagstaff. I met his sister when she came to visit. Over a long weekend, we flew to Mexico and stayed at a cheesy resort: private beaches, unlimited cocktails, the Gulf chlorine blue as a swimming pool. I began sleeping at his place more often than at my own. When he went out of town, he let me use his car. I picked him up at the airport, his favorite fast food in a bag on the dash. He brought Amabel and me souvenirs, kitschy postcards from small towns, key chains, trinkets encased in plastic spheres from bubble gum dispensers. I went along when he shopped for clothes, and weighed in on the fit of jeans and blazers while a piano player serenaded us. We jogged together along Tempe Town Lake. I did my laundry at his place. On our anniversary, we exchanged keys.

  With every step forward, my excitement was tempere
d with dread. It seemed inevitable that Bryant would find out I was lying. He’d want to know when he could meet my family, or at least why I never went home. Or I’d make a mistake, contradict some part of my story.

  Yet even as I was afraid, and guilty, it was exhilarating. Becoming Finn for him. Walking into a party on his elbow and thinking that no one knew me, nobody realized that I didn’t belong. Fixing my hair in the mirror at some five-star restaurant, I felt I’d come so far I’d never go back.

  Sometimes, laughing together in bed, or meeting his eyes at a party over some inside joke, or seeing his face loosen when I entered a room, I thought: I can tell him. He’d understand. But more often, his upright code of proper behavior made it clear that he wouldn’t. It was too late. I couldn’t tell him the truth now.

  7

  Friday morning, the sun was shining for the 165th time that year. I dropped Bryant at the airport and sped away in his BMW, the car leaping at the slightest pressure of my toes. Air-conditioning poured from the vents, luxurious as cashmere.

  The Martins lived on a red rock mountain that curved around the valley like a hand cupping a bowl. In college, my friends and I had hiked it, not realizing the land was private. Fenced yards stymied our progress, and halfway up we ran into a patch of brush and couldn’t go farther. The view was still incredible. At the horizon another mountain, humped like a camel, bookended a quilt of low buildings stitched by roads. The sunset was stunning, as if the red rocks had steeped in the sky, releasing clouds of syrupy color.

  I always felt a thrill when the heavy iron gates to Ocotillo Heights swung open for me. The narrow, twisting road was lined with dense hedges. Here and there a driveway allowed a snatched glimpse of a garden, a turret, a cantilevered roof. For these residents, privacy was the ultimate luxury.

  The Martins lived at the apex of the road. Beyond them, the mountain made its final ascent—steep, pebbly, treacherous—to a blunt peak. Lizards, snakes, scorpions, and the coyote made homes in the dry dirt and foliage there. Afternoons, dust rose, filming the air.