Wild on You (35 page)

Idiota
, she scolded herself.

Her brother had been right. No matter how careful you were, no matter how cautious, there were surprises. Traps.

A string of traps led from their arrival in the United States twenty years ago, when Ana was seven, to this moment. Ana’s mother had never been a meticulous woman, and her exodus to the United States had broken her. She’d left behind home and a beloved sister in the Dominican Republic, only to discover that her husband, who’d promised to follow her to the States, had reneged on his word.

Then Ana’s mother had gotten stomach cancer. Bedridden, she’d forgotten about, or ignored, her children’s visas. After her death, her kids had discovered the truth and, terrified, had hidden until hiding became a necessity.

Now there were no more choices. There was only Ana’s reality: live here, in the shadows, or be deported to a country that was as foreign to her, as devoid of the things she loved, as rural China.

She was hyperconscious of the sealed door to Ed Branch’s tiny, airless office. Of the narrowness of her own breathing passages, the tightness of her chest.

“Do you need a pen?” He fished one from the can on the desk and handed it to her.

She drew the deepest breath she could. “If I’m not on the Recommended Tutors list, can you still refer people to me?”

“I’m afraid not.” He gave her a sorrowful smile that had more in common with a smirk. “We can’t put our stamp of approval on anyone who hasn’t met our requirements.”

Was he suggesting that he’d cut her off from her current clients as well?

“Ana, honey—”

That was worse, somehow, than “sweetheart.”

“—all I’m asking you to do is give me your previous addresses and Social Security number, and show me some ID.” There was a sour note in his voice now, an emphasis on the phrase “Social Security number.”

He had somehow guessed the truth about her. Of course he knew she was Latina—her name proclaimed it, and she’d been told until she was sick of hearing it that she looked like this or that Latina actress, only “skinnier” or “with lighter skin” or “with straighter hair”—but she didn’t fit most people’s stereotypes of an undocumented immigrant. Because she’d moved here so young and started school in kindergarten, she’d learned English in a matter of weeks and was as culturally American as any of her classmates. But his manner—unctuous and sneering—told her she hadn’t fooled him. He knew.

She closed her eyes, shutting out his disdain and the bare cinder-block walls. The office smelled like ozone and indoor-outdoor carpeting. “I’m sorry.” She put down the pen and stood up. “I don’t have ID with me today.”

“Ana. I can help.”

His tone had become low and deliberate, oozy and sexual.

And here they were. Where Ed had been leading her all along.

He got up and came around to her side of the desk. She stepped back, involuntarily. She could see the gray whiskers he’d missed when shaving, the flecks of chapped skin on his lower lip. He smelled like fabric softener, his breath like maple syrup.

“Let me help,” he murmured. He reached out and, before she could move, stroked her long, jet-black hair back from her face.

She shuddered. “No.” Men like Ed Branch were the reason she tied her hair in a ponytail, avoided makeup, and dressed in baggy clothes most of the time. Because the only thing worse than living in the shadows was when something low and dirty crept in there with you and made itself at home.

“We can work out this CORI problem. I’m on your side.”

She tried to draw away, but he’d woven his fingers into her ponytail. Behind his John Lennon glasses, his eyes were gray, too. The urge to yank her head away was overwhelming. “There’s no problem,” she said.

Fear had made her accent stronger, and distaste flickered across his face. “Ana,” he coaxed. The greasy sound of his voice, the too-sweet scent of him, made her dizzy. “You can tell me. Tell me the truth. What’s wrong? Why don’t you want to fill out the form?”

Because I’ve never been a fan of signing my own death warrant
. She reached up and removed her hair from his grasp. Took a deep breath. “I can fill out the form just fine. I just have to look up the old addresses. I’ll take it with me. When do you need it by?”

His mouth formed a hard line. “I know you’re illegal.”

Behind her burst of fear, she felt a sliver of satisfaction. She’d made him show his hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think you do.”

“I’ll just take this home with me and fill it out. Just tell me when you need it by.”

“Ana, honey.”

She darted past him and snatched the CORI, but he grabbed her arm and backed her toward the desk, his bony hip bumping hers. “Ana, please, baby. I can make this go away.”

Bile rose in her throat as he moved his other hand to her waist.

* * *

Head pounding from the din in the high-school gymnasium, Ethan Hansen warily watched his son, Theo, and reminded himself that there were excellent reasons he’d volunteered to do this.

When the school nurse had asked if he’d create a helmet safety booth for Beacon High’s lunchtime health fair, he’d jumped at the opportunity. As a suburban pediatrician,
he saw way too much head trauma. If he could remind even a few kids that helmets saved lives, he’d be doing some good. But the truth was he had an ulterior motive, too. He was here because he wanted to show Theo that he was an active, involved father. Even if Theo had no interest in the demonstration.

Theo regarded the tagboard foldout critically. “If You’ve Got a Brain in Your Head, Wear a Helmet,” the slogan proclaimed.

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” Theo wore a beat-up Pink Floyd T-shirt and sweatpants, which Ethan had told him more than once were too casual for school. His shaggy black hair shadowed one green eye. He and Ethan shared the eye color but, physically, nothing else—Theo’s fair skin and delicate features were elfin, almost ethereal, where Ethan’s features were rougher, his body brawnier, and his red-brown hair a less dramatic contrast to the green eyes.

The rest of Theo was purely his mother, and even eight years after her death, nothing had the power to reduce Ethan to black grief like catching sight of Theo’s face at an angle that suggested Trish’s.

A student darted close enough to snatch a miniature helmet key chain out of the jar on the table but retreated before Ethan could engage him in conversation.

Theo watched him go, arms crossed. “If you’ve got a brain in your head, come up with a decent slogan.”

Ethan’s blood pressure jerked upward. “Don’t talk to me that way.”

“I wasn’t talking to you in any
way
. I was just making a joke about the slogan.”

People sometimes said that teenagers were like toddlers, only bigger. Ethan thought they were dead wrong. Teenagers were much cleverer and more dangerous than toddlers. They knew how to weasel out of tight semantic spaces. “Just watch your tone.”

“Why did you have to come here? It’s humiliating.”

Ethan took a deep breath. He was trapped behind this table for another half hour, and getting into an all-out battle of wills would be disastrous. “It could have been worse. I could be giving out condoms, like those moms.” He gestured toward the three moms behind the table beside him.

Not a glimmer of humor in Theo’s scowling face. “You’re the only dad here.” An accusation.

When Ethan attended school events, he was almost always the only dad, and it was lonely. Some moms were good about including him in conversation, but many avoided him. He didn’t exactly blame them. It was an awkward thing, being the only man in a roomful of women. Conversations stopped dead when he showed up, which was just as well when the moms were talking about hair-removal strategies, husbandly inattentiveness, or a gathering where they’d sold each other things such as jewelry or bras or sex toys in a modern-day version of the Tupperware party. Not only was he not plagued with sagging breasts or unwanted hair, but he didn’t have a spouse to complain about. It was a double whammy, being a widower in a town of two-parent families.

“Yes. I’m the only dad here.”
And I’m all you’ve got
, thought Ethan, but he didn’t say it out loud. In the mood Theo was in now—a mood he seemed to be in more and more these days—he’d find some way to make it Ethan’s fault that Trish had died.

Ethan wanted to say, “Theo, if it’s so humiliating that I’m here, why are you hanging around my booth?” But then Theo would accuse Ethan of making him feel unwelcome.

There was no winning these days. And it was getting worse. Sometime in the past few weeks, Theo had crossed over from sullen to outright obnoxious, and Ethan was braced, waiting for genuine rebelliousness—rule-breaking, drug-taking, or crime.

“Theo, is this your dad?” The voice belonged to a plump middle-aged woman whose silver hair was pulled back in a bun. “I have some business with him.”

Generally speaking, there were two reasons women wanted to talk to Ethan: either they wanted to ask his advice, as a pediatrician, about a medical problem or they wanted to flirt. He was guessing, however, that this woman’s business fell into neither of those categories. She looked—angry, he’d have to say. Ferocious.

“You didn’t think it might be worth at least trying to get him a tutor?” she asked.

What?

With a father’s sixth sense—so often absent lately but suddenly at his command—Ethan reached out and grabbed Theo’s scrawny wrist as he began to slink
away.

“Hang on.” He turned to the silver-haired woman. “What’s this about?”

“Kids these days,” she harrumphed. “They give up soooo easily. And it’s because their parents let them.”

“What are we talking about?” Ethan asked pleasantly. Theo was twisting in his grasp, but Ethan didn’t loosen his fingers.

“We’re talking about the fact that you allowed Theo to drop Spanish.”

“Theo dropped Spanish?”

Theo had given up the struggle. His wrist lay limply in Ethan’s hand now. Ethan eyed him. Theo looked at the floor, at the ceiling—anywhere but at his father.

“Are you his Spanish teacher?”

“His former Spanish teacher. Elsie Andalucía.”

“Ethan Hansen.” He shook her hand, Theo’s wrist still firmly gripped in his left. “He dropped Spanish?”

“You signed the form.” She crossed her arms.

“Actually, I didn’t.”

They both looked at Theo, whose face had turned red. Elsie crossed her arms. “I guess that explains why you never responded to my note suggesting that you get him a tutor.”

“Theo,” growled Ethan.

With his shoulders up and his hair falling over his face, Theo gave the distinct impression of a pill bug rolling itself up to hide.

“I’m very sorry about this,” Ethan told Elsie. “Let’s start over, shall we? Can we get him back into that class?”

She smiled, and the wrinkled skin on her cheeks softened into folds. “Absolutely. I can make that happen. But he’s going to need a tutor to make up what he missed and get back on track.”

“And how do I find a tutor?”

“Best way is to go upstairs and talk to the academic-support specialist, Ed
Branch.”

“Excellent.” Ethan released Theo.

“Can I go back to class? I’m late.” All Theo’s earlier bluster was absent.

“We’ll talk about this later,” Ethan said sternly.

Theo escaped, his shoulders hunched.

Ethan turned back to Elsie Andalucía. “Thank you so much for bringing this up with me.”

“You’re very welcome. I’ll get him back on that class list—and you let me know how finding a tutor goes.”

They shook hands, and she trotted off.

In the scheme of things, Theo’s forging Ethan’s signature on a class-drop form wasn’t a major crime, but it scared Ethan. He was losing Theo. It was what he’d always feared, from the moment his wife died and left him with the care and feeding of an innocent seven-year-old. He’d hoped the fear would abate with time, as he became more accustomed to being Theo’s sole caretaker, but it had gotten worse, his anxiety rising as Theo grew into a full-fledged teenager. During Ethan’s own high-school years, it had taken all the efforts of both his parents to keep his teenage high jinks from having permanent consequences. There were no checks and balances in single parenting. If he screwed up, if he let Theo slip away—

“Hey!” A petite high-school girl had stuck her hand into the jar of miniature helmet key chains and come away with a handful. “One per customer!”

She tossed a scornful glance at him over her shoulder.

He gave up, looked at his watch. Seventeen more minutes, officially, until his shift was over. But it wasn’t like he was contributing anything. He leaned over toward the wholesome blond mom at the condom booth. “May I ask you a favor?”

She gave him a flirty smile. “Sure,” she cooed.

“I have to run an errand and head back to work. Can you keep an eye on this booth, too? It’s not high-demand.”

She looked disappointed, but she nodded. What had she expected, that he’d ask
her if she wanted to help him make use of the jar of condoms? He knew perfectly well she was married. Most of the women in Beacon were. Which didn’t stop them from flirting; it only stopped him from flirting back.

The non-flirting on his part wasn’t sexual deadness, not by any stretch. He could appreciate the glories of Beacon’s stay-at-home moms just fine from a visual perspective—expensively colored and straightened hair, subtly applied makeup, bodies finely tuned through obsessive, boredom-induced exercise. But he was careful. Careful, above all, not to flirt with married women, but also careful not to dally even with the few single women in town. Beacon was small, talk was loose—especially about financially well-off available men—and Theo had to go on living here no matter what his father did.

But man, he was human and male, and he missed what he’d had with Trish, missed their lively, near-daily lovemaking, the connection of being with someone at a level that went beyond Tab A, Slot B. His hand was ready, willing, and able but a damn poor conversationalist.

After Trish died, there had been no one for a very long time, only paralyzing grief and the unending demands of single fatherhood. When he emerged from the most intense period of that, he began dating again, but though he’d engaged in one or two sessions of frustration-busting, almost antiseptic sex, there’d been nothing that felt meaningful or lasted long enough to justify bringing a woman home to meet Theo. Because there was no way he was going to let Theo get to know, get to
love
, another woman who might leave. One lesson in grief was enough for a child.