Trouble (20 page)

“That was fun tonight,” I said into the sudden darkness, hoping we could parse out the whole night together, gossip about everyone, and that I could finally ask her what was up with her and David. My brain was still sparking and fizzing.

“Yeah,” she agreed, and took a deep breath. “I’m going to sleep like an animal tonight.”

And then we were silent. I went over the whole night in my memory, from arriving at the gallery until now. That moment at the gate, watching Raquel disappear with David, kept gnawing at me. I wanted to go over and get into Raquel’s bed with her and hold on to her, keep her with me, but I imagined that she was probably feeling solitary, and that she would have laughed, called me a “lezbot,” and told me to get back into my own bed. I couldn’t help feeling that she had slipped out of my grasp, somehow, but I told myself this was the histrionic thinking of my hash-addled, tequila-soaked, lust-thwarted brain. Soon I warmed up enough, alone under my skimpy blanket, to relax and fall asleep.

 
aquel woke up sick the next day. I went out that morning and got her a cup of hot water for her detox tea, the morning papers, and a fresh pineapple juice, but no food; she had insisted that she couldn’t eat. I delivered it all to the nightstand and announced its arrival to her humped and tiny form under the covers. All I could see of her was a spray of curly hair on her pillow. She acknowledged the delivery with a half-apologetic grunt of thanks that suggested to me that I would do well to go elsewhere for a while. I left her to it and went down to the hotel restaurant, where I robustly enjoyed a plate of
chilaquiles
, three strong coffees with foamy milk, and a big glass of the sweetest freshly squeezed orange juice I had ever tasted. While I ate, I watched the other hotel guests. Everyone but me seemed crabby that morning. Outside, it was very chilly and overcast, and the scraps of conversations I overheard at the nearby tables concerned the weird weather.
“Je croyais qu’il ne faisait
jamais
si froid ici,”
hissed a pinched-face Frenchwoman to the man who sat across from her—I assumed he was her husband by his air of stoic indifference to her pain. I was sitting over my third cup of coffee, bundled up in my warm wool hat and down jacket. I was feeling cheerful now because of this, but also because of Felipe, whose existence I felt in my solar plexus as a steady, radiating burn of joyful lust, and also because I seemed to have the opposite of a hangover. My reflection in the mirror earlier had shown that I looked as buoyant and optimistic as I felt, which had cheered me even further.

After breakfast, I checked my E-mail. Wendy had written back. Her E-mail said in its entirety, “Dear Mom, sorry I missed your calls. Daddy and I are fine! He cooked me some eggs this morning, but they sucked. He says to tell you hello. I hope you and Raquel are having fun. Love, Wendy.”

I wrote back to her immediately, omitting, naturally, any mention of tequila, cigarettes, weed, Felipe, or mescal, then did my daily sleuthing for Raquel. Her nemesis was apparently leaving her alone for the moment; evidently, Mina Boriqua’s spies had failed to track her here to the Isabel, so she had run out of ammunition. I browsed around her blog, reading about the various little girls she had dubbed “Wino,” “Brit-Brit,” and “LiLo.” All of them looked malnourished, lost, trashy, and sad. I knew, of course, that they were famous, rich pop stars and actresses; I knew exactly who they were. But seen through the prism of Mina Boriqua’s jaundiced purview, they were nothing but damaged waifs with ruined hair, amateurish makeup, and terrible clothes barely covering their sickly bodies. They all needed the cure poor little Heidi had been given in Johanna Spyri’s novel, which I had read to Wendy as a little girl: a summer in the Alps with a gruff saintly grandfather, sleeping on sweet straw, drinking bowls of fresh goat’s milk, and running over the clovered slopes all day in the sunlight, gulping lungfuls of fresh mountain air. Barring this degree of a wholesome extended cure, they seemed doomed to be choked by those Medusa-like tendrils of hissing snakes rising out of the poisonous L.A. or London air: drugs, mental instability, paparazzi, gossip hounds, and the fickle turning hearts of the public. Courtney, Pambo, and Posh, almost twice their age, were treated no better than the younger girls, but their faces looked more seasoned and weathered than their baby counterparts, as if they had purged themselves of vulnerability and tenderness and caused themselves to be eaten from within and flayed from without, consumed without being destroyed, to become tough, immortal survivor androids.

It shocked me that “Rock-Hell” had been pulled into their ranks. And this was the line of work my own daughter was so hotly determined to get herself involved in, my bright, pure girl with her nuclear-physicist IQ.

The computer beeped to let me know my ten minutes were almost up. Feeling relieved to stop looking, and slightly grimy, I logged off and went upstairs with another cup of hot water. Raquel was sitting up in bed with my blanket around her shoulders and her own over her legs, reading the paper. “Thanks so, so much,
chiquita,”
she said. “Can you get another tea bag for me?”

I sat on my bed in my coat while she drank her second cup of tea. “This is much better,” she croaked. “I’ve been rereading
A Passage to India
—sorry, I borrowed it. But it’s so funny, the English fear of otherness. I mean, they were so insecure, the English. They had to turn every place they conquered into England.”

“I know,” I said. “I was thinking the same thing when I was reading it yesterday. Can you imagine Mexico as colonized by the English?”

Raquel laughed. “Brits in the Yucatán,” she said, and laughed again. “They are so funny in hot jungle climates, with their roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”

“I shall take my afternoon tea under the mosquito netting,” I said in a mincing voice.

“A spot of sherry, memsahib?” said Raquel.

“Colonel Whitcombe!” I cried. “What is that I spy through my monocle? I must consult my Baedeker.”

“Unfathomably, I do believe it’s a mongoose,” said Raquel.

And for a moment, all was well; all was as it had been.

I went out again so she could sleep. I walked for miles, consulting that modern-day version of the Baedeker, the Lonely Planet guide, following the maps in the thick book. I walked for what seemed like an hour along a busy
avenida
, passing tarp-walled stalls of CDs, open tables of watches and underwear, then kitchen-implement stores, until I came to the Mercado Sonora, the witchcraft market. I entered hesitantly, with some superstitious misgivings, but it was a cheerful, bustling, well-lit place matter-of-factly stocked with bags of herbs, hanging bunches of voodoo dolls, pouches filled with various cures, incense, and good-luck candles, the sort of basic make-a-wish stuff found at any average New York City botanica.

I bought a pouch marked
Amor
for Raquel, figuring she needed all the good luck she could get in that department if she was really crazy enough to go from a twenty-three-year-old TV star to a one-armed, stone-faced ideologue. Then I wandered to the back of the market and had a plateful of spiced-meat tacos and a tamarind pop at one of the little food stalls. It was so cold, the steam rising from the stove bathed all our faces.

The guy to my left was chatting up the taco lady, who was about my age, a foot shorter than I was, with intensely dyed black hair under a hair net. She was wearing a down jacket very much like mine over a patterned dress. Her face was sharp and canny, and her eyes darted over to meet mine with laughter sparking in them as her gentleman caller got increasingly importunate in his courtship of her. He was about our age, too, with thin reddish hair on a bony scalp, a round, bland face, and thick, pursed, cherubic lips. I lingered over my pop just to enjoy the continuation of the drama. Finally, realizing she was not going to budge, he paid and left. She said something quick and sly to me in Spanish, and I laughed as if I had understood every word, and really, I had.

I wandered back through crowded streets in the general direction of the Isabel. I walked for a long time along a lovely tree-lined street that was hung with delicately cut paper streamers crisscrossing the street high above my head. It was like a fairyland. A band played on one corner. Stuff for sale was everywhere—so much commerce. How did these people do it? Massive quantities of clothes and watches and kitchen stuff and socks and CDs were everywhere in big piles on blankets on the ground, on tables. Where did they bring it from in the morning, and where did they lug it all back to at night? I imagined a stream of peddlers, like the olden days, with huge sacks on their backs, crammed into rickety little minivan buses going far, far away to all the endless concrete-building warrens on the outskirts of the city, noisy barrios with hanging laundry and cooking smells in every graffiti-festooned, concrete-lined alleyway. Such lives these people had, hard lives of complex mystery that my own life did not touch except glancingly as I met their eyes, passing by on my way back to my comfortable hotel.

When I got back to our room, Raquel was gone. I took a long, hot shower to warm up, then lay down in my bed and fell asleep for a while. I awoke, expecting to see her in her bed, but either she had come back and left again or she was still gone. I put on my coat and hat and went down to the lobby.

I looked in the hotel bar and restaurant—no Raquel.

It was nearly four; had she gone out in search of food? Why the hell hadn’t she left a note?

I asked the two beautiful young women behind the desk whether they had seen her, whether she had left any message for me; they looked blankly at me and shook their heads. I wrote on a slip of paper, “I’ll be in the hotel bar at seven. See you then and there? Jo.” I folded it and wrote “Cecily Sweeney” on the front.

I left the note and room key with the desk clerks, went out of the hotel, passing the smiling but armed guard, and headed for the Zócalo. The intermittent sunlight was weakening, and the temperature seemed to have dropped. The pavement felt very hard against my heels; not for the first time, I wondered if they made it out of harder stuff than New York pavements. On Avenida Cinco de Mayo, I ducked into El Café Popular and stood at the counter right by the door.
“Café con leche, por favor,”
I said to the woman behind the counter. She poured hot black coffee from a carafe into a Styrofoam cup and then tipped in foaming hot milk from a metal pitcher. She slapped a lid on it; I tipped her, paid for it at the cash register, then went back out into the blast of icy air. I sipped my hot coffee as I crossed the Zócalo toward David’s spot. The enormous Mexican flag over the square whipped in some wind that existed only higher up, apparently, because down on the ground it was perfectly calm. The flag snapped taut, crumpling, then snapped taut again, as if it were constantly disintegrating, then magically reintegrating itself.

David was sitting on his chair, bundled in an authentic-looking Indian wool blanket over a puffy down jacket. Over his head, he wore a black balaclava with cutout eyeholes that covered the lower half of his face completely. He had set up four finished framed landscapes on the ground near his chair; instead of working on a new one, he was reading a book. He wore a black leather glove.

“Hey, Marcos,” I said. “How’s business?”

He looked up and saw me. I couldn’t tell what his expression was because of the balaclava. He didn’t say anything. His eyes were watchful.

“I’m looking for Raquel,” I said. “Have you seen her today?”

He was silent a moment, as if he was trying to decide whether or not to tell me. Suddenly racked with dark fears, I fought an urge to fly at him with fangs and teeth bared and rip his arm off.

“Yes,” he said finally. “I saw her a while ago.”

“When did you see her?”

Again I had to wait while he processed the question and weighed its merits and worthiness of being answered. Again I fought that same urge to attack him, which was getting stronger.

“About an hour ago,” he said.

“I don’t suppose you know where she was heading.”

He inclined his head, but the movement was so subtle, I didn’t know whether or not it was a nod or a twitch.

“Does that mean yes?” I asked, trying not to sound livid.

“I have an idea,” he said. He waited.

A light dawned, vaguely: Does he want me to bribe him?

“I’ll give you ten bucks to tell me where she went,” I said.

He shook his head emphatically.

“Twenty,” I said. “Two hundred pesos.”

“No,” he said. “Listen, she asked me for my sister’s phone number, but I wouldn’t give it to her. The same thing happened the other night. She went off by herself; I wouldn’t help her. I think she went over there a while ago to find Maria at the cantina.”

My heart thudded cold and damp in my chest. The suspicion that had been coiled in my brain released itself now with a
ka-ching
like a pinball and went ricocheting down various hot spots and sand traps to the pit of my stomach, where it vanished into a hole.

I said in a low, hard voice, “So your sister sold her drugs?”