Awake (3 page)

-5-

The week on campus begins by somehow pulling it together and getting through my biochem test with flying colors. I skip a poly sci lecture in the afternoon and go to Pinkberry for something tangy.

Waiting in line I decide to mess with my phone. Wade’s number is still there under missed calls. I know that I will delete it and hope it makes me feel better when I do. It’s a 213 area code. I’m not even sure what part of town that covers exactly. Mostly downtown, I believe.

He does not reside in the gilded world behind gates. He’s a regular guy which makes him even more intriguing. I’m hopeless. I must delete these digits. There. His number is gone baby gone. It’s not my place to be intrigued by this one.

My only boyfriend now is the swirly goodness of Pinkberry Mango.

I will move on and the week will move on with me. Little by little my life will restart without the memory of his scent or the twinkle of his eyes or his wicked smile haunting everything. Some men were put on this Earth just to poison the well.

That boy’s a disease.

Saturday morning, I decide to seize control. Tranquility is a better state for the human soul than obsession. I get my stepmother to take me to meet Lyric, her longtime Yogi.

My stepmother’s yogi uses the name Lyric only when he runs his weekend yoga class at his palatial estate that, from a distance, overlooks the Pacific Ocean. During the week he is none other than Doctor Reed Hendricks, plastic surgeon to the wealthy and the famous.

Lyric/Reed is a creature you could only find in this city, a man so beautiful and chiseled he would never need any type of cosmetic surgery and yet he dedicates his life to cutting into the flesh of others in an attempt to beautify them. On weekends, he attempts to assuage his guilt for profiting from the vanity of aging trophy wives by delving into and correcting their souls through yoga.

For my stepmother’s part, at least she buys her yoga gear the proper size. All the other women seem to buy their yoga gear one or two sizes too small. They want their curves to burst at the seams for the gentle stud who contorts his manhood for their viewing pleasure. It all feels like a non-contact orgy for a gaggle of socialites clinging hopelessly to middle-age.

I try to keep my eyes off Lyric’s junk banging around in his tight, teal yoga shorts. I open my body and clear my mind. I close my eyes to focus on the good doctor’s calming voice and ask myself deeper, more imperative questions about life and existence.

The still postures are stepping stones, he tells us, to the higher clarities of harmony and peace. I start to feel the simple act of breathing expanding my lungs slowly. This was a good idea. I feel better.

When my eyes blink open I see Lyric with his hands on my stepmother’s ass helping her hold a posture. She keeps her eyes closed but her smile reveals the thrill his contact gives her.

He catches the weight of my stare and winks knowingly. He passes by without laying so much as a finger on me. “Very good, Erin. Namaste.” Our yogi is very perceptive. He knows I do not welcome his touch the way the older women eagerly welcome it.

After the session, Lyric has a buffet of chopped fruits that he had his maid bring fresh from the farmer’s market. About half of the women stay to enjoy the offerings and a Saturday morning chat at a shaded table. I go to the buffet last and decide on a grapefruit.

When our yogi returns from a quick trip inside his house he is suddenly dressed in baggy khaki shorts and a faded UCLA tee shirt. I think this means he is Doctor Hendricks again, or just Reed, as he tells me when I try to call him doctor.

“The bravest choice, Erin, is always to be here in the world with all its beauty and all its problems,” he says. He’s not talking about today; he’s talking about last weekend. I can only imagine what a doctor could see in my eyes when my blood was on fire with intoxicants.

“Is this the doctor talking or the yogi?” I say.

“Now I am just a person who’s been there.”

“There’s nothing happening, trust me,” I say slightly annoyed.

Reed makes up a plate of mostly cantaloupe. “Isolation and emptiness are the henchmen of nothing,” he says. “There were these lines in an old B movie I saw long ago. They have saved me from despair ever since.
The sun is good.
Follow the light and beware the night
.”

“That was Lyric, right?” I tease. “Because that definitely did not sound like a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon.”

When he smiles at my jab I feel relief until he seems to look right past me. “Oh, there he is,” the doctor says. “Wade. I’d almost forgotten.”

I really don’t understand what’s happening at first, but my blood turns cold and hot at the same time. I’m suddenly aware my mouth is dry. The name
Wade
escapes my lips in a whisper as the good doctor reaches out to shake the hand of someone coming up behind me.

I notice my stepmother and the table of sweaty yoga groupies all turning to us flashing hungry grins. I want to disappear. I fucking came here to disappear. I have not showered and now I’m sweaty.

“Hey, Doc,” Wade says just inches behind my ear.

I’m at a loss as to what do so I walk away without even looking at him. Reed grabs my arm. I miss Lyric. Lyric would never grab my arm and pull me back into such disharmonious feelings.

“Erin,” Reed says, “I want you to meet someone.”

And there he is, mister man candy himself. Wade Donovan. He clutches two big bags of groceries to his hard chest. What feels like hot lightning erupting in my belly and chest makes me fight off a tickling sensation. I really would like to be smashed up hard against his muscular pectorals. No use in denying the simple truth.

“We’ve already met, Doc,” Wade says with a devious sparkle in his eyes. “Erin and I are old friends.”

“Really?” Reed says authentically surprised.

“Yep,” I say without passion. I know Wade’s sparkling eyes are remembering my discarded panties and I don’t like it.

“I have the cooking supplies,” Wade says as he sets the bags down on a brick counter next to a giant brick barbecue.

“Excellent,” Reed say. “This will give a little extra boost in the offerings today. I think the people of Boyle Heights will really enjoy it.”

“Hope so,” Wade says.

“Let me say goodbye to the ladies and we’ll be on our way,” Reed says as he squeezes Wade’s shoulder and walks over to my stepmother and her coven of rich friends.

Alone with Wade. I have nothing to say. For the first time, he seems uncomfortable in my presence. I fixate on his half-unsnapped shirt and the simple gunmetal black ring at the end of his brown leather necklace.

“You’re searching,” Wade says curiously.

“Excuse me?” I say.

“Last week, shrooms. This week, yoga.”

“And this is your business, how?”

He grins. “It’s not, but I think it’s good.”

“Oh my god, you’re arrogant,” I say. “I’m beginning to understand.”

His smile vanishes. Thank, God.

“Understand what?” he asks.

Now I grin and enjoy his increasing discomfort. I won’t tell him his leggy fiancée is the most arrogant girl on Earth. “Nothing,” I finally say with a dismissive wave. “How does one cook for the people of Boyle Heights? You’re going to need more than two bags, by the way.”

“The bags are just the spices,” he clarifies.

“Wow, that’s a lot of spices.”

“We’re feeding four hundred today,” Reed says as he grabs the bags. “It’s cinco de Mayo. You should come with us, Erin. It would do you good.” Reed winks at me before walking into his house with the bags.

“Yeah, Erin,” Wade says peering soulfully into my eyes or so I like to imagine. “Might get your mind off the rest of the world.”

I glance back at my stepmother. Wade and I talking for so long makes her nervous. “Boyle Heights?” I wonder aloud. “Okay, that’s so random. Why not? Do I need to bring like my AK-47 assault rifle?”

“You’re a funny one,” he says. “No, you’ll be perfectly safe.”

“And how can you be sure?” I ask.

“Because I will be your protector. I grew up in Boyle Heights.”

-6-

Wade Donovan grew up in Boyle Heights. As we drive past the fake palaces of Bel Air and Beverly Hills I realize I know nothing about him.

I decide to get nosy and quickly learn that his father was an Irish studio musician who had abandoned his beautiful, half-Mexican mother when Wade was an infant. Being only a quarter Hispanic, he grew up the whitest kid in the almost entirely Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights.

Wade does not tell me these things. Reed answers my questions while Wade drives his Jaguar. Reed also tells me Wade received a scholarship to a top culinary school from the foundation the doctor had set-up with other Beverly Hills surgeons.

“I bet you’re wondering about the Jaguar,” Wade says. It’s the first time he’s spoken since we pulled out of the circular driveway of the doctor’s estate.

I don’t answer. I just try to get a glimpse of his eyes in the rearview mirror from the backseat. For a moment his eyes flash up at the rearview mirror and see mine. When our eyes meet I feel it in my blood.

“It’s a 2006. Doctor Hendricks sold it to me for five-thousand dollars. It’s worth twenty-five thousand.”

“I wasn’t wondering,” I say even though I totally was. “But that was nice of you, Doc. Let me know when you want to sell another car.”

Reed turns back and winks at me. “I told him he can pay me back when he’s a big restaurateur.”

“Ninety percent of restaurants fail,” Wade says. “You might be waiting a while.”

They smile and I can see they have something like a father and son relationship. I assume Reed was the one who introduced Wade to Tori.

“Your restaurant can’t fail, boyo,” Reed says. “Your future father-in-law and I have too much money invested.” He shoves Wade in the shoulder affectionately.

“Don’t remind me,” Wade says quietly.

Reed turns back to me. “The kid’s a genius. Even today, at the shelter, his food will blow your mind. We finally pulled him away from the Tiki Hut or wherever he was working on Melrose.”

Wade rolls his eyes in the rearview mirror. “It wasn’t called the Tiki Hut.” I can tell he’s had to say this a dozen times before.

“I know that place,” I say. “I love Polynesian.”

Reed turns back to the front. Wade stares at me a long time in the rearview. I decide to stare back. If all I am to ever have of him are his eyes then I might as well remember them.

Wade parks his Jaguar next to a dumpster in the alley behind the Soto Street Mission. We enter through the kitchen. The stifling air inside carries with it the gagging smell of deep-fried grease.

A very short Hispanic woman, she can’t be five feet tall, walks around a stack of industrial-sized cans of baked beans. She wipes her hands on an already filthy apron and reaches out to take my hand.

“Buen dia, pretty girl. I am Alodia. Can you wash dishes?” she says.

I smile as she studies my body like she’s buying a horse. Reed has disappeared and Wade just grins at my awkwardness.

“Is this your Tori?” Alodia says glancing at Wade. “Does she speak?”

Wade laughs. “No, this is Erin. She wanted to come and help.”

“Well?” Alodia says staring intensely into my eyes.

“Nice to meet you,” I say. “Yes, of course I can wash dishes.”

As I am led away by this small, but strong little lady, I look back. Wade winks at me just as I am pulled into Alodia’s lair. My trip across town to Boyle Heights and ultimately into this dingy little room full of filthy sinks and filthier dishes makes me feel like I am on shrooms again.

My fall into the rabbit-hole did not end up in Wonderland, but rather an airless tomb desperately in need of a window or, at least, four or five dishwashers.

“We’re washing them in these sinks?” I say more to myself than to Alodia. I immediately regret that she could hear my snobbish, rhetorical question.

“You were expecting the Ritz Carlton?” she teases and hands me first a sponge and then a dishrag.

“I came here to work,” I offer.

Alodia chuckles. “Did you now?”

I ignore her implication and eye a sink wondering what the first step would be in this endeavor. Alodia steps in front of me, grabs a sink stopper and places it in a drain. She runs the hot water.

“Hot water. Not too much soap,” she advises.

I begin washing pots and pans. Alodia concentrates on the smaller dishes. It takes a thing Alodia calls a
scouring pad
for me to scrub caked on spaghetti out of a five-gallon kettle.

We talk very little for the better part of an hour. Wade occasionally enters to grab some of my clean cookware which makes me work harder and harder to make them so spotless they shine.

“Nice work, Cassidy,” he says. I notice the sweat on his neck and fight off thoughts of scrubbing him in my shower with a soapy sponge.

“Cassidy is your surname?” Alodia asks as she carries a stack of bowls to the tables behind us.

I’m confused at first, but, in the end, it’s a simple question. “It’s my father’s name. Yes.”

“You are Irish.” Alodia says.

“Irish and Swedish,” I say.

“Ah, your mother is Swedish,” she states.

When I don’t answer Alodia catches something in my eyes, a glimmer of nostalgia caused by her use of present tense and my mother.

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” she says. “It’s hard to be motherless in this world.”

“It was long ago,” I say to make her feel better.

“No need to be brave with me,” she says. “A thing like that is never long ago. It’s always yesterday in your heart. I know.”

I marvel at her ability to read me so easily. I debate whether there would be any point to try to hide my feelings for Wade but then I remember she has already teased me when I said I was here to work.

She knows.

“Are you from Boyle Heights, Alodia?”

“As opposed to Mexico, you mean?” she grins. “Nope, I’m from Michigan. Ann Arbor.”

“Really?” I say half expecting her to say she was only joking.