Most Unnatural Read online

  He asked her out after the semester was over. He went to her office in the little corridor for GA offices. She’d had an officemate back then, another Ph.D. candidate in plant sciences, but he had not been there when Cordo went in. She was poring over papers, grading, wearing odd circular spectacles—not glasses, spectacles, that’s how old they were, predating the hipster era of interest—and she gazed over the rims with her Amazonian green eyes and hair loose around her shoulders and she smirked, perhaps long ago discerning his crush on her.

  “Hi Cordo. What can I do for you?” she sat back, crossing her arms.

  He took a deep breath—he hadn’t been on sertraline then and perhaps in retrospect, such a feat as asking someone out made him awe at his younger self—and he could hear the shaking in his own voice.

  “Do you drink coffee?”

  “Not habitually,” she smiled. “I’ve had it.”

  He shrugged.

  “Would you care to have coffee with me?”

  Lourdes swiveled her chair around, pushing back her grin.

  “We’re really not supposed to drink coffee with students.”

  “Iced tea then.”

  She laughed.

  “That either.”

  “The semester’s over though.”

  “Almost. Still have to put in grades.”

  “Afterward then.”

  She hesitated.

  “Look,” he said, taking a business card from his pocket—CORDORUBIAS TENDLER, MANAGING EDITOR, THE DAILY, his office and cell phone, work email—and put it on her desk, “I’ll leave this here. If you find you ever need a coffee fix or a doughnut fix or a falafel fix, call me. I’m 21, so we can also go get some nonthreatening mimosas if you’d like.”

  “I get to work early and stay late.”

  “Mimosas at midnight then.”

  She snickered.

  “I prefer red wine.”

  “OK, wine is fine.”

  She smiled.

  “Just think about it, OK?”

  “I will.”

  Cordo smiled, left. Lourdes went back to grading. After a moment she looked over at the business card.

  A week later, after final grades had been submitted, she texted him.

  They met at a coffee shop near the university during winter break. They both had French roast.

  “I like strong dark coffee,” Cordo said as they prepped their coffees at the sideboard.

  “I like anything French.”

  They sat at a table almost too small to hold their two large cups, which Cordo had paid for. They both sat back easily.

  “That have anything to do with your name?”

  Lourdes took a small sip, winced at the heat when it singed her lips and tongue tip. Then she grimaced at the taste.

  “Too strong?”

  Lourdes nodded, still holding the coffee in her palette. Seeing no reprieve, she swallowed as though it were a shot of cough syrup. Cordo chuckled, took her cup.

  “I’ll put in more cream and sugar.”

  “I told you I’m not a coffee person.”

  When he got back, Lourdes drank and quickly nodded.

  “Much better, thank you.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Where were we?”

  “Your name.”

  “Right, good memory. So you know the town Lourdes in France?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How?”

  “I read. Pick up on little things here and there.”

  “That’s good,” Lourdes said. “My mom went there for junior year abroad, loved it and the culture and everything. And she was a good Catholic, so when I appeared, she saw an opportunity to indulge and stay reverent.”

  “Clever woman. Did she speak French?”

  “Oh yes. Loved it, that was her major. Taught it to me growing up.”

  “Vraiment?”

  Lourdes’ eyebrows rose, then she smiled.

  “Toi aussi?”

  “Oui, oui.”

  “Comment—pourquoi?”

  “J’aime Frasier.”

  “Frasier, oui. Alors pourquoi n’es-tu pas en train d’étudier la psychologie?”

  “Parce que je ne veux pas aller á troisiéme cycle.”

  Lourdes chuckled.

  “Oui, c’est une doleur. Tu suivais des cours de français á l’université?”

  “Oui.”

  “Tu parles bien.”

  “Merci, toi aussi.”

  Then they sat looking and grinning at each other.

  “So what about your name?”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s a little unusual. Cordorubias?”

  “My dad’s idea. He said he was a sophomore in high school and he woke up one morning and had that name in his head. Said it followed him. When my mom got pregnant, he told her he wanted to name me that if I turned out to be a boy. Mom was against it at first but eventually she came around.”

  “I like it.”

  “So do I. One of those names that completely stumps elementary school bullies.”

  Lourdes chuckled.

  “Tu es trés séduisant.”

  “Et tu es trés belle.”

  Lourdes looked at him softly, lips held thinly together.

  “You’re quite unusual, aren’t you?”

  Cordo smiled.

  “Yeah. Probably I am. But I think you are too.”

  Lourdes took a sip of her milky sugar with a splash of coffee in it.

  “So what do you want this to be?”

  Cordo sat forward, elbows on the table, chin in palm.

  “I don’t date.”

  Lourdes was confused.

  “So…”

  “I don’t date. But I want to. You, specifically.”

  “You’re very straightforward.”

  “I wasn’t always.”

  “What changed you?”

  “A pretty girl.”

  They both cracked up. Then Lourdes leaned over the table, both arms folded. Their faces were up close.

  “So. You wanna do this again?” she asked.

  “No. Dinner next time.”

  Lourdes studied his face: unshaved stubble, which would probably never grow into a full beard or mustache, the slight sheen of oil in his T-zone, the blackheads in the pores of his nose, the smile wrinkles at both his lips and eyes, the curly soft brown hair lightly touching his forehead.

  “And after dinner?” she asked.

  “Maybe a movie.”

  “And after that?”

  “Share a glass of red downtown.”

  “And after that?”

  “I take you back to your place. It’ll be after midnight, so of course I walk you to your door.”

  “And after that?”

  “Your eyes will tell me if a goodnight kiss is permissible.”

  “And after that?”

  Cordo studied her face: the soft straight black hair hiding her ears, her Granny Smith eyes, one slightly crooked front tooth, lipstick-less unchapped pink lips.

  “Up to you,” he said.

  So they went on their first date the next night and it was all very lovely and chaste. They talked about small things over dinner: how he’d gotten interested in journalism after working on his high school newspaper, which class he’d been relegated to after the creative writing class he’d originally signed up for failed to form. Now he aimed to be a reporter for The Times while secretly he felt he had a novel hidden in him.

  At her apartment he kissed her goodnight and almost instantly got an erection.

  Their next outing was for pins and beers at a bowling alley, followed by dine-in pizza.

  Then came Cordo’s introduction to Tom, whom Lourdes called her best friend and who was also gay but those two facts have nothing to do with each other. Cordo and Tom shook hands in Tom’s office across from Lourdes’ and soon fell into talking about how great David Foster Wallace was, how it had nearly killed them both when he had died.

  Cordo held Lourdes’
hand as they left the lab and headed into the parking lot.

  “You told me you hated David Foster Wallace,” Lourdes said.

  “I do. But I wanted Tom to like me.”

  Next they went to a used bookstore—Cordo’s favorite. They made out in the literary fiction aisle, amid the lonely gazes of dusty Faulkners, Rands, Steinbecks, Styrons, Rushdies, and Hemingways, the lattermost of whom Lourdes soon heard all about, how Cordo all but built a temple in Papa’s honor. Lourdes followed him by the hand into the religion and philosophy aisle for him to examine several books on Hinduism.

  “My journalism teacher in high school got me interested in Eastern religions,” he told her.

  “You practice any?”

  “No.”

  “Atheist?”

  “Such an ugly word. But maybe. Or agnostic. You?”

  “Atheist. Used to be Catholic.”

  “What happened?”

  She shrugged.

  “I became a scientist.”

  Cordo put up a book, picked out another.

  “You believe in reincarnation?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I think it’s interesting. Pretty much every religion and philosophical system has some version of it. I think there must be something universal to it.”

  He put that book up too, got out another, showed it to her.

  “I do believe in karma. Maybe that obligates me to believe in reincarnation. I don’t know. I don’t think you can cherrypick.”

  “What’s interesting about it to you?”

  Cordo put away the book, held her hand again, continuing down the aisle.

  “I don’t know. The possibilities maybe? Hinduism believes the spirit, the jiva, can reincarnate for several reasons, one of them being to finish something important, called sādhanā. What if Hemingway had come back to finish The Garden of Eden properly or Scott Fitzgerald and The Love of the Last Tycoon?”

  They turned out of the aisle, passed by the drama aisle.

  “But then the Hindus also believe jiva can be reincarnated in order to suffer for things they did in past lives. That scares me.”

  “Why?”

  “Mistakes. Everyone makes them and sometimes they can lead to bad things. You don’t want to think about people you love suffering, especially after they’re dead. And according to Hinduism, some jivas can just go through life after life of suffering without ever gaining peace, moksha.”

  “That’s bleak.”

  “Thus my personality.”

  Lourdes chuckled.

  “What do you believe in, darkness?” he asked her.

  She shrugged.

  “I guess. I more think of it as like going to sleep or going back to the way things were before we were born. No one remembers anything from before they were born, so why wouldn’t we go back to that?”

  “Makes sense.”

  They turned down another aisle—gardening. They wandered slowly. Lourdes took down a coffee table book of U.S. flora. As she flipped through, she named each of the plants she saw.

  “What made you want to become a botanist?”

  “My dad.”

  “He was one?”

  “No, he was a lawyer, is a lawyer. But growing up he kept a garden, big garden with sunflowers and gingko trees and lavender and jasmine, beautiful. Used to work on it together in the early morning, mist all in the air, in our pajamas.”

  Cordo watched her face as she thought about the past.

  “Where is your dad?”

  She stiffened, shut the book, put it up.

  “I don’t know. He remarried when I was 12, I didn’t get along with her, lived with Mom’s brother in Wyoming until he died, then I came back here.”

  “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  She thought.

  “Seven years ago? We bumped into each other on the street, had lunch. Didn’t go well.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged.

  “We’re better this way.”

  She picked out the same book, opened it again.

  “What about your mom?” Cordo asked.

  Lourdes smiled.

  “I think one sad story per date is enough.”

  “So you’ll tell me on the next one?”

  “There’s going to be a next one?”

  “Isn’t there?”

  She smiled.

  “You like that book?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I do,” she flipped through slowly.

  Cordo took it from her, headed up to the cash register, ignoring her feeble protests, and bought it for her.

  Their next date he made dinner for her at his apartment. As he was boiling brown rice and broccoli in saucepans while the oven baked two chicken breasts, seasoned with black pepper and olive oil and wrapped in aluminum foil, she examined his large bookshelf beside the front door. The top had Hemingway and Hinduism books while the lower had CD cases.

  “So ‘90s,” she remarked.

  “Call me luddite.”

  She examined the CDs.

  “You have a lot of Tom Waits.”

  “You know him?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He’s simultaneously the creepiest, most depressing, most romantic singer of all time.”

  “That’s quite a claim.”

  He came over, got a case, put it into his laptop, connected it to his TV.

  “Listen,” as he went back to stir the rice and broccoli.

  Mule Variations started.

  “So your mother,” Cordo said as they ate dinner and drank red wine at the kitchen table Cordo had gotten at Goodwill for $15.

  “Ah shit, has that bill come due?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Lourdes half-smirked, shifted her rice around her plate, glanced up.

  “Breast cancer. I was eight.”

  Cordo looked at her move around her rice more.

  “You remember much about her?”

  “Yeah. The French. The way she laughed. Way she looked at my dad.”

  She looked up at him.

  “Is that good?” she asked.

  “I think so.”

  They went back to eating.

  “What about your parents?” she asked.

  “One sad story per date, remember?”

  “Each.”

  “Oh.”

  He exhaled.

  “Dad died in a car accident when I was 16. Mom killed herself a year later.”

  She said nothing. They looked across the table into each other’s eyes.

  “Do you know that song ‘We’ve Got Tonight’ by Bob Seger?” Cordo asked.

  Lourdes shook her head.

  “Brilliant song,” Cordo went on. “Love song, at one point he says, ‘I know your plans don’t include me.’ But I’m wondering if yours do.”

  After a moment she set her fork down and leaned forward in her chair.

  After dinner they sat listening to The Black Rider on the couch and drinking the rest of the red wine. Lourdes had her head on his shoulder, his arm around her waist. They fell in love during “I’ll Shoot the Moon.” When the album was done, Lourdes stood, took his hand, and pulled him up. Then she led him into his bedroom, unplugging the computer from the TV and silencing the apartment.

  They made love, slow, considerate, touching, looking. She smelled sweet with sweat. He cupped her cheek and saw her green irises in the dark.

  Afterward, anesthetically drifting, he told her it was his first time. She told him it was hers too. She’d been worth it. So had he.

  After he graduated they moved in together and three months later, after completing a summer internship with The Times and being offered a full-time position, which he accepted, Cordo proposed one morning in bed and the next day, they wedded at the courthouse with Tom as a witness.

  Cordo was 22, Lourdes 25.

  So that had all led to this: Cordo standing in front of the glass looking into the strange hospital’s nursery as a strange nurse tol
d him which of the babies within was his—the little bald baby girl in the third row—and his wife missing, an APB out for her, a call in from someone in Bremerton who owned a boat that was currently missing, a detective later grilling Cordo as to his whereabouts the night before, corroborations from his editor and other writers, phone calls, Tom coming into his house after Cordo had been released from the police station, hugging him.

  The hospital took a sample of the inside of Cordo’s cheek, as well as a sample from Lourdes’ hair from her hairbrush in the bathroom, and a swab of the babe’s inside cheek, all to be sent off to the mythical lab and two days later the tests results came in: the baby was Lourdes’ daughter but Cordo was not a match as father.

  People love a good murder mystery, hence the successes of Agatha Christie, Gillian Flynn, although the obscurity of Patricia Highsmith remains a mystery in and of itself.

  So passionate is this love that people will often try to turn something confounding into something sinister, thereby casting everyone remotely involved in a bright crimson light.

  The media picked up on Lourdes’ disappearance, the only clues: a missing motorboat and a two-week-old baby, verified as Lourdes’, found on the beach. The Coast Guard patrolled the waters and trolled for sunken motorboats and Lourdes’ face was sent to every port, harbor, and dock along the coast all the way down to Santa Cruz.

  The Times ran a missing person story, not mentioning the individual’s relation to a Times writer. The A.P. picked up on that story and sent it along the wire to every other media in the country, acolytes of Bill O’Reilley, Ann Coulter, Nancy Grace, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck finding a Scott Peterson-esque string and running with it, motive be damned, that can come later.

  Cordo was granted custody of the baby, as he was Lourdes’ next-of-kin. He named her Amelia. His editor gave him time off with pay as calls starting pouring into the office from hecklers and rubberneckers. Cordo sat on his couch in his—their—house with the babe in her bassinet out of reach and he watched the news, saw Lourdes’ picture, then his own, his name below, the newspaperman’s worst dream: to see his name in the headline rather than in the byline.

  The beach on which Amelia had been found was sprayed with luminol, which revealed traces of blood but which traces were too damaged by the tide to yield any accurate DNA results. The luminol provided, however, a pattern to the blood traces. From the area of the most concentration in the middle of the beach, there was a lesser trail leading up to circle of rocks in which Amelia had been found safe and sound, then another trail parallel to the first going back to the area of high concentration, from which a third trail projected westward until the tide became too strong for the luminol to be effective.