I went to three clinics stateside, trying to find a doctor willing to do a vasectomy on a teenager. No dice. I remembered my grandpa used to get his denture work done in Ciudad Juarez because it was cheaper and there wasn’t any hassle with insurance or paperwork.
I was already west by then, so I sold my laptop for cash and drove along the border until I got to Mexicali. A doctor there sent me on to Tijuana, where I finally found someone who didn’t want to see ID, and cash on the table was good enough to get snipped.
The procedure itself wasn’t too bad. They gave me some pill that made me loopy and sluggish. I felt a needle and some pinching. Afterward, though, walking was impossible. I couldn’t really understand the nurse’s instructions and had no idea what I was supposed to do for pain.
I ended up at the farmacia in hopes of scoring something stronger than Tylenol. The girl behind the counter was beautiful, long black hair curling down her back, not unlike Corabelle’s. She spoke enough English that I could explain what had happened, and she consulted with a man in the back. She gave me a cold pack and a jockstrap and a bottle of pills with the stern instructions to take only two per day.
I was saved. I stayed at a hotel across the street, unable to go any farther, and I remember looking out the window and seeing her close up the shop. The nightlife was colorful and the pain, while duller, kept me up for hours.
In that hot little room, though, the magnitude of what I’d done started to hit. I couldn’t go back to Corabelle, not ever. She’d take it personally. She’d assume I didn’t want a baby with her after all. I would have to stay away. I’d finished us.
I don’t think about those first few hours after the surgery any more than I replay that span of time after the ventilators went silent. But when I pulled myself together enough, I tried to find a diversion inside those four filthy walls.
All the TV channels were in Spanish, so I pulled a chair up to the window, surprised when I saw the girl back again, lounging on the corner, wearing a low-cut stretchy blouse and a short skirt.
She seemed uncertain about what she was doing, and that innocence caught my attention. A man approached her and they argued a moment, but she sent him on his way. Probably wanting something for free. When an hour passed and she had no luck, I made my way painfully down the stairs and out onto the street.
She saw me coming and pressed her hand over her cleavage. “Feeling better, señor?”
“How much?”
“Perdón?”
Suddenly I worried that I was dead wrong. She was just hanging out here, waiting for someone, someone who was really late. I waved my hand at her. “Sorry. Never mind.”
I turned away, but she caught my shoulder. “You are not well for this.” She glanced down at my pants, bulging from the cold packs.
“I know.” My ache for Corabelle was suddenly fierce, and the comfort of this woman seemed like it might help.
“Okay. I come. You are up there?” She pointed at the hotel.
I nodded.
We walked back across the street and up to my room. I had to take it super slow, and she held my arm, keeping me steady.
“This doctor. Was he good?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I have no idea.”
She helped me get settled on the bed. “Why you do this? You are so young.”
“I have my reasons.” I reached out for her hair, tweaking the strands between my fingers. When she faced away, taking off her shoes, I could almost believe she was Corabelle.
We still hadn’t agreed on a price, and I had no assurance that she wouldn’t rob me blind if the drugs knocked me out. But most of my stuff was in a locker on the other side of the border. I could probably afford to lose everything I had on me. I twined my fingers through her hair, relieved I could touch her without worrying about her reaction, and closed my eyes.
Her body fitted next to mine and now I could really imagine that Corabelle was next to me. We were on a holiday, our honeymoon maybe, and this was all we could afford. Her parents were watching Finn for a couple nights, and we’d gotten away. The girl laid her hand on my chest and I held it.
“Rosa,” she said.
“I’m Gavin.”
“You rest, Gavin.”
And so I spent my first night with her in a seedy hotel room and slept through the haze of pain medication and sore balls. I stayed in Tijuana for a week, until I figured out that I wasn’t going back home and I needed to find a job. Settling in San Diego made sense, and since I was already accepted to UCSD, I could easily get admitted, take a GED for my diploma, and start my coursework.
At first I went back to see Rosa just to get a sense that I had taken a few steps into my past. I always paid her, but it was probably my fourth or fifth visit before we finally got to business, when my loneliness hit a peak. After her I found other girls, closer, in San Diego, and realized that prostitutes were a perfect solution. No strings. No mess. No mistakes.
Over the years, I got to know Rosa better. She always seemed happy to see me, and now that I was restless about Corabelle, I wanted only her.
The apartments where she lived were stacked in rundown buildings with adobe facades. Normally I wouldn’t enter one alone, being so obviously an outsider, but every time I thought about what Corabelle might be doing with that baby-faced punk, I couldn’t give a shit about any of it. Bring on the switchblades, the fistfight, even the gunpoint. Anything was easier than trying to be the good guy again just so Corabelle could finish me off.
I knew better than to leave my bike on that street, so I rolled it right into the corridor between the two halves of the building. I kept my back to the wall as I pulled out my phone to text her.
It took a few minutes, but she finally responded with “I’m coming down.” I didn’t know if that meant she was rushing someone out, but I didn’t much care either. Rosa was my top choice, and tonight it would take more than any ordinary girl to settle me.
The locks began twisting and creaking as someone fumbled with the other side. When Rosa opened the door, I didn’t respond like I expected. She looked the same, long black hair now laced with blond, her curvy body strapped into things that pushed up and squeezed in. She motioned me inside, looking both ways down the corridor into the night. I grasped the handlebars of my bike and rolled it in as I always did, and we shoved it into a little room under the stairs where people stuffed their trash until collection.
“Mi amante,” she said. “I am glad to see you.” She wrapped her arms around me and pulled me in to her lips. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off, but I managed a passable kiss. She led me up the stairs to her door.
Some people would probably have considered the place squalor, but to me it was typical for the district. The walls were peeling and the rail rusted out. A weak light sputtered at the landing.
Inside the apartments, the tenants took care of their spaces. Rosa covered her walls with large woven tapestries in red and gold and green. Candles burned in every corner, and a CD turned low just covered the street sounds with rhapsodic love songs in Spanish.
“Sit,” Rosa said, pushing me to the sofa, also covered in bright blankets. She moved to her kitchen and returned with a Corona. “Bad day?”
I nodded and knocked back half the bottle. Rosa could handle this. I’d come here in bad shape before.
“Ah, pobrecito. Let me fix.” She knelt and began to untie my boots.
I laid my head back on the sofa and tried to relax. Her ceiling was covered in stains. We were all born into such different circumstances. I hadn’t been that much better off than Rosa, a tumbledown house on a bad street in a small town. My biggest luck had been to back up to middle-class row houses across the alley, and Corabelle.