James Patterson: Now You See Her

Driving me to the bus station, Peter had taken one look at my face and told me that he had a tiny room above his garage that he sometimes rented.

“If you’re not ready to go back to school just yet, you could stay for a couple of days,” he said.

A couple of days.

Key West’s most famous last words.

When two days turned into a week, Peter said he had a friend, Elena, a female cop, who was part owner of the island’s largest catering company and was always looking for people.

I took the catering job the next day and withdrew from school the day after that.

I knew it was a rash, probably borderline crazy thing to do. I also knew things were different now. That I was different. It wasn’t just the accident. With the break from my friends, the last vestiges of my old life had been cast away. One door had closed, and something in the Key West air told me to sit tight until the next one opened.

And that’s exactly what happened.

From the beginning, Peter was a perfect gentleman. Really more like a father or an extremely protective brother. He was always making sure that I used sunscreen and ate enough and got enough exercise and enough sleep. He was constantly leaving things on the rickety landing outside my door, videotapes, bags of fruit, books.

By far, my favorite offering was a battered, secondhand copy of seventeenth-century English poets, Herrick and Marvell. At night I’d lie in my tiny bed and read, rediscovering why I’d become an English major in the first place. Rose petals and winged chariots, eternal youth and beauty. It was uncanny how well Peter seemed to know me.

Peter actually stuttered the first time he asked me to come to dinner. He served in the backyard with a tablecloth and china. He even wore a jacket with his Bermuda shorts. The lamb chops were burnt, the mashed potatoes were runny, but by the end of the sunset, even before he reached across the table and held my hand, I knew.

We both knew. Despite our ten-year age difference, we’d both known it from pretty much the moment we looked at each other through his cruiser’s backseat mesh.

He proposed two weeks later. Teaching me how to fish, he asked me to reel in the line so he could change the bait. Only instead of a hook, my ring was tied to the end of the line, and I turned to find Peter down on one knee.

We were married in a city hall wedding six months after that.

I knew the whole thing was crazy. I knew that I was too young, that things were happening too fast, that I was being impulsive. But the craziest thing of all was that it kept working.

“Jeanine?” Peter said.

I opened one of my eyes.

“Yes, Peter,” I said.

“I thought you mermaids never wore shirts.”

“That’s only under the sea, silly,” I said. “On land among you mortals, we have to keep the devastating, beguiling power of our boobies in check or nothing would ever get done.”

“Except you?” Peter said.

I closed my eye. “Now you’re getting it.”

“Jeanine?” Peter said, laying down the sea pole.

“Yes, Peter?”

“You know what I’m in the mood for?”

“Devastating beguilement?”

“How’d you know?” he said.

“Mermaids know,” I said, standing and taking my husband by the hand.

BACK TO THE PRESENT, and I’d just put in a load of whites when I heard the beeping. I padded into the kitchen and turned off the microwave timer before I headed to the rear of our cozy beach bungalow and into the master bath.

Then I took a monster breath and held it as I turned and lifted the pregnancy test off the toilet lid.

Time and my heart stopped at the exact same moment as I stared at the display window with its two identical blue lines. My breath whooshed out of me as though I were a seven-year-old blowing out birthday candles.

Because I’d already read the math on the box.

One blue line plus one blue line equaled one pregnant Jeanine.

Over the past two weeks, I’d been in panic mode. More and more as another day passed and I didn’t get my period. I kept thinking about those three pills that I’d somehow missed. I must have experienced brain freeze in the middle of last month’s cycle.

Peter had elected me the head of the contraception department, and I’d definitely dropped the ball. Talk about a whoops.

I also thought about what a baby would do to my twenty-three-year-old body, my twenty-three-year-old future.

But as I stood there, staring down the two blue lines, something odd and unexpected happened. A warmth started in the center of my chest and for a quicksilver second, I could actually feel my baby, skin on skin, soft in my arms.

Why not? I thought, suddenly dazzled with the life-affirming awesomeness of it. Why couldn’t Malibu Jeanine bring a Malibu baby to the luau? Hell, why not two? I’d always wanted kids. Peter and I had planned for some in the vague future anyway, so why not start early?

Life was crazy. You had to roll with it. If the last two years and Key West had taught me anything, it was that. Mi vida really was loca. Besides, plans were for making God laugh.

I dropped the test, sending the trusty stick flying, when there was a pounding on the door followed by a deafening electronic squawk.

What the?

“THIS IS THE POLICE!” Peter called through a police megaphone. “WE KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE! COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP AND YOUR PANTIES OFF!”

I couldn’t stop laughing. He was always so crazy and funny, a holy terror of a rascal. All he did was make me laugh. When he wasn’t making me do even better stuff. I knew right then that Peter would make the best dad on earth.

Should I tell him about the test? I thought. No, I quickly decided, hiding it under the sink. In two weeks we were going up to the Breakers in Palm Beach, where we’d spent our honeymoon. I’d drop it on him at dinner. Blow his doors off. Knock his socks off. Then his pants.

He might be a little thrown off, but not for long. I’d show him. I loved him and he loved me. We could definitely make this work.

“I’m coming out,” I said a moment later.

“GOOD MOVE!” Peter squawked. “AND NO FUNNY BUSINESS!”

I unlocked the door. Then I sailed my Victoria’s Secret bra and thong onto the megaphone, right into Peter’s dumbfounded blue eyes.

“Don’t shoot,” I said, wearing nothing but my smile.

IT WAS THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY when I decided to clean Peter’s boat.

Peter liked to go fishing by himself on Fridays after work. It was his way to blow off steam, clear his head, transition from the stressful workweek to the weekend. He’d usually come back in at around nine, and we’d end up having a late dinner of freshly caught wahoo or sailfish or blackfin tuna.

So as a surprise, I wanted his boat to be shining when he came home after his shift.

My hair up in a bandanna, wearing stylish yellow kitchen gloves and holding a soapy mop bucket, I boarded his twenty-five-foot Stingray at around eleven that morning. It was a white cabin cruiser, squat and powerful, almost like a speed-but with two berths for sleeping and a small galley under the bow.

An enormous seagull cried from atop the mast of a small sailboat across our canal as I stood on the softly swaying deck. As a breeze came off the electric blue water, I suddenly felt a strange lifting sensation in my stomach, guilt mixed with pleasure, like a child playing hooky. My life consisted of pretty much nothing but playing hooky, didn’t it? I was loving every millisecond of it.

I smiled as I glanced at the CD in the boat’s topside boom box. It was by the seventies one-hit wonder Looking Glass. As silly as it was, the old jukebox staple about a sailor torn between the sea and his beloved bar wench, “Brandy,” was our wedding song.