Laura van den Berg: The Isle of Youth: Stories

The stairs were flooded with guests. I grabbed my husband’s elbow and he put his hand over mine. Earlier that night I never went back to the cocktail party. I’d left Christina Humbolt alone in the manager’s office, gone upstairs, taken another pill, and fallen asleep fully clothed on top of the bed. I didn’t know what time my husband came back to the room, only that he didn’t bother waking me, so I was one of the only guests not wearing pajamas or slippers or bathrobes.

“I hope we don’t die,” I said.

“Don’t be absurd,” my husband replied, squeezing my fingers.

Outside we congregated a safe distance from the hotel, the sea cliffs behind us, a black ridge in the darkness. We watched smoke collect above the resort. It hovered over the building the way smog hangs over a factory. The air thickened and warmed.

By then the drugs had worn off and my nose was killing me. This will never stop , I thought, pressing a fist against my forehead. But within two weeks the pain and the swelling would be gone, the bruising reduced to a yellow spot or two, though my face would never look quite the same. There would always be a slight crook in my nose, only visible if you examined me head-on. Over time, I would come to believe my husband and I were the only ones who knew it was there.

We had been watching the fire for a minute or two before there was a cracking noise and bright orange flames burst through one of the top windows. Someone screamed and I was reminded of how, as our airplane tumbled toward the earth, I’d thought of our passports in their black nylon cases and our plastic toiletries bags and the international cell phone we’d rented, everything tucked neatly away in our suitcases, and was stricken by the notion of rescue workers pulling these possessions from the rubble and using them to determine who we were.

“I think we’re going to have to take another honeymoon,” my husband said. “This can’t be what we think of when we remember our honeymoon. It just can’t.”

“Should we take this as a sign?” I said. “That this whole time we’ve been trailed by disaster?”

“It’s a coincidence,” my husband said. “There’s no such thing as signs.”

I watched fire balloon out of the building.

The guests had scattered, some of them standing near the edge of the sea cliffs and facing the water. I heard sirens, but they sounded too far away to believe they would arrive in time to do much good.

My husband tugged on my sleeve. He was pointing at a group of four that were huddled together. It was the Humbolts and the Meyer-Stewards, all of them in hotel-issued white bathrobes and slippers. “We should be standing with them,” he said.

When he started toward them, I hung back. I was watching Christina Humbolt, who kept untying and retying her sash. Had she been out swimming? Or already returned to her room and, when the alarms woke her husband, pretended she’d been beside him all along? Her face was luminous with sweat; from a distance, her hair appeared darker and sleeker, like it might be damp.

When my husband reached the Humbolts and the Meyer-Stewards, he turned and looked for me, but other people had spilled into the path between us. He waved his hand above his head and called my name, but still I did not go to him. I heard the sirens again, louder now, and the hotel manager had started handing out little fleece blankets and bottled water, just as he had promised. The space between my husband and me grew more congested— I looked for you , he would say when we were finally reunited — and soon I wasn’t able to see him at all.

A boom sounded, loud as the rushing of the Garganta del Diablo. Fire spilled from the hotel like an outstretched hand. Right then I longed to go back inside, to our room that overlooked the sea. To sift through our wallets and the backpacks we carried on day trips, to lay the contents out on the bed like evidence and try to understand what it was that was going to be lost.

My sister was the photographer. From a rooftop deck, nestled between two enormous ferns in clay pots, she photographed our target, Mr. Defonte, entering the adjacent apartment building. He wore a white linen suit, boat shoes, and a straw sun hat with a chin strap that dangled beneath his jaw.

“Only in Florida,” Julia said, snapping a photo. “Does he think he’s on a safari?”

Mr. Defonte paused outside and stared at his feet. He was only a few steps away from the entrance of the glossy high-rise building. The doors were made of blue glass with silver handles in the shape of leaping fish. Julia took another picture. I was crouched beside my sister and peering through binoculars. I could see his face in profile, his long downward-sloping nose and soft chin. I knew his full legal name, his social, his date of birth, where he lived, where he worked, his favorite lunch spot, and his license plate number. His wife had hired me and Julia to investigate him. Together we made up Winslow & Co., the private detective firm we’d been running for the last year.

“I don’t think he’s going inside.” I lowered the binoculars. It was Boca Raton in June. My throat was slick with sweat, my underarms damp. “I just have a feeling.”

“If that motherfucker doesn’t walk through that door, I’m going to climb down from this roof and smack him in the face,” Julia said. The apples of her cheeks were flushed. Her chestnut hair glistened.

I opened the red cooler we brought on stakeouts and fished out an ice cube. I ran it along the back of Julia’s neck and over her cheeks. She sighed in a way that sounded grateful. I kept moving the ice over her skin until it turned into a tiny translucent shard and melted into my fingertips, until it was just my hand on the nape of her neck.

Mr. Defonte opened the door. He hesitated for a moment, then disappeared into the building. Julia snapped three pictures in a row. Now all he had to do was come out. And all we had to do was wait.

* * *

What do you want? That was how the conversation with Mrs. Defonte began, how they always began. You don’t hire a private investigator unless you want something. In our early twenties, Julia and I hired a detective to track down our father, who vanished in the middle of the night when we were teenagers. I was fifteen, Julia thirteen. We just woke up one Saturday morning and found him gone and our mother in the backyard, staring at the sky. Our detective was expensive and didn’t have any luck. We knew what it was like to want something so badly, it burned a hole inside you.

Mrs. Defonte had hired us for the same reason most women hired PIs: she suspected her husband was having an affair. In the last six months, she explained in her living room, his behavior had changed. He took phone calls in the middle of the night. He worked later. Something about his tone of voice was different, his smell, even. He seemed to have trouble looking her in the eye. She had followed him once, waited outside his office and trailed him to a café on Second Street, but then she lost her nerve.

Mrs. Defonte had beautiful black hair that nested on her shoulders and nails painted the color of pink geraniums. She wore a snug black sleeveless dress, a white sweater draped over her shoulders, and sat with her ankles crossed. She was in her fifties, around the same age as my mother, who was several weeks into a six-month cruise around the world; it had started in Fort Lauderdale and would end in Monte Carlo. Julia liked to joke that our mother had been away at sea her whole life. She’d done her best to raise us, but once we were out in the world, the distance that had always been there shifted and hardened, like a building shedding its scaffolding and assuming its final shape. We reminded her of painful times, we understood.