Элин Хильдебранд - What Happens in Paradise

“He had an incident on the boat today, I guess,” Irene says. “Passenger got drunk and Cash was called on to help get the girl home. Turned out the girl had a friend that Cash knew. From that restaurant you both like so much?”

“La Tapa?” Baker says.

“That must be it,” Irene says. “And I think he went out with the friend. Something like that.”

Baker pushes his chair away from the table. “Was it Ayers, Mom? Is he out with Ayers?”

“It wasn’t Ayers,” Irene says. She throws Baker an exasperated look. “You boys, honestly. No, it was some other name. British, unusual…”

“Tilda?” Baker says.

“Yes!” Irene says. “He went out with Tilda.”

“Who’s Tilda?” Floyd asks.

“A friend of your uncle’s,” Irene says.

Baker can’t describe his relief. He tousles Floyd’s hair. “You want some ice cream, buddy? They had red velvet cake at the Starfish Market.”

Baker puts Floyd to bed, then decides to turn in himself, mostly because there’s nothing else to do. Cash is still out and Baker has no other friends. If he were at home in Houston right now, he would smoke some weed and crash out in front of the TV—he needs to catch up on Game of Thrones —but he can’t watch that with Irene around.

His phone rings. This, he thinks, will be Anna, just getting home from work at nine o’clock at night. He steels himself. It would be just like Anna to have glanced at his text distractedly and responded with K, but then, after running the whole thing past Louisa, suddenly have a list of objections.

Baker should have texted Louisa.

But his display says Ayers.

“Ayers?” he says.

“Hey.” Her voice sounds funny—sad, trembling, like she’s been crying. “Are you busy?”

“Not at all,” he says. “I just put Floyd to bed so I can talk. What’s up?”

There’s a pause. “Can you get out? Is Cash there? Or your mom? To watch Floyd?”

“Uh…yeah. Cash is out but my mom is here.” Baker stands up and checks himself in the mirror. He hasn’t shaved—or showered, for that matter, unless swimming in the pool counts as a shower—since the day he went to Gifft Hill, Monday. He does have a nice tan now, but he looks like a Caribbean hobo. “Do you want to meet somewhere?”

“Can you just come here, to my place?” Ayers asks. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“Your place?”

“Fish Bay,” Ayers says. “It’ll take you fifteen minutes if you leave right now.”

“Right now?” Baker says. And before he can explain that he needs to shower and change, she’s giving him directions.

Unlike the rest of the island, Fish Bay is flat. And really dark. Ayers said she lived past the second little bridge on the left, but Baker would have missed her house if he hadn’t caught a flash of green, her truck, out of the corner of his eye.

She’s standing in the doorway, backlit, hugging herself. He doesn’t need to feel bad about not showering, he sees. She’s still wearing her Treasure Island uniform and her hair is wild and curly.

“Hey,” he says. “You okay?”

She moves so that he can step past her, inside.

Her place is small, cute, bohemian. There’s a tiny kitchen with thick ceramic dishes on open shelves. There’s a papasan chair, a bunch of houseplants, a glass bowl filled with sand dollars, and a gallery wall of photographs from places all over the world—the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramids, the Matterhorn. Ayers is in every picture; in many, she’s a kid.

“Have you been to all these places?” Baker asks.

“Story for another day,” she says. “Come sit.”

Baker picks a spot next to Ayers on a worn leather sofa draped with a tapestry. There’s a coffee table with three pillar candles sitting in a dish of pebbles, and lying across the pebbles is a joint.

Are they going to smoke?

“Would you like a glass of water?” Ayers asks.

“Maybe in a minute,” Baker says. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on.”

Ayers folds her legs underneath her. How is it possible that even when she looks awful, she’s beautiful?

“This morning—” She laughs. “Which now feels like three days ago.” She picks up the joint and lifts a barbecue lighter off the side table, then seems to think better of it and sets both down. “It’s been a very long day.”

“Some days are like that,” Baker says. “Start at the beginning.”

“Last night Mick told me he had to go to St. Thomas to get restaurant supplies today,” Ayers says. “Whatever, I found it a little strange, but I didn’t question it. Too much.” She throws her hands up. “Anyway, then this morning, I saw him on the ferry with Brigid.”

Baker makes a face like he’s surprised. But he’s not surprised. He knew Mick would screw it up. He actually wishes Cash were here to listen to this. Baker leans in. “You’re kidding.”

“Not kidding. I saw them sitting together and I was…pissed. Livid. Suspicious.”

“I bet.”

“So I sent him a text telling him never to call me again.”

Baker spreads his palms against the cool, cracked leather of the sofa. This is real? He didn’t fall asleep in bed next to Floyd? Ayers is telling him exactly what he’s been waiting to hear, only much sooner than he had hoped. Her timing couldn’t be better.

“Then Cash and I had this weird, awful thing happen at work.”

“Yeah, I heard, sort of.”

“This girl got really drunk, and I thought she’d tanked while snorkeling. We stopped the boat, I dove off, your brother dove off, this other kid who’s probably going to be in the Olympics dove off, it was a total circus, and in the end the chick was in the head changing out of one inappropriate suit into a second, even more inappropriate suit, and this was all before we even got to Jost. The girl continued to drink and then puked off the side the whole way home.” Ayers sighs. “And I left your brother to handle it because guess who was waiting for me at the dock.”

“Mick,” Baker says, and he suspects that maybe this story isn’t going to have the ending he wants it to.

“Mick,” Ayers says. “He just left here a little while ago. Right before I called you. We broke up.”

“You broke up?” Baker says. He’s afraid to go back to feeling optimistic. “What did he say? Why was he with Brigid?”

“He said they bumped into each other. Unplanned. A coincidence. She was headed over to St. Thomas to get a tattoo of the petroglyphs.”

“Okay?” Baker says.

“I just got a tattoo of the petroglyphs a few weeks ago,” Ayers says. She holds out her ankle so Baker can see the tattoo; it’s a curlicue symbol in dark green. “We’re hardly the only two people in the universe with a petroglyph tattoo. Rosie had one. But still, I was chafed.”

“Understandably,” Baker says.

“Mick says they only talked for a couple of minutes, then Mick took Gordon, that’s our dog, his dog, up to stand at the bow and he didn’t see Brigid again.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I don’t want to believe him,” Ayers says. “But I do.”

“You do?”

“I do.”

“So…why did you break up?”

“Two reasons,” Ayers says. “Both are secrets that I’m keeping from him. One is this…project that I’m working on. I can’t tell him about it, and I can’t tell you about it yet either. Maybe in the future, once I’m finished, but not right now.”

“Secret project,” Baker says. “I won’t ask.”

“Please don’t,” Ayers says. She seems to shrink under her Treasure Island T-shirt and when she gazes at him, her eyes appear robbed of their pigment. They are very, very pale blue. “The second reason is…that I have feelings for you.”