Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
CLAIRE
By Tuesday, the second morning, I'd stopped pretending the water would fix it.
The water was beautiful, that part hadn't been a lie.
Hard flat turquoise that hurt to look at, breaking over black rock forty feet out, and between the rock and the sand the current pulled sideways with a strength you could feel standing knee-deep.
Delfina, who wore the same working smile as the boy with the clipboard, explained that the beach was for looking, not swimming.
Currents. Rocks. The resort took no responsibility.
It was, she said, part of the natural experience.
We tried the hike. That was Tessa, still captaining the morale, and I went because going was easier than watching her face if we didn't. Delfina pointed us at a trailhead behind the kitchen, forty minutes, easy, well-marked.
It was ninety minutes, not well-marked, uphill through air so thick it was like breathing through a warm sponge.
The waterfall, when we finally reached it, was a trickle down a rock face into a pool the color of weak tea, with a sign staked beside it in three languages: NO SWIMMING — FLASH FLOOD RISK.
Tessa looked at the sign, and the trickle, and laughed, and the laugh went somewhere she hadn't meant it to, cracked, and she sat down hard on a rock and put her face in her hands.
"I just wanted one thing," she said. "One thing to be what they said it would be.
The water. The hike. The rice. I keep waiting for one single thing to match and none of it does.
" She scrubbed at her face. "And I feel insane for caring, because it's a vacation, people have real problems, but I can't reach my kids, Claire.
I never go this long without checking in, and I keep thinking what if something happened and nobody could—" She stopped.
Breathed. Mara sat down next to her and didn't say anything, just put a hand flat between her shoulder blades and left it there, and the three of us sat by that tea-colored pool under the NO SWIMMING sign, sweating, twenty miles of bad road from a working phone.
Poor Viv, I thought. She'd be sick if she saw this.
Even there, on that rock, I was spending my sympathy on the woman who'd sent us.
Everything here was part of something. The philosophy, the experience, the reset. They had a word for every failure, and the word always made the failure sound like a gift I was too spoiled to unwrap.
None of us had slept. The villa held the day's heat all night like a shut fist, the fan only turned during power hours, and by three in the morning I'd given up and lain on top of the netting listening to Tessa breathe and Mara not-breathe, because Mara sleeps like she's guarding something.
At some point I went out to the porch and sat in the dark and tried to be grateful for the stars, which were, I'll give them this, extraordinary, more than I'd seen since I was a kid at my grandmother's lake house.
But you can't eat stars, and you can't sleep under them once the mosquitoes have found the one gap in the net.
The second night was worse than the first, because on the first you can still believe tomorrow fixes it.
By the second we knew it didn't. The power died at ten and the three of us lay in our narrow beds in the black heat, none of us sleeping, until Mara said into the dark, "We should just say it.
We're all lying here pretending. Let's not.
" So we didn't. Tessa talked about her kids, the youngest's asthma, how she still checks the monitor at night out of a habit she can't break, with the child a thousand miles off.
Mara talked, which she almost never does, about her own marriage, the good hard work of it, how her husband had learned to read her silences.
And then they asked about Grant, and I heard myself describe a marriage I wasn't sure I was still living in.
"He hasn't asked how the trip is," I said.
First time I'd let the thought all the way out of my mouth.
"Not once. I told him it was awful and he sent back, glad you got there safe.
Like a weather report." I stared up at netting I couldn't see.
"When did he stop being curious about me?
I can't find the day. It didn't have a day.
It just wore down, and I let it, because a marriage to somebody incurious is so much quieter than fighting about it. "
"That's not quiet," Mara said from the dark. "That's just slow."
I didn't answer. Out past the villa the generator ticked as it cooled and something moved in the underbrush, and I lay there in a marriage I'd let wear down on purpose because the wearing-down was peaceful.
Breakfast was the rice again, cold this time, with a fruit gone soft on one side.
Tessa ate hers with the grim focus of someone finishing a race.
She'd made herself morale officer around dawn and now she narrated the good things in a bright brittle voice that was starting to scare me a little.
"The tree in the courtyard's a plumeria, I looked it up.
And Delfina said there's a waterfall hike, that could be nice, we could do the hike. Viv would want us to do the hike."
"Viv," Mara said, "is not doing the hike."
"Well, no, obviously, she's at the hospital?—"
"Is she." Mara set down her fork. She'd been building to this since the lantern. "Claire, I want to ask you something, and I want you to actually think before you defend her, because you defend her like a flinch. When did Vivienne send you the hospital text?"
"Six. Right when we got to the airport."
"Six exactly?"
"Around six. Why?"
"Because I've done six years of trips Vivienne planned, and Vivienne does not do anything around a time.
She does things at a time. She sends the itinerary at nine sharp.
She confirms the car at seven the night before.
She has never once, in six years, been vague about a minute.
" Mara leaned in. "But the morning her aunt supposedly cracks a hip in a Sarasota bathtub, at the exact hour we're boarding, suddenly it's around six, go without me, don't cancel.
Does that sound like a woman in a crisis, or a woman running a schedule? "
I opened my mouth for the loyal thing. It was right there, smooth from years of use. That's not fair. You don't know what you'd sound like in a hospital. I'd have said it and meant it, because the other thing was too big to let into the room.
"Text her," Mara said. "Right now, while I'm sitting here. One specific question. Which hospital. What's the room number, you want to send flowers. Watch how long she takes, and watch whether she answers the question or sends back a paragraph of feelings."
"That's cruel."
"It's a test. The difference is whether she passes.
" She pushed my phone across the table. "If she's really in an ICU waiting room, she fires back Sarasota Memorial, room whatever, in four seconds, because it's the one fact her whole day is built around.
If she's somewhere she can't say, you get a wall of oh honey don't worry about flowers, just be present for each other, and it takes her an hour, because she has to work out what's safe. "
I looked at the phone and didn't pick it up.
I had a clean simple test in my hand and I wouldn't run it, because some part of me already knew how it came out and wasn't ready to.
Not knowing was still a place I could live.
"She's my friend," I said, which wasn't an argument, only the last wall I had.
"I'm your friend," Mara said. "She's your project.
There's a difference there too." Not unkind about it.
She reached over and took a piece of the soft fruit off my plate and ate it, wincing, because even the fruit was a small betrayal.
"Fine. Don't text her. But when the AC and the signal and the Thursday shuttle all turn out to be exactly the kind of thing Vivienne would've known about — because Vivienne knows about everything — I want you to remember I told you to run the test and you didn't want to. "
Then my phone buzzed.
Not a text. A bank alert, the kind that only lands when the signal catches, so it had been queued somewhere over the water and now dropped all at once, three of them, stacked.
Purchase alert: $4,200.00 — AURORA CELESTE CRUISE LINE. Purchase alert: $890.00 — MERIDIAN SPA SVCS. Purchase alert: $1,150.00 — ONBOARD BOUTIQUE.
I looked at them a long time. The rice sat cold in front of me. Mara had stopped talking, which was how I knew my face had done something.
"It's fraud," I said. "Somebody's got the card number.
Look — a cruise line, we're not on a cruise, Grant's home.
I'll call the bank when we get real signal and they'll reverse it.
" I turned the phone facedown, gentle, the way Tessa had set down her bag.
"It happens all the time. Grant left his card at that steakhouse once for two days and somebody bought a laptop on it. "
"A cruise, a spa, and a boutique," Mara said slowly. "That's not a laptop, Claire. That's somebody on a boat."
"It's fraud."
"On the Aurora Celeste."
"It's fraud, Mara."
She put both hands up and let it go, which was the second time in two days she'd let something go, and Mara letting things go is water running uphill.
It means a larger force is at work. She'd seen my face and decided I couldn't hold the real thing yet, and she was right, I couldn't. I flipped the phone over once more to be sure I hadn't misread, hadn't, turned it back, and went to find Delfina and ask, again, about the Thursday shuttle, and whether there was any way at all, any way, to leave sooner.
There wasn't. Not without arranging transport forty-eight hours out. Unless, Delfina said, we wanted to hire a private driver, which the resort didn't officially recommend, but which could sometimes be managed through one of the men who came up from the village with the fish.
His name, she said, was Mateo.