Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Tess
The first time Ted and Marissa Monroe stayed at the Carmen Beach Resort, they knew it was something special.
It was their honeymoon, and because they’d married young, a trip to the nearby Gulf Coast was all they could afford. The resort was little more than an oversize shack at the time, with clapboard siding and a rotten back porch that led to the sea. It wasn’t a bad thing, though, because they were in that kind of love that makes even the most humble date nights feel like a grand affair. They played in the surf, ate jumbo Gulf shrimp and oysters until their bellies were nearly bursting, then stayed up all night chatting while huddled close beneath sandy sheets as they dreamed of the life they’d build together.
One that, a few years later, would grow to revolve around me.
The Carmen grew bigger, too, but maintained its charm. My parents had a regular room on the top floor with a view of the water. It was jokingly named the Marilyn Suite, golden plaque and everything, as a riff on our last name and my mother’s gorgeous blonde hair. When I picture Mom and Dad, he’s wearing a Cuban-style linen shirt and her sundress billows around toned, suntanned legs. They’re leaning against the white railing of their balcony, laughing at some joke that only makes sense to them.
My grandparents continued bringing me here after my parents were killed, but staying in that room was too difficult for them. Too many memories, especially for my grandmother, who never quite got over the loss of her daughter and son-in-law.
It wasn’t until she, too, was gone and my grandfather became too sick to come with me that I reclaimed my parents’ room. Mauricio, the operations/maintenance/a little-bit-of-everything manager, was overjoyed. The room still smelled like them. Or maybe my memories of them are so wrapped up in this place that, to me, they smelled like the room. They were everywhere, from the pergola covering the rooftop bar that they helped the owners, Alex and Jenna, select to the mimosa tree the gardeners let Dad and me plant by the entrance when I was six.
Even now, as I walk through the sliding glass doors into the lobby, I swear Dad’s booming laughter is echoing from the hall that leads to the elevator bay on my right. Mom’s espadrilles slap the seashell-colored tile just to my left, at the edge of my vision. I turn, half expecting her to be standing by the coffee counter with her arms wide open, welcoming me home.
Because that’s what the Carmen is to me. Home. With all its pain and comfort wrapped up in an ocean-blue bow.
“ Mi querida Tessa. ” Mauricio sweeps me up in his cigarette-and-cologne scent before I’ve even spotted him. I squeeze him back, peppering kisses along his cheekbone as he does the same to me. “ Te extrané. ”
“I missed you, too, Mo.”
We retreat to cupped elbows, scanning each other for new scars or fashion movements (I’m not sure which). He smiles, folding his tan face into joy. I mirror it, though my heart is still throbbing with nostalgia.
It’s a relief, knowing if some of the grief leaks through my facade that I won’t be judged for it. The Carmen is the one place where I can be honest. Where I don’t owe anyone my composure. I just exist here, in this limbo at the edge of my real life. For the rest of the year, the staff here do not know me. So what does it matter if a tear falls in their opalescent lobby even as I smile?
Mo swipes my cheek clean without faltering. “How beautiful you are. More like your mamá every day, Tessa.” His accent is thick, landing firmly on each consonant. He’s also the only person in the world I’d let add an A to the end of my name. “So grown up I can hardly bear it.”
“ Gracias, Tio. ” Despite his persistence through the years, my Spanish is abysmal, but he loves it when I try. Even my simple phrases earn a wash of pride over his expression. “I’m literally thirty, though.”
He mock spits on the ground to my right, his left, then says, “Not possible. Because that would make me old, and I do not feel old, querida. ”
I rub a thumb over the wrinkle between his dark, bushy brows. “You’re not old, Mo. Simply experienced.”
He blows a raspberry that trickles into laughter. “Come; the ladies will not allow me to keep you to myself much longer.”
With an arm around my shoulders, he takes control of my ratty suitcase and guides us both toward the check-in desks in the far left corner of the room. Every surface here is white or beige or some shimmery shade of almost-pink or almost-blue that gives the impression that you’re gazing at the inside of a conch. Couches and tables arranged haphazardly throughout the space allow people to enjoy the view through the windows along the back wall, which face the pool deck and, beyond that, the Gulf.
The desks—three stand-alone pods forming a half circle—are framed with driftwood boards harvested from the beach. Exposed wooden beams traverse the lofty ceilings overhead, with fans constructed to look like palm fronds dropping from them. They circle lazily, stirring up the Florida humidity that gets swept in each time the door opens behind me.
I tug my blouse away from my chest, allowing some of that air to cool my sweat-dampened skin. It’s not busy season yet. A few regulars, whom I acknowledge with a nod, pass through the lobby on their way to the half-empty parking lot. Give it two weeks, though, and the place will be slammed with every tourist along the I-65 corridor.
The desks on either end are empty. In the center pod, two familiar women huddle close. Jenna glances up from a paper she’s been studying on the raised counter that shields the computer from view, her brown gaze finding mine and instantly illuminating. “Tess!”
Jenna co-owns the Carmen with her husband, Alejandro, who is Mauricio’s older brother. Their daughter, Xiomara, is poised in front of the computer to her mother’s left. She started working here officially when she turned sixteen two years ago, though she, like me, has been around the place since infancy. Mara tears her gaze from the key jacket she’d been scribbling on and squeals at the sight of me.
Mo barely releases me in time for the women to envelop me in an embrace that’s all pointy limbs and long, dark hair.
“Ouch!” I pull away, laughing while rubbing my sore boob. “Someone nailed me with an elbow.”
“Can you blame us?” Jenna squeezes her daughter since she’s been rejected from squeezing me. “We’re just so excited. Tess time is our favorite time of year.”
Despite a forty-year age difference, the two women could be twins. Short and thin but strong, both built like gymnasts. Ears that poke out from their lush, dark hair and skin that’s always kissed by the sun. Jenna struggled for years with infertility. She finally got pregnant with Mara by accident just when she figured her fertile days—if she’d ever had any—were long behind her. I remember the summer we showed up to find a rosy-cheeked and swollen-stomached Jenna, and all the summers after where I pretended Mara was the baby sister I never had.
“Can’t blame you at all.” I stick my tongue out at Mara. “Wasn’t sure if I’d get to see you this year or if you’d be too busy with college prep.”
“If you had social media, you’d know I deferred a year.” She flips her hair over her shoulder as she circles her mother, returning to her spot in front of the computer. “I’m going to travel the world first.”
My rounded gaze meets its match in Jenna’s. “Is that so?”
Jenna crosses herself but doesn’t comment. I can’t imagine it’s easy to loosen the reins on a baby you never thought you’d get to have.
“Yep. Some friends and I are going to backpack through Europe. Have you ever been?”
I tug at one of Mara’s curls. “I spend all my vacation hours with you, you dork. When would I have been to Europe?”
Mara shrugs and types something, probably my name, into the computer. I unzip my purse and reach for my wallet, but a firm hand lands on my wrist, stopping me.
“Not a chance,” Jenna says, glaring.
“You know the rules. Monroes stay for free at the Carmen.” Mauricio pats my back, his eyes crinkling at the edges. “Though I wouldn’t say no to help if you feel like folding sheets.”
“I’d rather give you my next paycheck,” I tease, bumping him with my hip. Internally the realization that I’m the only Monroe left carves out a notch in my heart that I’ll be nursing for days.
We all seem to think it at once, because a silence falls between us save for the click of Mara’s nails against the keyboard.
Discomfort settles in the nape of my neck. No matter how hard I try to make returning to the Carmen a happy occasion, somehow the sadness always leaks through. I clear the lump from my throat, plastering a smile on my face to remind everyone I haven’t actually forgotten how to make the expression. “You know what’s crazy? I actually found out last year that I have an uncle. Mom had a half-brother that she never knew about.”
“That’s amazing!” Mo says just as Mara adds, “When do we get to meet him?”
My smile thins, and I glance from Mo to Mara to Jenna in turn. “Well, he lives in Colorado, so even I haven’t seen him since Christmas. But next summer, maybe.”
I try to picture Gary here, in one of his fishing shirts and a pair of cargo shorts, surrounded by the shimmering lobby. Enveloped in an embrace by the Ortiz family. Witnessing me floating down the halls like a waif or saturated with grief as I lie in the same room where my parents made plans for the years that lay before them, never realizing how few there would be.
A haze of tears like fogged glass clouds my vision. My friends become a blur of colors before me. Funny how easy it is to only remember the sunshine and salty skin and sand-ridden carpets when I’m away from here. The minute I step through the door, it’s like I become a different version of myself. A truer one, I fear.
“Is that where you met your man?” Jenna asks, completely missing whatever mist has suddenly turned my eyes overcast.
I blink once, twice, to clear it. “My man?”
She laughs. Mo hip checks me. Mara places my key card on the counter, and even she is smirking.
“No need to play coy with us. Christopher arrived yesterday, and Mara here had the pleasure of checking him in, but we all watched the security footage after.” Jenna’s full lips curve wickedly. “Very handsome, Tess.”
“I’m sorry.” I shake my head, trying to reel my thoughts back to a place where what they’re saying makes sense. “Christopher who?”
Mo scratches his temple. “Something with an L?”
Mara’s nails clack rapidly, the light reflected on her face changing as a new screen loads. “Llewellyn.”
“He was asking for you. Said he was meeting you here.” Jenna’s eyebrows rise. “Is that not— Did you not invite him?”
My chest flutters like my heart has grown wings and is desperately attempting to fly away. Or I’m having a heart attack. The odds are fifty-fifty, favoring no one. In a matter of seconds I’m thrown from grief to something else entirely, with no way for my body to make the journey between the two.
Heaviness settles in my limbs as the image of a dark, broody cop fills my belly with unwelcome warmth. Kit is here. Here. Either in a room that looks too similar to mine or at the lima bean–shaped pool where I learned to swim or in the ocean, the water tousling his hair and making his skin at once sticky and deliciously salty. He’s at the Carmen. Right. Now.
Did I invite him? Well, yes, I guess I kinda did. In a joking way, though, right? I was being flirtatious, drunk on ice cream and the scent of his hair gel and filled with the kind of confidence that only comes from conversations held in the dark cabin of a car. I never thought he’d actually show up. Never actually hoped.
That’s a lie, if only a small one. For that brief moment after the words spilled from my lips and before they tripped into other, more scandalous thoughts, I allowed myself to imagine it. Lying close to him in a cloud of white bedding, the sound of the waves drifting through a cracked balcony door. But in my wildest dreams I never thought it would feel so thick with terror and vulnerability. That beneath it all would be a thread of anticipation, bubbling up like an unwelcome illness in the midst of the overwhelm.
“Tess? Should we be concerned?” Jenna asks.
“I’ll call the police on him if you’d like,” Mara offers with a shrug.
“No, no.” I suck in a breath. When I open my mouth again, I pray my voice comes out level. “I’m just…surprised, is all. We haven’t talked in a while, and I… I guess I assumed he wouldn’t come.” Haven’t talked at all, actually. Not since that night outside the Horseshoe.
Everyone is staring at me. Even if I couldn’t see them, I’d feel their gazes on me like a thousand tiny pinpricks in my skin.
I stuff fisted hands into the oversize pockets of my boyfriend jeans. Grip. I need to get a fucking grip. “Sorry, what room is he in?”
Never mind that I don’t know what I’ll do with that knowledge. I’m teetering between avoiding him like the plague and hunting him down to rip him a new one for not calling first.
“We’re not really supposed to say—” Mo starts.
“It’s 326,” Mara interjects, eyebrow raised.
Fuck. Fuck. “Okay.” I grab my key packet from the counter and force a smile. “Thank you.” Mo fights me for control of my bag, a question still in his gaze, but I pry it away in the end. “I’ve got it, Tio. See you all around?”
Jenna takes a step toward me. “Tess, if?—”
“So good to see you again! Really!” I toss over my shoulder, already making a break for the elevator bay down the hall. An alarmed family plucks their toddler from my path. I don’t slow down. Don’t apologize. Heat is flooding my face, my throat, my head until I can hardly see to press the button that will summon the elevator.
By some miracle of the universe, it’s already on the ground floor and closes behind me blessedly fast. I want to sag into the railing, but I can’t, because realization is sweeping over me like a splash of cool water. Kit has to leave. I can’t trust myself to be levelheaded when that man is around, if our making out on the porch of the Horseshoe Inn is any indication. The raw, aching grief that I only allow this close once a year… I can’t do that with him here, distracting me. Because there’s no doubt in my mind that he will if given the chance.
I press the button for the third floor. My spine is rigid. My stomach twists with anticipation. I’m going to see Kit again for the first time since our kiss. A fist closes around my heart, whether to protect it or wring my feelings dry, I couldn’t say.
A bell chimes and the doors slide open. I spill from the elevator and turn right, then left, climbing the spine of the L-shaped building. My feet move without needing instruction on where to go. Of course they don’t. We’ve walked this path a thousand times before.
At the end of the long hallway, I stop, the wheels of my suitcase nearly taking out my ankles in the process. I become my pulse. Every nerve ending in my body flickers with its beat. With a trembling hand, I knock. It doesn’t take long. Almost like he could sense me coming.
He appears from behind the opening door like an apparition. The way my parents would still be standing in the kitchen in the days after their funerals. Something I willed into existence. Now I have to will him right out of it.
Our gazes meet, green grass and the earth that lives beneath it, and he smiles, stealing my breath away. “You’re here.”
“I am.” My voice is surprisingly calm. Stronger than I feel. I stand taller, even as I white-knuckle my suitcase handle. Every ounce of fear, I siphon into some sense of authority, praying it hides the truth well enough. “But you shouldn’t be.”