Chapter 3
There was only one phone number Scarlett knew by heart that didn’t belong to her husband.
She sat at Cooper’s kitchen table the next morning with his phone in both hands and looked at it.
Her head still pounded. The light through the shutters hurt her eyes.
Cooper had gone downstairs to open the shop, because a dive shop that didn’t open would make people wonder why.
He had left her coffee, a plate of toast she couldn’t eat, and the phone.
She dialed.
It rang four times. Then Jess’s voice, hoarse and thick. “Who is this?”
Scarlett opened her mouth and nothing came out.
“Hello? Look, if you’re a reporter, I swear to God—”
“Jess,” Scarlett whispered. “It’s me. Don’t say my name.”
There was a silence on the line so long that Scarlett thought the call had dropped.
Then Jess made a sound Scarlett had never heard her make. Not after the worst night in the ER, not ever. It was half a sob and half a scream, and it was cut off in the middle, like she’d clapped her hand over her own mouth.
“Are you hurt?” Jess said. Her voice was shaking so hard it barely held together. “Tell me where you are. Tell me if you’re hurt.”
“I’m on an island. In the Exumas. A man pulled me out of the water. I hit my head. I’m okay.” Scarlett pressed her fist against her mouth. “Jess, I need you to not tell anyone. Not the police. Not Ryan. Nobody.”
“Not Ryan? Scarlett—”
“Don’t say my name.”
“Sorry. Sorry.” Jess took a long, ragged breath. Scarlett could hear her pulling herself together, piece by piece, the way she did at the start of a bad shift. “Okay. Okay. Don’t tell anybody. I can do that. Tell me how to get to you.”
* * *
Jess landed on the island’s little airstrip the next afternoon, in a six-seat plane that bounced twice before it stuck. Cooper drove Scarlett out to meet it in his old pickup, and Scarlett stayed in the cab with a baseball cap pulled low while Jess climbed down with a duffel bag and a backpack.
Jess looked terrible. Her curly black hair was tied up in a knot that was coming apart. She had dark circles under her eyes. She was wearing scrubs, as if she’d run straight out of a shift, and Scarlett later learned that she had.
She walked to the truck. She opened the passenger door. She looked at Scarlett, at the bandage and the swollen eye and the man’s T-shirt, and her face crumpled.
“One minute,” Jess said, and climbed into the cab, and wrapped both arms around her.
She cried for exactly one minute. Scarlett knew because Jess looked at her watch over Scarlett’s shoulder when she started, and again when she stopped. Scarlett cried too, into Jess’s scrubs, which smelled like hospital soap and airplane.
Then Jess sat back, wiped her face on her sleeve, and took Scarlett’s chin in her hand.
“Look at the light,” she said. “Follow my finger.”
* * *
Back at the apartment, Jess went through her like an ER patient.
She took the strips off the cut, looked at it closely, and said Cooper had done a good job, which made Cooper look at the floor.
She checked Scarlett’s eyes with a penlight.
She had her squeeze her hands and push against her palms and walk heel to toe across the kitchen.
She asked her the date and the name of the president and what they had eaten at their college team banquet senior year.
“Bad chicken,” Scarlett said.
“Terrible chicken.” Jess put the penlight away.
“You’ve got a concussion. A real one. No screens, no bright light, and you’re going to feel like garbage for a couple of weeks.
If you start slurring or you can’t wake up, we go to a hospital, and I don’t care who finds out.
” She turned. “Now tell me about the champagne.”
Scarlett told her. The bitter taste at the end. The halos around the lights. How her legs had gone wrong. How her thoughts kept sliding off.
Jess’s face went very still.
“Half a glass,” she said.
“Half a glass.”
“You’ve been drunk a hundred times. You know what drunk feels like.”
“This wasn’t drunk.”
Jess stood up. “Is there a clinic on this island?”
* * *
There was. It was a small pink building near the harbor with a flag out front and a nurse named Monique who had known Cooper for years.
Cooper went in first and talked to her. Then Jess went in with a cap pulled down and a plastic cup, and came out twenty minutes later with a folded piece of paper in her fist.
She didn’t open it until they were back in the truck.
“I told her it was mine,” Jess said. “I told her I was worried somebody slipped me something at a bar in Nassau. She had the kind of test cup we use in the ER. Fast, not fancy.” She unfolded the paper. “You don’t take anything, right? Nothing to sleep? Nothing for anxiety?”
“Nothing,” Scarlett said. “Ever. You know that.”
Jess turned the paper around. There was a checked box next to a long word Scarlett didn’t recognize, and a note in blue pen that said positive, benzo class.
“It’s a sedative,” Jess said. “A prescription one. The kind that makes you dizzy and sick and confused, and it’s twice as bad with alcohol. It stays in your system a few days, which is the only reason we caught it.” Her jaw was tight. “Somebody drugged you, sweetheart.”
Scarlett looked at the paper. Her hand was shaking now. It had not shaken on the boat, or in the water, but it shook now, holding a piece of paper in the front seat of a pickup truck.
“Alexis handed me the glass,” she said.
* * *
Jess wanted to go to the police that night.
They argued about it in Cooper’s kitchen with the shutters closed and the television off. Cooper sat on the counter and didn’t say anything. Every so often he looked at Scarlett, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
“She drugged you,” Jess said. “You have a test. You have a bruise on your back the size of a hand. You go to the police, they arrest her, done.”
“I have a test that says I had a sedative in me,” Scarlett said. “I don’t have anything that says she gave it to me.”
“She handed you the glass!”
“She handed me a glass at a party in front of eight people. And then she told the police I’d been drinking heavily.
” Scarlett pressed her fingers to her eyes.
“She already told her story, Jess. She got there first. Everyone on that boat saw me get sick. Everyone saw me stagger away from the table. And she’s a doctor.
She’s his doctor. Who do you think they’ll believe? ”
“You. They’ll believe you. You’re the one who went in the water.”
“I don’t remember going in the water.”
That stopped Jess.
“There’s a hole,” Scarlett said quietly.
“I remember walking to the back of the boat. I remember her face. And then I’m in the water choking.
I don’t know what happened in between. I don’t know if I fell.
I don’t know if she—” She couldn’t say it.
“If I walk into a police station with a concussion and a hole in my memory and say the famous doctor pushed me, what do you think happens? They look at the test. They find out what I read on Ryan’s phone.
And they say, poor thing. She found out about the other woman, she had a few drinks, she took something, and she went over the rail. ”
“You didn’t take anything.”
“Prove it.”
Jess opened her mouth. Then she closed it.
“And Ryan,” Scarlett said.
“What about Ryan?”
“I don’t know what Ryan knew.” Her voice cracked.
“I don’t know, Jess. I don’t think he’d ever.
I can’t believe it. But I didn’t believe he’d spend two months calling her at one in the morning, either.
She’s standing next to him. She’s touching him on television.
What if I call him and he’s the one who picks up the phone and tells her? ”
Jess sat down hard in a kitchen chair.
“He called me,” she said after a while. “Yesterday. At four in the morning.”
Scarlett looked up.
“He wanted to know if you’d said anything to me.
If you were upset. If you’d—” Jess stopped.
“If you’d been sad lately. He wanted to know if you might have done something on purpose.
” She rubbed her face. “I’ve known that man for nine years, and I’ve never liked him, and he sounded like he was dying. ”
Scarlett turned toward the window so neither of them could see her face.
She wanted to call him. She wanted it so badly that her hands curled. She wanted to hear his voice say her name and know from the sound of it whether he was guilty, and she knew that was stupid, and she knew she couldn’t, and she stood at the shutters and hated all of them. Alexis. Ryan. Herself.
“Not yet,” she said. “Not until I know.”
* * *
Her face was on every channel.
Cooper came back from the settlement store the next morning with bread and eggs and a stack of newspapers from Nassau, and Scarlett’s picture was on the front of all of them.
The foundation photo with the pearls. A photo of her at a gala in a green dress.
A photo of her and Ryan on their wedding day, laughing, that someone must have gotten from Luke.
“People here watch the news,” Cooper said. “Not a lot of people. But enough.”
So that afternoon she sat on a kitchen chair with a towel around her shoulders, and she held out Cooper’s kitchen scissors to Jess.
“To here,” Scarlett said, and touched her jaw.
“You’ve had long hair since we were eighteen.”
“I know.”
Jess cut it. It took a long time, because the scissors were for cutting fishing line and not hair.
Long dark blonde pieces fell onto the towel and the floor.
Scarlett watched them fall. She thought about Ryan in the early days, winding a piece of it around his finger in bed.
She thought about her mother braiding it before swim meets.
When the cutting was done, Jess mixed a box of dark brown dye from the settlement store in a cereal bowl and painted it on with a pastry brush. They waited while it set. Then Scarlett rinsed it out in Cooper’s tiny shower and looked in the fogged mirror.