Chapter 15 Hailey
Hailey
They had possibly collectively lost their minds.
The Breakers was almost a thousand dollars a night.
Hailey was still in deep shit at work, Mack seemed to be in deep shit at life in general, and they had no real savings left apart from the untouchable check from Sunshine Enterprises.
Yet here they were, checking into one of the most luxurious hotels in the country, choosing the New York Times as their morning paper option, asking about breakfast.
“Tell me where you’d take her,” Hailey had said to Mack as she’d held him by Leonora’s bedside. “One place your mom always wanted to go.”
Mack’s mother had apparently aspired way beyond her means, and so, in a flurry of emotion and rash decision, here they were—though, of course, without Mack’s mother.
Sunlight streamed into the giant lobby of the Breakers, its beams bathing the furniture, the rugs, and the endless flower displays in an otherworldly and dust-particle-free glow.
Hailey searched the edges of her consciousness for the first hints of panic but couldn’t find any.
Bad thoughts were banned from here, best left outside with the poor people.
Mack took the room key from the receptionist, and they made their way to the elevator.
A bellboy wheeled the trolley of their embarrassing luggage—L.L.Bean duffel bags, the cardboard box with Leonora’s papers that Mack had refused to leave in the car—on its own discrete journey, freeing Hailey to pretend that they belonged in this place.
She wondered, fleetingly, if David Rainier had ever stayed here, and then slapped him from her mind.
Mack needed her; what was done was done, and now she had to press ahead without overthinking.
The hotel room was not a room, but a suite, with two Juliet balconies overlooking the ocean.
“Did you ask for a—”
“It was all they had,” Mack said, sinking onto a pristine white sofa.
She could not bring herself to ask him how much.
The bellboy knocked, and Mack didn’t move, so it was Hailey who let him in, watched him place their bags on the luggage racks, awkwardly gave him a twenty-dollar bill.
(Five hardly seemed enough, given the pile on the carpet and the exotic fruit basket on the dining table.) Once the man was dispatched with, Hailey stretched out on the bed, closed her eyes, and breathed in the scent of unattainable wealth.
No matter how many coffee stains she had had laundered, no matter how many broken hearts she had achieved revenge for or Cartier love bracelets she bought herself, she would never be immune to this kind of luxury.
Too much blue-collar water had passed under the bridge for her to take even a lesser five-star hotel for granted.
Maybe they should bring the girls here, whet their sense of entitlement, acclimatize them early.
When she opened her eyes, Mack had not moved from the sofa. Hailey sat up.
“How about we try the pool?”
He didn’t respond. Hailey had the distinct feeling that twenty years’ worth of denying his traumatic past may have come to an abrupt end. Which was just great. She really needed him to keep it buried for a while longer; this was not a good year for digging up a nervous breakdown.
She checked her phone. One email, from Marla the paralegal. Straus and Clarke, the two most senior partners, had been looking for her, had been “surprised” to hear she was out of the office.
Any update on Rainier payment? Hailey sent off with a prayer.
The negative reply was instant, and still Hailey couldn’t bring herself to text David.
She dragged herself from the bed, grabbed the $250 Vilebrequin swim shorts she had bought for Mack, and tossed them onto the coffee table in front of him. She saw him grimace at the print.
“These are some very expensive turtles,” she said to him, leaning down to pop the tags. “Come on, they want an outing.”
The long hallways were empty, and Hailey was glad no one was around; she had not sprung for additional beachwear, and they were both in sneakers and T-shirts, looking for all the world like they’d just wandered in from Marc’s.
But poolside it was another story: even in his delirium she saw Mack gape at the red bathing suit as she undressed.
He and his turtles followed her unprompted into the water and to the far side of the empty pool.
He still wasn’t saying much, but that was fine with Hailey, and long after the sun dipped down into the ocean the two of them floated there on the edge of the infinity, only their elbows touching.
* * *
Hailey came out of the shower the color of a lobster; her every pore had been opened to maximum capacity, and the mirror above the mini bar in the living room area steamed up as she opened the bathroom door.
“You okay?” Mack wanted to know. “Better?”
“I think it must have been the chlorine. Chlorine and exhaustion.” Mack had rallied, had pounced on her like a tiger when they’d come back from the pool, but Hailey had panicked, found herself unable to breathe as the room spun around her.
She couldn’t explain it, not even to herself. Nor did she want to try.
Mack was back on the sofa, and Hailey saw that he had opened Leonora’s box. She knelt over him in her towel to inspect the documents he’d laid out on the coffee table. One was a marriage license, dated 1977.
“Oh wow, look. Both your parents’ signatures are there.”
“I was just thinking she should have run a mile.”
Hailey thought so too, but said in her best divorce lawyer voice, “You can’t ever know that when you start out.
” She examined the whisper-thin sheet of paper, tried to picture them in some New York registry office, completely oblivious of what lay before them.
The document felt cursed; she put it back down on the table.
Mack was already moving on. He had found an old black-and-white photograph of two small children and presumably their parents, scowling out at the camera from the steps of a partially built house.
It could have been almost Civil War–era, based on their clothing and the state of the paper.
The background behind them was one of desolation, all barren fields and dust Hailey could almost feel on her tongue.
“That looks like Little House on the Prairie,” she said to Mack. “Who are they?”
“I have no idea, how sad is that? No names on the back, so I guess that info dies with Mom.”
Hailey could feel him teetering on some kind of precipice. She held up the room service menu. “Are we ordering in or going out somewhere? I don’t think we have the right clothes for any of the restaurants in the hotel . . . except maybe the staff kitchen.”
“Definitely in. I’m never leaving this room again.”
“You’d better win the lottery then.”
Mack did not answer, and the air was heavy with a question: Had they already? They were getting free money in the mail . . . wasn’t that the same thing? A Publishers Clearing House of sorts?
Hailey slipped into a logoed bathrobe and continued her examination of the in-room dining offering.
An order of chicken fingers was $45. For a minute she thought Mack shared her indignation; he gasped just as her eyes landed on the $32 piece of flourless chocolate cake.
But his attention was still on his mother’s box, and a handwritten letter he had found within it.
Dear Leonora,
He won’t take my money. You probably already know that.
You’ll say it’s his decision, and I guess you’re right. But he’s just a kid. A smart one—you did good. I went up to Duke, just to lay eyes on him there. He’s gotten so tall.
Maybe you’re happy that he hates me. Maybe you told him to. But I’m here, like always. We both know I’ll never, ever stop being his father. I’ll always look after him, I promise you that. And I will love you forever, and always wish I’d taken you both with me.
Yours,
Tommy
“I thought your father’s name was Warner?” Hailey said when she had finished reading.
“Warner Thomas. I don’t remember what she called him. I was so little when he left; I don’t remember her calling him anything but ‘your father.’ ” Mack leaned back and closed his eyes; she was losing him again.
“It must be some comfort to know that he was still looking out for you. Even after you told him to go away. Which he deserved,” she added hastily.
It took Mack a minute to reply. “I guess. Except I thought he had been looking out for me all along. I thought he paid for my mom, and then I thought he was Sunshine Enterprises . . . I mean, how could I just assume that?”
“It makes sense.” Hailey studied the dark, desperate scratches under never, ever. “Or it did before you knew he’d passed away. It made as much sense as anything.” She handed Mack the room service menu, and once he’d chosen, she called in their order. Mack was on his phone by the time she’d hung up.
“What are you doing?”
He turned his screen around to show her. He had pulled up his father’s obituary in the Daytona Beach News-Journal. It was a bare-bones write-up of the life of Warner T Evers and gave no hint of the man’s background apart from “he is survived by one son.”
“I looked for that and couldn’t find it,” Hailey admitted.
“I found it last week. It was way down in the Google search results.”
“Right.”
“There’s no photo with the obit though.”
“So?”
“So what if he’s not really dead?”
“Oh, Mack.” Hailey felt as sorry for him then as she had by his mother’s bedside.
“Just hear me out. What if he’s not dead, what if he faked it? What if he faked his own death so he could start over?”
“He’s like eighty, Mack,” Hailey said gently. “That’s a little late in life for that kind of thing, isn’t it?”
“Or okay, if he is dead, what if he set up some kind of thing where somebody else pays us for him? On his behalf, I mean? I know it sounds crazy, but I just don’t know anyone else rich enough to be sending us money out of nowhere, do you?”
“No.”
“And I don’t know, maybe Irene Weigand is overseeing it. Maybe she’s not telling me the whole truth—”
“Why would she change up how she pays for things? She could just keep paying for your mom the way she always does.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know! A way to hand off the money maybe, since she’s getting old. But those checks have to be tied to my dad somehow. Why would anyone else just send us a bunch of money?”
Hailey couldn’t think of an answer, at least not one that she was ready to voice out loud.
David Rainier was there, though, sipping his whiskey cocktail in the dark corners of her almost-subconscious.
Was it possible? Had the timing been right?
That first check that Mack had deposited, when exactly had it come?
She would ask him, later. Because David Rainier did owe her, no matter how much he hated his wife, and he was very, very rich.
Though she suspected that even he might have been shocked at the bill for their room service order.