33
“I’m just saying, you overplayed your hand when you emptied the vending machines.” Dan shimmied his shoulders, tried to make his Dan-shaped hole a little roomier. “That’s what did you in. It was the vending machines and the plumbing. At the end of a long day, Lilyanna, people just want some trans fat and a quiet place to shit. That’s it. Everything else is window dressing.”
Lilyanna’s dusty accent called back from somewhere in the dark. “Quit talking to me.”
“And then there was the electricity. I actually think you could’ve pulled that off. People understand the need to conserve energy, that’s a simple concept. But lighting up Building A like a goddamn Christmas tree every night—what were you thinking? How’d you think they’d—”
“Danny,” Mara said from below. Or above? It was impossible to tell. “Maybe let’s be quiet for a while.”
Dan had been talking a long time, though it’s worth noting that time, famously an abstract concept, only becomes more nebulous once entombed. He’d been talking for two or three hours straight at least, and actually, you know what, it had probably been the better part of a day because he’d already explained the intricacies of Dr. Terry Shae’s evil plan, recited the wedding vows he memorized but never delivered, and pondered aloud why the latest Die Hard movies were both thematic and structural disappointments.
He’d now shifted his monologue to cover Lilyanna’s toxic leadership style and how it had directly led to everyone’s demise.
“I’m just warming up,” he said, because it was true. When he was talking, he wasn’t thinking about what happened to Alan and Charles. He wasn’t thinking about all the guests at Tizoc. He wasn’t thinking about what was going to happen to him and Mara either.
He used his fingernail to pry loose a small rock he’d been picking at for hours. Once dislodged, a larger pile of debris shifted, further compressing their graves.
Lilyanna shrieked as the ground settled around them. And then: “Gracious Lord, we pray that You would be with us today in mind, body, and spirit, to remind us that You made plans for each of us long ago, that we—”
“What’s this we stuff?” Dan asked. “Lilyanna Collins is not authorized to speak on my behalf, Lord. Actually, I’ve got some things of my own to say to you once I’m finished with her. I—”
“Danny,” Mara said. “That’s enough.”
“We’re trapped beneath thousands of tons of LCD screens because of her, Mara.”
Lilyanna said, “That’s Shae’s fault.”
Dan lifted his head, whacking it against something. “Well, you certainly didn’t help the situ—”
“ Danny .” Mara was stern, as stern as one can be from the fetal position. “Fuck. She just lost her husband.”
Dan scoffed at that, which was a pretty mean thing to scoff at, but come on. Yeah, she’d lost Pete, but how many people on Tizoc had lost their Petes? Gloria’s Pete was shot to death. Alan and Charles, they were each other’s Petes, and they exploded. Mara’s Pete was two soliloquies away from succumbing to dehydration. Shae was the root cause, sure, but Lilyanna and her ilk were just as culpable, just as—
“Did you scoff, son? Did you just scoff at my husband’s death?”
“Whatever,” Dan shot back. “I know how you felt about Pete.”
Mara gasped so hard that she probably inhaled two tablespoons of sediment.
“No, really,” Dan said. “You should’ve heard her in the hotel room, she—”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about. You need to—”
“—called him useless, stupid, said he was an anchor to her ship. Said he could never—”
Lilyanna snapped. “And I loved that stupid, useless man with every fiber of my being. I was a prisoner of war, son, you caught me at a weak moment. Stay married for nineteen years, and tell me if you don’t once criticize your wife.”
Now she was weeping again, and Dan felt Mara’s glare through the earth, felt those dual lasers slice clean through the wreckage and flambé his still-beating heart.
“Of course you loved him,” Mara said softly.
“Pete was the father of my children. He was the anchor of our ship. I—gave up my last chance to see my babies again just for another moment with him. So don’t you tell me I didn’t love him. How dare you.”
No one talked for a while, not even Dan, until there was finally a break in Lilyanna’s tears.
Mara said, “That’s why you helped me save Danny.”
Lilyanna sniffed. She took a long breath. “Oh, hun. I put so much work into that man. You know what that’s like. You should’ve seen him when we got married. In worse shape than yours. Just a complete blank canvas. I spent years fixing that—”
“ Fixing ,” Mara emphasized.
“Fixing, hun. Fixin’ him into the man I—”
“You’re so full of shit.” Woah. The empathy had abruptly drained from Mara’s voice. Dan knew that tone. That was the Mara’s-thinking-about-tearing-your-ass-up tone.
“Don’t act like you didn’t have similar plans for Dan,” Lilyanna said.
Mara laughed. “Everyone needs fixin’ till you come along, right, Lilyanna?”
“It don’t say life coach on my Instagram for nothing.”
“Right. You coach the hell out of those BeachBod boss babes. And this island,” Mara slapped some wreckage, “certainly would’ve been lost without you.”
“That’s right.”
Mara shifted. Oh, boy. She was settling into this one. Dan chewed one of his fingernails, pretended it was popcorn.
“So let’s take a look at your scorecard, Coach. Those BeachBod women—all million of them or whatever—the vast majority of them lose money, don’t they?”
“Now, that ain’t true. Income potential is based on individual output and any earning claims are—”
“We’re buried alive, Lilyanna. The FTC can’t get you here.” Mara clicked her tongue. “Okay, crappy start. Let’s talk about the island. You’re right that Shae started all this. But do you think that maybe— maybe —if we had all worked together, we could’ve figured out what was going on before it came crashing down on our heads? All anyone’s been focused on for over a week is class warfare, so we completely missed the real threat staring us in the face. That’s because of you. ”
Lilyanna began to protest, but Mara rolled on.
“And Pete. I’m sorry what happened to him, Lilyanna, truly. He didn’t deserve that. But you empowered the monster that took his life. And now you have the gall to say you fixed him? You know what Pete said to me before the wedding? He said your daughter wouldn’t even talk to him. For years . He saw me in my wedding dress, and he almost cried because he was convinced his own daughter wouldn’t want him at her wedding. Said he wished he’d made different choices.” Mara scoffed. “Despite appearances, that dude was broken.”
Dan remembered Pete saying something weird about their daughter that day too.
Mara gave Lilyanna a moment to respond, but she didn’t take it.
“You don’t fix people—you bring out the worst in them. Life coach, my ass. Anyone who claims to have mastered life to the point that they’re qualified to coach others’ is full of shit. Each of us is just figuring this out as we go. There’s no playbook, or secret to success, or even one definition of what the hell success is . So don’t tell me, Lilyanna, about plans to fix my husband. Dan doesn’t need fixing—he just needs what we all need: nonjudgmental love and support. Maybe if you’d had some of that, you wouldn’t have turned into such a colossal uppity bitch.”
God damn . Dan would’ve pumped his fist in the air if there was any nearby. Instead he just mumbled, “Mm-hm,” like that added anything, and for the first time since he’d met her, Lilyanna was speechless.
The three of them lay silent for hours.
Mara was a master at dressing people down, and she certainly had a flair for dramatics, but she inevitably felt guilty afterward. Dan imagined what she’d text him right now if their phones worked. She’d say, Was I too harsh , without any punctuation, followed immediately by I’m starting to feel bad lol . And Dan would say, no, no way, Lilyanna needed to hear that , and then he’d say, it was actually kind of hot with the eggplant emoji. And Mara would just say, haha , and nothing else, which Dan would take as a sign that she wanted him to be serious, so he’d say, OK maybe we can soften it the next time we talk to her. SLIGHTLY .
“Hey, Lilyanna,” Mara eventually said. “About before. I—”
Lilyanna sniffed. “No, you were right, hun.” She paused. “I think there’s something wrong with me, y’all.” She laughed, but it wasn’t a real laugh, no way, and she became quiet again.
“We were going to steal the plane,” Dan admitted, feeling like maybe he should be reflective too. “We were going to leave everyone behind to fend for themselves. I was okay with that. Maybe there’s something wrong with me too.”
“I shouldn’t have ruined our wedding,” Mara said.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Dan said.
“It was awful of me to wear white, hun. It’s not even in my top three colors.”
“If I hadn’t gone along with Lenny’s plan…” Mara’s voice trailed. “I just got so caught up in winning, you know, being the person I thought my parents would want me to be. Maybe the war wouldn’t have happened. Lenny. Gloria. Charles. So many people would—”
“I made up that stuff about Lenny stealing the food on the first night,” Lilyanna said. This enraged Dan, but he didn’t express it. Their grave had suddenly morphed into a safe space. “My whole life, I’ve always said anything I needed to get my way.”
“I threatened to stab scissors into the guy whose beard is his whole personality,” Dan said. “The one who sang ‘Bubble Toes’ at Julio’s funeral. I was really mean to him.”
“I tried to manipulate your husband on y’all’s wedding night,” Lilyanna said.
“I know,” Mara said.
“It didn’t work,” Lilyanna said.
“It kind of almost did,” Dan said.
Lilyanna prayed. “I know I don’t deserve a second chance, Heavenly Father, I know it. But if You see fit to get us through this trial, Lord, things’ll be different. I’ll be different. I’m not gonna try to fix people, Lord, I’m just gonna help them. I have the money and power to do so much good in Your name, Lord, I do, and I can make a difference. I’m gonna be better.”
She stopped. “I’m gonna be better, y’all.”
The ground shifted but no one cried out. As debris again settled around him, something wriggled down near where Dan’s hand was folded. A rat, he thought, which was perfect. Plague was the only postapocalyptic box they hadn’t yet checked on their vacation.
But it was Mara’s hand. She’d found him in the dark, and he squeezed it and she squeezed back.
Space and time collapsed. The sun circled Earth, not the other way around, fish climbed trees and chimpanzees swam the Pacific. Dan’s entire world was flipped upside down, pulled inside out, and the ringing in his ears had softened to a dull, mournful hum.
He was awake or dead. Definitely one of those, but also maybe neither.
No one had spoken in what felt like years. Dan was afraid to speak, terrified Mara wouldn’t speak back. Did his legs work? He wiggled a toe. Yeah. What about—what about your hands, Dan? His left pinky twitched. Hey, that’s something! Okay.
He summoned the last of his strength—that got him up on an elbow—and he inched toward a side wall, disconnecting from Mara. He brushed his hand over it. Pebbles skipped away, dust filled his nose. He swatted the wall again. Again. A thousand years from now, when they found their tattered clothes down here, there’d be evidence. Evidence that Daniel Lewis Foster hadn’t given up completely, that he’d left some sort of mark, that he tried. Even if he never made it out, even if he didn’t get anywhere, he hadn’t gone gentle into the night either.
He’d done something.
A larger chunk of rock gave way, and the ground shook from above. Oh, God. The biggest landslide yet. Nice, Danny. They’d be—wait.
Hold on.
Dan listened intently, every hair in his ears at attention.
Were those?
“MARA! Mara!” He shook her hand.
“Hm?” She hardly stirred.
“Voices!”
“What?”
“Voices, Mara! Voices!” Danny tried to scream but mostly spat out dirt. “Down here! DOWN HERE!”
Lilyanna was moving now, somewhere out there. She screamed too. “YOU FOUND ME! I’m right here! It’s Lilyanna! IT’S BEACHBOD BY LILYANNA!”
That dull, mournful hum didn’t belong to the space between Dan’s ears, it belonged to a backhoe, and it loosened the earth and debris above their heads, so close that Dan thought it might crush them. Dan and Lilyanna screamed some more, and Mara joined in, and Dan’s vocal cords scraped like sandpaper against stucco. The backhoe puttered to a stop, and there was a moment of silence, but then someone hollered back, said, “We can hear you, we can hear you. We’re from the United States, and we’re here to help.”
Dan, Mara, and Lilyanna cried from joy.
Dan could’ve delivered ten more monologues in the time it took them to clear a path out. It was careful work, removing all that rubble, like sweeping fossils with a seven-ton brush. But eventually a gloved finger poked through the ceiling, and then another, and when they retracted, light filtered through the holes.
The rescue team lifted Mara out first because she couldn’t stand on her own. They covered her eyes with a bandana so they wouldn’t be damaged by the sun, and she floated into the light like an alien abduction, her hand glued to Dan’s until they were forced to part. Then they freed Lilyanna.
Finally they seized Dan, exhumed him with one mighty pull, and placed him on a stretcher, six men wearing clothes with Red Cross emblems, and they said, “You’re a tough son of a bitch, man. We got you, we got you, here, cover your eyes.”
But Dan pushed away the bandana, and he gazed into the endless blue sky, because for the first time in a long time, there wasn’t anything hanging over him.