At a restaurant meant for locals but appropriated by the sunburned, Rachel sits while Devlin and Davenport order for her: a double-bacon cheeseburger, a bowl of conch chowder, a plate of coconut macaroons.
“Get her a beer,” Devlin says. “Two.”
“God, beer,” Davenport says. “What I wouldn’t.”
Rachel watches them fight over the menu, as if they’ve never held one, as if it’s pornography, a love letter, a treasure map. The waiter lets them keep it to peruse, which they do, producing a pack of menthols while they read it, smoking as if they’ve just had sex. Rachel notices that the Caribbean sounds different from other oceans. It sounds like something Rachel knows, but cannot place.
“Jerk chicken,” Davenport says.
“Fucking potatoes,” Devlin adds.
When the food arrives, the sisters sit back and watch Rachel eat, their eyes glassy with booze and tears.
“Take it slow,” Davenport says.
So, Rachel does. She eats the burger as if it’s her first, the soup as if it’s her last. She pinches up each cookie with her soft, ringless fingers and holds them up for the girls to see, sugar in the sunlight. By the time the meal is over, Rachel feels the feeling of a job well done—one hundred stacks of counted checks. A layered pudding, well-layered.
“Take a bow,” Devlin says.
“No shit,” Davenport adds.
Rachel does not refuse. She brushes the crumbs from her lap and stands. She bows stage left. She bows stage right. She bows right down the center.
That night at the house, from their twin bamboo beds, the girls show Rachel how they entertain themselves without television.
“Things to smoke,” Devlin says, laying out cigarettes and joints like a picket fence on her bedspread.
“Things to drink,” Davenport says, placing a bottle of vodka next to a bottle of rum on the nightstand.
“And things to play,” Devlin says, thumping her skull as if she’s thinking up something good.
“Like what?” Rachel asks.
Devlin runs an unlit joint under her nose and inhales. “Sometimes Davenport and I pretend we’re regular people. That we’re not rich.”
“Yeah,” says Davenport. “We just lie here and say shit that rich people would never say.”
Rachel frowns. “Such as?”
Devlin licks the joint and smooths it, like a child’s cowlick. “Rachel can judge us,” she says to Davenport. “Rachel can tell us if we sound poor.”
“Oh, wow!” Davenport says, showing an emotion Rachel guessed her incapable of. An emotion Rachel feels compelled to nurture, to cup her hands around and blow on like an ember. “Would you?”
Rachel cannot imagine saying no. “Okay,” she says. “For Skittles.”
For a second, Davenport and Devlin further brighten, as if Rachel has offered to eat two slices of cake in front of them. “God, I love you,” Devlin says.
Davenport says nothing, she just stares at Rachel until Rachel turns warm, and after an eternal minute, Devlin lights a joint and takes a long drag, thinking. “I’m gonna run to Sears,” she finally says, releasing smoke. “And get me a new jog bra.”
Davenport doles out two Skittles to Rachel. “Well?”
Rachel eats the candy. “That doesn’t sound rich.”
Davenport takes her turn. “I got summer teeth,” she says. “Some are here. Some are there.”
Davenport and Devlin burst into an unexpected laughter that sounds both magnificent and terrifying, the howl of two lean dogs. Rachel eats the rest of the Skittles off the bedspread while the sisters, beige and bony, pass the joint between them. Both of them could fit inside her body, she thinks. Davenport and Devlin could be dropped into her torso like two silk scarves into a basket. They could hide there, where the hunger lives, a little, shimmering, satin pool.
“What’s your dad do?” Davenport asks out of nowhere.
“Great question,” Devlin says.
Rachel has forgotten where she is, who she is supposed to be. “Oh,” she says, coming to, declining the joint with a wave of her padded palm, imagining two scarves unfurling, down her throat. “He’s an entertainer.”
Davenport and Devlin look at each other quiet, then they clamp their hands over their mouths like they’re at a funeral suppressing laughter. “Like an actor?” Devlin says.
“Like a rock star?” Davenport adds.
Rachel isn’t sure what to say. “He just has this way,” she says, “of putting on a show.”
“Oh, our dad’s like that, too,” Devlin says. “He throws big parties and never shuts up. Sometimes he pays someone to play the piano.”
Davenport wets her fingertips and pinches the hot end of the joint without reaction. “One time, he hired a magician for the cokeheads. You know. Cokeheads love card tricks.”
Devlin nods. “And last Christmas he brought in an owl.”
Davenport points at Devlin. “That’s right. He found an owl under the house, down by the stilts, and brought it inside to show to everyone at the party.”
Rachel stares. “An owl?”
“Yeah,” Devlin says. “Did you know there were owls in the islands? I didn’t. I thought owls were from a forest in Germany or some shit.”
“Dad just walked in with that owl on a beach towel. Everybody went out of their fucking skulls and the owl didn’t do a goddamn thing,” Davenport says. “It had to be sick.”
Devlin blinks slow, remembering. “It just sat on that towel and stared. Everyone was passing it around and Dad was standing there like it was no big thing except it turned out to be a big thing.”
“A real owl,” Rachel says.
“Turns out owls are beautiful,” Davenport says. “Who knew?”
“Thanks, Dad,” Devlin says, as if he’s right in the room with them. “People were so-so before you brought the owl in, but now they’re happy as hell.”
Rachel feels something close to fear, rising. “What happened to the owl?”
Devlin lays down on her bed and closes her eyes. Davenport pulls off her shirt and sits there, topless, using her shirt to pat under her armpits. “It’s hot,” she says. “I’m wasted.”
Davenport falls forward on her bed. Her tan, bare back is as slight as a child’s. Rachel stands there, alone for a moment, thinking about the owl. She wonders if they let it go. If the owl let people touch it. She imagines the owl, startled, flying around the living room, the guests both delighted and afraid, Mr. Billingsley really getting his money’s worth, even though it cost him nothing. Rachel leaves Devlin and Davenport the way they are: passed out, with the lights on.
In Rachel’s room, Rachel finds Mrs. Billingsley on the bed, staring at the ceiling, a drink loose in her hand. Her stout arms are pink from sun. Her eyes are pink from gin. Her dress, also pink, is hiked up on one side to reveal a pale, dimpled leg.
“My girls,” she slurs. “I do apologize.”
Out the window, Rachel can hear the ocean but not see it. She still cannot place what it sounds like. “Oh, they’re fine,” she says. “They’re fun.”
“Pfft,” Mrs. Billingsley says, shaking her head, jiggling a bit of her drink onto the floor. “Thank God they’re rich. If they weren’t rich, they’d be dead. They don’t know how to do anything.”
Rachel says nothing. She wants Mrs. Billingsley to leave. She wants to climb into the bed and think up catch phrases for her father. What do I look like, an idiot? She thinks of the one time she went to see her father perform. It had been late in the afternoon, in a bar that smelled of Pine-Sol. Only eight people had been in the audience and one of them kept saying: “Give it up, man. Give it up.”