Jason laughed, leaned his fists on the table. Oh, Jaime, he said. You don’t fool me for a minute.
A sea rush in her ears. I don’t? she said, wondering what he meant. She strained to hear upstairs, and relaxed when she heard a door close, Bettina’s heavy tread on the stairs.
Jason heard, too, and his smile fell off his face. Nope, he said. You and my wife are hiding that woman upstairs, aren’t you? I’m not as stupid as I look. Soon as I heard about the people in the car, I thought of that woman. He sighed, sat down. He looked suddenly old.
Jaime, he said, Bettina’s a complicated lady, you know. She’s got her own reasons for what she does. I just don’t want you getting mixed up in something you don’t understand.
Jaime made a sound as if she’d been hit in the sternum, though it came out sounding like a laugh. And then there was Bettina in the door, frowning, with the empty tray.
Jason stretched, smiling. We should go into town now, he said. Ready, Bette?
In a jiff, she said. Jaime, you’ll hold down the fort?
Sure, said Jaime, though she wasn’t sure, at all. In a minute, they were in the car, gone.
They have been away for hours when she hears Jason’s truck coming to a stop before the hotel. She weighs Jason against Bettina and finds him lacking. The doors slam, the kitchen door opens, the rustle of bags on the counter. Jaime waits until she hears Jason crunch over the gravel outside, heading to his workshop, and then she’s in the kitchen, where Bettina has sliced open a melon and is eating a juicy crescent at the window.
Bettina laughs, guiltily. Couldn’t help myself, she says. Then puts the sweet fruit before Jaime’s lips for her to bite.
But Jaime looks at Bettina, and Bettina takes the fruit away. I have to tell you, says Jaime. I have to tell you about something. Up rises the kiss in the dark corridor, Jason’s face behind the shower curtain; Jaime feels the prickles on the back of her neck, as if she’s about to lob a grenade into a marriage. It’s about Jason, she says.
But Bettina is already nodding. I know, she says. He’s smarter than I gave him credit for. Called the police. While we were at the store, he took off and I know he did it then.
Jaime feels dizzy, and when Bettina smiles and leans forward, her pretty mouth close to Jaime’s, Jaime doesn’t at first know what is happening, and only thinks fuzzily of the woman upstairs.
LILY IS HIDING in her grandmother’s closet. It is a palace in there, mahogany and crystal, whole walls of spike heels and furs in plastic shrouds. Lily is trying to listen into the bedroom, but Sammy is odious. She’s pulled out the silk pockets from the grandmother’s spring coats, spilling used tissues to the ground like shriveled mushrooms, and is now standing in a pair of red heels, shimmying on her bowed legs, her belly pulsing in and out.
Lily mouths, Stop it, Sammy! but Sammy only chuckles and shimmies some more.
Her uncles are in the room with the grandmother, all stone-faced; her aunts are there, too, crying and patting at their cheeks with tissues. The lawyer is there, a family friend, a fat man with a big nose like a red lightbulb. Lily was standing on a chair on the cold veranda, peering at the birds, when Sammy hissed and pointed through the glass door, and Lily saw the slow march of the relatives and the lawyer toward the grandmother’s room. When she saw Maria pushing a cart full of drinks and snacks toward the door, Lily waved at the birds and their mother, who hopped in indignation on one foot. Bye, Winkyn, Blinkyn, and Nod, she said. Be good.
The lawyer is now saying something: a car found in a pond. Upstate. Howard. Blood. Missing. Tabitha.
Tabitha is Lily’s mother. Howard is Lily’s father.
And then the grandmother gives a curious sound, a half-shout, raspy and metallic. My Howard? she shouts. My Howard? Murdered?
Uncle Chan, the oldest uncle, begins to roar. Why?
A long pause. The lawyer honks into a handkerchief and folds it away. He says loud enough for Lily to hear, We’re not sure. But the evidence points toward. Well, there was a manuscript on the desk, unfinished. From what we can piece together, there may have been some, er. Indiscretion. On the part of. We’re running things by the credit card company, to make sure. And we’re looking for Tabitha now. Or her body. We’re just not sure.
Lily feels like she’s swimming. She can’t breathe. Sammy stands over her, staring down with a dirty finger in her mouth. Lily clutches a silk skirt and lifts it to her face, over her nose and down, three times.
Your mother, whispers Sammy, murdered your father. She grins a terrible grin.
Maria finds Lily hours later, folded into a ball beneath her grandmother’s dresses, wet, mute. The girl won’t speak through her bath, won’t eat the soup. And so, when she puts Lily to bed, Maria curls up beside her and breathes with her until Lily sleeps in her own small nest of pillows. She is careful to stay on the corner of the bed so that when Lily wakes in the night, Maria will not have rolled over and crushed Lily’s imaginary friend.
PARADISE, THE PARROT in the lobby on his brass hoop, Donna’s pale to tan, blonde to white. Their breakfasts of fruit, melon and papaya and pineapple.
This, Howard says to the girl over the coffee, watching her in the breeze in her kimono; this is the best gynecological conference I’ve ever been to in my life.
She snorts. Real diamonds, his gift, glow in her ears. Aren’t you glad I made us stay? she says, her voice still rough after all her painstaking finesse. What if we just didn’t go back? she says.
Yes, he says, but with the word there swims up a small unease. His wife, banging pots in the kitchen, coming up with her sloppy dinners to go back more quickly to her imagined worlds. He was supposed to have returned three days ago: he left messages with the answering service when he knew his wife would be out of the house, making excuses: they asked him to stay to address a medical school class, then the plane broke down and he had to stay overnight.
What would happen if he just remained here, soaking his flesh in the sun like lobster in butter, Donna beside him? Every day, this lascivious sun. He’d buy a yacht and sail it from island to island. Even in the midst of his fantasy, though, he knows he’d think of Lily, his pale, intense girl, and guilt would chase him. It would catch him, no matter where he was.
On the wind now there’s a trace, a hint of sound: Shostakovich, moderato. Someone in the kitchens, listening to a grainy radio. The mournful piano, unsuited to this thoughtless place, brings him back to the gray grandeur of New York, and he closes his eyes. He must get back, he knows. It makes him terribly sad. There’s his mother, sick in her bed, suffocating in broad air. His daughter, who breaks his heart. His wife. He listens to the movement of the music, the waves, the seabirds, until it is all smothered under the gardener’s electric hedgetrimmer.
Donna is looking at him, rubbing her hand on his knee. She says, What? a little crossly. He looks at her, the music heavy in his stomach: he opens his mouth. Howie doesn’t know what he’s going to say, only that it may be unpleasant. Donna’s lips purse, her pretty face suddenly waspish. And he hesitates just long enough for the phone to ring in the room behind him. He stands and answers it.
As he listens to that old, familiar voice on the line, he watches Donna on the balcony, drenched with light, her hair shifting in the wind like seaweed. The words at the end of the line put an urgency into his limbs. And a grief as clean as relief comes into his heart.
THE WOMAN CREEPS DOWN the curved stairwell in her bare feet, her heart bumping hard against her ribs. It is cold downstairs. Only her room has been heated nice and toasty; the rest of the hotel is frigid. There are voices, but in all this immensity, it is hard to tell where they are from.
Stink of the springs’ sulfur, heavy from one open window. Transistor music, some country song cloyed with longing. She sees the gardener scraping the wrought-iron gate, the black chips falling into the mud, his pink ears bobbing to the beat. She slides through the rooms like an eel in the deep.