* * *
Ann had gone alone into the plunge pool the night before and felt around the grassy bottom with her feet till she retrieved the sat-phone. She had overheard Dex say how waterproof they were, and indeed, when she snuck down the dark beach and called Lorna, she answered on the first ring.
“So how is it?” Lorna said.
“You’ll never guess who is here.”
After they had exclaimed over Dex, Lorna admitted that things were not going well.
“Javi’s ex hired a barracuda. They are slapping all kinds of charges together against the three of you. Collusion, fraud, etc. Harassment, plain and simple. I’m trying to settle this thing. Get some dirt on her. Sit tight. It might take some time.”
“How’s Javi holding up?”
“Out of his mind to talk to you guys.”
A thought occurred to Ann that she realized was the real motivation for her call. “Don’t sleep with him. He’s fragile.”
“It’s been ten years since your fling. Statute of limitations. Bye.”
* * *
Now Loren started to put away the picnic things. “You are enjoying your unplugged vacation? How is your husband enjoying himself?”
“He likes watching fish apparently.”
“He seems a lost soul.”
That stung. She blinked and looked away. “We’ve been under stress.” She gave a dry, dissimulating chuckle that she would have disliked in someone else. “Somewhere along the way we forgot how to be happy. Can we talk about something else?”
Loren hesitated, then decided to take the gamble. “I saw you swim the first night at the hotel.”
Her face went blank, unreadable. Professional training kicking in. “That must have been amusing.”
A mistake, but there was no turning back. “I couldn’t look away.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
The idea of being watched infuriated her, but she pretended to not care. Caring meant you showed all your cards. After all, she had guessed his secrets already. When he bent over at dinner the previous night, she had seen the ugly bedsore-like bruises along his hips. In the firm’s minuscule pro bono work, all done for publicity, always dumped on the associates, she had been routinely assigned clients who didn’t have the insurance to cover the financial ravages of AIDS on themselves and their families.
“I’m telling you in order for you to know me. So I’m not a perverti. Otherwise I’d have an advantage over you. In a friendship both people must be equal.”
She smiled, her words out to haunt her again. “You could still be a pervert. A gentleman wouldn’t have looked.”
The gamble had paid off. Sometimes risk made one appreciate the goal even more. He wanted this woman’s friendship more than he’d wanted anything in a long while. “I’d rather not be a gentleman than not to have looked.”
Ann laughed. She had forgotten that delight could come so easily.
* * *
After lunch, Loren climbed back to his tidal pool. Going after one particularly tricky eel, he slipped and scraped his leg on a long branch of volcanic rock.
Ann jumped up and grabbed a towel. “Let me clean it.”
“No!” He put his hands out to stop her coming closer. The diversion of his game was now gone. He had functioned well for years, but his health was giving out. His reality was to quarantine himself until he was down to this island, to dismiss all his lovers and become a celibate as some kind of penance, but the course of his illness was relentless. The fact was that soon he would lose even this — palm trees, lagoon, ocean, sunset, self — when he could no longer work. Cruel fate would not even allow this one chaste conquest. “Stay away!”
“Loren, I know.”
“You know nothing.” He bowed his head, sweat beading on his forehead. “Hand me the towel.”
After he wrapped his leg, he hobbled back to the compound in silence, leaving Ann to fend for herself while carrying the basket. She had to fight her instinct to pester him with questions, force him to a responsible course of action.
There had been a time in her youth, in high school, when she had been too timid to ask questions, afraid of revealing what she did not understand. Later, in law school, she blossomed, grew provocative, argumentative, a know-it-all, intent to prove herself. But during these last years, she had settled back down into that familiar silence, comfortable in her not knowing until the information, ripe, fell into her lap. She would allow Loren to ask her for as much or as little as he chose.
When Titi saw Loren and the blood-soaked towel, she ran for the first-aid kit and rubber gloves. Once he was bandaged, she joined them to eat dessert on the beach. Their conversation didn’t interest her, so she merely nodded her head to the rhythm of their voices and ate most of the custard and cookies herself.
“It’s like having a shark bite your leg,” Loren said. “The leg is gone, but your mind cannot believe the reality. The old reflexes go on.”
“How long?”
Loren shrugged. “The symptoms, only in the last year. I pretended to myself that they were nothing. Years ago I had the fever. Then it was gone. I forgot. Maybe it disappeared, I thought. A year ago I started to have problems. I went to Papeete for treatment. But I can’t stay there … My kingdom needs me. The drugs make me sick so I stop taking them. Next time they don’t work as well. It goes on.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to go to the States or France?”
“I’ll die wherever I am. Please say nothing. No one will come if word gets out. The story of me being a drunkard is much more picturesque.”
There was nothing Ann could say. How badly she’d misjudged him that first day.
Loren took a stick and drew shapes in the sand.
“Which do you prefer?”
She frowned. “The circle, I guess.”
He nodded. “I thought as much. It is better than the square, more loving. But I prefer the squiggle — the wild, the unknown. For that I am paying.”
* * *
The next morning, Loren did not come out. Titi made her tsk-tsk-ing sound when questioned at the breakfast table, implying that it was due to overindulgence. When Ann went later to question her, Cooked was sitting at the kitchen counter, Titi hand-feeding him pieces of peeled fruit.
“Tell me what’s really happening.”
“He never takes the pills. The alcohol is very bad.”
Determined, Ann walked to the remotest corner of the resort, where Loren’s hut was secluded behind bushes, set back in the jungle on a slight elevation. It had not been refurbished as the others had, the island’s punishing climate revealed in the brittle, rotted thatch, the bleached and cracked floorboards. A sign above the door read:
DO NOT COME IN. YOU HAVE NOT BEEN INVITED.
PRIVATE. OFF LIMITS.
YES, THIS MEANS YOU.
Ann knocked.
“Go away,” Loren said. She tried the door and found it unlocked.
Coming from the harsh sunlight, she waited a minute for her eyes to adjust to the dimness of the room. Pandanus mats against the windows blocked both sunlight and fresh air. The room echoed her first impressions of the island’s emptiness; its few pieces of furniture were scattered as if they’d been left where they washed ashore. Incongruously, one of those pieces was an ornate French sleigh bed that had seen better days, pushed into the corner. Loren was settled in a lair of pillows and sheets.
“Guests are forbidden here.”
Although the walls were empty, one door was covered with curled sketches and watercolors of palms, the ocean, a few sunsets, all hastily but expertly done. The paper was yellowed and split along the edges, suggesting they were not recent, yet it was hard to tell for sure. Everything aged prematurely in the tropics.