There are voices down the hall.
I get out of bed. I grab the robe I failed to return to Clem and throw it on over my pajamas. I creak our door open slowly, not wanting to wake Peter again.
I tiptoe past Clem’s bedroom down our wing to the front entryway, where I find an unlikely duo huddled together.
Roberto and Ingrid.
“What’s going on?” I whisper.
“I heard a siren.” Ingrid says.
“I heard it, too!” They look confused as to why I’d deliver this news with such enthusiasm. I lower my voice. “It sounded like it was close.”
“Yes,” Roberto says. “It is close. The police, they drive our road.” He wears light blue cotton pajama pants and a white ribbed tank top, but he might as well be standing in a pair of briefs, it’s equally jarring seeing him this way.
“We’re on a dead end,” I’m still whispering. “Why would they drive down our street?”
“I do not know,” Roberto says. “But I go outside and I see nothing. They are gone now. It is okay.”
It’s then that I notice the nightstick in his hand. He sees me looking at it.
“It is for protection,” he says. “Just for to be safe.”
I don’t remember reading about this on the villa’s website. For your safety our house manager carries a nightstick.
“I tell Mrs. Solly it is okay. Police are getting control. The cartel, they agree to release the men they kidnap. This I hear on the radio. Can go back to sleep now. Tomorrow will be better. It is Good Friday.”
Ingrid does not look mollified. In fact, she looks like a wreck. Gone is her effortless magazine-worthy beauty. All those months spent detoxing her system, undone by a single day of stressors.
“Listen to him,” I tell Ingrid. “We’re fine. We’re safe.”
Just then Luisa enters. Either she’s thought better of coming upstairs in her pajamas or she sleeps in her clothes.
Come back to bed, Roberto, she says. Put away that ridiculous nightstick. What are you going to do with it anyway? What are you, some kind of tough guy? Come on. Leave these crazy women with their paranoia about lead in our pottery and all their other nonsense and come back to bed.
This is what I imagine she is saying to him in her rapid-fire Spanish.
“Sí, querida,” he replies. She takes him by the hand and leads him back to the secret bedroom.
Over his shoulder he calls, “Good night. Have good sleep. No more worry.”
When they’re out of sight, Ingrid collapses into my arms and lets loose a sob. I rub her back like I’m soothing a child, if I had a child who would let me hold her like this.
“I’m sorry,” she cries. “I’m just . . . a bit of a mess.”
I lead her over to the sofa and sit her down. She takes her oversize Boychick Bagels T-shirt and dabs at her eyes with it. I switch into my default mode for uncomfortable situations: I offer to be useful.
“Let me go get you some water.”
Down in the kitchen I fill a large glass from the filter and then grab a half-empty bottle of tequila from the counter. I hold up both when I return.
“A little something for each of us.”
She points to the bottle. “Actually . . . I think I’ll take some of that.”
I grin. “Hold on. I’ll get you a glass.”
“Don’t bother.” She grabs the tequila from me and takes a modest swig. She does the all-over body shake of an inexperienced drinker.
I sit down next to her. I slide the water glass closer.
“Thank you. I know I’m like a broken record, but you’re a great friend.”
“Well,” I say. “It’s unsettling to be woken by sirens.”
“I wasn’t sleeping.”
“No?”
“Solly and I had a fight.”
I try for a look of surprise. “You did?”
She holds the tequila bottle in her lap. I’m waiting for her to take another sip so that I can follow that up with a healthy slug, but she just spins it slowly around in her hands. Her eyes refill with tears.
“Oh, Ingrid. I’m so sorry.”
Ingrid sniffles. “We don’t really fight. I know that sounds weird, but it’s true. I’m conflict averse and he’s a people pleaser. And we’re lucky enough not to have a third rail.”
An affair, I imagine, would count as a pretty significant third rail. So clearly she hasn’t found out about Solly’s affair with Gavriella or else she wouldn’t be describing him right now as a people pleaser.
“Surely you can still find things to fight over,” I say.
“Do you know the top three reasons couples fight?”
“I’m not sure I do.”
Ingrid takes a long pause. She picks at the label on the bottle of tequila, then holds up three fingers. “Sex. Money. Kids. We don’t fight about sex—let’s just say we have compatible drives and appetites. Money is something we have plenty of and I never cared much about anyway. And as for kids, Ivan is a joy and a pleasure, and by virtue of Solly’s age and the fact that he’s already raised one child, he’s happy to take a backseat and let me be Ivan’s primary parent. I know some women scoff at me, they think I’m failing to live up to the feminist ideals of my generation by taking on more than fifty percent of the child-rearing burden, but to me it’s far from a burden, it’s a privilege, and I enjoy being in control of that privilege. I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
She moves the tequila to her lips and then pauses.
For the love of God, I think. Please take a sip and pass it on.
She lowers the bottle back into her lap, untouched. “And then . . . there’s Malcolm.”
“So you do have a third rail,” I say.
“No.” She shakes her head. “I love Malcolm. He’s Ivan’s brother. He’s Solly’s son. I care deeply for him. He’s never been a source of contention. I’ve always wanted to see more of him, to have him with us for more than what is set out in the custody agreement. I never thought Solly should have let Maureen take him to New York; I always believed she did it out of spite.”
Ingrid removes her hands from the bottle and grips her bare knees. I seize this opportunity to snatch the bottle from her lap. Since I don’t know when I’ll get it back again, I take two long pulls, one after the other, before I pass it back.
“I don’t live with guilt like Solly, so I can see clearly when it comes to Malcolm.” She sinks a little deeper into the couch. “And what Malcolm did . . . well . . . it was just . . . unconscionable.”
“He sold drugs?”
She looks at me, surprised. “You know?”
“Only that he sold pills to some kids at school.”
“Did you know that one of the girls died of an overdose?”
I shake my head. I wonder if Peter knows and somehow managed to leave out this detail, but then I think that no matter how much snooping, prodding and interrogating I do, I’ll never know what secrets Peter and Solly keep for each other.
“Solly and Maureen, they think Malcolm is a victim because he was kicked out of school. Malcolm is lucky! The only reason he didn’t face criminal charges was because it couldn’t be proven that she died from the drugs he sold her rather than drugs she bought elsewhere. But still, they say: ‘Malcolm was targeted.’ ‘Malcolm was just doing what other kids do.’ ‘Malcolm was treated unfairly because he’s biracial.’ They never, in my opinion, held him accountable for his actions. I know I’m younger. I’m newer to being a parent. But Jesus. What kind of message are they sending him?”
“I think sometimes it’s hard to know who’s really to blame for the terrible things that happen. Can’t he bear some responsibility and also be a victim?”
“I don’t know. Can he?”
“He’s still a good kid,” I say.
At long last, Ingrid takes another swig from the bottle. The shock is milder; she only wiggles a little in her seat.
She shrugs and then turns to face me, a sad smile on her flushed face. “It’s so easy to forget here. The sun shines, most of the time. The water is warm. The house is spectacular. All our needs are met! And yet, right outside . . . right down the street . . . it’s ground zero for the terrible chain of supply and demand that led to the death of that poor girl at Malcolm’s school. And whether Solly and Maureen want to admit it or not, Malcolm, this boy of unfathomable privilege, this good kid, was a crucial link in that chain. This is what I’m struggling with. This is why Solly and I had a fight. He doesn’t want to think about it. Doesn’t want to talk about it.”
“Who can blame him?”
“I can,” she says. “After what happened last night, after the kidnapping, after all the sirens . . . I can’t stop thinking about the connection between what’s happening here and what happened at Malcolm’s school and what’s happening everywhere. Refusing to think or talk about these problems or to acknowledge our role in them is irresponsible. Did you know there are more deaths from opioid use in the United States than there are from car accidents?”
“I didn’t.” What I do know with a piercing clarity is that I’m an idiot for worrying about my daughter spending too much time staring at her phone or having sex with her boyfriend or puking on a friend’s Turkish kilim from drinking too many wine coolers. I’m an idiot for worrying about half of what I worry about.
“Look,” Ingrid says. “I know I’m violating the basic number one rule of vacation: Leave the tough stuff at home. Sit in the sun and forget.” She lets loose a quick and not entirely genuine laugh. “Sit in the sun and forget. That’s my mantra for tomorrow.”
She takes another, longer, sip from the bottle and holds perfectly still as it goes down.
“Maybe you should take it easy,” I say. “Last time I checked, tequila was not a complex carbohydrate.”
She laughs, a real laugh, and puts a hand on my leg. We are compatriots, she is saying. Sisters-in-arms.
There are so many ways I misunderstood Ingrid. I saw her as self-involved in that way young attractive moms are, where they think all they do is give, give, give, and in fact all they really do is think about themselves as objects of desire and affection. I underestimated her as a friend, as a writer, as a woman of substance.
“I haven’t forgotten your kindness, Jenna. I’m still feasting on every word you shared about my manuscript.”
“Well, I meant what I said. And when we get back home, with your permission, I’d like to send it to my agent.”
The tequila has made my face, my insides, warm. I am el cabron suertudo. I am a lucky bastard. I have a husband who loves me. I have a child who is not in terrible trouble. I have a book under contract that I will finish eventually. Why not help out a friend who is about to face tough times?
I feel expansive. I have power. I hold keys.
Ingrid slides even closer to me on the couch. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
The last lines of Ingrid’s email that she sent with her manuscript come back to me: Please, be brutally honest. No good will come from trying to protect my feelings.
No good will come from lying. From keeping what I know to myself.
“You’re an excellent writer,” I say to Ingrid. “I mean it. And I think you have a big career ahead of you.”
“Jenna—”
“Wait. There’s something more. Something else I need to tell you.”
“Okay.” She smiles. Her hands clench the bottle in her lap. She is an eager listener. A rapt audience.
“It’s about Solly.”
“Solly? What about Solly?”
“I . . . I . . . think Solly may be having an affair with Peter’s assistant.”
Ingrid lifts the bottle from her lap and puts it down on the coffee table. She stands up slowly. She walks to the far side of the room; I think she’s leaving, heading toward the master to rouse Solly from sleep, to drag his not insubstantial mass from the king-size bed and let him have it. But instead she walks the perimeter of the living room, past the balcony with its view of the moon over the Bay of Banderas, around the back of the couch, until she’s come full circle. She sits down in the chair facing me.
“Jenna,” she says, her voice calm. “Solly isn’t having an affair.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I say. “But as your friend, as a wife, I felt like I had to tell you. That you had the right to know. I’m sorry.”
“Jenna,” she says again. She is still calm, but more emphatic. “Solly isn’t having an affair.”
I reach for the bottle between us. I unscrew the cap. When did she put the cap back on the bottle? I take a long drink.
“I know it’s hard to process. It’s a big bomb I’m dropping in your lap, in your life. I hate to do it, but I also hate to sit by and watch you get hurt. I don’t want him to do to you what he did to Maureen.”
“Jenna.”
“What?”
“Solly isn’t having an affair.”
And just like that the years between us open up again, a wide, yawning canyon. We are no longer compatriots. Sisters-in-arms. She is too young. Too naïve. Too nice to see the hard truth about the man she loves. The man everyone loves.
“Ingrid, I’m sorry.” Like Roberto, I keep apologizing for something entirely out of my control.
“Jenna,” she says. “Solly isn’t having an affair with Gavriella.” She reaches across the table for my hand. “Peter is. It’s Peter.”
THE AIRPORT IS STILL CLOSED. We are little more than twenty-four hours away from our scheduled flight back to Los Angeles and the fucking airport is still fucking closed.
This is what Roberto tells me. Roberto knows this from making a phone call on the mustard-yellow rotary phone mounted on the kitchen wall. Telmex still has not restored our service and I am on the verge of a Big Red–style tantrum about this.
There was an all-inclusive horse ranch near Solvang that made our final list of destinations. Why didn’t we go to the fucking horse ranch? God, how I wish we’d gone that route, even though I’ve never much cared for horses. It would have been a far better place to gather for the birthdays if for no other reason than it’s only a two-hour drive from Los Angeles. I could have hopped in the car and driven through the dark. I’d be in my house right now, sitting in my kitchen, staring out the window onto my backyard, instead of sitting here, in this foreign place, an incalculable distance from my life back home.
It is very early in the morning.
I spent hours watching minutes go by. Time collapsing. I stared at my iPhone, the clock its one remaining utility—I’ll never take another picture in this place. When it turned 6:00, an hour I convinced myself was a justifiable hour to wake the caretaker of one’s luxury vacation rental, I knocked on Roberto’s secret bedroom door.
“Que pasa?” he mumbled. Clearly he’d been dead asleep. This made me feel even more embarrassed for appearing at his doorstep at this ungodly hour.
“What is happening?” he asked again, awake enough now to remember I don’t speak Spanish, as if I don’t know what que pasa means. “Everything is okay?”
“No,” I said. “Everything is most definitely not okay.”
“You wait,” he said, closing the door.
I thought about opening it. Following him, uninvited, into his glorified closet of a room. Hiding out in there until he and Luisa would have to leave to cook breakfast, make beds, wash towels, arrange flowers, mix drinks, or any of the myriad magic tricks they perform each day to further the illusion of perfection vacationers seek and pay a pretty penny for when coming to Villa Azul Paraiso.
Would the others know where to look for me? Do the others even know about the secret door to the secret room?
I feel no compulsion to escape the children. They are not why I want to hide in Roberto’s room and come out only when the taxi is idling, ready to drive me to the airport. I have no issue with Ivan and his neediness, or Malcolm and his recklessness, or even Clementine, whose secrecy is just part of the natural order of things. A mother need not know, and probably should not know, the intimate life of her child; the same is not true of a wife and her husband.
By the time Roberto reopened his door wearing his white faux doctor’s coat, I was crying again. I thought I’d stopped. That I was through with tears. I was wrong.
“It is your daughter?” he asked.
Why else would a full-grown woman clearly not bleeding from an open wound demonstrate this sort of pain and anguish—it must have something to do with her child. Is this who we become when we become mothers? People who can feel deeply only on behalf of others, who have lost the right to cry for ourselves?
“No,” I told Roberto. “She is fine. It’s me. I need to go home.”
“Is something wrong? Back in your home? Where you are from?”
“Yes,” I said. “Something is wrong back in my home where I am from.”
“I am sorry,” he said. “How can I help?”
“There’s still no wi-fi. I need to reach the airline. I know my flight is tomorrow, but I’m hoping to leave today.”
“We go to the kitchen,” he said. “I make for you the coffee. I call from there.”
He moved toward the stairs but I didn’t follow, so he pivoted and returned to where I stood, motionless.
“Should I get for you your husband?”
“No. Not my husband. I don’t want to see my husband.”
He rubbed some sleep from his eye. “Okay,” he said. “I do not get him. You come with me. I make for you the coffee.”
He took me by the elbow, and led me up the stairs. In the kitchen he sat me down at the table and then pushed the button on the coffeemaker he’d prepared last night as per usual.
“You do not sleep?” he asked.
“No.”
“It is early for calling the airline. But first I find out if the airport is open.”
I don’t know who he dialed or what he said but somehow he managed, on the ancient rotary telephone, to discover that, no, the airport is not open. There are no flights landing or leaving Puerto Vallarta. This is what he tells me now.
I start to cry again.
“Is there any other way?” I ask him. “Any other way to get out of here?”
“No,” he says. “I am sorry. There is no other airport close with flights to United States. And anyway, many roads, they are blocked. But it is okay. You are safe here.”
I am not safe here.
I am anything but safe here.
Solly knew about Peter and Gavriella, and what is perhaps worse, even though I’ve known Solly longer, is that Ingrid, a woman, a wife, a mother—she knew about Peter and Gavriella, too.
Imagine being trapped in a house with your cheating husband and your best friends who have all conspired to keep the same secret.
Oh, the humiliation.
When I thought I knew Solly was cheating on Ingrid I worked up the courage to tell her. It took me a few days, and a few slugs of tequila, but I did it. Ingrid has known for months, and yes, she did finally tell me, but only in the face of what I’d said to her: my funhouse mirror version of the facts. We sat together, Ingrid and I, sharing the bottle, side by side on that couch, and I told her. I felt expansive. I felt lucky. I thought I was holding keys.
And then she reached for my hand and said: It’s Peter.
For a brief flash I thought that it was Peter with whom Solly was having the affair. It even made sense to me. That explains so much. But then I saw her face, soft with pity.
I don’t remember what happened next. Knowledge, slow at first and then picking up speed, like a hurricane, winds clocking in at 200 miles per hour and gusts approaching 250. I do not know the difference between winds and gusts, truth and lies.
Time collapses. I do not know how long we sat across from each other, the bottle between us on the table.
I know that I asked her, finally: “Why did you come on this vacation?”
I whisper-screamed this at her. The last thing I wanted was to wake Peter. Or Solly. Or Clementine, who does not need to know the intimate lives of her parents.
Why did you come on this vacation? How could you let me plan this trip? Why didn’t you say: no, I won’t go? Why didn’t you say: I can’t go along and pretend?
“Why are you so angry with me?” she answered in a true whisper, not a whisper-scream. A whisper of regret and remorse. A conflicted whisper, with a hint of self-righteousness. It was a prism of a whisper, refracting a rainbow of reactions to the moment in which she’d suddenly found herself. “Shouldn’t you save your anger for Peter?”
My anger does not need saving. It does not need rationing. I have plenty of anger to spread around. My anger runneth over.
“He’s the one who’s been lying to you for all these months,” she continued. “I told Solly . . . I begged him to fire Gavriella. But there are rules about that sort of thing. So I told him he had to make Peter stop. And Solly tried. He even threatened to dissolve their business partnership.” She sighed. “It went on for too long. And when Peter finally did end it, well . . . Gavriella . . . she just won’t accept it. She has abandonment issues and daddy issues, a lethal combination, really. It’s been a nightmare. She’s been a nightmare. Solly is trying to handle it. He’s even consulted a lawyer. Look. Peter loves you. He never planned on leaving you for her. It’s not like what happened with Solly and me. It really isn’t. As cliché as it may be, I think you can chalk it up to a midlife crisis. Not that it’s a reasonable excuse. But Peter never loved her. He loves you, Jenna.”
Still not looking at Ingrid. Not looking at anything. I stared at the bottle on the table between us with an unfocused gaze. All I could see was blur.
“I’m so, so sorry.” She took a deep, slow breath from her center. Something she likely learned in a meditation class. Something she paid an expert to teach her to get her through the tough times she doesn’t have to face because she lives a perfectly charmed life. “I wanted to tell you. I really did. But I thought Peter should be the one to do so.”
“So I’m the cuckquean.”
“Sorry?”
“Please. Just . . . leave me alone,” I said, speaking now in a controlled voice that did not match the hurricane within me. “Go back to your sleeping husband. Go back to your weird kid who still shares your bed. Just . . . go.”
She stood, momentarily forgetting her perfect yogi posture. Back curved, shoulders slumped, head hanging.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Roberto slides a cup of coffee in front of me. “You drink,” he says.
I stare at it.
“Please,” he says.
I take a sip. It’s warm and earthy.
Luisa enters. Her hair, usually up in a neat bun, is down at her shoulders. She’s also given up on her uniform. She wears a gray sweatshirt with her white cotton pants. I hadn’t noticed her natural beauty. Had barely noticed her looks at all. Luisa does not need a diet of complex carbohydrates eaten off of lead-free paper plates to attain her good looks. All she has to do is be seen, and this morning, I see her.
“Esta ella enferma?” she asks Roberto.
He shrugs. She comes and takes a seat next to me at the table and puts her hand on mine. I have to hold myself back from collapsing into her arms and sobbing into her loosened hair.
“Estas bien?” she asks me.
“No,” I say. “I am not bien.”
She pats my hand. Roberto brings her a cup of coffee. She holds it up, as if toasting me.
“My husband has been having an affair with his assistant,” I tell her.
Luisa shakes her head at me.
“Everyone knew but me. I don’t want to see him. I can’t see him. God. I’ve got to get out of here.”
I put my forehead down on the table. In this moment, I can’t even stand to have on me the eyes of a woman who doesn’t understand what I’m saying, who has no comprehension of my pathetic situation.
Luisa and Roberto have a long back-and-forth in hushed, tender tones.
Roberto taps my shoulder. “Luisa say you need sleep,” he tells me. “She say women, they need sleep for to deal with this. So you do not do or say things you do not mean. Is not good for to talk with husband if too tired.”
While I hate few things more than being told I’m tired when what I am is upset, I have to admit that she’s right. I’m exhausted. I’m not thinking clearly. At this moment, Luisa is my best friend in the world—Roberto, too—and I should listen to my two best and only friends, and I should go get some sleep.
“You’re right,” I say. “I need to sleep. But where? There’s nowhere for me to go.”
Luisa says something to Roberto. He says something back. They look at me, then back at each other, then back at me, like in a Ping-Pong match.
There’s a bench in the kitchen. I could lie down on that. It doesn’t look comfortable, but I’m so very tired. “Maybe I’ll just stay in here.”
Luisa stands up from the table and puts her hands on my shoulders. She grabs them and lifts a little. “Vienes conmigo.”
“You go with Luisa,” Roberto tells me. “She will make for you the bed.”
I’m too tired to argue. Too tired to talk. Too tired to do anything but follow.
I figure Luisa must be taking me to the living room with the TV in it, but instead she leads me back downstairs, to the secret door to the secret bedroom. She motions for me to stay, so I do, I stand there like an obedient dog while she darts around the corner and underneath the staircase, where the washer and dryer are hidden. She returns with clean sheets in her arms.
“No,” I say to her. “I don’t need you to change the bed. Please. You do enough. I don’t mind. I’m just going to close my eyes for a little bit. I really don’t need fresh sheets.”
She stares at me while I speak but it’s clear she doesn’t understand or care about whatever it is I’m trying to say. She’s going to do what she’s set out to do and that is to change the sheets on their bed for me. It’s then that I realize maybe she isn’t doing it for me; she’s doing it for them. I may not care about sleeping on their used sheets, but she may very well care about sleeping on mine.
She opens the door and turns on the exposed overhead lightbulb. She switches the sheets quickly, like a pro.
“Aqui,” she says, patting the bed. “Para ti.”
I want to hug her but that feels inappropriate so instead I end up bowing a little in her direction, which ends up feeling even more inappropriate. “Gracias,” I say as I crawl into the crisp, fresh sheets.
She turns to leave and switches off the light. Before she closes the door behind her I call out, “Luisa?”
“Sí?”
I sit up in the bed. “Please . . . no tell the people upstairs where I am?” I point to the ceiling. “No tell my husband? No tell anybody that I’m here. Please?”
She smiles at me. “Sí.”
I have no idea if she understands me. She closes the door behind her.
I’m cast into utter darkness.
I WAKE UP six hours later.
I check my phone. No wi-fi signal.
I lie still, listening for sounds. Splashing in the pool. Feet on the floor above me. I hear nothing. This secret bedroom is an impenetrable fortress.
By now everyone must be awake. By now they must be wondering where I am. By now Ingrid has told Solly who has told Peter. By now they know that I know.
The fact that nobody has come knocking on my door proves that either Luisa understood when I asked her not to tell anyone where I’d gone or nobody is ready to face me.
I get up. The darkness is deep. The room has no definition. I shuffle carefully to the wall that faces the foot of the bed and I make my way down it, palm over palm, until I find the switch by the front door. I flip it. The bulb buzzes to life and summons a group of moths. An eclipse. This is what a group of moths is called. I know this because Peter and I have made a habit over the years of collecting and then quizzing each other on the proper group names for various species. A shrewdness of apes. A mischief of mice. A cyclone of scorpions.
A trio of liars.
I crack open the door and peek outside. The midday light is blinding. The swimming pool is still and all six loungers lie empty. I push the door open a bit more until I can see the whole of the pool area and a large swath of the beach out front. No sign of life.
I close the door again and step into the tiny bathroom where I splash my face with cold water and wipe away the black from yesterday’s mascara with some scratchy toilet paper. I’m wearing what I wore to sleep before the sirens woke me: cropped drawstring pajama bottoms and a tank top. I could use a shower and I debate hopping into the one in the corner that has no curtain, but instead I grab from the sink the stick of deodorant that must belong to Luisa—the flowers on the label are a giveaway—and slather it on.
I’d like to cover up a bit more. My tank top is cut low in the armholes and I’m wearing no bra, something that didn’t bother me this morning in the kitchen with Roberto and Luisa, but now, with six hours of sleep in the bank, I’m acutely aware of the copious amount of side boob I’m showing.
I pick up Luisa’s white coat from a hook on the back of the door. It’s short sleeved and has buttons instead of zippers. It’s what she wears when she cooks in the kitchen with her hair done up in a bun. I slip it on, open the door and step outside.
Once I’m standing on the patio by the pool, underneath the overhang, I can hear that there’s music playing above me. I can’t place it either by artist or by genre. It’s not party music. Not eighties pop. It’s not one of the lugubrious folk singers Ingrid loves who Solly will, when he’s feeling generous, put in the rotation. It’s not jazz building to a resolution that will never come. I shake it off. What do I care what they’re listening to?
I’m not sure of my next move. I’d like to go be with Clementine, to ally myself with her against everybody else, but I know I can’t draw her into my crisis; I can’t force her to choose a side. It isn’t fair.
But oh, to huddle up with her in her room, or on the couch by the TV for an encore showing of Charlotte’s Web. To retreat back into the recesses of her childhood with her, back to when she sang off-key in a tutu and wasn’t having sex. Back when the introduction of this child into our young marriage gave us what the poet Donald Hall called a third thing, an essential something two individuals can turn their collective gaze upon. A project, a cause, a passion like a shared love of architecture. More often than not, that third thing is a child. But unlike a shared love of architecture, a child will eventually pack up and leave you. And then what? Where do you turn your collective gaze?
If I walk toward the gate that leads out onto the beach I run the risk of being seen by anyone who stands near either the second- or the third-floor balcony. I do not want to be seen. Not in my current state of distress, with my side boob and stolen chef’s coat. Instead I stay under the overhang. I go around and behind the staircase and skirt the side of the villa where various unsightly utilitarian units are kept—heating, water filtration, power generators. These are guesses of course. What do I know about what’s needed to run a luxury villa in a foreign country?
I squeeze between two of these units. They’re large, loud and hot enough either from the sun or from doing their job that I jump back as I brush one with my elbow. Beyond them is a fence. It’s only chest-high and I climb up and over it easily, even without shoes. I land in a patch of dirt only a few yards from the beach.
I could walk south. Nobody would see me if I walked toward the rocks where Malcolm took Ivan searching for starfish. But I don’t know what’s beyond those rocks, and I have walked the beach to the north. I know what’s around that bend. I know that I’ll pass the villas Shabby and Tacky as well as Villa Perfect. I know I’ll reach the stretch of private beach where I sat with Clementine and Malcolm, where they later escaped the club to be alone, where Malcolm would ultimately decide not to have sex with my daughter and this would crush her in a way I don’t fully understand because even if I try to inhabit that world through my fiction, it’s been too long since I’ve been sixteen.
I go north. It feels better in this moment to walk toward something I know than toward something I do not.
I keep close to the gate that protects the house from outside intruders so I can’t be spotted from the balconies. To be even more careful I drop to my hands and knees and I crawl the perimeter of the gate, staying in its shadow, catching my pajama pants a few times on the wood’s errant splinters.
When I get a safe distance from the villa I stand up. I wipe the sand from my pajamas. I rub my knees, sore from the crawling. I know what Officer Delgado said. He told us to stay close to home, and that’s what I intend to do. I’m not going to walk all the way to town. Not with no shoes, in a stolen chef’s coat.
I round the bend to the other three villas. Like the other day, they look empty. It’s too early for siesta. Maybe all the guests are gone. Maybe they got out before everything fell apart. Maybe they wrapped up their perfect vacations and headed to the airport, bags full of rainbow-colored blankets and chunky stone necklaces, to catch flights that were still leaving.
But where is Maria Josephina?
I see the hammock. It is not a U shape. It is not a smile beckoning me. It is flat, sagging and low to the ground with the weight of a seventeen-year-old boy.
Malcolm.
I try to sneak by him, tiptoeing up to the metal gate at Villa Perfect. There is a keypad. And a camera. I’m not sure what to do. This is a far more sophisticated security system than the splintery wooden gate with a latch that protects us at Villa Azul Paraiso.
“Hey, Jenna.” I don’t want to turn around. I don’t want him to see me in my ridiculous getup. “What are you doing?”
“My friend lives here.” I point at the house. Malcolm looks at me. A shadow from the palm trees falls on his handsome face.
He has climbed out of the hammock and it swings behind him. He catches the rope in his hand and steadies it. “Everyone is wondering where you’ve gone. They’re, like, kind of freaking out, actually.”
I pull Luisa’s coat tighter around me. “I’m sorry. I was just . . .”
“It’s okay,” he says. “You don’t need to explain.”
“Thank you, Malcolm.” He knows. Of course he knows. Everyone knows. And if they didn’t already know, they know now. I wonder what Peter has said to Clementine. By disappearing I have left him with the unenviable task of explaining to his daughter why I needed to escape from our perfect vacation.
“So? What do you want me to tell everyone?” Malcolm asks. “You know, about where you are?”
I turn back to the keypad. I have no idea what button to push to ring the doorbell. How do I let Maria Josephina know that I am here? That I need a safe place to hide? Should I push 9-1-1?
“I’d rather you not say anything, if that’s okay.”
He shrugs. “Sure . . . I guess.”
“Malcolm?”
“Yeah?”
I might have slept for six hours, but I’m as tired and lost and hollowed out as I was before locking myself into the secret bedroom. I’m fragile. A husk. The hurricane winds have subsided, but still there is the storm, the tormenta.
I want to ask him if his mother is happy. Does Maureen feel bitter and rudderless or does it feel like her life is hers again? Is she maybe even happier now than she was when she was married to Solly?
Right then a loud buzzing noise comes from the metal door. I look at the camera. Its lens is trained on me. From a speaker I hear Maria Josephina’s voice.
“Would you like to come inside? Have something to drink?”
I could weep from the kindness of this invitation. I fear I might choke on my answer so instead I just reach for the door handle and push. It opens.
I turn back to Malcolm. “Never mind,” I tell him. “I’m sorry.”
“You really don’t need to apologize,” he says.
MARIA JOSEPHINA STANDS waiting for me. She is wearing that sheer black cover-up which hides a tiny black string bikini. I can’t help but notice her taking in my bare feet, my pajama pants, my chef’s coat.
I look around at the large deck with the infinity pool, a modern open living room and enormous kitchen with state-of-the-art stainless steel appliances.
When Peter and I first moved in together, combining our two modest incomes to rent the duplex in West Hollywood, I couldn’t believe our good fortune. We had one and a half bathrooms! A guest room! When friends would come over we’d proudly give them a tour of our apartment that lasted all of a minute. But since I’d moved from a studio, and Peter had moved from a three-bedroom bungalow with four roommates, we felt flush. This was luxury living. Then we got married and starting thinking about having a kid and Peter started making more money and we bought our three-bedroom house with the backyard with fruit trees and it became hard to fathom how we ever coexisted happily in that tiny duplex.
This is how it feels seeing the inside of Maria Josephina’s villa. I’d thought Villa Azul Paraiso was the apex of luxury living, but that is only because I hadn’t yet stood on the deck of Villa Perfect.
She calls out something in Spanish to the woman in the kitchen who doesn’t wear a white button-up coat; she wears all black, a T-shirt and cropped pants. At first I’m not sure who this woman is—a domestic worker, a friend, a sister—but then she responds with “Sí, señora.”
We sit at a glass table under a canvas umbrella. The infinity pool makes a hypnotic lapping sound in the background. The woman from the kitchen appears with a bottle of sparkling water and a bottle of white wine on a tray. She pours both of us a glass of each.
“Jenna. Are you okay? Most people, they are not going outside of their homes since the events in town. Do you know about this?”
“Yes,” I say. “My daughter was at the club the night of the kidnapping, but she left before it happened. And we don’t know much about what’s going on now because our villa is without internet connection.”
“Ours, too,” she says.
“I’m supposed to go home tomorrow. But I want to leave today. And the airport is still closed.”
“Is it?”
“There’s no other way for me to leave.”
“Why do you need to go? Do you not feel safe? It is safe here. Where your villa is and mine. It is a safe place to be.”
I reach for the sparkling water and take a long drink. My throat feels thick. “It is not a safe place for me.”
“So this is not about the events in town.”
“No. This is not.”
“I see.”
We sit in silence for a few minutes. The pool, the ocean, the glass table—everything reflects the punishing sun.
“Thank you, Maria Josephina, for inviting me in,” I say. “You have provided me sanctuary with your kindness.”
“It is my pleasure.” She clinks her glass against mine. “In vino veritas, in aqua sanitas. It is an old Latin phrase. Do you know this? It means in wine there is truth, in water there is health.”
I take a long drink of the wine. It is cold and crisp and wonderful. This old Latin phrase has it all wrong. In wine there is escape. In wine there is rewritten history. In wine I am enjoying a leisurely Good Friday with a new friend I’ve made on my perfect vacation, an infinity pool lapping hypnotically in the background. In wine my life isn’t falling apart.
And in water there are just bubbles.
I want to know how she’s done it. How she’s made this life for herself. Endless sunsets and bottomless glasses of sauvignon blanc. But she hasn’t asked why I’ve shown up at her door in a chef’s coat and no shoes, so perhaps I shouldn’t ask how she manages to spend her days on perpetual vacation. Better that we behave like children, engaging in parallel play, side by side, drinking our wine.
Before the silence stretches on too long, a man appears.
Is he her Roberto? His hair is also slicked back. He also wears a uniform of sorts, all black like the woman in the kitchen. Across his chest: a thick black strap. Over his shoulder: the narrow black barrel of a machine gun.
I freeze.
They speak in a rapid back-and-forth. He is agitated. She is calm.
He hands her a cell phone. She speaks into it for only a minute. She finishes with “Sí, mi amor.”
My head is spinning. Who is this alternate universe version of Roberto? Why is he carrying a machine gun? Who is the amor on the other end of the phone? Wait . . . there’s cell service here?
Maria Josephina reads my questioning face. She takes a sip of her wine and then lights a cigarette. She offers me one. I haven’t smoked a cigarette since college.
I take it.
“He has a . . .” I motion to my back. For some reason it is difficult for me to say the words machine gun.
“Yes,” she says. “For safety.”
“Has it gotten that bad? You said we were safe in these villas. I thought the danger is only for the men involved in the warring drug cartels.”
She takes a slow drag of her cigarette. “Yes. This is true.”
“But then why does he need a machine gun?”
I know the answer to this question as soon as I’ve asked it.
She watches me come to an understanding.
“So . . . were you there?” I ask her. “At the club that night?”
The girl in the street told me that the kidnappers took the men but left behind the women. If her amor was kidnapped, then Maria Josephina was likely one of the women left behind. If her amor was a kidnapper, she was likely home, safely ensconced in her perfect villa, sipping her wine.
“Me? No.” She shakes her head. “I was not at the club.”
I take a drag of my cigarette. I don’t cough, which I worried I might do. Smoking a cigarette is like riding a bike, though I haven’t ridden a bike since college either.
I take another drag. I go for the smoke ring and nail it. I watch my perfect circle drift up and blow apart. Why did I stop smoking? What’s the point of making all the right decisions? Has my life been better because of all of the responsible, healthy, grown-up choices I’ve made?
My wineglass is empty. I pick up the bottle to refill it, but the bottle is empty, too.
“The amor on the phone. He is . . .”
“My lover.”
“Oh.”
“We are not married. He has a wife. She does not live here. When he is here in Puerto Vallarta we are together. When he is not I am on my own. Free. It is a good life. It is the life that is best for me.”
“It sounds . . . complicated.”
“No. It is very simple. Marriage,” she says. “Now, that is complicated.”
“Very complicated.”
“And this is why you are here? Why you do not feel safe in your villa? This is because of your husband? Because of your marriage?”
“My husband is having an affair.” This is now the second time I have said this sentence out loud and it still feels as if I were speaking a line of dialogue, saying something that someone else has written for me to say. Even my voice doesn’t sound like my own as I say it.
“So he has a lover?”
“Yes. But it’s different. We don’t have an understanding. In fact, our understanding is that we’re faithful to each other. Infidelity is for other people. Not for us.”
“So you worry that your husband does not love you? That he loves this other woman only?”
“No. In fact, I think things are over between them. And I do believe Peter loves me. I do.”
The bottle is empty but Maria Josephina reaches for it anyway and holds it upside down over her wineglass. A few drops pour out. She drinks them. We sit staring out at the ocean.
“I suppose it is hard for you to understand why I’d be so upset,” I say.
“No,” she says. “It is not. Like we agreed: marriage is complicated.”
“Yes, it is.”
“But I wonder if you are living a good life. If you are happy. If you are living the life that is best for you.”
“I . . . don’t know.”
“JENNA?”
It’s Peter. What is he doing here? Did Malcolm tell him where to find me? I thought Malcolm and I had an understanding. I thought we were friends.
“JENNA?”
He’s walking up the beach in his shorts and a misbuttoned white shirt, hands to his mouth in an effort to amplify his voice, which grows more frantic with each repetition of my name.
“JENNA?”
He reminds me of Tom Hanks in Castaway with his scraggly beard and hair. His desperation is apparent even from this distance.
“Who is this?” asks Maria Josephina. “Is this your husband?”
I sit back a little farther in my chair. I wish I had her large sunglasses to hide behind.
He stops and stares up at Villa Perfect. He puts his hand to his eyes to shield them from the sun. He is trying to decide if it’s me next to this glamorous woman in her sheer black cover-up on the deck by this infinity pool.
“JENNA?” he calls.
“JENNA!” He starts waving frantically.
I take a drag of my cigarette. He drops his hands to his sides and cocks his head. If he were in a cartoon, the word balloon above him would read:
That can’t be Jenna because that woman is smoking a cigarette.
Jenna doesn’t smoke.
And my word balloon would say:
Fuck you, Peter. Maybe you don’t know every single thing about me.
Maybe I keep secrets, too.
“JENNA!”
I take another drag.
“Your husband,” says Maria Josephina. “He is very excited to see you.”
“My husband knows he is in trouble,” I say.
“JENNA!”
“Is he a bad husband?” she asks.
“No. Not entirely.”
“JENNA!” Peter shouts. “PLEASE COME DOWN HERE AND TALK TO ME!”
“And you? You are a good wife?”
“JENNA! PLEASE! I NEED TO TALK TO YOU!”
Am I a good wife? I have never cheated on Peter. When one is called upon to give an account of her role in a marriage, that fact matters. I have loved him—sometimes more, sometimes less—for nearly twenty years. I have never told him the big sorts of lies, only the small ones we all tell to make everything run more smoothly. I have faults; that’s for certain. I can insist on things done my way. I am not always patient. I am sometimes petty. I have shunned enough embraces that he has grown cautious in how and when he reaches for me. I can be anxious, worried. I sense storms on calm horizons. But I have, above all else, believed in the certainty of our marriage.
Am I a good wife?
“I think so,” I say. “I’ve tried to be.”
“JENNA! PLEASE!”
“He must love you very much. Why else would he shout like this?”
“JENNA!”
“He’s humiliated me. And maybe even worse, he’s gaslighted me.”
“Gaslighted? What does this mean?”
“JENNA!”
“He has let me think I’m crazy. That I imagine things.”
“Do you imagine things?”
“JENNA! PLEASE!”
“Yes, but sometimes what I imagine is true.”
“JENNA!”
Maria Josephina calls out something to the woman in the kitchen. She brings a tray with another bottle of wine and fresh wineglasses, which are unnecessary because the bottle is the same vintage we’ve already been drinking.
“JENNA! PLEASE!”
I take the final, delicious drag of my cigarette. “He’s been lying to me for months. He let me believe it was his best friend who was having the affair.”
“It is not good to lie about these things. It is much better to live out in the open.”
Peter drops to his knees in the sand. “JENNA! COME DOWN HERE AND TALK TO ME. PLEASE!”
Maria Josephina watches him, laughing a little to herself. “This is why I do not have a husband.”
I look at Peter. Prostrating himself before me. Alone on the beach in his misery.
“JUST COME DOWN AND TALK TO ME.”
“I’ll be fifty soon,” I say.
“Yes. You tell me this already. And I tell you that this is not the end of living. It is not too late to have the life you deserve. To keep climbing the ladder like in the statue on the Malecon. I am fifty-five. And still, I climb.”
“JENNA!”
“Twenty years,” I say. “It’s a long time to be with one person.”
“It is an accomplishment. Or is it more like a sentence? I do not know . . . perhaps it is both.”
“I WON’T LEAVE UNTIL YOU COME DOWN HERE.”
“Would you like some more?” she asks me, managing the bottle in one hand and the burned-down butt of her cigarette in the other.
“PLEASE!”
I look at the bottle and at my empty glass and then I look out at Peter. He’s shifted to a sitting position. He’s settling in. He isn’t going anywhere.
“I don’t know what to do.”
She pours herself some wine. “These are big questions.”
“JENNA!”
“I’ll take some more. Thank you.” She refills my glass. “And another cigarette.”
She lights mine and then lights one for herself.
I am a planner. I do my research. I think long and hard about every choice, I examine every option. I like to have all the facts at my disposal. Even the hidden ones. I try to prepare for the unexpected. And yet, I have absolutely no idea what to do next.
“I love him,” I say. “But . . . I don’t know if I can forgive him for betraying me in this way.”
“You do not decide today,” she says. “You take your time. And when you are ready, you decide what is right for you. What it is that you want.”
“JENNA!”
“He will apologize,” she says. “Many times over and then again. This I can tell. And you will decide if this is enough. If you are getting what you need from this desperate man on the beach. If you are living the life that is best for you.”
I look down at Peter. He sees me looking at him and he makes a move to stand, he is hopeful, but then I turn back to my friend. Back to my wineglass.
“PLEASE,” he calls out, his voice weakening as he collapses back into the sand.