I wake up on what is supposed to be my final morning in Puerto Vallarta not in Puerto Vallarta at all, but rather in Nuevo Vallarta, about twenty-five miles to the north. Nuevo Vallarta is a planned resort community, a made-up place, an ersatz Mexico for tourists who want no part of the real thing. It is a place I had no interest in going, until I found myself desperate for somewhere to go. I wake up to the news that the airport is still closed.
I am in a hotel that is one of five on a vast property of interconnected fake waterways, chain restaurants, golf courses designed by celebrities and twenty-seven pools that stretch out like strands of DNA.
My view is not of the Bay of Banderas but of this fake paradise.
Here in Nuevo Vallarta nobody knows about the kidnapping or the violence or the closed-off roads. Or if anyone knows, they do a fine job of acting as if nothing at all has happened. Nuevo Vallarta is in another state of mind as well as one of geographic boundary—it is not in the state of Jalisco, but in a state called Nayarit.
To get here took some planning. I do not mean tracking hurricane websites or watching for airfare sales or negotiating with a rental company that represents the property interests of an old couple in Wyoming. Because many of the roads were still blocked on Friday and because there were no taxis willing to find a creative way to reach this vacationers’ paradise, Maria Josephina offered the services of her version of Roberto.
“Do not worry,” she told me. “He will get you there safely.”
Clementine didn’t complain about leaving the villa. She loves our hotel. The wi-fi is stellar. She’s been on FaceTime with Sean for most of the time we’ve been here. It even works down by the nearest chain of pools.
She has not asked any questions about why we made the change. She didn’t even ask about our machine-gun-toting escort out of town. I’m not sure what Peter said to her during the hours I was gone, nor am I sure what she makes of the fact that we left her father behind with the Solomons. One thing I know about teenagers is that very little of their parents’ lives seeps into their consciousness. They are first and foremost narcissists. This is okay. It’s what it means to be sixteen. And for now, I’m grateful that she just seems content to have uninterrupted service and a room number to which she can charge a cheeseburger or a Cobb salad because she’s so over Mexican food.
Last night, I asked her, from my bed on the opposite side of our shared room, if there was anything she wanted to talk about. If she had any questions.
“Nah. I’m good.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Mother. I’m sure,” she said. And then: “I want to respect your privacy.”
One thing Clementine was right about: My problem is that I don’t know anything about anything. But telling her this, affirming her worst appraisal of me, I knew, was not what she needed to hear in this moment.
She went back to her phone. I opened my computer and pulled up the app that lets me read her texts, and then, with a swift click: I deleted it.
Then I opened the file for my book, the one with no title, the one in the middle of which I am desperately stuck. It sprang to life. I scrolled through pages and pages of writing I’ve spent the better part of the last two years on.
It may be that the book I’ve been struggling to finish is simply no good. I may have done it all wrong, made all the wrong choices. Perhaps, I finally realized, there is no way out of this thicket; perhaps the only way forward is to start over again from the very beginning.
AFTER FINISHING the second bottle of wine and a third cigarette on the deck with Maria Josephina I had gone down to the beach to talk to Peter. He rose from the sand when he saw me, at first reaching his arms out and then, realizing I was time zones away from allowing an embrace, he shoved his hands deep into his pockets.
“Jenna . . . I don’t know what to say except that I love you and I’m sorry.”
“I had fucking cancer.”
“Jenna. Come on.”
“Come on?”
“I know you had cancer. But it was stage one. You’re fine now. Please don’t make me out to be the guy who cheated on his sick wife.”
“Are you really trying to tell me what to do? Or how to feel?”
“Jenna.”
“Peter.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying that.”
“But I am sorry. God, I am so, so sorry. This isn’t who I am.”
“So you aren’t the guy who cheated on his sick wife?”
“Jenna. Please. It’s far more complicated than that. I made a mistake. You know this isn’t who I am. This isn’t who we are.”
“We? Please don’t blame me, Peter.”
“I’m not. I’m just . . . Come on, you know me, even if I can hardly recognize myself. It’s one of the reasons I love and need you like I do.”
A cloud passed in front of the sun and with it, a long silence. In this diffused light everything around and between us felt dialed down a half notch.
I walked to the water’s edge. Peter followed. We stood side by side, letting our feet get wet.
“There’s a billboard I pass every day on my way to the shop,” he said finally. “On the corner of Pico and Sixteenth. For the Church of Scientology. It’s black with white lettering and all it says is HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW YOURSELF?”
“I’ve driven by it, too. Because I also go into the shop. All the time.”
“I know. Of course I know. I know the important role you play in my life, in the business, in our family, in everything. I don’t question that. I really don’t. But what I’m trying to say, Jen, is that when I’ve passed that sign these last few months I’ve looked up at it and thought: I don’t know myself very well at all.”
“Huh. When I pass it I think: What a bunch of fucking weirdos.”
He moved his hand as if to touch my shoulder, then thought better of it and pulled it back again. “Jenna, this had nothing to do with love and everything to do with me being an idiot and an asshole.”
“So you still love me?” I asked.
“Of course I love you.”
“Then you will do what I’m about to ask you to do.”
For the first time, he smiled. When they play, boys like to smash, crush and kill, and then they grow into men who want to fix things. To take action. To do something. “Anything at all,” Peter said. “You name it.”
“Go back to Villa Azul Paraiso. Pack my suitcase. Bring it here, to me, along with our daughter and her suitcase.”
“Jenna.”
“Do not pack yours. You will not be coming with us.”
“Jenna. Please.”
I looked back up to the deck of Maria Josephina’s perfect villa. The table was empty.
“What can I do to make this right?”
I looked up to the infinity pool. To the floor of rooms above. To the roof. To the tops of the palm trees. The clouds had passed and I looked up into the fierce, blazing sun.
“I don’t know what you can do, Peter. Or if there’s anything to be done. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what happens next.”
“Jenna.”
“All I know is that I don’t need to decide today.”
I AM SITTING by the pool. In a new cover-up I purchased in one of the hotel’s many gift shops. A margarita in my hand. It is not as good as Roberto’s margarita, and it cost nearly fifteen dollars, but it will do. Clementine has gone back to our room. When I complained about her spending too much time indoors on her phone instead of soaking up what I pray will be our final day of sun she said, “Look at me. Look at my skin. Don’t you think I’ve had enough sun? Haven’t we all had enough sun already?”
“Mrs. Carlson?”
I open my eyes and push my sunglasses on top of my head. It’s Diego, from the concierge desk. I have already asked him not to call me Mrs. Carlson.
“It’s Jenna,” I remind him.
“Jenna,” he repeats. He is wearing a floral, short-sleeved button-down shirt. Tan and pale blue. If it wasn’t the same shirt that every other person who works for this hotel is wearing you could mistake him for a fellow vacationer. “I have for you some pleasant news.”
“I could use some pleasant news.”
“The airport. It will be open tomorrow. Easter Sunday. You are confirmed on a three o’clock flight to Los Angeles. You and your family.”
“Thank you, Diego.”
“Can I do for you anything else?”
“No, that’s all. Thank you so much.”
He stands by my chair. I take the last sip of my margarita. I put down the glass and settle back into my lounger. I lower my sunglasses and close my eyes. I can feel him still standing by my side. Is he so attentive because it was Maria Josephina who called to arrange our stay? Does her association with her lover wield power here in Nuevo Vallarta? He remains standing next to me for a few more seconds before he finally takes my empty glass and walks away.
A tip.
Dammit.
He was waiting for a tip. And I’m the stupid American who didn’t think to give him one. I’ve spent all week having every need catered to, having the staff go so far as to invite me into the sanctuary of their temporary marital bed, and I never once tipped them because in a luxury villa rental, my research told me, it is customary to wait until the end of your stay. Fortunately, I know that before he leaves Villa Azul Paraiso, Solly will tip and tip generously, enough to cover all of us.
I pick up my phone. There are eleven missed calls and too many texts from Peter to count. I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want to hear his voice or see his face or read the words he has typed with his thumbs. I want to sit out here alone in the abundant sunshine and enjoy the last day of a vacation I worked so hard to put together; a vacation that is ending in a way and in a location that, despite my careful planning and research, I could never have anticipated.
Or perhaps I could have anticipated this ending. Perhaps I should have anticipated this ending. How did I not see this coming? Wait . . . didn’t I see this coming? Didn’t I wonder about Gavriella? About the attention this young and beautiful woman paid to my husband? Didn’t I ask him about his relationship with her? And didn’t he tell me I worry too much? That I look in the wrong places?
I get up and rotate my lounger 180 degrees. I turn my back to the sun so that it will fall instead on my outstretched legs. I turn from the view of the pool and the pristine beach in the distance so that I am facing the chain of buildings in which there are thousands of soulless rooms occupied by thousands of people who have come to this fake paradise to escape the monotony of their regular lives, or to celebrate a special occasion, or perhaps to breathe new life into something that is dying.
I told Peter not to blame me, but I wonder how much of this really is my fault. What could I have done differently? Can I bear some responsibility and also be a victim?
I didn’t plant the devil grass, neither of us did, but we let it spread untended.
What do I do now? What do we do next?
I do not know. I do not know if we can weather this tormenta.
All our minutes are high-value minutes. I have a keener sense now, since that first meeting with my doctor, that I do not want to waste them. I do not know if I want to spend them with a man who has betrayed me. I do not know if I want to spend them in the constant company of Solly and Ingrid, because being married to Peter means also being forever tied to his best friend. I do not know anything about anything.
My phone buzzes in my hand.
It buzzes again.
I want to go home, too. I am ready to go home. I don’t know what will happen once we get there, but I believe that home is the only place we can discover if the pieces of our lives can be put back together; if everything still fits. If maybe there’s a secret room we didn’t know about. A room we have left untouched, waiting to be discovered. If our home holds within it an expansive space, an astonishing surprise.