16

I spend the next several hours alone, thinking until I think I’ll drive myself insane.

It’s at this point that I ask myself the question: Who? Who was it? It was dark in that room, and I never saw the man’s face. I only got a glimpse of the back of his head. I struggle to call up the image. Dark hair, cut short. Wide bare shoulders narrowing to a trim waist.

I shudder with revulsion.

One thing is for certain: it wasn’t Pop, changing his mind about not coming on the trip, Popping in to surprise us all.

Pop is black. And this guy wasn’t black.

So who was it?

I make a mental list of possibilities, starting with the men in Mom’s circle:

Jerry. He has dark hair but, ugh, no. Jerry is way older, and not in the best shape. The man I saw was definitely not Jerry with his shirt off.

Max Ahmed. Max also has dark hair. But Max is so quiet, so reserved and so proper all the time. I can’t grasp the idea of a universe in which Max would cheat on his wife.

Billy Wong. But he’s so attentive to his family, which I’ve always appreciated, in contrast to Mom. Last year at the awards dinner I caught Billy mouthing the words “I love you” to his wife across the crowded room. I can’t imagine Billy doing . . . that.

Which only leaves the hundreds of other doctors at this conference, men who only my mother has met. Men I don’t know.

Tearful and frustrated, I stretch out in one of those white rope hammocks that are scattered around the resort and try to talk myself into taking a nap, so I’ll have a few hours of relief from the torturous rat maze that my mind is turning into, but I can’t make myself sleep. After I give up on that, I stand on the hillside and watch a couple get married in the outdoor chapel.

Because I am apparently a glutton for punishment.

I’m not close enough to hear what the bride and groom are saying, but I know they’re making promises to each other. Like promises to be faithful. As in, to refrain from having sex with anyone else. It must be so easy to believe those promises, I think mournfully as I watch them, when you’re young and you’re in love.

Of course I wouldn’t know anything about that. The whole thing with Leo is now so clearly unimportant and childish and silly. I didn’t love Leo. I liked him, sure, and I loved the idea of him, and that’s not the same. But I believed that true love existed, out there in the world, that it was a real thing. That it was possible. I believed that because of Mom and Pop.

They got married at a vineyard in wine country when I was eight years old and Afton was ten and Abby didn’t exist yet. It was sunny that day, and the air smelled of lavender. Mom wore a simple white cotton dress, a circle of wildflowers pinned to the crown of her head, and cowboy boots because she thought they would be funny and more comfortable than heels. She smiled all day long, from morning until night, even when she knew she was having her picture taken. Mom hates to smile for pictures because she thinks smiling makes her eyes get small and squinty. Her doctor profile picture on the hospital website, for example, is of her staring almost solemnly at the camera, her eyes as wide as they’ll go, her lips turning up in the tiniest possible version of a smile. But that day, on her wedding day, she smiled with her teeth.

I wonder if Mom smiles at this other man like that. I don’t want to imagine it, even though I’ve seen her doing so much worse. There’s a part of my brain that refuses to accept that what happened this morning was real. It was dark in there, this part of me whispers urgently in the back of my mind. Maybe I didn’t see what I thought I saw. Maybe I misinterpreted it somehow. It tries to make me doubt everything, because it wants to cling to the stubborn belief that Mom would never cheat on Pop. Mom can be distant sometimes, she can be neglectful in her own distracted intellectual sort of way, and she can be careless with a person’s feelings because feelings are not her forte. But I don’t want to admit that she could be so horribly disloyal to us all, so dishonest, so repulsive and ugly and bad. That’s not her, I keep thinking, over and over. That’s not Mom.

But clearly I’m wrong. Clearly I don’t know my mother at all.

Clearly the promises she made that one sunny day don’t mean anything to her, and there’s nothing I can do about that. I am completely useless. The only thing I can do that has any value is to keep Afton and Abby from finding out. I can protect my sisters. And possibly Pop. If he doesn’t already know.

But maybe this is why he refused to come to Hawaii.

My phone buzzes at my hip. A text from Mom.

All done for the day. A group of us is getting together for dinner at seven. Meet you back at the room at six?

I squeeze my eyes shut against the desire to hurl my phone into the nearest body of water. There are a lot of bodies of water around to choose from, but I resist the urge. It wouldn’t be fair to take my anger out on my innocent, well-meaning cell phone.

My fingers are cold, and for some reason the phone won’t register my touch. I rub my hands together, open and close my fists, take a deep breath, and try again.

Actually, I’m not feeling well, I type shakily. I think I’m sick.

I’m a coward. I hate myself for it. But I know I can’t do it, not tonight. I can’t have dinner with Mom and Afton and Abby and everyone in our group and pretend like I don’t know.

I send the text.

What kind of sick? my mother texts back immediately.

Of course she wants to know the exact symptoms I’m experiencing.

Stomach, I reply.

Did you vomit?

I bite my lip. She won’t let me stay in tonight if I only have an upset stomach. She’ll make me take a Pepto or a Tums and go with them anyway. She has this thing about participating.

Yes, I text back. A lie. The first of many, I think, about this thing I am not supposed to know. The first in a lifetime. But what choice do I have?

Are you at the room?

I cringe at the phone. Shit. Yes.

I’ll come check your vitals.

I tuck the phone back into my pocket, my heart drumming in my ears again, and start walking fast, calling myself a moron the entire way back, because I was so incredibly brainless to tell her I’m sick, and she’s a doctor and she’ll know I’m not really sick, won’t she, and even if she doesn’t know I’ve made it up, she’ll be actually examining me and how am I going to be that close to her, look into her eyes, and hide what I know? She’ll figure out that something’s up in two seconds flat. She’ll demand to know what it is. She and Afton are so alike that way.

But I can’t think of what else to do. I’m on an island two thousand miles from home. I don’t have a car or money or a good excuse.

I have to go back to the room.

I quicken my pace, and within a few minutes I’m standing at the base of the Ocean Tower. I stare up at it for a minute, wondering which window is ours. They all look the same, but some of them have the curtains drawn and some don’t.

I wonder if they opened the curtains, afterward, while I was running away as fast as I could. I wonder if Mom went out onto the balcony in her new sexy robe—it’s sexy, why didn’t I notice that before, why wasn’t I suspicious that she brought a sexy robe with her on a business trip?—and I wonder if she stared out at the ocean perfectly happy with where she was and what she’d just done with someone who wasn’t Pop.

I feel a sudden stabbing pain in my stomach, followed by an awful pressure, and then I veer off the sidewalk and throw up in the bushes. Out comes the half-digested Hawaiian bacon BBQ burger. I kneel down in the dirt for a few minutes, wiping my mouth on the hem of my shirt.

I guess I won’t have to lie about the vomiting, after all.

“Whoa, are you okay?” comes a voice.

I look up. Standing a few feet away is Nick Kelly. He’s been swimming. His hair is slicked back, and he has a towel wrapped around his skinny waist.

“Hi, Nick,” I say numbly. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?” His face is arranged in the classic expression of worry, eyebrows arcing upward, wide, sympathetic eyes, slack mouth. “That was . . . a lot of puke.”

“I’m okay, really.” I straighten. Nick takes a step forward like he’d like to help, but that would involve touching me, and he’s not sure he ought to touch me. I would laugh at how awkward we are, but I’m too worn out. “I should go in, though.”

He walks along with me to the door of the building and holds it open for me.

“Do you want me to call anyone? My dad’s a doctor. He could come look you over.” He scratches the back of his neck. “Wow. That was a dumb idea, sorry. I realize that everybody here is a doctor. Should I call your mom?”

“She knows. She’s coming.” My stomach rolls again, but I keep it down this time. Barely. “I need to go in.”

“Okay. Feel better, Ada,” he says.

But I know I won’t.