I walked straight through the cabin and onto my terrace, which had been my home and respite since Saturday. One could dive directly off the deck, if they were the kind of person who swam. Not me.
I pulled my phone out, expecting a dozen voicemails from Olivia, but there was only one text message: WALTER AND I CAN KEEP A SECRET.
She’s got to be kidding.
I tried to call her. How was I going to tell her that however bad it now was, it might get a whole lot worse? Maybe it would go to voicemail.
“Lexie. Ok. Fill me in,” she urgently said. Taking a turn for the sweeter, she cooed to Walter, “Baby, will you check what’s keeping the martinis?”
Is that what you drink when your friend dies?
“Olivia, I don’t know how…” I stuttered.
“Spit it out.”
“Well, it looks like it might not be a heart attack. Or drowning.”
I could imagine her face; lips pursed and furrowed brow. “What do you mean? Of course it was.”
“They think it could be venom from a poison frog. They are analyzing a puncture wound and a needle now.”
“Are you messing with me?”
I heard Walter return in the background, most likely two martinis in hand. “Who’s messing with you, baby?”
“No one, Walter,” she dismissively said. “Lexie says that these backwoods cops still can’t figure out if Nico drowned or had a heart attack. So we’ll have to wait to make any decisions until tomorrow.”
I didn’t follow that logic.
I wasn’t going to be able to get through to her. “You understand we’re probably talking about a murder. You have to think of the safety…”
She was done with the conversation. “You worry too much, Lexie. You are going to be the best host a cocktail party has ever seen tonight. Don’t worry. Now I’ve got to get going. We’re just trying to process things over here.”
“Don’t hang up!”
But she did.
I tried to call back repeatedly. The first two calls weren’t answered, and the subsequent ones went to the voicemail of a turned off phone.
Take a break, Lexie.
Look at where you are. When’s the next time you’re going to see a dolphin?
I tried to appreciate the magic of the scenery. To say that it was common to see dolphins dash by was an understatement. They were constantly frolicking along the coral reef at the edge of the resort.
Watching them made me doubt the hype that they were the smartest animals in existence. If they were truly brilliant, they wouldn’t be playing around like eight-year-olds during the last days of summer vacation. If they really were as smart as everyone claimed, they’d operate more like the deep-sea hatchet fish, with underbite fangs and existential scowls. Bottom feeders. Vertical migrators. Silhouette hunters. At that particular moment, I stood behind the theory that intelligence bred misery.
Stop it now. Chin up. Be a good bridesmaid.
I pulled out the slam book, hurrying to find Nico’s page. As the best man, his page opened like a centerfold; a close-up of a handsome, imposing man, with his default expression of condescension, looking much more mafia than Wall Street. Next to him was the scribbled-out face of ice princess Max, with comments written over her white evening gown that I’d rather not repeat.
On the bottom of the page, Olivia had written in her blood red sharpie, “You scullion! You rampallian! You fustilarian! I’ll tickle your catastrophe!” Henry IV.
She may have abandoned literature, but she’d always keep Shakespeare’s Henries close to her heart. We’d spent a summer sure we would become stars of stage and screen, yelling across the yard, random lines from The Complete Works of Shakespeare. But Max was a fustilarian for sure, whatever that was.
Re-reading all that I had forgotten, I saw Nico had still been a good friend to some. He’d invested in Walter’s gym business, Lloyd’s medical research, and the supercomputing start-up of Edgar, another groomsman.
Those facts didn’t make him a good person, they made him a wealthier person. No mention of charm, charisma, or real charity.
Nico once came up behind me at a fundraiser he was throwing for a museum that didn’t really need the money. “What about giving some money to a charity that’s actually helping people in need?” I had asked, going on to ask if they donated any of their money to a real cause.
He didn’t respond, but later in the evening grabbed my bottom and said, “You have a butt like a twelve- year- old boy.”
Wanting to slap him, I merely walked off.
He had called after me, as I hurried into a different room, “What? That’s a good thing!”
Please just have died of a heart attack.
I skimmed over the pages of the guests, most of whom I only knew in passing. Then I landed on Salty, guest no longer, face crossed out with various Shakespearian insults scribbled across his visage.
I’m not going to make it.
I never thought that I’d miss Salty, with his stupid name and passive-aggressive confidence. But the hole he had left was closing more slowly than anticipated.
It wasn’t the crying fits of my college years, hyperventilating and dry heaving - a bond that Olivia and I had unfortunately shared for many years during destructions of the heart; it was a dull ache, aware of how long a day could be. Blah.
After four years with Salty, lying on the couch after he delivered me the perfect cup of tea, I simply said, “I can’t do this anymore.”
I ended up hating a lot of silly and meaningless things about Salty. I hated that he didn’t use a Mac, wore his pants a little too short, and that his ears stuck out. I hated that he ironed his jeans and t-shirts and had abandoned rare steak for kale and beet juice.
I hated that he retreated to another room when my friends were over, and said things like, “Who else would be stupid enough to love you?” He’d turn, walk a few steps, then turn back and say, “I don’t mean that,” but the damage was done.
I felt conspicuously alone, even when we were together. Three days before, I’d received a text from him, stating, “As of late, I seem to have taken a full-time job regretting years of taking you for granted.”
Day late. Dollar short.
Moving on takes time.
So, I’d go on faking it ‘til I made it, but the wedding week was going to be challenge enough, and now with Nico…. I was exhausted and went inside. I stretched out across the couch, finally giving up trying to get the bride on the phone. Even if she hadn’t been avoiding me, service was spotty at best.
What was she doing? Her wedding plans had morphed from Princess Diana in a train of ivory to the Countess of the Dark Side. I gave Olivia credit for abandoning the traditional princess theme, but I wasn’t sure how the rest of the guests would feel about her witching hour fantasies. She’d joked for life that she wanted a wedding on an underwater Monopoly board we saw in Cosmopolitan. The humble dream I’d shared with her was a roller-skating wedding at our childhood rink, Spin Off.
We weren’t Cinderella, she’d say. We weren’t princesses in everyday life, so why dress up like one and have a mediocre dinner with the choices of chicken, steak, or pasta primavera? Sometimes salmon was added to the mix. But that wasn’t any of our lives and weddings should represent who we were, or who Olivia was.
When Olivia asked me to be her maid of honor, eons before Salty and I sunk south to Hades, I declined (there actually is a place called Tartarus south of Hades. It’s really terrible there. Look it up).
“Please don’t think it wouldn’t be an honor,” I respectfully stated, “but I’m not a good choice. I should be the last on your list. Last. What about Phil?”
“No,” she said, as we sucked down PBRs in our dive bar, which she had pretty much abandoned for Soho House by that point. “But no. No, no, no. I choose you. We’re blood sisters!”
Olivia held her scarred knuckle up, pointing at it dramatically, conspicuous enough for anyone around to take a gander. When we were eight
, we scraped our knuckles with rocks down on Cape Cod, pressed them together for a few minutes, and from then on we were theoretically one.
“Blood.” She put her hand, partially obscured by the 4-carat ring, on my bare one and pensively said, “Seriously Lexie. I just need two things and I will leave you alone after. One, you need to make sure I look gorgeous and two, throw me an epic bachelorette party. Phil and Amanda can do the rest. Wait, okay. There is a number three. Three, a good speech. A good toast. Most importantly I need an epic toast.”
“I love you, but it’s never three things with you,” I replied.
“It’s me and you, Lex. There’s no one else who could hold a candle.”
What could I do but say yes?
“Yes!” she exclaimed and ticked something off in her book.
Check. Moving on.
Yes, my responsibilities ended up being far greater than those three things she listed after she got the gift of a lifetime. After Nico offered to pick up the bill, the skies opened, so naturally, Olivia had planned for the moon.
I had my own mantra. I could close my eyes, breathe deeply, and think of my new Greenwich Village apartment that I would return to in five days. Small. Tiny, really, but affordable. And alone.
Olivia wasn’t the only one who had written a book. I penned my own once too, a self-help volume of sorts called Left Behind, which encouraged you to have your friends verbally rip you apart, mentioning every flaw from the insignificant to the major, to inspire you to be a better person.
It was kind of a big deal for a while and I was paid a very respectable advance for a first-time author, certainly enough to quit my job and write full time for a stretch. At the time, I had thought that in publishing a semi-successful book, my days of working for someone else were over. Not so. The fad soared and then nose-dived pretty quickly. Two more books had been published, but they’d been so ignored that no one knew they even existed, and I was repeatedly asked what my follow up to Left Behind would be.
Money runs out pretty quickly in New York City, even when you’re cautious, and sooner rather than later I was back to theatre marketing. It was the least scientific of all marketing, where student interns were still sent out to Times Square with sandwich boards, shoving flyers in people’s faces with promises of 40% off the Lion King, Tuesday through Thursday only.
If you don’t like your life, change it. That’s what they say. Five years ago, I thought that I had entered a better chapter two. That was when I hit 30. I guess that 35 meant chapter three. How many chapters were left?
Romance is not dead, but it is bastardized. It’s a little bitter and a lot cautious.
I was exhausted and ready for a nap.
Chapter 6: Murphy’s Law: Anything That Can Go Wrong, Will Go Wrong
I was having one of those dreams, where you think you hear the voice of someone you know. Maybe a friend you haven’t seen in twenty years, maybe a dead grandparent, maybe a rock star you’d never met but for some reason, you are buddy-buddy with in your dreams. You can never tell who it is, but the voice gets increasingly familiar. You quietly follow, eventually turning the corner, catching view of their shoes, the back of their head, the silhouette of their body, and then wake up…
It wasn’t a dream.
I had taken an unheard of two-hour nap, still not having heard back from Olivia.
I trudged over to the closet. Ten blood red outfits hung side by side; one for every event, fitted for the pre-breakup Lexie of two months prior, who was ten pounds lighter. Granted, the wardrobe was all a lovely gift, but there was no chance of me blending into the crowd (forget about fading into the wall-less scenery).
Having identified the dress assigned to the party, I squeezed myself into it. I looked like a red sailor in the Gothic US Navy, sucking my gut in, hoping the zipper would hold me in the heinous frock. Now constantly identifiable as crimson wedding concierge.
I was regular everywhere but my stomach, able to see the outline of my belly button through the fitted dress. How offending.
The very familiar but unidentifiable voices, which I’d thought had been from my dream, continued laughing and frolicking, having a great time splashing around. The scream and the laughter of a woman pushing a man into the water.
I can’t place these voices, but they are making me nervous.
I don’t need any more nervous right now.
Is it Nico’s ghost? Is it someone else? Is it my NYC constant paranoia?
I settled on the most amorphous outfit that I had and walked back out to my terrace to see what was going on, and saw the body that went with the whimsical laughter: Emma, Olivia’s younger sister. She had got off a plane after all.
God, how those sisters despised each other. The event that had been the final straw was still a mystery, but they hadn’t spoken in over five years.
Olivia’s father had put his foot down with Olivia to stop the ridiculousness. He wouldn’t come unless the bride at least invited her sister. Olivia wasn’t up for much tradition but needed to have her father-of-the-bride dance. It was one of the few traditions that she wanted to abide by for superstition’s sake. No one thought Emma would reply. I don’t think their dad was even happy that she did, to be honest.
Emma had been a terror for years. To say that they had seen each other twelve times in as many years would be an exaggeration. Emma had attempted to ruin all her older sister’s triumphs; the publishing and flop of Olivia’s poorly received novel, the opening of Femme Fit-all, the cover story of Shape Magazine. Though a murder wasn’t going to stop the wedding, Emma certainly could.
She gushed from the next deck over, blowing inauthentic kisses with grand gestures. “Lexie, Lexie, Lexie! It has been way too long.”
“You look beautiful,” I commented, and she did; five years younger than her sister, and a lot more deceptively charming. Emma’s genes were just a tiny bit nicer, a little smoother.
“I brought a surprise!” she chirped as her “random dude” materialized through the water, propping himself up on his elbows. He shook the water out of his hair like a shaggy dog and redirected his gaze towards me. Ryan Michael Lawler.
Knock me over with a feather.
The little clueless sibling had brought Olivia’s high school boyfriend and the first “love of her life”. She’d been ripped apart when Ryan dumped her three months into his freshman year of college. I spent hours hogging up the hallway phone at NYU (How did we exist without cell phones? And how did we pay exorbitant long-distance bills as college freshmen?), nursing her through her first heartbreak, the one you think isn’t going to end and that might literally kill you.
Her roommate, who hardly knew or liked her, had begged me to come down to New Jersey to help, where I took her to the hospital; dry heaving, dehydrated, sleepless and unable to keep food down. She was able to compartmentalize, but she never forgot him. You never forget the first one.
I certainly never did. Forgot Ryan that is… He was the major secret of my life. He was my first love, before Olivia knew he existed. I met him the first day he transferred to Brookline High from Huntington Beach, CA.
He was a surfer, dreamy but demoted to riding a Boston skateboard. We had a week together, keeping him secret because I didn’t want to share him, and gave him my virginity. Gave? Threw it at him.
Try how I might to keep him to myself, all it took was one solo trip down the corridors of BHS for the lady hawks to descend. Then he had a virtual cornucopia of virginities to take, but he fell for Olivia. It wasn’t her fault I was crushed; I never told her what happened. I had mistakenly kept us a secret. I didn’t want to ruin it for Olivia, but I did my fair share of secret dry heaving in my own right.
Ryan, baffled, confounded really, looked at me, pulling himself onto the dock and grabbing a blood red towel. “Lexie?”
His movie star eyes repeatedly darted between Emma, myself, and an escape route he was obviously looking for.
“Lexie…come over here and talk to us. I’ll exp
lain.” She beckoned me with her little finger.
I held my hand up to her, flabbergasted, gob smacked, knocked for a loop. “You, young lady, stay in your room. Ryan?!”
“You are here for the wedding too…?” Ryan began.
“Olivia’s wedding.”
“Crap,” was his simple but suitable response. “I had no idea.”
“Ryan, meet me in the bar, now!”
I held my stomach in as we walked.
Not a beauty contest, Lexie. Just get him out of here.
The sooner the better.
How was I going to say anything to him without lipstick? Ryan was walking behind me, looking like he just realized he was on bad reality TV. Emma started to come over to us, but I put my finger up again and hissed, “Back in your room.”
The solution should have been simple - put them on a water taxi back to the airport so they could leave on the next flight out of there. Except that the airport was closed for the foreseeable future. A murder on a tiny island trapped us all. Their departure was more than I could fit on my plate. Yet another secret to hide.
Before I could say a word, he had ordered two glasses of wine, handing me one as if an offer of apology. I walked quickly to the furthest table, like a bickering honeymoon couple, realizing we’d made a huge mistake by being together at all.
“Emma. Really? You knew her when she was six,” I scolded.
Uncomfortable silence followed. The conversation couldn’t be over quickly enough.
“What are you doing trolling around like that? What’s wrong with you?”
“I just thought I was going on a slightly sordid, no strings attached vacation with an old friend. There was no ill will. Trust me, if I had know…
“Old friend? Emma? You should be settled down and married. With kids or something. You should…”
“Should what? Miss Left Behind?” Twenty years later and his smile hadn’t changed.
“Don’t.” No one could mention my book or the Left Behind Club except me. And I didn’t mention it anymore, ever.
Drowning Lessons Page 4
