“Where’s that?” Irene says.
“It’s a country in South America,” Natalie says. “They have a pay-for-citizenship policy. Invest two hundred thousand in the country’s economy and receive a passport. That would have allowed Mr. Thompson to move around more freely, without the oversight of the British government.”
“I’m sorry,” Irene says. It’s nearly seven o’clock; Natalie called just as Irene and Huck were driving home from a double-charter day. They are both exhausted and irritable. “I’m sorry, Natalie, but there is no way Russ was the mastermind behind all this.” Irene laughs. “He—I swear to you—didn’t have it in him. Let’s start with…we lived in Iowa. Russ was a member of the Rotary. He was on the school board. He liked puns, for Pete’s sake.” Underground gambling? Irene thinks. Human trafficking? Russ’s definition of underground gambling was the office football pool, and he would have thought human trafficking was something a crossing guard took care of. “He was a decent man. I do still believe that. He must have been bribed by Todd Croft and that was why he was the one who got his hands dirty.” Irene turns and looks out the open window. They’re climbing Jacob’s Ladder. It’s one steep switchback after another and the engine of Huck’s truck wheezes like an out-of-shape geezer on the StairMaster. But they make it, they always make it, and they’re treated to a magnificent sunset—brilliant orange, like a wildfire across the sky. The beauty of these islands is completely at odds with the news Irene is now hearing. Or maybe it’s not at odds. Maybe this beauty was what seduced Russ. Irene knows better than anyone that once you experience life in this paradise, you’ll do anything to keep it. “Todd Croft offered Russ more money than he could possibly imagine,” Irene says. “Russ made fifty-seven thousand dollars a year selling corn syrup. We were always struggling before he took this job. All I can think is that Todd offered him millions, and in exchange, he agreed to be the fall guy if they ever got caught.” Irene swallows. “He was that desperate, that eager to please me. I was hard on him.”
“Maybe it was bribing at first,” Natalie says. “But I’m going to guess that, as things progressed, it became blackmail.”
“Blackmail.”
Natalie lowers her voice. “If Todd Croft knew about Rosie…and about Maia…well, he could have gotten Russ to do anything.”
Huck pulls into the driveway. Irene sees Baker and Floyd out on the deck with Maia. She can’t continue a conversation that involves organ trafficking—and not the church kind of organ—while she’s looking at her grandchild. She has to end this call. “Right,” Irene says.
“But we have no way to prove Todd did that,” Natalie says. “Yet.”
Ayers
Baker must have had a sixth sense that something was going on because he’d called Ayers while she was in the bathroom holding the pregnancy test with a shaky hand.
Positive.
Ayers had stared at the screen of her ringing phone. Baker was listed in her contacts as “the Tourist” with a photo of a leatherback sea turtle.
She’d declined the call.
She was pregnant? Well, yeah. Obviously. Of course.
Ayers wasn’t a complete idiot; pregnancy had been her first thought, but she’d dismissed it immediately because it was too awful and Ayers had had so much awful piled on her recently that there wasn’t room for any more. Rosie dying, a broken engagement, and now…
When Ayers got back together with Mick, she’d insisted he use a condom because of Brigid. He’d been good about this. Not happy, but conscientious. Even the night of their engagement, he’d used a condom.
The only time Ayers had had unprotected sex was with Baker on their single night together. It was just that one night. A couple of times, but still.
Still, that was all it took. One egg and one sperm—baby.
Well, she couldn’t have a baby. She could barely take care of herself. She lived in a studio—cute, but unsuitable. Her houseplants were dying. Where would she put a crib? A high chair? A Pack ’n Play or a bouncy chair or a swing or any of the other large, noisy paraphernalia that babies required?
She could, maybe, have had Mick’s baby, because Mick was a known quantity to Ayers. But to have a baby with Baker, a person she had been on exactly one date with and slept with twice?
She wasn’t prepared for any kind of conversation with Baker. She sent him a text: I’ve come down with something. It’s bad and I wouldn’t want you or Floyd to catch it. I’ll call you when I’m better.
Rosie had been in this exact same predicament. No, Rosie had had it worse. Rosie found herself pregnant by a man she thought she’d never see again. She’d kept the baby—and who was that baby now? It was Maia, the most wonderful human Ayers knew. Didn’t Ayers want a Maia of her own? A child who was wise and sweet and smart and funny? A child who would love her the way that Maia loved Rosie?
Theoretically, yes; Ayers wanted children. She had always pictured herself with children, and she even knew what kind of mother she wanted to be—the kind of mother who dressed up with her kids for Halloween, the kind of mother who let the kids have hot fudge sundaes for dinner on their last day of summer vacation. She wanted to be a Scout leader. She wanted to be fun and involved and reliable, a buoy during the unpredictable currents and undertow of growing up.
Just like everyone else, she wanted to be exactly like and completely different from her own parents.
Oh, jeez, Ayers thought. She had to tell her parents the news. But first, she would need to find them.
Treasure Island was fixed, but Ayers couldn’t handle an all-day boat charter either physically or mentally. She called Whitney in the office and told her that she needed some time off—a couple of weeks, she thought, but maybe longer.
“But you’re not quitting on us, right?” Whitney said. “No pressure, girlfriend, but you’re the heart and soul of this operation. Cash is good but he’s brand-new.”
“I’m coming back?” Ayers said. “I mean, I’m coming back. Of course I’m coming back.”
At La Tapa, Ayers was shaky and sweaty and distracted. Tilda covered for Ayers’s lethargy and her mistakes. Tilda thought the problem was Mick, both the broken engagement and his weeklong sit-in at Cruz Bay Landing. It had become a thing. Mick had been going to work, but directly afterward, he sat at the bar at CBL with the ring in front of him and Gordon tied to his bar stool, and he drank. He was there on his days off as well, from open to close. Tourists had started posting pictures of #heartsickmick with the beer and the ring box in front of him and Gordon snoozing dutifully at his feet.
Mick had managed to make the breakup all about himself; he’d cast himself as the victim, and he’d gotten his own hashtag in the process. Meanwhile, Brigid was still working at the Beach Bar and not at Island Abodes like Mick had promised, so frankly Ayers didn’t care if 60 Minutes came to do a segment about his broken heart—Ayers wasn’t going back.
“I feel bad for the guy,” Skip, the La Tapa bartender, said at the end of service. “I’m going over to have a drink with him.”
“Birds of a feather,” Tilda murmured.
Ayers needed to confide in someone—and that someone should have been Baker. However, on Wednesday afternoon, Ayers got a text from Cash, and the next thing she knew, she had offered to adopt Winnie for a while because Tilda’s fancy, type A parents didn’t “do dogs.”
This, at least, felt right. It was the least she could do after abandoning Cash on Treasure Island. It would also be nice to have a warm body around, one who wasn’t going to ask her any questions.
Ayers had picked Cash up from the boat and driven to Peter Bay to collect Winnie. Ayers had never been to Tilda’s fancy, type A parents’ villa before—she had never been to any of the homes in Peter Bay; it was exclusive, private, gajillionaire territory—and when she drove down the steep chute of Tilda’s driveway, she got vertigo. It felt like they were driving off a cliff into the sea.
Whooooooo! When Ayers parked, her heart was slamming against her chest.
Uncle Cash, she thought. My baby’s uncle.
She was about to leave—she had Winnie’s leash in one hand and her bowl in the other—but then…then she blurted it out. Without intention, without planning, without warning.
I’m pregnant.
“Whoa!” Cash said.
“It’s Baker’s,” Ayers whispered.
Cash’s eyes bugged. “It is?”
Ayers nodded.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“You haven’t told my brother yet, have you?”
Ayers shook her head. The mere thought made her want to hurl. She’d inhaled the scent of the frangipani bushes that surrounded Tilda’s fancy, type A parents’ villa. She needed to get out of there. The last thing she wanted was for Tilda to come home and ask what was wrong.
“I haven’t told anyone,” Ayers said. “Not even my parents.”
“That explains your leave of absence.”
“Just for a couple weeks,” Ayers said. “Until I get a better grip on things.”
“I’m sure it seems scary,” Cash said. “But I’ll help. We’ll all help. Baker has his flaws, but he’s an excellent father.”
Ayers wasn’t ready to hear this; she wasn’t even sure she was going to go through with it. “Don’t tell a soul,” she said. “Not Tilda, not your mom, not Baker.”
“Are you kidding?” Cash said. He bent down to rub Winnie’s head. “I’m giving you my best friend. The last thing I’m going to do is cross you.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m here,” Cash said. “And you know what? I’m psyched.”
To track down her mother and father, Ayers clicks on the Wandering Wilsons Facebook page. Her parents share a cell phone and they call her when they’re in a place with reliable service, which isn’t often. Ayers’s parents—Phil Wilson and Sunny Ray—have never married, though they’ve been together for thirty-five years. Each refers to the other as “my partner,” and they call each other “my love.” Their relationship is nontraditional—and enviable. They have a shared vision of seeing the world on its own terms, abiding by the old adage “Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints.” Phil and Sunny met during a semester abroad in the Canary Islands in 1984; Phil was at Berkeley, Sunny at the University of Wisconsin. After that semester, they both dropped out and hopped on a freighter headed for Portugal, starting a life of wanderlust that has continued to this very day. Ayers’s earliest memories are of walking between her parents down the dusty streets of one foreign country or another, the smell of diesel fuel, the sound of unfamiliar languages. Phil was the navigator; he had the map. Sunny was the ambassador; she did the talking, learning the words for Hello and Thank you in the language of every place they visited. They stayed in hostels or cheap hotels, Ayers and her parents sometimes all sharing a bed. They cooked in communal kitchens, showered in communal bathrooms. They slept on trains. They hiked and camped, snorkeled, tubed, zip-lined, canoed, rafted, spelunked. They shopped at local markets, napped in botanical gardens, hopped on and off the goat-and-chicken bus, lit candles in churches, swam with dolphins and whale sharks, ate from street carts, bathed in hot springs, climbed to the scenic lookout at the crack of dawn, rode the elephant or donkey or camel, awoke to the call of the muezzin from the local mosque, swapped paperbacks, hand-washed their laundry and hung it to dry stiff as cardboard in the baking sun. As soon as they stayed somewhere long enough to feel comfortable, they packed up and moved on. Ayers had seen it all: the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, Torres del Paine, the Galápagos, the northern lights, the Monteverde Cloud Forest, the Amazon River, the fjords, the glaciers, the mountain ranges, the deserts, the lakes, all of the oceans.
That must have been so cool, people say when Ayers describes her upbringing. You’re so lucky.
We all want what we can’t have. Ayers wanted a house. She wanted a subscription to Seventeen magazine that would arrive reliably on the first of the month. She wanted parents like Coach and Tami Taylor. She wanted siblings.
Every week or two someone aboard Treasure Island asks Ayers, “What do your parents think about you living on a tropical island?”
The true answer: They think it’s boring. “Oh,” she responds. “They’re proud of me.”
Ayers’s parents have money now—inherited from Ayers’s paternal grandmother—and so their travel has become far more comfortable. They stayed at the Shangri-La in Paris, which must have been interesting. Phil and Sunny still travel with large backpacks instead of proper luggage. Sunny wears pants and dresses made from khaki cotton; both of Ayers’s parents wear Birkenstocks. While in Paris, they had dinner at La Tour d’Argent—because, as Sunny said, it was a classic Parisian experience they’d yet to have in their half a dozen visits to the city. Had Sunny worn her Birkenstocks to La Tour d’Argent? Ayers was afraid to ask.
The last time Ayers spoke to her parents, they were in Morocco, staying with friends they’d met in Ibiza in the 1980s, before Ayers was born; these friends now own a home on the coast in Essaouira. All of Phil and Sunny’s close friends are people they met on one adventure or another—hiking around the crater of Mount Batur in Bali or shopping for an authentic Panama hat in Montecristi, Ecuador. That conversation with her parents was on the morning of Rosie’s funeral, and a lot has happened since then. It feels like nearly everything important in Ayers’s life has happened since then.
A Facebook post from yesterday puts Phil and Sunny at Fairmont the Norfolk in Nairobi. A scroll back through their pictures shows they’ve been on safari in the Maasai Mara.
Bah! Ayers thinks. They never took her on safari! They always said it was too expensive. There are the requisite pictures of giraffes, zebras, lions, elephants. And some of a hot-air balloon ride they took at sunrise. Cheetahs, leopards, rhinos, baboons, hippos. A Maasai warrior posing with Phil and Sunny in their Birkenstocks.
Ayers sighs. Her parents are in Africa. They couldn’t be any farther away. Still, she tries their cell phone. What’s the time difference? She doesn’t care. She calls.
Her mother answers on the first ring. “Freddy!” Sunny says. “Your timing is perfect! The front desk just sent us a bottle of champagne. They think we’re travel bloggers.” She laughs. “I may have misled them a bit—”
Suddenly, Ayers’s father is on the phone. “She misled them a lot,” he says. “Though it works. We’ve gotten free stuff every place we’ve checked in since your mother started referring to her ‘blog.’”
“Great,” Ayers says weakly. Her parents are in high spirits; they’re about to open a bottle of champagne at a five-star hotel after having been on safari. In other circumstances, Ayers might have made a sarcastic comment about the “good old days” when they drank river water that they’d purified with iodine tablets and stayed at a hotel in Borneo where the sheets were crawling with tiny golden ants.
“We’ve been expecting your call for over a week.” Her mother again. In the background, Ayers hears the cork pop—the mere sound makes her stomach lurch—and the Tubes singing “Talk to Ya Later,” Phil and Sunny’s favorite song, straight out of the early eighties. Ayers’s eyes water. Despite the fact that she can’t remember the last time she saw her parents, Ayers knows them well. They’re her family.
But why were they expecting her call? She never calls them; it’s always the other way around. “You have?”
“There’s something you want to tell us, isn’t there, Freddy?” It’s her father again. Freddy is their nickname for Ayers; it’s short for “Ready, Freddy,” which was apparently what Ayers said nonstop when she was little.
“I do…” Ayers says.
“You’re engaged!” Her mother blurts it out; the champagne must have gone to her head already. “Mick sent us a Facebook message asking for our blessing.”
“He did?” Ayers says. She’s taken aback by this news. Mick has met Phil and Sunny three times—the two times th
ey swung through St. John to visit and then at Ayers’s cousin’s destination wedding in San Juan. Phil and Sunny like Mick. Phil and Mick are both craft-beer fanatics and they have a friendly rivalry in the sunset-picture-taking department (#sunset; Ayers doesn’t miss this habit of Mick’s one bit). Mick won Sunny over by dancing with her at Brinley’s wedding and by agreeing to tour Castillo San Cristóbal at seven o’clock the next morning. But even so, asking for her parents’ blessing isn’t something Ayers ever thought Mick would do. It seems too formal and old-fashioned.
It also seems unfair. If Mick was so invested in the engagement, why did he blow it less than two days later? Who does that?
“When we did an overnight in the Maasai village,” Sunny says, “we told the elder that our daughter was getting married, and he insisted on roasting a goat, which is a very big honor.”
Ayers falls facedown across her bed. Mick asked for her parents’ blessing without her knowledge. Her parents celebrated her engagement with Maasai villagers without even hearing if she’d said yes, which feels vaguely dishonest of them, just like intimating they wrote a travel blog. And yet this is typical of her parents. When they travel, living is done in the moment. The strangers they’re with become friends. The particulars of their lives can be stretched and even distorted without any consequence because tomorrow, they’ll be gone.
Ayers lifts her head from the bed. “Why didn’t you call me?” she asks. “You had goat with the Maasai but you didn’t call to say congratulations?”
Troubles in Paradise Page 9
