What Happens in Paradise

by Elin Hilderbrand

  “Brandon the barista,” Lydia says. “We’re dating. We’ve been dating since…that night.”

  Irene supposes it’s too late to ask Lydia to keep the news of Russ’s death to herself. “I’ll call you tomorrow, really. I…I have to go.”

  “Okay,” Lydia says. She sounds put out, and then she starts to cry. “I’m so sorry, Irene. I’m sure you’re destroyed. Russ was…well, you know he was the most devoted husband.”

  Wasn’t he just, Irene thinks. “Good night, Lydia.” She punches off the phone, sighs deeply, then turns her attention to the library shelves. Three shelves in from the right, three shelves down from the ceiling, Irene finds the Oxford English Dictionary that she lugged to college, Roget’s Thesaurus, and Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations in a solid, scholarly stack. She moves the three massive tomes onto the brocade sofa and slides the panel out of the back of the shelf to reveal a secret compartment. And voilà! There’s a manila envelope, stuffed full.

  Irene had forgotten all about the secret compartment until she started thinking about hiding places. The secret compartment had been original to this room, and even though the library had undergone a complete overhaul, Russ had insisted the compartment stay. It added character and history—they agreed it had probably been used to hide alcohol during Prohibition. It was one of the only aspects of the house Russ had taken a personal interest in.

  What will we hide in there? Irene had asked.

  Love notes, he’d said.

  She remembers that, clear as day. Love notes.

  She pulls out the manila envelope and empties the contents onto the coffee table. It’s a stack of postcards secured with a rubber band. For one second, Irene holds out hope that the postcards are family heirlooms, maybe the correspondence that Milly conducted with Russ’s father while he was away in the navy. But once she wrangles the rubber band off, she sees the pictures on the postcards are all of St. John—Cinnamon Bay, Maho Bay, Francis Bay, Hansen Bay.

  None of the cards is addressed. On the back of each is a short, simple message. I love you. I’ll miss you. You are my heart. I’ll be here waiting. I love you. I love you. I love you. All of them are signed with the initials M.L.

  M.L.? Not Rosie? She thinks of Maia, but these notes feel, almost certainly, like declarations of romantic love. So they have to be from Rosie. M.L. must be a nickname.

  These are the love notes Russ was talking about then, years earlier, when he insisted they keep this compartment.

  Irene feels a wave of anger and disgust—he kept these in the house!—but she also feels implicated. If she had to guess, she would say Rosie tucked these cards into Russ’s luggage for him to find once he’d arrived home. Or maybe she slipped them into his jacket pocket as he was leaving. Instead of throwing them away, as Russ certainly knew he should, he’d kept them. He’d wanted—or needed—to save this proof that someone loved him because so little love was shown to him at home.

  Irene has heard that love is a garden that needs to be tended. And what had Irene thought about that? She had thought it was sentimental nonsense, the stuff of sappy Hallmark cards. Love, for Irene, was a daily act—steadfastness, loyalty, devotion. It was raising the boys, creating a beautiful, comfortable home, stopping by to see Milly three times a week because Russ was too busy to do it himself. It was ironing Russ’s shirts, making his oatmeal with raisins the way he liked it, taking his Audi to the car wash so it was gleaming when he returned from his trips.

  She tosses the postcards in the air and they scatter. She would like to burn them in one of her six fireplaces; nothing would give her greater satisfaction than watching Rosie’s declarations of love for Russ curl, blacken, and go up in smoke.

  Forgiveness, she thinks. She will save the postcards and give them to Maia someday.

  She picks up the landline and dials, and Huck answers on the first ring. “Hello,” he says. “Who’s calling me from Iowa City?”

  “It’s me,” Irene says, which she knows is presumptive. They haven’t been friends long enough for her to be “me.”

  “Hello, you,” he says, and she feels better. “What’s up?”

  What should Irene tell him first? That she spent all day with the FBI? Or that she found an illicit cache of postcards from his stepdaughter to her husband?

  “Adam leaves a week from Tuesday?” she says.

  “Yep,” Huck says.

  “All right,” Irene says. “I guess that means I’ll be down a week from Monday.”

  “You serious?” Huck says. She hears him exhale, presumably smoke. “Angler Cupcake, you serious?”

  She squeezes her eyes shut. “Yes,” she says.

  Ayers

  You’re hiding something,” Mick says. It’s one of their rare nights off together and they’re having dinner at the bar at Ocean 362, where they can watch the sun set. Ayers spent the afternoon on Salomon Bay by herself; Mick asked to come along but Ayers said she wanted to be alone. It was important, this time around, to preserve her me-time.

  I want to lie in the sun and think about Rosie, she said.

  You can think about Rosie with me right next to you, Mick said. You can even talk about Rosie. I’ll listen.

  It’s not the same, Ayers said. You’ll distract me. What she didn’t tell Mick, couldn’t tell him, was that she needed time to read Rosie’s journals. She had made it from the year 2000—Rosie at age seventeen—all the way through her tumultuous relationship with Oscar to the weekend in 2006 when she met Russ. Ayers was just getting to the good stuff, the important stuff—but it was tricky, finding blocks of time to read.

  “If you’re suspicious,” Ayers says now, “it’s probably because of your own guilty conscience.” She digs into the walnut-crusted Roquefort cheesecake.

  “What?” he says.

  “Don’t act offended,” Ayers says. She lowers her voice because the bartender, Alex, is a friend of theirs and she doesn’t want him to hear them squabbling. “We agreed we wouldn’t dance around the topic of your infidelity. We agreed you would own it and that I was free to bring it up at any time.”

  “Within reason. We said ‘within reason.’”

  “You’re accusing me of hiding something,” Ayers says. “Meanwhile, you haven’t even fired Brigid.”

  “I can’t fire her just because we broke up,” Mick says. “That’s against the law.” He pulls his phone out because the sun is going down and one of Mick’s passions is photographing the sunset every night, then posting it on Instagram as #sunset, #sunsetpics, #sunsetlover. Ayers has forgotten how this annoys her. She enjoys a good sunset as much as the next person, but she finds pictures of the sunset #overdone.

  “You can fire her because she’s a terrible server,” Ayers says. “She’s the worst server I’ve ever seen.”

  “You’re biased.”

  Ayers carefully constructs a bite: a slice of toasted baguette smeared with the Roquefort topped with the accompanying shallot and garlic confit. “How do you think I feel knowing that she’s right there under your nose every single night? The answer is: not great. But do I complain? Do I sniff your clothes or show up at the restaurant unannounced? No. Do I accuse you of hiding something? I do not.”

  “You’re right,” Mick says. He’s distracted by his sunset posting. “I’m sorry.”

  Ayers lets the topic drop because guess what—she is hiding something! She’s obsessed with Rosie’s journals, and she isn’t using that word cavalierly like the rest of the world now does (“I’m obsessed with AOC’s lipstick” or “mango with chili salt” or “‘Seven Rings’ by Ariana Grande”). If Ayers didn’t have two jobs and a boyfriend, she would lock herself in a room and binge on the journals until she had the whole story—but there is pleasure to be had in pacing herself. Read, then process.

  Of course, it’s more difficult to hold back now that Russ has entered the picture.

  Ayers and Mick finish dinner and decide to end the evening by going to La Tapa for a nightcap. To an outsider, it might seem patheti
c that Ayers can’t stay away from her place of employment on her night off, but the fact is, La Tapa is her home and her coworkers are her family. Skip and Tilda finally hooked up—they’ve been circling each other since October—and Tilda told Ayers that for three days straight, they did nothing but drink Schramsberg, eat mango with chili salt, and have wild sex. But on the fourth day, Tilda woke up at Skip’s place and wondered what the hell she was doing there.

  It was like the fever broke, Tilda whispered to Ayers as they polished glasses before service. I’m over him. In fact, looking at him makes me feel kind of sick.

  Human nature being what it is, when Tilda’s enthusiasm cooled, Skip’s grew more intense, and Tilda confided to Ayers—yes, somehow Ayers and Tilda were becoming confidantes—that Skip followed her home to her parents’ villa one night after work. (Tilda’s parents are quite wealthy and have a home in Peter Bay. Tilda doesn’t have to work at La Tapa but she’s determined not to “play the role of entitled rich kid,” so she hammers out four shifts a week and also volunteers at the Animal Care Center, walking rescue dogs. The more Ayers learns about Tilda’s life outside of work, the harder it is not to admire and even like her.) When Tilda explained to Skip in her parents’ driveway—she was not about to invite Skip in—that she thought maybe they had gotten too close too quickly, Skip had started to cry.

  Now, apparently, he’s venting his anger at the restaurant during service; he’s been acting erratically with the customers.

  And sure enough, after Ayers and Mick claim two seats at the bar and order Ayers’s favorite sipping tequila, Ayers overhears Skip describing a bottle of Malbec for the couple sitting a few stools away like this: “This wine is a personal favorite of mine,” Skip says. “It has hints of hashish, old piñata candy, and the tears of cloistered nuns.”

  “What?” the woman says. “No, thank you!”

  Ayers waves Skip over. “You okay?”

  “Great, Ayers, yeah,” Skip says, scowling. “Seriously, never better.” He looks over Ayers’s shoulder and his expression changes. “Hey, man, how’re you doing? Good to see you! It’s…it’s…I’m sorry, bud, I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “Cash,” a voice says.

  Ayers whips around. “Cash!” she says. She hops off her stool. It’s Cash Steele, here at La Tapa! Ayers remembers too late that she’s angry with him. She finds that she’s happy, really happy, to see him. She inadvertently checks behind him to see if maybe Baker followed him in.

  No. But Ayers finds her heart bouncing around at the prospect of his being here.

  “Hey, Ayers,” Cash says. He offers Skip a hand across the bar. “Good to see you, man. Just got in on the ferry. I’m starving. Can I get an order of mussels and the bread with three sauces?”

  “You got it, Cash,” Skip says.

  Cash eyes the stool next to Ayers. “This taken?”

  Mick clears his throat. Ayers says, “No, no, sit, please. Cash, this is…Mick. And Mick, this is Cash Steele.”

  Mick raises his tequila and slams back the whole thing. Cash nods in response.

  “So what are you doing here?” Ayers asks. “I thought you guys went back to your lives in America.” Which is how it always happens, she thinks. Which is why she doesn’t date tourists.

  “My life in America kind of fell apart,” Cash says. “So that text you sent me was pure serendipity.”

  On the other side of Ayers, Mick sounds like he’s choking. Ayers watches Skip set a glass of water in front of him.

  “Text?” Ayers says, though she knows exactly what Cash is talking about.

  “About the job on Treasure Island,” Cash says. “Have you filled it?”

  “Uh…no,” Ayers says. “We haven’t. We’re pretty desperate, actually. Wade leaves in another week.”

  Cash slaps some paperwork down on the bar. “I can fast-track my lifesaving certification,” he says. “I should be good to go in another week.”

  “Seriously?” Ayers says. “You want the job on Treasure Island?”

  “I’d love it,” Cash says.

  Ayers hears Mick muttering on the other side of her. She would be lying if she said she wasn’t taking some satisfaction in his discomfort. She must be angrier at him than she realized.

  “Cash!”

  Tilda swoops in and throws her arms around Cash’s neck, then gives him a juicy kiss on the cheek.

  “Hey, Tilda,” Cash says.

  Across the bar, Skip holds Cash’s order of bread with three sauces. He glares at Tilda and Cash, then comes just short of slamming the plate down.

  “I thought you were in Colorado!” Tilda says. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell my parents that I’m taking a trip to Breckenridge to ski with you.”

  “No Breck for the foreseeable future,” Cash says. “I’m moving down here. And hopefully working on Treasure Island with Ayers.”

  “‘Working on Treasure Island with Ayers,’” Mick mimics under his breath.

  “Moving down here?” Tilda says. “That’s hot.”

  Skip huffs. “Hot?” he says. “Get back to work, Tilda.”

  Tilda appears unfazed. “Call me later,” she says to Cash. She sashays off to give table eight dessert menus.

  Ayers says, “I didn’t realize you knew Tilda.”

  “You sound jealous,” Mick murmurs. “How about you let lover boy eat his bread and we get out of here?”

  “She gave me a ride home when I was here the last time,” Cash says. “She’s cool.”

  “She’s taken,” Skip says. He’s holding Cash’s mussels and looks like he might dump them over Cash’s head.

  “She’s not taken,” Ayers says. She waves Skip away. “Get back to work yourself.”

  “You’re not my boss,” Skip says.

  Mick stands up. “I’m going home. Are you coming?”

  Ayers looks from Cash to Mick. It’s a standoff, she realizes. To Cash she says, “Hey, I’m picking up Maia tomorrow morning and we’re hiking from Leicester Bay to Brown Bay, then swimming after. Do you want to join us?”

  “Do you think Maia would mind?” Cash asks.

  “Are you kidding me? She’d love it.”

  “I’m in,” Cash says. “I have Winnie with me. She’s tied up outside.”

  “Winnie!” Ayers says. “This is so great! I’ll text you in the morning. How are you getting to the villa? I mean, we can wait until you’re finished and give you a ride.”

  “No, we can’t,” Mick says. “We have to get home. I have work tomorrow.”

  “At four o’clock,” Ayers says. “Chill.”

  “Don’t tell me to chill,” Mick says. “Please.”

  “No problem,” Cash says. “I’ll see if Tilda can give me a ride home. If not, I’ll take a taxi.”

  Skip leans across the bar. “How are those mussels?” he asks aggressively.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Ayers says. “Welcome back.”

  Ayers weaves her way out of the restaurant. Mick is already on the sidewalk, lighting a cigarette. Ayers stops to rub Winnie’s head. She seems to recognize Ayers; her tail is wagging like crazy.

  Mick takes a deep drag of his cigarette, then exhales. “I guess I’m confused. That’s Banker’s brother, right?”

  “Cash. Right.”

  “And you guys are buddy-buddy as well?”

  “Mick, stop.”

  “You texted him,” Mick says. “You told him about the opening on Treasure Island.”

  “That was a Hail Mary,” Ayers says. “He came out on Treasure Island a few weeks ago, he was good with the guests.”

  “The plot thickens,” Mick says. “Why am I just hearing about this?”

  Ayers shrugs. “Why would I have told you? We were broken up.”

  Angry exhale of smoke.

  “You know we need to hire someone who already has a place to live,” Ayers says. “Like Cash. And I think he’d be excellent on the boat. Not okay, not good, excellent. He likes people. He’s a ski instructor
—”

  “Did you not hear him say his life fell apart?” Mick says. “Doesn’t that send up a red flag?”

  “His father died, Mick. He found out his father had this whole other life. That’s enough to throw anyone into a tailspin.”

  “Yeah, but wouldn’t you think he’d want to stay as far away from here as possible?”

  Ayers inhales the night air. There’s guitar music floating down from the Quiet Mon. Across the street, the lights twinkle at Extra Virgin Bistro. “I think he came down here and fell in love with the place,” she says. “Just like I did. Just like you did.”

  “As long as he didn’t fall in love with you,” Mick says. “But who are we kidding? Of course he did. There isn’t a woman in Colorado or anywhere else that’s as beautiful and sexy and cool as you.”

  Ayers climbs into Mick’s blue Jeep. She’s still bothered by the memory of Brigid sitting in this seat. “Honestly, I barely know him.”

  “And yet you invited him hiking with you and Maia tomorrow. You didn’t invite me; you invited Money.”

  “Cash,” Ayers says, trying not to smile. Mick is good with nicknames and it’ll be hard for her now not to think of Baker and Cash as Banker and Money. “You don’t like hiking. And I’ll point out that Cash is Maia’s brother.”

  “Half brother.”

  “Whatever. He and Baker are Maia’s only blood relatives, aside from whoever is left on Rosie’s father’s side.”

  “I don’t want you hiking with him.”

  “You don’t have any say.”

  “But we’re in a relationship,” Mick says.

  “We’re dating. You don’t own me. I’m sorry that you don’t like it. I don’t like it that Brigid still works for you. I didn’t like driving down to the Beach Bar at three o’clock in the morning and seeing you—”

  “Stop,” Mick says.

  “I’m going hiking with Cash and Maia,” Ayers says. “And Winnie!”

  “Great,” Mick says. “You’re cheating on Gordon as well.”

  “Just drive,” Ayers says. She leans back in the seat, marveling at the unexpected turn the night has taken and how buoyant she now feels. Mick is jealous, but Ayers doesn’t care. Cash is here—and tomorrow, Ayers will ask him about Baker.