What Happens in Paradise

by Elin Hilderbrand

  Cash

  His mother called to tell him about her visit from the FBI, so Cash isn’t surprised when the taxi turns onto his father’s road and he sees a dark SUV parked in one of the dummy driveways.

  They’re watching the house. Well, he can’t blame them.

  It’s been nearly three weeks since he left. The villa seems basically the same, although Cash can tell things have been gone through. The bed in the guest room he used last time has been hastily made and all of the drawers in the adjacent bath are ajar. Cash does a quick check of the house and this seems to be the case throughout. Irene said they found nothing at the house in Iowa City and Cash imagines the same is true here. There was very little of a personal nature in this house to begin with. When they arrived the first time, reeling from the news of Russ’s death, it seemed more like a hotel than someone’s house.

  It feels good, though, to have the place to himself. It feels better than good; it feels luxurious. Cash stands out on the deck bare-chested while Winnie goes nuts sniffing everything and chasing after geckos. Cash gazes down the lush, leafy hill over the moon-spangled water. He’s king of the castle! He wants to howl, he wants to sing. The villa is his!

  His exultation is tied to seeing Ayers. He wondered if he’d built her up in his mind—but when he saw her from behind, her curly blond hair hanging loose and crazy down her back and the silhouette of her body in that halter top and white jeans, he felt like he was being swallowed up. She had been so happy to see him, happier than he would have predicted, and she had seemed nearly jealous when Tilda came over to give Cash a hug. The interaction had been great, great, great, everything Cash could have dreamed of.

  Today was the first day of the rest of his life, Cash thinks. It’s a tired phrase—and yet so true, so true! He has never been more certain of anything: his life began today. He swung down here on a slender filament of hope that a potential job on Treasure Island offered and now it looks like it will all work out.

  He wants to beat his chest! He has escaped the doom of a lonely winter in Iowa City, shoveling snow and bumping into ex-girlfriends at the grocery store. Tomorrow he has plans with Ayers and Maia, and Monday he starts his lifesaving course, which Irene has given him more than enough money to pay for.

  “I’m so happy!” Cash cries out. He wonders if the FBI has bugged the house. Well, if they have, they are going to hear the twenty-nine-year-old son of Russell Steele talking to himself. And maybe it will seem strange or even cruel that Cash is so jubilant only a few short weeks after his father died. Cash misses his father; he’s mourning his father, and he’s angry and resentful and disappointed in his father. But all of that feels like a pot Cash can pull off the stove for now. His excitement about this island and this girl and this sense of freedom and opportunity win out.

  “It’s going to be epic!” Cash says. Winnie barks and comes trotting over; she noses around Cash’s legs and he bends to rub her soft butterscotch head. “Right, Winnie? Right?”

  The next morning Cash winds his way down the hill in one of his father’s gray Jeeps, stops at the black SUV, and rolls down his window. “I’m Cash Steele,” he says. “Russell Steele’s son.”

  The man sitting in the front seat—shaved head, blond Hulk Hogan mustache—flexes one of his enormous biceps as he brings a cup of coffee to his lips. “I know,” he says.

  Cash waits a second, thinking maybe there will be more, but the guy looks down into his lap; he’s reading the paper. Cash is the one with questions—who is this guy? Why is he watching the house?—but Cash is certain he’ll be stonewalled and he doesn’t want to be late, so he carries on.

  He meets Ayers and Maia in the parking area on Leicester Bay Road. In Cash’s backpack are three towels, nine bottles of water, and three sandwiches from the North Shore Deli. He’s wearing trunks under his cargo shorts, his Social Distortion T-shirt, and his lightweight hiking boots. Both girls are standing next to Ayers’s green truck, tying bandannas around their foreheads.

  “Hey,” Cash says as he climbs out of the Jeep. Winnie heads straight for Maia, who crouches down to pet her. Winnie is an excellent ambassador; as always, she smooths over a potentially awkward situation. Cash follows, tentatively offering Maia a fist bump. Ayers said that Maia would be cool with Cash joining them, but will she? Cash knows nothing about the psyches of twelve-year-old girls.

  “Hey, bro,” Maia says. She bumps knuckles with him, then grins. “You came back! And Ayers tells me you’re going to work on Treasure Island.”

  “That’s the plan,” he says. He glances quickly at Ayers in her white tank and light blue Lululemon running shorts; he can see the outline of a bikini underneath.

  “Ayers’s boyfriend, Mick, is really jealous,” Maia says.

  “Maia!” Ayers says. “Hush!”

  “What?” Maia says. “He is. He’s even jealous we’re taking this hike.”

  “Well, he doesn’t need to be jealous,” Cash says. “Ayers and I are just friends.”

  “That’s what I told him,” Ayers says. She drops her blue aviators down over her eyes. “Are you sure you don’t mind carrying the pack? It’s got to be heavy.”

  “Please,” Cash says. “I hike at eight, nine thousand feet with a pack that’s three times this weight.”

  “Ayers doesn’t like hiking,” Maia says. “But she’s my parent now, so she has to do enriching things with me.”

  “Mangrove snorkeling is enriching,” Ayers says. She looks up at the brilliant blue sky. “And a far more appropriate activity than hiking on an eighty-degree day.”

  “Next week,” Maia says. She strides toward the trailhead. “Come on, Winnie, let’s go.”

  The Johnny Horn Trail has five spurs, Maia explains. The first spur, a flat, sandy walking path, leads to a narrow beach hugging a bay that has a rugged island a hundred yards offshore.

  “Waterlemon Cay,” Ayers says. “Best snorkeling on St. John. How about I stay here and you guys keep going?”

  “We’ve only been hiking thirty seconds,” Maia says. She turns to Cash. “See what I have to deal with?”

  The second spur takes them up a steep, rocky incline that requires a fair amount of scrambling and careful foot placement before it levels out, when they reach stone ruins. This is the guardhouse, Maia tells them, built in the 1840s, back when slavery had been abolished in the British Virgin Islands across the Sir Francis Drake Channel but was still legal on St. John.

  “There were sixteen soldiers stationed here,” Maia says. “And their job was to keep watch for runaway slaves.”

  Cash is impressed. “You have quite the body of knowledge,” he says. “How did you learn all this?”

  “My mom,” Maia says. “She knew everything about the Virgin Islands.”

  Cash nods as the peculiarity of what he’s doing hits him. He’s hiking with a half sister he never knew he had. Maia bows her head and is quiet and Ayers places a hand on the back of her neck and draws her in. They’re thinking about Rosie; Cash can feel how much they miss her. A twelve-year-old girl lost her mother, lost both of her parents, and yet here she is, bravely soldiering on with her mother’s best friend and a strange man she has gamely decided to accept as “bro.”

  “Did your mom like to hike?” Cash asks.

  “No,” Maia says, and she and Ayers laugh. “She was more like Ayers; she preferred the beach. But, I mean, she brought me up here a few times because she wanted me to experience the place we lived.”

  “I wish I’d been able to meet your mom,” Cash says honestly. More than once over the past couple of weeks, Cash has imagined this whole thing unfolding differently. What if, at some point, Russ had just come clean about his life, said that business had taken him to the Caribbean and he’d met a woman and fallen in love. Cash and Baker would have been furious at first, incredulous, resentful on Irene’s behalf. They probably would have refused to speak to Russ for a while. But eventually, Cash suspects, they would have come to terms with the situation and flown down to v
isit Russ here. They could have met Rosie. It might have taken time, but they could have accepted her as part of the family.

  Cash shakes his head. That is a trail spur that never was; there’s no use dwelling on it.

  “Shall we go?” Ayers asks. “Get this over with?”

  After the guardhouse, they begin to hit their stride. There’s not much canopy cover but even so, Cash finds himself slowing down so he can enjoy just being. His breathing steadies. He reminds himself he doesn’t need to be anywhere; he has nothing else to do today. Ayers is here, Maia is here. Ayers is right, it’s hot, but just then, the sun disappears behind a cloud, so there’s a brief respite.

  Maia not only knows history, she is also quite the naturalist. She points out a genip tree—in the summer it produces a fruit similar to a lime. Cash has never heard of it.

  “In the summer, I eat elk jerky,” Cash says.

  Maia shoots him a look. “I’m a vegetarian,” she says.

  “You are?” Cash says. “Ayers told me to get you a pastrami melt.”

  “I make an exception for pastrami,” Maia says. “And Candi’s barbecue.”

  Maia points out wild tamarind, cassia trees, and something called catch-and-keep, which is a cute name for a nefarious pricker bush. They eventually reach a scenic overlook where each of them—Winnie included—sucks down a bottle of water. Maia points across the way to Jost Van Dyke and Tortola.

  After the lookout, the trail heads downhill and it’s fully shaded. Everyone seems a little happier.

  “So I guess I’ll address the elephant in the room,” Maia says. “How’s your brother?”

  Cash isn’t sure he’s heard right. “Is Baker an elephant?”

  “I don’t know, Ayers, is Baker an elephant?” Maia says.

  “Stop being precocious for one minute, please,” Ayers says. She turns to Cash and he can see the hopeful expectation in her face, even with her sunglasses on. “How is Baker? He…went back to Houston, I take it? I haven’t heard from him.”

  Cash can’t look at her. He concentrates on walking, left foot, then right, steady in his boots, moving down the dirt trail over rocks and around the tentacles of catch-and-keep. Ayers likes Baker. She’s hung up on him; Cash can hear it in her voice. He can’t believe it. He’d met Mick the night before, and Mick is who she’s with now, but Cash isn’t intimidated by Mick. Mick is ridiculous, a clown, a clown who cheated on Ayers once and who would most certainly do it again.

  “I haven’t heard from him since our grandmother died a few days after we all got home,” Cash says.

  “Milly?” Maia says. “The one I look like?”

  “Yes,” Cash says. He chastises himself for being insensitive. Milly was Maia’s grandmother too—how weird is that? “I’m sorry. I should have broken the news in a different way. She was really old. Ninety-nine.”

  They are all silent for a moment, then Ayers says, “So you don’t know if Baker is pursuing a divorce or—”

  “No idea,” Baker says, cutting her off. “If you’re curious about Baker, just call him. You have his number, right?”

  “Right,” Ayers says.

  “Uh-oh,” Maia says. “Sounds like somebody needs lunch.”

  When they reach Brown Bay, Maia shows them a little cemetery. “These are the graves of islanders from long ago,” Maia says, which is obvious, as the modest headstones are so old and weathered they’re barely legible. “But I kind of wish my mom had been buried here. Look at this view, and it’s so peaceful and shady under these trees.”

  “She would have liked it here,” Ayers says.

  “Where…” Cash starts. He has no idea where Rosie is buried.

  “She’s with my grandma in the cemetery in Cruz Bay,” Maia says. “Or that’s where her body is. Her spirit is wherever spirits go when people die.”

  They march single file onto a ribbon of white-sand beach. It’s completely deserted and the water is a clear, placid turquoise. Cash can’t recall ever seeing such inviting water. He shucks off the backpack and strips out of his shirt and shorts. Winnie is already splashing in, barking with joy and, probably, relief. Cash follows and soon he’s floating on his back, staring up into the cloudless sky. He hears Maia and Ayers get into the water as well. Cash tries to readjust his frame of mind. He’s not going to let his brother ruin a perfectly good day when he’s a thousand miles away in Houston.

  Cash likes Ayers. Ayers likes Baker. It’s a classic like triangle. But Cash has the advantage because Cash is here and Baker isn’t. Cash has a further advantage because he will soon be working with Ayers. After spending some time with him, Ayers will realize that he’s the superior Steele brother. She’ll fall in love. He will, somehow, make her fall in love.

  After swimming, he joins Ayers and Maia, who are drying off on a flat rock—Picnic Rock, Maia calls it. Cash passes out the sandwiches and gives Winnie the biscuits he brought. Maia slips Winnie some of her pastrami, which makes her Winnie’s new best friend. The silence is companionable, Cash thinks, or maybe it’s awkward; he can’t tell. It’s true that, among the three of them, there are a number of taboo subjects.

  “How’s Huck?” Cash asks.

  “Grouchy,” Maia says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Part of it is that I’ve started going to town with my friends and he doesn’t like it.”

  “I don’t like it either,” Ayers says.

  “We’re just hanging out,” Maia says.

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Ayers and Cash say at the same time. They exchange a look and for a second, Cash feels like he and Ayers are Maia’s parents instead of her half brother and sort of aunt.

  “Me and Joan,” Maia says.

  “And?” Ayers says.

  “And Colton Seeley and Bright Whittaker,” Maia says. She licks some mustard off her thumb. “Joan has a crush on Colton.”

  “And you have a crush on Bright?” Ayers asks.

  “No,” Maia says. “Bright isn’t my type. Plus, he has a crush on Posie Alvarez.”

  “Do I know Posie?”

  “She goes to Antilles,” Maia says. “She’s friends with a kid named Shane who’s a year ahead of us.”

  “I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark here,” Ayers says. “You have a crush on Shane.”

  Maia shrugs. “I might.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Ayers says. “Your first crush! I have to meet this kid. I’m going to come find you guys in town one day before work. And Cash, you have to come with me. This is your little sister. You need to protect her. You need to be a lieutenant in the cause.”

  Cash opens his mouth but he’s unsure of what to say. Your little sister. You need to protect her.

  The FBI are staking out the house. Russ was conducting illegal business. He likely got Rosie killed. Do Ayers and Maia know this? If they don’t know and they find out, will they hate Cash? Isn’t it better to prepare for this eventuality and remain aloof?

  Cash focuses on Ayers for a second. She’s sitting on Picnic Rock, wearing a white bikini and a towel around her waist. Her blond hair is drying in the sun. She takes a bite of her Cuban sandwich, waiting for him to answer.

  They won’t hate him, he realizes. They know his heart is pure, that he’s as bewildered as they are, maybe more so. He’s a good guy. He doesn’t know a thing about having a “little sister”—both the phrase and the notion are completely foreign to him—but he wants to learn. He wants some good to come out of the choices Russ made. Their relationship—his and Maia’s—can be part of that good.

  “I would certainly like to meet Shane before this goes any further,” he says.

  Maia rolls her eyes theatrically, and although Cash knows exactly nothing about twelve-year-old girls, he can tell that beneath the surface of her exasperation, she’s grateful. Her mother is gone, but she’s not alone. She has Ayers and now she has Cash, and they’re here to pay attention. They’re here to care about her.

  “Just please, please, don’t tell Huck,” Maia says.<
br />
  “You have my word,” Ayers says.

  “And mine,” Cash says.

  “So I told my secret,” Maia says. “Now it’s your turn. Cash, who do you have a crush on?”

  “Okay,” Cash says, standing up. “Time to head back.” He whistles for Winnie, who is down on the beach, chasing stray chickens.

  He has a crush on Ayers; more than a crush. When they get back to the parking lot, it’s difficult to say goodbye. Ayers has to work at La Tapa that night and on Treasure Island the next day, and Maia is going fishing with Huck. Then, next week, Maia has school and Cash starts his lifesaving classes. He can begin crewing on Treasure Island a week from Sunday; Wade will still be around to train him.

  A week from Sunday feels awfully far away.

  “Maybe you and I can hike again sometime,” Maia says. “I’ll take you to the Esperance Trail. There’s a baobab tree.”

  “It’s a date,” he says. He peers over Maia’s head at Ayers. “Thanks for inviting me along today.”

  “Of course,” Ayers says. She and Maia hop in the little green truck and wave. “See ya later.”

  Cash and Winnie watch them drive away.

  There’s no reason to feel down, and yet he does. He drives back to the villa, knowing he can crack a beer and spend what remains of the afternoon by the pool, and then he should take a trip to the grocery store because he can’t eat at La Tapa every night or he’ll quickly burn through the money Irene gave him.

  He passes the black SUV in the dummy driveway—different guy, dark-complected. Cash waves.

  When he gets up to the house, he hears voices, splashing. Someone is in the pool.

  Whoa! Cash’s crazy first thought is that it’s FBI agent number one. His second thought is that the house has been rented and Paulette forgot to tell Irene, or maybe she thought it wouldn’t matter since they’d gone back to the States. That must be it. What is Cash going to do? He doesn’t have money for a hotel and his lifesaving class starts Monday. He sends Winnie up the stairs ahead of him. Paulette will have to come up with a solution. Find these people another house.