What Happens in Paradise

by Elin Hilderbrand

  It was dark outside. The bedside clock said twenty past nine. It was too late to get dinner anywhere on this sleepy island, besides which I was basically in hiding. So we ordered room service, lavishly, recklessly, like we were rock stars on the last leg of a world tour—one bacon cheeseburger, one lobster pizza, French fries, a Caesar salad, the key lime pie, a hot fudge sundae, and, of course, conch fritters, because now that was our “thing.” I would never see Russell Steele again but every time I put in an order of conch fritters, I would think of him. I told him this and he threw me down on the bed and said, “God, Rosie, how can I ever leave you? I’m…different now, in such a short time. I’m changed.” He was putting words to what I felt as well. I had tears in my eyes as I tried to control my crazy, runaway heart.

  Don’t leave me, I nearly said—which would have been pathetic after a relationship of only twenty-four or forty-eight hours (depending on how you looked at it)—but I was saved from myself by a knock at the door.

  It was room service with our food, which I knew would be delivered by Woodrow, so I had to go hide in the bathroom while Russ answered the door.

  I stayed overnight Sunday; Todd Croft and the other guy, the company lawyer, Stephen, were due to pick Russ up at noon. I had been up since dawn worrying about how the goodbye would go and I even brazenly wandered out to the beach where I saw my donkeys, Stop, Drop, and Roll, eating grass at the edge of the beach. I decided to take their presence as a positive omen. This is my home, this is where I belong, and I need to find someone who calls St. John home as well. The reason that getting involved with a married man is wrong is that it hurts. I knew that if it continued one minute past noon today, it would be destructive. What did I want Russ to do? Go home and tell his wife that he was leaving her for some woman half his age with whom he’d had a fling in the Caribbean?

  Hell no!

  We lay in bed together until the last possible minute. Then Russ showered and dressed and I thought, What can I give him to remember me by? I wished I’d dived down at Waterlemon and picked up a shell or a piece of coral—some island token—but I hadn’t. And so I rummaged through the desk in the room and found a postcard with a picture of the Sugar Mill on the front, and I wrote, I’m going to miss you. I signed it with the initials M.L., for Mona Lisa. I wasn’t sure he would figure that out, but I enjoyed imagining him puzzling over it. I stuck the postcard in the side zip pocket of his bag and right as he was gathering up his things to go, I told him I’d left him a surprise in that pocket that he should look at before returning home. The last thing I wanted was for Irene to find it.

  He held my face in his hands. Out the window I could see the yacht anchored and a crew member pulling the skiff around (it fit, somehow, underneath the boat or inside of it). Russ kissed me hard and deep. It was the kiss you give someone when you’re absolutely, positively never going to see her again.

  “I don’t have anything to leave you with except for that,” he said. Then he turned and left the room and I was so addled, so undone, that I hung in the doorway and watched him trudge through the sand. He raised an arm to Todd Croft, who was standing on the deck of the boat.

  Bluebeard was the yacht’s name. I hadn’t noticed that before.

  I saw Todd Croft see me; his head tilted and his smile grew wider, and I disappeared into the shadows of the room, cursing myself. I was wearing my swim cover-up. If Todd asked, Russ could say we’d struck up a friendship and I’d come to say goodbye. It didn’t matter, I would likely never see Todd Croft again, but I regretted not leaving first. I should have headed for home an hour or two earlier, but that would have meant losing time with Russ, and I hadn’t wanted to do that. For my greed, then, I was punished. I became the one who was left behind.

  As I drove home, I thought of how the weekend had been a Cinderella story, minus the part with the glass slipper. I was returned to my ordinary self, in my proverbial rags, facing my scullery work. The only part of that magical story I could claim was that I had enjoyed a night (in my case, two nights) of bliss. I had successfully charmed a prince, only the prince was a midwestern corn-syrup salesman. A married corn-syrup salesman.

  Mama was at work when I got home, despite the holiday, and I was momentarily relieved. Now I’m locked in my room, writing this down, because supposedly “getting it out” is a kind of catharsis. I have an hour left to get ready before I have to go back to Caneel, where I will work and pretend that everything is just fine.

  February 23, 2006

  I’ve decided that Bluebeard is an appropriate name for the yacht that delivered Russ to me and then took him away.

  He was a pirate.

  He stole my heart.

  March 30, 2006

  Mama was the one who noticed that I looked peaked and that I wasn’t eating much. When had I ever said no to her blackened mahi tacos with pineapple-mango salsa? Never was the answer. But they just didn’t seem appealing. Nothing seemed appealing.

  She said, “Do you want to come to the clinic at lunchtime tomorrow and I’ll slide you in?”

  I couldn’t tell her that I was suffering from a broken heart, and there’s no cure for that except time, and for all the technological advances going on in the world, no one has figured out how to speed time up or slow it down—or stop it. Whoever figures out that trick is going to be rich. “Nah,” I said.

  “No, but thanks for offering,” Mama prompted.

  I retreated to my room. I needed to put less energy into pining for the pirate and more into saving money so I could get a place of my own.

  Then, a couple of days ago, I woke up feeling dizzy and nauseated and I thought, Damn it, I really am sick. I had planned to go to Salomon Bay—the best thing for me to do was get back into a routine—but it looked like it would be the clinic instead.

  I raced to the bathroom and puked into the toilet. I heard Mama knocking on my bedroom door, asking if I was all right, and then I heard Huck say, “LeeAnn, leave the poor girl alone, no one likes to be bothered when they’re praying to the porcelain god.”

  And Mama said, “You’re right, handsome. I’ll leave her be. She’ll be okay as long as it’s not morning sickness.”

  Morning sickness, I thought.

  It was off to the Chelsea drugstore for a test, but I had to wait until my mother’s friend Fatima left for lunch because Rosie Small buying a pregnancy test would win Fatima a gold medal in the Gossip Olympics.

  I hurried home, praying, praying, and then I peed on the stick.

  I’m pregnant.

  April 30, 2006

  Today a package addressed to me was hand-delivered to the house. The package contained ten thousand dollars in cash.

  I’m being bought off.

  There wasn’t a note but I don’t have to be a wizard to know the money is from Todd Croft. But has Todd Croft told Russ that I’m pregnant?

  Let me go back.

  When I found out I was pregnant four weeks ago, all I could think was that I needed to tell Russ. I was pretty sure he would offer to help. And by help, a part of me was thinking he would leave his wife, move to St. John, and raise this baby with me. It was a long shot, I knew, but not impossible. Maybe instead of making Russ’s marriage stronger, the weekend affair (I’m shying away from the word fling) had been a breaking point. Maybe Russ would say yes to the job and goodbye to Irene and start a whole new life. The boys were teenagers; the older boy was headed to college in the fall and the younger one was only a year or two behind, so they were nearly out of the house. If anyone was poised for a second act, it was Russ.

  Or so I let myself momentarily believe.

  I called Iowa City information and asked for the phone number for Russell or Irene Steele.

  “Irene Steele,” the operator said. “Hold for the number.”

  I hung up the phone. The listing was under Irene’s name. She paid the bills. She was in charge of the household. She intimidated me—indeed, scared me—even from afar. I would never call the house, I decided. I wasn’t th
at desperate.

  I had to somehow circumvent Irene. I needed an e-mail. I knew there was probably an e-mail attached to the room reservation at Caneel. I had worked at Caneel long enough to know that all reservations were kept in a database, but that database couldn’t be accessed on any of the restaurant computers.

  So I would have to ask the restaurant manager, Estella, to get it for me.

  I said to her, “Please don’t tell my mother”—Estella rolled her eyes as if to say, Rosie-child, no matter how you implore me, you know I could never keep a secret from LeeAnn—“but a gentleman who stayed here over Presidents’ Day weekend begged me for the conch-fritter recipe. He wants to give it to the chef at his country club so they can serve them at his wife’s surprise birthday party and I promised him I’d send him the recipes for the fritters and the aioli. He gave me his e-mail, but I lost it, Estella. And I feel terrible. I remember he said his wife’s birthday is May twenty-third because that’s a day after mine and so time is of the essence. Can you help me find the man’s e-mail, please, Estella? I want to provide the kind of service Caneel is famous for.”

  Estella huffed for a minute. Didn’t I know that accessing the guests’ personal information was forbidden?

  I said, “But he already gave it to me and I lost it! It’s his wife’s fortieth birthday!”

  Estella hesitated, then she ushered me into the back office, and together, we looked. The name Russell Steele didn’t turn up in the system, which was perplexing. Had he used a fake name? Was he not only a pirate but an impostor?

  Then I said, “Let’s check the name Todd Croft.” And it popped right up—room 718 for two nights, total bill $1,652. There was an e-mail, but it was Todd’s, and my heart sank, though I did think it was encouraging that it was a BVI e-mail address.

  I copied it down and thanked Estella, who closed the file and hurried us out of the office, saying, “That was the easy part. Good luck convincing Chef to hand over his recipes.”

  I wrote to Todd Croft, explained who I was, and said merely that I would like an e-mail address for Russ so that I could send him the conch-fritter and aioli recipes that he’d requested.

  But I guess Mr. Croft saw right through my ploy because here I am, holding ten large.

  I know I should feel insulted but all I feel is relieved. Because if Mama kicks me out, and she very well might, I’ll have money to get a place for me and the baby.

  I’m telling her tomorrow.

  May 1, 2006

  I was so nervous that I got out of bed early after barely sleeping all night. I couldn’t wait another hour, another minute. Once I heard both Mama and Huck in the kitchen, I walked down the hall, comforted by the idea that in thirty seconds, the secret would be out. They could holler; they could scream, call me names, and cast me out, but all of that would pale against the relief of speaking the truth.

  When Mama saw me, she was shocked. “Rosie? What are you doing awake? Is everything all right?”

  In that second, everything was still all right. Mama was dressed for work in her raspberry scrubs and her white lab coat, her towering bun wrapped in a brightly patterned scarf. She’d had her nails done—she was vain about her nails, and they were the same shade of raspberry—and I noticed her fingers against the white porcelain of her coffee cup. Every morning, Huck makes her coffee, one poached egg, and a piece of lightly buttered wheat toast. Huck was standing at the stove tending to the egg. He was wearing cargo shorts with a lure hanging from the belt loop and a long-sleeved T-shirt advertising the Mississippi. He had a bandanna wrapped around his neck and was ready for a day of fishing. I didn’t dread Huck’s anger; what I dreaded was his disappointment in me. We’d had a rocky start to our relationship. When he started courting Mama seven years ago, I resented him. I thought, He sees a single woman and her wayward daughter and thinks they need to be saved—but we don’t need to be saved. But I quickly grew to love Huck and, yes, to count on him. I remember one time when he’d told me to help myself to twenty bucks from his wallet so I could go into town to meet my friends, I found a folded-up, faded picture of Huck with another woman. The picture was obviously old, from the seventies or eighties. In it, Huck was a young man. He had a full head of strawberry-blond hair and a mustache but no beard; he wore jeans with what looked like a white patent-leather belt and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt. The woman was in a crocheted chevron-print dress and had on white patent-leather boots. Her blond hair was feathered and she wore too much black eyeliner.

  I took the picture to Huck and said, “Who’s this?” Huck had had a sister who had died of cancer and I thought maybe this was her; he rarely talked about her but I knew her name was Caroline.

  “Her?” Huck said. I thought he might be angry that I’d snooped in his wallet for more than just the twenty, but he didn’t seem angry. “That’s my first wife, Kimberly.”

  I was shocked by this. I didn’t know Huck had been married before. I felt affronted, maybe even betrayed—for Mama’s sake, but also my own. He and Mama had been married a year or two when I found this picture and the three of us had become a happy family. I didn’t like the idea of sharing Huck with anyone. “I didn’t realize you’d been married before.” I swallowed. “Does my mother know?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. He smiled sadly. “Sorry, Rosie, I should have told you. There just never seemed to be an appropriate time and it doesn’t matter anyway.”

  “If it doesn’t matter, why do you keep the picture?” I asked. I handed it back to him, though really I wanted to tear it to shreds.

  “Well,” Huck said. He thought about it for a minute. One thing I love most about Huck is that he’s a straight shooter. He doesn’t candy-coat the truth or brush it away because he doesn’t want me to see it. “Kimberly ended up being a disappointment to me. She was an alcoholic, a really, really mean drunk, and that destroyed our marriage. It destroyed just about all of her relationships, actually. But in this picture, we were happy, so I keep it as a reminder that my time with her wasn’t all bad.” He slipped the picture back into the wallet. “In even the bleakest situations, there’s usually some good to be salvaged.”

  Facing Mama and Huck to tell them I was pregnant was a bleak situation. Would any good be salvaged from it?

  “I’m pregnant,” I said.

  Huck turned from the stove.

  “What?” Mama said.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  She set down her coffee cup and stood up. Her face was unreadable. Shock, I suppose. Huck was watching her.

  “Oscar?” she said.

  “Not Oscar,” I said. “It was a man at the hotel, someone you don’t know. I was stupid. He’s gone now and I don’t know how to reach him.”

  There was a moment of such profound silence that I felt like the world had stopped. She was probably deciding whether or not to believe me.

  Then, finally, she opened her arms, and I entered them.

  Part Three

  The Soggy Dollar

  Irene

  Before she leaves for St. John, Irene has some loose ends to take care of.

  A death certificate issued by the Department of Vital Statistics of the British Virgin Islands arrives in the mail in an unmarked envelope. Is it authentic? It seems so, though Irene has no way of knowing for sure.

  So, obviously, Paulette received her message. There’s no note, no invoice, no mention of a fee. Irene has assumed that Paulette is the one who pays to maintain the villa—taxes (do they have taxes in the Virgin Islands?), insurance, landscapers, repairs, et cetera—probably out of a fund that Russ or Todd Croft set up…with cash.

  She takes the death certificate to Ed Sorley’s office and drops it off with the receptionist, then leaves before Ed appears with questions.

  She withdraws eight thousand dollars from the account at Federal Republic, using the drive-through window. The cash and the postcards from M.L. go right into Irene’s suitcase.

  At Lydia’s insistence, Irene puts an obituary in the Press-Citize
n, and she phones her close friends and neighbors to invite them to the house for a memorial reception. She tells them that Russ was killed in a helicopter crash; lightning was the cause. He was down in the Virgin Islands for work. He’s been cremated and the ashes scattered. This is a small gathering so his friends can pay their respects.

  “No food and no flowers,” Irene told them. “I’m taking some time away, leaving Monday. If you feel you must do something to honor his passing, you can donate to the Rotary Club scholarship fund. It always goes to some terrific kid who really needs it.”

  Lydia arranges for the Linn Street Café to cater the reception and Irene is grateful. Under normal circumstances, she would insist on doing everything herself—but these aren’t normal circumstances. The people from the café will drop off sandwiches, quiche, salads, and urns of coffee. Irene chills wine and rolls her drinks trolley into the parlor. With so many people in the room, it will be too warm to light a fire and Irene will be so busy visiting that she won’t have time to tend it.

  Irene is anxious about facing everyone. She doesn’t want to be the recipient of sympathy or to be asked any probing questions. She nearly succumbs to the temptation of taking an Ativan right before the reception begins. She has the prescription bottle in her hand, but the doorbell rings and Irene hurries downstairs.

  It’s Lydia, attended by Brandon the barista, who looks far more distinguished out of his leather apron. He’s holding Lydia’s hand, and with his other hand he offers Irene a platter of cookies.

  “Homemade,” he says. “Lemongrass sugar.”

  Irene tries out a smile. Lydia looks radiant. She and Brandon are delirious with infatuation, and Irene is, of course, happy for her friend. Brandon and Lydia take charge of setting out the food and cups for coffee and filling buckets with ice, leaving Irene idle to steep in her dread and count the minutes until she boards the plane.