Summer Days

by Lisa Jackson

  “It was nothing,” Sam repeated for what felt like the tenth time in as many minutes.

  Gina, immersed in a bubble bath, smiled at him. “I know.”

  She did? For some reason, he had expected her to react a little more tartly to his afternoon with Meredith. “I just ran into her . . . and we went to a restaurant. . . .”

  “It’s fine,” Gina said.

  Her nonchalant attitude rattled him. “And I brought you back some food.” He held up the sack, his peace offering, even though there apparently was no conflict to smooth over.

  “I couldn’t eat a bite.”

  “I was worried about you. But you seem . . .” He looked at her face poking up through a mass of bubbles, “. . . fine.”

  “Sleeping did me a world of good, and then visiting with Janie. You should take a quick nap yourself.”

  “I’d better not.”

  “Isn’t it great to be on vacation?” She stretched, flicking bubbles across the tile floor. “We lucked out with this room, let me tell you. Poor Janie’s stuck with her sister in some kind of dank broom closet.”

  He frowned. “Really? Meredith didn’t say anything to me.”

  “Well, if what Janie tells me is true, that one’s used to primitive conditions. She lives in Queens.” When he shot Gina a look, she arched a brow. “I’m serious. What’s being a starving artist good for if not lowering your expectations? She’s probably just glad to be here.”

  The vision of Meredith standing in front of Qorikancha came back to him—that smile of amazement, the way her hair seemed to refract sunlight, like an aura in a Renaissance painting.... He’d been leaving the ruin, walking away from it. What had caused him to stop and look back?

  He wished he hadn’t. Talking to her had been pleasurable for a time, but the whole episode felt like a complication now, even if Gina didn’t seem to care.

  Why didn’t she care?

  “Scrub your back?” he offered.

  “No thanks. I brought my scrunchy-scrubby.” She produced the rope of braided plastic netting out of the bubbles. “I’m good.”

  Amazing. They were on a weeklong trip to Peru, and she’d remembered to pack her bath scrunchy.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Nothing.” He paced over to the window and stared out, watching the women Gina called the yoga mommies tripping down the sidewalk toward town. The first big night out in Peru.

  The afternoon had been so distracting that he’d almost forgotten about tonight. He glanced back over at Gina, who had sunk down into the tub, her head resting against the back, eyes closed.

  “Still tired?” he asked her.

  She let out a blissful groan. “No—just thinking how glad I am to be here.”

  He smiled.

  “Anything’s better than work,” she continued. “Janie and I played cards this afternoon, and it got my mind completely off fish flake disasters.”

  Janie made her feel glad to be here? His smile faded. “We never play cards together. We could sometime. Now, if you want to.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I’m nice and relaxed. Just read a book or something for a while. I’ll get dressed soon.”

  That meant she would start getting dressed. So, by his mental calculations, their hour of departure was still an hour and a half away. He lay down on the bed, deciding to read a little before he needed to change clothes himself. He’d bought a thick book in the Miami airport—a page-turner about a hard-talking guy with a mysterious past who was investigating a murder. The bodies piled up at a rate of about one every ten pages, so he had no fear of nodding off. He could just lie back, crack the book open, and be transported.

  But after a moment, he found himself transported to the old railroad flat he had shared with Meredith—the kind of apartment that was several rooms divided by glass doors. In essence, the apartment was one long hallway. To get to her room from the living room, Meredith had to go through his room. He had to go through hers to get to the bathroom. This lack of privacy had annoyed him at first. About a month went by before he realized that he actually enjoyed having Meredith underfoot all the time—that they spent more time seeking each other out than trying to avoid each other.

  In a wink, he was back in his old room—the futon on a box spring on the floor, next to his shelves constructed of pine boards and milk crates. Due to a dearth of outlets, the television was plugged into the wall next to his bed, but actually stood in the living room thanks to an extension cord that was a fire inspector’s nightmare. He studied the cord now—it seemed to be sparking and smoking, like the fuse leading to a stick of dynamite in the old cartoons. He followed the spark, but when he reached the end of the cord, instead of finding the television, he was in Meredith’s room. She sat up in her twin bed—a squeaky camp bed they used to refer to as the orphan-home bed. She held the sheets up to her chin.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “What are you doing on my vacation?” he demanded right back.

  One of those laughs trilled out of her. “This isn’t a vacation. This is our life, and you brought Gina along.”

  The statement confounded him. “Gina? I haven’t even met her yet.”

  “Sam?”

  It was so like Meredith to throw a wrench like that into the conversation.

  “Sam!” Someone nudged his shoulder, and he opened his eyes—and gasped. Gina loomed over him, draped in a low-cut sheath of shimmery red silk. “You are here,” he said to Gina through a fog of sleep.

  Her brow pinched. “Where did you expect me to be?”

  Sam lay heavily against the mattress as if he had been glued there, the forgotten book on his chest. The burning cords and conversation with Meredith had just been a dream.

  Gina stood over him, cleaned and coiffed, Chanel emanating from her in a perfumed plume. She shimmered onto the bed next to him and laid a manicured finger on his shoulder. “Are we going out, or are you going to lie here like a lump all night?” Before he could force himself up, she added, “Because I’m starving.”

  He struggled to unstick himself from the mattress. “I brought you food.”

  Her nose wrinkled. “I wanted to hold out for something really good.”

  “Just give me a minute,” he said.

  A shower woke him up a smidge, although his brain synapses still felt mired in quicksand. His jetlag prevention strategy had backfired. Applying aftershave, he gave himself some sharp slaps and debated taking the ring out of the safe and carrying it with him. There seemed no good way to handle the ring, which he’d spent months deciding on. He’d given more thought to buying it than he had to asking Gina out after they’d met.

  The trouble was, there didn’t seem any good way to handle the ring now. When he carried it, he was anxious about pickpockets. When it was in the safe, he worried about the unscrupulous hotel employees. It would be a relief when it was finally on Gina’s finger. Maybe tonight he would do some spontaneous marriage proposing and put himself out of his misery. Except he’d planned to give it to her at Machu Picchu, and he hated to switch everything up at the last minute.

  Maybe that seemed rigid. People like Meredith might scoff at him, but without clear plans the world would unravel.

  Still, her laughing voice echoed in his ears. “A map? Where’s the adventure in that?”

  He hesitated, looking down at the guidebook he had put aside to take with them. This was supposed to be a romantic evening—hauling his guidebook around screamed Boy Scout. Anyway, he had the address of the restaurant memorized. He took one last glance at the map in the guidebook—with all his planned destinations marked with red Xs—and tossed it to the bed.

  He had his smart phone, in case of emergency. He patted his jacket to make sure the familiar telecommunication lump was there. He’d checked ahead and purchased a local SIM card that would allow him to use it here, just in case.

  To get a taxi, they had to scale down the narrow stairs and then the torturous hilly
street until reaching the more crowded avenue at the bottom. And then there was competition. Several others waited to flag something down, and when a car barreled down the street toward them, a jostling war broke out at the curb.

  Sam lost the battle, but consoled himself that he was new to the fight.

  A young man approached him. “Taxi? Quiere taxi?”

  Sam nodded more out of reflex than agreement, but that nod was as good as a contract to the young man. He hooked onto Sam’s elbow, beckoned Gina with a crook of the head, and hustled them around the corner into a waiting car. Sam dug into his pockets for change and handed the boy several nuevos soles before the door shut.

  Dazed, he gave the driver the name of the intersection closest to the restaurant.

  Gina took his hand. “You handled that with aplomb.”

  He had? “I’m not certain whether this really is a taxi,” he mumbled, “or part of some kidnapping racket.”

  “I’m just glad to be off my feet and on my way to food.”

  The cab sped through streets, which became slightly emptier, more residential looking, as they traveled out from the city center. The sun hung lower in the sky, and a cooler breeze whipped through the cracked driver window to the backseat. Next to him, Gina hummed along with the rhythmic, fluty Peruvian music bleating out of the dashboard, but he remained alert. How far was this place? It was supposed to be a restored monastery that had been converted to a restaurant, so the guidebook had warned that it was on the outskirts.

  At last, the driver rammed the brake as if to avoid a collision, although the street had no other traffic on it. Sam and Gina, splattered against the back of the front seat, righted themselves. He thanked the driver, negotiated for him to come back in two hours, and gave him a fifty percent tip.

  Holding hands, Sam and Gina started strolling up the street dominated by stucco houses in white, with red tile roofs.

  “This place really is something,” Gina said, inhaling and exhaling. “So foreign. I just love it!”

  He squinted at the surrounding buildings. It was growing darker, and not all the numbers over the doorways were metal—some were stenciled in faded, peeling paint and hard to read.

  “Where is this restaurant?” Gina asked.

  “Should be in this block . . . or the next one.”

  “I hope it’s not too far. Did you hear my stomach rumbling?”

  He squeezed her hand.

  She grinned back at him. “No pressure or anything.”

  They passed the building where Sam was fairly certain the restaurant should have been, although he tried to avoid giving any indication of this at first. The windows of the large stone edifice were boarded up. His heart sank, but he kept walking, and when they arrived at the next intersection, he surreptitiously checked the street names.

  But the street was right. Maybe he’d memorized the wrong number?

  He’d just begun to panic when Gina said, “You said we’d only have to walk a block or two. Otherwise, I would have made a different shoe choice.”

  He glanced down at her sexy backless stilettos and winced. “I thought it would be in this block, but it’s . . . not. Or if it is, it’s that boarded-up building.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one we just passed.”

  Gina twisted and gaped. “Are you serious? Because that place is definitely not a working restaurant. How old is your guidebook?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  She held out her hand. “Give it here. We should double-check the address.”

  “I didn’t bring the book,” he confessed. “But I had the address memorized. I’m sure that was it.” He took a breath. “Almost sure.”

  Gina blinked in astonishment at their predicament. “How are we going to get back? The taxi’s not coming back for two hours.”

  “There are other taxis.”

  “Where?” she asked, gesturing at the quiet street around them.

  This, he supposed, was the downside of choosing an out-of-the-way spot for dinner. It was . . . well, out of the way. Still, he chuckled. They might not be in Manhattan anymore, but they were still grappling with first-world, easily fixed problems.

  He reached for his phone. His smile faded.

  “What’s the matter?” Gina asked.

  “My phone.” He patted down all his pockets. “It’s gone.”

  “You left it at the hotel?”

  “No—I had it in my pocket when we left. I must have dropped it in the cab.” But how did a phone drop out of his breast pocket? Even when the driver had slammed on the brakes, Sam would have noticed a cellphone flying up from his chest through the vehicle’s interior. That hadn’t happened.

  He remembered being jostled on the street as he’d tried to flag down a taxi. It might have been stolen then. And then there was that kid who’d hustled him around the corner—he could have been a pickpocket, which would explain why he would be working in tandem with a driver who obviously wasn’t hurting for business.

  And if the pickpocket and the driver were working in tandem, what incentive would the driver have to show up for a fare from whom he’d just stolen a phone?

  Crap. “I think we’d better start walking.”

  He said this with every confidence that they would run into another cab, or find a phone to call one. Instead, they ended up walking for blocks and blocks, past houses, parks, and churches, and then through a warehouse area that he hadn’t noticed during the ride over. He pulled Gina close, but her body was rigid and spiky with irritation.

  “How is it that we haven’t hit a major street yet?” she asked.

  “This is a major street, I think.”

  “But it doesn’t have any restaurants or stores. Even a little bodega would be welcome. I’m so hungry I’m about to faint. Plus, my feet are killing me.”

  He had given her his jacket already, but he couldn’t do anything about shoes. And the shoes were slowing them down. In a classic bit of displacement, he redirected the irritation he felt toward himself for getting them into this mess at those ridiculous shoes. They were basically expensive, spike-heeled flip-flops. What was the point of them? Why would a person bring them to Peru?

  Because this is what he’d planned. “Let’s have one real night on the town by ourselves,” he’d suggested. And why? Because he’d worried he wasn’t romantic enough. Because all those years ago, Meredith had thought that. And he had left his map at the hotel tonight because Meredith had criticized him this afternoon. And then he’d lost his phone....

  Okay, maybe that wasn’t Meredith’s fault.

  “I should never have left the choice of restaurants up to you,” Gina muttered, startling him. Although he might have guessed that her thoughts would be circling the same who-to-blame territory as his were. “Why did it have to be so far from everything else?”

  “I thought it would be romantic,” he said. “I thought that you would like that.”

  “Oh sure—women love being dragged into the middle of nowhere so they can cripple themselves walking home. Great idea.”

  “Maybe someday we’ll laugh about this.”

  She sent him a withering look. “Someday might never arrive if I drop dead from hunger before we reach the hotel. Are you even sure we’re walking in the right direction?”

  A feverish wave of doubt hit him. Then, in the dying light, he nodded toward the large spire of the cathedral. They were still heading toward it, although it still loomed far away. “Of course we are.”

  “I’ll never make it,” she said with a groan. Then, she stopped. “What’s that?”

  He squinted down the street toward a distant figure in the twilight.

  “That’s a food cart.” Like a marooned desert traveler seeing a mirage, Gina licked her lips. Her feet moved forward briskly, her heels tapping in urgency.

  He hurried to keep pace. “We can find another restaurant—somewhere nice.”

  “I don’t care about nice. I’m ravenous.”

  Hunger mus
t have sharpened her eyesight to raptor clarity, because after speed walking several blocks, they came upon what was indeed a food cart run by a small old woman wearing a shawl over a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a baseball cap. The metal cart with wheels was little more than a traveling grill with a shelf containing a few plastic condiment bottles. Over the hot coals lay several skewers of what Sam first assumed was sausage, but upon closer inspection appeared to be an entire small animal—skinned, gutted (presumably), and roasted. Cuy.

  Gina held up one finger to the woman, who produced a skewer with a charred guinea pig impaled on it, its little skinned, cooked head attached. Sam’s stomach lurched.

  “Don’t you want something?” Gina asked him.

  He shook his head, trying to clear the echoes of the wheek wheek sounds Meredith had put there.

  Gina took a bite, tearing at the meat with her teeth as if she hadn’t eaten in weeks. She rolled her eyes in appreciation. “Delicioso,” she told the vendor, loudly, between swallows. “Gracias.”

  The woman broke into a toothy smile. “Por nada.”

  Gina continued walking, scarfing down cuy with every step.

  “I can’t believe you’re eating that,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, because . . .” He shook his head. If she didn’t remember her childhood pet, he would not be the one to remind her at this sensitive moment. Still, when he looked at that pathetic grilled, impaled animal—its mouth gaping as if frozen in the agony of its dying moments—he couldn’t help thinking of Buttercup.

  CHAPTER 5

  Sitting at a table in a busy bar with Nina, Pattie, Jennifer, and Amelia—aka the yoga mommies—Meredith had to remind herself that she was in a different hemisphere. Yes, the atmosphere felt a little more rustic, and there was more Spanish being tossed around at other tables than you’d hear in some parts of New York City, but otherwise, this could have been anywhere. Drinkers Without Borders.

  She’d arrived with Janie and Fran and had joined Seth and Claudia, but she’d wanted to branch out and talk a little with the rest of the group, so she’d switched tables and joined this group. The women were welcoming, but they were all really good friends. They talked over each other, and random buzzwords would send them into whoops. As they slugged back tequila shots like sorority girls on spring break, their conversation ricocheted from annoying teachers to annoying playdate parents, from husbands who didn’t help enough with the house stuff to all the things that could go wrong with kids.