I dropped The Compass and it landed on the deck with a thud.
“Wait,” my mother said. “I thought—”
“I filed. I’m divorcing Reggie.”
“What?” I scrambled up in as much of a hurry as I could. I sat on the side of my sun chair facing Fantasy, Mother’s big sun hat swinging back and forth between us. “Why, Fantasy? Why?”
“I’m giving him his freedom, Davis. I want him to move on with his life.”
“But you love Reggie.”
“I do. With all my heart, ’til death do us part. Which is why I’m letting him go.”
Mother’s hat sliced back and forth.
“Try it, Davis. Break Bradley’s heart, then try to pick up the pieces. Sit across from him at breakfast every morning and get a good look at what you’ve done. Wait for him to walk through the door all day hoping it will be the day you’ve been pardoned. Climb into the bed every night with a man you’ve wrecked.”
“Fantasy.” My breath was coming in short bursts. “These things take time. Wait it out. Don’t be a martyr. Don’t nail yourself to some righteousness cross.”
“It’s done, Davis. I can’t spend the rest of my life waiting for him to forgive me. I want Reggie to move on with his life. He won’t until I’m gone.”
My hands were all over my children, protecting them from this. “What about the boys? What about your innocent little boys?”
“Do you think I want them to grow up thinking this is how it works? Davis, if I don’t get out of their faces they’ll never trust a woman. Ever. I’m not going to turn my back on my boys. I will always love them and take care of them, but not under the same roof with Reggie. Because someone has to pay for what I did. And that someone is me.”
“Fantasy, no!”
“This isn’t your call, Davis. This is my life. My marriage.”
“And you’re throwing it away!”
Mother’s arms spread slowly and she landed a bony hand on one of my knees and the other bony hand on one of Fantasy’s. “Both of you pipe down and listen up.” She pulled off her ginormous sunhat and a shock of bright Caribbean sun hit my mother’s head and I could see her bleached scalp through her whisper-thin hair. I grabbed for my heart, lodged somewhere near my throat, because I thought it might burst.
“Marriage is a two-way street.” Mother’s voice was even and steady. “And it takes two to tango. If you’ll take a harder look at what happened, Fantasy, you might discover it wasn’t all your fault and there’s no need to walk out on your husband for something that might have been just as much his fault as it was yours. These things don’t happen by accident. You didn’t just fall into that other man’s bed. Dig a little deeper and you might find out you had a little push. There isn’t a divorce out there that’s all one person’s fault, and you taking all the blame on yourself might be the worst example you could ever set for your boys. The problem isn’t that your husband hasn’t forgiven you. The problem is you haven’t forgiven yourself. And all your cockamamie ‘the greater good’ isn’t serving anyone but you. He can forgive you all day long, Fantasy, but until you forgive yourself you’re going to be no good to anyone.”
TEN
Fantasy took a little personal time behind the closed door of her stateroom. She needed it, and I let her have it while I sent an S.O.S. email from the library. Or I would have sent an S.O.S. email from the library if there’d been an interactive television. I looked high and low—no interactive television—until Mother rang the lunch bell, and I decided I’d have an easier time finding it when I wasn’t starved out of my mind. I might have been more upset about the missing interactive television if it weren’t for the fact that Bradley’s plane should have landed at Macau International Airport on Taipa Island two hours ago. Which meant this was almost over with or without an interactive television.
“Guess what?” I asked my lunch buddies.
“What?” Fantasy asked.
“It’s rude to read at the dinner table and I raised you better, Davis.”
“There’s a wedding tonight.” I turned The Compass around for everyone to see. “The theme is Tie the Knot. It’s in the wedding chapel on the ninth deck from eight until midnight. Everyone will be there. It’s the New York hedge-fund man,” I tapped his face, “who left his wife for the nanny.” Tap.
“I read about that,” Fantasy said. “They’re on this boat? Big scuttlebutt.”
“Ship,” I said. “It’s a ship.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous. You young people know nothing about commitment.”
“Mother, I think we’ve covered that subject thoroughly and no one here is responsible for the hedge-fund man’s actions.”
“Whose actions are you responsible for, Davis? Because you certainly don’t take responsibility for your own.”
“So, can anyone do anything about her?” Jessica pointed straight at my mother.
“How about I jerk a knot in your tail, young lady? How about I do something about you?”
Like a squall, it came out of nowhere: the gloves were off. Mother and Jess were sitting there one second and ready to fly across the table at each other the next.
“Do something,” Fantasy whispered.
“I’m not getting in the middle of this,” I whispered back.
Jess blinked first. She didn’t blink so much as she closed her eyes and the next thing we knew, she was on the way to her plate. Poppy, who moves at the speed of light, bolted across the table and caught her, easing her back against the chair. We stared as Jessica’s head lolled, the bluster blowing her long dark hair, until Fantasy said, “Here she comes.”
Jessica sat up, shook it off, raised her empty shot glass and stared into it, wondering where the tequila had gone. “So?” She looked around the table. “Stop looking at me.”
The drama died down and lunch picked back up under miles of wisteria weaving through an overhead iron pergola providing a leafy canopy for the outdoor dining area. We lingered under the wisteria and around the table long enough for me to eat all of my chef salad and most of Fantasy’s. For dessert, we had chocolate mousse with raspberries in chilled martini glasses. I was polishing off my third, Poppy and Jess having donated theirs. “This is delicious, Mother.”
“You’re eating like a truck driver, Davis,” she said. “If you don’t watch out you’re going to be big as a barn.”
“She already is big as a barn,” Fantasy said.
Mother refolded her napkin.
“Listen to this,” I said, flipping a page of The Compass. “The reason the deck railing is bowed and curved isn’t to keep us from jumping or climbing to another deck, or even for privacy.” All of which it did, in fact, accomplish. “It’s aerodynamically designed to keep the wind down. Probability was built for interoceanic crossings, which, as it turns out, is a windy proposition.”
My audience wasn’t nearly as impressed as I was.
“So, does it say how to get out of here? So? So? Does it?”
We stared at the inoperable V2s stacked in the middle of the table.
“They could come back on any minute,” I lied. “Let’s try to be patient and make the best of it until then.”
“Where is that man?” Mother’s sunhat whirled. “He needs to clear this table. Why is he forever sneaking off? Davis, you and Fantasy do the dishes.” She looked at her watch. “I’m going to my room to rest my eyes. We’ll have a swim in the pool in one hour. Two o’clock. Don’t be late.”
* * *
We used the first half of our hour doing the dishes. Most of it on another dishwasher search.
“Was there anything in the book about the dishwasher?”
“I didn’t see anything,” I said.
“Can we wash dishes with shampoo?”
Five minutes later we were lugging a
Louis Vuitton Keepall between us. Price tag $4,200.
The $4,200 Keepall was full of silverware, salad bowls, and martini glasses. After we tossed it, I gave her a look. A big look. A hard look.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You’re in luck,” I said. “We don’t have time to talk about it.”
The dressing room in the master stateroom of Probability 704 was as large as the bedroom. It had two interior arched doorways, one leading to the Hers closet and one to His. The walls were painted gauntlet gray. The back wall was made up of four full-length mirrored panels, the middle two stationary, the ones on the right and left on hidden tracks allowing them to pull away from the wall for 360-degree viewing.
Anderson Cooper had been in the dressing room with the door closed all morning. Between Save This Marriage and Chef Salad, I’d come back to the dressing room to find something, anything, else to wear, because the Madonna robe was driving me out of my mind, but instead I found my kitty girl sleeping with a $10,000 Probability casino chip. We were up to $40,000 in chips Anderson had swiped. Clearly, the casino chip stash was somewhere in the dressing room or my cat was sneaking in and out. And I was still wearing the Madonna robe over my string bikini.
We checked the closets, top to bottom. We tapped the walls, shook the shelves, and checked for loose carpet corners, finding neither a stash of casino chips nor an entry or exit. In His, Fantasy pointed to the smaller of Bianca’s two Louis Vuitton trunks. “If we have a big enough dinner tonight, this can be our dishwasher.”
“No, it can’t. Bianca is going to kill me.”
“We have to get off this boat for her to kill you, Davis.”
“Ship.”
“I’ve about had it with that.”
“Then call it a ship.” And don’t divorce your husband.
We checked the gauntlet gray walls, top to bottom. They were solid.
We studied the ceiling. Nope.
The floor. Nothing.
“It’s the mirrors.” Fantasy flopped across the white linen ottoman.
“Has to be.” I started on the right, dragging the mirrored panel across the carpet as far as I could, exposing a length of gauntlet gray. “How in the world is my cat getting in and out of here?”
“There.” Fantasy lobbed an arm. “Look by your foot.”
“I can’t even see my feet, Fantasy. Could you possibly get up and help?”
She rolled off the ottoman, her body slack, her energy zapped by our predicament, the sun, my mother, the Vodka Fizzes, or her pending divorce. She crossed the six feet of carpet between us in two long lazy steps, then dropped to the floor. She splayed out flat on her stomach beside me to examine the dark open space at the baseboard between the mirror and wall. “Your feet are so fat.”
I nudged her with one of my fat feet. “They’re swollen, thank you. Not fat. And if you think my feet are fat you should see Bianca’s. They’re pillows.”
Fantasy dove behind the mirror. “Her pillow feet are going to come unglued when she finds out what you did with her luggage.”
“What I did?”
Fantasy, afraid of nothing, at the moment sharks, minnows, or any other sea creature that might be lurking between the ship’s walls, had an arm all the way in the dark unknown behind the mirror, slapping away. “That luggage business is between you and her.” Slap slap. “God be with you.” She pulled her arm out of the black hole. “There’s nothing back there. Let’s check the other one.”
I helped her up and we crossed to the opposite side where she gave the left mirror several pulls. It didn’t budge. “How’d you do this?”
“I just slid it away,” I said. “Is it caught on something?” I leaned in to help the very second her tugging efforts were rewarded. And I got hit in the head with a nine-foot-tall, three-foot-wide flyaway mirror. I landed on my butt, splat, on the dressing room floor.
“Dammit!”
“I didn’t do it on purpose!” Fantasy flew to my side. “You walked right into it!”
“Wait.” I placed a hand over Baby B and sat very still.
“What! What? Are you okay? Should I get your mother?”
“Are you kidding me, Fantasy? Why would you do that? Are you mad at me?” I poked. “This baby has the hiccups.” My hand jumped to the other side. “And now this baby does too.”
Fantasy sat on the floor with me, relief flooding over her. “You scared me to death.”
“Sorry.” Both babies had the hiccups, and not at the same time, off by half a beat of each other. “It’s like popcorn popping in here.”
She patted her chest.
“You are the scariest pregnant woman in the history of childbirth.”
“No, I’m not.” I propped myself up on my elbows. “I’ve had, as twin pregnancies go, a very easy time. I don’t need to fall again, though. Or you’ll be delivering babies at sea.”
“That’s not funny, Davis. And that’s what’s so scary, how casual you are about your pregnancy.”
Hiccup hiccup.
“I am not.”
“You are,” she said. “I was a textbook first-baby nervous wreck every single minute with my first. You aren’t at all. And you should be twice as nervous as I was.”
“Fantasy, I fell on my butt. I’m fine. The babies are fine.”
She stood and I held up both arms.
“There you go again.” She pulled me up with a grunt. “I never raised my arms above my head when I was pregnant the first time. I made Reggie reach for everything.”
“Why?”
“Because my grandmother told me the baby would be born with the umbilical cord around his neck if I raised my arms above my head.”
“Well, my grandmother told me not to look a monkey in the eye or the babies will look like monkeys.”
“That’s a horrible thing to say.”
“Are we going to be like that when we’re old, Fantasy?”
“We have to get off this boat to get old, Davis.”
And with that, a hush settled over us. We were halfway through this day—no SEALS, no No Hair, no V2s. We didn’t take the time to discuss it, per se, but it was there.
“You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’m way more okay than you are, Fantasy.”
“Look.” She leaned against the runaway mirror. “I would have told you, but I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Because you didn’t want to tell me your secret.”
“I have no secrets, Davis. What I did made the news.”
True. She had to testify to all the intimate details of her extramarital fling in open court. Her husband Reggie in the front row for every minute of her testimony. Staring at his shoes.
“You kept your decision a secret, Fantasy. You didn’t decide to divorce Reggie just now by the pool.”
“Are you suggesting, Davis, that you don’t keep secrets from me?”
“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. There’s not a thing about me you don’t know. Name one secret I’ve kept from you.”
She rolled her eyes.
Right.
She snapped her fingers. “No Hair told me you were pregnant. Not you.”
She had me there.
“And Bradley told me your mother had breast cancer. Not you.”
“Those weren’t secrets. If you hadn’t been avoiding me you’d have heard both from me.”
We heard a tinkle, which effectively ended the contest about which one of us kept the most secrets, and we both looked up to the crystal chandelier. But the jingle was coming from below. It was Anderson Cooper’s collar bell. She came out of Hers kicking and flipping a $10,000 Probability casino chip all the way to my (fat) feet.
I scooped her up. “Good girl,” I signed. “Thi
s makes an even fifty thousand. Where in the world are you getting these, Anderson?”
“From back here.” Fantasy had ducked behind the mirror.
I put Anderson Cooper down and followed Fantasy. “Can you see anything?”
“I need to get on the floor.”
I dropped to all fours behind her. “Can you see anything now?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“You have to see something.”
Her head barely fit into a ten-inch-wide gap. She carefully pulled it out. “Back up. I don’t have enough room to turn my head. I need to lie down and look up.”
I tried to put it in reverse, but I was stuck between Fantasy and a gauntlet gray wall. “I can’t move if you don’t get up.”
“Well, stay there.” She flipped, pulled her knees up to her chin, then shot her legs between mine and there we were, Davis and Fantasy, playing Twister in the dressing room. The babies were brushing her thighs. “I swear I can feel their hiccups and it’s freaking me out.” She gently lowered her head back through the opening to the carpeted floor. “Good grief.”
“What?”
“Gimme a minute.”
“Can you see anything?”
She lifted her head an inch to find herself nose to nose with me as I’d managed to creep up an inch or two. “Will you back up?”
“I have nowhere to go.”
She grunted and her head went back into the dark space. “What’s above us?” She sounded like she was in a cave.
“I think it’s the service area behind the bar.”
“Why do you think that?” she asked.
“The Compass,” I said.
“You and that book.” I could barely hear her.
“What does it look like?”
“It’s a long dark way up.” Her voice echoed around. “And it’s tight. The only one of us who’ll fit up there is Poppy. Go get her.”
“Seriously? Surely it’s not that small.”
“Yes, it is,” she said. “She’s the only one of us who’ll be able to move in here. The whole way up it’s made of material that looks like concrete but it’s not. It’s moldy.”
DOUBLE KNOT Page 10
