Meet Me in Hawaii

by Georgia Toffolo

  As though by magic, her phone lit up.

  Video call.

  Lily.

  Zoe smiled as she hit the button to accept. ‘Hey!’ she said. ‘It’s close to midnight over there! Do you miss me that much?’

  Lily opened her mouth…then closed it.

  ‘Lily?’ Zoe said, alarmed at the distraught look on her friend’s face.

  Lily opened her mouth again…and burst into tears.

  ‘Lily!’ Zoe clutched the phone so tightly in her hand she was in danger of cracking the case. ‘Tell me, tell me what it is!

  ‘Sorry, sorry!’ Lily wiped furiously at her eyes. ‘It’s just…Blake.’ A little sob escaped her, but Zoe could see her pulling it all together, the way she always, always did. ‘H-he’s d-dead.’

  ‘Oh Lily! Lils! I’m so, so sorry. Do you need me to come? I will, you know I will.’

  Lily shook her head furiously. ‘You hate Hawke’s Cove.’

  ‘This isn’t about Hawke’s Cove, it’s about you.’

  ‘You’re on a job.’

  ‘I’m a fill-in, nothing more. It’s a junket. Like…blerrgh. You know I don’t do those.’

  A ghost of a smile from Lily. ‘And yet there you are.’

  ‘Meh!’ Zoe tossed in nonchalantly. ‘I like the guy who asked me to do it, that’s the only reason.’

  ‘As in like?’

  ‘As in no! Geez! Rolf lives in Germany. It’s an online friendship, nothing more. Let’s leave the romance to V and Devil, shall we? On the subject of which, this is Lost Hours business. They’re joining us, right?’

  And just like that, Lily was crying again. ‘I was going to dial them in but I…I mean, they’re both…you know, with Oliver and Todd. But Mum’s not here and I just…I feel kind of lost, and I knew you were in a time-friendly zone and…oh, I don’t know what to do!’

  Okay, sound the alarm! Lily lost? Not knowing what to do? It. Did. Not. Com. Pute. ‘Okay, you just stay there, I’ll conference in V and Devil and we can all cry together.’

  ‘You never cry. And you wouldn’t have to even if you did. You barely knew him.’

  ‘I’ll cry for you like a professional mourner. And Malie will cry for real. You know she adored him almost as much as you.’ She started tapping at her phone.

  ‘Not V!’ Lily said suddenly. ‘I mean, the Hawkesbury estate!’

  ‘The estate? I don’t see what that has to do with V. Unless it’s a will thing? But how could that—? Okay, what am I not getting?’

  ‘Not a will thing, a wedding venue thing. Not that there’s going to be a problem, because I won’t let anything go wrong, but she might worry.’

  ‘Er…if you think the death of the richest man in Hawke’s Cove can be kept a secret for more than an hour you’re dreaming. Or is Mrs Whittaker dead too? Cos I’ll bet she’s already got the megaphone out.’

  ‘Oh. I just…I’m not thinking.’

  ‘Not thinking? You? You’re scaring me with that kind of talk! Anyway, Victoria isn’t going to give a damn about her wedding!’

  ‘Victoria certainly is going to give a damn about her wedding,’ Victoria said, laughing as she joined the call.

  At which point Lily burst into tears again.

  ‘Or…maybe…not…?’ Victoria said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Blake Hawkesbury’s dead,’ Zoe explained.

  ‘WHAT?’ Mali said, announcing herself.

  ‘Today,’ Lily said, and kept on crying. ‘It happened today.’

  ‘And her mum’s out of town,’ Zoe said. Imbuing the phrase with as much meaning as she could. Subtext: someone has to get there fast!

  ‘Right, I’m coming,’ Malie said, and actually jumped to her feet.

  ‘What about Todd?’ Lily sniffled.

  ‘We’re not joined at the hip you know.’

  Lily shook her head, adamant. ‘No, you can’t come, you’ve got another surf competition coming up.’

  ‘There’ll be other competitions,’ Malie said, and then abruptly started crying too. ‘But there was only one B-B…’ But she choked, and couldn’t continue.

  She didn’t have to. Everyone knew Blake Hawkesbury had loaned Malie the money she’d needed to flee Hawke’s Cove after the accident. Maybe he’d done that out of a sense of responsibility—it had been his only son Henry’s girlfriend, Claudia, driving the car that night—but Zoe had always thought it was simply that he was kind. The deep down type of kind. To all of them. Especially Lily, to whom he’d become a mentor, almost like a father, after giving her a job in his hotel kitchen when she was sixteen.

  Zoe may not have had much to do with him but the memories she had were good ones. ‘Hey,’ she said, suddenly overwhelmed by nostalgia, ‘remember how he always let us get away with sneaking onto his private beach for our night-time barbecues, pretending he never knew we were doing it?’

  ‘Yes!’ Victoria agreed, smiling mistily. ‘And how he sent that case of his finest champagne to me and Oliver to celebrate our engagement? He was so happy to be hosting our wedding at the Hawkesbury estate.’ And her smile dropped as the tears came to her too. ‘And now he won’t even be there.’

  Silence, except for Lily, Malie and Victoria weeping.

  And then Malie blew her nose. ‘Right. What do you need?’

  Lily heaved in a shuddery breath, then let it out, making a visible effort to get back to her normal self. ‘I need you to go to that surfing competition and win it for Blake.’ Another heaved in breath. ‘And Zoe, I need you to stay where you are and write me something poignant to say at the funeral. And Victoria—’

  ‘Save your breath,’ Victoria said, cutting her off. ‘I’m coming to Hawke’s Cove tomorrow and it’s not to discuss wedding plans.’

  Lily gave a choked sob. ‘Of course you’re coming. Of course you are, and I need you to come.’ Another hitching sob. ‘But right now, I’m going to get into bed and cry my eyes out.’

  Lily rang off, leaving Malie, Victoria and Zoe staring at each other.

  ‘Will she be okay?’ Zoe asked.

  Mali blew a corkscrew curl out of her eyes. ‘She’ll pretend she is, anyway.’

  ‘Maybe I should come over for the funeral…?’ Zoe said, tentative.

  ‘Maybe you shouldn’t,’ Victoria said. ‘You think we don’t know how much you hated coming back for Christmas?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘But nothing. I’m not taking the risk that another visit so soon will have you vowing to stay away forever when I need you at my wedding in June.’

  ‘Not to mention my wedding when the time comes so don’t let the Cove outstay its welcome. Or do I mean you outstay your welcome? Whatever, just don’t pretend you don’t loathe Hawke’s Cove with a passion and would rather swim with the piranha in the Zambezi than come home.’

  ‘I think you mean the Amazon—’

  ‘Details, details!’

  ‘—but okay!’ Zoe huffed out a short-lived laugh. ‘Hey, do you think Henry might finally turn up?’

  Malie rolled her eyes. ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Who cares?’ Victoria said, and then grimaced. ‘Sorry, I don’t mean that, I take it back. Henry may have been a spoilt brat—’

  ‘Not may have been, he was a spoilt brat, and probably still is a spoilt brat!’ Malie threw in.

  ‘—but, if you’ll shut up, Malie, for a few seconds, I think he suffered as much as the rest of us. Not physically, obviously, but emotionally. I mean yes it was an accident, but Claudia died, right next to him in that car. How do you even start to deal with that?’

  ‘Claudia’s parents still blame him,’ Zoe said, and then she sighed. ‘And so do mine.’ Another sigh. ‘Talking about my parents, if I don’t email them within the next ten minutes they’ll declare a state of emergency. So that’s me, signing off.’

  ‘Measurements!’ Victoria called out. ‘Remember, I need your measurements if I’m going to make your bridesmaid’s dress not look like a sack on you!’

  ‘They’ll
be the same as they were at Christmas—and incidentally I’m wearing that divine pink dress you made me to a cocktail party tonight—but yep, fine. Measurements. As soon as I locate a tape measure.’

  Zoe disconnected and returned to the email from her parents, rescanning the words and heaving another sigh.

  She was going to have to refer to Blake Hawkesbury’s death and she really hoped that didn’t have them harking back to the accident. She’d used up a lot of energy over the years putting that night behind her, leaving Hawke’s Cove behind.

  Lately, though, fate seemed to be conspiring against her.

  The Christmas visit.

  Victoria’s wedding, coming up in a few months.

  Now Blake.

  And of course, Malie’s decision to move back there and reopen her family’s surf school in the near future, taking her entrepreneur fiancé with her—not that it was so much taking him with her as it was him being willing to follow her to the ends of the earth.

  And on the subject of Malie, damn her for bringing up Finn Doherty during that visit to Hawaii in February, because ever since he’d been popping into her head at inopportune times. Damn her for all her talk about how Finn used to look at Zoe like he wanted to strip her naked.

  Damn her…but God, how Zoe loved her.

  How she loved them all. They were her anchor and her safe harbour.

  But they were also the tide, pulling her back to where she didn’t want to go.

  You hate Hawke’s Cove. Lily.

  You think we don’t know how much you hated coming back for Christmas? Victoria.

  Don’t pretend you don’t loathe Hawke’s Cove with a passion. Malie.

  She’d tried so hard to escape, she had escaped…but because of the precious friendships she’d forged there she was scared she’d never truly leave it behind. In fact she felt a terrible, burning certainty that Hawke’s Cove was waiting for her to return, to face a past she wanted to forget—a feeling that had been growing stronger since Christmas.

  Maybe it was tiredness getting to her; since December she’d done practically back-to-back trips—Mexico, England, the Caribbean, Hawaii, New Zealand. And yet she’d so easily shelved what she’d thought was a firm plan to chill at home in Sydney for a few months. She should have turned down this job—it was so last minute she hadn’t been able to do her usual meticulous research, plus she really, truly hated junkets—but a nagging discontentedness had had her accepting.

  And so here she was, batting away memories, replying to yet one more email, drowning in the…the suffocation of her life, the same suffocation she’d fled ten years ago.

  ‘And you think Henry Hawkesbury was a spoilt brat?’ she asked herself out loud. ‘Get over yourself Zoe Tayler. Blake Hawkesbury just died, Lily is in mourning, Rolf’s got pneumonia, and you’re complaining? You’re alive, you’ve got a job people dream about, you’re in paradise—stop bitching about having to write an email.’

  Quickly, she typed:

  I just heard Blake Hawkesbury died. Lily’s Mum’s away at the moment so I hope you’ll check on her—you know how close to him she was.

  And then she switched to autopilot, and kept typing. She’d been typing versions of the same email for so long she could just about write it in her sleep. Soothe, placate, deflect.

  She reread her message, checking for typos, hit send, then returned to her interrupted article.

  But stubbornly, the words wouldn’t come. As she sat there watching the cursor blink, it struck her that when she’d checked for typos in that email she hadn’t absorbed one word of the actual content.

  She went back to the email she’d sent, read it again, and knew why the content hadn’t pulled her in: it was tepid, it was practised, it was nothing. Even the reference to staying in her room all day writing her story on Malie’s godfather’s surf school was a glib throwaway, nothing but a facile reassurance that they could go—to—bed—please!

  Strictly speaking she would be working in her room all day. She was going to finish that article, then she was going to write a brief on the surf school for a documentary maker she’d met on a trip last year, then she was going to tackle the research on Poerava she ordinarily would have done a week before flying in. But she had oh-so-carefully ‘forgotten’ to mention the cocktail party she’d be attending in the evening—an omission that suddenly troubled her.

  She started to rub her hands up and down her thighs, then stopped herself. She didn’t need to remind herself why her parents worried; they never stopped telling her they worried. And at almost twenty-eight years old she didn’t need to confess every single thing she did or feel guilty about skipping an occasional detail that might cause them unnecessary anxiety.

  Especially since she knew nothing was going to happen to her at the cocktail party. Nothing interesting, anyway. She’d been to so many of those parties she could describe exactly how the evening would unfold. She’d dress up and do her hair and make-up. She’d drink champagne, eat canapes, meet the resort manager if he/she was there, be schmoozed by the public relations executive who’d arranged her travel. She’d talk to as many people as she could, gathering information on the resort and the area’s most interesting attractions, and at the end of the evening she’d return to her room with Cristina and go immediately to bed to rest up for the always-busy first day of action.

  Boring.

  So boring maybe she should just skip it. After her recent travel-fest no one could blame her for preferring a quiet night in. Even when you were being flown Business Class (as she invariably was), air travel was exhausting, especially when you had to navigate airports in a wheelchair. And then, of course, she had jetlag to contend with, which could kick in at any moment, not to mention—

  ‘Oh. My. God! Listen to yourself! Sermonising on the evils of travel! Who even are you?’

  She sat up straighter. She wasn’t going to lie to herself by pretending she was too tired to go to a two-and-a-half-hour party when what she was actually suffering from was a guilty conscience over not telling her parents she was going out. Nor was she going to send a follow-up email mentioning the party. That would be tantamount to asking for permission to attend when she—did—not—need—permission! She also didn’t need another email shot back at her listing the dangers that lurked in the unfamiliar dark.

  What she was going to do was remind herself—visually, since she couldn’t trust the tortured inside of her head—that she was living the life she’d always dreamed of.

  She pushed away from the desk and wheeled herself onto the large sundeck of her bungalow, gazing at the endlessness of blue.

  Blue was her favourite colour, and it didn’t get more beautiful than this, laid out in shades shifting seamlessly from crystal to powder to electric to azure to sapphire, all the way out to the horizon where the lagoon collided with a vivid cerulean sky. Her bungalow seemed to be suspended between two worlds—and in a way that was exactly what it was, perched on stilts over water, not earth. There were glass panels in the floor inside that allowed you to see the colourful fish darting freely below, but Zoe preferred this outdoor vantage point. In her soul she was soaring, skimming across the lagoon, rising into the air, flying straight up to the heavens.

  This was why she’d fought so hard to not return home to Hawke’s Cove with her parents. This beauty, this freedom.

  It had been worth every trade-off she’d negotiated—the apartment that had been bought for her off the plan and before construction so modifications could be made for her wheelchair, the physiotherapist who came twice a week, the cleaning service, the detailed itineraries provided to her parents whenever she was travelling, Cristina’s assistance, the regular phone calls when she was at home, the barrage of emails when she was working, a hundred other inconsequential intrusions.

  It had been a fight for her life…at the cost of her parents’ hope for a cure.

  ‘Fight your big battles to the death, but don’t sweat the scrappy skirmishes if you want to win the long wa
r,’ she said again, looking out across the lagoon.

  Once more she heard Finn saying those words. But now she could see him, too. His crooked smile with the tiny chip in his front tooth as he’d tucked a hank of her hair behind her ear. She’d looked into his too-blue eyes that day and seen more than a colour. She’d seen, so clearly, that Finn was mysteriously older than his eighteen years. His life had been nothing like her pampered existence—and yet he’d believed, he really had, that she was as strong as he was, capable of fighting for what she wanted, ready to do whatever she set her heart on.

  What would he think of all those compromises she’d made to get where she was? Would he see her as a victor or would he say she was…

  ‘Lost,’ she said, and closed her eyes, trying to unblock the memory of the very last time she’d seen him.

  Impossible.

  As usual, only a snippet or two resurfaced, just enough to tell her it had been traumatic; the rest stayed safely buried.

  She opened her eyes, stared out at the horizon, and saw again his eyes, the same colour as the French Polynesian sky.

  She may not have the full memory of that night but she knew one thing: however Finn Doherty may have looked at her during that Crab Shack year, his opinion had gone through a dramatic metamorphosis in the two years that followed.

  And it didn’t matter. It really, truly didn’t.

  She hadn’t seen him for ten years and she’d never see him again.

  Which was just fine with her.

  Because she had an article to finish, a party to go to, and a life to live.

  Chapter 2

  FINN DOHERTY WALKED SLOWLY around the hotel ballroom with Aiata, the resort’s PR manager, looking for flaws to be corrected before the guests arrived.

  But there were no flaws. Everything was perfect.

  No, not perfect.

  He hated the word ‘perfect’.

  ‘Magnificent’ was a better descriptor. He’d go with that.

  Yesterday this had been a moderate-sized room running the length of the fare pote—the communal house—which was comprised of an airy lobby, Tāma’a restaurant, the Manuia bar, a quiet library room, and a ruthlessly modern but hidden commercial kitchen. Elegant, certainly, with richly-brown teak flooring, fairy lights strung across the ceiling, and full-length glass doors replacing walls on three sides and opening onto a wrap-around deck. The doors offered uninhibited views onto a grass clearing that was ideal for small soirees. The clearing was bordered by stunning gardens landscaped to merge with the island’s natural rainforest beyond. Objectively speaking, it wasn’t vastly different from any other expertly-designed, well-positioned hotel ballroom.