Here Today, Gone to Maui (21 page)

“There’s plenty of room where I’m staying,” Michael said, handing the valet a tip. “You can come home with me.”

“NO!” I said. Everyone (including the valets) looked at me in surprise. I cleared my throat. “What I mean is . . .” What did I mean, exactly?

“I understand what Tiara is going through,” I said. “And I think it’s important that she and I support each other. You know—talk things out. I’d like her to stay with me.”

Shoot me now.

Michael shrugged and slid into the driver’s seat. “Okay.”

Tiara enfolded me in a hug—not easy since her enormous rack didn’t exactly compress. “Thanks, Jan. That means a lot to me.”

“It’s Jane,” I said.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to withstand a touchy-feely discussion with Tiara because when I came out of the bathroom after changing into my nightgown, she was passed out on my bed. In her underwear. The matching bra and panties were satin and lace, the same shade of teal as her dress.

There was no way I was getting into that bed with her. I pulled the stinky cushions off the chairs and lined them up on the floor. There were no spare sheets, of course, so I spread a couple of scratchy white towels on top of the cushions as a kind of barrier between me and the mold that inevitably lay within. I retrieved the scary bedspread from the closet and pulled one of the dust-mite-infested pillows off the bed.

Astonishingly enough, I slept. Okay, maybe it’s not so astonishing when you factor in all of the mai tais.

Shortly after daybreak, the phone woke me. I lunged for the receiver as a primitive, really stupid part of my brain thought,
Jimmy
. Maybe Jimmy had been found. Maybe Jimmy was alive. Maybe Jimmy had an explanation for the credit-card mix-up and the affair with Tiara. Maybe cats could swim and whales could fly.

It was Mary.

“I’m glad you called,” I said, even though it was seven o’clock in the morning and I didn’t want to hear from anyone unless it was Jimmy calling to beg my forgiveness.

“Don’t leave your room,” Mary commanded.

“I wasn’t planning to at the moment,” I said, bleary-eyed. “But I wanted to ask you—are there any more units available right now? Because there’s this woman—”

“A luau,” Mary was saying.

“Yes,” I said. “I went to one last night.”

Mary’s words continued to seep through as I thought,
Jimmy’s gone. Really gone
. “Pictures,” I heard her say. “Video.”

“What?” I needed coffee. And aspirin. And five more hours of sleep.

“Turn on the TV,” she said.

I did. And there I was—again. Only this time I didn’t look like the shocked and grieving fiancée. This time I was standing front and center of the hula line, leaning a little too close to Michael, and I looked like, I looked like—

“Tramp,” Mary said.

“Excuse me?”

“There’s this headline on the Internet,” she said. “It says, ‘Two Tramps. Where’s the Lady?’ ”

“That’s not even very clever,” I said weakly.

“There are at least four reporters in the parking lot,” Mary told me. “Plus a couple of camera crews.
Stay in your room
.”

Mary was right: there were a couple of news vans in the parking lot, along with a woman in a pink suit and a man in shades of blue and beige. Stuck in the room, I settled back on my cushions and watched my life on television. Some of the shots I’d seen before: the search crews at Slaughterhouse Beach, Michael’s DMV photo. Others were new: the hula line on the luau stage. Me loading my plate at the dessert buffet. Jimmy in mid-orgasm.

I screamed. Tiara made a couple of sleepy-snorting noises and repositioned herself on the bed. She’d love these pictures. She looked great at the luau, and the porno picture of Jimmy’s was hers, of course. As for the next quick video—Tiara throwing a tantrum in the Hyatt lobby (Hey! Who was hiding the camera?)—she might not be so thrilled.

When my cell phone rang, I checked the display (it was my sister, Beth) and muted the television.

“Aloha,” I said weakly.

“What. The. Fuck.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you use that word before,” I said.

“Jane! What’s going on?”

“I guess you heard about Jimmy’s disappearance,” I mumbled. “And about the other woman.” She didn’t need to know that the other woman was in the room with me.

I was embarrassed, I realized with surprise. Surely I should be feeling something darker, stronger? But my level of embarrassment was so profound it was crossing over into humiliation, which in turn crowded out a whole host of more noble emotions.

I’d last seen Beth over the holidays. After Christmas Eve dinner (a seafood-and-pasta extravaganza, all of which Beth prepared and served while her mother-in-law sat on her ass and said that an Irish girl can never cook like an Italian), Beth had advised me to give Jimmy an ultimatum: not for marriage, not yet, but for a steady, committed relationship (whatever that meant). She had asked why I didn’t see him more regularly. She’d wanted to know what he was doing at Christmas, why he hadn’t flown east with me.

“It’s early,” I’d said, scrubbing an especially noxious pot. “We haven’t been going out that long.”

“Early in the relationship, maybe.” China clinked as she maneuvered yet another plate into the dishwasher. “But not early in your life.”

She said stuff like this not as my protective big sister but as Mrs. Sal Piccolo, mother of five, devoted scrapbooker, coupon clipper, and CCD instructor at Our Lady of the Turnpike parish. (It’s not really called that; I just say it to annoy her. Also, CCD isn’t called CCD anymore, either—presumably because nobody ever knew what CCD stood for.)

She was just being defensive, I decided. Nobody could really believe that Sal (“We’ll keep pumping ’em out till we get a boy”) was better than my golden god Jimmy.

“Jimmy will come for Christmas next year,” I had told Beth, putting the pot aside to soak. He’d promised no such thing, of course. He seemed incapable of planning more than a few hours ahead. But at that moment, I believed it.

“Is it on TV back there?” I asked her now, peeking through the venetian blinds. The reporters were still there.

On the muted television, a close-up of my face flashed on the screen. “Oh my God!” I shrieked. “I’ve got something stuck between my teeth!”

“What? So take it out,” Beth said.

“Not now! Last night. We went to a luau, and someone took videos and—”

“I
know,
” she said. “It was in our paper.”

“You read the newspaper?” That came out wrong.

“When I get the time.” That meant never. “My friend Renée called me. You remember Renée? From the PTA?”

“Yes,” I said, meaning no. “I should not have bought that dress.”

The video had, thankfully, zoomed away from the crap in my teeth, providing a full-length shot of my Safeway couture. The dress was too straight, I saw now, too loose. It made me look like I had no shape whatsoever. Even a pear has some curvy contours.

“I can’t imagine what you’re going through,” Beth said. “I can’t believe he lied like that, and that you never even suspected—” She stopped herself before saying how lucky she was to have married Sal. “What did Mom say about it?” she asked.

“Mom? Do you think she knows?” I pictured my mother in her cramped kitchen, sitting at her oversize table. She read the paper first thing every morning, the various sections spread out in front of her, her big coffee cup filled to the brim.

 

 

“Hi, Mom.”

“Janie? Is that you?”

“Yes. I’m in Maui.”

“I know!
Everyone
knows!”

“I’m sorry I didn’t call you sooner, but—”

“You were on the news this morning! They’d gotten hold of your high school picture—you know the one where your hair was all one length, the way I liked it? They said your name and where you’d gone to high school. They didn’t actually mention me, but enough people know I have a daughter named Jane to make the connection.”

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry.”

“The phone has been ringing off the hook! All morning! I’m surprised you were even able to get through. My supervisor at Home Depot said I could take today off if I needed, but I said, no sir, I’m a team player.”

“Oh, wow, Mom, I hadn’t really thought about how it would affect—”

“You remember Adele Pritchard? From when we lived on East Lane?”

“Sort of,” I said, meaning not really.

“I hadn’t spoken to her for, what? Eighteen years? And she calls, out of the blue, says she’d seen you and didn’t know you were in California and how awful this whole thing must be for our family. And she told me how brave she always thought I was, soldiering on after your father left me with two young children.”

“We weren’t that young.”

“And so, anyway, we’re going to have lunch next week, probably Tuesday, and Adele’s going to call Barb Reilly, too, see if she can make it.”

“Well, I’ll still be here for a few more days,” I said. “Just in case Jimmy shows up—or floats up, or whatever.”

“No great loss,” she said.

“What?” Surely she hadn’t said that.

“Better you find out what he’s really like now rather than after wasting twenty years of your life with him. Oops—I gotta run if I’m going to make it to work on time. I know everyone is going to have lots of questions!”

 

 

“Do you want to talk to a reporter from
People
magazine?” Mary asked me an hour later. This was after I’d talked to Lena (“The phone’s been ringing off the hook. Mr. Wills hasn’t left his office all day”). After I’d watched the special reports on television (“credit-card fraud . . . pornographic pictures . . . multiple lovers . . . poi . . .”). After I’d read the local paper (
Although police haven’t officially named the two women as suspects in the case
. . . ). After I’d talked to Sergeant Hosozawa (“We still think he’s alive, but we’re not ready to say that to the press”).

“
People
magazine?” I said to Mary, feeling slightly hysterical. “Is this about me carrying Brad Pitt’s baby? Because it’s not true.”

“You shouldn’t joke,” Mary said somberly. “It doesn’t look good.”

“I can’t help it,” I said. “It’s a nervous tic. If I don’t joke, I’ll—” A sob escaped my lips, followed by another and another. “Lose control,” I finally managed to gasp.

“I’ll tell the reporter that you are too overcome by emotion to talk right now,” she said.

“Good thinking,” I said.

I thought Tiara would be thrilled about the news crews in the parking lot. I expected her to throw on her pretty silk dress and sprint out the door.

“I can’t go out looking like this!” Tiara said, practically in tears. Her hair was all pouffy on one side, flat on the other. Her eye makeup had finally smeared. While she still looked better than I do on my best day, she wasn’t up to her usual standards.

She turned on the shower (leaving the door open) and dug through her suitcases. “My product! The Hyatt people didn’t pack my product!”

“Your—what?” I asked.

“My hair thickener, and the polishing milk and the spray. And the—oh my God,
they didn’t pack my makeup, either
!” Once again, she was more hysterical than she’d been when Jimmy disappeared, and this time she was sober.

“You can borrow my makeup,” I said. “And I’ve got a can of mousse.”

I don’t want to describe the disdainful look she gave me because it’ll just piss me off all over again.

While Tiara showered (squealing when the people next door flushed their toilet, turning the spray burning hot), I called the airlines to see if I could get an earlier flight home. Tonight there was an available seat on a red-eye for a price so high I paused to consider my credit-card limit. Still, I was about to book it when the reality hit me. Going home wouldn’t solve anything. Instead of news vans in the Maui Hi parking lot, there might be news vans outside my condo. And if I wouldn’t talk to the reporters, they might interview my neighbors, or my coworkers, or maybe even people from my past.

Oh God.

Mary called on the room phone. “I’ve got Michael James on the line. I’ve been holding all your other calls.”

“Have there been many?” I asked.

She paused for a second, counting. “Twenty-three.”

“No!”

“But a lot are repeats. One guy, he called ten times, probably. I know it’s him because he says his
r
’s funny. But each time he uses a different name.”

“Like Wobert?” I said.

“No joking,” she said, though she couldn’t help chuckling.

 

 

“Maybe the luau wasn’t a great idea,” Michael said over the phone.

“You think?”

“You’re a good dancer, though,” he said.

“So are you.”