The Last Good Paradise (24 page)

Dex knew music, not guns, changed hearts and minds. He experienced it on tour, the unity of thousands at concerts. Power comes in all forms; the old man could never get his head around that one.

*   *   *

Rifle safely returned to its place, hours later Ann woke up on a bench by the kitchen. She found Richard asleep on the beach. She stroked the hair plastered to his forehead. In his sleep he looked as content as when they first met. Where had that Richard gone? For that matter, where had the old Ann gone? She lay down beside him. On the wind, she thought she heard voices arguing as she fell asleep.

A roaring woke her. The morning sky was a bright, glowing yellow. The silver ocean worried its way back and forth along the beachfront. Ann sat up, alone, sand in her hair, shivering.

Wende stood at the dock with a small battered valise—the same one that Cooked had carried back from their trip to town. Although Ann had grown fond of the girl and was sorry she was leaving, there was a part of her that was also glad. Wende’s youth exhausted her. She didn’t like her part serving as cautionary tale. Ann was tired of the girl’s lording it over the
motu
with her body; tired of the haunted, panting men; tired of the bikini and breasts and the promise implied by the dazzling belly button ring that could return at any time.
WILD
. Poor girl didn’t have the first clue. Wild could be in the heart of the most buttoned-down, burned-out lawyer. Wild was the ability to drop one life and pick up another. Wild was refusing the scratchy dry surface of things and digging into the rich loamy depths. Ann was searching for a wild far deeper and grander than anything offered up so far. She had tried to rise to the occasion, had borrowed the skimpy two-piece bathing suit to jazz up her marriage, but it wasn’t her, and she knew it. Then she remembered her half tattoo. She walked to the dock and pointed to her thigh.

“You can’t leave. You didn’t finish this.”

Wende shrugged. “You never wanted it.”

“Now what am I supposed to do?”

“Dex proposed last night—you have to come to the wedding. Call me when you get back to LA, and I’ll finish it.”

Her words and her expression were at a disconnect.

“You don’t love him.”

Wende frowned. “It’s time to grow up.”

Ann sighed. Had this whole thing with Cooked been an act to get what she wanted from Dex? Had sweet little Wende played them all? Impossible to save another even if it was clear she was throwing away her dreams, however misguided. The girl had wanted to save sharks.

“What’s with Cooked?”

He was hunched over in the gloom of a palm tree, dark and glowering, one of his eyes black and swollen shut. Titi refused to let him in the kitchen while she prepared breakfast. Later, Ann found out Titi was the one who had given him the black eye, giving the lie to the Polynesian no-jealousy policy. The human heart guided itself. Was the slickness on Cooked’s cheeks from tears? He bolted from his place and ran to the water, holding a bucket.

“Go away,” Wende yelled into the wind, but Cooked ran into the water and threw a bouillabaisse of cut fish around him. He raked his fingernails down his chest, drawing streaks of blood. Wende screamed. Richard and Loren jumped into the water and dragged the boy out.

“I’m sorry,” Wende said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“I don’t think he’s doing it for you,” Ann said.

Titi made her stately way down the path from the kitchen to the water. Cooked ran to her and fell on his knees, burying his face in her billowy dress. Had the love potion worked after all, albeit slowly, painfully, like all true love?

Wende turned away, her face pale. “Okay,” she yelled. “I’ll do it.”

Ann was confused. Events were unspooling like a bad drug trip.

With difficulty Loren pulled the boat around in the choppy waves. The wind from the coming storm was pulling at every surface so that one had to hunch one’s shoulders against it. Dex appeared with a duffel and his guitar case.

“Do you have to go?” Ann asked, more a whine than a question. The night before had been special, the whole group finally bonded, and now just as quickly it was falling apart. “We could all hang out a while longer. Our little paradise. What about the free nights?”

“Are you speaking as my attorney?” Dex said.

Ann shook her head. “As your friend.”

“I don’t want to lose her,” he whispered.

They hugged and exchanged good-byes. Wende and Dex held hands sitting in the boat while Loren and Cooked argued; finally Cooked yanked on the hotel’s official yellow shirt and got behind the wheel. The shirt soaked up his blood like a cocktail napkin, a Rorschach of heartbreak.

“I didn’t think she even liked Dex,” Richard said.

Thankfully, Richard appeared to be staying for now.

“Life’s strange that way,” Ann said.

Richard watched as they boarded and the boat pulled away.

Ann felt sorry for him. It was so easy to forget one’s husband could be a hurting human being also.

Cooked was mournfully staring at Titi as if he were going away on a many-years-long sea voyage, with the possibility he might never return.

Titi and Richard turned away as the wind kicked up sand, but Ann kept watching the boat as it made its way into the deeper part of the lagoon. She alone saw Wende rise, holding the small valise, then lift her free arm for balance as she gracefully stepped over the side like a modern-day Ophelia.

“Man overboard! Woman!” Ann screamed as the others turned around and Loren ran out of the kitchen.

There was a loud cracking sound as the boat hit an underwater coral reef.

Loren grabbed his head. “I’ll kill him!”

Both Cooked and Dex jumped overboard to rescue Wende. In the panic all three almost drowned. For a weird moment in the choppy waves, Cooked appeared to be yelling at Wende, and she submerged again. A miracle that they made it back to the boat, and that the boat returned to the shore before it was logged with water and sank. Their own twenty-first-century shipwreck. The luggage, including the valise, lost.

*   *   *

By the afternoon, rain pelted down so hard that they had no choice but to stay sequestered inside their
fares
. Even a quick trip to the kitchen punished one with a drenching. At dusk a howling began, like a never-ending freight car roaring overhead. Loren beat on each of their doors and ordered them to evacuate to his
fare
, which was the highest point on the island.

“How much higher?” Richard asked.

“One meter. Three feet. Maybe enough to save you.”

Outside, the island’s transformation was spellbinding. Water that had been fifty feet away, now surrounded them, and they sloshed barefoot through it. Debris floated in the sand-heavy liquid, knocking into their shinbones. This was way beyond any thunderstorm. When Richard and Ann got to Loren’s, everyone else was already inside. Titi sat in the corner, chanting to herself. Cooked thumbed through a sports magazine. Dex had his arms around Wende, who was shivering and teary-eyed.

“We should have left,” she said. “It’s my fault.”

Cooked looked up sharply at her, but she ignored him.

“The other resort would have been no different,” Dex said.

“The other resort is steel-fortified,” Loren said. “It can easily withstand a hurricane. Plenty of food, medicine, boats there.”

“What’s the safety plan here?” Richard asked.

“If the storm surge floods the island much more, the buildings will go. You don’t want to get hit by debris. Put your life jackets on and head for the boat.”

The stack of neglected yellow life vests sat piled in the corner. Ann did not mention the obvious—that there had been no boat since that morning.

A storm went on so long into the night that intermittent sleep finally overcame their fear. The sole light came from a battery-operated lantern, which threw attenuated, spooky shadows on the ceiling. Alternating from prayers that sounded more like plea bargains to self-recriminations (why hadn’t they gone to Alsace?), Ann fell asleep on the floor and woke to the startling sensation of sitting in water. She whimpered.

“I hate storms,” she said.

“I know,” Richard whispered, and wrapped his arms around her, forming a Richard blanket.

It was true—Richard was the one person in the world who knew she preferred earth tones, that she liked anchovies on her Caesar salad, that she absolutely detested and loathed thunderstorms. How had she forgotten all this?

“I’m sorry,” Ann said. “For everything.”

“I’m not sorry for a minute of it,” Richard said, and kissed her hair.

Minutes later, the water pooled up to the undersides of the rush-bottomed chairs. They would literally drown in the Pacific, their leaky life raft of an island sinking beneath them.

And then the waters retreated. Within ten minutes, the floor was no longer underwater. The force of the hurricane passed to the west.

“I’ve never been so hungry in my life,” Wende said.

“Food,” Richard agreed.

*   *   *

Although it was still raining hard, the howling had subsided the slightest degree in intensity. Celebratory after two close calls, feeling very much alive, they shoved the wet table and chairs into the kitchen. Richard cooked a large pot of linguine
frutti di mare
and served family-style.

At Richard’s insistence, Titi and Cooked joined the table for the first time to eat with them. Something had been settled between the two. They only had eyes for each other and the food, which they ate with gusto. At the beach, after the near-drowning, they’d had a passionate, seawater-sputtering reunion when Cooked staggered back to solid land.

“Today I saw my life passing by,” Dex said. “It’s good to be back.”

“You were only one hundred meters out.”

“I was already checked out here.” Dex tapped his ear, which in his case might indeed have been the seat of all desire. “I’m taking it as a sign.”

“It’s only a sign,” Loren said, “that Cooked is an imbecile.”

Through this exchange, a subdued Wende sat silent. Ann had been the only witness to her act.

“What does it mean?” she muttered, but so softly they could pretend not to hear her.

“The boat sinking was a gift,” Titi said.

“Of course. No guilt, no remorse at all,” Loren said bitterly. “It would be different if the boat was yours.”

Cooked dropped Titi’s hand. “Yes, it would be different. But it isn’t.”

The table fell into a funky silence.

Richard broke the impasse by serving a huge platter of cheeses and fruit. “‘A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.’”

“Whoa, I like that,” Dex said. “Did you just make that up?”

“That’s the master—Brillat-Savarin.”

“Cool. I think I’ll use it.”

Wende looked on the verge of crying. “I almost died out there. No one cares!”

Dex put his arm around her. “Clumsy honey bunny, you fell overboard. We had you covered.”

Wende was about to blurt out a confession she was not ready to make and they were not ready to hear—or, rather, that Ann was not ready for them to hear, with the likely outcome that the camaraderie would again be broken. Everyone would want to leave as soon as they could. The table slumped back into inaction. So quiet that they could hear outside.

“Listen,” Ann said.

Silence.

“I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly.”

They tumbled outside into the darkness. The island was holding them up again. The clouds had cleared away. The night sky was newly scrubbed, moon-brilliant, star-punctured.

Around them on the beach were scattered bits of rock and coral. Glistening bodies of sea life lay stranded. Fish and eels fluttered in small pools, and the guys grabbed them and threw them back into the water. The farthest
fare
, vacant, had disappeared off its finger of sand as if it never was, washed away. A lesson, Loren thought.

“We’re marooned. At least till the hotel sends out another boat,” Richard said.

The idea of actually being marooned sent a tingle down Ann’s spine. Her fantasy was taking a majestic turn toward the real.

“It feels like the beginning of the world,” Dex said. “If only you could record this feeling.”

Loren yawned. “Good night, lovely people. Enough excitement for tonight,” he said, and went off.

Ann felt the urge to lay out something precious before the others, to seal the evening as extraordinary. Besides, her secret had been burning a hole in her pocket for a week now. “You can record it.”

*   *   *

They scampered through the glittering night like trick-or-treaters, kids playing hooky, whispering and giggling, sneaking kisses and gropes, tripping and falling in the sand. It was like a happy return to childhood. The beach was littered with palm fronds, and in the dark, Wende stumbled over one. Dex fell on top of her, and they rolled away, laughing.

“Knock it off,” Ann said, a taskmaster. “Hurry.” Her heart beat a staccato of excitement.

No reason to hurry. They had basically forever, but she wanted to create proper awe for the unveiling. The hurry also obscured the tiniest feeling of unease at betraying Loren.

The path along the island’s edge was deceptively longer at night. Shouldn’t they have already passed it? Richard was drinking straight out of a bottle of red wine and singing Italian opera, of all things, though he didn’t even speak Italian. Dex and Wende passed a bottle of champagne back and forth. Everyone was enjoying the journey far too much for Ann’s taste.

They didn’t pass anything remotely familiar at the point Ann thought the camera should be. Had the storm washed it away? They went farther. Farther still. Ann walked ahead, squinting into the darkness past the feeble cone of light from her flashlight, unconfident of her landmarks. Behind her, the troops were grumbling. Richard stopped to take a leak behind a palm. Wende complained she was tired.

“There it is!” Ann shouted.

In the middle of a stretch of washed beach was her webcam. As each of them came up to it, there was an unimpressed silence.

Finally Ann said, “Here it is.”