Welcome to Paradise (9 page)

“This place brings you back to a lot of simpler things,” Mira mused as she leaned against the wall of the house next to Gabe, who’d come to join her after the men had taken the furniture back inside. She wrapped her shawl around herself against the evening chill. “It may be on camera, but it still feels real, doesn’t it? I keep finding myself forgetting it’s a show, and that we’re competing. I suppose it’s because you can’t help but be inside the life you’re living, the moment you’re in.” She looked up at him, wondering if he understood her. “And right now that’s singing for entertainment, and waiting for the outhouse.”

“No distractions, no labor-saving devices. No time out, no time off. And not much to hide behind,” he agreed.

“You do get what I’m saying,” she said with pleasure.

“Of course I do.” He looked surprised at the question. “You always only have the moment you’re in, but we tend to forget that. It’s too intense here to forget, though. You can’t live in the past or think about tomorrow if what you’re doing now requires your complete attention. And as far as competing . . . until our first challenge, at least, it’s what Cliff said. Working hard and getting along, just like the original homesteaders.”

“Neither of which seems like much of a stretch for you.” She cast a sidelong look at him. “Maybe because your dad was a minister, huh? That does make sense—for you. If I’d only met Alec, though, I’d have been surprised.”

“We both did some rebelling back in the day, but he’s pretty much grabbed that role now. He’s the oldest, so he got first pick.”

“You’re twins, though,” she objected.

“Twenty minutes older is still older,” he said wryly. “Believe me.”

“Your dad must be more like you,” she guessed. “More quiet and serious.
More . . . steady.
Does Alec get that . . . that spirit from your mom?”

Gabe smiled a bit at that. “Yeah, I’m more like my dad. But he’s not like you’re thinking, some kind of mild-mannered minister type. Disabuse yourself of that notion. My dad’s taller than me, broader than Alec. Smart as a whip and twice as tough. And you don’t want to see him mad.”

 
“And it’s your turn.” He nodded towards the path where Melody’s apron showed white against the gloom of twilight as she came towards them. “Ladies first.”

She shoved herself away from the wall, feeling the effort after another full day of physical labor.
Time for bed.
“You outside tonight?” she turned to ask him.

“Yep. Me and Martin again.”

“Ouch,” she winced.

“Yeah.” His teeth flashed white in the dim light as he grinned. “Hope nothing comes along to scare him. Get him excited, and I’m a lot more likely to get shot than any coyote.”

“Last one,” Mira said breathlessly the next morning, coming up from the creek with yet another bucketful of water.

“Thank goodness,” Maria-Elena sighed, carefully pouring the water from her own bucket down the last of the trenches Gabe and Kevin had dug.

Mira set her empty bucket down, went to grab her hoe from its spot near the garden’s border, and set in on the row of beans. The plot was so big, by the time they got to the other
end,
they’d have to start again at the beginning, even working for several hours every morning, before the day got too hot. She was finding, though, that she enjoyed the physical work. She’d quickly got the hang of working neatly around the plants, digging up the weeds and avoiding the vegetables.
In marked contrast to Melody, whom Mira had secretly dubbed the Assassin for her merciless ways with their produce.
Zara was the best cook out here, but Mira was doing her share there too, as well as nearly half of the remainder of the chores. And it was all strangely satisfying. The simple, physical tasks made such a complete contrast to the meetings, spreadsheets, and reports that made up her normal workload.

At the beginning, her body had protested every day. She’d never known she had so many muscles until she found out how sore each and every one could get. But although she was still bone-weary every night, she didn’t wake up aching all over anymore. In any case, hoeing was a whole lot easier than digging postholes as Stanley and Kevin were doing right now. The garden surround was barely started, the men having decided it was more important to get the animals into a corral before tackling the eight-foot deer fence. Now Gabe had Martin helping him fell young trees, and, Mira thought with a secret grin, pulling him out of the way when they fell, while the other two were working on getting the first posts into the ground.

She almost dropped her hoe at the scream from the direction of the house. Then she was running, together with all the others, including Danny.

“Help! Oh, my God! Help!” It was Melody, pelting up the path from the outhouse as if a bear really
were
after her.

“What is it?” Kevin got out, meeting Zara, who’d come bursting out from the house at the sound of the screams. “Are you hurt? What happened?”

“My phone!” Melody sobbed. “It fell down the hole! We have to get it!”

“Your
phone?”
Kevin stared in
disbelief
as Mira and Maria-Elena pulled to a stop, red-faced and panting after running in the tight corsets. “What do you mean, your phone? What phone?”

“What’s happened?” Gabe asked urgently, arriving ahead of Martin and the cameraman who’d been filming the tree-felling operation. “Snake? Somebody hurt? What?”

“My iPhone!” Melody was still crying. “A spider came down on a string, and it landed in my
hair!
And I
dropped
it!”

“Your iPhone,” Zara said slowly. “Which you brought in, what? A pocket?”

Melody nodded, turned a pleading face to them. “I only turn it on once a day. Just one call.”

“Who are you calling?” Kevin drawled. “Your no doubt overworked agent?”

“My mother,” Melody sniffed. “I just call her and talk for a minute. If I don’t get my phone back, I can’t call her at all.” Her eyes filled with tears again at the thought.

Mira found her heart softening at Melody’s admission. There was no question that the girl had suffered more out here than any of them. Kevin had appeared just as urban in the beginning, but, to his own evident surprise, seemed to enjoy using his decorative muscles in the rigorous chores that fell to the men’s lot. Of course, he was also focused on that million-dollar prize, whereas the harshness of their life here seemed to have completely overwhelmed Melody. And Melody, unlike Kevin, didn’t have any friends on the homestead, unless you counted Maria-Elena.

“You aren’t going to get your phone back,” Zara said firmly. “That phone is
gone.
It’ll be wrecked anyway. And who do you imagine would be fishing down that hole to get it for you? Do you want to do it?”

“The guys will!” Melody insisted. “Won’t you, Stanley?” she pleaded, looking up at him with a little-girl pout that, Mira suspected, had probably been effective on her own father. Stanley just shook his head, smiling at her in rueful amusement.

 
“Honey, if you can find the man who’d do that for you,” Zara said, “better snap him up fast.
Because that’d be true devotion.
But I think I’m pretty safe in saying that nobody here’s likely to take it on.”

“Why do you all hate me so much?” Melody asked plaintively. “It’s all backwards! Everyone likes Mira best, and I don’t get it! I’m
popular!
I’m
pretty!”

“Pretty is as pretty does,” Stanley said, not unkindly. “Like my grandma used to say.”

“Huh?” Melody looked at him blankly, rubbed her nose woefully on the corner of her apron.

It was Zara who answered. “This isn’t LA,” she said. “We have to live with you, remember. And the way you act isn’t all that pretty.”

“Hey,” Stanley said, his voice softening at the confusion on Melody’s face. He reached out for her, gave her a hug. “I’m right sorry about your phone, but it’s gone. You’ll just have to write your mama a letter, like the rest of us are doing. Go on back to work, now. This is the red-letter day, right? Aren’t you supposed to be stuffing those mattresses?”

Melody nodded and sniffed again.

“Then go on back there, get to work on that,” Stanley urged. “Because I’m real excited about sleeping on some padding tonight, and I bet you are too.”

“You’re a better man than I am,
Gunga
Din,” Kevin said wryly to Stanley as everyone but Zara and Melody walked back toward the garden again.

Stanley shrugged. “We’ve all got our weak sides. And it’s tough on her. Used to being the belle
of
the ball, and she can’t understand why it isn’t happening. Who knows, maybe she’ll
do a little growing up out here
,
go back a better woman
. This is the place for it.”

The growth wasn’t evident as the following day began. “Laundry day today, I figure,” Zara said crisply, straightening up from the stove she had just lit.

Mira exchanged a rueful glance with Maria-Elena, just returned from the outhouse after dumping the previous day’s accumulation of ash. Then turned her focus back to pouring water carefully into the stovetop kettle from the two buckets she’d brought back from the well. She’d graduated already, she thought proudly, from carrying one bucket to two.

Melody, as always, was last down the ladder, arriving just in time to hear Zara’s announcement. “Something
else?
Do we
have
to?” she moaned.

“First challenge tomorrow,” Zara reminded her. “And our first chance to see the others, too. I for one would like to wear clean clothes. And otherwise,” she added practically, “it’ll be three more days before we can do it. Not till after the vote. We’ll
really
stink by then.”

“I guess,” Melody sighed, reluctantly picking up the egg basket. “Well, at least there’s not that much to wash. Only one set of clothes and a couple pairs of underwear.”

“And the towels, and the sheets, and the men’s clothes,” Mira reminded her.

Melody stared at her in disbelief. “We don’t have to wash their stuff, do we?”

“Of course we do,” Zara snapped. “How do you imagine it’d get clean otherwise?”

“Their
underwear?
By
hand?
That’s
gross!”

“It won’t be so bad,” Mira encouraged her, reaching to pull down the side of bacon hanging on a hook from the ceiling and setting it on the table to begin slicing off the morning’s rations. “Not really any worse than doing each other’s. And it’ll be nice to have clean things to wear.”

Cleanliness, she realized a few hours later, was going to be relative. She was standing over the stove, stirring the
undelicious
contents of their largest kettle. Maria-Elena and Melody were watering the garden, and Mira was already looking forward to somebody else taking a turn over the hot stove. The day was warming by the hour, which would be good for getting things dry, but wasn’t helping at all with boiling them.

After some deliberation, she and Zara had settled on boiling the women’s underthings first, then the men’s, and finally the women’s and the men’s outer garments, before starting in on the sheets and towels.

“Because we aren’t going to be able to change the water,” Mira had realized once they’d sorted all the dirty laundry into distressingly large heaps on the floor. “It would take forever for the stove and the water to cool off enough for the guys to lift this thing down and dump it. And then we’d have to heat it up again . . . We’d be washing for days.”

“Yep. Underwear first,” Zara agreed. “The water’s going to be nasty, but once we scrub everything, and rinse them . . .” They looked at each other in rueful agreement.

“Yeah,” Mira said. “Once we do that, we’ll be wiped.”

“Why, honey,” Kevin said, entering the hot, steamy cabin at lunchtime, followed closely by the other three men. “You never told me we were getting a sauna.”

“Ha
ha
,” Mira said grimly, using her big stirring stick to pull out the sodden skirts and dump them onto the canvas tarp she’d laid on the floor.

“Here,” Gabe
said,
when she bent down to gather the ends, preparing to carry the heavy thing outside. “I’ll do it.”

“And I’ll let you,” she sighed, wiping her face with the crook of her arm. She’d ended up over the stove most of the morning after all. As soon as Melody had realized that the cameramen couldn’t film inside the steamy cabin, she’d decided that she was more suited to the outdoor portion of today’s enterprise. Maria-Elena and Mira had done some trading off, but it had been a long, sweaty morning.

“Just sandwiches today, sorry, guys,” Mira said now. “Ham on biscuits. And unless you really
do
want a sauna, we’d better eat them outside.”

“This is some operation y’all got going here,” Stanley said, looking at the piles of clothing in the yard, the garments already hanging on the line, as he took a grateful bite of sandwich. He reached for another baby carrot, the result of yesterday’s thinning operation in the garden.

“Yeah.” Zara pushed a stray silver lock behind her ear and settled wearily down on the log next to him to take a carrot of her own. “I’m going to go home when I’m done with this and give my Maytag a big, wet kiss. Every single thing we’ve worn has to be boiled in lye soap, scrubbed on the washboard, rinsed, wrung out, put through the mangle, and
then,
” she paused for breath, “hung on the line. And every bit of water to do it with has to be hauled out of the well first. If any of you guys wants anything ironed, well, I’ll just say, do it your own damn self. Because the only thing I’m going to be using that flatiron for is a doorstop.”

Melody pulled her blouse, unbuttoned halfway down as usual, from the waistband of her skirt and used the hem to fan herself. “If we didn’t have to wear so many clothes,” she complained, casting a glance at Danny behind his camera, “it wouldn’t be so bad. Bending over that washboard in this corset almost cut me in half. I don’t see why we have to wear it anyway. We could wear this, you know, nightgown
thingie
by itself and
be
way more covered than I ever am in LA. And I could at least show what I
look
like, which was the whole point.”

“Don’t let us stop you,” Gabe grinned. “Go ahead and strip down.”

Zara snorted. “Trust me, nobody wants to look at me without some underpinning. I’ll just stay dressed, thank you very much. Besides, remember that agreement you signed? The one that said you’d wear period dress?”

“I thought, corsets,” Melody complained. “When I’ve worn them at home,” she said, casting a glance at Gabe from beneath her lashes, “they look good.”

“Bet they do,” he agreed with another appreciative smile.

“But here,” she complained, “first off, they’re ugly. And they do push you up, but you’re all hidden anyway, under these . . .
sacks.
” She looked down at herself with disgust.

“Oh, it isn’t that bad,” Gabe said. “We can still see your shape under there, trust me.”

“You can?” she asked, perking up visibly. “You think other people will be able to, when the show’s on?”

“Yep,” Kevin confirmed. “And honey, you look
good.
Doesn’t she, Martin?” he added teasingly.

“No comment,” he replied stiffly.
 

 
“You’ve lost weight,” Kevin said, ignoring him. “Hey, I’ve just decided on my new business venture. I’m going to be taking groups out and doing this for a couple weeks. The women get in shape, and the men . . .” He grinned cheekily at Gabe, who looked back at him with amusement, “get in shape.”

“It’d probably work, too,” Mira sighed, stretching her legs out in front of her and taking another big drink of water. “Because I don’t even feel like eating.”

“I know,” Maria-Elena agreed. “Me too.” The young woman had lost a little of the roundness in her cheeks already, Mira realized. She had no idea how she looked herself, other than bedraggled. She barely had time in the morning to check her hair in the small shaving mirror as she braided it or put it up in a rough bun. And that was the last time she looked at herself all day. But she’d probably lost some weight too, if Maria-Elena had.

Too bad that no matter how much work she did, or how little she ate, she’d never look like Melody. She felt a stab of jealousy that had her shaking her head at herself. Gabe could flirt with anyone he wanted, she reminded herself sternly. He wasn’t her property. And she wasn’t his.

Their evening bath in the creek had never felt better, not even the first day.

“The problem out here,” Mira decided, sitting on the creek bank and twisting her wet hair into a rope to wring it out, wishing for the hundredth time that she’d cut it short before she came, “is that there are no shortcuts. Boy, what I wouldn’t give for a Pizza Hut right now.”