“Fred!” Heather slaps him lightly with her free hand, but she’s smiling, too.
“He might get mad. ‘Breaking into the shed of confiscated items and eating prohibited items is against the church’s rules. The tribe has spoken. It’s time for you to go.’ ”
It’s not a bad imitation, and even catches a bit of Isaac’s twang. And as if on cue, Isaac steps out of the shadows of the jungle and enters the pavilion. He looks flustered. All the churchwomen pause, although they don’t look at him directly. Then they return to their work.
Julia reaches for the coconut drink. “What’s this?” she asks, to change the subject.
“I thought it was coconut milk, but it’s fruity, too,” says Heather. “It’s super good, whatever it is.”
Fred groans loudly. “I don’t know if I can take this for seven days. No TV. No Wi-Fi. No cell phone. No Xbox.”
Something quietly sad flits across Heather’s face. A secret pain. “I think it’s going to be amazing. Everyone I’ve talked to says it is.”
“We don’t even know if it’s going to work,” says Fred.
A tension there, the press of words that can’t be said in public. A territory Julia knows all too well. Just as she’s trying to think of another subject for small talk, Isaac clinks a spoon a few times on a glass. Everyone obediently becomes quiet. Crash of waves in the background, a new white noise.
“Thank you, thank you all for your attention. First, a little housekeeping. We will be serving an all-vegetarian meal tonight. An unexpected power surge damaged our refrigerator and freezer, and they are not operational. The chicken we planned to serve has spoiled, and the frozen steak has not sufficiently thawed yet. If this presents a dietary issue due to lack of protein, we do have canned organic pinto beans which we would be happy to prepare for you.”
“Beans, beans, the magical fruit,” whispers Fred.
“We have called our pilot and he will purchase new equipment and deliver it as soon as possible. However, and this is unfortunate timing, a tropical storm is brewing, and depending on the wind shear, it may hit Kapu. If it does land, we can expect tropical force winds, high surf, and flash floods. As a precautionary measure, the waterfall is off-limits until further notice.”
There’s a round of boos and catcalls.
“The bungalows have been constructed to withstand hurricane-force winds, so there is no real danger, just the possibility of inconvenience. We may lose electricity completely, in which case you’ll find a flashlight and a battery-operated lantern in the bottom drawer of your bureau. We suggest keeping the flashlight by your bedside.”
Athletic Woman raises her hand.
“Yes?” Isaac says.
“How long is the storm expected to last? If it makes landfall?”
Isaac visibly braces himself, then says, “Possibly three days.”
Everyone erupts in a titter of dismay, and the blondes look like they’d walk out on the spot if there weren’t thousands of miles of ocean between them and civilization.
“If there’s no electricity, how do you communicate with the pilot?” Noah asks.
“We have a backup generator in the village, for emergencies such as these. However, I think you will find that it really is a small inconvenience to go without electricity. The lanterns provide adequate light for reading before bed.”
One of the college boys shouts, “What about hot showers?”
Isaac pauses and then says, “Without electricity, unfortunately, there would only be cold showers.”
“Oh, come on! This vacation sucks!” Fred calls out, causing Heather to blush profusely.
Isaac must feel the rancor building. He holds up his hand. “Because of the incident with the refrigeration and the storm, if you would like to return with the pilot, you can, and receive a complete refund.”
“Well, when is he going to get here?” one of the blondes asks.
“We have to wait and see. We’ll know more in the morning about the storm’s path.” There’s an eruption of general distress—Julia overhears I can’t believe I waited all year, They should have known before we got here, What are they going to serve if they run out of beans?
“Now please,” Isaac says. “Everyone please . . . it’s only a couple of days.”
Good God, Julia thinks, imagine if they didn’t have electricity for weeks at a time. Or had to eat around the mold in a stale loaf of bread. She’d been through all that, and worse.
The brunette stands up, near tears. “I demand to speak to your supervisor. This is completely unacceptable. My father is a lawyer, he knows people.”
“We can’t control the weather,” says Isaac. “And—”
“You should have contingencies in place,” one of the college boys says. “A backup generator for the resort, too. We should all get a refund for any days we don’t have electricity.”
Fred cups his hands to his mouth. “Refund! Refund!”
Noah leans toward Julia with a wry grin. “Well, this is quickly devolving into The Lord of the Flies.” He rubs his finger and thumb against each other. “World’s smallest violin.”
Julia smiles in spite of herself. It’s not her best self, but there’s something satisfying about their consternation over such a relatively small problem.
There’s movement to the left, and out of the corner of her eye Julia catches Roger and Lois emerging from the shadows. They step up onto the pavilion and walk toward the only two seats left, trying to be unobtrusive. Working a little too hard at it.
Noah reaches for a slice of mango. “Wonder what they’ve been up to?”
Yes, she does wonder about that. And if the paper will still be lodged in the doorframe when she gets back to her cabin.
It took a few minutes for Isaac to quell the mutiny, mostly with apologies and promises of partial refunds. And to Julia’s surprise the food, albeit vegetarian, is actually really good. The buffet line was the perfect way to make introductions, listen in on conversations, engage in a little espionage. By the beet salad, she discovered the names of the two blondes (Brittany and Alison) and the brunette (Jessica)—all friends, all recently divorced, all from Orange County and with eerily similar noses, like they went to the same plastic surgeon. Fred steered right to the two college-age boys who are, indeed, seniors at Harvard—Connor and Larry, one the son of an internet billionaire Julia had actually reported on in the ’90s when he suspiciously sold most of his shares right before the dot-com bust, the other the son of a US senator. Roger, as he steadily bragged to anyone within earshot, is a wealthy oil tycoon—he seriously used that word, tycoon—with a hand in, and a board seat on, enough Fortune 500 companies to warrant him an annual weekend stay in the White House, regardless of who’s president. We always get the same room, Lois chimed in, and they know exactly how we like our steaks done.
The only person who kept to herself was Athletic Woman. Her name, Julia found out only after forcefully introducing herself, is Beth. Beth offered no other details, and in fact, after dropping Julia’s hand, skipped past the buffet straight to dessert, loading up on coconut pudding, then heading back to the farthest edge of the table.
It would have made her seem suspicious, except wouldn’t someone with an agenda try to fit in?
Like me?
“That color really works for you,” Julia tells Heather, making another run at small talk. Heather’s silk tank is baby blue.
“Thanks, my mother bought it for me,” says Heather, who then takes a little too long casting about for a return compliment. Julia understands her conundrum, is even amused by it.
Heather chooses self-deprecation instead. “I tell her to stop buying me stuff. I mean, I can hardly find anything, my closet is so stuffed. I’m like a pack rat.”
Fred, interestingly, doesn’t jump to her defense. These two, Julia suspects, are real tourists. You can’t fake that intimate level of passive aggression. Fred, after all his whining, is working on his second plate of food. Given the way he’s eating, there
might be a third. The buffet had offered spring rolls with green onions, carrots, lettuce, and bean sprouts; steamed dumplings filled with sweet bean paste; wraps with some kind of soft cheese; olives; fresh tomatoes and cilantro; and Greek pastries filled with wilted spinach and pine nuts. The subtlety of flavor was unexpected. But Julia briefly spotted the redheaded young woman carrying a tray, handing it over to one of the other churchwomen. Maybe she’s the chef.
In fact, the food is so good, no one’s complaining about leaving anymore. There’s an ambient social cohesion. And Julia feels just the slightest bit fuzzy, like she’s just had two glasses of wine. Something alcoholic in the coconut juice?
“So why Kapu?” Noah asks Fred. “Why not the Bahamas? Doesn’t seem like much here to interest a young couple like you.”
“We’re trying—” Heather stops, looks toward Fred.
He shrugs, like no big deal if you want to tell them. Gets back to work on his plate, dipping the spring rolls into the sweet-and-sour sauce.
“We’re trying to conceive. I have some issues, but everything we’ve tried . . . well . . . nothing has worked. And Kapu . . . My best friend came here, last year. I thought maybe . . . I know, it sounds ridiculous. I’m not religious or anything.”
She blushes, seems to regret having said anything at all. Noah looks perplexed. But Julia understands Heather’s desperation. She and Ethan had tried for years, suffering through six miscarriages, before she eventually conceived. Apparently Julia’s uterus was “hostile,” her own cells attacking the embryo, a rare condition. They were just about to consider adoption when she finally got pregnant with Evie.
Something else clicks into place right then—the last letter from the Church of Eternal Light to Aunt Liddy, something about the locals trying to smuggle family members with leprosy onto the island. The belief that it could heal them.
“You think something about the island will help,” says Julia.
Heather nods. “My friend had stage-four pancreatic cancer. I thought she was insane to take the trip. I mean, the doctors, everyone said she might not even make it back. I literally pleaded with her to stay, thought I’d never see her again. But when she came back . . . she was stage three. A couple months later, stage two. By the end of the year she was cancer-free.”
“But how can that be? Stage four isn’t curable,” Noah says. “I think it’s more likely that your friend was misdiagnosed. Happens more than it should. I had an uncle who was diagnosed with leukemia, but it turns out they had mislabeled his blood sample.”
Heather shakes her head. “No, she’d practically wasted away and could barely walk without help.”
Noah arches an eyebrow at Julia. “I just think if there was a cure for cancer here, the news might have gotten out.”
“What’s it matter to you?” Fred says gruffly. “If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, well, we had a helluva great week.” He reaches out for Heather’s arm, lays a hand there. Looks her in the eye.
Suddenly they’re in a different space than the rest of them, a private room no one else can enter.
Oh God. She misses that feeling, misses it desperately. Even though the lights are warm, the tropical breeze is warm, she feels very, very cold, and impossibly alone.
CHAPTER 10
AS SOON AS JULIA CAN reasonably slip away from the dinner table, she does. The moon is enormous, casting enough light to make the sand glow. She can’t remember the last time she saw so many stars either; there’s no light pollution casting an orange sheen to the night sky. The air so clear she can even see the band of the Milky Way. She kicks off her flip-flops, picks them up, and heads down the path toward the beach.
Her heart is racing. She doesn’t know why. It just started to feel too tight under the pavilion, claustrophobic, and even though she’s blowing an opportunity to mingle, pry into the backstories of the other guests, she can’t bring herself to. She needs some time alone.
She gets to where the beach has been smoothed and flattened by the ocean, no prints except the ones she’s leaving. The sand is cold and wet under her feet. Lights are on in the bungalows along the pier—they look warm and inviting. The waves break farther out, and the looming dark shapes of rocks now poke through the surface. A thin rush of water spreads toward her, wraps around her ankles, before being pulled back into the deeper waters.
She’s three hours behind Pacific time. Probably almost midnight there, a good enough excuse to not call in. And the truth is, she really doesn’t want to hear Aunt Liddy’s voice, not now. Maybe it’s the effect of whatever it was she drank, but she has a disjointed sense of being outside herself, looking in. Checking in is not important. Leanne and the baggage handler wearing masks, not important. Even the urban rumor of Kapu’s healing powers, not important.
Her heart is just a knot of pure pain. Sitting across from newlyweds trying to conceive. It’s like stepping through time, being a ghost on the periphery of who she used to be.
What time is it on the East Coast? Soon the morning sun will rise there. She pictures Evie in bed, asleep, Mr. Bones curled in her right arm. She misses waking her up, tickling her toes under the bedsheet, then swooping in for a kiss on the forehead. The damp scent of sweaty, sleeping child. Good morning, sunshine. The smell of espresso—Ethan made it himself, never trusted it to anyone else. He was always up before them, fully dressed—chinos, white shirt, brown loafers. Julia would joke he could walk into any decade and fit in. A timeless kind of style.
There were nice parts. She has to hold onto the nice parts, protect them. Where did it go wrong? They were as happy as she reasonably expected two people to be. She never thought the honeymoon would be forever, and she took his occasional bouts of itchy dissatisfaction to be typical of marriage. Nobody is truly happy ever after; she’d always known that was a fairy tale, a myth. So when he complained about her using the fine china every day, buying—gasp—clothes for Evie at a discount store, letting Evie play and track in mud from their backyard garden, it just seemed like the usual jostle of irritation that happens between people in close quarters. Then he started complaining about what she chose to wear to dinner parties. Then he suggested she go to an orthodontist to get her teeth fixed, and why don’t you ever do anything about your hair? Like she was a Pygmalion experiment that wasn’t working out as expected.
She didn’t understand that her class was considered inferior, not until it was too late. That he wanted Evie to have different values.
His.
A shudder of longing hits her, so strong she wants to jump into the ocean, start swimming for the other side of the globe. It’s hard, so incredibly hard, to check the impulse, to stay on land, be patient.
Money. Money is what she needs to see Evie again. Just stick with the plan, Julia.
She takes a deep breath. Settles herself into the present.
Something bobs along the crest of a wave, too dark to make out. A living something, intent on the lava rocks. She sees a dark arm reach out and for a panicky moment thinks it’s a person—the nightmarchers—but then another arm reaches out, and another, and another, and then the slick skin glimmers in the moonlight and she can see they’re not arms, they’re tentacles. An octopus, climbing out of the water, latching into crevices to pull itself up.
She watches, briefly fascinated to witness this in the wild. Probably tide pools lie along the surface of the lava rock, small fish trapped there. A late-night snack.
The octopus reaches the top, slithers about a foot, then stops. She wonders how long it can hold its breath.
Suddenly it pounces, and barely a few seconds later it’s back in the water, landing with the softest plop. Dinner is served.
Sometimes it seems to her that half the world is trying to eat the other half.
She can hear bits of conversation carried on the breeze, laughter. People are straggling back. She turns her back to the ocean, starts up the slope to her bungalow, hurrying to avoid being caught up in a conversation. She’s too shaken, too emotionall
y vulnerable. And she’ll need her best, sharpest mind on hand for her trip to see the Reverend.
She gets to the lanai, pulls out her key, unlocks the door and is just about to open it when she remembers the paper she’d slipped into the doorjamb.
Still there. But wasn’t it lower now? Uncertain.
She enters the cabin, shuts the door behind her, and locks it. Takes a look around. Nothing seems amiss; all looks exactly the way she left it. She heads over to the armoire, and yes, her suitcase is still there, apparently undisturbed.
It just feels like someone has been inside.
So she takes one of the wooden chairs and props it under the knob. There. Then she heads for the bed, collapses on it, not bothering to even get under the covers or pull the mosquito netting closed. Lets her eyes close.
The breaking waves a much better lullaby than the traffic along the 405.
She hears a conch shell blow. Is it morning already, time for breakfast? But when Julia opens her eyes, the room is still dark. She must have been dreaming. She’s irritated with herself for waking up—as if that was in her control somehow. No clock to tell what time it is—it could be one in the morning, or four, or just before sunrise.
Something chirps inside the cabin. Another something responds. Two geckos—they weren’t there when she went to sleep. Theoretically she knows they’re harmless—good, actually, since they eat mosquitos and cockroaches and spiders. She should be grateful, but damn they’re loud. She tries covering her ear with one of the pillows, but no luck.
Chirp.
She presses a second pillow against her ear.
Chirp, chirp, chirp.
No, she’s never going to get back to sleep with that racket.
She reaches out for the lamp, turns it on. The bungalow fills with soft light. The geckos aren’t hard to spot, at least: both of them cling to the surface of the cool window, skin white as ghosts. No way to camouflage themselves on clear glass.
Wait, there are the specimen jars in her suitcase. She could try to knock them into a jar, trap them inside, then release them in the leafy green foliage by the lanai if she wants to be generous. Or she could try to kill them, whack them with something without breaking the glass. If they were spiders she wouldn’t even hesitate, but those damn commercials featuring the talking gecko with a Cockney accent make her feel like she couldn’t possibly be so cruel.
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