What Happens in Paradise

by Elin Hilderbrand

  Max is not dead and Max is not lost, Ayers tells herself.

  Cash appears next to her. “I’m so sorry, I thought—”

  “There’s no time for sorry!” Ayers says. She mentally breaks the water into a grid and starts scanning it square foot by square foot. In seven years, she has never lost a swimmer. She has had to do only five rescues—five, in seven years. Today will be her sixth rescue, she tells herself. Today, she will rescue Max.

  Someone calls out, “Over there!”

  Ayers follows the pointing arm of Mr. Dressler. Yes, she sees a piece of fluorescent tape about two hundred yards away. Before Ayers knows what’s happening, someone dives off the lower deck of the boat and starts swimming toward the snorkeler. It’s the oldest Dressler kid, DJ, Ayers realizes. She strips off her shorts, and, although it’s forbidden, she dives off the top deck, hits the water with so much force that her nose and ears flood with water, and swims after him. A second later, she feels the concussion of someone else plunging in nearby and she envisions everyone on the boat trying to be a hero.

  She raises her head in order to get her bearings. Cash goes thrashing past her. He’s moving so fast he nearly catches DJ. Ayers sees DJ and then Cash reach the snorkeler and Ayers hears shouts. She swims closer, and only then does she realize that the snorkeler isn’t a she. The snorkeler isn’t Max. It’s some guy from another boat who has also gone rogue.

  “Go back to your boat!” Ayers yells to the other snorkeler. She casts about helplessly. Where is Max?

  She hears the air horn and swivels her head to see Captain James on the top deck windmilling his arm to beckon her back.

  What? Ayers thinks. We can’t just leave her here. Or…has Max turned up? DJ and Cash are already swimming back to the boat and Ayers puts her head down and powers forward with everything she’s got left, thinking, Please let her be okay, please let her be alive. If she’s injured, they can get her to Schneider Hospital on St. Thomas in half an hour.

  When Ayers is only a few yards from the boat, James calls out, “She’s aboard.”

  “She is?”

  “She was in the head,” James says. “Why didn’t you guys check?”

  In the head. Max was using the bathroom. Why didn’t Ayers check?

  Sure enough, Max is sitting on the stairs to the upper deck (which isn’t allowed) drinking what’s left of a painkiller when Ayers hauls herself up the ladder.

  Ayers can’t bring herself to say anything to the girl. What would she say? We thought we’d lost you. We thought you drowned. At which point, Max would say, I went to the bathroom. Sorry, I didn’t know I needed to report in. I wanted to change my swimsuit. Because, yup, Max is wearing a new bikini, white, which Ayers will (again) bet the key to her truck becomes completely see-through when wet.

  Ayers climbs past Max without a word and goes into the wheelhouse to apologize to James.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I should have checked the head. I…” Ayers tries to explain what made her jump to the conclusion that Max was still in the water. All Cash had said was Wait. What? Ayers was the one who had panicked. “She’d been drinking. More than everyone else combined. I guess my mind supplied the worst-case scenario, that she went out snorkeling while drunk and she drowned.”

  James gives her the eyebrows. He’s a man of few words, though he’s been blessed with wisdom beyond his years—he’s thirty-five; he went to high school with Rosie—and a dry sense of humor. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were jealous.”

  “Jealous of Max?” Ayers says. “Please give me some credit.”

  “She’s been hanging on your boy,” James says. “And we both know it’s not like you to fly off like that.”

  “First of all, he’s not my boy,” Ayers says. “Is that what you think?”

  James starts the engine.

  “I’d like permission to cut her off,” Ayers says. “She’s had enough to drink.”

  “She didn’t do anything wrong,” James says. He leaves it unspoken that this whole event was Ayers’s fault. Ayers can only imagine what kind of dramatic retelling the fourteen adults will provide on TripAdvisor.

  “I’m sorry,” Ayers says again. “I’m having a bad day.”

  James nods. “You’re allowed,” he says. He laughs. “Tell you what, though—your boy sure can swim.”

  Ayers puts on the headset. “Sorry about that, folks,” she says. She notices that the Dressler kids are all lined up at the railing seeing who can spit the farthest and there’s now a queue at the bar three-deep.

  Right, she thinks. Crisis averted, people are getting bored, time to drink. “We’re on our way over to Jost Van Dyke, named for the man who discovered it in the early seventeenth century. It became a center of custom shipbuilding, but now, however, Jost is most famous for its world-class beach bars, including Foxy’s, One Love, and…the Soggy Dollar!”

  Everyone claps. She’s forgiven.

  There’s no happier place on earth than White Bay on a sunny day. The stunning crescent of powder-fine sand is lined with palm trees and funky, bare-bones beach bars. Treasure Island slips in among a flotilla of boats. There are people splashing in the shallows, tossing a football; there’s reggae music and the smell of jerk chicken and the low buzz of blenders making Bushwackers and piña coladas.

  “Please get yourself some lunch,” Ayers says. “And try not to wander off. We’d like you back on the boat at two thirty sharp.”

  Ayers counts the Dressler kids as they jump off the boat in succession. There’s a bit of a wade required, which the boys don’t seem to mind. To DJ, Ayers says, “Thank you for your help. You’re a fast swimmer.”

  DJ shrugs and Donna Dressler puts a hand on Ayers’s shoulder and says, “That was some unexpected drama, huh?”

  Ayers spies Max walking down the beach—with Cash, of course—toward the Soggy Dollar. “I don’t know if I should feel angry or relieved.”

  “Sounds like being a parent,” Donna says. “You’re not sure whether to ground them or hug them.”

  Grounding sounds good, Ayers thinks.

  Lunch isn’t a bad idea, and Ayers is a big fan of the Soggy Dollar lobster roll, so she walks down the beach and into the bar. Her favorite bartender, Leon, is pouring something pink and fruity out of the blender and into two cups, which he delivers to Max and Cash, who are sitting together at the end of the bar.

  Cash says, “I’m on the clock,” and passes his drink to Max.

  “Awwww,” she says. “Thanks.” She leans her head on Cash’s shoulder and closes her eyes.

  Did Ayers give Cash “the talk” about not fraternizing with the guests? She knows she didn’t. It never occurred to her that it would be a problem. Cash had been so earnest, so eager to please—please her, Ayers—that she hadn’t realized that many if not all of the available women (and maybe even those who weren’t necessarily available) would find Cash sexy and attractive and throw themselves at him as inelegantly as moths beating themselves against a screen.

  Cash nudges Max’s head off his shoulder and orders a Coke and a blackened mahi sandwich with coleslaw. He says, “So what do you do for work?”

  “I sell drugs,” Max says. She waits a beat, then honks out a laugh. “Not what you’re thinking! I’m a pharmaceutical rep.”

  “Did you grow up in the Midwest?” Cash asks.

  “Peoria,” she says, diving nose-first into her pink drink.

  “I’m from Iowa City!” Cash says.

  Ayers isn’t eavesdropping; she’s just waiting to get Leon’s attention. It’s like she’s invisible today. She debates interrupting the happy couple to remind Max to eat something, but she’s not the girl’s mother and she’s afraid of sounding like a schoolmarm or a scold.

  Max says something under her breath and Cash laughs. Is Ayers jealous? Maybe she is. She had thought Cash was in love with her. She thought Cash had taken the job on Treasure Island because he wanted to work with her. And yet he hasn’t looked over at her even once.
He’s completely entranced with Max!

  Ayers can’t believe she’s having these thoughts. She doesn’t like Cash in that way—does she? She didn’t think so, but right now, there’s no denying she’s jealous.

  No, Ayers thinks. She enjoys being the object of Cash’s affection. It’s flattering, a boost to her ego. What’s really going on is that she’s upset about Mick and Brigid and confused about her feelings for Baker. Baker, who is maybe staying on St. John but also maybe not staying. Ayers would bet the keys to her truck and her apartment that Baker will go back to Houston for the school fund-raiser and never return. He’ll find relocating too complicated. He’ll spend two weeks on St. John and become bored; without a job to do, it’s just sun, sand, and water. There are no museums or movie theaters, there are no professional sports teams or shopping malls. There isn’t even any golf.

  He won’t stay. The schools won’t be good enough for Floyd. Baker won’t be able to find a fulfilling job; St. John isn’t Wall Street. There will be some solid reason why he has to go back to the States. St. John is paradise when you visit, but when you live here, it becomes very real very quickly.

  Ayers can’t risk getting involved with Baker.

  “Ayers,” Cash says suddenly, yanking her out of her mental quicksand. “Would you like to join us?”

  Ayers assesses her options. Cash’s sandwich has now arrived and he offers some to Max, who slowly, slowly, shakes her head. She’s slipping down her stool, melting like a candle.

  Leon finally gives Ayers a wave. “I see you, darling. Just gonna be a minute.”

  “That’s okay, Leon,” Ayers says. “I’m not staying.” She steps back out onto the sand. She’ll head down to One Love, she decides, and get some jerk pork.

  At a quarter after two, Ayers is feeling a little better. She has eaten and taken a ten-minute chair nap, and now she combs the beach for her guests, urging everyone to head back to the boat. If they get out of here at two thirty, there will be less of a line at customs.

  Ayers has never so badly wanted a charter to end.

  Coming toward her down the beach are Cash and Max. Max is stumbling and bent over; she’s so drunk she can barely walk. Cash has to take her by the hand once they’re wading back to the boat. If she fell over, she would drown in only two feet of water. Ayers wants to say something to Cash, something like Why did you let her get so drunk? She wants to point to Max and say to James, We should have cut her off after snorkeling! But instead, Ayers helps Cash get Max up the three-step ladder and onto the boat. Max heads toward starboard and Ayers thinks maybe she’s going to the bar for another drink, but she bypasses the cabin, pushes little Dougie Dressler out of the way, and starts puking over the side of the boat.

  Ayers bows her head. It would be very unprofessional to let the others see her smirking.

  Cash

  He’s not sure how he got saddled with the drunk, and now crying, young woman named Maxwell—well, yes, he does know, he enabled her drinking and indulged her little crush on him because she’s attractive and flirtatious, and both of these things seemed to bother Ayers, which was, he thought, a very good sign—but now he’s responsible for making sure she gets home safely.

  “Find her friend, her people, whoever,” Ayers says. “I’ll clean the boat by myself.”

  “But—”

  “And, please, Cash, don’t let this happen again. These are our guests, not our friends.”

  “You’re right,” he says. “It won’t happen again.”

  He half leads, half carries Max off the dock and into the streets of St. John. As they pulled into port, he’d asked Max the name of her friend from high school, but all she’d said was I dunno, and then she groaned and started vomiting again.

  It hadn’t been a good look for her, for him, or for Treasure Island, though everyone else on the boat seemed to take it in stride. The parents of the six boys used it as a cautionary tale. “That,” Cash overheard the father whisper to the Stanford-bound DJ, “is what happens when you decide three shots of tequila sound good after midnight.”

  There was a couple on the boat, keen snorkelers who’d brought a checklist of fish they were hoping to see, and the man said, “I could have told you how this was going to end up, but she was having so much fun, I hated to put a damper on it.”

  “We’ve all been there,” his wife said. “For me, it was the Sig Ep house at West Virginia University in 1996.”

  Cash tended to agree; many people at some point in their lives had overdone it like Max. Cash had sampled his father’s scotch and smoked one of his cigars when he was a week away from graduating high school, and that had ended badly. And he had taken care of Claire Bellows after she drank Jägermeister from a flask in the bathroom during their junior prom.

  The town is teeming with people. All of the tour boats have just disgorged their passengers and it’s happy hour at nearly every bar in Cruz Bay. Cash has no leads on who he should hand this chick off to. No one seems to be waiting for her. Cash then tries to imagine bringing Max home to the villa, where Baker, Floyd, and his mother will all be waiting.

  Nope. No chance.

  “Cash!”

  Cash cranes his neck, trying to figure out who’s calling his name. Then someone appears under his nose.

  It’s Maia. With a boy in tow—a handsome young man with dark hair that has been highlighted in the front. He’s a couple inches taller than Maia.

  “Hey,” Cash says. He’s more than a little uncomfortable bumping into…well, his little sister…with Max draped over him like a fur coat. “What are you doing?”

  Maia shrugs. “Hanging out.” She nods at the boy next to her. “This is my friend Shane. He goes to Antilles.”

  “Hey, Shane,” Cash says. Shane is the kid that Maia has a crush on; Cash remembers this much. It’s nice that they’re hanging out together—alone, from the looks of it; is that okay?—and Cash feels honored to be introduced, but he really wishes it wasn’t under these circumstances. Any minute, Max might projectile-vomit onto Shane’s shoes.

  “What are you doing?” Maia asks, taking an appraising look at Max.

  “I’m…well, this woman was a guest on the boat and I’m trying to find her friend. She has a friend who lives here, she said, but I have no idea who it is or what to do.”

  “Is it Tilda?” Maia asks. “She was just here, looking for her friend who was visiting…from Chicago.” Maia turns to Shane. “Did she say Chicago?”

  Shane nods. “Definitely Chicago,” he says. “But I thought her friend was a boy.”

  “Was she looking for a Max?” Cash asks. “Maxwell?”

  “Yes!” Maia says.

  “Tilda is her friend?” Cash says. “Really? The Tilda that I know? Tilda from La Tapa?”

  “Yeah,” Maia says. “She worked with my mom.”

  “Right, yes, yes,” Cash says. He’s forgotten that everyone on this island is connected. “I’m going to sit with Max on this bench. Can you guys go find Tilda and tell her where we are?”

  “Come on,” Shane says, clearly energized by this mission. He takes Maia’s hand and leads her across the street toward the docks. Is it okay that they’re holding hands? Cash wonders. They look pretty darn cute.

  “This way, Max, easy does it, here we go,” Cash says. He sighs. He would give anything to be twelve again.

  “I am so sorry about this,” Tilda says. “I’m mortified. I told her to behave herself. I told her I worked with Ayers. And I’d forgotten that you were working on the boat now too. That makes it so much worse!”

  “You don’t have to apologize,” Cash says. “It’s not your fault.” Cash offered to help Tilda get Max settled at home, and now he leans back into the soft leather seat of Tilda’s Range Rover and enjoys the air-conditioning blowing full blast. Max is lying across the back seat, moaning. Tilda laid a beach towel across the floor of the car in case Max throws up again, although she’s been at it for so long that Cash doesn’t see how there could be anything left in
her stomach. “I think maybe she was just nervous about going on the trip by herself.”

  “She should have made some friends,” Tilda says.

  “She sort of…attached herself to me,” Cash says.

  “Of course she did,” Tilda says. “You’re superhot and you’re her type. You look exactly like her boyfriend in high school. Freddy Jarvis.”

  Cash isn’t sure how he feels about being the reincarnation of high-school boyfriend Freddy Jarvis. If he’d seen a woman who looked like Claire Bellows, he would have steered clear. “I don’t think Ayers was too happy about it.”

  “Oh, please,” Tilda says. “As if Ayers isn’t hit on herself every single charter.”

  “Is she?” Cash says. “She wasn’t today.”

  “That’s rare,” Tilda says. “But Ayers is used to it. She never succumbs to temptation because she loves Mick.” Tilda pauses. “Did you hear me, Cash? She loves Mick.”

  “I heard you,” Cash says.

  Tilda pulls up a steep incline called Upper Peter Bay and they go up, up, up until they can’t go any farther. There’s a gate; Tilda punches in the code and then they shoot down a driveway that’s so steep Cash feels like he’s on a luge or a log flume in the amusement park. They arrive, finally, at the villa, which is absolutely stunning. It’s three separate buildings in the Spanish-mission style attached by arched, columned walkways.

  “Um…okay?” Cash says.

  “It’s my parents’,” Tilda says. “As is this Rover. They only come three times a year, and I have the west wing to myself.” She parks the car. “Max is staying in the guest wing.”

  Cash follows Tilda through the main entrance into a foyer that’s two stories high. Everything is white, with accents of palm green and the palest blue. To the right is a sweeping curved staircase; above it hangs a long, dripping chandelier that looks like crystal rain. In front of them is a white and pale blue living room and a white kitchen with a very cool curved bar around which are pale blue suede stools. Beyond the kitchen are floor-to-ceiling sliding doors that open out onto a patio and a T-shaped pool.