The Last Maharajan (Romantic Thriller/Women's Fiction)

by Susan Wingate

  “I don’t have to tell you anything. I don’t have anything to come clean to.”

  Geoff reappeared with three machine-made coffees balancing in his hands. He placed Belle’s on the nightstand and handed Euly hers then sipped at his burning his tongue.

  “Kee-Rikey! These are always so freaking hot. I burned my fingers getting them here.” Euly arose.

  “Well, it’s now or never, mother.” Geoff looked at Euly then her mother.

  Belle turned her head away.

  “Euly, let’s go, you’ll miss your flight.”

  “Yes, I will. Goodbye mother.”

  Belle refused to look at her.

  “Come on, honey. Let’s leave your mother alone. Belle, she’ll be back in a week or so. Right Euly?” He gave her a strained look. “But, I’ll be over to see you.”

  Belle smiled at Geoff and nodded and when he walked to the door nearer to Euly, Belle glared at her daughter behind his back. Euly glared back.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Like most airports, SeaTac hummed with white noise. People talked on cell phones, a voice over the loudspeaker, children screaming, carts beeping, televisions broadcasters droning on about the latest news—the BP oil spill—and wheels rolling luggage along cold tile floor.

  Euly felt disoriented by the rhythm, not at all like a kid jumping back onto a bike.

  Back in the city, going back to any city, almost made her motion-sick from the sway of its rapid pace – a pace she’d long fought to get away from and found she was losing the battle every time she returned. It was borne in her, the stink of traffic and diesel from buses, the din of airplanes and no geese, like on the island. However, the city’s robust pace made her feel alive again in an upside-down sort of way – dangling in its web.

  She admitted, the trouble to simply get off the island had begun to wear her down. A bridge would help the situation but without one, people on the island were held captive unless they took a chartered a ferry or a plane.

  Euly needed this break, the time away. She was fighting the urge to scream, an urge to leave making her want to scream. She fought these urges by getting away. Did that make sense? She wasn’t sure but, for now, it was the only reason she could rely on, the here and the now of it.

  One of the questions looked like a billboard.

  The urge to leave what?

  The question slipped over her head like a neon sign, flashing on and off, repeating. Geoff.

  Did she love him? She wondered. She could honestly say she did but she still longed to be alone, independent, making her own choices, living a life she’d envisioned by herself – one she’d gotten a glimmer of right after her first divorce yet here she stood, in the thick of it, in another marriage.

  She punched her eTicket information into the airline’s monitor, retrieved her ticket and went to the counter. She hoisted her bag onto the metal scale.

  “May I see some ID?”

  Euly fumbled for the passport in her vest pocket and held it out for the ticketing agent.

  “Just one bag?” After the overly made-up ticketing agent tagged her luggage handle she pulled the bag off the scale and onto a moving rubber runway behind her.

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Winger. Gate C4. You’ll begin boarding in forty-five minutes.”

  “Thank you.”

  Ticket agent. All they really were nowadays were luggage assistants, bellboys with better uniforms. It was the same as calling a server in cafeterias a waitress.

  Her sharp metered steps struck loud against the composite tile of the airport floors as she walked to the security gates. She stood in line waiting with her shoes held by two fingers and her shoulder bag held closely against her chest. The line method moved and mimicked the same motion as an assembly line – grab the tray, set in the shoes, set in the jackets, set in purses – the forward movement was only broken when one woman had forgotten to combine all of her liquid items into a see-through bag. Since the war, it was a new development and level of security that had everyone baffled and yet everyone but this one woman remembered to do it.

  No longer were no eye creams allowed in the passenger area for fear they’d be used to heist the plane in flight. The woman had to relinquish what Euly noticed were some spendy Estee Lauder emollients and creams, a set of high-priced shampoo and conditioner, and a bottle of perfume. The woman stepped out of line to discuss the matter with the man-in-charge, a Transportation Security

  Agent, and the assembly line continued.

  Hotdogs sizzled and glistened on a rotisserie as she walked past by a fast food deli. Their meaty juice sizzled and their scent waft through the air sending a pang into her stomach. She needed to eat before boarding. She resolved to by a pre-packaged sandwich, an iced tea and a bag of potato chips from the next vendor down from the hotdogs.

  While she ate, she avoided eye contact with people sitting around her. A man appeared as though he was talking to himself but when he turned, she noticed his earphone. He looked ridiculous. He was making overstated gestures so people would notice him. He was trying to give an impression of importance by telling whomever was on the other line what they needed to do, how to do it and by what time. He sickened her. Geoff sickened her. Her mother sickened her. She stopped eating and put her hand to her mouth. She couldn’t believe she just thought that about her mother and husband.

  She was still trying to fold the information into her mind, trying to understand why her mother would keep from them all these years that Micaiah was their brother.

  * * *

  “I thought you’d be happy. You always said you wished you’d had a brother.”

  “Mother! What you’re telling me is that Aunt Moon and dad had an affair and Micaiah is my half-brother. It’s not what I meant when I said that I’d wished I had a brother. Good grief.”

  Her mother could unravel her with such ease.

  She felt her heart palpitating. She’d had one panic attack in her life and it was more than she’d ever hoped for. She remembered the helpless feeling of not being able to breathe but, at the same time, that was all that she was doing. She couldn’t stop her heart from racing, she felt dizzy.

  Her mother was pushing her limits. Euly had been doing well since her mother’s health started to fail. She’d assumed a more mature attitude about their relationship, the reckless barbs thrown by Belle were simply deflected by the understanding that her mother would soon be gone and she’d miss her. She knew she would. But, this new revelation was unconscionable. I thought you’d be happy. How dare she.

  “Okay. Back up. What happened?”

  “They had sex and she had a baby. It doesn’t get more complicated than that.”

  “I mean, when? Where? How did they get away with the secret all these years?”

  “Why does that matter at this stage of the game? Anyway, poor Micaiah is dead now. I just thought you should know. You don’t have to do anything about it. Just accept it for what it is.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me when he died? Or before?”

  “Drop it, Euly. It’s old news.”

  “To you! Does Enaya know?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You doubt it or you know for a fact she doesn’t?”

  “I know for a fact.”

  Euly glared at her mother trying to determine if she was telling her the truth. Belle always told Enaya everything first like the time she decided she wanted to move to the island and build a place on Euly’s property. Instead of discussing it with Euly first, she tossed the idea around with Enaya. It was when she finally asked Euly if she could make room for her did she mention Enaya. Enaya thinks this and Enaya says that. Euly remembered feeling that if she’d refused her mother it would have been an affront to both her mother and her sister.

  “Quit glaring at me.” Euly turned away.

  “I have to go anyway. I have, uh, my publisher is supposed to call me.

  “Fine.”

  “Do you need anything? I’m runni
ng by the store later and I can pick up whatever you want.” She was fumbling again. She fidgeted. She grabbed her purse but then didn’t commit and wiped the hair out of her face. Her hands finally fell onto her lap and she began to play nervously with her fingers.

  “Don’t do anything with this, Euly.”

  “I’ve gotta go. Love you mother.” It sounded strained. She bent over and kissed her mother on the cheek.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  She unclipped it and pulled it out of her notebook. A corner was creased and she knew it would fall off if she didn’t tape it for strength. She regarded the photo with the utmost care. It seemed like a last-ditch effort to spur on the memory of the times for the people she would interview. After repairing it, she placed it tenderly into the journal and carried it in her purse.

  Tomorrow she would meet up with Enaya. But for now she just wanted to lie down on the bed and rest.

  She remembered everything there sitting alone in her hotel room. It was hot even for November. The desert air slowed down in the heat. The coolness of the island pulled on Euly’s sleeve tugging her back. She felt homesick for the first time in many years. It was odd.

  The last time she felt that way was when she was a girl. They’d all driven to the Petrified Forest – the place, the year, 1965 – the time was shortly after Pearl Harbor and a repercussion of that war and then the Korean War. They called Japanese soldiers during that time of anti-Japanese mentality, Japs and Nips. She’d heard her father say those words. He knew how it felt being a dark-skinned Arab. She didn’t understand it and now four decades later she was seeing the bigotry shift over to her people the way it had to the Japanese back then.

  She looked out at the hotel window. The lower desert differed from the high desert in climate. The high desert at least produced a thick cover of snow in January. Snow in the low desert was unusual at best. If it ever snowed it ended up highly-publicized with news cameras and reporters all gathered around a small corner where it fell and where neighbors built a dwarf snowman. In a place where the sun scorches at a rate of 122 Fahrenheit in July and August, snow rarely blessed Phoenix, even in the winter.

  She remembered everything here.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The morning was sunny – nothing unusual for the desert. Back then, in the early morning before anyone thought of rising, the earth sang. She would lie in bed and let an orchestra of crickets and birds blanket her. It started slow as if one single cricket had cracked a baton on a podium and began its orchestra. It awakened and needed company.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  And, slow like a drop of rain on parched soil that makes people look up to the heavens and bless the rain gods, there in the desert cricket legs chirped out in the high-pitch of a violin, only the way a violin or a cricket can perform their music. Crickets were harbingers of morning coming. And, the evenings popped were given up to dense clouds of white flies so thick you had to laugh close-mouthed for fear of sucking in gulps of them.

  But, only four months there during the late, late fall, winter, and early-early spring it seemed like a cooler version of summer. The other seven months, were full-on heatstroke summer and from late March to early November felt more like hell. Summers weren’t filled with butterflies, asters, and hydrangeas, people having barbecues, playing volleyball. They were filled with panting dogs, dying pigeons, and old people being rushed to emergency from exposure. The cooler time – that four-month respite – proved the sole reason people left the east coast, the northwest, the Midwest, and the Gulf States to relocate. You could layout in swim suits in the winter! Something not many folks could do in the rest of the contiguous U.S. How they balanced it with the rest of the year, she could barely understand.

  She could never forget childhood or those scents that transported her to other place in time – creosote burning under a single band of sun that never lets up and pasty school cafeteria pizza still on her tongue. School chums and she standing outside red brick walls of homeroom waiting for Mrs. Potts to return from her lunch break. Mrs. Potts in the fourth grade meant two things: she was nine years old and she loved homeroom class. For whatever reason, the girls standing around were discussing family heritages, probably from something they’d learned that day. One girl was of English stock, another Irish, and so on. When they asked Euly, she explained to them she was Lebanese. They howled. They said, “She’s a lesbian, she’s a lesbian!” Euly wondered now if they really knew what the word meant. But, the other girls jeered and poked fun at the similarity of the words. Euly vehemently and red-facedly corrected them by saying in broken and slow words so even they could get it, “Leb-a-nese.” It wasn’t funny and they didn’t let up. When Mrs. Potts came back from lunch the taunting stopped. The girls scuffled and chatted back into the room – back to their seats. All was forgotten, for them, but for Euly the burn of their barbs stuck under her skin and lingered.

  After that, she and Enaya were different. They stood apart from the other girls with creamy milk-fed skin who ate mashed potatoes and gravy. It was at that young age she remembered feeling strange. For Euly it was like having a noose around her neck.

  The teasing followed her into high school and she hated it there too. She wanted to fast-forward life into college where she thought people might be different, smarter, involved with learning and not only concerned about being popular. But, why she hadn’t told the others girls her heritage was her mother’s, from her mother’s side of the genetic stitch, she hadn’t a clue. Belle was a mix of English, Irish and Dutch. And, because of the mix in gene pools, they didn’t look different, aside from a fewer poisonous reminders from her slip in elementary school, they were no worse for the wear.

  In college, there was a wild mix of ethnicities shapes and colors and Euly no longer stood out as odd. Plus, when she did reveal her background, people didn’t seem to care or, at least, it wasn’t profound like it was when she and her friends were seven. Anyway, those days it was the blacks and Jews getting the brunt of bigotry, they were the ones collectively treated as second-class citizens, not people like Euly and Enaya, not then. Sometimes honesty didn’t pay. The memories flooded back as she watched the sun closing out another day.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  She looked older. Euly detected the finest lines around Enaya’s sea green eyes but she still looked good. She wondered why someone with the color of her eyes didn’t live near the ocean the way Euly did. Backwards, she thought. Enaya, the one with ocean-eyes, living in the desert and Euly, with her brown eyes, living on an island. It was backwards. Euly pulled at her sleeve when she noticed wrinkles set in at her shirt’s elbows. She compared how Enaya was ordered, the proper way she sat in her chair, her beige linen suit looking fresh, her short cropped hair thick and pulled perfectly behind her ears and, her earlobes, studded with what looked to be two-carat diamonds in each. “Jimmy.”

  Euly’s attention was distracted and she looked into her sister’s eyes. “Hmm?”

  “Jimmy, he got them for me.” She flicked at one of her lobes. She’d seen her looking at the earrings. Euly angled her eyes down to the table. “Said they put him back a pretty penny.” There it was, the expected jab to let Euly know in one of her many ways how much money they made.

  “Well, they’re lovely.”

  Right away, Euly felt uncomfortable. She didn’t have clothes for the desert anymore. She wore a long-sleeved jersey top and jeans. Her boots looked urbane but were more suited for Seattle than Phoenix. She had a tight silk scarf around her neck that began to get hot, even hotter, so she untied it and let it hang loosely on her shoulders. She was tired from traveling. The waiter came back to the table expecting them to order.

  “I’ll have the Pinot Gris.” Enaya folded her menu and handed it to the waiter making sure not to make eye contact with him. Euly couldn’t help but feel a pang of disgust.

  “I’ll have the Cab, thank you.” She smiled directly at the man and he thanked them both for the order with a tip of his head, first at Euly t
hen at her sister.

  “You’re on a fact-finding mission, are you?” Enaya sipped her water then dabbed the corners of her mouth.

  “Yeah. Yes.” Euly folded and re-folded her napkin.

  “What facts are you trying to scare up?”

  She looked at Enaya. Her older face was no less critical. Squinting her eyes the way she did when she didn’t believe something you said, added to her age. A busboy came with a silver pitcher to fill their drinks. Euly whispered thanks to him and grabbed the glass not so much because she was thirsty but to still her thoughts before speaking to Enaya. She wanted to tell her what a bitch she thought she was – how she’d always been an uppity bitch – but Euly took a sip instead.

  “Things about our past.” She dug into her bag and brought out the journal and set it next to her plate.

  “Things…”

  “Yes, things about our family. What really happened.”

  Euly sensed her sister’s skepticism grow by the look on her face. Enaya shook her head.

  “You’re funny. Always trying to make something out of nothing.”

  “You think mother and dad’s divorce is nothing?”

  It never failed. Whenever they got together, they got to the meat of it.

  “Nothing? No. I wouldn’t say that, Eu.” Euly bristled at the way her sister shortened her name. She was testing her patience. “Not nothing but not something either.”

  “Wow, Enaya. You really have a talent for words.” Now, she dug in. Enaya had always been jealous that Euly had become a professional writer, that she was making a living of it. But, Enaya handled herself well.

  “So! It’s nice we’ve gotten all of that out of the way.” She smiled because of their little battle. “Really, Euly, it’s good to see you. I miss you, you know?”

  “No. I didn’t Enaya. You don’t call all that often so, no, I don’t know. Your distance speaks volumes.”

  “Jealous?”

  Euly laughed. Her sister had the knack for not assuming the responsibilities others would. She supposed Enaya had good reason. With a family and a career she had a well-stacked plate.