The Best of Us

by Sarah Pekkanen

  “Yeah, every Saturday,” Gio said.

  He was really trying. She owed it to her marriage, and to herself, to meet him halfway.

  “I’d like that so much,” she said.

  “And, babe?” Gio said. “You know I don’t think about Savannah that way. She’s a friend. It would be like you and . . . you and Dwight hooking up.”

  He burst into laughter and tightened his arm around her.

  Tina felt a little smile play on her lips. For a moment, she was tempted to tell him about kissing Dwight so long ago. Then she decided she was going to keep that little tidbit to herself.

  “Should we get up?” she asked. “It’s going to be an interesting day, with the storm. And I wonder if Gary’s still here.”

  “I’m already up,” Gio said, wiggling his eyebrows and pulling back the covers to show her exactly what he meant.

  Chapter Seventeen

  * * *

  Storm Front

  SAVANNAH HAD BEEN AWAKE for twenty minutes, and she was still sitting on the edge of her bed, her hands cupping her cheeks, as she studied Gary. She hadn’t given him a pillow, but he must’ve snuck out to the couch to grab one at some point during the night.

  Maybe they could become friends someday, she thought. But almost immediately, she scratched that idea. She couldn’t imagine going to dinner with Gary five years in the future and meeting his new wife.

  No, she and Gary couldn’t be in contact again—ever. This trip was the last time she’d see him, other than in divorce court. Seven years of marriage, she thought. What a waste.

  Savannah finally stood up from the bed and went into the bathroom to take a long, hot shower. She put on a robe and wrapped her hair in a towel turban before coming back into the bedroom. Gary was awake and already dressed in khaki shorts and a green knit shirt. He was sitting in a chair by the window, waiting for her.

  “Hi,” he said, fixing his eyes on her face. She knew he was trying to gauge her mood. She supposed she’d thrown him off balance by appearing nonplussed by his arrival, then announcing she’d just had sex with another man, before screaming at him, and finally crying until her throat felt raw.

  “Morning,” she said. Her emotions felt subdued, maybe because she’d released them so spectacularly the previous night. She wasn’t angry at Gary right now. In fact, she didn’t feel much of anything other than weary.

  She crossed the room and opened the closet door, selecting a strapless blue-and-green-patterned sundress. She started to unwind the belt of her robe, then stopped and walked back into the bathroom. Old habits, she thought to herself. She’d never undress in front of Gary again. Never introduce him as her husband. Never fly to Australia with him like they’d been planning for their tenth anniversary.

  “Savannah?” Gary’s voice sounded close; he must have been standing on the other side of the closed bathroom door. “Do you want me to go?”

  She got dressed and combed the tangles out of her hair before opening the door.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I thought maybe I was making things worse.”

  Savannah gave a little laugh. “I don’t mean this in a bitchy way, but I don’t think you could make things worse, Gary,” she said.

  “Could I make them better?” he asked.

  His hair looked completely ridiculous; it was sticking up on one side.

  “I don’t know,” she repeated.

  “So let’s go have some coffee,” he said.

  She looked at him and wondered if this was Gary’s Plan B: if he was hoping to hang around until she forgave him. Or maybe he hadn’t gotten to Plan B yet. Maybe his backup plan was something else entirely—giving up on a reconciliation and moving ahead with a life that didn’t include her.

  “Sure,” she said. She didn’t bother with shoes or makeup, even though her eyes were a little puffy. But she’d had her eyelashes tinted black a few weeks ago, and they still looked fabulous—plus the dress was the most flattering one Savannah had packed. Then there was the fact that she’d brought the dress into the bathroom but hadn’t carried in panties or a bra. Gary was very attuned to details, and she was sure he’d noticed.

  She might not be able to forgive Gary, but she saw no harm in making him suffer a little more.

  * * *

  Pauline surveyed the basement shelf and found everything where the management company had promised it would be: electric lanterns with extra batteries, a dozen gallons of spring-water, a box of canned foods, and a portable radio. A representative from the company had phoned earlier, directing Pauline to the hurricane shelf, as she’d called it. Apparently the company kept one for each of its properties in Jamaica.

  Pauline picked up a couple of lanterns and the radio and headed back upstairs to the game room, where everyone else was clustered around the big-screen TV. By now, the workers had finished covering the windows with plywood and the rooms felt strange and closed in and dark—it was like a completely different house. Still, Pauline was glad they’d decided to ride out the storm here. Their only other options would be to cut the vacation short, which no one wanted to do, or try to find hotel rooms in town. And who could say if they’d be any better off there? Betty could reach down anywhere she chose, and if she proved to be as unpredictable as just about every other hurricane in history, there was no way to outsmart her.

  They’d be safe here, Pauline thought. All the pieces of outdoor furniture had been tucked into storage so they couldn’t turn into flying missiles. And the carefully tended landscaping around the villa was more than aesthetically pleasing—it was chosen with foresight. There were no big trees positioned close enough to crash onto the roof, and the thick shrubbery would provide a little protection against the winds. The only things they hadn’t moved from the pool area were the enormous concrete pots containing plants and flowers that rimmed the stone patio—but the pots were so heavy they wouldn’t become airborne.

  “Anything new?” she asked as she sat down next to Dwight on the large sectional couch.

  “Betty’s shifting,” he said, reaching for a handful of popcorn from the bowl on the coffee table. “She may hit us after all.”

  “Really?” Pauline asked.

  “It’s still unclear,” Ryan said. “But it looks more likely now.”

  “I say we go down to the beach and do one last round of shots before the storm hits,” Gio said. “Let’s stare Betty in the face.”

  “Great idea,” Ryan said.

  “Tina?” Allie asked, twisting around to look at her friend, who was moving toward the door. “You coming?”

  “I’m just going to mix up some shots,” Tina said. “Lemon drops okay with everyone?”

  “Sounds good,” Savannah said.

  A few minutes later, they were gathered by the front door. “Yeah, baby!” Gio shouted, pumping his fist at the sky. “Bring it on, Betty!”

  Pauline looked up and felt a chill, even though the day was warm. The sky was a shade of pink she usually saw only during sunsets—but the sun wouldn’t be setting for another few hours. The air was calm, but it seemed brimming with an uneasy electric power. Was she the only one who could sense it? The others were laughing and heading toward the stairs that led to the beach.

  Pauline closed the front door and was enveloped by silence as rich and heavy as cream. She realized it was the first time during the entire trip that she’d been alone in the villa. She leaned back against the door, feeling exhaustion settle over her heavily.

  After a moment she crossed the room and flicked a switch that turned on the gas fireplace, more for its light than for heat. She curled up on a couch and watched the blue and gold flames flicker and wondered how, when the trip ended, she’d find the right words to say to Dwight.

  * * *

  All around Allie on the beach, her friends were spreading out. Gio was jumping over the crashing waves while Tina set the bottle of vodka and bowl of sugar-dipped lemons down on the tiki bar, and Savannah was walking off to the lef
t with Gary beside her. Ryan and Dwight were the only ones still near Allie, but she spun away from them.

  She ran a few dozen yards down the beach, then abruptly turned and raced into the sea, feeling the shock of the cool water against her warm skin. She dove under a wave and silently screamed until all the air was gone from her lungs. She surfaced and threw out her arms and floated on her back, bouncing along with the waves. She felt as if the coming hurricane had materialized from somewhere inside of her and now it was absorbing her in turn, as if it was a physical manifestation of the tumult that was too big for her to hold in any longer.

  Earlier today, while everyone else had been preoccupied with listening to a storm update, she’d slipped away to her bedroom to call the genetic counseling center. She’d expected to leave a message, but to her surprise, an actual counselor had answered.

  At first, the woman hadn’t wanted to answer any of Allie’s questions over the phone. Only after Allie had pleaded, and agreed to schedule an appointment for the next week, did the woman relent. Or maybe it was the desperation in Allie’s voice that had finally swayed her.

  “Do you know if your biological father received genetic testing after his diagnosis?” the counselor had asked. She’d said her name was Ann, and she sounded like she was about Allie’s age.

  Allie had cradled the phone between her shoulder and ear and begun to fold and unfold the piece of paper in her hands. “I don’t know. We’ve never even met. But if he knew he had the disease already, what would be the point?”

  “For familial ALS, we can sometimes identify the gene that mutates and causes the symptoms. So if he was tested, and we could pinpoint the gene responsible, we could check your copy of that gene for a mutation,” Ann had said.

  “I can try to find out,” Allie had said. She’d suddenly felt cold and shivered. “I heard he had three other children. Maybe he got tested for them. I doubt he would have done that just . . . for me.”

  “I see,” the counselor had said. After a pause, she’d continued speaking. “You know, if he didn’t get tested . . . in a way, it might be a blessing.”

  “A blessing?” Allie had held it together until then, but her voice had finally broken on that word. “How can any of this be a blessing?”

  “The average age of onset for familial ALS is around forty-six,” the counselor had said. Her voice was gentle and soothing—the same voice Allie used with traumatized clients. They were in the same general field, their names started with the same initial, they were probably around the same age . . . so why was Allie on the wrong side of this call? She was the one who counseled people through problems. She’d always been the one to find silver linings.

  “Forty-six,” Allie had said. “So, in about ten years.” Eva would be seventeen; Sasha, nineteen . . .

  “If you even have the gene,” Ann had said. “You might not. But how would you feel if you knew you had it?”

  Allie had just shaken her head. She couldn’t answer the question; it was all she could do to breathe. Her earlier confidence had completely evaporated, and terror ballooned in the space it had left. Making this call had been a mistake!

  “So try to live life like you don’t have it,” Ann had said. “Choose to believe you got that particular gene from your biological mother.”

  “Ten years,” Allie had repeated. How many days was that? How many minutes?

  “But your biological father must’ve been diagnosed later than forty-six,” the counselor had said.

  Allie had nodded eagerly, suddenly feeling as if she’d been grabbing at a tiny piece of hope. “He was fifty-two.”

  “In some families, it strikes later. There’s a big range. And think of all the advances in medicine we’re going to have in the next ten to fifteen years,” Ann had said. “There was a huge breakthrough just recently at Northwestern University.”

  “Okay,” Allie had whispered. “But what if I need to know?”

  There was a long pause. “You could try to find out if he was tested,” Ann had finally said. “Reach out to his family members.”

  “And then what? If he was tested?”

  “You’d get some blood work done,” the counselor had said. “But I don’t think—”

  Allie had cut her off. Who cared what the counselor thought? This was Allie’s life hanging in the balance! “How long until I’d . . . know?”

  “It would take six to eight weeks to get results,” Ann had said.

  “How accurate are they?” Allie had asked.

  There was another pause. “Very accurate,” Ann had said.

  “Okay,” Allie had said. She’d taken a deep, shuddering breath, then she’d said good-bye and hung up the phone.

  She’d allowed herself one hard, fast cry, sitting on her bed and folding her arms over her knees and putting her head down while her body shook. Her fate would be determined by a spin of the roulette wheel—black meant she’d get ALS, red meant she wouldn’t. She stood a perfectly even chance of living a normal life or enduring one of the worst things she could imagine.

  Some time later—Allie didn’t know if it was minutes or an hour—she’d woken up flopped over on the side of the bed, her arms still holding her knees to her chest. At first she couldn’t believe she’d fallen asleep, but then she’d remembered that the mind had strange ways of protecting itself. She couldn’t handle the news she’d received, so she’d simply shut down.

  Her brain hadn’t turned off, though, just gone to an altered state. Her dreams were filled with horrible images: the hurricane ripping off the roof of the villa; Allie getting hopelessly tangled in a vine underwater near the tropical reef they’d visited on the second day of the trip; a dealer at a gambling table turning over a card with a strange pattern and smiling, revealing a toothless hole of a mouth.

  She’d heard knuckles against the door, then his voice: “Allie?”

  But it had been the wrong voice.

  “Hey, Ryan,” she’d said, standing up.

  “You okay?” he’d started to ask, but she’d brushed by him.

  “Sure!” she’d said, flinching at the too-high note in her voice. “Just had to use the bathroom. Come on, let’s go join the others!”

  Now she flipped over and swam back to shore, fighting the sea’s strong undertow, and saw Dwight walking toward her. She felt her clothes plaster themselves to her body as she emerged from the water and went to meet him. She leaned up on her tiptoes to whisper into his ear. “Let’s go back now.”

  He nodded. Allie glanced at the others and saw Tina watching them, an odd look on her face. Maybe Tina thought Allie was crazy for diving into the water with all her clothes on, or maybe she’d picked up on something else—whatever it was, Allie didn’t care. She’d spent her entire life worrying about others and taking care of them. She was through being the good girl. Where had it gotten her anyway?

  Still holding Tina’s eye, Allie motioned to herself, then the stairs and waved good-bye. Tina nodded and turned back to look at the water.

  Allie began walking up the stairs with Dwight a step behind her. She could feel another panic attack jabbing at the edges of her mind, and she tried to breathe the way Dwight had taught her.

  But before she could push it back, a horrible thought burst free: Would it be worse to learn that her birth father had been tested, or to learn that he hadn’t?

  * * *

  “That was a fantastic idea,” Savannah said as she stepped into the house. “I’ve never seen anything like that pink sky!”

  “It’ll be a great story to tell the folks back home,” Ryan agreed. He dropped his voice and mimicked a TV announcer: “They walked through a hurricane . . . and lived to tell about it.”

  “Technically it’s not a hurricane yet,” Gio said. “And it may not even hit us.”

  “But it will,” Dwight said.

  Savannah whipped around. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s going to hit Jamaica,” he said.

  “When did you hear that?” she
asked.

  “Five minutes ago,” he said.

  “So what do we do?” Tina asked. “Should we leave?”

  “It’s still just a Category Two,” Dwight said. “It’ll be fierce, but the house can stand it.”

  “Let’s stay,” Gio said. He reached out an arm and pulled Tina close. “I’ll protect you, babe.”

  “Gio, come on!” she said. “You don’t have to prove anything. We should go . . .”

  “I’m staying,” Allie said. Savannah looked at her and absently noted that Allie hadn’t been around when they’d all done shots on the beach. Maybe she’d left while Savannah was walking in the direction of her encounter with Mr. Red Bathing Suit. She’d wanted to see that particular spot again, but if there had been any evidence of their tryst in the form of indentations in the sand or the condom wrapper that had blown out of her hand, the wind had erased them.

  Still, she’d felt as if the score had been evened up just a bit. Gary knew she’d been with another man, and it hurt him; she’d read it on his face this morning, when he picked up a shirt off the floor of her bedroom. Initially, Savannah had smiled; during their marriage, Gary had forever been tidying up after her. Then she saw him staring down at the shirt, and Savannah realized it was the one she’d worn the night before and had misbuttoned.

  “You really want to stay, Allie?” Tina was asking. “I figured you’d be the one telling us we should go.”

  “I don’t want to leave,” Allie said. “Besides, didn’t you promise Dwight a superhero cake? Let’s go make it.”

  “Okay,” Tina said. “But should we see if Pauline wants to help? It’s her husband, after all.”

  “Speaking of, where is Pauline?” Savannah asked, just as Pauline came in from the living room to rejoin the group.

  “I’m going to fill some pots with water, just in case,” Gio said. “The bathtubs, too. Ryan, gather up whatever you can find. Candles, flashlights . . .”

  “On it,” Ryan said.