Going for Kona

by Pamela Fagan Hutchins

  She frowned. “I didn’t think it was a secret. I had no idea, Michele. I’m very sorry.”

  I ground my fists into my eyes. Sure, she was sorry, except that she wasn’t. She had succeeded, and did it really matter how? I couldn’t trust her, and I didn’t know if I could trust Brian either. Not with my feelings, anyway.

  “Where’s my phone?” I’d given it to Scarlett before I went on air. I needed it back so I could call Adrian. I’d started dialing his voice mail and listening to it whenever I got upset. It was better than nothing.

  Scarlett handed it to me and I saw the HPD, my favorite phone number, blowing up the screen at that moment. Scarlett grabbed me by the elbow and started walking me out. I took the call.

  “What.”

  “Wow, Michele, so I just heard you were on TV.” Detective Young.

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “I don’t often have widows on TV selling books that have gone viral less than a week after their husbands are murdered. Congratulations on your bestseller. That worked out pretty nicely for you.”

  “My husband is dead, you asshole. Nothing will ever work out nicely for me again.” I pressed end and threw my phone at the wall. It bounced on the floor, the OtterBox protecting it as billed. I needed breaking glass and flying parts and loud screaming, not this, not any of this. I stooped to pick up the phone.

  Scarlett stopped. “Are you okay?”

  “What the hell do you think?”

  We walked in silence to her car and she drove toward my home. After about ten minutes, she cleared her throat delicately. “This may not be the best time to ask you this, but it can’t wait. I need you to do TheToday Show in New York on Friday.”

  “NO! No, no, no, no, no!” I shot each word out rapid-fire through my clenched teeth.

  She winced. “I need you to think about it. Talk to Brian. It’s a very big deal, and it would mean a lot to Juniper. It would have meant a lot to Adrian, I think, for that matter.”

  “You’re in no position to tell me what anything would have meant to Adrian.”

  “You’re right, I’m sorry. Just talk to Brian. Decide tomorrow. Please.”

  We arrived at my house, and I got out and slammed the car door without answering her.

  ***

  When I stood in the security line with my boarding pass for the flight back to Houston from New York that Friday afternoon, my Today Show makeup and hair were starting to droop, but my Ann Taylor skirt and blouse still hid my exhaustion. All I wanted was to get home so I could throw my son a party and see Annabelle before she moved away, probably for good. Unfortunately, I still had a bicycle ride to get in before bed. I didn’t know how I was going to do it. With Adrian around, it wouldn’t have been hard. The man just flat-out did whatever it was he decided to do, and it was easy to ride along in his wake.

  “Excuse me, are you Michele Lopez Hanson?” The woman who asked was heading in the opposite direction through the accordion of security lines. She looked close to my age, if a foot taller.

  I wondered if I’d dropped something. “Yes, I am.”

  The woman smiled brightly and reached into a long-handled bag slung over her shoulder. She pulled out My Pace or Yours.“I saw you on the Today Show, and I picked this up on the way to the airport. You’re so inspiring. Would you mind signing it for me?”

  I looked around me. People were watching us now. “Um, sure. Do you have a pen?”

  She handed me a blue Bic.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Beth.”

  I scribbled a message and my name on the cover page and handed the book and pen back to her.

  “Thank you. I’m very sorry about your husband. And good luck at Kona.”

  “Thank you very much.” I turned my attention to my phone to stymie further conversation.

  I heard a woman next to Beth ask to see the cover of the book, and they struck up a conversation about the show. “She’s so beautiful. And tiny. Even prettier than she was on the air.” Beth’s voice. I squirmed. Then I heard the other woman’s voice. “She looks like the short Mexican actress on Desperate Housewives.”

  This was odd for me, and I thought how much Adrian would have loved it, and how I would have loved it with him, but not so much now. It didn’t suck, it just wasn’t the same as it would have been. Nothing was, not even flying. I hate flying, and the thought of getting on the plane without Adrian to hold my hand and distract me during take-offs and landings was awful.

  Never mind, I told myself. Never mind. Just get home.

  At the gate, I logged into wifi with my little Asus laptop. Scarlett and Brian wanted an update on the Today Show and I’d put off answering their many calls, texts and emails. They’d manipulated me, and ultimately both played the “do it for Adrian” card.

  The terrible reality? Adrian would have wanted the book to sell and me to do Kona with him, one way or another. I did feel obligated to carry on for him, but I knew he wouldn’t want to see me so miserable. It was just hard to know for sure, because, of course, if he were here, I wouldn’t be miserable, and we would have exulted in all of this together. And if he’d lived, well, then the Today Show probably wouldn’t have invited us to come on. God, the whole thing hurt my head. All I wanted to do was sleep.

  I clicked send on an email to my two puppet masters. My inbox was full—fifty-seven new messages in one day. My touchpad browsed me through them almost of its own volition. Condolences, congratulations, invitations to speak, to guest, to host, to write. An infuriating email from my ex-husband accusing me of neglecting Sam when he needed me. And then something totally different. An email from a freelance reporter asking me about a reputed affair between my husband and a woman who had contacted him, a woman named Rhonda Dale. He wanted my side of the story.

  I ran to the bathroom and vomited.

  ***

  By the time I got back to Houston, the inquiry had mushroomed from one reporter to one hundred. After sending an answer to the original reporter—Absolute horseshit!—I couldn’t answer the rest. Even though I had seen Adrian’s face when he met Rhonda at our launch party, even though I wanted desperately to believe he had never met her, how could this not buffet me about like a cowboy caught in a stampede?

  According to the “press release” she emailed to every media outlet in the universe, Rhonda and Adrian met at the New Orleans 70.3 triathlon the year before. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, it wasn’t impossible. I’d come down with salmonella and had to scratch, but Adrian went to try for a Kona qualification. He missed it by seconds and stayed over to recover, then slept in and had lunch in the Quarter before driving back to Houston. I racked my brain for anything odd about how he acted when he got home, but I came up with nothing. He nursed me through the rest of my salmonella and was as attentive and loving as ever.

  Rhonda’s email included lurid details of a wild night in her hotel room with her “athletic stud” and weekday trysts and weekend hookups all over Houston for the next year—including in my own house, in my own bed. She said he had her meet him when he was out with me in public places, and they’d sneak off and do it in back hallways, bathrooms, and closets, because, he told her, I was “an uptight bitch with no sense of adventure.”

  Two things were crystalline: Rhonda knew where we went, and she was obsessed with my husband. The rest I just had to believe were the delusions of a disturbed woman.

  I hated this woman for messing with my mind, and I Googled her name every five minutes on my phone as I bicycled in my living room. My parents were staying for Sam’s birthday the next day, and I tried to hide my anxiety from them, which was tricky with Papa ten feet away watching his favorite movie, Lonesome Dove,on Netflix with me, and Mom in and out, fussing. The kids had both taken off with friends, luckily. So I searched and searched, but nothing came up about her crazy allegations, and I let myself hope.

  Then I woke Saturday morning. On my first try, I found her story—with a picture of her and Adrian from our book
launch party, with me cropped out—on PerezHilton.com. From there, it went everywhere, and not a single story ran my horseshit quote. They all managed to include the same one from Rhonda, though, about how she liked to pretend she was on his bicycle and ride him across the finish line.

  Honestly, if I believed Adrian was capable of sleeping with a twit like her, I never would have gone out with him in the first place. I could show her a thing or two about a sense of adventure. I wasn’t going to trumpet those things to the media, though. I turned my phone to airplane mode so no one would pick up a media call.

  My sole goal for the day was to keep Sam and Annabelle from seeing any of that garbage. I’d spent the past two years helping Juniper Media get savvy to the ways of online news, and I knew Internet trash gives over to something new every fifteen minutes, and that weekend stories die before Monday. Newspapers don’t print this crap, either. So I just had to get us through the weekend. At least. Sam and Annabelle would be consumed with birthday distractions, and my parents I didn’t need to worry about. They didn’t get online much, especially when they visited us. Mom would be baking and decorating Sam’s 33 cake all morning, and then we’d leave for the party.

  My prevention plan started to gel. I could formulate the rest of it on my run, which I had to get in before Sam woke up. I scrambled out of bed and got ready, dodging Mom by staying out of the kitchen. Five minutes later I loped out the door and into the heat and humidity with Adrian’s seventies rock playlist cranked as high as I could bear on my Shuffle.

  Sixty-seven minutes later, my Garmin read 9:30 a.m. I took the fastest shower of my life, listening for sounds of life upstairs. Nothing from Sam yet. Annabelle would return from swim practice any minute. The clock on the oven read 9:59 when I made it into the kitchen. Mom’s cake was on the counter, but she and Papa and their car were nowhere to be seen.

  Sam wanted Belgian waffles for his birthday brunch, but that would have to wait until I disabled the wifi router in the home office. I went in and eyeballed the setup, looking for a way to stop its signal that my tech-savvy teens wouldn’t be able to diagnose without serious effort. I decided my best bet was to pull the phone plug out of the socket just far enough to lose contact, but not so far that you could see it with the naked eye behind seven bajillion other cords. I crawled under the desk and grabbed the DSL cord, gently pinched the plastic tab and eased it out until it unclicked, and left it barely hanging from the socket.

  “What are you doing, Mom?” My head cracked into the underside of the desk, and I crawled out, grimacing. Sam was standing six inches behind me. “Wifi is out. I was trying to fix it.”

  “Is it working now? I have friends coming over before the party, and we need it for League of Legends.”

  Caca del toro. “Let’s test it.”

  I sat down at the desktop between our floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves of books and Sam hovered over my shoulder. The flashing red lights on the router already told the story—no wifi—but I made a show of pulling up the Firefox browser. “Nope. It’s dead. I’ve tried everything. I’ll call AT&T and report an outage.”

  “Ah, man.” Sam kicked an Amazon box an inch across the floor with his toe. Then he stood up straighter. “I’ll see if we can play at someone else’s house.”

  “Don’t you think you can live without League of Legends for one day?”

  “It’s my birthday.” Sam’s voice sounded more whiney thirteen than I-think-I’m-grown-up sixteen.

  If I let him game at someone else’s house, he’d have Internet access and he might see a story flash across a news page. I thought fast. “Well, it was going to be a surprise, but I’d decided to let you pick up your friends—with me in the front seat, of course—and we’d all go to the batting cage and have hot dogs and canned-cheese nachos before we head out to paintball.” It was an Adrian-inspired plan that I’d regret when I got the credit card bill.

  I headed into the kitchen. Sam followed me and thought about it while I mixed the waffle batter. “Okay.”

  I breathed an inner sigh of relief. Now, if I could just convince my parents and Annabelle to come with us, maybe I could insulate them all from my new reality.

  Chapter Seven

  Sunday morning at six fifteen, right on my mother’s schedule, my parents finally left. As soon as they backed out of the driveway I ran for my bicycle gear and straight back to the Jetta. I was desperate to fly along the Church of the Open Road, the name Adrian had given our Sunday morning rides. That day I would ride it by myself for the first of many times to come. I couldn’t just wake up one day in October, hop on a plane to Hawaii, and say, “Let’s do this.” I would continue training twenty-five hours a week over the next two months. I had to train, and I had to do it alone.

  Adrian used to ride solo when I couldn’t join him, but I never had. What would I do if I got a flat tire or a broken chain and I couldn’t fix what my semi-pro bicycle mechanic husband had made a non-issue before? What if I was chased by a dog? When a pony-sized spotted mastiff stormed us on one of our Sunday rides, Adrian rode between the beast and me, let it get within two feet of him, and squirted it in the face with his water bottle. The dog spun away with a yelp, tucked its tail, and sprinted for home. I’d frozen.

  I had my water bottles with me, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t scared of dogs. All I wanted was to get on my bicycle. Adrian had been gone for ten days, and I pretty much didn’t feel anything anymore, except hollow. Not relieved that my parents left, not proud that we pulled off a good-enough birthday for Sam, not angry about Rhonda Dale trying to snatch a humiliating fifteen minutes of fame off of Adrian and me. At least the kids hadn’t found out about her. FML, as Sam would say.

  Dying didn’t sound as scary as it used to. Besides, no one really needed me. Sam had his birth father, Annabelle had her grandparents. Everyone had someone. I wouldn’t be reckless—I didn’t have the energy to kill myself—I just didn’t care which direction the needle swung between life and death.

  Once I got out on the roads around Waller, though, all that started to change. My body warmed up and the ride felt good. The gently rolling hills, gnarly oaks, and tall pines awakened my senses. I was sorry I hadn’t thought to go out there earlier. Every breath I drew in filled my void and brought me a sense of Adrian’s presence as I flew low to the ground, until it was close to joy. I could feel him out there, feel a connection to him. I could have ridden to Alaska and back.

  We loved to go out there early in the morning, when the fog hovered over the ground. It began to lift, and I picked up speed as I passed a mobile home with a hand-lettered yard sign that said, “Ain’t nothing here worth your life.” Almost immediately beyond the trailer homes was a grand, gated entrance to a ranch with magnificent horses. I’d been horse crazy as a kid, for the horses at my dad’s clinic and my own little quarter horse, Joey, and the Waller ranches were my favorite part of the route. On cooler mornings, Adrian and I watched the quarter horses run through the fields with their tails held high. Donkeys lived at almost all of the horse ranches, paired to the flightiest horses to keep them calm, but I always thought they looked like status symbols, an “I’m so cool I have my own donkey” sort of thing.

  Adrian had gotten a kick out of them. “Michele, I guess that makes me your ass.”

  I laughed, remembering, and warmth flooded me from the inside out.

  When I was deep in my memory trance and out as far in the boondocks as I could go—about twenty miles from the car—an old white Ford Taurus pulled up beside and around me. Startled, I swerved. I nearly crashed as it accelerated and drove on. I steadied La Mariposa before I tried to change direction again.

  A car horn blared in front of me.

  “Hey!” The rush of wind and the engine of a truck muffled my yell. A beater pickup truck was heading straight at me. The driver held his hand high in a one-fingered salute.

  I heard Adrian’s voice and time stopped.

  “You want to know how I survived that head-on, Michele? I jump
ed the bike, like hopping over a big speed bump. I didn’t let the car or my bicycle dictate my fall.”

  Was this now, was it for real? I answered, although whether it was aloud or only in my mind, I didn’t know: “I’ve never had a fall. I can’t even squirt water at a dog!”

  “You’ll get your chance. Everyone does. My money is on you.”

  I jerked my handlebars to the right and ditched my bicycle as it hit the ground, twisting my ankles to uncleat and going into a tuck-and-roll into a grassy patch of wildflowers. My chin strap pulled hard as my roll forced the helmet around on my head, but that was the worst of it. I ended up facedown in the grass. The truck honked again and sped away.

  “Adrian?” My voice sounded tiny in the quiet.

  No answer.

  He had been there. I was sure of it. I rolled over and stared up at a sky the color of bluebonnets. It was strangely peaceful, lying there in my bed of green with a warm afterglow of Adrian, no one in the world knowing where I was. My heart didn’t hurt as much. I could have stayed there forever. That part seemed real. The Taurus and the truck didn’t.

  After lying there for God knows how long, I snapped back. If I didn’t get moving, the fire ants would eat me alive. I’d promised Annabelle a new outfit for her first day of school. I had to keep Sam from taking a joyride before he got his license. A heavy sigh burst out of me, and I summoned my will and began testing all my movable parts. Everything worked, I had only minor scrapes, and nothing really hurt. I wiped the dirt and grass off my hands onto the leg of my white bicycle shorts. My pulse throbbed in my temples and my insides started doing their winding-up thing. I wanted to scream the F word, but I couldn’t choke it out. Chingase, I thought instead. Chinga the damn truck driver, and chinga the Taurus driver, too. My first solo ride, and I had to ditch or be pancaked because of another damn Taurus. Maybe this wasn’t even the same car, maybe none of these Tauruses were the same car, and maybe Tauruses didn’t even matter. None of the drivers were blond, and Detective Young’s witness said the vehicle was a Ford F150.