Happily and Madly

by Alexis Bass

  Chapter 42

  Chelsea wakes up for only a few minutes, after we arrive at the cottage, to brush her teeth and put on her pajamas. George and Trisha also go straight to bed, but I still wait a little while, lying in the dark over my covers before I text Edison to let him know that the coast is clear for me to leave.

  Alone in the silent dark house, my thoughts start to sort themselves out, leaving behind the panic I’d felt after what I’d heard and giving me some clarity. They all seem to be connected, George and Senator Stevens and the Duvals and the Ellises; their ties to Stevens are of the business variety, while whatever ties them to George and the Ellises is covered up by personal relationships.

  It’s nearly an hour after we returned, about 1:00 A.M., when I finally text Edison. He’ll have answers or he’ll have more lies. But when the choice is to stay away or to pursue the possibility of the truth, regardless of the risk, I am always guilty of making the same choice.

  He writes back: Come outside.

  I pull a sweatshirt on over my pajamas and slip on my running shoes. I walk out the front door because the bedrooms are on the other side of the house and this cottage doesn’t have thin walls like the New Brown beach house. I follow the path past the driveway, to the street. Edison steps out from the bushes to meet me. We don’t say anything as we walk a few feet down the road until we reach the golf cart that he rode over here. He drives us down the narrow road. Edison has a map, but he seems to know where he’s going. We ride for about five minutes before we reach a small cabin with the porch light on and a rocking chair out front.

  “This is where you’re staying?”

  He nods. “Just me.”

  We open the door to reveal one spacious room with a wall for a kitchen, a small sofa and two chairs around the fireplace making up the living room. There is a desk in the corner, and a bed along the far wall taking up most of the space.

  It’s warm inside, thanks to a fire brewing in the fireplace.

  The exhaustion is plain on us both, Edison constantly rubbing his eyes, me yawning every few minutes. We sit together on the sofa in front of the crackling flames.

  “Do you believe me that nothing bad is going to happen to George?” he says.

  “I don’t know. How am I supposed to believe anything you say now?” Now, or ever again.

  “But can you at least trust me that I would never let anything happen to George, or Trisha or Chelsea? And I won’t let anything happen to you either.”

  “Maybe I could trust you if you sorted out some of the other lies.” He’s told so many I wonder if I’d be able to untangle them. And what makes me think he’ll tell the truth now? Just because I feel like he’s the first person who’s ever really seen me? Just because I felt like I was that person for him, too? But it’s not enough to trust him after what I overheard, no matter how badly I wish I could.

  “What do you want to know?” he says.

  I don’t know what to ask first, so I start at the very beginning. “What were you really doing on the island?”

  “I was hiding.” He alters his answer. “I was supposed to be hiding. Someone was sending threats to Stevens. He’s the senator who was in the room—” I nod so he knows he doesn’t have to explain. “Someone was trying to blackmail him with an incriminating recording of him—something from years ago. We didn’t know who was behind the threats, so we made arrangements to meet him. We said we’d pay for the recording. Archaletta didn’t know who he was meeting either. Which is probably why he brought his friends—other criminals interested in a payday who would back him up—even though Archaletta was supposed to come alone.”

  “They’re all criminals?” I say, thinking of the unmarked van and the disguises.

  “Archaletta wasn’t even his real name. And the two men he had with him aren’t upstanding citizens either, from what I’ve seen of them.”

  It’s a good sign that he’s at least told me the truth about Archaletta’s fake name, matching what the detectives told me.

  “Why were you the only one who went to the island to meet him?”

  “It wasn’t really going to be a meeting. We just needed to see who showed up. I’m not a Duval, and if people don’t know the Duvals well, they don’t know who I am.”

  The text message on Edison’s phone when I found it on the island had said, What did you see?—I remember.

  “But Archaletta did know who you were.” Goose bumps form on my arms remembering the way they’d called his name in the forest on the island, the terrified look on Edison’s face.

  “Yes. And they spotted me right away. Archaletta tried to get information out of me. He wanted to know how he could get paid for the recording. I wouldn’t talk, and that didn’t sit well with him. I saw the knife strapped to his belt and managed to pull it. You know the rest.”

  “What happened to Archaletta?”

  “No one will ever find him.”

  “He’s missing, Edison.”

  He nods. “He’s a criminal and he’s missing, and his friends have what they asked for, and the recording is no longer a problem, and that’s all you need to know.”

  “That’s why the other two from the island came to the Duval offices?”

  “We thought it might be safer, talking to them at the office. Negotiating with them wasn’t a problem. Everyone has a price.”

  “You and Sepp aren’t afraid they’re going to use the payoff against you?” I think of what I saw on my run—the hidden SUV, the disguises, the guns.

  “There’s always that chance. But our deals are hard to resist.”

  “Why do the Duvals care about protecting Senator Stevens?” This is the easiest part for me to work out on my own based on what I heard, but I ask him anyway, hoping he’ll tell me more.

  “The Duvals and Stevens have an arrangement. He helps us and we help him. It’s a trade of secrets. I don’t know all of them, and I think it’s better not to know.” He stares at the roaring fire, the flames reflect in his glassy eyes. “Some secrets are traps.”

  “What else do you know about it?”

  “Too much.” He sighs. “Enough that I’ll never get away.”

  “Get away?”

  He waves his hand, dismissing this.

  “What does any of this have to do with George?”

  Edison shifts so his arm is resting along the back of the couch and he’s closer to me. “George is on the recording with Stevens. I’ve never seen it; I’ve never seen it because it’s not necessary for me to know what’s on it. All that matters is that it’s incriminating somehow for both of them. It could easily destroy Stevens’s career—probably George’s too—if it got out.”

  “Why does Archaletta have this recording?”

  “I have no idea.” I’m starting to get the impression Edison is on a need-to-know basis when it comes to the affairs of the Duvals. “But it’s convenient timing, coming at Stevens with this kind of blackmail right as he’s turning into a political powerhouse. People are starting to recognize him.” He turns so he’s facing me. “That’s why we had to keep George close. In case Archaletta figured out who he was and tried to blackmail him, too. Or tried to use him against Stevens. We were never going to hurt George.”

  I watch the fire when I ask the next question, and try to ignore how my first instinct is to hold my breath, waiting to hear the answer. “How did you really meet Chelsea?”

  “We were looking into George Brown. We thought the best way to get to know him would be through his daughter. We had her followed and knew she loved to go to the café in her neighborhood every Sunday morning for a chocolate croissant. We needed to make sure George wasn’t a threat, that he wasn’t being pressured to talk. We needed a reason to know him, to be close to him, while we secured the recording from Archaletta.”

  I feel the most shameful stroke of relief hearing this, knowing that nothing between them is perfect, because none of it is real. He’s given Chelsea manufactured happiness and artificial affection, and it’s
not fair that he’s standing in her way of finding the real thing. Maybe nothing between Edison and me is real either and I’m only getting closer to him because I’ve seen and heard too much. I’ve lied for him on more than one occasion and maybe he thinks the price for my continued silence is middle-of-the-night meetings and secret boat rides. On the boat he’d pushed me away and then after I lied to the police, he met me at the half-built house. He set up candles. He asked me about regret. He kissed me.

  I lean back, away from him, feeling tricked again and it’s just as bad as the day I learned he was Edison and Finn was a lie. He senses the shift and turns toward me. I sit on my hands, in case he tries to grab one, in case they try to reach for him. I turn my head so I can’t see him—so he can’t see me—in case my face shows how hurt I am.

  “It’s not over yet,” he says. “The recording, the payoff, there’s still some stuff to take care of to make sure it’s really never going to touch Stevens, or George. Otherwise—” His hand gently touches my arm. “Come on, you know if it were up to me, I wouldn’t be with her.”

  I let myself look at him. He’s closer than I expected. He sees something in my expression that makes his hand drop from my arm. “You said you had to be with Chelsea because she’d met your mother, and you could never be with someone who didn’t know that part of your life.”

  “It was a lie.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Come on,” he pleads. “You know why I told you that—because we were getting too close.” He brings his hand to my face but is careful about touching me. He lets the tips of his fingers graze the hair that’s come loose from my ponytail. “Remember what you told me,” he says quietly, “about the reasons you lied to your mom.”

  To protect her. That’s how he’d defined it and I’d agreed. Even though it was selfish, it was also to keep her away from the trouble I was getting into; things I didn’t want her to know, because I didn’t want to hurt her.

  “How am I supposed to believe that?” My lip trembles. I’m scared of how much I am ready to let myself go, to let myself trust at least that confession from him.

  “I told you all of this so that you would know the truth about what you heard at the party and what you saw on the island. So you would know what you lied for and that there’s nothing for you to be afraid of,” he says, his hand returning to my shoulder, moving up the side of my face, so I can’t turn away from him again. “But you have to believe me about how I feel about you. It’s why I told you all this. It’s why I won’t tell you anything else.”

  My eyes fall shut and I feel his breath on my lips before he kisses me so gently and hesitantly it’s like he’s still waiting for me to tell him I believe him. I don’t tell him this, but I do kiss him back, turning the soft kiss into something that’s fierce and electric.

  Is this what it means to exist in two worlds; trusting him enough to let him press his mouth against my lips, my neck, along my collarbone, lift my arms so he can remove my sweatshirt and my tank top, lie on the floor with him, skin to skin, letting his weight shift over me and believing him when he says I am safe and he wants to protect me, while having no faith that he’s given me all the information I should have and his confessions aren’t still muddled by lies and ulterior motives, hiding a bigger, much worse secret?

  I don’t tell him that right now, with him, like this, is the closest I’ve ever let someone really get to me, and it’s not how it was with Trevor, or how I ever dreamed it could be—like the sum of me is wrapped up tight, rolling between his fingers, and I know that even though he could, he won’t crush me. But he’s looking at me like he knows; like he feels the same way. I don’t tell him that there are some lines I can’t let myself cross, even though my betrayal is already deep and unforgivable, but he never reaches for my shorts, the way he did my shirt, and when the fire starts to die and the darkness closes in on us and the electricity between us surges stronger, he moves away, takes a blanket from the sofa, and lies down behind me so my back is pressed against his stomach and his arms are around me.

  I shift so I can see him. His smile is beautiful. It is everything. It is the moon and Mars and Dubai and the beaches of Thailand and the top of the Eiffel Tower.

  I watch as he slowly closes his eyes. My eyes fall shut, too.

  I want nothing else, not a single thing in this godforsaken world, except to lie here with him, listening to his breathing getting deeper and slower. A forbidden and buried thought comes to the surface: I could die right now. Happily.

  And another: I’m in love with him. Madly.

  Chapter 43

  We wake up right before sunrise. The sky is hazy with the glow of the sun and the birds are chirping as he drives me back to the New Browns’ cottage.

  The morning light illuminates our surroundings and the beauty is overwhelming. The lush green trees and the golden valleys that stretch for miles. Everywhere the Duvals have taken us, it’s been astoundingly picturesque. But at what price? So much beauty, but what does it cost? How many lies? How many secrets? How many bruises and backdoor payoffs?

  And how does this kind of life sustain itself?

  “Edison?” He slows the golf cart and looks at me. “What would your mother say?” He turns away, his eyes full of worry. “If she knew,” I add.

  He stares ahead as he drives us forward. “She said, ‘You’re going to have a beautiful life, my boy.’”

  I sneak in through the front door, and Rosie is in the living room with Phoebe, who squeals when she sees me. I’m ready to blurt out lies about having gone on a morning run, but Rosie picks Phoebe up and takes her into the kitchen, not acknowledging me at all.

  The plane ride home is full of quiet cheerfulness; the New Browns and Chelsea already nostalgic for last night, because it was packed with enough memories for an entire summer. The Duvals are all relaxed. Oswald smiles that smile I used to think of as resetting the room, bringing everyone together, that now looks terrifying in its friendliness. Chelsea rests her head on Edison’s shoulder, and Edison struggles to keep his eyes open. Sepp and I play cards.

  The Duvals aren’t staying at Cross Cove this week; they have business out of town and friends to visit in the Hamptons, they say.

  Since Edison leaves in the morning, I take a guess that he will be at the half-built house tonight to see me alone one more time before he goes. But when I arrive, the house is empty, the platform is dark.

  Chapter 44

  With the Duvals gone for a week, Chelsea and I spend the next few days on our own beach. Phoebe has developed a cough that has Trisha and George keeping her inside, steaming up the bathrooms to help her sleep, so Chelsea and I are mostly left alone.

  It’s just us in the water, in the sun, sometimes laughing, sometimes lost in our own thoughts. We can be quiet together, and I like that. Sometimes we float listlessly on our inflatables, sometimes we ride together on the same paddleboard, trying to go faster but always giving up before we get to the other side of the cove.

  No matter how close I get to Chelsea, it can never be as close as I wish. I can still feel the wall between us, put there by me, built strong by the betrayal of knowing that Edison is pretending with her and I am, too.

  We’re lying in the sand under the shade of the giant red beach umbrella we dragged out of the garage, eating apricots and salt-and-vinegar chips and drinking sparkling water, laughing about the sand that comes out of our hair every time we move. Somehow, over these past days with Chelsea, I feel comfortable with a perfectly predictable day.

  “What do you want to do next year?” she asks, something she’s inquired about before.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her, a particular kind of sadness creeping over me, knowing I have no plans and no idea even how to start thinking about the future or how I fit into it. “It’ll come to you,” she says. She sucks the last juice off her apricot and tosses the pit, aiming for the center of our tube. When she misses, she gets up and retrieves it.

  “You know what scares
me the most?” Chelsea says later that night. The two of us are sitting on lawn chairs eating popcorn, waiting for the fireworks we never miss.

  “Spiders? Snakes? Sharks?” I tease her. She throws popcorn at me.

  “Bats!” she screams. I’m not sure if that’s what she was going to say originally, but then she launches into a story about camping with George and her mom, before Phoebe was born, how they found the perfect spot in the forest to set up their camping gear, and then when the sun started going down, they looked to the sky and saw a cluster of bats above them, dipping and diving, and she spent the rest of the night in the tent, even when George tried to get her to come out for s’mores.

  George never took me camping. But we have old sleeping bags and a red tent collecting dust in our garage. And we have photos of when he and my mom would go, when they first started dating. They look delighted and fresh-faced, so much hope in their eyes and smiles that didn’t know any better. I saw those photos, and I felt bad for them. I wonder what Chelsea would say if I told her this; if I were allowed to let her see the dark parts of me that I hide; if I were allowed to be as open with her as she is with me.

  Some nights, watching George be gentle and sweet and loving with the New Brown girls, I feel overcome with confusion. Who is he, really? What else is in his past that no one in his life knows about? What’s his role in the threats that Senator Stevens had to be protected from? Is he really safe from it now? Are the rest of us? Who is this man who has so many sides to him that he can conceal so easily?

  “Chels?” I say. She turns to look at me. “What really scares you?”

  “Loneliness.”