• • •
THE AIRPORT IS STILL CLOSED. We are little more than twenty-four hours away from our scheduled flight back to Los Angeles and the fucking airport is still fucking closed.
This is what Roberto tells me. Roberto knows this from making a phone call on the mustard-yellow rotary phone mounted on the kitchen wall. Telmex still has not restored our service and I am on the verge of a Big Red–style tantrum about this.
There was an all-inclusive horse ranch near Solvang that made our final list of destinations. Why didn’t we go to the fucking horse ranch? God, how I wish we’d gone that route, even though I’ve never much cared for horses. It would have been a far better place to gather for the birthdays if for no other reason than it’s only a two-hour drive from Los Angeles. I could have hopped in the car and driven through the dark. I’d be in my house right now, sitting in my kitchen, staring out the window onto my backyard, instead of sitting here, in this foreign place, an incalculable distance from my life back home.
It is very early in the morning.
I spent hours watching minutes go by. Time collapsing. I stared at my iPhone, the clock its one remaining utility—I’ll never take another picture in this place. When it turned 6:00, an hour I convinced myself was a justifiable hour to wake the caretaker of one’s luxury vacation rental, I knocked on Roberto’s secret bedroom door.
“Que pasa?” he mumbled. Clearly he’d been dead asleep. This made me feel even more embarrassed for appearing at his doorstep at this ungodly hour.
“What is happening?” he asked again, awake enough now to remember I don’t speak Spanish, as if I don’t know what que pasa means. “Everything is okay?”
“No,” I said. “Everything is most definitely not okay.”
“You wait,” he said, closing the door.
I thought about opening it. Following him, uninvited, into his glorified closet of a room. Hiding out in there until he and Luisa would have to leave to cook breakfast, make beds, wash towels, arrange flowers, mix drinks, or any of the myriad magic tricks they perform each day to further the illusion of perfection vacationers seek and pay a pretty penny for when coming to Villa Azul Paraiso.
Would the others know where to look for me? Do the others even know about the secret door to the secret room?
I feel no compulsion to escape the children. They are not why I want to hide in Roberto’s room and come out only when the taxi is idling, ready to drive me to the airport. I have no issue with Ivan and his neediness, or Malcolm and his recklessness, or even Clementine, whose secrecy is just part of the natural order of things. A mother need not know, and probably should not know, the intimate life of her child; the same is not true of a wife and her husband.
By the time Roberto reopened his door wearing his white faux doctor’s coat, I was crying again. I thought I’d stopped. That I was through with tears. I was wrong.
“It is your daughter?” he asked.
Why else would a full-grown woman clearly not bleeding from an open wound demonstrate this sort of pain and anguish—it must have something to do with her child. Is this who we become when we become mothers? People who can feel deeply only on behalf of others, who have lost the right to cry for ourselves?
“No,” I told Roberto. “She is fine. It’s me. I need to go home.”
“Is something wrong? Back in your home? Where you are from?”
“Yes,” I said. “Something is wrong back in my home where I am from.”
“I am sorry,” he said. “How can I help?”
“There’s still no wi-fi. I need to reach the airline. I know my flight is tomorrow, but I’m hoping to leave today.”
“We go to the kitchen,” he said. “I make for you the coffee. I call from there.”
He moved toward the stairs but I didn’t follow, so he pivoted and returned to where I stood, motionless.
“Should I get for you your husband?”
“No. Not my husband. I don’t want to see my husband.”
He rubbed some sleep from his eye. “Okay,” he said. “I do not get him. You come with me. I make for you the coffee.”
He took me by the elbow, and led me up the stairs. In the kitchen he sat me down at the table and then pushed the button on the coffeemaker he’d prepared last night as per usual.
“You do not sleep?” he asked.
“No.”
“It is early for calling the airline. But first I find out if the airport is open.”
I don’t know who he dialed or what he said but somehow he managed, on the ancient rotary telephone, to discover that, no, the airport is not open. There are no flights landing or leaving Puerto Vallarta. This is what he tells me now.
I start to cry again.
“Is there any other way?” I ask him. “Any other way to get out of here?”
“No,” he says. “I am sorry. There is no other airport close with flights to United States. And anyway, many roads, they are blocked. But it is okay. You are safe here.”
I am not safe here.
I am anything but safe here.
Solly knew about Peter and Gavriella, and what is perhaps worse, even though I’ve known Solly longer, is that Ingrid, a woman, a wife, a mother—she knew about Peter and Gavriella, too.
Imagine being trapped in a house with your cheating husband and your best friends who have all conspired to keep the same secret.
Oh, the humiliation.
When I thought I knew Solly was cheating on Ingrid I worked up the courage to tell her. It took me a few days, and a few slugs of tequila, but I did it. Ingrid has known for months, and yes, she did finally tell me, but only in the face of what I’d said to her: my funhouse mirror version of the facts. We sat together, Ingrid and I, sharing the bottle, side by side on that couch, and I told her. I felt expansive. I felt lucky. I thought I was holding keys.
And then she reached for my hand and said: It’s Peter.
For a brief flash I thought that it was Peter with whom Solly was having the affair. It even made sense to me. That explains so much. But then I saw her face, soft with pity.
I don’t remember what happened next. Knowledge, slow at first and then picking up speed, like a hurricane, winds clocking in at 200 miles per hour and gusts approaching 250. I do not know the difference between winds and gusts, truth and lies.
Time collapses. I do not know how long we sat across from each other, the bottle between us on the table.
I know that I asked her, finally: “Why did you come on this vacation?”
I whisper-screamed this at her. The last thing I wanted was to wake Peter. Or Solly. Or Clementine, who does not need to know the intimate lives of her parents.
Why did you come on this vacation? How could you let me plan this trip? Why didn’t you say: no, I won’t go? Why didn’t you say: I can’t go along and pretend?
“Why are you so angry with me?” she answered in a true whisper, not a whisper-scream. A whisper of regret and remorse. A conflicted whisper, with a hint of self-righteousness. It was a prism of a whisper, refracting a rainbow of reactions to the moment in which she’d suddenly found herself. “Shouldn’t you save your anger for Peter?”
My anger does not need saving. It does not need rationing. I have plenty of anger to spread around. My anger runneth over.
“He’s the one who’s been lying to you for all these months,” she continued. “I told Solly . . . I begged him to fire Gavriella. But there are rules about that sort of thing. So I told him he had to make Peter stop. And Solly tried. He even threatened to dissolve their business partnership.” She sighed. “It went on for too long. And when Peter finally did end it, well . . . Gavriella . . . she just won’t accept it. She has abandonment issues and daddy issues, a lethal combination, really. It’s been a nightmare. She’s been a nightmare. Solly is trying to handle it. He’s even consulted a lawyer. Look. Peter loves
you. He never planned on leaving you for her. It’s not like what happened with Solly and me. It really isn’t. As cliché as it may be, I think you can chalk it up to a midlife crisis. Not that it’s a reasonable excuse. But Peter never loved her. He loves you, Jenna.”
Still not looking at Ingrid. Not looking at anything. I stared at the bottle on the table between us with an unfocused gaze. All I could see was blur.
“I’m so, so sorry.” She took a deep, slow breath from her center. Something she likely learned in a meditation class. Something she paid an expert to teach her to get her through the tough times she doesn’t have to face because she lives a perfectly charmed life. “I wanted to tell you. I really did. But I thought Peter should be the one to do so.”
“So I’m the cuckquean.”
“Sorry?”
“Please. Just . . . leave me alone,” I said, speaking now in a controlled voice that did not match the hurricane within me. “Go back to your sleeping husband. Go back to your weird kid who still shares your bed. Just . . . go.”
She stood, momentarily forgetting her perfect yogi posture. Back curved, shoulders slumped, head hanging.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Roberto slides a cup of coffee in front of me. “You drink,” he says.
I stare at it.
“Please,” he says.
I take a sip. It’s warm and earthy.
Luisa enters. Her hair, usually up in a neat bun, is down at her shoulders. She’s also given up on her uniform. She wears a gray sweatshirt with her white cotton pants. I hadn’t noticed her natural beauty. Had barely noticed her looks at all. Luisa does not need a diet of complex carbohydrates eaten off of lead-free paper plates to attain her good looks. All she has to do is be seen, and this morning, I see her.
“Esta ella enferma?” she asks Roberto.
He shrugs. She comes and takes a seat next to me at the table and puts her hand on mine. I have to hold myself back from collapsing into her arms and sobbing into her loosened hair.
“Estas bien?” she asks me.
“No,” I say. “I am not bien.”
She pats my hand. Roberto brings her a cup of coffee. She holds it up, as if toasting me.
“My husband has been having an affair with his assistant,” I tell her.
Luisa shakes her head at me.
“Everyone knew but me. I don’t want to see him. I can’t see him. God. I’ve got to get out of here.”
I put my forehead down on the table. In this moment, I can’t even stand to have on me the eyes of a woman who doesn’t understand what I’m saying, who has no comprehension of my pathetic situation.
Luisa and Roberto have a long back-and-forth in hushed, tender tones.
Roberto taps my shoulder. “Luisa say you need sleep,” he tells me. “She say women, they need sleep for to deal with this. So you do not do or say things you do not mean. Is not good for to talk with husband if too tired.”
While I hate few things more than being told I’m tired when what I am is upset, I have to admit that she’s right. I’m exhausted. I’m not thinking clearly. At this moment, Luisa is my best friend in the world—Roberto, too—and I should listen to my two best and only friends, and I should go get some sleep.
“You’re right,” I say. “I need to sleep. But where? There’s nowhere for me to go.”
Luisa says something to Roberto. He says something back. They look at me, then back at each other, then back at me, like in a Ping-Pong match.
There’s a bench in the kitchen. I could lie down on that. It doesn’t look comfortable, but I’m so very tired. “Maybe I’ll just stay in here.”
Luisa stands up from the table and puts her hands on my shoulders. She grabs them and lifts a little. “Vienes conmigo.”
“You go with Luisa,” Roberto tells me. “She will make for you the bed.”
I’m too tired to argue. Too tired to talk. Too tired to do anything but follow.
I figure Luisa must be taking me to the living room with the TV in it, but instead she leads me back downstairs, to the secret door to the secret bedroom. She motions for me to stay, so I do, I stand there like an obedient dog while she darts around the corner and underneath the staircase, where the washer and dryer are hidden. She returns with clean sheets in her arms.
“No,” I say to her. “I don’t need you to change the bed. Please. You do enough. I don’t mind. I’m just going to close my eyes for a little bit. I really don’t need fresh sheets.”
She stares at me while I speak but it’s clear she doesn’t understand or care about whatever it is I’m trying to say. She’s going to do what she’s set out to do and that is to change the sheets on their bed for me. It’s then that I realize maybe she isn’t doing it for me; she’s doing it for them. I may not care about sleeping on their used sheets, but she may very well care about sleeping on mine.
She opens the door and turns on the exposed overhead lightbulb. She switches the sheets quickly, like a pro.
“Aqui,” she says, patting the bed. “Para ti.”
I want to hug her but that feels inappropriate so instead I end up bowing a little in her direction, which ends up feeling even more inappropriate. “Gracias,” I say as I crawl into the crisp, fresh sheets.
She turns to leave and switches off the light. Before she closes the door behind her I call out, “Luisa?”
“Sí?”
I sit up in the bed. “Please . . . no tell the people upstairs where I am?” I point to the ceiling. “No tell my husband? No tell anybody that I’m here. Please?”
She smiles at me. “Sí.”
I have no idea if she understands me. She closes the door behind her.
I’m cast into utter darkness.
* * *
• • •
I WAKE UP six hours later.
I check my phone. No wi-fi signal.
I lie still, listening for sounds. Splashing in the pool. Feet on the floor above me. I hear nothing. This secret bedroom is an impenetrable fortress.
By now everyone must be awake. By now they must be wondering where I am. By now Ingrid has told Solly who has told Peter. By now they know that I know.
The fact that nobody has come knocking on my door proves that either Luisa understood when I asked her not to tell anyone where I’d gone or nobody is ready to face me.
I get up. The darkness is deep. The room has no definition. I shuffle carefully to the wall that faces the foot of the bed and I make my way down it, palm over palm, until I find the switch by the front door. I flip it. The bulb buzzes to life and summons a group of moths. An eclipse. This is what a group of moths is called. I know this because Peter and I have made a habit over the years of collecting and then quizzing each other on the proper group names for various species. A shrewdness of apes. A mischief of mice. A cyclone of scorpions.
A trio of liars.
I crack open the door and peek outside. The midday light is blinding. The swimming pool is still and all six loungers lie empty. I push the door open a bit more until I can see the whole of the pool area and a large swath of the beach out front. No sign of life.
I close the door again and step into the tiny bathroom where I splash my face with cold water and wipe away the black from yesterday’s mascara with some scratchy toilet paper. I’m wearing what I wore to sleep before the sirens woke me: cropped drawstring pajama bottoms and a tank top. I could use a shower and I debate hopping into the one in the corner that has no curtain, but instead I grab from the sink the stick of deodorant that must belong to Luisa—the flowers on the label are a giveaway—and slather it on.
I’d like to cover up a bit more. My tank top is cut low in the armholes and I’m wearing no bra, something that didn’t bother me this morning in the kitchen with Roberto and Luisa, but now, with six hours of sleep in the bank, I’m acutely aware of t
he copious amount of side boob I’m showing.
I pick up Luisa’s white coat from a hook on the back of the door. It’s short sleeved and has buttons instead of zippers. It’s what she wears when she cooks in the kitchen with her hair done up in a bun. I slip it on, open the door and step outside.
Once I’m standing on the patio by the pool, underneath the overhang, I can hear that there’s music playing above me. I can’t place it either by artist or by genre. It’s not party music. Not eighties pop. It’s not one of the lugubrious folk singers Ingrid loves who Solly will, when he’s feeling generous, put in the rotation. It’s not jazz building to a resolution that will never come. I shake it off. What do I care what they’re listening to?
I’m not sure of my next move. I’d like to go be with Clementine, to ally myself with her against everybody else, but I know I can’t draw her into my crisis; I can’t force her to choose a side. It isn’t fair.
But oh, to huddle up with her in her room, or on the couch by the TV for an encore showing of Charlotte’s Web. To retreat back into the recesses of her childhood with her, back to when she sang off-key in a tutu and wasn’t having sex. Back when the introduction of this child into our young marriage gave us what the poet Donald Hall called a third thing, an essential something two individuals can turn their collective gaze upon. A project, a cause, a passion like a shared love of architecture. More often than not, that third thing is a child. But unlike a shared love of architecture, a child will eventually pack up and leave you. And then what? Where do you turn your collective gaze?
If I walk toward the gate that leads out onto the beach I run the risk of being seen by anyone who stands near either the second- or the third-floor balcony. I do not want to be seen. Not in my current state of distress, with my side boob and stolen chef’s coat. Instead I stay under the overhang. I go around and behind the staircase and skirt the side of the villa where various unsightly utilitarian units are kept—heating, water filtration, power generators. These are guesses of course. What do I know about what’s needed to run a luxury villa in a foreign country?
I squeeze between two of these units. They’re large, loud and hot enough either from the sun or from doing their job that I jump back as I brush one with my elbow. Beyond them is a fence. It’s only chest-high and I climb up and over it easily, even without shoes. I land in a patch of dirt only a few yards from the beach.
Tomorrow There Will Be Sun Page 21