Here Today, Gone to Maui Page 10

  She held up the size-six bikini top. I have coasters that are bigger.

  I shook my head. “I think the bottom would be too loose.” I waited for her to agree. She didn’t.

  “Besides,” I continued. “It seems wrong—to act like we’re still on vacation, while Jimmy . . .” My voice trailed off as my gaze fell on the big, comfortable bed. I thought of Tiara and Jimmy on the bed. I thought of their pictures. “Do you want to get a drink?”

  “There’s all kinds of stuff in the minibar,” she said. “Beer and wine and those cute little bottles. Jimmy said to take whatever I wanted. Help yourself.” She sat down at the triangular table.

  I stayed standing. “Thanks, but I’d rather go somewhere else.” A few days ago I couldn’t wait to get into this room; now I couldn’t wait to get out of it. “After you’ve checked your calendar, I mean.”

  “Oh—that.” She popped up from her chair. I followed her into the room but waited while she went into the bathroom, returning with a round plastic case.

  “Birth-control pills?” That was her calendar?

  “Mm.” She squinted and then looked up for a moment, calculating. “We met twenty-four days ago,” she finally announced.

  Three and a half weeks. That would have been days after Jimmy had booked the Maui tickets. So, he hadn’t planned to bring both of us over; he made the decision after meeting Tiara. Did that make things better or worse? Did it matter?

  Downstairs, next to the penguin enclosure, there was an open-air lounge—the Weeping Banyan, it was called, after a giant, twisting tree that grew in the middle, providing shade for fashionable guests and a perch for birds looking to poop on them. Unfortunately, the Weeping Banyan served as an espresso bar until five o’clock (when it turned into a bar-bar) and it was just shy of four. I definitely needed something stronger than an espresso.

  “Guess we’ll have to hit the pool bar,” Tiara said with fake disappointment, tossing her dark hair off her face. She was dressed for the pool area, of course. She’d topped off her white bikini with a cover-up—one of those fishnet things that doesn’t actually cover anything, just softens the edges. As for footwear, she’d gone with bright pink high-heeled flip-flops.

  “Maybe I should just leave,” I said, suddenly craving darkness and solitude.

  “Oh, no!” She turned on her rubber heels and grabbed me by the wrist. “We still have so much more to talk about!”

  It was true: we did. I’m not one to leave questions unanswered, so it was best just to get it over with. Perhaps we could find a quiet seat at the pool bar—under an umbrella, maybe, away from the crowds.

  Or—not.

  “YOU DIDN’T TELL ME THE BAR WAS IN A CAVE.” I had to shout to be heard over a waterfall. There was another one at the end of the man-made cavern, where swimmers could splash through to the biggest section of the pool. In the shadowy water next to the bar, a pale, hefty couple snuggled on a ledge, sipping frothy drinks from plastic cups.

  “I KNOW—ISN’T IT COOL?” Tiara said. “IT’S CALLED THE GROTTO BAR.”

  When Tiara sat down, the men a few chairs down swung their heads to look at her, even though her tummy got all poochy when she sat.

  The bartender gave her a big, friendly smile. He gave me a big, friendly smile, too, which just demonstrates the Power of the Tip.

  When two women joined the men at the end of the bar, the men wisely turned their attention away from Tiara. I had to admit: she wasn’t merely beautiful, she was interesting-looking. Her mouth was full and wide, her nose child-small. Her light brown eyes, almost gold and flecked with green, were practically iridescent against her naturally tan skin.

  Tiara ordered a banana daiquiri. A daiquiri seemed too festive under the circumstances, so I ordered a mai tai instead.

  “Jimmy and I came here on our first morning,” Tiara said wistfully (and right into my ear so I could hear her over the waterfall). “After we made love. I had a piña colada, but he had a Coke because he didn’t want to get too sleepy.”

  That would be the morning when I went to the convenience store. I remembered Jimmy coming back to the room with damp hair. He said he’d been calling customers from the beach. He said he’d jumped in the ocean.

  “Did Jimmy swim in the pool that morning?” I said into her ear. Weirdly, it would feel like less of a betrayal if he’d told the truth about an ocean swim.

  She looked up, considering. “Nope. He went in the ocean instead, which I thought was kind of weird.”

  A family—mother, father, two squealing boys—came from under the waterfall and walked through the pool next to the bar. “Cool!” one of the little boys yelled. “There’s a TV in here!” It flickered on the wall behind the bartender, captions running along the bottom. There was an aquarium, too, filled with tropical fish. It seemed sad, somehow, for the fish to be cooped up here, so close to the ocean.

  “How did you meet Jimmy?” Tiara asked me.

  “I’m not ready to talk about it.”

  “Do you need a few days?”

  “No, I need a few mai tais.”

  She laughed. It was the first time I had heard her laugh. Actually, it was the first time I had seen her smile. She had a beautiful smile: bright white, with teeth just imperfect enough to give her some character, and a little dimple on her left cheek.

  Bitch.

  “I met him at the restaurant,” I said. “He was my waiter.” What had once sounded free-spirited, fated, and funny now seemed cheap.

  “Me, too,” she said, sounding wounded.

  We didn’t say anything for a moment. It was too painful. Plus, there were several blenders going at once, and it sounded like we were in a subterranean machine shop.

  Tiara signed the drinks to the room. “Jimmy said I could sign anything to the room from anywhere in the hotel, even the shops. You like my shoes?” She stuck out a leg to show off a pink high-heeled flip-flop.

  “Mm,” I said.

  “Sixty dollars. But he said I was worth it.”

  Did she not remember who I was and why we were here?

  The bartender turned on another blender.

  “Do you want to take the drinks outside?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “LET’S GO OUTSIDE.”

  “What?”

  The bartender turned off the blender. “OUTSIDE!” I screamed, my voice echoing off the walls of the grotto.

  “Sure,” Tiara said. “You just had to say so.”

  The pool lounges had cushy green pads and white frames. We claimed two under a thatched tiki umbrella and put our drinks on a white plastic table. From there, we could see the children’s pool (complete with gravel beach and pop-up fountains) and the outside of the waterfall, bougainvillea spilling around the edges. Beyond a suspended rope bridge, a waterslide expelled shrieking riders. Around us, half-naked, dangerously pale adults glistened with suntan oil while their children scurried around, damp and squealing.

  Day one of my itinerary: hang around the Hyatt pool. So the vacation wasn’t a dead loss, I thought grimly.

  At her request, I gave Tiara a brief synopsis of Jimmy’s and my relationship, and then I asked, “How did you and Jimmy get together?” I didn’t really want to know, but it would have been rude not to ask.

  She slipped on oversize sunglasses and leaned back on her lounge. “Kinda like you, I was going out with this guy, supernice, totally into me, bought me lots of shit, but the sex just wasn’t that hot, you know?”

  She turned to me and slipped her sunglasses down to make eye contact. Then she pushed them back up. “Plus, he was married, and even though he said he was thinking about leaving his wife, I had this feeling like he was leading me on. He was really rich, though. That was cool. But he was, like, a lot older than me, so I kept feeling like I was screwing my grandpa.”

  I sucked on my mai tai straw, only to realize that the plastic cup was empty. “Yeah. That sounds exactly like my situation. Except for the grandpa bit.” I held up my hand to get the
waitress’s attention. She wore blue board shorts and bright white sneakers. She raised her eyebrows as if to ask, Another one?

  “Just a Diet Coke,” I said (I had to drive). “And charge it to her room.”

  “So, anyways,” Tiara continued, fluttering her pink nails. “We’re at the restaurant, Jimmy’s restaurant, and I’m just taking my first sip of champagne—the good shit, really expensive—and I hear this voice say, ‘Excuse me, is this your purse?’ ’Cuz it’d dropped off my chair. Jimmy wasn’t even my waiter, but he just, like, came to my rescue, like a knight in shining armor.” She took a deep breath, which made her chest even huger, and let out a long sigh. Then she slipped a finger behind her big sunglasses to wipe away a tear.

  Old guy. Champagne.

  “Wait a minute. The guy you were with—silver hair, distinguished-looking? Ate there a lot?” I remembered the sugar daddy. “Mr. Richardson?”

  “Mr. Robertson.”

  “Right. Jimmy said he was a regular. Brought in a new young woman every month.” Tiara looked stunned. “But maybe he cared about you,” I said quickly, not wanting to hurt her, in spite of everything. “Maybe he really would have left his wife for you.” (And, gee, isn’t that a romantic thought.)

  “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s just—if Mr. Robertson brought in all these other girls . . . how many of his dates do you think Jimmy picked up? Just the ones who dropped their purses on the floor?”

  I remembered how Jimmy tricked Geoffrey into leaving me alone. It seemed cute at the time. “Maybe you didn’t drop your purse, after all. Maybe he knocked it over when you weren’t looking.”

  There were two of us here; how many more were in California? And that waitering job: was it really for the extra cash? Or did he just do it to meet women?

  “That first night—did Jimmy make love to you on the beach?” I asked.

  Her face crumpled. “I had sand in my crack for days.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “What an asshole.”

  “No!” She really looked upset by that assessment. “What Jimmy and I had was real.”

  “Sure it was,” I muttered. “He just forgot to mention that he had another girlfriend.”

  “I thought there might be someone else,” she said quietly.

  “Why?”

  “He was always changing plans at the last minute or hurrying off with some lame excuse. But I didn’t want to screw things up. I figured, if I just gave him time, he’d realize I was his perfect match. But . . .” She looked up from under her long lashes before dropping her gaze to her long legs. “I never wanted to hurt anyone. If I’d known you then . . .” She let the sentiment go unfinished. “Do you really think there were others?”

  I thought back to my nights alone and my anonymous phone call to his office. “I always wondered about Ana.”

  “Who?”

  “You know, the office manager. He made a big deal about me not calling his office.”

  “Me, too,” she said, nibbling on a long fingernail.

  “I worried it was because he had something going on with Ana,” I said. “Or maybe he was juggling so many women that he didn’t want to get caught.”

  “Do you really think there are more women?” Tiara squeaked, sounding hurt again.

  My diamond—if it was mine—caught the light. How many rings could he possibly afford? “It was probably just you and me.”

  On top of the tiki umbrellas, birds hopped around, chirping and pecking, hoping to score a stray potato chip, content with a lifetime of crumbs. The ocean breezes tickled us from behind. My eyes stung with tears; not just for the loss of Jimmy, but for the loss of hope: for a better man, a better me.

  Tiara suddenly sat up and gasped. “What time is it?”

  I checked my watch. “Almost six.”

  She popped off the lounge. “I’ve got to get to check-in at the cabanas—I’m scheduled for an oceanfront massage.”

  “A massage?”

  She adjusted her mesh cover-up. “I scheduled it my first day here. I forgot to cancel it, which means they’ll charge me, anyway.” The cabanas were right behind us, at the edge of the beach, little teak rooms draped with canvas for privacy.

  “I know Jimmy would want me to go,” Tiara said. “Especially since I’ve been under all this stress.” She paused to blink back tears. “It was supposed to be a couples’ massage. We were each going to have our own masseuse.”

  “Nice,” I said sarcastically.

  She touched my arm. “Why don’t you come? You can take Jimmy’s place.”

  I tried to say no, but I was thinking, Ew.

  “New,” I said.

  “It would be fun,” she chirped, squeezing my arm (and pinching me just the tiniest bit with her talons). “We’d be like sorority sisters. Or sister-sisters.” On any other day, the thought of Beth and me getting a couples’ massage in Hawaii would have cracked me up.

  “Jimmy would have liked that,” I said, making no effort to keep the bitterness from my voice.

  “So you’ll come?”

  “New,” I said.

  Chapter 14

  That night, I dreamed about Joey Ardolino.

  Joey and I went to the same high school, but we traveled in different circles. He was a second-string football player, a C student, a heavy-metal fan. I was a viola-playing honor-roll student, a baton twirler, and president of the French club. I’d known Joey since freshman year—our school wasn’t that big—and he seemed nice enough. We’d smile when we passed in the hall or say hi if we bumped into each other around town. He was undeniably cute, with lush lips, giant brown eyes, soft olive skin, and a wiry build, but I was hung up on a trombone player and didn’t give Joey a lot of thought.

  Until junior year, that is. The second week of September we had an all-school assembly—a chance for club presidents to push their extracurricular offerings on the apathetic student body. (With yearbook photos scheduled for October, the pressure was on.) As president of the French club, I had three stomach-clenching minutes to say, “Bonjour, mes amis,” and describe the club’s upcoming activities—in French, no less. (Geeky, yes, but my adviser made me do it.)

  It went pretty well—which is to say that nobody in the audience laughed or threw spitballs—and attendance at the next French-club meeting was respectable enough for me to consider the speech a success.

  Joey didn’t come to the French Club meeting—I think he took Spanish—but he showed up at my locker the next morning, hands in the pockets of his faded blue jeans, work boots stubbing the ground. He wore a dark blue hooded sweatshirt even though the days were still summer warm, and he smiled shyly.

  “You did really good yesterday,” he said. “You know—at the assembly.”

  “Thanks,” I said, surprised. “I was nervous.”

  “You didn’t look it.” He blushed and dropped his eyes to the ground.

  “It helped that I had to speak French,” I said. “If I messed up, no one would know.”

  He beamed at me as if that was the cleverest thing he’d ever heard (which, maybe, it was).

  I pulled out a textbook covered with brown kraft paper and shut my locker. “I’d better get to class.” I wasn’t trying to ditch him; even then I hated to be late.

  “I can walk you,” he said, apparently lacking my fixation on punctuality. “What class is it?”

  “Trig.”

  “Cool.”

  Things went on like this for a couple of weeks. He’d show up at my locker, bat his thick eyelashes, make small talk (I mean, really small), and walk me to class. He thought it was cool that I played the viola, cool that I was in honors English, cool that I watched Quantum Leap.

  We were a mismatched couple—him in his hoodie and work boots, me in my Docksider shoes, Gap jeans, and oxford cloth shirts. “I never would have put you two together,” my best friend, Regina, said—but the way she looked at him, long and hard, left no doubt that she would have been glad to have Joey lingering at her locker instea
d of mine. The trombone player did a double take when he saw us whispering outside the music room, and I didn’t bother trying to hide my smile.

  After two weeks, Joey finally asked me out on a date. We went to his friend’s house and watched TV, and then we drove around town with his friend and his friend’s girlfriend until we found a shadowy spot to park behind the public library. There we spent a good half hour necking while Nirvana played on the radio.

  The following Monday, I bounded into school with a big smile: I had my first official boyfriend. I’d been to formal dances and group movie dates, but this was the real thing. I expected some hand-holding to go along with our new status, perhaps a chaste peck when he dropped me off at trig class, but things continued as before: the random locker visits, the strolls down the hallway.

  He was busy the next weekend—family stuff, he said—but he called me twice, and the next week he continued to spend quality time with me in the four-minute breaks between classes.

  “I need to talk to you,” Regina told me at the beginning of orchestra one day. A harpist, ballerina, and aspiring anorexic, Regina was the only person I’ve ever known who could make me look laid-back. “It’s about Joey.”

  “Mm.” I rested my viola on my shoulder and made a show of tuning the strings, which were pretty much in tune to begin with. In the past few weeks, my honors and music friends had warned me that Joey had been known to cut class and skip school on occasion. There was even a rumor that he’d been caught smoking pot after a football game sophomore year, but I didn’t believe it.

  “Joey’s dating Katie Rothman,” Regina said. Her face was tight, anxious—I mean, even more than usual.

  “No, he’s not,” I said calmly. “He’s dating me.” Why can’t she just be happy for me? I thought.

  “But he’s dating Katie, too.” She detailed the chain of information, which began with Katie telling someone about her Saturday-night date with Joey and ended with us there in seventh-period orchestra.

  “It’s not true,” I said, believing my words. “Joey likes me.” You’d think I’d be less trusting, considering that I’d so recently had a front-row seat to my parents’ divorce, but this was different. My mother was middle-aged, messy, sagging at the edges, while I was young, accomplished, and well groomed. Besides, I spoke French. On top of that, Katie was a little, well, quirky—an artist with a tiny lisp who favored tinted glasses and thrift-shop clothes. There was no way Joey could like her.