Here Today, Gone to Maui (27 page)

 

 

I spent the afternoon in forced normalcy. I called the airline to confirm my flight the next day (I’d already had them switch it to a paid ticket). I called my sister, who said that “Tiara Cardenas” had appeared on Yahoo’s list of most popular searches. I talked briefly to my mother, who was on her way to the mall to find something to wear for lunch with Adele Pritchard. After that, I turned off my phone because there was no one else I wanted to talk to. I made a long list of things to accomplish when I got back to work. If I stayed busy enough for the next month—or twenty—I wouldn’t have to think at all.

I took a break to watch Sergeant Hosozawa’s (mercifully brief) press conference on TV. He announced that the body of a man between the age of twenty and forty, fitting the description of the missing California tourist, had been recovered off the coast of Kihei. The death was “presumed accidental at this time.” He also said that the man previously known as Michael “Jimmy” James, aged thirty-four, of Laguna Beach, California, was actually James Studebaker, aged twenty-eight, also of Laguna Beach. The real Michael James, a victim of credit-card fraud and identity theft, was still very much alive.

I was relieved when it was finally late enough in the afternoon to start dinner. Tiara had left for her interview by then, so I was all alone in the house. There were tiny cooked shrimp and flour tortillas in the freezer, goat cheese and mozzarella in the fridge. Shrimp quesadillas would be easy and good.

I ran the cooked shrimp under cold water to thaw. With a heavy chef’s knife from the butcher-block holder, I set to work chopping green onions and cilantro.

Michael came in from the driveway, toting his laptop. “How are you holding up?”

I stopped chopping and shrugged. “I’ll survive. It’ll be a relief to get home, get back into my routine.” As I said this, I felt a pang at the thought of leaving Michael. “I just hope the press doesn’t start bugging us again.”

“There were a bunch of photographers smoking cigarettes out by the gate when I pulled in. I think Tiara tipped them off.”

“Wonderful,” I grumbled. “Did you hear the news? She got an agent. She’s already out doing an interview.”

“Yeah, she told me. Mind if I turn on the tube?” he asked. “I just want to check some basketball scores.”

“Sure. No problem.”

Michael pushed the secret button on the painting/television set and settled onto a white chaise, remote in hand. He found the basketball game, but when it went, almost immediately, to a commercial, he started channel surfing, keeping the sound very low.

There was a bag of salad in the refrigerator’s crisper drawer; I dumped it into a large bowl. I put a cast-iron skillet on the stove and turned the heat on medium.

Michael paused at an old
Star Trek
episode. Or maybe it was a new
Star Trek
episode. I never quite got them straight.

When the quesadilla was all hot and melty, I slipped it out of the pan and onto the cutting board. I’d just made my first slice when a catalog shot of Jimmies wetsuits appeared on the enormous television.

“At least you’re getting some free advertising,” I said.

Michael turned up the sound just as the newscaster said, “A small start-up with a limited customer base.”

I was just about to say that there was nothing wrong with being small when my photograph flashed on the screen. I clutched the knife handle and held my breath.

The photo wasn’t the plain Jane shot that had become my standard representation. Instead, it was taken a few years ago, on a company retreat in Mexico. I was smiling at the camera, a frozen margarita in my hand, a handsome young man at my side. My dress was strappy and low cut, my teeth bright white against my tan.

“Change the channel,” I pleaded, my entire body starting to shake and sweat. If Michael and I didn’t see this report, maybe no one would. Maybe it would be like it never happened.

He reached for the remote, but it was too late. They switched to the recent photograph of me taken outside the police station. There I was, looking drawn—and slightly crazed, some might say. Only this time, the tag over my picture didn’t say PLAIN JANE.

Instead, it said: STALKER.

Okay, so maybe I should have mentioned the stalker episode earlier. But it happened so long ago, it’s like I was a different person. Besides,
stalker
is such a nasty word and not really accurate. I wasn’t stalking anyone, really. I was just . . . preoccupied. And premenstrual. For about four months.

Did I mention that I spent a couple of years at another company, a manufacturer of cement fiber roofing? And that I left because Wills offered greater growth opportunities? Because that’s really what happened—all that’s important, anyway. The, um,
incident
at my old job didn’t seem relevant. Except, all of a sudden, all these years later, it was.

Did I mention I was lonely in those years? Because it’s one thing to seize the moment: move across the country and stay there when your only friend leaves. It’s another thing to build some kind of a life with no family, no real friends—nothing to call your own, really, except a beat-up Honda Civic and a closet full of knee-length skirts.

His name was Keith. He was in sales. Of course he was: where else could someone so handsome, so charming, so
glib
end up? When I say handsome, by the way, I’m not talking about the sculpted good looks of a Fruit of the Loom model. I’m talking smoldering: huge brown eyes fringed by girlie lashes, thick black hair (molded into place by an astonishing array of salon products), dimples. His nose was a little wide, and his muscles were overdeveloped for my taste—which is a nice way of saying that his boobs were bigger than mine.

Did I mention I was lonely? Oh, yes, I guess I did.

I didn’t even like him at first. He seemed like he had attention deficit disorder—never sitting still, never focusing. Plus, he was so full of crap, you could practically smell it on him—or you could if he didn’t douse himself in some citrus-y cologne every morning. He’d come skipping over to my desk—or gliding, or skimming or bounding; the man never just
walked—
and he’d spout something like, “Such beauty! It blinds me!” And then he’d cover his eyes. Or he’d put a hand on his chest and say, “Be still, my beating heart!”

And then he’d ask me to do something for him: approve a vacation day, expedite an expense reimbursement, whatever. I’d do it, of course—but I would have done it anyway because it was my job.

Just so we’re clear, I wasn’t desperate, at least not romantically. If he’d asked me out, I probably would have said no. Plain Jane headlines aside, I’ve always attracted some men: not all of them, but enough. I was really skinny in those years, too, if only because food didn’t fit into my budget (and because depression can be a powerful appetite suppressant). Besides, I was a twenty-four-year-old female with no obvious deformities, and for some guys, that’s enough.

It happened during a sales retreat in Mexico. I wasn’t even supposed to be there, but my boss’s toddler got sick at the last minute, so I stepped in to deliver a snooze-worthy presentation entitled “Protecting the Company’s Bottom Line by Limiting Excessive Sales Expenditures.” It was all about how the sales force should save the big-ticket items—fancy dinners, concert tickets, baseball seats—for customers and exercise frugality when it was “just us” out on the road.

According to my boss’s presentation, which I read verbatim,
Many grocery stores, seeking to meet the demands of our fast-paced society, have started offering prepared meals in their deli cases such as gourmet salads, enchiladas and even sushi. Many hotels, in response to the needs of busy travelers, supply refrigerators, microwaves, etc., which are helpful in preparing in-room meals and eliminate the need for expensive restaurant food.

The irony in the presentation—aside from its obvious futility—was that the “just us” retreat was held in a luxury beachfront resort. The sales manager said it was important to let “his people” know how important they were, and nothing says “important” like a really swank hotel. When choosing a topic, my boss should have stuck to more modest goals, perhaps writing a speech called “Why a Strip Club Does Not Qualify as a Business Expense.”

But more on that later.

It began with a margarita. Actually, it began with about fifteen margaritas, if you put Keith’s and mine together. (I had to file the expense report, which is why I know the exact number. He put away nine; I had six.) We drank them over the course of about ten hours—tequila facilitates team building—which is why we wound up merely hammered and not, say, dead. It could have been worse. The one teetotaler in the group drank Mexican tap water the whole day and spent the rest of the retreat on the toilet.

Keith and I wound up in my room. You don’t need to know the details, which is just as well since I don’t remember them. The next day, I almost welcomed my hangover because the knife jabs in my brain kept me from thinking too much about what an idiot I’d been. I avoided eye contact with Keith, drank lots of bottled water (no ice, thanks), and sucked down every kind of painkiller I could find: Aleve, Tylenol, ibuprofen, aspirin. Someone told me you can take them all at once because they act on different parts of the body. Later I found out that that’s only true for Tylenol and ibuprofen, so I’m lucky I didn’t blow out a kidney.

Then again, if I’d blown out a kidney, at least I wouldn’t have let Keith spend the night again. I couldn’t blame it on margaritas this time, so I blamed it on loneliness. And Mexico. Also, Keith had been really nice to the waiter at dinner, ordering in perfect Spanish (his mother was from Colombia) and saying
no problemo
when our food took so long to come out of the kitchen. (I was considerably less patient; time crawls when you’re sober.) That made me think Keith was a nicer, finer, more openhearted person than I’d given him credit for being. It wasn’t until I filed the expense report that I realized he’d had six Bloody Marys at that point. When he said I’d done a great job on my speech—all in the delivery, really—I thought it meant he respected my intelligence.

What the hell. I was in Mexico. I was on vacation, sort of. I was lonely.

I probably would have left things in Mexico, but when I say Keith spent the night, I’m not just speaking in euphemisms. He was there when I went to sleep and he was there when I woke up in the morning. Most crucially, he was by my side when we rushed into the breakfast meeting forty-five minutes late, only to have everyone stare at us in shock before they burst out laughing. Later, over margaritas (I leaped off the wagon as soon as my headache went away), people said stuff like, “I kept wondering when you two were going to get together.” People must think we are well suited, I reasoned. It wasn’t until later that I came up with an alternate interpretation: we were destined to get together because Keith had already worked his way through every other young female in the office, and I was fresh meat.

Back in California, we quickly became a couple, talking first thing every morning, going out to lunch (when he wasn’t traveling for work), and spending a few nights a week together. My emotions snuck up on me. What started with
Hey, I’m just killing time,
quickly morphed into
I miss him when he’s gone
. From there, it was a short leap to the always-deadly
Maybe he’s the one.

I never thought he was perfect. His faults were too obvious to ignore. Like Jimmy, he was always canceling plans at the last minute. And he talked too much, often when I most craved quiet: first thing in the morning, or when I was paying my bills, or trying to watch TV. When we went out to dinner, he’d start conversations with people at other tables. He couldn’t sit still, didn’t cuddle. He’d use up the last scoop of coffee, the last drop of milk. He put empty cartons back in the fridge.

Worst of all, he flirted with other women. And he went to strip clubs.

But it was all okay. The way I saw it (warning: defeatist female rationalization ahead), we balanced each other. I needed someone more sociable, more fun—a man to add color to my drab little life. I needed to loosen up. Besides, I was so hyper-responsible, I needed to take care of someone else (yeah, I know—blech). Besides, Keith’s flirtations didn’t mean anything, right? Anyone could see his feelings for me were real.

Ha! In a way I deserved what came next (as I didn’t deserve, say, misplacing a boyfriend off the coast of Maui).

After we’d been going out for almost three months, he cheated on me. Of course he did. I confronted him about it, our exchange already scripted in my deluded little mind: