The Isle of Youth: Stories (20 page)

I walked up to the woman sitting on a black stool and stamping the hands of people entering. She was pixieish and scowling. Her silver dress showed the dragon tattooed on the tops of her breasts. Her name was Lydia, according to my sister’s notes.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said.

“You’re always late.” She jammed the inkpad and stamp into my hands, then drifted over to the bar, where she sat for a minute before disappearing into the mass on the dance floor.

My sister was right about one thing. Her job was easy. The people knew to stick out their hands, palms down; all I had to do was press on the phosphorescent stamp. I listened to the music. I thought about Sylvia on the Isle of Youth, with the black coral and the iguanas. I imagined my husband watching the news in our living room. He liked to turn all the lights off when he watched TV. He felt so far from me, now that I had slipped into this other dimension, this crack in the earth. All the questions that had plagued me on the flight to Miami—Does he want me to stay? To go?—felt remote, like background noise.

I’d been stamping hands for an hour when I spotted the woman who had been following me. She wore a dress with a scoop neck and long sleeves, which looked out of place in the sea of naked bellies and shoulders and thighs. In the line, she looked straight ahead and held out her hand. I rolled on the stamp.

“Won’t your husband wonder where you are?” I whispered.

“He could care less.”

She went to the bar. The bartender brought her a drink without being asked. She didn’t seem to be watching me very closely, which I took to mean she’d been to the Bortaga enough times to know what my sister did.

I was looking at the woman when I felt a hand on my shoulder. A man in a gray suit stood over me. His hair fell to his chin and his eyes were different colors, one of them blue, the other hazel. He leaned down and pressed his lips against my ear.

“Meet me upstairs in five,” he said.

He went up the spiral staircase, vanishing into the darkness above. I was gazing upward when a bouncer called my sister’s name and pointed at the small group waiting for me to stamp their hands. I spotted Lydia and waved her over. Sweat had beaded on her temples.

“I need you to cover me,” I said, handing her the inkpad and stamp.

On the staircase, I put my hand on the cool steel railing and started to climb. What had my sister failed to tell me? It could be anything. That I knew.

At the top of the stairs, there was a dark hallway with doors at each end. I could tell from the flat sheets of light shooting through the bottoms. The growl of heavy metal came from behind one of the doors. The man in the gray suit was waiting in the shadows, leaning against a wall. I stood next to him. My palms were damp. I felt on the verge of being exposed. Up close, would I sound like my sister, smell like my sister? I was grateful for the darkness.

He moved in front of me and put his hands on my shoulders. He asked if I had it.

“It?”

“What we discussed.”

“Yes,” I said. “I mean, I will.”

“Sylvia.” He moved his hand over my face, closing my eyes. Then his fingers went down my stomach. I leaned into the wall, unsure if I was supposed to be frightened or enthralled.

He said my sister’s name again. I asked what he wanted. I kept my eyes closed.

“I need to know that you’ll be there,” he said.

“There?”

He pulled his hand away. “Don’t act stupid. It doesn’t become you.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

“With what we discussed?”

“Right. With what we discussed.”

He stepped back. “I don’t want to see anything happen to you, Sylvia.”

“I know,” I said. “Of course not.”

He touched my neck, his fingers pressing into the little dip at the base, before walking down the hall and disappearing behind a door. When I went downstairs, into the blistering light, the ceiling was raining silver confetti.

*   *   *

At Sylvia’s apartment, I took the cordless phone onto the balcony and called her hotel. The front desk transferred me to her room and when she didn’t answer, I left a message. I told her about the gray-suited man, that she was supposed to have something for him, that some kind of meeting had been arranged. I said she had to tell me what was going on, that this wasn’t the kind of thing I could pretend my way through. I said she was wrong about what she’d told me earlier, that I hadn’t agreed to this because I wanted to know what it was like to be her.
Couldn’t you see
, I said,
that I just wanted to get out of my life?

The sky was black, the horizon electric. I heard the distant whoosh of the ocean. Even at night, the heat was crushing. I leaned over the railing and stared at the sidewalk. Cars lined the street; people drifted up and down the concrete strip. I tried to imagine Sylvia flinging herself over the iron barrier and dropping through the air like a meteor. Her apartment was only on the third floor. Thick hedges bordered the sidewalk; the lawn was green and soft. Certainly it was possible for someone to jump off the balcony and survive. I wondered what those first waking moments, on the grass or in the hedges, might have been like for Sylvia. I wondered, as I lived my own unhappy life hundreds of miles away, if any of those sudden, inexplicable pains—the ache in the belly, the cramp in the knee—was some primitive part of my brain registering that my other half was in peril.

I went into the living room and dialed my husband’s number. We hadn’t spoken since I phoned to say I was extending my stay in Miami. But, I realized as the phone rang, I didn’t have to be the person calling him now.

“Mark,” I said when he answered, adopting my sister’s higher pitch. “It’s Sylvia.”

“How’s the weather?” he asked. “The storm?”

“It’s passed.”

“And my wife?”

“She’s fine,” I said. “A bit difficult at times.”

He paused. I thought I heard a door close. “Sylvia would never say ‘a bit difficult.’ She would say ‘she’s a pain in the ass’ or ‘she’s fucked in the head.’ She wouldn’t be delicate about it.”

“You got me.” My voice slipped back to its usual tone. I lay on the floor, my legs stretching underneath the coffee table.

“Why would you pretend to be Sylvia?” he asked. “After all you’ve been through with her?”

“You mean after all
we’ve
been through with her.”

“When are you coming home?”

I nestled the phone between my chin and shoulder. “Soon. When Sylvia is done needing me.”

“Since when do you care about Sylvia needing you?” he said. “I don’t understand why you went down there in the first place, let alone why you’re staying.”

“Since when do you have conversations with my sister without telling me?”

“It’s not what you think.”

“How would you know what I think?”

He was quiet for a moment. “Let’s not let this go the way it always goes.”

I picked at the wax drippings that had solidified on the carpet. “When I get back, are we going to take that trip or what?”

“Yes,” he said. “We’ll do it.”

“You really want to?”

“I really do.”

“Sylvia said you weren’t sure.”

“Sometimes we get frustrated. Sometimes we say things we don’t mean.” He sighed. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“So much,” I said. “There’s so much more you could tell me.”

“I’ve decided I want to go away with you,” he said. “Can’t we just leave it at that?”

“That’s been our whole problem. Deciding to leave things at that.”

“You’re making it impossible to talk.”

“Fine. Where will we go? Tell me.” I listened to his breath on the line.

“One summer, when I was in college, I visited a Tibetan monastery,” he said. “It was just outside of Lhasa. I sat in silence with the monks for three days. We could do something like that, something spiritual.”

I already knew about this trip. He’d taken it in the company of his former girlfriend, whom he’d come close to marrying, but I didn’t bring that up. His voice reminded me of who I really was, of the deepness of my—our—unhappiness. When you’re married, our counselor had told us, happiness is like a joint banking account; it becomes full or depleted in tandem.

“I was thinking an island might be nice,” I said.

“I hate to swim. You know that about me.”

I rested the phone against my chest. My husband started talking about practical things, how long we could afford to stay away, whether or not we should use a travel agent or buy insurance. His voice passed over me like wind.

3.

The next morning, when I went into the kitchen to make coffee, I found two men sitting on the living room sofa. They stood and introduced themselves as A2 and B2. They were broad-shouldered and bald. They both had round faces and squinty eyes. They wore black T-shirts and black slacks and boots. They told me that my name was no longer Sylvia Collins. To them, I was only the mark: C2.

I hadn’t done my makeup or hair or put on the lip ring. I was naked underneath my sister’s silk bathrobe. I crossed my arms over my chest.

“What’s with the names?” I said.

“It’s the Pythagorean theorem,” A said. “We used to be mathematicians.”

“You missed your meeting this morning,” B said, stepping closer to me. “You told Andre you’d be there and you weren’t. So we’ve been sent to keep an eye on you, to make sure you’re getting things in order, like you’ve told people you would.”

“And to make sure you don’t split,” A said.

I sat on the floor. My bathrobe gaped open. The whole picture was coming into focus, a blur in my periphery gradually taking shape, like when your sight starts recovering after getting eyedrops at the doctor’s office. I pressed my legs together. I felt like I was sinking into the floor.

“This is a complicated situation,” I said.

“Everyone tells us that,” A said.

“Sylvia isn’t here right now. I mean, I’m not actually Sylvia.”

“Everyone tells us that, too,” B said.

I asked about making a call. The men shrugged. I dialed my sister’s hotel room and got the machine again. I told her that two men were in her apartment and she needed to take the next flight home. After hanging up, I turned to A and B, who were unimpressed.

“Listen,” A said. “Nothing is going to happen to you. Not yet. It’s too soon for that sort of thing, we’ve been told.”

“Just do what you’ve promised to do,” B said.

“I didn’t promise anything,” I told them. “I’m not Sylvia.”

“Whatever,” they said.

*   *   *

I made coffee and got dressed, taking the first thing I saw in the drawer: jean shorts and a red tube top. In the bathroom, I styled my bangs and did the makeup basics—lipstick, mascara, blush—and put on the lip ring. When I came back into the kitchen, A and B had emptied the coffeepot. They took up too much space in the apartment. I needed to get out.

I drove to Coco’s with A and B in the backseat. Before leaving, I’d taken one of Sylvia’s pills, and when they realized what I was up to in the bathroom, they’d demanded a dose of their own. These kinds of jobs have their perks, A had said, knocking his back without any water. In the car, they squabbled over radio stations.

“Are all people in your profession like this?” I asked.

“Like what?” they said.

We passed high-rises and surf shops, snow-cone vendors and hot-dog stands. There was little sign of the storm by then, just the occasional ripped billboard or bare palm tree. In the rearview, I saw the Lincoln behind us. I rolled down the window and waved.

“Who are you waving to?” A wanted to know.

“No one,” I said.

“Is this a convertible?” B asked.

I nodded.

“Put down the top,” he said.

“I don’t feel like it.”

A leaned over the console. His cologne reminded me of what my father used to wear. He had a silver stud in his ear. I felt his breath on my neck.

“Who gives a fuck what you feel like?” he said.

I put the top down. Wind raked through my hair. The breeze felt good. At a red light, I took my hands off the wheel and thrust my arms into the open air.

*   *   *

At Coco’s, A and B took a table in the corner and waited. The window was still boarded up. The boy behind the counter had a black eye. Ants crawled beneath the plastic dome covering a lemon meringue pie. While I was in line, the woman came in and took the same booth. She wore her sunglasses. A little orange scarf was tied around her neck. I got my coffee and joined her. This time, I kept my sunglasses off.

I touched the boards covering the window. “I wonder how much longer these will be here.”

“Who knows,” she said. “We’re used to seeing the mark of storms.”

“Don’t you want something to eat?” I asked. “Something to drink?”

She shook her head. I asked what she knew about the Isle of Youth.

“Many years ago, I went there with my husband,” she said. “It was full of marshes and huge insects. The houses and hotels were falling in. It was anything but a paradise.”

“I don’t know your husband, but he isn’t on a business trip, like he said.”

She took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were a dull blue. “What are you talking about?”

I looked past the woman, at A and B, who were huddled together at their table, watching. “I’m not sure how to explain this,” I began, and then I told her everything. That it was my sister, Sylvia, and not me, her twin, having the affair, that I was just filling in while they had one last hurrah. And now, thanks to my sister’s involvement in God-knows-what, I was being followed by two men who wouldn’t believe me when I said I wasn’t her.

The woman cupped a hand over her eyes. “My husband hasn’t left town, on business or otherwise, since April.”

“What?”

“He lost his job,” she said. “I thought you knew about that.”

“When did you see him last?”

“This morning. I watched him do a crossword puzzle. He kept asking if I knew a synonym for ‘flummoxed.’”

“You mean he’s home? Right now?”

“Yes,” she said. “Right now.”

On the radio, I caught the end of one of the songs Sylvia had played for me and claimed as her own. My cheeks tingled. I leaned back in the booth and tried to picture my next step.