Don't Look Back (7 page)

She sourced the sound of wet breathing to the neighboring hut—Claire’s hut. The thatched palm roof was painted with lantern light, and through the slats of the wall Eve detected movement. She progressed carefully along the walkway, dodging slugs, and knocked.

The door swung in against her knuckles.

Claire stood contorted, her foot brace locking out her knee, forcing her to double over uncomfortably. It took Eve a moment to see that the metal band running beneath Claire’s bare foot had wedged between the floorboards where an eroded knot had widened the gap.

Claire’s face was flushed with frustration, her hair pasted to one sweaty cheek, and her eyes smoldered; she’d been stuck for some time.

“Don’t you do it,” she said. “Don’t you fucking pity me.”

“Okay,” Eve said.

Claire tried to lunge forward to unlock the brace, the metal digging into the raw skin of her ankle. She bit back another yelp.

Eve remained in the doorway until Claire looked up again, breathing hard, nostrils flaring. “Fine,” she said. “I need your help, okay?”

Eve entered and knelt before her, shifting Claire’s weight and freeing the catch. The metal gave, squeaking around the hinge, Claire’s knee sagging into a relieved bend. Eve gripped the orthotic at either ankle, working it back and forth until Claire’s leg lifted free. Claire staggered back two steps and sat heavily on her bed. The women regarded each other.

“Okay,” Claire said. “We don’t need to have a big sadpocalypse over this.”

“Got it,” Eve said. “No sadpocalypse.”

Claire blew the hair out of her eyes. “I bet you feel all Florence Nightingale, sweeping in here saving the day.”

Eve watched the bugs flutter around the lantern. A moth touched the glass, crumpled, dropped to the floor.

“Anika,” she said.

“What?”

“Her name is Anika,” Eve said. “And—stop me if you’ve heard this one—she’s younger.
And
elegant, I’m told.”

Claire’s face shifted, the squint softening, angry lips unpursing until they grew fuller, prettier.

Eve had never been one of those
Sex and the City
women who struck up instant friendships in line at a grocery store, bonding over Kate Spade, bitching about men. Truth be told, she envied those women, their ease and here-I-am confidence. Her relationships tended to be fewer and older, the kind that could go months without a phone call and then resume midsentence. Quick intimacy was not second nature. And yet if she’d learned anything this past year, it was that her instincts required improvement.

She cleared her throat though it was not in need of clearing. “We got married a few years out of college,” she continued. “I wasn’t …
formed
yet. Relationships like that, they’re like bad horses. You’re never sure how to get free because you’re too busy trying to hold on.”

“Men can wear you down,” Claire said. “But not unless you let them.”

Eve allowed the sentiment to sit for a moment, sensing there might be something beneath the rebuff. Claire pulled her ankle into her lap, rubbed at it angrily. After a moment she looked up, her eyes loosely focused on the wall above Eve’s head.

“I was seeing someone,” she said. “Good enough guy, left the toilet seat down. Moved in together, all that. We were right there, on the verge. Then I got diagnosed. I told him he could leave, that I’d understand.” A one-shoulder shrug. “So.”

Eve nodded once, slowly. “That sucks.”

“This is gonna be no picnic,” Claire said. “
I
wouldn’t stick around.”

“Really?”

Claire picked lint from the sheets. “I’m your age. Too old to take a wedding seriously. But still. You figure maybe there could be something, a white sundress, view of the water, someone … I don’t know …
kind.
”

“You don’t think there can be?”

Claire gestured to the walls of the hut. “I’m taking this trip while I still can,” she said. “I got a ticking clock. You don’t.”

“We all do.”

“A little easier to say when you’re
you.
” Claire released the catches on her brace, snapping them with aggressive twists. “You have everything going for you. Attractive, smart—”

Eve laughed. “Come
on.
You’re tough. Fearless. You speak your mind.”

“And every day that matters a little less.” Claire tugged off her orthotic and threw it onto the mattress beside her. “You can do anything you want. And you don’t even have a fucking clue you can.” She shook her head. “If
I
had what you had—”

“You’d
what
? Be cheery?”

Claire leaned back, turned down her lantern. “Thanks for the help, Florence.”

SATURDAY

Chapter 10

Eve came awake with a dull throb between the temples, a stress-and-jet-lag hangover. After pulling on clothes, she stepped out of her hut to see the camp already bustling with movement,
indígenos
scrambling around shifting crates of supplies, leading burros by their noses, hauling linens, sprinkling pesticide around the cantina’s perimeter. No sign of Neto, Lulu, or the group, but voices and the hum of machinery carried from several roomy canvas tents erected by the outskirts—“activity centers” if she remembered correctly from the Días Felices Ecolodge™ Web site.

Eager to hear Nicolas’s voice, Eve ducked into the admin shack to check the Internet connection. Still not working. She closed the screen and headed back out.

Grabbing a cup of coffee at the cantina, she wandered toward the tents, passing through shafts of intense sunlight breaking through the canopy. Given her precaffeinated state, the play of brightness and shadow had a dreamy, strobe-light effect, and she slipped into the first activity center slightly disoriented.

The confusion of scents inside didn’t help. Rose, mandarin, and mint, freshly chopped into bowls, perfumed the air. Claire, Sue, and Harry stood over various pots, boiling glycerin, stirring dye, pouring waxy liquid into molds. The cooling products, laid out on a table beneath Lulu’s imperious eye, were colorful hand soaps in the shapes of turtles and crocodiles.

Lulu paused from tying bamboo ribbons around cutesy bottles of massage oil. “Morning, sleepy.”

“What time is it?” Eve asked.

“Isn’t it nice not to know?”

Claire glanced up from her witch’s cauldron behind Lulu and rolled her eyes—the first gesture of public bonding she’d offered up.

Eve manufactured a smile for Lulu. “Where’s everyone else?”

“At the artisanal mezcal station next door.”

“The other men opted for alcohol over soap,” Harry said. “I know—
shocking.
But me? I’m in touch with my feminine side.”

A clanking carried to them through the canvas walls, followed by animal braying.

Eve lifted her eyebrows. “This I must see.”

The second activity center was a study in focused chaos. Neto leapt back and forth, stoking burning stones, juggling agave
piñas,
pouring juices into vats. Airplane-miniature spirit bottles, arrayed on the shelves in rows like missiles, bore rugged Días Felices Ecolodge™ labels. Gay Jay chopped fermented agave with a cartoonishly large knife. Beyond the vented canvas rear wall, a burro yoked to a millstone had halted stubbornly, and Will pushed at it from behind, trying to get it to continue along its prescribed circle. He set his back against the burro’s flanks and shoved, shoes slipping in the crushed pulp. He spotted Eve and paused. The burro brayed again, displeased.

“I swear,” Will said, “this
isn’t
what it looks like.”

Eve laughed.

But Neto kept on, a commander pacing the deck, throwing out orders and bits of knowledge. “Come
on,
amigo. Move that burro. You see these beautiful piñas? We have to wait
eight years
to harvest them. There, no
there.
We burn them in the buried fire, see? For
three days
we’ll wait. No—use the
hardwood.
We want
good
charcoal,
sí?
” He leaned over a copper still, adjusting a connection, his mouth never slowing. “We don’t need no yeast, we will pull bacteria
from the air
to ferment. Is why mezcal is
más puro.
”

A tinny melody shattered the atmosphere, filling the canvas tent. A familiar diva voice sang,
At first I was afraid, I was
petrified
!

A musical hiccup and then again:
At first I was afraid, I was
petrified
!

Neto finally stopped, as frozen as the burro: “Is that…?”

Eve said, “Gloria Gaynor?”

Jay sheepishly removed from his pocket a sleek phone with a fat folding antenna.

Will pointed. “Contraband!”

Neto frowned disapprovingly at the phone.

Jay said, “Sorry. I day-trade, and I told my broker to text me if we hit any limit orders.”

“Any way I can borrow it to make a quick call home?” Eve asked. “I haven’t connected with my son, and Skype’s out.”

Neto redirected his look of disappointment at Eve. Then he said, “I will have the dish looked at for you by one of the peons.”

The term, Eve gleaned, was not derogatory here.

“Feel free to pass on the number in case he needs to reach you.” Jay flipped her the satellite phone, then shot Neto a wry glance. “Not that I’ll ever have it on me.”

Eve retreated to the cantina, choosing a picnic table in the shade. To her side, two so-called peons scrubbed at oxidized patches on the cladding that protected the stove, the shushing of wire brushes against aluminum oddly soothing. Despite the phone’s impressive antenna, the reception bars flickered in and out as she dialed.

A few rings and then a cheerful feminine voice: “Hardaway residence, substitute matriarch speaking.”

“Lanie.”

“Mizz Hardaway.”

“See the number on caller ID?”

“Registered and recorded.”

“How is he?”

“Aside from the F he’s gonna get on his summer-reading book report?”

“An
F
? Why?”

“He did a report on the
book,
” Lanie said.

“Isn’t that what he’s supposed to do?”

“Oh, no. Permit me to read.” Rustling pages. “Here we go.” Lanie cleared her throat theatrically. “‘This book is forty-three pages long. It costed three dollars and ninety-nine cents plus tax. It is filled with chapters and words, except for inside the front and back covers. Those parts are blank. It is a half inch thick and weighs—’”

“Put him on,” Eve said.

“Hold, please.” Then: “Brainiac! It’s your mom.”

Scampering footsteps. “Mom? Hi, Mom!”

His exuberance softened her instantly. She had been warned that in a few years her son would be pathologically unappreciative, that he’d prefer hard labor to spending time with her, but he was still such a baby at times, and she missed the crackle of his voice, the dimples of his knuckles, the way his head smelled when she lay next to him at night.

“Are you in the jungle?” Nicolas asked. “Is it fun? Are there velociraptors?”

“No velociraptors. What’s with this book report?”

The line fuzzed, and for a moment she thought the call had dropped.

Then he said, “I thought it’d be funny.”

“But Lanie didn’t think it was funny.”

“… No.”

“Do it over.”

“It’s
Saturday.
And it’s
summer.
”

“I’m aware of that.”

“If I do it, can I
please
—” His last words dropped out.

“What? Nicolas? You there?”

The connection came back on, picking him up—of course—mid-request: “—I
please
sleep over at Zach’s?”

“You want a reward for
undoing
F work?”

“No.” A beat. “For working on a Saturday.”

“I told you, Little. Not with me gone. I can’t risk—”

“The food.
Fine,
Big.” Pouty silence.

“What are you doing today?” Eve asked.

“Besides
not
sleeping over at Zach’s?”

“Besides not sleeping over at Zach’s.”

“Drawing,” he said.

“What are you drawing?”

A beat of pride found its way into his voice. “The outer reaches of the universe.”

Eve grinned, amused. “Some people say they don’t know what that looks like.”

“Well,” Nicolas said, “
now
they will.”

She rotated the mouthpiece to her neck, stifled a laugh.

They said their good-byes, and she signed off. The sun had encroached on the shade, and she tilted her face to the warmth, closed her eyes, and breathed in the smells. The workers—a man and a woman—bantered in a dialect not unlike Spanish. Eve let the patter wash over her, deciphering every fifth word. She took in the soporific rasp of the brushes at work, the whine of a winged insect, the rustling of fronds.

And then a phrase sailed out of the conversation and smacked her.

“—la desaparecida.”

Eve rose abruptly and walked over to the workers. They paused in their task, at nervous attention. She recognized the young man as the bearer of the anniversary cake.

“Hi, I’m Eve.”

They nodded at her.

“You are?”

“I am Fortunato,” the man said. “This is Concepción.”

The woman smiled shyly, hooked her hair back over her ear.

“What were you saying?” Eve asked.

“I am sorry.”

“No, it’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong. I was just curious.”

Fortunato cleared his throat. “She say you remind her of another tourist who come here months past. She sit by herself also. And be thoughtful.”

“La desaparecida?”
Eve asked. “The disappeared woman? What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?”

Fortunato shifted from one bare foot to the other. “She leave here early.”

“Theresa Hamilton? A blond woman?”

“I do not know her name.” Fortunato cast his gaze everywhere but at Eve. He was even younger than she thought, maybe seventeen. “We have many reservations.”

“
Why
did she leave the lodge early?”