The Red Bikini (3 page)

“And this.”

The woman added it to the bag. “You girls have a wonderful time,” she said, throwing the color into a bag. “Do you need help to your car?”

“No, thanks,” said Giselle.

They were, she decided, fine on their own.

 • • • 

The surf grew louder as Giselle and Coco trekked the few blocks to the ocean. She’d left half the groceries on the kitchen counter—she wanted to mimic Coco’s spontaneity, rushing back through the door with only a clear mind and a beach towel—but now she couldn’t stop making a mental list of what had been left on the countertop. She didn’t leave the frozen strawberries out, did she?

“Mommy, look!” Coco pointed to a caged iguana on a tortilla-colored patio. The home had a Spanish-tile red roof. Hot-pink bougainvillea exploded along one side.

Giselle stepped closer to the waist-high wrought-iron gate and peered over it with Coco, smiling at the funny pet. They decided his name should be Iggy.

Giselle had walked these same sidewalks in Sandy Cove about six years ago, visiting when Lia had first moved in. They had strolled next to these same stucco homes—each a paler shade of sand than the last, with low-walled patios lined with potted succulents. Iron lounge chairs, padded with striped-green cushions fading from the sun and salt, still lay in wait for their owners. Giselle had been about eight months pregnant with Coco then. Rabbit and the boys were probably still living with their parents. Roy was still kind. And the world seemed like it was a flower waiting to unfurl.

She took a deep breath and fought back the heavy pang in her chest. Her sisters had been right about Roy. It was terrible that she’d let him isolate her. Roy had never “approved” of them, and she’d let herself become more and more pulled away, wanting to please this man she’d so admired. He rolled his eyes when Giselle mentioned Lia—saying her independent ways were never going to win her a husband—and spoke with disdain whenever Noelle’s name came up—a “girl with her head in the clouds.” Then he’d grab Giselle and tell her that he would never be able to stand the idea of “those girls” rubbing off on her. Soon, Giselle began to see the pattern of conversations about her sisters being followed by Roy being particularly paranoid, then demanding, in bed—ordering her clothes off, with a resentful, irritated bark, and throwing a certain aggression into sex that made Giselle’s teeth grind. Over the years, she found it simply easier not to talk about them. And certainly not to visit them. It was just one more thing she’d grown to resent.

Coco sank her bare toes in the sand, and they weaved their way past a quilt of colorful beach towels to find a spot near the water. Giselle tilted her head back to the late-day sun, letting it warm her until it reached all the way down to a calming spot in her chest. She sprayed sunblock all over Coco, plus on the few patches of skin she herself revealed—her wrists and ankles—then let Coco make elaborate sand castles near the water.

“You know who lives here?” Coco asked Giselle, pointing at her largest castle. She had just trudged back up from the water’s edge for the millionth time with another pail full of sandy, murky water. The sun was sitting low on the horizon.

“Who?” said Giselle.

“Me.” She readied her pail with both hands to pour into the moat she’d created around the sand mansion. “And you. And Iggy. And a prince.”

“A prince?”

She nodded solemnly. “For you.”

Coco poured the water into the moat and sat back on her haunches, the sand granules sticking to her legs in circular patterns, while the water swirled briefly, then disappeared into the sand.

“Oh.” The wind swept the tendrils of yellow hair around her ears while she put together what just happened. “I guess we need soldiers.” She scrambled to her feet and ran back to the foamy surf to look for pebbles and shells, which she collected the rest of the afternoon. She spent the good part of the next few hours making sure they all had a specific place to stand guard.

 • • • 

A knock sounded on the front door as Giselle lined the fish sticks along the cookie sheet. The sun cast a golden glow through the curtains.

She padded across the floor in her bare feet, pulling her cover-up tighter, and flung open the door.

“Heeeeey,” Rabbit drawled.

Giselle smiled. She liked Rabbit.

Coco ran up from behind and peeked her head around the door.

“I came to ask you two about a party tonight,” he said.

“Oh, no, thanks, Rabbit.”

“It’ll be fun.”

“No, thanks.”

“You have something against having fun?”

“Of course not. It’s just . . . not my thing. . . .”

He smirked. “Fun is not your thing?”

“Parties are not my thing.”

A flash of honesty went through her mind, though, of the multitude of charity balls and hospital events she’d attended over the years for Roy, and she felt a pang of guilt for lying. She’d been attending parties for Roy’s medical colleagues for years, signing up for committees, standing around in floor-length gowns, doing him proud. “
Beach
parties are not my thing,” she amended.

“You have a lot of beach parties in Indiana?” Rabbit said, smiling.

“I just don’t—” She began to explain, but then stopped. She was tired of defending herself. She motioned toward the kitchen. “I’m putting fish sticks on.”

“Weeeell . . .” Rabbit followed her into the kitchen and glanced over her shoulder at her baking tray. “I’m pretty sure there’ll be something better than fish sticks there.”

“I have Coco.”

“There’ll be lots of kids.” He took a frozen fish stick off the tray and tried to bite into it.

She glanced at Coco. Rabbit had already found her weak spot.

Lia, too, had mentioned in her phone message earlier that Giselle should go out and have fun. Giselle had been so happy to hear from her—when she’d called back and gotten voice mail, she’d almost asked about Fin—
Have you seen this guy? Do you know who he is?
—but then she chickened out, embarrassed to ask such a thing of her younger sister, who was trying to set her up with a stable real estate investor. Instead, she left a message about Rabbit and how nice he’d been.

Rabbit waved a fish stick. “This is terrible. C’mon.”

Giselle felt something inside her give up. Maybe this was the reason Roy left her—maybe she was too cautious, too closed off. Maybe she was going to end up being some old lady, with just Coco and Iggy and some cats. Until Coco left her, too. And then it would just be Giselle. And the iguana. The crazy lady on the hill.

She turned off the oven and put the fish sticks back in the freezer like some sort of wild woman.

“Let’s go.”

L
eaning forward to peer out the windshield of her rental car, Giselle followed Rabbit’s beat-up Volkswagen through the weathered streets of Sandy Cove.

The isolated town bore little resemblance to the flashier beach towns farther north, which she’d visited often when she stayed with her mom. Her mom and younger sisters had eventually made their home in Los Angeles shortly after her parents’ divorce, but Giselle had started college that year and fled back to Indiana, happy to be near her father. She hadn’t liked L.A. much: It was too pretentious, too much of a show-off. But Sandy Cove, farther south, was different. Weatherworn, with cliffs and hillsides setting it apart and an “Old California” vibe that was ceaselessly forgiving, the little town seemed made for people who wanted to hide.

Coco pointed to a bulletlike train that glinted in the sun, passing through. Giselle crossed the tracks and parked behind a community of narrow, aluminum-sided homes, laid along the sand like piano keys. The bases of the homes were permanent—some with Polynesian-style lava rocks, some with stacked stone. The entire community had a 1950s ambiance—the rental office was flanked by retro tiki torches and miniature palm trees, and many of the homes still had green-turf balconies and Plexiglas-panel windbreaks standing at attention against the ocean. It looked like a community that time forgot.

The party house boasted the same retro feel, but with an updated, million-dollar face-lift. A slate walkway led to a bright white door, and a vintage Sputnik-styled lantern hung in the doorway.

Giselle, Rabbit, and Coco stepped into a small, open living area. Dark wooden floors and wainscoting showed off sleek, masculine furniture. Eight-foot walls of glass showcased a long stretch of ocean and horizon, all the way north and south. The house perched right above the sand, only about twenty feet from the water, but elevated by a wall of rocks. A set of nautical-roped stairs zigzagged to the sand, where several children played. A second patio held a cluster of adults, who sipped colorful stemmed drinks and complimented one another’s bright tropical dresses and shirts over the steel-drum tunes that came from a live four-piece band.

Coco spotted a girl about her age sitting in the sand, playing with a bright pink sand bucket off the main-level patio. The girl looked up and asked Coco whether she would like to play.

Giselle wished it were that easy for her. She smoothed her spring sweater and cotton skirt and studied the clusters of absurdly beautiful people.

Rabbit had, as Giselle had feared, slipped away. She took a glass of champagne from a passing tray and wandered toward the patio rail, where she could keep an eye on Coco and her new little friend. The foamy waves of the Pacific rolled up behind the girls, the water glistening like gemstones. Giselle had told Rabbit she’d stay only an hour, but as soon as she saw the view, she decided she might wait until the sun went down. Watching it from here would be magical.

She leaned into the rail, letting the rhythmic roar of the sea envelop her, allowing her shoulders to relax for what felt like the first time in days. She let the seaside serenade lull her.

“You came,” said a man’s voice over her shoulder.

She whirled, then tripped backward to see Fin.

He had clothes on today—a loose-fitting button-down shirt that draped off his shoulders, narrowing at his hips and falling over a pair of dressy shorts. He didn’t have the air of a surfer about him today. He looked like a yachter, perhaps. Or some wealthy woman’s boy toy, with his blond tips and expensive clothes. He was remarkably handsome up close—his face lean at the sides, with lines around his mouth—and he offered her the kind of grin that must stop many a surfer girl’s heart. But the thing that stopped Giselle’s was his eyes. She’d noticed them before, in Rabbit’s apartment, but up this close they were stunning: bright blue, with an outline of navy.

Giselle glanced over his shoulder, almost expecting the wealthy woman he must belong to to materialize behind him.

“Rabbit invited me,” she blurted out.

Fin seemed to find that amusing. He nodded and looked into the tumbler he held with an amber drink. “I’m glad.”

“He said there’d be lots of kids,” she babbled, “and that I could invite my daughter, even though we weren’t going to come. I wasn’t really sure. . . .” She lamely indicated Coco playing in the sand. “I don’t even know whose party this is.”

She was embarrassed she was talking so fast. She couldn’t remember the last time a man had left her so flustered. And this one was so . . .
young
. Wasn’t he? It was hard to tell. She stole a quick glance at his mouth, at his square jawline. He could’ve been twenty-two or thirty-two, really—he had one of those faces that made it hard to tell. But either way, he was clearly younger than she was. She took a deep breath and decided it was safer to simply not look at him.

Taking a sip of champagne, she kept her eyes on Coco. The flute stem provided a thankful distraction for her hands, and she grasped it tighter, as if she could harness some of the recklessness of her pounding heart—perhaps wrap it neatly around the stem.

The music lulled into a Caribbean-sounding number, and several guests began rolling their hips.

Fin leaned closer. “Can we go somewhere?” he said over the music. He reached toward her lower back, not touching her, but indicating he’d like her to move with him.

Her heart thumped again—flipped, really, right there in her chest—at his ocean eyes and coconut scent. She almost snapped her champagne flute.

“My daughter,” she choked out, indicating Coco. “I need to keep my eye on her.”

“Of course.”

The music grew louder and a young couple in matching red bathing suits did a rumba toward them. Fin smiled to the woman and stepped aside, then directed Giselle’s attention to a spot in the sand just behind Coco.

“How about there?” he said toward her ear.

A cluster of bright white beach chairs occupied the spot he indicated, just out of reach of the lapping foam.

Giselle nodded, her gaze skimming over his forearms—much too thick, too roped, to belong to a boy.

As she surreptitiously extended her inspection to his hands, he reached back to steer her across the patio to the steel-drum beat, turning sideways through several clusters of people. He nodded to several of them.

When they got to the chairs, she positioned herself to make sure she could see Coco, smoothing her skirt with one hand and balancing her champagne in the other. He studied her carefully. The sun was setting behind him, shining through the blond strands of his hair.

“I noticed you at Rabbit’s apartment yesterday,” he said.

The waves cracked, and Fin’s voice drifted on a current of wind. She pulled the comment back, letting it flutter about her, forcing it into her consciousness while she tried to filter it, process it, put it somewhere inside her normal view of herself. She couldn’t, exactly. She nodded, deciding to avoid mentioning that she’d noticed him, too, particularly his bare chest. She was pretty sure gorgeous surfer dudes didn’t care about being noticed by scrapbook moms.

She took another sip of champagne.

“I have this event to go to,” he went on. “It would be a favor.” He took a nervous sip. “I need someone to go with, and when I saw you, I thought you’d be perfect.”

It sounded like a compliment, but the fact that he wasn’t meeting her eyes indicated otherwise.

“
I’m
perfect?”

He nodded.

“If you tell me it’s a mother-son ball, I’m going to kick sand at you,” she said.

He squinted at her for several long seconds and then smiled. She had the strange thought that there was a lucky girl somewhere who got to see him smile like this all the time.

“Those boys at Rabbit’s must be doing a number on you,” he said. “Are they still calling you ‘Donna’?”

Her breath caught in surprise. “How did you know?”

“Donna Reed.”

The name hung in the air while Giselle assembled it in her mind. Slowly, inside, she began to crumble. She pulled her sweater tighter and looked away.

Fin did a double take through his bangs. “They mean it as a compliment.”

She nodded halfheartedly. Of course they did. A pearl-clad 1950s television housewife was exactly who everyone wanted to be compared to.

“You . . . just have an air about you.” He shrugged.

“An air?”

“Very maternal.”

Giselle sucked in as much air as she could, as every organ inside her seemed to deflate. She could almost feel her breasts flattening against her chest. She looked over the top of his blond head at the ocean, briefly, just to gather her senses, then forced herself to face the fact that whatever reason she’d hoped he’d invited her out here—that wasn’t it. Whatever reason he’d noticed her at Rabbit’s apartment—that wasn’t it, either. She looked away from his tousled hair.

“Do I need to bring cookies?” she said sarcastically.

He laughed. He had a nice, mature-sounding laugh. “I heard they were good, but no. It’s a wine tasting and art auction. I have to impress some people. I was thinking about asking your sister, but when I came by to see if she was there, Rabbit said she was gone for a couple of weeks.”

Lia?
It hadn’t occurred to Giselle that Fin might date Lia. She tried to picture her extroverted, hair-flipping little sister on the arm of this magazine-cover surfer boy and felt, first, a stab of jealousy. But then she dismissed it. Lia wouldn’t date someone like Fin. Lia had liked serious boys when she was young, then moved on to serious men. First it was boys who wrote dark poetry and rode motorcycles to high school; then it was men who wore black suits and took over companies. Fin wouldn’t fit into her worldview at all.

“Do you . . .
date
Lia?” she asked anyway, unable to keep the incredulity out of her voice.

“No, no.” Fin shook his head as if the idea were preposterous. “She’s not—
I’m
not . . . her type at all.”

At least they agreed on that much.

“We’re friends. She’s helped me out of a few jams. But this one—even she wasn’t right for this. But you . . .” He looked her up and down. “You’re perfect.”

Giselle let the words settle over her for an instant, enjoying their flash of warmth. She didn’t hear compliments very often, particularly from her ex, who had looked at her as if she were simply part of the furniture for the last several years. But then she noted another of Fin’s skittish glances and reminded herself he was probably up to something.

“You must know a million other women.”

“Not old enough.”

Her extraordinary reserve allowed her to keep perfectly still. One didn’t get through excruciating high-school beauty pageants by letting hurt feelings show. Her eyes, however, must have given her away.

“I don’t mean—” Fin lifted his hand. “I just mean I need someone my own age.”

Clearly, he’d missed the mark on this one. “How old
are
you?” she asked.

“Twenty-nine . . . soon.”

Giselle looked at him skeptically. “When’s soon?”

“Next weekend.”

She raised her eyebrow. Twenty-eight? She had about seven years on him. Although at least he was older than she’d thought. He’d looked boyish from a distance, but up close he had all the strength that brings a man over the threshold from boyish to sexy. He was definitely already there.

But, even so, this wasn’t possible.

“Well.” She stood, brushing the sand off her legs. “I’m a little older than that. And besides, it certainly must serve you well to have a beautiful twentysomething on your arm?”

“Not at this event.”

He seemed resigned to the fact that she was leaving. He took a sip of his drink and looked, for the moment, terribly sad and lonely.

“You must know several sophisticated thirtysomethings.” She could see at least seven or eight from here—glowing tans, beautiful bodies, windswept hair in shades of gold.

“Too married,” he said without looking.

She watched him for a minute as the waves crashed behind them. She almost asked how he knew she wasn’t married, but then remembered he’d asked Rabbit. So
that
was it: She was the only thirtysomething who was still single in the state of California. Her fingers instinctively went to her wedding ring. It was a strange habit, keeping the ring on, and she couldn’t exactly explain why she did it. She knew it had something to do with Coco—she didn’t want people to look at her and Coco, alone, and think she was depriving her daughter of a two-parent home. It was strange and pathetic, but there it was.

“Yeah, that threw me.” He nodded toward her finger. “I double-checked with Rabbit.”

A quiet tingle ran through her at the thought of being discussed, privately, between two men. But then she told herself to ignore it. She was being discussed as Donna Reed, after all, not Pamela Anderson.

“Rabbit talks too much,” she said, with more irritation in her voice than she wanted.

Fin chuckled into his drink. A light breeze came up and blew sand across their shoes.

“Why do you still wear it?” he asked.

She felt her face flush. She didn’t want to discuss her personal choices with this surfer. What would he know about the difficulty of having your husband run away from you? Of not being able to face any of your friends or family because you didn’t even know what went wrong? Of feeling like you’d failed in a catastrophic way?

“It’s difficult to explain.”

“Try me.” He looked straight at her—as if he actually expected an answer—but Giselle shook her head.

He bobbed his as if to acquiesce that she didn’t want to say. The sunlight caught his face as he stared at the ocean. And, as soon as she was about to turn, his eyelashes lowered. He looked knowing, somehow. But also achingly, painfully lonely.

“When is this event?” Her words, now spoken, hung in the breeze between them, seeming like they belonged to someone else.

“Wednesday.” His expression shifted from doubt to hope. “Look, uh—Giselle, isn’t it?”

“Well, it’s not Donna.”

He grinned. “Look, Giselle, I didn’t mean to insult you. I’m sorry if I did. I just mean that this event is important to me, and I need to bring someone who is beautiful and sophisticated, and when I saw you at Rabbit’s place, I thought you were perfect. Even better than Lia.”