“No,” Ivy says. “I don’t think so. My career is all I have.” She pauses, and for a moment I catch a glimpse of her as a child, lonely and shattered and needing something no one can give her. “I just want him.”
We both want the same boy who’s already taken.
She tries to make herself bigger, tries to paint confidence on her face. “I don’t blame him. I was a mess when I met him. I was exhausted and I wanted out. I wanted to run away from everything. From my mom. My contract with A-Corp. Everything. I was crazy for thinking he would do that with me. We had just met. And he has nothing to run away from.”
“So you don’t want to run away anymore?”
She sits up a little straighter. “I know what’s real. I know how the world works, how people work. I’m not going to ask anyone to change for me. I just want to know him again.”
My skin is starting to get pruney, and I’m feeling a little nauseated from the heat and smell. I wonder how long we’re supposed to stay in here to get the supposed medicinal effects, how long it takes to get to prime relaxation, if there’s some magical equation for us to get Ivy’s money’s worth. I wonder what it was like here before it got turned into this place with bamboo walls and imported tea sets and white women in geisha dresses and security guards with guns, if it was just mud and rocks the way nature intended. Maybe if it was still like that, I wouldn’t feel such a strong impulse to leave.
I count back in my head a year and a half, to the winter Ash got back from his trip to Brazil. I remember he seemed shaken, quieter than usual, drinking and smoking more. He confided in me at one party that he was thinking about breaking up with Tami. He said she didn’t understand him. But then he arrived at the next party with a split lip and he wouldn’t tell anyone where it came from. Tami was overly affectionate with him that night, by his side the whole time, offering to get him things, holding his hand like she was someone who liked holding hands instead of who she really was—someone who makes fun of those kinds of couples. Her eyes burned with something that did not quite look like love. He looked at her like someone possessed. The look on his face did not look like love either.
Later that night, I saw them in the shadows, Tami in his lap, straddling him, moving slowly, whispering something into his ear, and I remember it struck me that I was witnessing something like magic being performed, an incantation, a powerful spell being cast, and I wondered how people learn to do these things. Where do they get that kind of power? How does Tami just know what it takes to control him? His eyes were shut tight and her whispers were conjuring him into being. She was making him. He was hers.
She reclaimed him from Ivy, and he has belonged to her ever since.
“So that’s why you moved to Commodore Island?” I say. “For Ash?”
I don’t say, “But what if he doesn’t want you? What if you’re wasting your time? Why are you planning your life around a boy you knew for two weeks? What if there’s nothing for you here? What if Tami is more powerful than all of us?”
“It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? My mom has been obsessed with moving to Commodore ever since she was a little kid. She’d hang out inside the ferry terminal in Seattle, waiting for her mom to get off work, watching all the people getting on and off the boat, and she thought they had everything she didn’t, and she’s been fixated on it ever since. She knew that spot where I met Ash was where a lot of Commodore’s most important families own vacation homes. Her idea of making it was to find someone to take care of her and own a big house on the water on Commodore Island and never have to work again.”
“And she got her wish,” I say. Ivy is that someone. Ivy is the one who has to take care of her.
“Yeah, I guess so. Sometimes I don’t know where her dreams stop and mine start.”
“Is she happy?”
Ivy laughs. “Of course not. She’s fucking miserable.”
“Maybe she was wishing for the wrong thing.”
“She wants me to be with Ash too. For her own reasons. No matter how much money I make, it’s never enough. She won’t be happy until we have old A-Corp money. She wants to be part of a dynasty.” I do not know how to read the look on Ivy’s face. I do not know the secret language of hating a parent.
I decide I can’t stand it anymore. I’m too hot. I lift myself out of the water, and Ivy does too, like a mirror image of me on the side of the pool, and now here we are, naked, dripping wet, sitting on rocks, staring at each other, and I do not look away.
“I need your help,” she says, throwing me a towel. “I need you to organize a meeting at your place. With me and Ash.”
“Why can’t you do it?”
“I can’t just invite him over. Can you imagine what Tami would think of that? And you know how this island gossips. You two are already friends. It makes more sense if people think we meet through you. Plus, I want you to be there.”
“Why?”
“I trust you. I trust myself when I’m with you.”
I don’t say, “But you don’t even know me.”
“I don’t have his new number,” I say. “Tami will think it’s weird if I ask her for it.”
Ivy looks at me, a war of yearning and disappointment on her face.
“Yes,” I say. “Okay, yes. I’ll figure something out. I promise. I will.”
AshandIvy. IvyandAsh.
She drops her towel and I try to burn into memory the perfect back of her body before she puts on her robe.
Maybe what Ash needs is a love like Ivy’s.
Maybe what I need is to be the glue that binds them.
14
Tourists and bored housewives. Family time. Skyping with Lily.
That’s what my summer should look like.
* * *
• • •
Ivy materializes as soon as I get home from work, like she was waiting for me in the bushes, like she fell from the sky.
* * *
• • •
Tami says come over. I say yes, hoping.
But Ash is not there. Again.
* * *
• • •
Ivy says, “Did you call him yet?”
* * *
• • •
Daddy drives Papa around the island to the ferry terminal every morning and picks him up every night. That is what they are like.
* * *
• • •