Baggage Check Read online

  Eventually, Marci retired to the big master bedroom she’d been sharing with Suzanne to nap. Kate sat outside on the porch, reading. She’d left the door open so the other three could hear the sound of the waves and gulls as they played cards at the kitchen table. It was idyllic. Rebecca tried not to appear too nervous about the plans for the next day.

  The general idea was that sometime Saturday evening, Marci was going to drag Suzanne out to satisfy a pregnancy craving for something that, of course, would be impossible to obtain easily on the island. That would keep Suze busy for a couple of hours while the rest of them set everything up and hopefully, Dylan would appear with Jake and Kate’s husband, Jeff. Rebecca had offered to call in favors at the airline to get them last-minute tickets, but she sort of hoped they wouldn’t take her up on this. She wasn’t entirely sure how much clout her three years of service had earned her in this regard.

  She, Beth, and Suzanne were on their third game of rummy when her phone vibrated in her pocket. Rebecca jumped, startled, and Suzanne looked puzzled. She pulled the phone from her pocket and checked the number. Her heart skipped a beat. Jake.

  “Hey,” she said, getting up from the table and mouthing “work” to Suzanne and Beth.

  Then she realized she probably wouldn’t answer a work call with “hey,” so she added, “Hello, Mr. Roberson,” in a fumbling voice. Judging by Suzanne’s confused expression, this was even worse. In her panic, Rebecca bumped into a table, cursing loudly, as she headed out the front door and closed it behind her so they could speak freely.

  “Hey, slick,” Jake said. “Remind me not to hire you as a spy or anything.”

  “Yes,” Rebecca said. Her knee throbbed from the collision with the table, and her heart pounded with the same intensity.

  “I called you since my darling wife is probably napping,” he said.

  “Yes,” she repeated, stupidly. “She is.” Was Rebecca imagining things, or was there a hint of sarcasm on my darling wife?

  “I guess she told you girls, then, about the baby?” His tone was unreadable, awkward.

  “Um, yes. Congratulations, Jake, of course.”

  “Not Jacob, huh?”

  “What?”

  “You never call me Jacob anymore. I always thought it was kind of endearing, how only you did that. Well, you and my grandmother.”

  It was as though Rebecca had hit her head instead of her knee. Everything was spinning in the glaring sunlight, so she shaded her eyes, wishing she had thought to grab her sunglasses on the way out the door.

  “Well, it’s been—different,” she managed. You know, I haven’t felt as affectionate and playful since you broke my heart and married the other girl. Where was he going with this?

  And then, it was as though he had never said any of it. “Okay, so anyway, Dylan’s got a charter booked for tomorrow afternoon and we should be there by five. We’re bringing a bunch of fishing stuff in case the paparazzi are lurking around. Do me a favor and text me when Suze and Marci leave, so we don’t cross paths with them on our way to the beach house.”

  “Sure,” Rebecca said. “Will do.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “You’re wonderful as always, Bec.” The phone had disconnected before she could think what to say next.

  * * *

  Saturday morning was leisurely at the beach house, and Rebecca had finally managed to quell some of her nervous excitement. It was overcast until almost noon, and the girls sat in their pajamas drinking coffee and scarfing down pastries Marci had obtained from a bakery in Charleston while the rest of them slept in. They got sub sandwiches for lunch, and spent a couple of hours on the beach before Marci retired for her daily nap at three, with strict instructions for them to wake her by four thirty.

  Rebecca had stepped out the front door to take a walk when her phone rang. Hoping for Jake, she made out her mother’s number through the glare and her stomach sank. She twisted the ring on her right hand, breathing deeply, and answered.

  “Becky! You have to come home!” Her mother’s voice, high and strained. “Come tell them I’m not leaving!”

  “Mama, what is it?”

  “They’re saying I have to leave.”

  “Who is?”

  “I don’t know. There’s a note on the door. On my door! They had to walk on my private property to put the note here. It’s an outrage. I pay my taxes!”

  Rebecca inhaled deeply, twisting her ring again. “I know you do, Mama,” she said, using the calm voice she normally reserved for white-knuckle passengers during turbulence. “I’m sure there is some kind of mistake. Did you call Daddy? Did you remember to pay the bills?”

  “Your father”—Lorena Williamson spit out the word—“hasn’t returned my call. He’s probably with that whore!”

  “Okay, calm down. I’ll call Daddy, okay? Just try not to panic. We’ll get it straightened out.” She said this, as she always did, with far more conviction than she felt. But it worked.

  “You’ll get me a lawyer, won’t you, Rebecca?” Her mother’s voice was thin, but at least calmer as she pleaded. “You know people over there in Atlanta; you’ll find someone who can help?”

  “Of course I would, Mama, but I’m sure you don’t need a lawyer. This is probably just a mistake, and we’ll get it straightened out. Why don’t you take a walk and get a little fresh air?”

  As soon as it was out of her mouth, Rebecca knew it was the wrong thing to say. “I don’t need to take a walk. I need people to leave me alone and stop putting papers on my damn house, Rebecca!”

  “Okay, Mother, I’m sorry,” Rebecca said. “I’ll try to find out what’s going on.”

  “And you’ll come home?”

  “I’m on a trip with some girlfriends, Mama,” Rebecca said gently. “I’m supposed to go back to work on Tuesday.”

  “Oh,” Lorena said. Then she made the statement that was the signal of motherly guilt worldwide. “Well, don’t worry about me, then.”

  “Tell you what, I’ll call you back today if I find anything out, and then I’ll look at the schedule when I get back and find out when I can get over there. Okay?”

  “Okay,” her mother said. Now her voice had a thin, faraway quality, and Rebecca knew just as surely as if she were standing next to her that her mother was in Cory’s room, holding his worn baseball glove to her chest and staring out the window at the backyard. Rebecca hung up without saying anything else, knowing that she wouldn’t have been heard if she did.

  Her father answered after two rings. “Rebecca Rockstar!” he said gleefully. He had given her this nickname at age eleven, toward the end of a two-week period during which she enjoyed singing into her hairbrush and pretending to be Joan Jett, until Tanya Boozer informed her that she couldn’t sing. Joan Jett and the Blackhearts were long gone, but despite her best efforts, Rebecca Rockstar would never go away.

  “Hi, Dad.” She decided to get straight to the point, glancing at the house behind her. “Do you know what’s going on with Mama?”

  There was quiet on the other end of the line, and Rebecca was pretty sure she heard whispering. “No, darlin’,” he said at last. “She tried to call me a little bit ago, but I … well, I’m kind of busy.”

  “But you answered when I called,” she said.

  “I’ll always answer for you, Rebecca. But the truth is I’m down at Playa del Carmen with some friends and—”

  “Wait a minute. You’re in Mexico?” She tried to picture her dad in his full beard and postal service uniform, hanging out on a beach, sucking down margaritas. It didn’t compute. “Who with?”

  He hesitated. “Just some friends.”

  “Friends?”

  “Yes, George and Annette Brown—you remember them—and a couple of others from church—”

  “And Sonia?” Rebecca hated the accusatory tone in her voice.

  “Yes, Rebecca, and Sonia.” His voice was impatient.

  “You didn’t even tell me you were going,” she said. It sounded even more ri
diculous spoken aloud than it had in her head, especially since she had not mentioned to him that she would be at the beach this weekend, either. “I could have gotten you a flight.”

  “Oh, that’s okay, darlin’,” her dad said. “The group all flew down together and I didn’t really have much to do with the arrangements. Annette sort of led the charge on that. Anyway, we’re heading out to do some—what is it?—parasailing. Hopefully I won’t break my neck and drown. So, what can I do for you?”

  “Well, Mom called and she’s really upset—something about a note on the door. You’ve paid the mortgage and everything, right?”

  “Of course. I always pay it way ahead.” There was high-pitched giggling in the background. Rebecca gritted her teeth and twisted her ring, counting—seven, eight, nine.…

  “What about the bills? Like the utilities and stuff. Do you think she lost them again?”

  “I don’t think so sweetheart—I’ll be right there! See if they have an extralarge life jacket!—Rebecca, I pretty much stay on top of all that, for her house and mine. But I’ll check into it when I get home. If it’s the power company, I’m sure she has a few days before anything will happen. They put those notices up to scare people into paying the bills.”

  “So what should I do?”

  “Nothing you can do, darlin’—just go have a good time. Live your life. It will be fine. Now I need to run.” Before the call disconnected, she heard more talking and laughing and some kind of horns playing in the background. Mexico? Parasailing? Her parents’ small-town-Alabama Sunday school group partying like college kids? It was some kind of alternate universe.

  She debated about calling her mother back, and decided against it. What could she say? “Daddy doesn’t know anything and he’s busy partying on the beach with his new girlfriend and all your old friends”? Rebecca sighed and began walking along the asphalt driveway they shared with neighboring beach houses. Two doors down, a man was being pulled to a minivan by three children chanting, “Ice cream! Ice cream! Ice cream!”

  Rebecca and her father were both at different beaches today, and at least one of them was doing a bang-up job of getting on with his life. He’d suggested that she do the same, and she knew he was right. If Rebecca really knew what was good for her, she’d keep walking right now, leaving her former life and her friends, and even Jake, behind. She should jump on a plane to Madrid or Paris and never look back. Marry some exotic guy with a sexy accent and a powerful job. Get a cottage in the European countryside. Raise goats. Make cheese. She’d had this fantasy before but had only gone so far as to get a job that put her on planes every day. Now it called to her again—the desire to be somewhere, someone, else. To get as far away from Oreville, Alabama, as possible and never go back.

  Rebecca had been one foot out the door since her freshman year in high school, but even when she left to live with Aunt Louise before college, Rebecca knew she could never really leave. Almost two decades later, even though she had no obligations to hold her back, she could never bring herself to stay where the planes brought her. Something stopped her. Maybe the same thing that stopped her dad from filing for divorce, even though he’d been out of the house for years. They were both inextricably tied to that small house in Alabama, where Rebecca’s mother lived with her cats and collections and the lingering memory of a boy long dead.

  6

  Rebecca made her way down to the water and walked for a while, letting the Atlantic froth against her ankles. It was late in the afternoon and still hot; the beach was mostly populated by older children and their tired, sunburnt parents, with a few young-adult sunbathers here and there. She tried, without success, to make her mind as clear as the blazing blue sky.

  I am fine. Most problems are temporary. It’s not my job to fix everyone else.

  When she returned, she took the railroad tie path up to the house and overheard Marci trying to get Suzanne out of a lounge chair on the back deck. “Please, Suze, we never get to do anything just the two of us!”

  “We get pedicures every other week. And we have dinner just the two of us at least that often.”

  “I know, but this is different. No one else understands my cravings like you do.”

  “I don’t understand them, Marci. I indulge them. There’s a difference.”

  Marci caught Rebecca’s eye and shrugged slightly. Suzanne seemed firmly planted where she was, her giant sunglasses glinting in the late-afternoon sun and a stack of six or seven magazines next to her, beneath a bottle of ice water.

  “What are you craving?” Rebecca asked, not sure how to help Marci but needing to make her presence known.

  “You know, something greasy but not too greasy, and salty and a little bit sweet,” Marci said.

  “Hmmm … I could always come with you,” Rebecca said. “When we figure out what you want, we can just pick up dinner for everyone.”

  Suzanne sat up straight. She hated it when other people ordered her food—she was so picky about how things were prepared. “That’s okay,” she said, “thanks, Rebecca, but I’ll go with her. You should stay here and relax—you have to wait on people all the time at work. I was just going in anyway.”

  When Suzanne had hurried in through the door to change, Marci gave Rebecca a smile. “Nice work,” she said. “Thanks.”

  Rebecca shrugged. “No problem.”

  They stood awkwardly there for a minute, each one apparently waiting for the other to go into the house first. They did this: traded niceties, traded occasional barbs, and then stood outside doorways, trying to decide who should go first into a room. It was exhausting.

  “Please, go ahead,” Rebecca said.

  So Marci did, brushing past with a forced smile and a hand at her lower belly.

  Once Marci and Suzanne were gone, Rebecca texted Jake, and the guys arrived within moments. In his characteristic style, Dylan had managed to secure a shiny white Jeep from somewhere, so the three guys all looked ruddy and windblown as though they’d been on the island for days instead of hours. Dylan grinned at the girls as he signaled for the other two to get out. Jeff was out of the passenger’s seat and sweeping little Kate into his arms in a flash.

  “I missed you, baby,” he said.

  “Jeff, it’s only been a couple of days,” Kate said. “What’s it going to be like when you guys are on tour?”

  “You’ll just have to come with us. You and Adrian.” Before she could answer, he was planting a kiss on her mouth that made Beth and Rebecca look first at one another, and then quickly back to the Jeep in embarrassment.

  The horn sounded and Dylan yelled from the car, “Dude! You might be my best man, but that is still my baby sister!”

  Behind her, Rebecca heard Kate whisper, “I missed you, too, babe.”

  She stepped forward toward the Jeep to help unload. Climbing out of the backseat, Jake looked to Rebecca the same way he had in college, wearing a faded UGA T-shirt, worn khaki cargo shorts, and flip-flops. He even had a baseball hat on backward the way he always had when he had driven his own battered old Jeep around Athens. He was the kind of guy who was more at home eating hot dogs at a football game than a steak dinner at the country club. Even Marci, who was far from a slave to fashion herself, complained that she could never convince him to get rid of his ratty old clothes and buy anything new. You would never know he was in line to inherit a fortune of old textile money.

  He pulled a battered black duffel and his camera equipment out of the car with practiced ease and kissed Beth and Rebecca each on the cheek on his way into the house. He lingered, or Rebecca imagined he lingered, for a split second with his lips against her cheek. He smelled like deodorant and soap, with a faint hint of beer on his breath, presumably from the plane.

  She avoided Beth’s gaze as Jake went inside and Dylan backed out of the driveway to park the car farther away, so Suzanne would not see it when she returned. If Beth had noticed anything in Jake’s behavior or Rebecca’s face, she said nothing.

  The sun was a
lready sinking in the sky, so the six of them worked quickly to get everything set up. Kate and Jeff giggled and kissed like teenagers in the kitchen while they set up food and drinks. These consisted mostly of microwave appetizers with bottles of champagne and beer in ice buckets. Each time she passed the two of them during the setup, Rebecca wondered whether this was the first time they had been away from Adrian since he was born six months before. It must have been hard to enjoy being newlyweds, Rebecca guessed, when you were three months pregnant walking down the aisle.

  Outside, Jake and Dylan helped Rebecca set up the fishing poles in the sand and create a makeshift garland out of toilet paper. It took some practice because it ripped so easily, but soon they had a passable bough between the two poles and what looked like crepe paper streamers hanging down from each one. Beth had managed to find some wildflowers to tie up on each with dental floss, and Rebecca used the mason jars and cinnamon candles to create a path from the railroad ties to the spot on the beach. She lit them and hoped they would burn long enough to be visible when Suzanne and Marci got back. As the sun began to set, they all changed quickly into their nicest beach clothes, and waited on the back porch.

  “You ready for this?” Jeff asked Dylan.

  “Yep,” Dylan said simply. He wore pressed khaki shorts and a tan-and-white Hawaiian shirt. It was one of the few times Rebecca had seen him—in the media or in person—without his trademark camouflage hat. She noticed that he had a bit of a receding hairline, surprising for someone who was just twenty-seven. Normally larger than life, tonight Dylan Burke looked like an average guy.

  They heard the car pull up out front, just as the sun began to dip below the horizon. It was perfect timing—the little scene they had created on the beach was bathed in orange light, with the mason jar candles flickering cheerfully along the path in the sand. Dylan, Jeff, and Jake hurried down the stairs and took their places beneath the streamers, while Kate, Beth, and Rebecca gathered up the extra wildflowers and listened at the door.

  “Where is everyone?” Suzanne was saying irritably. “I told you we didn’t need to get all this stuff—they obviously went out.”