Next Time You See Me (13 page)

“Is Mac here?”

“What?”

“I’m looking for
Mac
. Have you
seen him
? Is he
here
?
With you?
” My voice shook more with every word and I felt as if I was going to hyperventilate.

A bell sounded from somewhere inside the house.

“Come in.” She stood aside.

Her living room was a cool and welcome contrast to the humidity outdoors. I followed her through a dining room with pale pink walls, into a large, well-appointed kitchen with white cabinetry, marble countertops, and lots of stainless steel. She went straight to her oven and opened it to let loose a blast of heat and remove four cake layers which she set on racks that had been laid out in advance. An industrial Mixmaster sat on the counter along with parchment sheets of sugar rosettes in different colors and a pastry bag that looked hastily abandoned.

“I just had to do that,” she said, crossing the kitchen to face me at close range. “What’s going on, Karin?”

“I’m looking for—”

“Okay.” Her left hand flew up, stopping me. I noticed that she was wearing a diamond engagement ring and my heart turned over in its grave. “Two questions pop to mind. One, why would you look for Mac here? Two, why would you look for him at all?”

All my suspicions about Deidre being the
other woman
deflated in that instant.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize; I can see you’re really upset.”

I showed her the photograph. “They never found him. He might not actually be dead.”

“He does look a lot like Mac.” She looked more closely at the photograph. “But I haven’t seen him since I left Quest. And that
definitely
isn’t me in the picture. I’ve never even stepped foot in the Collins.”

Ten minutes later we were parked at her kitchen island, drinking cups of the tea she brewed from whole leaves, telling each other our stories.

She had sold her co-op apartment in Manhattan, trading in a compact one-bedroom for this spacious three-bedroom house just blocks from the ocean and not far from her parents’ home. Her fiancé was Bo, a man she’d known since high school, and other than starting her own business catering cakes for parties—a Plan B career she planned to grow into a bona fide business—and planning her September wedding, she occasionally spoke to the lawyer who was defending her against Quest’s “absurd allegations.”

“Mac never believed you did any of it,” I told her.

“And
he
didn’t do anything wrong, either. This is office politics gone really awry. I can’t tell you how happy I am to have left all that behind. For me, despite all the heartache—and believe me, there’s been heartache—I’m happier now than I’ve ever been. I’ll
never
go back to New York.”

“I don’t know why I thought this could be you.” I touched the woman in photo, which lay between us on the counter.

“Of course you thought it was me. Why wouldn’t you? Given everything you’ve told me, I would have drawn the same conclusion. In fact, I kind of wish it was me so I could turn him over to you!”

We laughed.

“But really,” she said, “Mac? Having an affair? Ditching you and Ben? I just don’t see it. You guys were his life.”

That really made my eyes water because I knew in my heart it was true. But I had to make sense of all this;
without a body
. . . well, it was the drumbeat in my mind that wouldn’t quit. No body, and now this photo . . .

Deidre fed me a lunch of salad and cake and hugged me at her front door. I drove out of Rio Vista feeling both relieved and dismayed.

What now?

I picked up an iced coffee at a café on Collins Avenue and strolled back to my hotel, unable to fully take any of this in. Sunshine. Palm trees. Summer in wintertime. I was a single woman in vacation heaven, but not knowing whether Mac was dead or alive, whether he had loved us to the end or abandoned us heartlessly, made it impossible to
be here now
. There was no here and there was no now. No center of gravity. There was just me, alone in Florida, tilting at windmills.

Was
I delusional? Had I concocted something out of nothing? Back in my room, I took another long look at the photograph. At this point, I had looked at it so long, so hard, and so often that I couldn’t recognize or not-recognize Mac anymore. I remembered when I’d realized the memory of Jackson’s face was fading; it had taken a year. It had been only four months since I’d last seen Mac in person. With my third husband, would I forget him as soon as he walked out the door? But that was irrelevant because I would
never
marry again.

I carried the photograph in my purse all afternoon but didn’t bring it out to show anyone. Raul was still posted at the front of the restaurant and Tara still tended the desk with the rest of the day shift. I felt their eyes stay on me a moment too long whenever I passed through the lobby, monitoring that crazy, desperate woman who believed her dead husband was still alive.

But then in the late afternoon there was a shift change and I couldn’t help trying one more time at the restaurant and front desk. No luck. The bar was getting busy and so I found an empty stool, ordered a drink, and waited for one of the two bartenders—a sinewy black guy with short spiky dreads and earrings in both ears, name tag reading
Roy
—to pause long enough to catch his eye.

“Another drink?”

“Sure. And a question.” Out came the photograph. “Have you ever seen this man?”

“Looks like the new owner of the hotel.”

“He
bought
this place?”

“She. Ana Maria something-or-other. I only met her once.”

“Isn’t her name on your paycheck?”

“It’s a corporate name, Riviera Inc. or something like that.” Evidently Roy was not good with names.

A young man in a tuxedo who was sitting on a stool beside me twisted around, paying indiscreet attention to our conversation. He was strikingly handsome, but something about him looked older than his years; I put him at twenty-five. His hair was dyed black and gelled down and he wore eyeliner. My niece Lindsay had once given me a run-through of what she’d called “modern styles” (acknowledging my ancient status), and I recognized this one as emo, short for emotional and meaning hyperemotional or oversensitive, I guessed.

“Soliz Riviera Enterprises.” The young guy burped: sour whiskey. I held my breath until the smell passed.

Roy half nodded and began to move away but then my tipsy neighbor pushed his empty glass across the bar. Roy seemed to hesitate, then took the glass and brought the man a fresh drink, delivering it with a whispered reminder: “You’re on in an hour so this is the last one.”

“Isn’t it sweet how they care about me?”

Roy’s back was turned but you could tell by the quality of his stillness—the way his neck tightened and how he paused before moving on to his next customer—that he’d heard the remark.

“Why are you looking for him?” The photograph was still on the bar, and now he was looking at it, pulling it closer, holding it up for a better look. “I’m Ethan, by the way.”

“Karin. Do you work here or something?”

“I’m the entertainment.”

His tuxedo and makeup suddenly made sense. There was a baby grand in a mirrored corner across the lounge.

“You’re the piano player—”

“
Pianist
.” He took a long drink from his glass. “No, I’m a piano player. You’re right.”

“I didn’t mean it as an insult.”

“Why are you looking for him?”

“He’s my husband.”

“So he’s
married
.” Ethan nodded slowly, as if something now made sense.

“Why do you say that?”

He shrugged. “She always seems pissed at him, like he can never give her what she really wants.”

A fizzle restarted in my blood. Bubbling heat.

“Why didn’t anyone else recognize them here?”

“She’s a new owner. She only shows up at night and I guess she hasn’t met the day staff yet.”

“Do they live in the hotel?” I felt myself almost levitate off my seat. Because if they lived here, if they only came out at night, then any minute now they could make their appearance.

“She lives in Mexico, just came to survey her holdings.” He drained his whiskey and set his glass down hard on the bar, attracting both bartenders’ attention. Roy whispered something to the other one and they both ignored him.

“They hate me.”

“Where in Mexico, do you know?”

“Playa del Carmen, it’s south of Cancun. Unlike
Roy
,” he said loudly, “I actually read my paycheck. She’s building another hotel down there—Riviera Maya Palace.”

“You know a lot about her.”

“Sometimes I Google stuff when I’m bored.”

“So what do you know about him?” I touched the man in the photo.

“Nothing, really. Seemed like he went back with her because when she was gone, so was he.” He yawned and looked at his watch. “I should catch a nap before the first set. Good luck finding Dylan,” he said as he got down from his stool with more grace than I would have imagined him capable of in his condition.

“Dylan?”

“Your husband.”

“My husband’s name is Mac.”

“Oh. Well, I guess it
isn’t
him.” And then he gave me the same kind of suspicious look Raul the maître d’ had treated me to this morning:
Don’t you know what your own husband looks like?
But Ethan didn’t come right out and say it, and for that I was grateful.

“This has been really confusing for me.” My emotions transformed themselves again and quickly, continuing the roller-coaster ride of the past twenty-four hours. Anger turning to bewilderment to determination to disappointment to sorrow. Mac
was
dead, wasn’t he?

“You’ll find him.”

“No, I won’t.”

“I always kind of worried that there was someone else out there who looked exactly like me.” Ethan’s expression clamped with genuine angst.

I took a breath, stopped tears. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“I know the feeling.”

“Ethan, can I be frank?”

“You can be whoever you want. I’m open.” He smiled, and charm now shimmered off him, vanquishing the existential anxiety that had briefly altered his mood.

“You should stop drinking and get out of here. Go study the piano for real someplace that isn’t—”

“Florida,” he finished my sentence, half smiling and half nodding in dubious agreement.

“I mean it. Be a real pianist if that’s what you want.” On impulse, I took a pen from my purse and jotted my phone number on a napkin. “Come to New York, and call me when you get there.”

Now it was Ethan who was on the verge of tears. He folded the napkin and slipped it into his jacket pocket. “Good luck finding your husband.”

I looked straight at his face and saw past the black tuxedo and black hair and black eyeliner and looked into eyes that were tender brown and flecked with yellow. “He’s dead.”

Ethan didn’t respond. And that was it: the final confirmation.

I watched him weave across the lounge and into the lobby, disappearing in the direction of the elevators. I had run a fool’s errand; it was time to go home. I paid for my drinks and made my way out of the bar feeling overwhelmed by exhaustion.

When I reached the elevators I was surprised to catch a glimpse of Ethan in the one that was just about to leave. In contrast to his inebriated wooziness of a few minutes ago he seemed energized, almost sober, in heated argument with another man. I couldn’t hear a word of what they were saying but their voices were loud and the other man, a Mexican with thick eyebrows and a squarish face, struck me as the aggressor, though you couldn’t be sure. And then, just before the doors closed, the other man looked right at me with black eyes,
enraged
eyes. He wore a low-buttoned shirt that revealed a small tattoo of a lavender dahlia just below his left collarbone.

I blinked. Opened my eyes to the blank canvas of a departed elevator. Waited for the next one.

As soon as I stepped into my fourth-floor room I threw my suitcase onto the bed, wrested it open, and hastily packed my things, trying to shake all the ghosts out of my head. How many drinks had I had exactly? Two or three or four. It was one thing to be intoxicated, another to start hallucinating. Mac’s face really belonged to someone called Dylan. Deidre’s back actually belonged to a woman named Ana Maria. And now it wasn’t just faces and bodies but little tattoos that were appearing before my eyes. When would I start hearing voices, too?

I had to get out of here.
Get back home where life was real. Back to Ben and back to my mother.

I had bought an open-ended ticket but when I called my airline, I learned that no flights were available until morning; it was high vacation season and Sunday nights booked up far in advance. So I scheduled a morning flight, ordered up dinner, called my mother, told her I’d be back the next day by mid-afternoon, and went to sleep.