What Happens in Paradise(35)

“Well, he doesn’t need to be jealous,” Cash says. “Ayers and I are just friends.”

“That’s what I told him,” Ayers says. She drops her blue aviators down over her eyes. “Are you sure you don’t mind carrying the pack? It’s got to be heavy.”

“Please,” Cash says. “I hike at eight, nine thousand feet with a pack that’s three times this weight.”

“Ayers doesn’t like hiking,” Maia says. “But she’s my parent now, so she has to do enriching things with me.”

“Mangrove snorkeling is enriching,” Ayers says. She looks up at the brilliant blue sky. “And a far more appropriate activity than hiking on an eighty-degree day.”

“Next week,” Maia says. She strides toward the trailhead. “Come on, Winnie, let’s go.”



The Johnny Horn Trail has five spurs, Maia explains. The first spur, a flat, sandy walking path, leads to a narrow beach hugging a bay that has a rugged island a hundred yards offshore.

“Waterlemon Cay,” Ayers says. “Best snorkeling on St. John. How about I stay here and you guys keep going?”

“We’ve only been hiking thirty seconds,” Maia says. She turns to Cash. “See what I have to deal with?”

The second spur takes them up a steep, rocky incline that requires a fair amount of scrambling and careful foot placement before it levels out, when they reach stone ruins. This is the guardhouse, Maia tells them, built in the 1840s, back when slavery had been abolished in the British Virgin Islands across the Sir Francis Drake Channel but was still legal on St. John.

“There were sixteen soldiers stationed here,” Maia says. “And their job was to keep watch for runaway slaves.”

Cash is impressed. “You have quite the body of knowledge,” he says. “How did you learn all this?”

“My mom,” Maia says. “She knew everything about the Virgin Islands.”

Cash nods as the peculiarity of what he’s doing hits him. He’s hiking with a half sister he never knew he had. Maia bows her head and is quiet and Ayers places a hand on the back of her neck and draws her in. They’re thinking about Rosie; Cash can feel how much they miss her. A twelve-year-old girl lost her mother, lost both of her parents, and yet here she is, bravely soldiering on with her mother’s best friend and a strange man she has gamely decided to accept as “bro.”

“Did your mom like to hike?” Cash asks.

“No,” Maia says, and she and Ayers laugh. “She was more like Ayers; she preferred the beach. But, I mean, she brought me up here a few times because she wanted me to experience the place we lived.”

“I wish I’d been able to meet your mom,” Cash says honestly. More than once over the past couple of weeks, Cash has imagined this whole thing unfolding differently. What if, at some point, Russ had just come clean about his life, said that business had taken him to the Caribbean and he’d met a woman and fallen in love. Cash and Baker would have been furious at first, incredulous, resentful on Irene’s behalf. They probably would have refused to speak to Russ for a while. But eventually, Cash suspects, they would have come to terms with the situation and flown down to visit Russ here. They could have met Rosie. It might have taken time, but they could have accepted her as part of the family.

Cash shakes his head. That is a trail spur that never was; there’s no use dwelling on it.

“Shall we go?” Ayers asks. “Get this over with?”



After the guardhouse, they begin to hit their stride. There’s not much canopy cover but even so, Cash finds himself slowing down so he can enjoy just being. His breathing steadies. He reminds himself he doesn’t need to be anywhere; he has nothing else to do today. Ayers is here, Maia is here. Ayers is right, it’s hot, but just then, the sun disappears behind a cloud, so there’s a brief respite.

Maia not only knows history, she is also quite the naturalist. She points out a genip tree—in the summer it produces a fruit similar to a lime. Cash has never heard of it.

“In the summer, I eat elk jerky,” Cash says.

Maia shoots him a look. “I’m a vegetarian,” she says.

“You are?” Cash says. “Ayers told me to get you a pastrami melt.”

“I make an exception for pastrami,” Maia says. “And Candi’s barbecue.”

Maia points out wild tamarind, cassia trees, and something called catch-and-keep, which is a cute name for a nefarious pricker bush. They eventually reach a scenic overlook where each of them—Winnie included—sucks down a bottle of water. Maia points across the way to Jost Van Dyke and Tortola.

After the lookout, the trail heads downhill and it’s fully shaded. Everyone seems a little happier.

“So I guess I’ll address the elephant in the room,” Maia says. “How’s your brother?”

Cash isn’t sure he’s heard right. “Is Baker an elephant?”

“I don’t know, Ayers, is Baker an elephant?” Maia says.

“Stop being precocious for one minute, please,” Ayers says. She turns to Cash and he can see the hopeful expectation in her face, even with her sunglasses on. “How is Baker? He…went back to Houston, I take it? I haven’t heard from him.”

Cash can’t look at her. He concentrates on walking, left foot, then right, steady in his boots, moving down the dirt trail over rocks and around the tentacles of catch-and-keep. Ayers likes Baker. She’s hung up on him; Cash can hear it in her voice. He can’t believe it. He’d met Mick the night before, and Mick is who she’s with now, but Cash isn’t intimidated by Mick. Mick is ridiculous, a clown, a clown who cheated on Ayers once and who would most certainly do it again.