The Nest(97)
Nothing but the best for baby, she thought, hoping she would remember later that she’d had the presence of mind to make a tiny joke.
She was trying to fight the urge to push, but she knew she’d already lost. Her body was doing what it needed to do and it was completely clear that her job was to surrender. Tommy had come down the stairs and dumped a pile of things near her head and was in the kitchen washing his hands. At least she thought that’s what he was doing. She’d lost count of the contractions. She’d lost track of time. She thought she could feel something emerging, but how could that be true? It couldn’t be true. She remembered she was supposed to be trying short little breaths—ha, ha, ha, ha. No use. She reached down between her legs and felt it: her daughter’s head, slick and wet and grainy with hair. Her daughter was in a hurry.
“Tommy,” she yelled into the kitchen. “She’s coming.”
Her daughter was here.
CHAPTER FORTY–FIVE
There were three things Paul Underwood assiduously avoided: the beach, watercraft, and so-called street food. He genuinely disliked the beach, enjoyed neither the sand nor the beating sun nor the occasional whiff of putrefying sea creatures, nor the practically prehensile barnacles cleaving to a twist of brown otherworldly, goose-fleshed kelp. He made certain exceptions. On a cool, cloudy day, preferably in winter, preferably with an offshore breeze, he could be persuaded to walk along the waterfront for atmosphere if, say, a bowl of chowder or a bucket of steamers were offered as recompense at the end. But otherwise? Thank you very much, but no thank you. He’d never learned to swim, and marine vessels of any kind from kayaks to cruise ships petrified him. (He’d never even learned to drive a car, so the prospect of a stalled boat was also disturbing.) And the entire concept of street food was befuddling and abhorrent: the greasy cart with its questionable sanitation, the paper plates that lost all tensile strength before you were finished, eating while standing, having things drip down your hand or onto your pants, and how to accommodate a beverage along with flatware and napkins? He didn’t even approve of dining al fresco—what was the point when there was a perfectly wonderful, bug-free, climate-controlled room nearby? Street food was dining al fresco minus the petty luxuries of a table and a chair. In other words, minus civilization.
So Paul’s discomfort, while standing on a slightly swaying dock, under the relentless afternoon Caribbean sun, waiting to board a ferry while eating a plate of jerk chicken and fried plantains served from a truck in confounding proximity to the diesel fumes from the nearby idling ferry, was immense. Immense and vaguely nauseating.
His consolation? Bea. She was across the dock, sitting on a bench, her face bent to her plate of food and momentarily hidden by the wide-brimmed straw hat he’d bought her the minute they arrived at the ferry terminal from the airport, ten days ago. Although their trip hadn’t been successful by Bea’s measure (she hadn’t found Leo), the trip for Paul had gone exceedingly well. Bea’s spirits had oddly—or maybe predictably—risen a bit each day. Partly it was their surroundings, being away from New York, being away from the Plumbs. But partly it was because Bea seemed to let go a little bit more each day of the need to find Leo. It wasn’t anything she said—she wouldn’t talk about not finding Leo—but her dissipating urgency was obvious to Paul. Her brow seemed to smooth a little each day. Her shoulders unwound. She’d stopped chewing the side of her mouth.
Everyone else seemed convinced that Bea was on a fool’s errand. Well, if that made him the fool’s accomplice, so be it. He’d eagerly volunteered to accompany Bea when she confided how anxious she was about going alone, and not just for the opportunity of her company or to offer support for her fraught mission, but to be there to help her confront Leo if he actually appeared. Paul would be quite happy to confront Leo.
He enjoyed parts of their trip, especially the tiny side-by-side but separate wooden cottages they rented near the water, both with green tile roofs and cherry-colored bougainvillea surrounding the front doors. He appreciated the expansive view of the shimmering blue water that he could admire safely from his shaded deck. And the trip had begun with promise. An airport worker recognized Leo’s photo as someone who’d landed on a small charter from Miami some weeks ago and who hadn’t left, at least not by plane.
But after that initial hopeful sign, nothing. Nobody recognized his photo or—as Paul strongly suspected was the case—they did and didn’t say so. As Bea became increasingly frustrated, he started going out on his own some afternoons, looking in the more remote bars on the island, the places not frequented by tourists and, Paul believed, not appropriate for Bea. But those efforts ran dry, too. Two nights ago he’d coaxed her out for dinner at a small inn on the island. He took her hand in his and made his case for returning to New York. That’s as far as his physical intrusion went. She was preoccupied with Leo, occasionally despondent, and he didn’t want her to turn to him out of sadness or desperation. He’d waited this long, he could wait until they got back to New York. Or he could wait for her to make the first move. They’d been so simpatico lately that he thought he wasn’t crazy in believing she might just make the first move.
And she’d been writing nearly every day. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack. He could hear her from his deck when the door to her room was open, typing on the keyboard. She demurred when he asked what she was working on, but he could tell she was pleased. And he was patient. If Paul Underwood was anything, he was extremely patient.