I lost it again. I folded like a lawn chair as I started crying.
After about a minute, I wiped my wet face on my thigh. When I sat up, Officer Fournier was staring at me in the rearview mirror with a look I couldn’t quite read in his pale eyes.
We held eye contact for a long, startling electric beat. I guess it was a strange time to feel attraction toward someone, but there it was. I couldn’t look away. He cut away first, tapping my dad’s prayer card to his chin.
“What if?” he said after a moment.
I had my own what-ifs going through my head right at that moment. Like, what if I hadn’t had Jell-O shots for lunch? What if I hadn’t taken Alex’s car? What if I’d never been born?
That’s when the officer suddenly opened his door and got out. Then there was a snap and a click and the door beside me opened, too.
“I’m making a judgment call here,” he said as he undid my cuffs. “Get back in your car and get out of here. Go back to school, Jeanine. This never happened.”
Chapter 9
I STOOD UP in the street beside the police car, rubbing my wrists, trying to absorb exactly what was happening. My head was spinning faster than the Camaro had, faster than the blinding carnival lights on top of the cop car.
I looked forward past Alex’s Camaro at the open road. Beside the empty beach, the dark water was as still as glass.
“I don’t understand, Officer Fournier,” I said.
“That’s funny. I’m having a little trouble understanding what I’m doing myself,” he said, putting the cuffs back on his belt and passing a hand through his cropped black hair. “And you can drop the ‘Officer’ there. My name’s Peter. Saint Peter, in your case, since I just saved your life. Now get back in your car and get out of here before somebody comes or I change my mind.”
“But how can I just go?”
“There aren’t any witnesses, and I haven’t called it in yet, is how,” he said.
“But I’m responsible.”
“Listen to me,” Peter said. “The state of Florida is waging a war on drunk driving, with extremely strict sentencing guidelines for vehicular manslaughter. Once I make you blow into the Breathalyzer, you’re looking at jail time. It’s a ridiculously stupid, politically motivated law. But the jury won’t see that, and neither will the judge. You can’t survive jail, Jeanine. You won’t make it.”
“But that poor man is dead. I can’t just walk away.”
“Let me tell you a little about that poor man,” Peter said. “His name is Ramón Peña. He was a hard-core meth and heroin addict who just got out of jail. We collared the repeat offender a couple of years ago, climbing out of an old lady’s window. He raped and robbed an eighty-three-year-old woman. Broke her jaw.”
Peter nodded at my surprise.
“When Ramón couldn’t find a drunk to roll, he’d bum money from tourists on Duval Street with his dog. That’s basically his obituary. Besides, it wasn’t even your fault. He was probably so high that he dove out in front of your car thinking it was a swimming pool. Ramón’s hurt enough people in his life. Don’t let his death take you out, too. You’re a decent person who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now take your boyfriend’s keys and get out of here.”
“But…,” I said.
“I’m not asking you,” Peter said, putting the keys in my hand. “I’m telling you. Now go.”
Chapter 10
I WAS STARING at the keys, now miraculously back in my palm, when Peter’s police radio let out a long beep. A voice on the radio began chattering something I couldn’t decipher. Peter cocked his head, listening intently.
“What is it?” I said.
“Wait, wait,” he said, leaning back into the car, listening.
“Unbelievable,” he said when the radio voice stopped. He shook his head as he turned, his face crestfallen.
“What?” I said.
“Your boyfriend’s Camaro just came up over the radio as stolen. He told dispatch that not only did you take his car without permission, but that you’re drunk. First thing the DTs will do when they pull up is ask for all the overnight calls that came in. Next, they’ll want to see your boyfriend’s car, which for sure has blood on it. Which leaves no way out of this after all. I can’t believe this. I actually can’t let you go. I have to call this in now.”
Alex had called his car in as stolen? After what he did to me with Maureen, he actually called the cops on me? I felt incredibly weak suddenly. I felt like lying down on the asphalt next to the cop car and closing my eyes. Instead I just started to cry.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Peter said, putting his hand on my shoulder. He stared at me, his blue eyes as big as saucers. “Please don’t cry. I think we can fix this. I have an idea,” he said.
Peter made a dismal face as he slowly glanced over his shoulder at the fallen man, then back at me.
“We could get rid of Ramón’s body,” he said.
Chapter 11
“WHAT?” I said, wincing.
“I live a few blocks from here. I have a boat at my house,” Peter said. “I’ll take care of everything.”
My leg started hopping again like a Mexican jumping bean.
“But that’s nuts,” I said. “You know that, right? How nuts that is?”
Peter nodded with an almost comic enthusiasm. “You don’t have to explain it to me,” he said.
“But I mean…,” I said, hesitating.
“Look, Jeanine. It’s our only option. I’ll put him in the Camaro’s trunk. You follow me in the Camaro back to my house. I’ll take it from there. I’m working the graveyard shift. No one will even know I’m gone.”
“This is crazy,” I said, looking around.
“We’re out of time,” Peter said. “If a car comes by, I won’t have a choice. I’m trying to do you a favor, but if you’re not up to it, I completely understand. I’m not real jazzed about the possibility of going to jail myself. It’s entirely up to you.”
I stood there looking at him as he checked his watch. He blinked as he stared back, waiting calmly for my answer. Even with his big hands resting on his bulky gear-laden hips, he suddenly seemed friendly, a nice teddy bear of a guy, a drinking buddy, a big brother sticking his neck out for me, trying to do me a solid.
Had my father ever done something like this for someone? I wondered. Maybe he had, I thought.
I closed my eyes. There it was before me. The rest of my life. Jail or freedom. Right or wrong.
I thought about looking over again at the man I’d struck, but in the end I decided not to.
I opened my eyes.
In the silence, Peter clicked the cuffs together. Like the final tick of a scale coming to rest. Like the click of the bathroom door with Alex and Maureen behind it, I thought.
Then finally, I nodded.
“OK, then. Hurry up now,” Peter said. “Back up the car, pop the trunk, and follow me.”
Book Two
ENDLESS SUMMER
Chapter 12
IT MUST HAVE BEEN around noon when I woke up, but I didn’t open my eyes right away.
As I pretty much always did over the last two years, I lay still, my breath held and eyelids sealed, momentarily unsure and afraid of where I might find myself.
Then I opened my eyes and let out a sigh of relief.
Because I was OK.
I was still free.
I wasn’t in a prison cell.
Not even close.
Yawning, stretching, blinking in the bright, hazy morning light, I sat up in bed, slowly taking in the white-on-white bedroom. From left to right, I scanned the driftwood sculpture on the side table, the seashell shadow box, the book-filled beadboard bookcases.
And, as usual, my waking inventory ended at my left hand. Or more precisely, at the diamond engagement ring and wedding band that had somehow become attached to my ring finger.
Standing, I stopped and shook my startled head at the mirror above the bedside table. From all my sea kayaking and
windsurfing over the past two years, my light skin had turned a deep shade of brown. My brown hair, on the other hand, had become lighter, now striped with blond streaks.
I’d somehow become a version of myself I’d never even considered. Jeanine, surfer chick. Malibu Jeanine.
Failing to wrap my head around that one, I crossed the room and opened the vertical blinds on the sliders. I squinted as I took in the lazily leaning king palms, the expanse of Crayola teal water, the forest of boat masts.
My backyard, replete with two white seaward-facing chaise longues, could have been the set of a Corona commercial. I smiled at the muscular arm resting on the edge of the right chair.
Since we were out of Corona, I had to settle for putting an ice-cold bottle of Red Stripe into the big hand as I stepped up.
Two years of healing. Two years of love. No one was luckier than I.
“How’s the fishing there, Mr. Fournier?” I said.
“Slow, Mrs. Fournier,” Peter said, grinning at me impishly behind his Wayfarers.
Chapter 13
YEP. YOU GUESSED IT. Peter and I had gotten married.
Or maybe you didn’t. I don’t blame you. I sure as hell hadn’t seen it coming.
I came down for spring break, and I never went home.
“Fish don’t seem to be biting today,” Peter said, putting the beer bottle down next to his sea rod and grabbing my ankle. “But hey, wait. I think I got something.”
For a scary second, I worried that I’d fall onto our concrete seawall or off it. But then I was on my back, across Peter’s lap, screeching ecstatically as he mercilessly tickled my armpits. Over the last two years in Key West, I was basically majoring in ecstatic screeching.
“You honestly think I’d let you fall in?” Peter whispered as he caught my earlobe in his teeth. “After all we’ve been through? It took me my whole life to catch a real-life mermaid. I’d never throw you back. No way.”
“In that case,” I said, sighing, as I lay back in the neighboring chaise. I smiled up at the merciless blue tropical Floridian sky. “I’ll just have to put up with you mortals for one more day.”
What hadn’t we been through? I thought as I closed my eyes, remembering the night of the accident.
It seemed like a million years ago.
After we had pulled into Peter’s carport, he brought me inside and sat me down on his living room couch and told me to sit tight. About ten minutes later, I heard his boat start up. I fell asleep waiting for him to return and woke to the sun coming up and Peter, back from his night shift, in the kitchen making us breakfast.
He’d taken care of everything, including delivering the Camaro back to Alex and persuading him to drop the car theft charge. It was as if the night before had never happened at all.
When I went back to the hotel that afternoon, the only thing waiting in the lobby were my bags. My friends were gone. Not just Alex and Maureen, but Mike and even Cathy had left. They hadn’t left a message.
I remembered singing “Could You Be Loved?” with them. The answer in my case was apparently a big fat no. Life wasn’t an episode of Friends, it seemed. Not one of them had “been there” for me, that was for sure. Not one of them had given a shit whether I lived or died.
Driving me to the bus station, Peter had taken one look at my face and told me that he had a tiny room above his garage that he sometimes rented.
“If you’re not ready to go back to school just yet, you could stay for a couple of days,” he said.
A couple of days.
Key West’s most famous last words.
When two days turned into a week, Peter said he had a friend, Elena, a female cop, who was part owner of the island’s largest catering company and was always looking for people.
I took the catering job the next day and withdrew from school the day after that.
I knew it was a rash, probably borderline crazy thing to do. I also knew things were different now. That I was different. It wasn’t just the accident. With the break from my friends, the last vestiges of my old life had been cast away. One door had closed, and something in the Key West air told me to sit tight until the next one opened.
And that’s exactly what happened.
From the beginning, Peter was a perfect gentleman. Really more like a father or an extremely protective brother. He was always making sure that I used sunscreen and ate enough and got enough exercise and enough sleep. He was constantly leaving things on the rickety landing outside my door, videotapes, bags of fruit, books.
By far, my favorite offering was a battered, secondhand copy of seventeenth-century English poets, Herrick and Marvell. At night I’d lie in my tiny bed and read, rediscovering why I’d become an English major in the first place. Rose petals and winged chariots, eternal youth and beauty. It was uncanny how well Peter seemed to know me.
Peter actually stuttered the first time he asked me to come to dinner. He served in the backyard with a tablecloth and china. He even wore a jacket with his Bermuda shorts. The lamb chops were burnt, the mashed potatoes were runny, but by the end of the sunset, even before he reached across the table and held my hand, I knew.
We both knew. Despite our ten-year age difference, we’d both known it from pretty much the moment we looked at each other through his cruiser’s backseat mesh.
He proposed two weeks later. Teaching me how to fish, he asked me to reel in the line so he could change the bait. Only instead of a hook, my ring was tied to the end of the line, and I turned to find Peter down on one knee.
We were married in a city hall wedding six months after that.
I knew the whole thing was crazy. I knew that I was too young, that things were happening too fast, that I was being impulsive. But the craziest thing of all was that it kept working.
“Jeanine?” Peter said.
I opened one of my eyes.
“Yes, Peter,” I said.
“I thought you mermaids never wore shirts.”
“That’s only under the sea, silly,” I said. “On land among you mortals, we have to keep the devastating, beguiling power of our boobies in check or nothing would ever get done.”
“Except you?” Peter said.
I closed my eye. “Now you’re getting it.”
“Jeanine?” Peter said, laying down the sea pole.
“Yes, Peter?”
“You know what I’m in the mood for?”
“Devastating beguilement?”
“How’d you know?” he said.
“Mermaids know,” I said, standing and taking my husband by the hand.
Chapter 14
BACK TO THE PRESENT, and I’d just put in a load of whites when I heard the beeping. I padded into the kitchen and turned off the microwave timer before I headed to the rear of our cozy beach bungalow and into the master bath.
Then I took a monster breath and held it as I turned and lifted the pregnancy test off the toilet lid.
Time and my heart stopped at the exact same moment as I stared at the display window with its two identical blue lines. My breath whooshed out of me as though I were a seven-year-old blowing out birthday candles.
Because I’d already read the math on the box.
One blue line plus one blue line equaled one pregnant Jeanine.
Over the past two weeks, I’d been in panic mode. More and more as another day passed and I didn’t get my period. I kept thinking about those three pills that I’d somehow missed. I must have experienced brain freeze in the middle of last month’s cycle.
Peter had elected me the head of the contraception department, and I’d definitely dropped the ball. Talk about a whoops.
I also thought about what a baby would do to my twenty-three-year-old body, my twenty-three-year-old future.
But as I stood there, staring down the two blue lines, something odd and unexpected happened. A warmth started in the center of my chest and for a quicksilver second, I could actually feel my baby, skin on skin, soft in my arms.
Why not? I
thought, suddenly dazzled with the life-affirming awesomeness of it. Why couldn’t Malibu Jeanine bring a Malibu baby to the luau? Hell, why not two? I’d always wanted kids. Peter and I had planned for some in the vague future anyway, so why not start early?
Life was crazy. You had to roll with it. If the last two years and Key West had taught me anything, it was that. Mi vida really was loca. Besides, plans were for making God laugh.
I dropped the test, sending the trusty stick flying, when there was a pounding on the door followed by a deafening electronic squawk.
What the?
“THIS IS THE POLICE!” Peter called through a police megaphone. “WE KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE! COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP AND YOUR PANTIES OFF!”
I couldn’t stop laughing. He was always so crazy and funny, a holy terror of a rascal. All he did was make me laugh. When he wasn’t making me do even better stuff. I knew right then that Peter would make the best dad on earth.
Should I tell him about the test? I thought. No, I quickly decided, hiding it under the sink. In two weeks we were going up to the Breakers in Palm Beach, where we’d spent our honeymoon. I’d drop it on him at dinner. Blow his doors off. Knock his socks off. Then his pants.
He might be a little thrown off, but not for long. I’d show him. I loved him and he loved me. We could definitely make this work.
“I’m coming out,” I said a moment later.
“GOOD MOVE!” Peter squawked. “AND NO FUNNY BUSINESS!”
I unlocked the door. Then I sailed my Victoria’s Secret bra and thong onto the megaphone, right into Peter’s dumbfounded blue eyes.
“Don’t shoot,” I said, wearing nothing but my smile.
Chapter 15
IT WAS THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY when I decided to clean Peter’s boat.
Peter liked to go fishing by himself on Fridays after work. It was his way to blow off steam, clear his head, transition from the stressful workweek to the weekend. He’d usually come back in at around nine, and we’d end up having a late dinner of freshly caught wahoo or sailfish or blackfin tuna.