Chapter Ten

Over the next few days, Eleanor became convinced that Tessa was avoiding her—as much as anyone could avoid someone sleeping in the next room. The actress didn’t work much when Laya was awake, but as soon as her daughter trudged upstairs for her afternoon nap (usually grumbling that she wasn’t a baby and didn’t need to take naps anymore, a yawn nearly always punctuating this grouchy avowal), Tessa would vanish. Sometimes she went to “check e-mail” in the studio. On other occasions, Eleanor would glimpse her strolling alone down the hill toward the lagoon, chin lowered, shoulders hunched against the temperate trade winds. And she would wonder—what sort of quandary would someone like Tessa Flanagan have to weigh her down?

At night, once Laya was in bed, Tessa would set the alarm, say goodnight in a neutral tone and retreat to her bedroom, leaving her door slightly ajar in case Laya needed her. Eleanor would creep quietly past, fighting the urge to look through the gap to where her employer probably lay in bed in her plaid pajama pants and a beat-up UCLA T-shirt. She wasn’t sure if the cold shoulder meant Tessa was upset with her or merely had other things on her mind. The mystery kept her up at night, literally, as she tried to keep her mind on Jane Austen and found it instead wandering to the woman sleeping down the hall. A couple of times she rose and paced the length of her room, but she never ventured into the hallway. The realization that Tessa might be genuinely uninterested in her kept her from opening the door.

The rest of their first vacation week passed uneventfully and somewhat lonely, with Eleanor spending the bulk of her time with Laya or by herself. Sometimes Tessa took her daughter for walks or drives or down to the beach without Eleanor, and she was left on her own trying to figure out if she’d imagined Tessa’s initial friendly overtures. What about the encounter in the hot tub? Had the attraction been one-sided? Not that that should surprise her. Tessa could have any of a horde of willing men or women. A kindergarten teacher from Vermont could hardly expect to compete with the likes of Jude Law. Or even Lindsay Lohan.

As the first week on the island drew to a close, Eleanor finally called Sasha for help puzzling out her employer’s mysterious behavior. Her former roommate suggested the actress might suffer from PMS. Or perhaps she was off her meds.

“Do you think she’s on something?” Eleanor asked, keeping her voice low as she lay on the cover of her bed, afternoon sunlight and sea air pouring in the open window. Tessa and Laya were off on another of their strolls, leaving Eleanor to kick around by herself. Again.

“Everyone in L.A. is on something,” Sasha said. A male voice sounded in the background, low and fluid. “I have to go. Some of us actually have to work to earn our exorbitant salaries.” And the line clicked.

Eleanor shut her eyes and dropped her cell on the bed. This vacation wasn’t turning out the way she had anticipated. Not even close. Could Sasha be right about Tessa’s state of mind? She didn’t remember seeing Tessa take anything other than her daily multivitamin. But then again, who was to say that the pill she popped at breakfast was, in fact, a vitamin?

And then, just as suddenly as Tessa’s boycott of Eleanor’s company had begun, the unofficial blockade ended. At breakfast the morning after Eleanor’s emergency phone call to Sasha, Tessa asked Laya if she’d like to go to Waimea Canyon.

“Yeah huh!” the girl replied, smiling widely around a half-chewed bite of toast. “Elle, do you want to go?”

“Of course.” The previous afternoon, she’d been studying Hawaii’s Grand Canyon, as the park was known, on the map she’d ordered from Amazon. Had Tessa noticed? But as Tessa cast her yet another unreadable look before turning an indulgent smile on her daughter, who was “thrilled” by the idea of returning to one of her (many) “favorite places” on the island, Eleanor wasn’t sure Tessa had meant to include her in the invitation.

Whatever, she groused inwardly as she went upstairs to pack a bag. It wasn’t as if she required Tessa to be anything other than professional. After all, she’d lived quite happily—or at least, not terribly unhappily—for thirty-plus years without the Flanagans. So what if she had once told Laurie, her ex, that Tessa topped her Friends-inspired list of celebrity freebies? No one actually believed they’d ever meet anyone on their list.

By now Laurie had probably heard through the grapevine that she was working for Tessa. Eleanor had e-mailed a few friends back in Boston to gloat, but the NDAs she’d signed kept her from answering in any detail her friends’ numerous queries, the most common of which involved the actress’s rumored lesbianism. She tried to picture Laurie’s face at the moment she learned that Eleanor was working for her number one celebrity freebie as an “educational consultant.” (Tessa had jokingly coined this title, but Eleanor found herself using it at times—as a Smithie, it was difficult for her to admit publicly that she was working as a nanny, however temporary and lucrative the position might be.) As she attempted to summon an image of her ex-girlfriend, she realized suddenly that she couldn’t remember exactly what Laurie looked like. She could call up individual features—oval face, hazel eyes, ready smile, straight brown hair that moved like water in certain lighting—but not the overall package.

What about her mother? Had she lost her too? Fortunately, her mother’s face came back to her easily, in full detail. She relaxed, relieved—until she realized that the image she was remembering was in fact her favorite photo of her mom, taken at the crest of Monadnock Mountain during the first remission when they still thought everything might be all right.

It had begun. She was losing even her memories of her mother now.

The half-open door snapped back on its hinges as Laya entered the room. “Come on, Eleanor! Quit dillydallying!”

“I do not dillydally,” Eleanor said in a dignified tone. Then she grabbed Laya and planted a noisy zorbert on her forearm, smiling as the girl’s peals of laughter rang out. Thank God for little kids, she thought for easily the thousandth time in her adult life.

A little while later, Eleanor embarked on her second-ever helicopter ride. This trip was considerably longer than the first and took them over and around the mountains and valleys that adorned Kauai’s interior. The center of the island was surprisingly untamed, all trees and rivers and jungle with no sign of human habitation for miles at a time. Eventually the ocean appeared in the distance again, and then they were setting down at a makeshift landing pad at the parking lot of what turned out to be a coffee plantation on the outskirts of the southwestern town of Waimea. A gray-haired ex-hippie who both Tessa and Laya already seemed to know greeted them and waved the small party toward a mud-splattered Jeep Wrangler parked outside the plantation gift shop.

As they approached the vehicle, Tessa insisted Eleanor take the front seat. “You get motion sick in the back, don’t you?” the actress said, seemingly genuinely concerned.

Eleanor nodded grudgingly, refusing to be touched that Tessa remembered this fact, and slid into the front seat next to Pete, a retired geology professor who, it turned out, knew everything there was to know about Waimea Canyon. As they drove up the windy state highway that led into the canyon’s interior, the drops at the edge of the road increasingly impressive, Pete explained the plate tectonic history of the Hawaiian archipelago and the geology of Kauai, a former volcano and the oldest of the Hawaiian islands. When the paved road ended, Pete parked the Jeep and took them hiking on trails that lined the rim before dipping down into the red-brown canyon, where he related colorful Hawaiian myths as they walked up and down through cloud forests.

A couple of hours in, they stopped for lunch at the edge of a thousand-foot drop. As she munched the PBJ sandwich Tessa had fixed her that morning, Eleanor was enchanted. She’d visited the real Grand Canyon once with Sasha on a road trip a few years back and could see why this canyon had earned its nickname. The reddish earth fell away in dramatic fashion here too, lava flows leaving etched basalt ridges further scored by rainfall from the island’s central peak, Mount Waialeale, one of the wettest places on earth according to Professor Pete. The green of Kauai’s pervasive vegetation, another result of all that rainfall, gave the canyon a friendlier cast than the Arizona desert, though, while overhead, cumulus clouds sped past on omnipresent trade winds, casting shadows over the canyon walls.

The day passed quickly, Tessa and Laya recording their adventures on the family digital camera, Eleanor asking the professor question after question. Much too soon they were making their way back to the coffee plantation where they found the helicopter pilot waiting for them in the parking lot near the gift shop. But as Pete drove off, waving in the rearview mirror, Tessa didn’t immediately head for the waiting chopper. Instead she turned to Eleanor.

“Interested in a tour of the plantation?”

“Not really.” Eleanor associated the word “plantation” with America’s history of slavery. “But I’d love a look at the gift shop. I thought I might send some coffee to my dad.”

“Is he as big a dark roast addict as you?” Tessa asked, smiling a little.

“Where do you think I learned to be such a coffee snob?” Eleanor felt her pulse speed up and cursed her seditious body. True, this was the most attention Tessa had given her in days, but that didn’t mean she had to react like a dog starved for its master’s notice.

“Ah—so you admit that Northeasterners are snobs.”

“I didn’t say that.” As Tessa lifted an eyebrow, she added, “Okay, maybe the Northeast has that reputation for a reason. But New England and the Northeast aren’t the same thing, you know.”

At that moment, Laya, grouchy after a busy day without a nap, suffered an official meltdown, which prevented Tessa from pressing her further on the pretentiousness of the opposite coast.

They lured the whining girl into the “boring” gift shop with the promise of ice cream, and soon Laya was chomping on a sugar cone while Eleanor browsed the aisles, seeking out souvenirs to send to her family and friends. She’d rarely gone on vacation as an adult, except to visit Sasha or other college friends in various parts of the country. For Christmas one year when she was in high school, her family had visited London, where her mother still had relatives. And in their first year together, Laurie had surprised her with a week in France during summer break. Then, with a less than impressive bank account, she had sent only the occasional postcard home. But now her checking account was fairly brimming, and she hadn’t spent a cent so far during their sojourn on the island. Why not splurge a little?

“Geez,” Tessa said a half hour later as they made their way out to the parking lot. “I had no idea you were such a serious shopper.”

Eleanor had paid the gift shop to ship packages of coffee and other goodies to her father, sister and Sasha, spending a couple hundred dollars in the process. “I’m not usually, but I didn’t have to pay for a plane ticket,” she pointed out. “And besides, they’re all worth it.”

“I’m sure they are,” Tessa said.

Eleanor glanced at her, but the actress was already slipping her sunglasses on and smiling down at her daughter, who skipped along between them riding the crest of her sugar high. With their matching dark green fishing hats (Laya had picked them out before the trip because she said they looked like real ranger hats), they were adequately camouflaged. Only a handful of tourists in the shop had pointed and whispered, seemingly uncertain of the veracity of their celebrity sighting.

“Ama and Dani will like their T-shirts too, won’t they?” Tessa said to Laya.

“Uh-huh. And Uncle Will. I miss him. When do we get to see him again?”

“When we get back to California,” Tessa promised. “I’m sure he misses you too.”

Will Knight, Eleanor knew, was Tessa’s personal trainer. Were they more than friends? He hadn’t been around much before the trip, but that didn’t mean anything. Laya seemed on awfully familiar terms for him to be just a trainer.

The helicopter ride interceded to distract her from this unpleasant line of thought, and she enjoyed the seemingly slow-motion transit of the island’s interior. Besides, what Tessa did or didn’t do with Will Knight was none of her business. Likely, it would stay that way.

That night, Laya nearly fell asleep at the dinner table. Afterward, while Eleanor read her a good-night story, Tessa retired to her own bedroom and locked herself in for the night. She was tired from the day’s adventures too, so after reading a few pages of the most recent book by Arundhati Roy, another of her favorite writers, she fell asleep quickly. But she awoke in the middle of the night and lay in bed, moonlight streaming in her window as she strained to detect any sound from Eleanor’s room. So close. So tempting. And ultimately such a bad idea.

So far so good. She’d managed to keep Eleanor at a distance, which, though not entirely satisfying, at least allowed her to feel in control of the situation. Since the night she’d learned about Eleanor’s mother, she had avoided being alone with her daughter’s nanny for long periods of time. Another week and they would be back in L.A., and then she could return to the old schedule—leaving for work shortly after Eleanor arrived in the morning and coming home in time for dinner, after which Eleanor would return back down the hill to Sasha’s apartment. On the weekends, Tessa would practice being a single mom, something she was going to have to get used to come fall. She’d decided not to hire another nanny after Eleanor left at the end of August. Her job was in L.A. now, and she wanted to see if she could handle parenting on her own. She’d already hired a landscaping company recommended by her friend Margot Trivers, film producer and mother to Laya’s best friend and Barclay classmate, Rayann. Lawn work aside, she planned to assume the role of a normal mother once Eleanor left for Wisconsin.

Sometimes Tessa daydreamed about leaving L.A. herself, especially when they were on vacation in Hawaii. Perhaps it was genetic memory—her parents had each come from tiny, verdant island nations—but she felt comfortable on Kauai, her world bounded by sand and jungle, the ocean never far off. Not just tenants of her garden, sampaguita flowers grew wild across the island. The locals called the plant “pikake” and made leis from its fragrant petals. Each time she noticed the scent, Tessa thought of her mother. Had she survived, Benita Reyes would have celebrated her sixtieth birthday this November, lines etched about her eyes like Ama, her body thicker around the middle. Would her legs still be strong and shapely or would her muscles have slackened with age? It was hard for Tessa to imagine her as anything other than the young, laughing woman she remembered, as the few photos she kept hidden away in her bedroom dresser showed her to be. In a year, Tessa would be the same age her mother was when she died. Was she already that old herself? Could she really be on the cusp of surpassing her mother’s lifetime?

She thought of Eleanor’s mother too, so recently lost. Eleanor seemed fine most of the time, stoic in the face of grief. But Tessa understood now the question she sensed in Eleanor: What was she supposed to do now? She recognized the urge Eleanor had succumbed to—the impulse to leave, to go as far away as she could from the place she had always lived and, perhaps, the person she had always been. Tessa had read once that when you lost a loved one, you were supposed to stay put and let yourself grieve. And maybe there was something to that. But, like Eleanor, she had longed to leave the before part of her life behind. And, mostly, she’d succeeded.

Just as she’d succeeded in keeping Eleanor at a distance. At least, in daylight. At night, her imagination refused to toe the boundary she’d set. In the dark quiet of her room, she still dreamed about the long-limbed, freckle-faced woman in the next room—X-rated, entirely unprofessional dreams.

Perhaps avoiding Eleanor really wasn’t necessary, Tessa had found herself thinking the last day or two. After all, they were adults. They’d managed to keep their clothes on so far. Besides, it wasn’t often that she met someone who shared her values, political beliefs, interests. She wanted to know more about Eleanor—her favorite writers other than Austen, what kind of music she liked, and, of course, what types of movies she was into. In the Flanagan household, movies were a necessity of life.

The morning after their tour of Waimea Canyon, rare clouds drifted in to obscure the island. By lunchtime, rain was falling in tropical torrents, flooding the hillside below the house.

“It’s raining, it’s pouring,” Laya sang, munching potato chips as water gushed from the gutters outside.

“Whatever will we find to do?” Tessa asked, wiggling her eyebrows meaningfully at her daughter.

The girl clapped her hands. “Can we watch Finding Nemo?”

“I’m up for it,” Tessa said. “What about you?”

Eleanor looked up from her tuna sandwich. “Me?”

“Yes, you,” Tessa said.

“Yes, you,” Laya echoed.

“Okay,” Eleanor said, her smile tentative.

No more distance, Tessa decided as they cleaned up the lunch mess. There was no reason they couldn’t be friends. Not like she had all that many.

To prepare for the afternoon’s film screening, they popped a bowl of microwave popcorn and sprinkled it liberally with salt. Then they dashed through the rain to the studio where, at the touch of a button, shutters dropped into place over the windows and a movie screen descended from the ceiling.

Finding Nemo was Laya’s favorite movie, and she knew the dialogue practically by heart. She sat on the couch between them, her feet pressed against Tessa and her head against Eleanor’s shoulder. Tessa glanced at Eleanor occasionally. She looked happy, and even seemed to like the movie. She’d seen it twice before, she told Laya when the girl asked. This, in Laya’s opinion, was nowhere near enough times.

Even Nemo couldn’t compete with naptime, however. Halfway through the film, Laya’s snores began to rise above the voices of the animated characters. Tessa turned down the volume and glanced over at Eleanor, whose face was lit by the play of light and color across the screen.

“She’s really out,” Eleanor said.

As if in agreement, Laya let out a particularly guttural snort, and Tessa had to bite her lip to keep from laughing.

“Such a lady,” she said.

“Like mother like daughter.”

“Tell me about it. I used to complain that my agent was forcing me to wear drag whenever he convinced me to squeeze myself into a dress and heels for the red carpet. It’s a miracle I never fell flat on my face on camera.”

Eleanor glanced back at the screen as a flock of animated seagulls chased Dory and Marlin while calling out in creepy monotones, “Mine? Mine?” Tessa imagined the wheels spinning in Eleanor’s mind at the reference to drag, and decided it might be time to take pity on her.

“You know,” she said, “you were right. Some of those rumors online are true.”

Brow knit slightly, Eleanor looked at her again. “I’m sorry if what I said the other night upset you. It wasn’t my intent.”

“You don’t have to apologize.” Tessa forced herself to return Eleanor’s open, forthright gaze. “I might have overreacted a little. It’s just difficult knowing that complete strangers can find out such random information about you. Not that you’re a stranger. But for a while, I couldn’t blow my nose without wondering if someone would snap a shot and sell it to the dailies.”

“I can’t even imagine,” Eleanor said. “Technology probably just made everything worse. Along comes the Internet and camera phones, and suddenly everyone’s a reporter.”

Tessa hadn’t expected someone outside of the business to have such insight. “That’s exactly how it is. Anyone you meet could be secretly filming you in order to score a payday from some celebrity stalker site.” She stared down at her bare feet, clad in simple Armani flip-flops. She needed a pedicure. She hadn’t had time before the trip.

“I can’t imagine what it’s been like,” Eleanor repeated, voice as gentle as the hand that reached across Laya to settle on Tessa’s. “And I am sorry. I didn’t mean to touch a nerve.”

“It’s okay. I know I can trust you.” She paused. “Besides, you’ve signed away any future royalties should you decide to write a tell-all memoir about your summer with us.”

Eleanor drew her hand back. “Lucky for you I’m not a very prolific writer. I’m definitely not looking forward to having to write papers again. Yuck.”

“Really? I loved writing essays. One night my freshman year I just kept writing, and I didn’t even realize what time it was until my upstairs neighbor, who bartended until two every night, came home and started pounding around his apartment.” She shook her head, remembering what it had felt like to forget time and place. She hadn’t had that luxury for a while now.

“Me, not so much. I used to get Sasha to help me with my papers, and even then I’d barely eke out a B. That’s why I stuck with the social sciences. Not as much emphasis on topic sentences and paragraph transitions.”

Tessa watched the animated characters dance across the screen. “Sounds like you and Sasha have been friends for a long time.”

“The powers that be matched us as roommates our first year of college.”

“Have you and she ever, you know…?”

“Sasha?” Eleanor laughed. “Definitely not. She’s straight. Well, except for the requisite collegiate lesbian experience, which wasn’t with me.” She raised a hand to her mouth suddenly and gazed at Tessa through wide eyes. “Don’t tell her I told you that. She would kill me.”

“Don’t worry. Mum’s the word.” Knowing that Eleanor wasn’t living with an ex-girlfriend cheered her, for reasons she didn’t think she would examine too closely.

A moment later, Laya snorted herself awake. As Tessa and Eleanor exchanged an amused look over her head, she rubbed her eyes. “What? What did I miss?”

“Nothing, Mahal,” Tessa said, and rubbed her daughter’s feet, dirty from going barefoot on the estate.

As they settled back in to watch the rest of the movie, Laya snuggling sleepily between them, the rain tapered off beyond the darkened windows of the studio. Probably there would be a rainbow later. Maybe they could take a drive after the movie for a little rainbow-hunting. And then they would have dinner together, just the three of them.

Somehow, Tessa couldn’t remember a Hawaiian vacation ever feeling quite like this.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 638