Chapter 6 - Heather

Chapter 6

Heather

Paracas, Peru

What were the chances she'd end up in Paracas, just a couple of days behind Romeo? It was another one of those uncanny echoes.

They'd reached Paracas midafternoon, on the Peru Hop red bus, which had a cheerful alpaca on its side. Bon had bought them passes on the hop on/hop off bus from Lima to Cusco, even though flying to Cusco was quicker.

"The whole point is to see things we wouldn't usually see," she told them as they climbed onto the bus. "I only bought us tickets with three stops. We don't have time for Lake Titicaca and the rest of it before we get to Cusco."

As they'd climbed onto the bus, Heather could see the poor Hop staff trying to deal with all Bon's luggage. Everyone else on the bus was traveling like Mom, with just a pack.

"Do they have to call us hopsters?" Mom complained. "It's infantilizing."

"It's supposed to be fun." Bon was enjoying herself. "We should play a game to pass the time," she said, as she settled into her seat. "How about twenty questions?"

"How about not."

"Heather?"

"Yes?" Heather was sitting behind them and had to peer through the seats to join the conversation.

"You only have three words to describe yourself. What are they?"

Heather couldn't think of a single one.

Bon wasn't pleased. "Fine. I'll give you another one. Three words to describe me?"

"Impossible," Mom muttered.

The Peru Hop took them out of Lima through the chaos of the slums, which were walled off from the richer neighborhoods nearby. The bus stopped at a couple of tourist sights on the way out of Lima: the Cristo del Pacifico, a statue of Jesus looking down over the ramshackle suburbs, which tumbled down the hillsides and onto the desert plains of Lima; and the San Jose hotel, a colonial-era building where enslaved Africans had been smuggled in through underground tunnels.

Heather felt oily guilt at the Cristo del Pacifico, as she stared down at the ad hoc stacks of makeshift buildings, and then again when they considered the violent past at the San Jose hacienda. How could things that were so dark, and so messed up, be tourist spots?

"Don't you think it's weird to come look at this stuff?" she asked Mom as they stood by the statue of Christ, watching the sea mist rise from the ocean far beyond the tumbling shacks. Nets of illegal power lines sagged and tangled over the flat-roofed houses, cutting through the sky.

"It is weird," Mom agreed. "But important, I suppose. Otherwise, you just swim in pools and order pisco sours and pretend that it doesn't exist." Mom put her arm around Heather. "It exists at home too."

"You're not going to tell us some awful story from work now, are you?" Bon sighed. The slums had depressed her, and she was hiding behind her big sunglasses.

Heather's mother was a social worker and spent her days (and nights, and weekends) as a case worker for kids in the foster system. She was prone to sharing her rage at family dinners. Which Heather understood, but she didn't know what to do with all the anger her mother handed over, and neither did anyone else.

But that was the thing with Mom, Heather realized, wondering why it had taken her so long to see it. Mom handed her feelings over. If she was angry, she wanted Heather to be angry; if she was sad, she wanted Heather to be sad; if she hated Dad, she wanted Heather to hate Dad . . . and then when Mom was in love with Dad again, she wanted Heather to swallow down all that anger and sadness and hate too, and act as though love was the reality of their lives.

Mom and Bon argued about dark tourism and privilege for the rest of the bus ride to Paracas. Heather sat in the row behind them and pretended that she wasn't with them. She pulled upthe map to see where they were headed next. And that's when she saw that the next stop was Paracas.

Where Romeo had been.

This kept happening. These little coincidences that didn't feel little or coincidental. They felt seismic, like they meant something. Like the universe was rolling them together, like marbles, trying to get them to collide.

As the bus drove into the small bayside town of El Chaco, Heather was glued to the window. The photo Romeo had sent her of the bay hadn't shown the vastness of the landscape around it. The town was a long, dusty curve on the flanks of the peninsula, and the peninsula itself consisted of wildly arid amber-gold cliffs and hills. Heather felt like she was reaching the edge of a desert world, although she could see pockets of green here and there along the coast, oases of palms and white buildings, the glass of the hotels shining in the sun. They were expensive luxury resorts, dotted down the coast, at a polite distance from the tiny dusty town.

When the bus pulled to a stop, and Heather stepped out into El Chaco, the weather was uncannily temperate, and not at all what she expected from the desert bay; it was a pleasant seventy-five degrees, and the breeze stirring across the water was delicious on her skin. Heather drifted away from the bus and her quibbling relatives. She inhaled the coastal air and listened to the lap of waves. The sun was blaringly bright off the water. Heather could feel Romeo's ghost standing next to her. Feeling like she was in a dream, she took a photo of the same cluster of colorful fishing boats that Romeo had photographed a couple of days before, and sent it to him.

There was no reply. No flashing dots. Nothing.

Maybe he thought she was stalking him.

But then the dots flashed, and her heart squeezed.

Are you on the Peru Hop?

Heather felt the most intense flare of something—happiness?—at the sight of his words. It scared her. She'd known him for three days, but didn't really know him at all, so why did he make her so damned happy?

Her thumbs weren't entirely steady as she typed back. How did you know?

The Hop always stops in Paracas at El Chaco. That's how I got there.

Heather turned to look at the red bus behind her. He'd caught the Hop too?

We've got to stop not-meeting like this, she typed.

Easy. Stop stalking me, killer.

"See? She's definitely sexting. Look at that smile." Bon's voice startled Heather.

"Leave her be. It's nice if she and Shawn are making up." Mom gave Heather an irritatingly pleased pat on the shoulder.

Heather ignored her.

"Well, save your sexts for later, chicken," Bon instructed. "We need a tie-breaking vote."

Heather sighed. "Can I vote that you're both crazy and be done with it?"

"This is serious," Mom told her. "I want to stay in a local B and B, and your grandmother wants to stay in another soulless resort."

They were both oblivious to the raw beauty of the desert bay in front of them, each fixed on winning their argument.

"Honestly, Sandra, can't you ever relax and enjoy the finer things in life." Bon fished in her bag for her phone and punched up photos of the hotel she wanted them to stay in.

While Bon waved her phone at her daughter, Heather took the opportunity to look down at the message from Romeo. Oh God. It was a shot of a shower, with his long arm stretching into the frame to turn the water on.

You're not going to jump at me through the shower curtain, are you?he asked.

She wished. Instead, she was getting dragged into an argument she didn't want to be in.

"Stop!" Heather begged as they grew more heated. "Please stop. Honestly. You sound like a couple of overexcited parrots."

They both turned to her, outraged.

"The bus driver needs to know where to take us." Bon was terse. "He's waiting."

"Where did you book for tonight?" Heather sighed, holding out her hand to look at the pictures on Bon's phone. She was so sick of being the mediator in this family.

"An evil resort." Bon was being a snot now.

"Mom—have you looked at anywhere, or booked anywhere?"

"No," Mom confessed, still angry.

"We're going to the resort, then. And we can do a B and B next time." Heather cast another glance at the bay. "And before you get back on the bus, why don't you take a minute and actually look around this place. It's why you're here, isn't it? And it's pretty amazing." She strode back to the bus, aware of her phone buzzing.

The first message was a selfie of Romeo in a steamed-up mirror. He had a towel wrapped around his waist and droplets of water clung to his collarbones. The line of hair down his abs had curled into wet little whorls.

Guess you're not lurching through any shower curtains today,he wrote. But I'll keep vigilant. Just in case.

Heather had the urge to jump into the driver's seat of the bus and tear ahead a few stops. He was somewhere down the road, thinking of her . . .

* * *

Heather was contemplating telling Bon about Romeo, as they sat on the garden terrace of their room in the late-afternoon sun. Bon's resort was a travel-blogger's delight, a series of luxury villas dotted around an artificial oasis. Bon had allowed Mom to take the king bed in a separate villa, to salve Mom's fury after she didn't get her B and B, while Bon and Heather shared the twin. Mom had locked herself in her villa on arrival, and they hadn't seen her since.

The resort didn't have a view of the fishing boats, or the wild arid landscape of the peninsula. The place was a curated green oasis of white paths, palms, flowering oleander and Indian hawthorn, a garden out of time and place. Heather and Bon's villa had a private bamboo-roofed terrace, with cushioned benches built into the low walls and wicker furniture pillowed with deep sand-colored cushions. From where they sat on their terrace, they could see the sparkle of the ocean in the late-afternoon sun. It was lovely, but . . . well . . . inoffensive was the word that leapt to mind. It was like they'd pressed pause on the real world and had retreated to a set-dressed alternate reality. Resort World, rather than real world.

None of it was what Heather had imagined when Bon said they were going to hike Machu Picchu. All the websites, the guidebook she'd bought, the YouTube videos she watched—none of it showed the Resort World experience. She'd been expecting to hike through wild landscapes and to pass through villages, where she might eat with local people, and watch the mountains loom closer. She wasn't expecting high-end hotels, high-thread-count sheets, and high views of distant oceans. Heather thought she'd rather be paddling in the sparkling water than staring at it from an architecturally designed terrace. In truth, Heather would rather be back in Paracas, checking out El Chaco and watching the fishing boats putter in and out of the bay. With Romeo.

She bet Romeo wasn't doing the Resort World version of Peru. He seemed like a guy who liked the real world.

Oh, these feelings.

What was this? Was Romeo just a rebound from Shawn? A vengeance fling? A healing hookup? Or was he a form of self-sabotage? Was she just trying to screw up what should be a good thing with Shawn?

Or . . . was Romeo the real deal . . . ? Which was somehow even more terrifying.

She desperately needed advice.

"Bon . . . ?" Heather cleared her throat.

Bon looked up in relief from her book. She was still only a few pages in, even though she'd been reading for ages. "Yes?"

Heather braced herself. "How do you know when you're in love?"

Bon's periwinkle eyes grew wide. She snapped her book closed and Heather saw the cover. Eat Pray Love. How like Bon to read about traveling while traveling. Although she was really not reading while traveling, as she seemed to have been reading the one page this whole time.

Bon lit up at Heather's question. A secret little smile tugged at her lips. "Well, now you're talking. This is much better than reading about a bad marriage." She tossed the book aside with vigor. "If you want to know about love, you've come to the right girl. Did I ever tell you about Jimmy and the pool?"

Heather sat up straighter. She didn't know much about Bon's first husband, Jimmy. The family didn't tend to talk about him; Heather assumed out of deference to her grandfather, who'd been Bon's second husband. Heather didn't think she even knew Jimmy's last name.

Bon was grinning now. "I grew up in a place with one of those silly names that desert-dwellers love. Everything back then was ‘Something Gardens' or ‘Something Paradise' or ‘Something Greens.'"

"I thought you grew up in Phoenix?" Heather frowned, wondering what this had to do with Jimmy.

Bon flapped a hand at her to be quiet. "It was in Phoenix. Anyway, we lived in a place with ‘Gardens' in the name, even though there was no garden. But we all called it Shitsville."

"How did I not know that you grew up in a place called Shitsville?" Bon talked all the time. It was weird to find out there was something she hadn't talked about. "You never told me about Shitsville."

"Hush up, I'm telling you now."

Heather hushed. She had no idea what her grandmother might say next. But that was true of just about every conversation she had with Bon.

Bon's expression grew dreamy. "Lord, the summer I met Jimmy, I felt like I'd won the lottery. I don't think we got out of the pool that whole summer."

Heather was already getting lost. "And the pool was in Shitsville?"

"No, not in Shitsville." Bon swatted Heather on the knee. "You're not paying attention. The pool was at Jimmy's place."

"You haven't told me about Jimmy's place! I don't even know how you met him at this point." Heather was trying to keep up, she really was.

Bon glanced at Junior's box. "Hold on, I can't tell this story with Junior here." She carried her most recent husband into the villa. When she came back out, she was carrying the room service menu. "Are you hungry? I could eat."

"I thought you were telling me about Jimmy?" Heather cursed herself for ever asking Bon a question in the first place.

"I am. But we can order food while I talk. Thinking about Shitsville makes me hungry."

"I thought we weren't talking about Shitsville? I thought we were talking about Jimmy's place? Isn't that where the pool was?"

"They're linked."

"Right." Heather shook her head. She could never keep up with the way Bon's conversations jumped around.

"Who is it who keeps sexting you?" Bon asked abruptly as she perused the menu. "Is he the one you're in love with?"

Heather's heart jumped at the word love. "No one is sexting me. And I'm not in love. I'm just asking how you'd know . . . if you were," she said lamely.

"I assume it's not that S-H-A-W-N sexting you?"

"No, it's not that S-H-A-W-N. That S-H-A-W-N and I have broken up, remember?"

"Aha, so someone is sexting you."

"Neither S-H-A-W-N nor not-S-H-A-W-N is sexting me. It's just a friend."

"Uh-huh." Bon rolled her eyes and then ordered up a bottle of chilled white wine and a bowl of fries. "Sure. Because friends make you all flushed when they message you and friends make you ask your wise grandmother how you know if you're in love."

"I'm not all flushed." That was clearly a lie.

"If I tell you about Jimmy, will you tell me about this not-S-H-A-W-N?"

"Only if the Jimmy story is good."

"Challenge accepted."