“You’re changing the subject,” Reed said, trying to make it sound like he was laughing, but his chest felt as if someone were sitting on it. “Like you’re onto the next news story. And I’ve always wanted to swim. I didn’t say it like that.”
“Enjoy it. Those were your exact words.”
“Honey, there’s a lot more that we could be doing here than just sitting by the pool.”
“Sure. We could swim in it.” She walked to the edge of the water and bent her knees.
“That’s not what I meant.”
Reed couldn’t help admiring her dive: Barely a ripple, as if she’d sliced the surface with a blade and slipped inside. He watched the white patch of her swimsuit as it shimmered in the blue until she came up for air nearly three-fourths of the way across the pool, and he wondered what it would be like to enjoy staying underwater that impossibly long. She continued in a leisurely backstroke to the opposite side, then pulled herself out in one fluid motion and walked to the bar.
It took Reed a few moments to realize that the conversation, maybe the biggest one they’d had since getting married, was over. His hands were shaking.
“A drink, Señor?” asked a young waiter with “Carlos” on his name tag.
“Sure,” Reed replied, sinking down onto the still-wet nylon webbing of the chaise longue. “Anything, just make it strong, tall, and cold.”
No doubt Carlos was trained to watch for such situations and defuse them quickly with attentiveness and alcohol. Reed imagined that the boy had seen a thousand discussions just like this one, a hundred thousand hopefuls pinning their marriages on a week in this or that brochure’s paradise pages. In a day or a week or a month, the actors would rotate, new actors flying in, the same little dramas would play out and end in divorce or sex or bitterness or reconciliation or something in between. But it wasn’t like a week anywhere could wipe a slate clean, turn back time, or conceive miracles any differently than had the two stayed home.
Reed stared back up at the seagull, envying it the effortless non-mechanical loft. No rotors to worry about, no gravity that it couldn’t handle, no pilot to send it plunging earthward. As the waiter left behind a stand of coconut palms, two young women appeared at the stairway railing, looking around at the pool. Hesitancy was the only thing that gave them away as non-guests.
The first was tall, five feet nine or so, with straight, honey-blond hair that reached the middle of her back, and an affable, friendly smile. A blue bikini top with strings tied in little bows on the sides barely covered the tan, curvy torso. The other girl was a peroxide blonde, a head shorter, pudgy, with a chiseled nose that looked too cookie-cutter perfect to not be surgically crafted. A black vinyl camera bag hung from her wrist, studded with what could very well have been real diamonds.
Reed was about to turn his attention back to the abalone shell and its mysteries when a third girl appeared. Her dark, shoulder-length hair was tied in a low pony tail, quick and careless, as if the only purpose was to keep it from tickling a neck as long as a sea lion’s. Unusually bright lips glistened below a small, perfect nose. A loose, faded blue T-shirt hung over translucent white shorts that muted a greenish-aqua bikini bottom to a light mint green. Well-worn leather sandals protected her slender feet, and shimmery green polish made each toe look topped by a tiny seashell.
Reed stared at her as she slowly took in the hotel and pool grounds, seeming to commit the setting to memory as if she were going to reconstruct the scene later in her mind. When her gaze fell on Reed he tried to force his eyes away but couldn’t, holding his breath as if he’d been suddenly pushed underwater.
Reed reached for his drink and realized it was gone. When he looked up again, the girl’s attention was elsewhere, drawn to something on the beach or in the stairwell. She reached into her bag, unwrapped something and tossed it down out of sight to whatever hungry animal was below. Reed assumed it was a dog, maybe the same one he’d seen before. Dipping from the sky as if it had been shot, a seagull disappeared behind the wall, reappearing moments later with a tortilla in its beak. The piece flopped like a yellow sardine as the bird flew away.
She tossed a second piece down the stairs.
“If you keep doing that the stray will just follow you all day,” the rich-looking girl said.
“I know, Cecily,” the third girl replied. “But I’m going to feed it anyway.”
“You could walk up and down the beach for a million years and not help every dog.”
“I’m not trying to help every dog. I’m helping that one.”
“Just wait until it gives you rabies.”
Only when the girl was near enough for Reed to smell the piña colada of her sunscreen did he notice that her left arm hung strangely against her side. Just below the line of the T-shirt, Reed could see a band of skin pinched in around the bicep a little too tightly, making the contours of the wasted muscles beneath clearly visible. It was as if someone had placed a cable-tie around her arm and then pulled it tight. Some kind of childhood injury, Reed thought, or maybe a birth defect. The way she carried herself was so natural that he might never have noticed the injury had he not been staring.
“Is it okay if we visit the loo?” the tall girl asked the waiter, wincing as if to apologize for the intrusion. So that was why they had come, Reed thought. To scam a bathroom visit in the ritzy hotel.
The boy seemed confused. “You are here to see Mr. Loo?”
“The bathroom,” Reed interjected. “They need to use the bathroom.”
The waiter placed the drink on the table, then shook his head.
“I’m sorry. Bathrooms are for guests only.”
“What, should we just pee in the fucking pool?” the rich one said.
The man seemed unmoved.
The tall girl winced again. “Please? We’ve got to get the bus back to Tulum, and it doesn’t have a bathroom either.”
“They’ll only be a second, Carlos,” Reed said, reading the name tag.
“The access is locked to prevent theft.”
Reed fished in his pocket and pulled out a plastic card. “Then they can use my key. Hell, they can use my bathroom if they like. Room 1114.”
“But if they go to a room, security might—”
Reed laughed. “If they take anything, I’ll pay for it.” He turned to the girls. “Just go.”
“Thank you so much,” the tall girl said, reaching out for the piece of plastic. She winked at Carlos. “Shhh!”
The third girl approached and stood directly in front of him, her hips in line with Reed’s head. “Can you watch our stuff? While I steal the hotel diamonds?”
“Only if you split it, fifty-fifty,” Reed said, feeling his face flush, conjuring something witty to his tongue.
She smiled and then followed the other two, the thumb of her left arm hooked casually into the pocket of
