DOUBLE KNOT Read online

  “I really didn’t think about it, Mother.”

  “Well, you look ridiculous.”

  (I knew.)

  The air was pure, the view spectacular, the soundtrack of slicing through the sea in a luxury liner glorious. Because of the cool breeze blowing the fringe of silk ribbons all over my face, and for a split second blowing away my terror, I couldn’t really gauge the temperature. Definitely warmer the farther south we traveled, but not blazing hot, and without a single puff of a cloud in the sky. I could see where, under any other circumstances, this would be the vacation of a lifetime. And because she was who she was, more comfortable at home than anywhere else and uncomfortable in any social setting outside of Wilcox County Alabama, my mother was enjoying herself tremendously. Making herself right at home in 704. Her face was smooth and unlined, her posture relaxed, her temper tucked away. She was still my sharp-tongued mother, but she didn’t appear to be the least bit upset at being confined. With one caveat, the loudmouth whiner, and now, she informed me, two.

  “Why don’t you like him?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “You said you didn’t like the man. Burnsworth.”

  “Well, I got sidetracked by you being out here in your birthday suit.”

  We’d covered that. “Burnsworth?”

  “He has buggy eyes. I don’t trust men with buggy eyes.”

  “How are buggy eyes an indication of trustworthiness, Mother?”

  I slipped off the Madonna robe, because I was tired of batting down the billowing silk ribbons, and if ever there was a time for her to say something about the two humans inside my body and right in her face, it was now.

  She didn’t.

  I carefully positioned myself for the drop to the sun chair and, not without sound effects, lowered myself and stretched out. All belly.

  “How long has she been doing that?”

  Jessica DeLuna, having shed her Probability robe and now parading around shamelessly in her blood red skivvies (I’m one to talk), was on the other side of the pool, her body bent double, the top half of her hanging over the deck railing. With great flourish, she righted herself, gulped in as much sea air as her lungs could hold, and flung herself over the rail again, mouth moving furiously. Screaming for help. I was twenty feet away and couldn’t hear her. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind no one else could. Next, she flipped over and screamed up, her back bent over the rail, trying to get someone’s attention above us, again, to no avail.

  “For half an hour, at least,” Mother said. “That girl doesn’t have the sense God gave a goose. And how do you lose your clothes? Where’s Fantasy?”

  Following Anderson Cooper around in my stateroom to find the stash of Probability casino chips. The velvet gift bag in the sitting room was intact—Roberto Coin bangle bracelet and all. The casino chips were coming from somewhere in my stateroom and Fantasy stayed behind to find out where. “She’s changing. Why?”

  “I hope she had the good sense to pack a decent swimsuit.”

  The exterior styling of Probability 704’s deck space was minimalist, with a strong artisan touch. Running the length of the suite, there was, now that I gave it a good look, almost as much outdoor gathering space as there was interior, with three separate social areas made up of loungers, chairs, and fire pits, a private sun terrace, and an outdoor dining room that seated eight, all on wide-plank spice-colored teak decking. The fabric covering the furniture, the many outdoor rugs, and the dozen sun umbrellas was all the same parchment color, and everything pointed to the sparkling pool. Past the pool, as far as we could see, the Caribbean.

  “I think he’s been in my room.” Mother talked to me from behind her Woman’s Day.

  My heart stopped beating.

  “Who?” I knew who.

  “Buggy eyes.”

  “Did you see him in your room?”

  “No.”

  “Is something missing? Is anything disturbed?”

  “Not that I could tell.” She rolled her magazine into a weapon. She shook it at me. “But that doesn’t mean he’s not a rapist. And I don’t know why he’d bother me with that around.” She aimed her magazine at Jess. “She’s his best bet.”

  It was official. I would need to keep Mother close. Very close.

  Jessica took a break from calling for help and flung herself facedown on a double chaise lounge, her dark hair spilling down to the teak, her limbs slack and dangling, the physical definition of utter defeat.

  “If I could get up I’d go get her.”

  “Don’t you dare go get her.”

  “She’s pitiful.”

  “Leave pitiful alone.”

  “Are you talking about me again?”

  Fantasy could wear a one-piece on a New York runway. This one was an off-the-shoulder maillot in mocha, almost the exact color of her skin. Long and lean without an ounce of fat, everything fit Fantasy, which I’d never paid much attention to until recently, because nothing fit me. And she had three children. Three boys, whose father was leaving their mother. Something she had yet to say a single word to me about. She took in the scene. “Is this beautiful or what?” She pulled her sunglasses down and peered over them. “Is Jessica passed out again?” Then she looked at me, barely shaking her head no. She hadn’t found Anderson’s casino chip stash.

  “Fantasy, you sit over here.” Mother pointed to the chair on her right. “I don’t want you two ganging up on me, whispering and giggling. This isn’t high school. I want to talk to you anyway.”

  “And I want to talk to you, Mrs. Way.”

  Uh-oh.

  “Start at the beginning,” Mother said. “Tell me everything. I want to know why you’re getting a divorce. Everything. Spill the beans.”

  “Mother, Fantasy doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  “Davis,” Mother said, “this is a conversation between me and Fantasy. Stay out of it.”

  I stayed out of it and cracked open The Compass, the big blue book I was given when I stepped aboard Probability. I was looking for a chapter on “Secret Stairways in Your Suite” or “Hostage Holding Station.”

  “Are your parents divorced?” Mother asked Fantasy.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Fantasy asked.

  “I’m wondering if you had a good example set for you growing up,” Mother said.

  “It doesn’t seem to have worked for Davis. You and Mr. Way aren’t divorced and look at her.”

  I propped The Compass against the babies and did my best to lunge in Fantasy’s direction. “Leave me out of this.”

  “Well, Davis is a different story altogether. You can’t use her for an example of how to tie your shoe.”

  “I’m right here, Mother.”

  Then Burnsworth was right there.

  “Burnsworth!” Fantasy snapped. “Don’t sneak up on us!”

  He cleared his throat. “I thought you might like something to drink.”

  “No,” I answered too fast. “We’re fine.”

  “Speak for yourself, Miss Manners,” Mother said. “Yes. We’d like drinks. Fruity drinks. With umbrellas.”

  If Burnsworth was in on it, we’d be dead after one sip.

  He took our order, then crossed the deck to Jessica, who’d already had three breakfast Bloody Marys. “I hope she’s ordering water,” I said.

  “That’s a strange bird,” Mother said.

  “Jess?” Fantasy asked. “She’s out of her mind. I wonder what her story is.”

  “Don’t you have a big enough story of your own, Fantasy?” Mother asked. “Don’t go courting a bigger one and don’t meddle in other people’s business.”

  “Don’t meddle? What is it you’re doing, Mother?”

  She turned her hat my way so deliberately it’s a wond
er I didn’t hear every bone in her neck snap. “Is anybody talking to you?” I stuck my nose back in The Compass.

  “I was talking about that man,” Mother said. “He’s weird.”

  “Fantasy, Mother thinks Burnsworth has been in her room.”

  “Did you catch him?” she asked.

  “No.” Mother shook her magazine. “But that doesn’t mean he’s not a serial killer.”

  Fantasy and I made a silent agreement over our sunglasses: Keep two eyes on Burnsworth. One on Jessica, one on Poppy, two on him.

  “Has anyone seen Poppy since breakfast?” I asked.

  “That one’s not any bigger than a minute,” Mother said.

  “Well, have you seen her, Mother?”

  She looked at me from under the brim of her hat. “Somebody’s gotten so big for her britches, you know it? Don’t start smart mouthing me, Davis.”

  “I saw her with a feather duster sticking out of her back pocket,” Fantasy said. “She said she was on her way to make my bed.”

  “She’s not making mine. I made my bed this morning at six.”

  Which launched Mother into a speech about bed sheets. No-iron, percale, and thread count. Then she gave us her opinion of Egyptian cotton sheets. “That’s just a big rip-off. Do either of you honestly believe the sheet people go to Egypt and buy cotton? Let’s say they do. Is cotton from Egypt any better than good old American cotton?” She smacked Fantasy’s leg with a Family Circle. “I’m talking to you, Fantasy.”

  “What about Egypt?” Fantasy asked.

  “You know, Fantasy, this might be a big part of the reason your husband is divorcing you. You don’t pay attention.”

  “Mother!”

  “Davis, mind your own business. Read your book.” Back to Fantasy. “Now, where’s your mother in all this, Fantasy? What does she have to say about this divorce business?”

  “My parents retired to Florida ten years ago.”

  “Is that your answer? They’re retired?”

  “I haven’t told them yet.”

  “Oh, boy.” Mother didn’t like this news a bit. “Well, it’s a good thing I’m here. Now, start at the beginning.”

  My mother was having a ball.

  I went back to peeking over my big blue book into the salon. Burnsworth was at the bar mixing the world’s slowest drinks. Poppy had crossed through twice, back and forth. No SEALS.

  Fantasy launched into her life story: six pounds, ten ounces, twenty-two inches long. So she was tall and skinny from the get-go. She went to a private Catholic preschool and I turned the page and went to Dining Services. The kitchen on Probability was almost as large as the casino and on the same deck, eight, just above us. The one kitchen serviced all seventeen restaurants and covered room service. I read through the restaurant descriptions and decided everyone on this ship would gain ten pounds, which for me, if I weren’t a prisoner, would be forty. I flipped pages back and forth, trying to determine if we were under the casino or the kitchen. Flip flip. The casino. We were somewhere below and behind the ice sculptures in the casino. Maybe closer to the main bar.

  “Cotillion Ball.” My mother blew a raspberry. “So your problem is you’re spoiled.”

  “I’m spoiled?” Fantasy shot up and her long legs straddled the sun chair. “Have you taken a peek in Davis’s closet lately? Davis?”

  “Yo.” The Compass had an entire chapter on the building of the ship. Blueprints, diagrams, and the timeline, illustrated. First, a hangar was built in a port city in Germany on the Baltic Sea, and it took more than a year to build the hangar. Then the bones of Probability were laid out in the hangar, it went on and on, fascinating, and two years later here we were. On this half-billion-dollar prison.

  “If you had to say how much money you have tied up in handbags, just handbags, what’s your guess?”

  I looked up from The Compass. “What does the cost of my purses have to do with anything?”

  “Your mother is accusing me of being spoiled.”

  “You’re missing my point, Fantasy,” Mother said. “What I’m trying to say is this seemingly perfect childhood of yours didn’t prepare you for adulthood. You’re spoiled. You think your life should be like a Cotillion Ball. It doesn’t sound to me like you ever had to tough it out. Davis didn’t get a brand-new car when she turned sixteen, and she didn’t go to a fancy college like you did, and Samuel and I certainly didn’t buy Davis her first home or any other home.”

  I tried to sit up. “Why are you telling her all this, Fantasy? She’s just going to use it against you for the rest of your life.”

  “You zip it, young lady.”

  I opened my mouth.

  “Zip it.”

  Probability had a diving center full of water sports equipment. Somewhere near the submarine, far from the helicopter pad, and for whatever reason, on a ship built out for VIPs, there was a separate and invitation-only VIP deck. How very important were the people invited there? The ship was powered by twin 4000hp Yanmar diesel engines and held four hundred and fifty thousand gallons of diesel fuel. So not only was No Hair hidden somewhere on this huge ship, so were four hundred and fifty thousand gallons of potential inferno. Terrifying.

  Mother had a finger going very close to Fantasy’s nose. “Stepping out in a marriage happens, Fantasy. I’m not saying I go along with it. I am saying couples survive it every day. Now it’s usually the man stepping out, and you have to learn to look the other way—”

  “What, Mother? What?”

  She ignored me completely.

  “—but with you being the cheater and all, what you’ve done is taken away his manhood. You need to apologize to him and really mean it, and I’m not saying you’re not going to spend the rest of your life giving him his manhood back, but if you’ll take my advice and just tell the man you’re truly sorry, maybe he will forgive you.”

  Dead air.

  “And you may have to make it up to him in ways you’ve never dreamed of. Acts against God and nature.”

  “Mother! Stop!”

  She turned to me. “I’m talking about the oral sex, Davis, and I don’t mean discussing it. Your generation didn’t invent it and I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  I might drop dead today.

  She turned back to Fantasy, whose head was hanging off the other side of her sun chair; her shoulders were shaking and she was slapping her own leg. “What are you snorting about? You think this is funny? You slipped up, young lady. That’s all there is to it. You need to get over yourself and make it up to him for the sake of your children.”

  Burnsworth scared us to death again when he appeared with his silver tray of refreshments we’d totally forgotten, and for the first time since the day I passed the pregnancy test, I wanted a drink. Mother took a sip and wanted several.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s a Vodka Fizz, Madame.”

  “Well, keep ’em coming, Mister.”

  I took a sip of mine and it was more straight pineapple juice than it was antifreeze. Or rat poison. Or arsenic.

  I made it to the chapter describing the fifty staterooms on Probability and found the two pages dedicated to 704 just as Mother geared up to talk to Fantasy about the birds and the bees, a talk she’d never bothered having with me when it could have done some good.

  “Mother, Fantasy has three children. I think she knows all about the stork.”

  After slamming her magazine down she turned to me and said, “When you start a story, Davis, you start at the beginning. I’m trying to make a point here, if you don’t mind.” Back to Fantasy. “Do you know what my mother said to me ten minutes before I married Samuel? She said, ‘Men are nasty, but it’s your duty. The way you get through it is by thinking about your garden.’ Which is where I believe the cabbage patch business started. All t
hose women lying there stiff as boards thinking about canning the cabbage, cabbage soup, cabbage slaw, cabbage casserole, and stuffed cabbage rolls. Now I found out quick my mother was wrong. It wasn’t that way in my marriage bed.”

  I slapped my hands over my ears.

  Fantasy caught Burnsworth’s eye as he crossed the deck and toggled a finger between herself and Mother for another round. I watched over the top of my sunglasses as Jess dove into the bottle of Petron tequila she’d ordered for her mid-morning poolside refreshment. Mother finished explaining how fulfilling marital relations could be, not a bit worried about me slowly dying beside her, and moved on to her second Fizz and more timely matters. “You tell me what happened, Fantasy. How you met him and what was so special about this total stranger. And particularly I want to know if you had him take the AIDS test beforehand or if you used protective prophylactics. Because I can see your husband calling it quits if something was rotten in Demark.”

  I might be hallucinating. I was certainly hearing things, because surely to goodness my mother didn’t just say what I think she did.

  “Even then, Fantasy,” Mother said, “you could still clean up that mess. So to speak. I believe if you try hard enough you can talk your husband out of this divorce business. All he has to do is call his lawyer and take it back.”

  I turned the page and almost fell out of my sun chair. Page sixteen. Onboard Communications. There were two subtopics, the first V2. (Pfffffft.) The second entry was email. Channel seven on the interactive television located in the library. I’d been in every room looking for an emergency exit, including the library, and I hadn’t seen an interactive television in the library or anywhere else. But according to The Compass, I could send and receive email from the library. Relief flooded me. Email. If I could get just one email out of 704 this would all be over. I was on my way there, but before I could get halfway up, Fantasy beat me to it. She swung her brown legs over the side of her sun chair to face me and Mother. Her bare feet slapped down and her long shadow fell over me. She pulled off her sunglasses. “He didn’t call a lawyer, Mrs. Way. I’m the one who filed for the divorce.”