Page 28 of What Happens in Paradise
Irene closes her eyes. This is just as excruciating as she feared it would be. She has made things far worse by waiting for so long. Lydia doesn’t believe her; Irene should have called her right away. Irene should have brought her—or someone—in at the beginning. But she hadn’t. It had been so sudden and so bizarre, so inexplicable. It was still inexplicable—and yet, here they are.
“Lydia,” Irene says. “Russ is dead. He was killed in a helicopter crash in the Virgin Islands on January first. He was there on business. The rest of the details are too painful to share right now. His body was cremated and the boys and I flew down to scatter his ashes.”
“What?” Lydia shouts. There’s a muffled voice in the background. “Brandon and I are on our way over right now.”
“No,” Irene says. “Please, I was just heading up to bed. We’ll talk tomorrow, I promise.” She thinks for a second. “Brandon who?”
“Brandon the barista,” Lydia says. “We’re dating. We’ve been dating since…that night.”
Irene supposes it’s too late to ask Lydia to keep the news of Russ’s death to herself. “I’ll call you tomorrow, really. I…I have to go.”
“Okay,” Lydia says. She sounds put out, and then she starts to cry. “I’m so sorry, Irene. I’m sure you’re destroyed. Russ was…well, you know he was the most devoted husband.”
Wasn’t he just, Irene thinks. “Good night, Lydia.” She punches off the phone, sighs deeply, then turns her attention to the library shelves. Three shelves in from the right, three shelves down from the ceiling, Irene finds the Oxford English Dictionary that she lugged to college, Roget’s Thesaurus, and Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations in a solid, scholarly stack. She moves the three massive tomes onto the brocade sofa and slides the panel out of the back of the shelf to reveal a secret compartment. And voilà! There’s a manila envelope, stuffed full.
Irene had forgotten all about the secret compartment until she started thinking about hiding places. The secret compartment had been original to this room, and even though the library had undergone a complete overhaul, Russ had insisted the compartment stay. It added character and history—they agreed it had probably been used to hide alcohol during Prohibition. It was one of the only aspects of the house Russ had taken a personal interest in.
What will we hide in there? Irene had asked.
Love notes, he’d said.
She remembers that, clear as day. Love notes.
She pulls out the manila envelope and empties the contents onto the coffee table. It’s a stack of postcards secured with a rubber band. For one second, Irene holds out hope that the postcards are family heirlooms, maybe the correspondence that Milly conducted with Russ’s father while he was away in the navy. But once she wrangles the rubber band off, she sees the pictures on the postcards are all of St. John—Cinnamon Bay, Maho Bay, Francis Bay, Hansen Bay.
None of the cards is addressed. On the back of each is a short, simple message. I love you. I’ll miss you. You are my heart. I’ll be here waiting. I love you. I love you. I love you. All of them are signed with the initials M.L.
M.L.? Not Rosie? She thinks of Maia, but these notes feel, almost certainly, like declarations of romantic love. So they have to be from Rosie. M.L. must be a nickname.
These are the love notes Russ was talking about then, years earlier, when he insisted they keep this compartment.
Irene feels a wave of anger and disgust—he kept these in the house!—but she also feels implicated. If she had to guess, she would say Rosie tucked these cards into Russ’s luggage for him to find once he’d arrived home. Or maybe she slipped them into his jacket pocket as he was leaving. Instead of throwing them away, as Russ certainly knew he should, he’d kept them. He’d wanted—or needed—to save this proof that someone loved him because so little love was shown to him at home.
Irene has heard that love is a garden that needs to be tended. And what had Irene thought about that? She had thought it was sentimental nonsense, the stuff of sappy Hallmark cards. Love, for Irene, was a daily act—steadfastness, loyalty, devotion. It was raising the boys, creating a beautiful, comfortable home, stopping by to see Milly three times a week because Russ was too busy to do it himself. It was ironing Russ’s shirts, making his oatmeal with raisins the way he liked it, taking his Audi to the car wash so it was gleaming when he returned from his trips.
She tosses the postcards in the air and they scatter. She would like to burn them in one of her six fireplaces; nothing would give her greater satisfaction than watching Rosie’s declarations of love for Russ curl, blacken, and go up in smoke.
Forgiveness, she thinks. She will save the postcards and give them to Maia someday.
She picks up the landline and dials, and Huck answers on the first ring. “Hello,” he says. “Who’s calling me from Iowa City?”
“It’s me,” Irene says, which she knows is presumptive. They haven’t been friends long enough for her to be “me.”
“Hello, you,” he says, and she feels better. “What’s up?”
What should Irene tell him first? That she spent all day with the FBI? Or that she found an illicit cache of postcards from his stepdaughter to her husband?
“Adam leaves a week from Tuesday?” she says.
“Yep,” Huck says.
“All right,” Irene says. “I guess that means I’ll be down a week from Monday.”
“You serious?” Huck says. She hears him exhale, presumably smoke. “Angler Cupcake, you serious?”
She squeezes her eyes shut. “Yes,” she says.
Ayers
