Vacations from Hell

The tension started after the engagement. Phillip didn’t smile as much. He was distant. I could feel his anger as if it were heat coming from an open oven. My mom fluttered around him like a butterfly, trying to please him, to make him smile again. I hated to watch. I couldn’t tell if Evan did too. Not at first.



One night I was in the library with him playing Kingdom Hearts 2, mashing the buttons down hard like I was punching someone. Evan was beating me anyway. Then the noise came up suddenly—the shouting, my mom’s voice tearful and Phillip’s angry—rising over the electronic beeps and yelps from the Xbox.



Evan dropped his controller with a thump and went to slam the door shut. When he turned to face me, he was breathing hard. “I hate him,” he said. “I hate him.”



I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about how white he’d looked in the driveway that day Phillip had banged on the car window. How frightened. Except I wasn’t sure if it was his face I was now picturing—his look of fear or my mother’s.



“I didn’t think anyone would ever marry him,” said Evan. “I didn’t think your mother would ever say yes. If I had…”



I should have made him finish that sentence, I think now, rolling over in the bed. As I reach to pull the pillow under my head, my hand strikes something: a lump, hard and cool like a piece of metal. My hand closes around it; I draw it out and stare. It is a key, made of dark metal with a twisted brass handle. It gleams dully in the moonlight.



I wake up still holding the key in my hand. I wash in the outdoor shower, wearing my bathing suit, watching the ocean roll while I rinse shampoo through my hair. I can see my mother and Phillip out by the pool. They are both reading, on side-by-side loungers, my mother in a cap with a colored plastic visor that turns her face bright blue. She is facing Phillip, her voice loud and animated, but his face is buried in his book and he isn’t answering her. She might as well not be there at all.



The sand burns my feet through the flip-flops, but I have nothing else to wear. I endure the pain until the sand turns cold again outside Mrs. Palmer’s house. It’s almost noon, the sun directly overhead, and I feel it like a sharp nail piercing through layers of sky and into the skin at the back of my neck. Sweat trickles down into my bathing suit top as I work the key into the lock of the gate, twisting and jerking it until I hear the sound.



Click.



The gate swings open, and I step into the garden. I have to be careful, weaving my way through the shards of glass that stick out of the sand. A single one of them could slice off a toe if I stepped on it. I hardly look up at the house until I reach it; the rose pink is even brighter up close, the house made of a smooth, unremarkable stucco, a pattern of roses picked out along the side of it in bits of mosaic tile. There is a white rose painted on the front door, but I don’t go up to it. I slide around the side of the house instead, feeling like a thief, an interloper. I see Mrs. Palmer’s face again in my mind, her sunglasses like the eyes of a black fly, and I swallow against the dryness in my throat.



There is a window at the far side of the house that is open, just barely, a bit of curtain fluttering out into the still air like a banner. I raise myself on my toes, grab the ledge to get higher, and peer around the curtain into the room beyond.



It’s a living room, with plain, hard, modern furniture, nothing like the luxurious tropical furnishings at the villa. A coffee table, a red couch, a bunch of flowers in a black vase, a TV whose screen is dusty as if it’s rarely used. A square picture frame hangs over the couch, but it is backward, as if someone has turned the picture to the wall.



On the couch lies Evan. He seems to be asleep, his arm hanging limp down the side of the sofa, fingers brushing the floor. His hair has fallen over his face and moves slightly when he breathes, like seaweed in a current.



There is a rustle, and Mrs. Palmer comes into the room carrying a drink in her hand. There is ice in it and some slices of lime. It looks like a gin and tonic, one of Phillip’s favorite drinks. She sets it on the table and turns to look at Evan. She’s wearing a filmy sort of white cover-up over a black bikini and her sunglasses. Who wears sunglasses inside? And high heels? Her feet must hurt, I think as she bends over Evan. My stomach thuds dully as she brushes his hair back and leans in, her mouth over his, and I wait to see them kiss.



But she doesn’t kiss him. She stays where she is, hovering, like a bee over a flower. Her blond hair falls behind them in a sheet of pale gold, and I think how I wish I had hair like that, and then I see her purse her lips as if she’s about to start whistling. And Evan’s mouth opens too, though his eyes are still closed. His chest is rising and falling fast now, as if he’s running. I see his hand clench into a fist. Something pale white and faint as a wisp of smoke rises from his mouth; it looks like he’s exhaling a puff of dandelion fluff.