Can You Keep a Secret? (5 page)

The Sunshine Shack. It sounds quaint, maybe even a bit romantic, but of course it wasn’t.

Colby had left his boat shoes on the mat outside his door so Caitlin would be able to find him without having to ask at reception, and she knocked – very quietly.

‘I’m so sorry about this place,’ he said, letting her in.

‘What’s wrong with it?’ Caitlin asked, concerned. But of course she was seeing the Sunshine Shack as a girl from far north Queensland would see it, and not as a fund manager from Manhattan would. Colby’s room was typical of a 1970s Australian hotel-motel, with a pine double bed and a quilted, patterned bedspread; a plastic toilet lid with a paper strip over it to prove that it had been cleaned since the last time somebody rented the room; a shower cubicle with three-panel sliding door and a piece of soap in a sealed packet; a small TV atop a pine dresser; stiff towels; and a white plastic kettle with a very short cord.

‘What’s right about it? They told us it was three-star, and that was as good as we could get in Townsville.’ Colby kicked the door shut behind Caitlin. ‘Maybe the booking company made a mistake.’

‘It looks okay to me,’ said Caitlin, and that was all she got to say. Colby took her in his arms and forced her back towards the bed.

‘I’ve been waiting for days to get you alone,’ he said, between kisses on her neck.

‘You didn’t make it very obvious.’

‘Am I making it obvious now?’

He was. And then morning came, and with it a knock on the door.

‘Who could that be?’ asked Colby. He put an apricot-coloured towel around his waist and went to look. The Sunshine Shack was a family-run motel. The managers – Liz and Brian Forsyth – had taken on the business after Brian got retrenched from the old State Bank in Melbourne.

It was Liz who came to the door, carrying a breakfast tray.

‘Good morning! Where would you like this?’

‘Ah, anywhere is fine,’ said Colby.

Liz looked past him into the room, and what she saw made her roll her eyes. Caitlin had gone into the bathroom to hide, but the mattress was half off the base and, when Liz went to walk across the room to put the tray down, she stepped straight onto an empty champagne bottle, hidden under a pile of discarded clothes.

‘Check-out is at ten,’ she said primly.

‘Gotcha,’ said Colby as she left. He was already lifting the shiny cloche off a plate. There were strips of bacon underneath and fried eggs; there was a paper bag with cold toast and four squares of hard butter; a milk jug with Glad Wrap stretched over the top; and knives and forks, rolled up in a paper serviette.

‘Does this just come with the room? How do they know what I even want?’ he muttered to himself.

‘I ordered it,’ said Caitlin. She’d dragged a top sheet into the bathroom when Liz knocked on the door, and now she was wearing it like a toga, loose around her young bronze body.

Colby looked up. ‘Jesus, look at you. But when?’

‘While you were sleeping.’

Colby shook his head, bewildered.

‘You’re full of tricks,’ he said. ‘I could have sworn I didn’t let you up all night.’

‘I’m clever like that,’ said Caitlin, snapping her fingers. ‘Now you see me, now you don’t.’

They sat on the bed together, Colby in his towel and Caitlin in her sheet, feeding bacon to each other with their fingers, and fighting over the last of the coffee. Then the phone rang and it was Liz’s husband, Brian, wondering when Mr Colbert would be checking out.

‘Not today,’ he said, ‘I need to stay another night. Can you organise that for me? That’s great. Thank you. No, just me. The other two will be leaving today. Unless you hear different from them.’

Caitlin looked surprised. ‘But aren’t you supposed to catch the plane to Sydney today? To see the fireworks? What will you tell Robert?’

‘That I’ve fallen in love,’ said Colby flippantly.

‘Oh right, sure. Of course you have. Me too.’ Caitlin was trying to laugh it off but, quizzed, she’d have had to admit that she was falling for Colby. He was very handsome. He was also smart, and when they were alone together, funny. The sex had been great. His accent was cute. But she had to be realistic. He was ten years older, on holiday, and he lived in New York City. He’d made it pretty clear – not bluntly, and certainly not unkindly – that he was heading home.

‘Excellent news,’ he said, ‘we can fall in love together.’ He pushed the breakfast plates away and reached for the telephone. It was the old-fashioned kind, with a flat white receiver still connected to the base. He pressed nine for reception, and Liz said, ‘Yes?’

‘Can you put me through to Robert Brancato’s room?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘My friend, Robert Brancato. I checked in with him last night. Can you put me through to him?’

Liz said no. ‘We don’t do that. You can dial the number from your room.’

‘I don’t have the number,’ said Colby.

‘You don’t have the number,’ repeated Liz.

‘No. Can you get it for me?’

‘We’re very busy here,’ she said, ‘it’s right on check-out
time. I’ve got two people at the counter now. You’ll have to wait.’

Colby put the phone down. ‘Funny kind of service they have here. Like, I’m a pain in the butt for wanting the staff to do something for me.’ Ten minutes later, the phone rang, and it was Liz with the number.

‘Thank you very much,’ said Colby, but Liz was already gone.

He called Robert and explained the situation: he was very sorry, but he was probably going to miss the flight to Sydney. No, no, everything was fine. He’d just decided to stay in Townsville a little longer.

‘So, you’ve landed yourself an Aussie sheila,’ said Robert, ‘and my guess is, it’s Daisy Duke.’

Colby didn’t answer. He was old-fashioned that way. A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell.

‘And given that you’re not saying anything, she’s still there?’ Robert guessed.

Colby still said nothing.

‘Well, good for you. But you don’t want to miss Sydney. You
definitely
don’t want to miss New Year’s Eve in Sydney. So, have your fun and wrap things up with Daisy and we’ll see you there tomorrow, right?’

‘Right,’ said Colby.

‘And you’ll be coming alone, right? Meaning, what happens in Vegas is supposed to stay in Vegas. Do not turn up with excess baggage.’

‘Right.’ Colby put down the phone.

‘So, you’re leaving tomorrow now?’ Caitlin asked.

‘If that’s okay. I mean, you can stay with me another day, can’t you? Say you can.’

‘Well, I suppose I can,’ said Caitlin. ‘But, you know, it’s going to be hard to get a flight to Sydney tomorrow, with New Year’s Eve and everything.’

‘Well, that’s okay. Because I can’t see myself leaving you tomorrow either.’ Colby rolled towards her. ‘I actually can’t see myself leaving you this century.’

It was a joke, or at least it was meant to be, but then Colby did in fact struggle to get a flight down to Sydney, and he missed the fireworks over Sydney Harbour, by which time he was so thoroughly smitten with Caitlin that he very nearly gave consideration to missing his flight home to New York.

‘It wasn’t just the sex,’ he told Robert when they finally caught up at Sydney airport for the long flight home. ‘She’s just so different from anyone I’ve met before.’ And that was true: Caitlin was all, and none, of those things that Colby thought he understood. She’d dropped out of school at fifteen, seemed not to care, and yet she was not stupid.

‘You must want to go back,’ he’d said.

‘But why? I hated school,’ she replied.

They’d left the motel room to eat fish and chips off butcher’s paper on a bench on the Townsville Pier, in the company of anglers and giant pelicans.

‘You don’t have to love school, but you are supposed to finish.’

‘But they wanted me to do maths, and I hate maths. And then Mum got sick and she was going to be leaving Magnetic anyway.’

‘Your mom’s sick?’

Caitlin nodded, shyly. ‘She’s got MS – multiple sclerosis.’

‘Jesus. That doesn’t sound good.’

It wasn’t good. Ruby had been just thirty when she became aware of numb patches in her feet and, within a year, she was walking like a drunk. She caught a ferry into Townsville to see a GP who told her flatly that she’d have to leave her little pink timber cottage with its yellow-painted floor, which had been her home since Caitlin was born.

‘You’ll get less mobile as time goes by, and you’ll need to be somewhere where they have services. Plus it’s not fair on your daughter – she’ll end up your care-giver if you’re not careful.’ But Caitlin was already Ruby’s care-giver: she’d long done all the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning, and Ruby’s idea was for her to take over the business, too, which was picking heads off the marijuana plants behind the shed, drying them out in her old oven, and selling the buds to Dutch tourists as they got off the ferry from Townsville.

‘That’s where I drew the line,’ said Caitlin. ‘I told Mum, I’m not going to be a drug dealer. She’s got this view about marijuana – it’s harmless, that they only make it illegal because they’ve never figured out a way to tax it. Which is fine, whatever, but it’s not what I wanted to do with my life. So I told her, I’m leaving. It was the only way I could think to get her to leave the island.’

‘And did she leave?’ asked Colby.

‘Not yet. She’s stubborn. I dropped out of school and went to Brisbane and she basically stayed here and sulked. But it’s like the GP said: she’s got worse. She can’t even walk down to the pier anymore, not without a cane. And that’s where she’s got to go, to sell to the tourists. So now she really will have to move. I’ve promised to help her in the New Year.’

‘What about your dad?’ asked Colby. ‘Can’t he help?’

Caitlin picked up a chip, and threw it towards some pelicans, setting off loud squabbling.

‘I don’t see him,’ she said, which wasn’t true. Caitlin’s father had dropped into the Merchant not a fortnight earlier, having heard that Caitlin was working skimpy.

‘Nice one,’ he’d said, tipping his baseball cap towards her breasts. ‘So, you’re all shy when I come around the house, but here they are, out for everyone.’

Caitlin had sworn at him, gone into the cool room, and refused to come back out until security had shown him the door.

‘You know who he is, though?’ asked Colby.

‘Yeah. I know who he is. But I don’t really talk about him. Tell me about your parents.’ Caitlin was still young enough for that to be one of the first questions.

‘What do you want to know?’

Colby was now lying flat on his back, staring up at the blue sky and the crying gulls. Caitlin’s head was resting on his shoulder. She was drawing circles with her fingers, and occasionally dropping small kisses on his chest.

‘Well, are they still alive?’

‘Jesus. How old do you think I am? My mother’s alive, yes.’

‘But not your dad?’

‘No.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘Long story.’ It wasn’t, not really. Colby had been seventeen when his father, Alan Colbert, who worked for Boeing, ploughed into a field while trying to land a small plane near Sag Harbour. There had been a young boy in the field, and the crash had claimed his life, too.

‘His family sued my father’s estate,’ said Colby, ‘and things went downhill pretty quickly after that. My mother had to sell the house. Not that she minded. We’d been out in Connecticut and she’d always hated that. She moved into the City – that’s New York City – into something rent controlled. That was, what, thirteen years ago? When the neighbourhood – Upper West Side – wasn’t quite so glamorous. But now it’s where everyone wants to live, and she’s got this palace, and because it’s still rent controlled she pays nothing for it.’

‘What is that? Rent control?’

‘When the landlord can’t put up your rent,’ said Colby.

‘That’s like my mum. She’s in Department of Housing. Pays $22 a week.’

‘Right,’ said Colby, ‘it’s not quite like that, but fair enough. And Pearl – that’s my mother – has got no real income, except for Dad’s Boeing pension, which isn’t indexed and gets smaller every year. But the rent’s nothing. So I pay that. And I pay the salary of the bloke she’s got living with her, who’s some kind of butler.’

‘Your mum’s got a butler?’

‘He’s not a real butler. He’s, like, I don’t know, maybe he was a doorman or a butler in the building years ago and Pearl’s sort of inherited him. The place she’s in is massive. And I like the fact that he’s there. Pearl’s not … well, she’s not sociable. She basically hasn’t been good since Dad died. She drinks quite a bit. She’s only, what, in her fifties? But you’d think she was older. She smokes too much. She gets no exercise.’

‘But what happened to you when your father died? Where did you go?’

‘To business school. To Yale first, and then Columbia. This was back when everyone was going to business school and wanted to go to Wall Street.’

‘And that’s where you live now? Wall Street?’

Colby looked down to see if Caitlin, who was still curled up to him, making circles on his chest, was joking.

‘You don’t
live
on Wall Street,’ he said. ‘You work on Wall Street. Actually, that’s not strictly true, either. I don’t work on Wall Street. I work for a company called Carnegie. It’s an investment bank, owned by a guy called Aaron Blatt – a very
rich
guy called Aaron Blatt.’

‘And you’re not on Wall Street?’

‘Right. Well, I am. It’s just what you say when you’re in finance. I’m in finance. I work on Wall Street … but my office, it’s actually in the World Trade Center.’

‘Oh,’ said Caitlin. ‘And what’s that?’

‘You really don’t know?’ Colby asked.

She shook her head.

‘Okay. The World Trade Center, it’s a building – two buildings actually – in downtown Manhattan. I work in what they call the North Tower, on the sixty-eighth floor.’

‘With Robert?’

‘Right,’ said Colby, and then he laughed.

‘What’s funny?’

‘Nothing’s funny. Just, I guess, how you think people know things and they don’t. But, I mean, why should you know? You’re Australian. The main thing is, you should come and check it out for yourself. Not my work. New York. Manhattan. You’d love it.’