What Happens in Paradise - Elin Hilderbrand Page 0,84
you have bona fide legal documents to prove it. It’s difficult for me to see you.” I spread my hands across my stomach. “I had feelings for you.”
“Had?”
“Had, have, it doesn’t matter because you don’t live here and you aren’t mine.”
“I’d like to support the baby,” he said.
“I received money already,” I said. I wasn’t sure if this would come as news to him or not.
He said, “Todd showed me your e-mail last week. He told me he sent you money back in May. He told me he came down to Carnival in July and that he checked in on you and that his hunch was correct: you were pregnant. The instant he told me, I made plans to come down here. I’m here only to see you, Rosie.”
Todd Croft had come during St. John’s Carnival and had spied on me? I didn’t like that one bit.
Russ had found out only last week?
“I have everything I need,” I said. “But thank you.”
“You don’t have to forgive me but you do have to let me support that child,” Russ said.
“I don’t, though,” I said, and I walked out of the restaurant, past the Sugar Mill, and into the parking lot, where I climbed in my car and cried.
The following week, a package arrived containing five thousand dollars in cash. An identical package came the week after that. And the week after that.
October 29, 2006
Today at 5:09 a.m., Maia Rosalie Small entered the world weighing six pounds and fourteen ounces and measuring twenty inches long. She is the most beautiful creature I have ever laid eyes on.
The nurse brought me a form to fill out so she could make the birth certificate. On the line where it asked for the father’s name, I wrote Unknown.
November 1, 2006
Maia is three days old. Today, I sent an e-mail to Todd Croft at Ascension letting him know that I’d had a baby girl and that her name was Maia Small.
September 4, 2012
Today is Maia’s first day at the Gifft Hill School. She marched into the classroom, head held high, shoulders back, with barely a wave to me and Mama and Huck, all of us standing in the doorway, watching her go.
Huck had a charter and Mama was due at the health center and I thought, What am I going to do now? Then I realized this was the perfect time to start journaling again. Because if you don’t write down what happens in a day, you forget—and that day becomes a blur and that blur becomes your life.
If I had to describe what has happened in the past six years, what would I say?
I quit my job cocktail waitressing at Caneel and got a job waiting tables at La Tapa, but only four nights a week because of Maia.
I have a best friend named Ayers Wilson, who’s another waitress at La Tapa. She’s like a sister to me and an auntie to Maia. She dates Mick, the manager at the Beach Bar, so we stop by there after our shift and sometimes there are cute guys and a live band and sometimes I dance and a date comes out of it—but there has been no one special because the first thing I say is that I have a daughter but the father isn’t in the picture and the second thing I say is that I was born and raised on the island and will never leave.
This scares everyone away. Everyone.
On the first day of each month, cash arrives in a package and I put it in the bank for Maia. It’s how I can pay for Gifft Hill. I won’t say I’m not grateful, but receiving the packages also fills me with anger, shame…and longing.
Unbelievably, after all this time, I still think about Russ. I wonder how he’s doing. I can only assume he’s still married to Irene, trying in earnest to make the marriage work.
I hope he’s happy—because if he’s not happy, then what’s the point of staying with her?
February 9, 2013
Journaling is like exercise; it’s hard to keep it up. You have to make yourself do it, and ultimately, I don’t see the point of Went to work, played Tooth Fairy, went to bed.
Tooth Fairy because Maia lost her first tooth, bottom front left. It popped out when she bit down on a piece of breakfast toast, then it skittered across the floor and Huck found it.
I sometimes wish I had an e-mail or a cell phone number for Russ. I would tell