Page 60 of The Newcomer
By the time she came out of the bathroom in dry pajamas, Isabelle was sitting in the room’s only chair, reading her paperback, and Maya was softly snoring from her side of the bed.
Letty tried to hand the teenager a wad of cash, but Isabelle shook her off.
“No way. Maya and I had fun.”
“But you gave up a Friday night to stay with her,” Letty protested.
“I didn’t have anything else going on. It’s cool.” Isabelle went over to the bed and dropped a kiss on the top of the little girl’s head. “Night night, Maya Papaya.” She picked up her book and went out the door.
Therain drummed against the breezeway’s metal roof outside and the wind rattled the unit’s jalousie windows. For the first time since she’d arrived in Florida, Letty was cold. She burrowed under the covers and tried not to think about her ill-fated stroll with Joe DeCurtis.
But the genie was out of the bottle. How long had it been since she’d been kissed like that? When she closed her eyes she could still feel the delicious, unsettling sensation of his lips and his hands.
And she could still feel the sting of his accusations. He couldn’t know how close she’d come to completely letting go.
“Letty,Letty.” Maya pressed her face against hers and used her thumb to pry open one of her aunt’s eyes. Letty opened the other one. The room was bathed in a murky gray light. It was still raining, and according to the clock radio on her nightstand, it was only seven o’clock.
“Go back to sleep, baby,” she said, yawning and rolling onto her side. “It’s Saturday. Letty’s day off.”
“Where’s Ellie?” Maya asked. “I want my Ellie.”
Oh Lord,Letty thought. She sat up and looked around the bed. No sign of Maya’s beloved companion. She lifted the covers.
“Look under the bed,” she told Maya. “Maybe Ellie’s hiding under there.”
The child giggled and crawled under the bed. “She’s not here.”
“Check the bathroom. Maybe she needed to go pee-pee.”
Maya wandered away. “Ellie,” she called. “C’mere, Ellie.”
A moment later Maya was standing by the side of the bed wailing. “Ellie’s not there! I want my Ellie.”
“We’ll find her,” Letty said grimly.
Not finding Ellie was not an option. She could remember other incidents when the stuffed elephant had gone missing. There was the time Tanya’s new housekeeper had made the mistake of tossing it into the toy box and piling other toys on top, which had resulted in an epic meltdown from Maya, and the unsympathetic housekeeper’s subsequent sacking. Once, shortly after Evan and Tanya separated and Evan had Maya for her first visitation, Tanya had “forgotten” to pack Ellie in the child’s overnight bag.
Maya’s resulting case of hysterics had led to a series of frantic late-night emergency calls to Tanya, who, Letty always suspected, had rather enjoyed the spectacle of seeing Evan, exhausted and unshaven, having cut his weekend plans short, drive back from the Hamptons to deposit Maya back on her doorstep at six o’clock the next morning.
Of course, he’d accused Tanya of deliberately leaving the toy behind in order to sabotage his visitation. Thereafter, Evan managed to track down the exact same elephant to keep at his place, but Maya would have nothing to do with Ellie 2.0.
For the next fifteen minutes Letty and Maya searched every corner of the small motel room, but to no avail.
“I want her,” Maya sobbed.
Letty tried to remember the last time she’d seen the love-worn stuffed elephant. And then it came to her—last night, when Maya was curled up with Isabelle outside on the breezeway. Maybe Maya had dropped the toy?
She opened the door, but a gust of wind pulled the knob from her grip and blew it all the way open. “Stay here,” Letty warned her niece, closing the door behind her. Outside, an inch-deep torrent of rain—overflow from a nearby stopped-up gutter—gushed past, carrying leaves and twigs, cigarette butts and a stray coral-colored hibiscus blossom. But there was no sign of the elephant.
Grimacing, she waded out the door and down the breezeway. At the end of the concrete walk she spotted a telltale lump of gray with a gold-studded red leatherette collar wedged up against a large plastic trash bin.
Rainwater streamed from the sodden stuffed animal.
Maya was standing right inside the doorway, sucking her thumb when Letty returned. “Look who I found!” Letty said.
“Gimme,” Maya said, stretching her arms out for her toy.
Letty shook her head. “Ellie stayed outside in the rain all night and she’s soaked. We need to let her dry out.”
