Chapter 23

‘This is the life,’ thought Andi as she lounged in the sun. Overhead a few sea gulls lazily circled, occasionally their cries punctuated the gentle, rhythmic splashing of waves on the white sand beach. Behind her, palm trees swayed in the gentle breezes, and the giggle of the twins and Bitty could be heard as they raced naked up and down the beach, being chased by and chasing Yi-jin through the surf. The only other sound was the tinkling of ice in Andi’s tall cool glass of “Special Lemonade” (lemonade & tequila).

This was the “Ladies Beach” on the private island of Nisi Arcadia. Men are only allowed on this stretch of sand by invitation only. Andi was flanked by Macy and Miss Nicoletta, all three propped up by reclining beach mats, all three wearing only sunglasses and suntan lotion. As for the other women, Sunny and Stan were spending some quiet time together in a cabana on the east side of the island, and Andi suspected that Gus and Lucy were holed up in a cabana out there too, probably on the west side of the island. She hadn’t seen Gus and Lucy at all since they landed.

As for herself, Andi was watching Paul as he and John sailed around the island on one of Miss Nicoletta’s neat Hunter Legend sloops. Larger than their own 20-foot sloop, the Hunter Legend is thirty-six feet long and a much heavier boat containing a full cabin with a head, galley, and a 44 HP diesel engine. Their twenty-foot sloop, Amalthea, was tied up back in Florida at the “Jupiter house.” It was a fun boat with just enough room to recline in the below deck area. Andi has yet to see the Amalthea and the Jupiter house, but right now neither Andi, nor Macy, nor Miss Nicoletta were in the mood to go anywhere, except maybe the cooler for more ‘special’ lemonade.

Far off in the distance both Andi and Macy could see the sailboat and whenever it leaned far to the side, they would join hands, nervously waiting for the boat to right itself and continue its way around the island.

“My goodness dears,” said Miss Nicoletta, “either the two of you are lovers, or the both of you are nervous about your men out there. Which is it?”

There was a long silence.

“Well? Which is it?” asked Miss Nicoletta.

“We’re thinking,” responded Macy. There was another long silence. Then Andi rolled off her beach mat, laughing. Macy gave her a swat on her shapely behind, and Andi gave out a loud yelp. “Oh, come on, I hardly tapped you,” sneered Macy.

“I was tapped there quite hard last night, if you don’t mind,” responded Andi.

“Same here, thanks to you,” responded Macy.

Andi propped herself up on her elbows and grinned, her pretty sand covered breasts hanging delightfully from her chest and Macy finally understood what men saw in large-breasted women. “How did that go for you?” asked Andi with not only humor but genuine concern for her sister in her voice.

“Better than I expected,” sighed Macy and she wiggled her hips.

“Lovers it is,” observed Miss Nicoletta.

“Sisters actually,” said Andi, sitting up and trying to brush the sand off her skin.

“A lot better than I expected,” smiled Macy.

“Your beards are out of sight now,” said Miss Nicoletta. “You can go wash the sand off if you’d like.”

“I think I’m in love,” sighed Macy as she painfully eased her way to her feet. “I can’t believe how I deprived my husband and myself of that for ten years! What other painful delights do you have in store for me, sister dear?” She took Andi’s chin in her hand and tilted her head up and kissed her sister on the lips.

Miss Nicoletta rose and joined the Jarecki women and pulled them in for a three-way hug. “Childbirth,” said the justice. “What, you’re surprised? If you do it right, childbirth can be very sensual, even erotic. Believe it or not, giving birth to Nathanial was the first time a man gave an orgasm to this old girl. There’s nothing like the feeling of your child slipping from your womb into your arms. Nothing like it.”

Miss Nicoletta held Andi and Macy tight for a long time. Finally, they broke the hug. “I’m sorry you missed the opportunity for natural childbirth, Andi. Let’s pray that your son is delivered naturally, hmm? And you Macy! You’re going to do great!” She gave both a slap on the ass and they headed into the water to rinse the sand off.

Andi finally turned to Miss Nicoletta and ran a hand across her soft, slightly curved tummy. “Son? I’m a very regular girl, and a very unusual girl, by modern standards. I was chaste for five years. The first chance I had to get pregnant since I carried the girls was on my wedding night nine days ago. You must have been talking to Madeline. She has been spreading that rumor around. She wants a little brother.”

The justice looked absolutely shocked. “Five years? How did you survive?”

“I fingered out a way,” grinned Andi.

As they splashed about, taunting each other, Miss Nicoletta whispered in Andi’s ear, “Have you told him about the videos yet?”

Andi laughed, as if Miss Nicoletta had just told her a joke. “What videos?”

Miss Nicoletta motioned Andi to follow her back to shore. “My dear, if you weren’t aware of these, then you had best discuss this with Paul.” She pulled a tablet out of her beach bag and started a video that was downloaded to the tablet. “That is you, isn’t it? After spending the afternoon together, I’d recognize those nipples anywhere, but there is no caesarean scar, so this must be quite old...”

The video showed a curvaceous woman in her mid to late twenties wearing a pink wig and a blindfold, tied naked to a mattress. There were several men and women in the room seated around the mattress. They all looked like they were waiting their turn. All were silent, and they watched a young woman finger fucking the bound woman and sucking her nipples. When the bound woman began whimpering in desire, a man got on the bed and fucked her. This was potentially a video of Andi’s impregnation.

“Isn’t this man here your first husband?” asked Miss Nicoletta as she pointed to a man with a big grin who was seated next to the bed. Andi recognized that shit-eating grin immediately. There was no question for Andi. It was Frank Rosetti. “These videos were recently dumped on to the internet. You need to discuss this with your husband, he needs to become the lawyer again, so he can do something about this.”

Andi froze in shock, her mouth opening and closing and her eyes wide open in horror. She took her glass of “Special Lemonade” and chugged it down. With trembling hands, she poured herself another glass and drank half of it.

“Adrianna? Adrianna?” asked Justice Atherton, but Andi wasn’t responding. She knew now what she had to do.

“Adrianna?”

----- Ѻ -----

- - - Lucy started singing into her microphone as she ran, “I search myself, I want you to find me I forget myself, I want you to remind me I don’t want anybody else When I think about you, I touch...

“All right, enough singing,” interrupted Gus, “Your blood oxygen level is down to 93.”

Although Lucy didn’t know it for a fact, she was sure that Gus knew what the next word was in the Divinyls tune she was singing; she was very sure that she was in love with Gus now, and the way he acted on New Year’s Eve showed he was at least in lust with her, maybe in love. She was on her second lap of the island, and she was simply keeping up her edge. Lucy intends to be in shape for her cross-country bicycle run planned for July. Gus is also in training.

It’s his job to monitor her vital signs, make sure she remains hydrated and, most important, to keep her awake on the road during the cross-country ride. Gus also needs to keep her bikes in top shape.

His job is to tell her stories to keep her awake during the evening parts of the ride. During the long, horribly boring ride through eastern Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, he needs to keep her entertained. Audio books from Audible.com are great, but they don’t answer questions and they don’t explain what they’re talking about. Lucy asked Gus to pick a book to read to her, something that is not only entertaining but deep, something to keep the mind working on those late nights on the central United States’ prairies. Being a huge fan of JRR Tolkien, she expected him to warm up with ‘The Hobbit’ and save the Lord of the Rings for the long rides, but no, for today he picked a book that he absolutely loved: Genesis.

Gus knew each of those 66 books of the bible personally, but he loved Genesis. He started out with “In the beginning...” and read it not with fake Charlton Heston drama nor with the boring monotone drone that was her introduction to the book of books during her upbringing in the Jewish religion. Gus read it like it was an adventure novel. Of course, Gus understood her dissatisfaction with religion. He was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, and once he was freed from their doctrine, he reacted differently than Lucy did once she was freed.

Lucy confused God with the anger of the old rabbis that taught her and moved as far away as possible from that church. And as for Gus, once he was freed from the Roman doctrine, he was free to dive headlong into God’s word and learn what it was all about. He still thanks God for that day a young preacher responded to their pastor search at Springville Congregational. Both the pastor, John, and his wife, also a pastor, Macy, were “Catholic expats.” Right now, he had gone off topic to give a lecture on the difficulties of translating ancient Hebrew into modern day languages.

“ ... is considered the most difficult problem with translating ancient Hebrew. Personally, I believe that when the Babylonians removed Hebrew from existence in about 300 BC, that was the biggest problem. There had been no one to translate it for twenty-three hundred years. Now when you compound the facts that there are no vowels, no spaces between words, and that repeated letters are omitted, the sentence ‘Bob begs bad bread’ would end up being written out drbdbsgb and...”

“Wait a minute!” interrupted Lucy. “How did you get the letter d at the beginning of the sentence?”

“Because the Hebrew language is written from right to left...” Lucy repeated ‘from right to left’ at the same time as Gus, and mentally kicking herself for forgetting the strange fact of writing from right to left. Why would anyone do that? Modern culture writes left to right because most people are right-handed and when writing from left to right, you don’t drag your hand through wet ink.

Gus heard her say “from right to left” because, unlike CB radio, their radio system is set up in full duplex, it’s exactly like a telephone conversation where you can both speak at the same time. Imagine someone reading you a story on simplex radio, like CB. If you tripped and fell, you couldn’t ask for help until they stopped talking. Like now.

Lucy was jogging past the woman’s beach, and Macy flagged her down. “Hold up honey, Macy wants to talk to me...” Lucy muted her radio while she spoke with Macy and there was a long pause, then Gus saw Lucy’s blood oxygen level drop and her heart rate spike, it could only mean she was sprinting.

“Darling, what’s up? What did Macy say?”

Between gasps of air, Lucy said, “Nicoletta said something to Andi, and then Andi just ran off.”

“Do you know what Nicoletta said to Andi?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to tell me?”

“No, it’s between Paul and Andi.” For a while, all Gus could hear was Lucy chanting, “Shit! ... Shit! ... Shit!...” as she ran. There had to be more.

“What can you tell me? Come on, talk to me,” implored Gus.

“Macy said ... Andi told her ... told her to ask me to help Paul with the twins.”

Gus pondered that for a moment, then his heart sank. Lucy is the twins’ godmother; it would fall to her to be their mother if something happened to Andi. He didn’t want to think that something bad was up, but the only thing passing through Gus’ mind was ‘What the hell was that skinny little bottle blond thinking?’

Gus saw John strolling nearby with a bucket containing a few iced beers. “Yo, Sir John Sir!” John was one of those pastors that doesn’t like formal addresses, so Gus goads him by using the word Sir as often as possible when addressing him.

John thought Gus was going to grab a cold cerveza out of the bucket he was carrying for his brother. Even though Paul wouldn’t mind if his best friend grabbed one of his beers, John tried to protect the beer. “I’ve been accorded the duty to protect this amber liquid with my life! Nay I tell you!”

“I just want to know where your brother is right now.”

“He and Andi took Miss Nisi out recently. They took her out the channel then headed west.” The Miss Nisi is Miss Nicoletta’s second sailing yacht, identical in construction to the 36-foot Hunter Legend Bermuda rigged sloop Miss Arcadia.

Gus pondered, then asked, “Was there anything unusual when they went out?”

John shrugged, “I don’t know, Andi seemed pretty anxious, Paul wanted to take out the Miss Arcadia again now that he’s used to it, but she insisted she wanted to go out immediately and Miss Arcadia wasn’t ready to sail, so they went out on the Miss Nisi. She had an iPad with her. If you think that’s unusual, I guess.”

Gus keyed up his microphone. “Paul and Andi were just through here. They headed westbound on Miss Nisi. Andi had a tablet, if that means anything.”

Lucy raced through the jungle on the walking path running as hard as she’s ever run, the glinting of the sun on the calm ocean could be seen through the foliage of the tropical paradise, then she could see the boat, anchored offshore, rocking gently in the waves. Then she could see the figures laying on the beach, side by side, neither moving, and as she grew closer, she saw the blood trail leading back to the ocean.

Fighting back the desire to shriek, she fought her way through the tangled vegetation and keyed the mic. “Gus honey, get Sunny over here STAT, the fastest way possible. We’re on Sunset Side beach, bring bandages, lots of bandages, and med kits, and maybe an AED.”