But by day three, when the client had still not arrived, Maria had developed concerns, or rather niggling questions, about their now increasingly strange absence.
Would she still be paid? Maria asked the woman over the phone as much. The woman seemed surprised to find out the client had still not arrived. She herself seemed unsure about why this was happening, but reassured Maria that she would be paid regardless.
Maria was good at reading people. The woman’s tone confirmed, at least, that this late arrival was not part of some greater plan.
Recognizing what was and was not part of a client’s plan had become a very useful adaptive quality.
But this client’s absence didn’t seem to be part of anyone’s plan.
Perhaps he was old or sick. Perhaps something had happened to him or one of the children on their way out?
The thought of those eventualities hovered, for a few minutes, in Maria’s mind, but the truth was it really didn’t matter what the hell had happened to them. She didn’t know them, she’d never met them. Either they would arrive eventually or they wouldn’t. The truth was she’d lucked out in paradise, for the time being; she was now, it seemed, on a paid vacation.
And that’s when Maria’s best behavior began to slip.
She relaxed. She let her uniform crease as she lay on the deep cool sofas and read. She dived into the pool, used the floats, ate at the pool edge. She even allowed herself a double bill in the crisp air-conditioned darkness of the home cinema room as she shoveled freshly popped corn into her mouth. In the womblike blackness she let herself imagine again that this was her life.
A swim. A sauna. A steam. A shower.
Then exploring the rest of the house, the other rooms, the art, the books, the hints left behind by her absent employer.
She thought again of who the client might be. If he might actually be ill. No client of hers had ever not turned up.
And so, the insidious question of who the missing client was would not leave her alone. In the minimalist white library, she went as far as googling the house’s address on the desktop before deleting the search history. No celebrity lived here, no titan of commerce, or if they did, that information was not available online.
Maria thought again about the house rules. She thought about the room downstairs. The locked room. The room she definitely wasn’t allowed to go in. What was in there?
If it was a home office, as she had been told, it might hold the answer to whose house she was in. All she would need to do is go down there and take a look.
She shook off the notion as unprofessional and predictable. But the notion would not release its grip and finally Maria went back downstairs.
The door lock glowed blue. She placed her palm on it and then a low tone sounded: a denial tone. Access denied.
Maria was oddly relieved. The illusion of choice had been removed from the equation. She didn’t have to worry about going, or not going, into that room anymore.
Instead she went for a walk down to the private beach and swam naked in the secluded cove to feel the world on her skin—and as she did, she struggled to remember the last time she had felt so calm. Again she mused on what her life might look like if she lived here—if there were no client at all.
Salty, she returned to the house and got ready for dinner.
Halfway through her meal the house’s phone burst to life, ringing shrilly. Maria almost choking on her steak, a small chunk of it leaping from her coughing mouth across the swirling marble of the kitchen island. She rose as if suddenly interrupted by guests, smoothed down her hair self-consciously, and lifted the receiver.
It was the woman with the too-tight chignon. She had tried but failed to reach the client. She would keep trying, but she cautioned Maria it might be that the client would not be joining Maria at all. Though Maria would still be paid regardless.
That fact should have reassured Maria, however, when she put the phone down, she felt instead…what? Nervous. Though she couldn’t imagine why.
She thought of the door downstairs again and shivered, her imagination again taking flight. Were there ever any children? Was there even a client?
The only person Maria had met was the woman with the chignon. And why wasn’t she allowed to go in that room downstairs?
She knew her thoughts were childish, ridiculous, but without any other diversion she reveled in them for a moment, the drama of them, the horror of them, just to feel something. Before bed she tried the locked door again. But it was locked. She wouldn’t have been able to enter even if she wanted to.
In the middle of the night Maria woke to the lights in her room mechanically flashing on and off. Some kind of electrical fault, she inferred. She rose.
Tentatively, ready to reach for a vase or andiron as a weapon, Maria made her way to the living room phone and called the woman with the too-tight chignon to tell her about the fault.
The woman promised to send someone to fix the electrical problem first thing in the morning.
Could Maria manage with the lighting malfunction until then? Was the issue affecting other rooms in the house?
