"Mary and O’Neil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cronin Justin)

MAMMALS

April 1993

THEY WERE NOT gamblers, but the resort had a small casino, and that was where they spent the first two days. Kay and Jack: the trip was a reward for two hard years, the rough waters they had crossed together, and though they had imagined it as time together as a family, empty days lounging in the stolen sunshine, they had barely stepped outdoors. They left to eat and sleep and check on Mia and the boys, but always they returned-both winning and losing, yet always winning a little more-and by the morning of the third day, after a twelve-hour run when they had not gone to bed at all, they were ahead four thousand dollars, enough to pay for the week-long trip.

It was Kay who decided to stop. Ten A.M.: she’d just won three hands in a row-another sixty dollars-when an overdue exhaustion washed over her, a sense of absolute completeness, like the last bite of a meal. She understood at once that she was done.

“You know, I think I’ve had it,” she said.

Jack nodded, but kept his eyes on the table. His cheeks and chin were dusted with stubble the color of ash. He signaled to the dealer, a young black man with dreadlocks and a fine, copper-colored nose, that he was in. Expressionless, the young man dealt the cards: a ten, and an eight on top. The dealer drew a deuce. Jack waved a flat hand over his cards to say that he would hold where he was. His bets were small, ten or twenty dollars, but many times just five. He gambled carefully but also with a bemused wonder, like a man puzzling over a problem that seemed to work no matter what he did. He was an economist, but his work was very theoretical; when it came to actual dollars, he had no head at all. It was Kay who balanced the checkbook and paid the bills and kept the ship on course. She watched as Jack won again.

“Jack? Are you listening? Let’s cash in.”

He kissed her quickly on the forehead. “Go get some sleep if you want.”

The idea made her yawn. Four thousand dollars: not a fortune, she thought, but certainly a reason to be cautious. She had friends from college who had real money now: the bankers and lawyers who were just making partner, the doctors whose loans were finally paid off, even a novelist whose books did well. She read their news in the alumni bulletin and felt a stab of envy. To such people, she knew, four thousand dollars would seem like nothing at all. And yet it had taken Kay and Jack most of a year to set aside that sum, stealing a few hundred dollars here and there from his salary at the college.

Now the same amount sat before them on the table, neat rows of blue and red chips with the name of the resort etched at the center-a windfall that had cost them nothing. What was it about these chips that made them so pleasant to the touch? As tired as she was, still she longed to hold them in her hands.

“Seriously, Jack. How can this last?”

“I don’t know how it’s lasted this long.” He placed his bet on the table, and the dealer laid out fresh cards. “See? Twenty-one.” It was: a king and an ace, she saw. The dealer paid out.

She was too exhausted to press. “Come soon, then.”

Alone, she stepped from the casino, into the blazing light and building heat of the morning. The air smelled of flowers and the sea. The resort was like a compound, encircled by high fencing that made a U around one side of the bay and a beach of perfect white sand. The brochure had mentioned the casino almost in passing-it was just one more diversion, like the tennis courts and scuba lessons and limbo contests on the patio after dinner-and the two of them had joked about it. What kind of idiot would go to the Caribbean and fritter the time away playing cards in a dark room? But now the trip was half over, and they’d barely done anything else.

Their condo was empty, the beds rumpled and unmade. Searching from the windows, Kay found the boys down on the wide empty beach, and Mia, reading a book, her long, blond form stretched out in one of the lawn chairs that the resort staff put out each morning. Sam was nine, Noah six. She wondered if they felt neglected, but knew this wasn’t so: Sam wanted only to do as he wished, and Noah wanted nothing. It had been the hardest thing, to realize that she could only offer him comfort, that she would never really know him at all-that to be with Noah was, in some sense, to be alone.

She showered, dressed in a bathing suit-modest, matronly, one of those awful things with a skirt, but that was all they sold to women like her, women who were supposed to be older-and examined herself in the mirror. Thirty-six years old: her hair, a rich chestnut, had begun, here and there, to gray. She had never been a small woman, but now, after the boys, there was a wideness to her hips that was, she understood, a permanent rearrangement of the bones. And yet, looking at her reflection, she knew she was still, somehow, pretty. Her features were delicate and expressive; her legs were sturdy and lean, roped with muscle from the long walks she took now each day; her eyes and teeth were bright. The year of her illness-that awful year, they called it-had made her skin seem thinner somehow, almost translucent. Now, eight months later, her strength had returned, like wind filling a sail. The suit, with its high neckline, betrayed nothing.

The boys were making sandcastles, splashing in and out of the waves with buckets. They had no impulse to accumulate: all they built they destroyed at once, even Noah, who followed his brother’s lead in everything.

Sam took her hand and pulled. “Mia says we can go sailing if you say okay.”

“Did she?” The resort kept a fleet of rickety day-sailers on the beach. She tousled Sam’s hair, stiff with salt and sunshine. “After lunch, we’ll see,” she said.

“We want to go sailing now,” Sam declared. “Mia said she’ll take us.”

She knelt before the two of them. Their bodies were thin, absolutely without fat, and after three days in the sun, as brown as new pennies. Sam was tall for his age and hazel eyed, all knees and elbows and sharp angles, like his father; Noah, under a thatch of brown hair, had a wide, chunky face that on a different boy, one who smiled and laughed, would have been a constant barometer of his feelings. But his smiles, when they came, seemed like accidents. One eye, his left, did not look straight at her but just slightly away, a degree of misalignment that only someone close to him would notice. The condition was known as Brown’s syndrome, and was sometimes associated with autism. It was Noah’s eye, looking up at them from his cradle, that had first alerted them that something was wrong.

“Daddy’s made enough money to pay for the trip,” she told them. “What do you think of that?”

The littler boy wrinkled his brow and tipped his face to look at her. “Playing cards?”

“That’s right, playing cards. Grown-up cards. Mommy made some money too.”

“Can we buy a boat?” Sam asked.

“It’s not enough for that.”

“I found a jellyfish,” Noah announced. His world was a series of encounters with animals of all kinds; almost nothing else interested him. After a series of unhappy experiences with stray cats and wounded birds, they had tried to domesticate this compulsion with a menagerie of small pets: fish, turtles, a pair of lop-eared rabbits named Dopey and Doc. He seemed closer to these creatures than to any actual person, caring for them with complete devotion, and yet when they died, he seemed not to notice.

“Where was that?”

He pointed purposefully. “Over there. On the sand.”

“It was a dead jellyfish,” Sam said, scowling with boredom. “Big deal.”

Noah’s eyelids fell closed, like twin windowshades coming down. “Jellyfish. Any of various marine co-el-enter-ates of a soft, gelatinous structure, esp. one with an umbrellalike body and long trailing tentacles; medusa. Two. Inf. A person without strong resolve or stamina.” He pronounced the abbreviations exactly as he had seen them written in the dictionary. His face as he spoke was a perfect, emotionless blank.

“That’s wonderful, honey. Did Mia show that to you?”

The little boy frowned mysteriously. “It was dead,” he confirmed.

Up all night gambling, yet here she was, being a mother. For a while she helped Noah chase minnows in the shallows with his net, then moved a chair next to Mia’s, under the shade of a wide umbrella.

“How is the cards?”

Kay lay back in her chair. Just a few minutes with the boys had drained her; she knew right away that she would be asleep within moments. “We were doing pretty well when I left. I think we’re on a hot streak.” She sighed and turned to look at Mia. “You don’t mind? I know it wasn’t what we planned.”

Mia shrugged. From the wicker bag on the sand beside her chair she removed a hairbrush and, squinting into the light, stroked the underside of her long ponytail. “The boys are being good. Have the fun.”

“Well, their mother isn’t. Their mother is fried.”

Mia paused. “Fried?”

“Tired,” Kay explained, and closed her eyes.

She dreamed of being a girl, playing poker with her father in the kitchen, a dream that was also a memory: she had actually done this, years ago. One pair, two pair, three of a kind, straight: at the kitchen table, her matchsticks piled neatly before her, she calculated her bets according to a sheet of paper that listed the order of hands. It was notebook paper, folded and folded again, worn to the softness of chamois cloth from years of travel in her mother’s purse. Her parents played with friends; her mother was lucky, her father explained, but claimed to forget which hand was which. The light of the kitchen was winter light, cool and angular; Kay was eleven years old. Her father taught her to bluff, how to build the pot slowly when the cards were good, when to fold and be gone. Don’t fall in love with a hand, he warned her; even a good hand could lose. Wear a lucky color, but don’t count on it. Music played on the tinny speaker of the kitchen radio; she was wearing a nightgown, but was not cold, and her father was alive. He shuffled the cards to deal. Five-card draw, he said. Suicide kings and one-eyed jacks were wild. He showed her the cards, the jack with his averted gaze, the king with a sword in his head. Daddy? she said. Daddy, I married Jack. That’s good, he said. I know you did. I was there, remember? I’ve always liked Jack.

The light grew brighter and brighter and brighter still, the music louder and louder, and then she awoke to sunshine and heat, and remembered where she was. She had slept two hours; the boys and Mia were nowhere to be seen. Just a few hundred yards off the beach a cruise ship had sailed into view-deck after deck piled high above the water, an impossible vision, like a floating wedding cake. The grinding of the anchor, lowered on its chain, had awakened her, and something else: somewhere, a ragtime band was playing.

She found the boys at the snack bar, eating grilled cheese sandwiches and French fries off paper plates. Mia sat across from them, holding her book up with one hand, like an old painting of a woman reading in a park. Jane Eyre, a copy from the library, its plain covers wrapped in crinkling cellophane; she read voraciously but without discrimination, everything from pulp romances to The New Yorker to Sam’s books on baseball.

Kay sat down between the boys and helped herself to one of Sam’s fries. “Has Jack come out yet?”

“The professor said to tell you he is still winning.” Mia tucked a long marker in the pages of her book and closed the covers. “He did not want to disturb you.”

The fries were greasy and covered with salt: delicious. “How’s the book?”

Mia frowned. “Very sad. But I think it is helping with my English.”

“I haven’t read that since college. I haven’t really read anything since the boys.”

Mia shrugged and gave a neutral smile. “The professor thought I would like it.”

Kay ordered a club sandwich and iced tea, but the boys were too fidgety to wait, and she ate alone while Mia took them back to the condo to watch a movie on cable. Noah was not too old to take a nap, but she knew that Sam would keep him up. In any event, it was enough just to get them out of the sun for a while. It was their first vacation since she’d been sick, their first real vacation ever, not counting trips to friends’ houses or Jack’s parents’ in St. Louis -why not let them do as they liked?

She paid for lunch with the number of their condo, and returned to the casino. Jack was sitting at the bar, eating a hamburger. He told her he was up fifteen.

It took her a moment. “Fifteen thousand?”

“There are people in here who’d think that was nothing.” He bit into a pickle and wiped his hands. Sixteen hours at the table; he didn’t look tired at all. “See that room back there? Poker, the real stuff. I saw a guy lose twenty big ones on a single hand.”

Big ones-he’d never talked this way. “They don’t live on a college teacher’s salary. Jesus, Jack. Fifteen thousand dollars.” So much money, out of nowhere. She couldn’t believe it. “We can pay off all the cards, and the van too.”

“Don’t forget Uncle Sam.”

“Okay, just the van, then.” She laughed at herself. “Just the van. What am I saying?”

She stayed with him while he finished lunch, telling stories about the hands he had played and won, and then walked with him back to the blackjack table.

“Is this such a good idea? Playing more?”

He thought for a moment and nodded. “I think I’m all right,” he said. The dealer had changed; this time it was a young woman with cornrows, just a year or two older than Mia. She broke the seal on a fresh deck.

“Actually, I haven’t had this much fun in a long time. I feel like I could play all day. What are the boys up to?”

“They want to go sailing. Mia made a promise, I’m afraid.”

He rubbed a hand over his face. She knew how much he wanted to play, to ride this lucky streak. “You want to sit in a few hands? I can take them.”

“No, play if you want. Just be sensible. When you’re too tired, quit.” She kissed him one more time and squeezed his hand. The van was two years old; they’d bought it just before she’d gotten sick, after the old Volvo his parents had given them had finally died. How many payments left? All gone in a stroke, the slate wiped clean. “Fifteen thousand dollars, Jack. I can’t believe it. We can really use this luck.”

His hand found her waist, and he pulled her toward him. “This puts me sort of in the mood,” he said into her ear.

She accepted the embrace but then pried herself loose, suddenly embarrassed. She wrinkled her nose. “You need a shower,” she laughed.

The cruise ship was still anchored off the beach. A gate had been lowered at the bow, and a fleet of inflatable dinghies ferried passengers back and forth from the beach across the blue, blue waters of the bay. The sun was so hot it made her shiver.

She signed the rental agreement perfunctorily, barely bothering to read what it said. She hadn’t sailed for years, not since she was a girl at camp, but thought she would remember how. In any event, there was almost no wind. A young man wearing tennis whites and a huge wristwatch helped her rig, while Mia put Noah into a life jacket. Windward, leeward, tack, gibe: the words were all still there, unused for decades, like old bicycles hanging from the rafters of a cold garage.

“You know how to do it?” Stitched on his shirt pocket was his name, Thomas. His accent was southern; he had just graduated from college, she supposed, and was taking a year off to fool around in the sunshine.

“I think so.” She looked the boat over and nodded uneasily. “Well, the truth is it’s been a while.”

He smiled encouragingly at her. Besides taking care of the boats, he was also the diving instructor, he’d explained. “It’ll come back to you.” He directed her gaze across the water at an outcropping of dark stones, marked with a steel tower. “Just don’t go past those rocks. Nothing dangerous, it’s just open sea after that.”

Kay and the boys arranged themselves in the boat, and Mia and Thomas helped them push off. The crunch of sand along the hull, and then they were afloat; in the stern Kay pulled the little cord that dropped the rudder into place.

“Bon voyage!” Mia called from the beach. “Happy sailing!”

A mild breeze lifted them into the bay. Kay negotiated the tiller and mainsheet, clamping the line in her teeth as she adjusted the sail, then tying it fast to its cleat. She peeked quickly over her shoulder; the beach streamed away.

“So this is sailing,” she said to the boys. “What do you think?”

“Will we see any dolphins?” Noah asked.

“I don’t know, honey.” Tiller, mainsheet, rudder, centerboard. What had she gotten them into? She breathed deeply, steadying herself. “There’ll be lots of fish to look at.”

“Dolphins are mammals that live in the sea,” the boy intoned. “They nurse their young, and breathe air, like humans. Dolphins can stay submerged, under the water, for five minutes or longer, and have been known to dive as deep as eight hundred feet.”

“That’s right, honey. Did you read that in a book?”

“Creatures of the Deep.” It was a gift from the boy’s uncle, Kay’s brother, O’Neil. Noah had carried it with him on the plane.

“God,” Sam groaned. “You are so weird.”

“Your brother is not weird,” Kay corrected. “He’s different.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “God, you are so different.”

They skimmed past the cruise ship, its stern high above them, and the name, Windward Princess, painted in black. A vortex of churning water trailed behind it, holding it in place. Once beyond it Kay set the boat to tack, pointing close to the wind, and explained to the boys what would happen.

“Hard a-lee!”

The boom swung above their heads, catching with a firm snap as the sail filled once more with air. A clean tack; she felt a swell of pride. They were running parallel to the beach now, in the shadow of the ship, which stood between them and the shore. On the decks above people were watching them, leaning out over the rails. Some of them waved.

“Go closer,” Sam pleaded.

She pointed the bow tight to the wind; the boat heeled in reply. It was all coming came back to her, the play of the wind and the sail and the hull, how all of it was connected by unseen lines of force. The boys scrambled up beside her as she pulled the mainsheet taught. Above them the side of the great ship loomed, a wall of white steel a hundred feet high. One of the inflatable dinghies zoomed past, and they banged into the chop, spray flying over them like jewels of water.

“Hold on tight, guys!”

They rounded the bow, emerging into a pocket of still air and a view of the beach. Mia was still standing where they had left her, talking to the boy who had helped her rig. Boys, Kay thought-of course she would want to. She’d given her the rest of the afternoon off to talk with boys.

“Who’s that?” Noah asked; he spoke too loudly, uncertain how far to raise his voice over the sound of the water sliding under the hull.

She let out the mainsheet and refastened it in its cleat. “His name is Thomas.”

“Is he Mia’s friend too?”

She looked again. The boy stood at her side confidently, his hands in his pockets. Mia seemed to be laughing; with one hand she reached up and did something with her hair, setting it loose over her shoulders to catch the light. The image caught Kay short, not with alarm but with wonder, the purest amazement at time’s passage. It was as if, at this distance, she could see something she had been unable to discern before. When had it happened? She thought of the skinny girl who had come to them two years before, nervous and tall and poorly dressed, her English halting and full of strange phrases: “Were you born in the hallway?” she asked, incredulously, when the boys had done something careless; or, to urge them on, “Give the iron.” Too ill to pay attention, Kay hadn’t noticed the change. Lying on the sofa after her infusions, or in bed with a basin on the worst days, it was all she could manage to feel a helpless gratitude that somebody was there to help, to love and encourage the boys when she could not. Now she was well again, and Mia was reading Jane Eyre and flirting with a college boy on the beach. Her skinny body and bad clothes were gone. She wore a black bikini and a white cotton T-shirt cropped to show off her slender waist and all the rest, and as Kay watched, Mia touched her hair again, and then, with a slowness that betrayed her thinking, lifted one bare foot and dragged her toe through the sand. When had she learned to do this, to hold a boy’s interest with the smallest gesture? He would ask her, if he hadn’t already: Do you have friends in Vermont? Do you like the cold, does it remind you of Denmark? Do you like these people, the family you work for? When do you get off work?

She drew her gaze away. “Of course they’re friends,” she told the boys. “You don’t want Mia to have friends besides you?”

“Daddy is her friend,” Noah said. “But it’s a secret.”

The boat stopped suddenly. What the hell…? She pushed the tiller this way and that; they were held fast. Too close to the beach, she had run them aground. The lurch of the hull had sent the boys spilling forward. Later, she would remember this moment as almost comical: Kay with her boys alone at sea, the news that was not news, quite, breaking over her at a moment when she was simply too busy to think about it.

“Oh, damn,” she said, and heard the anger in her voice. “Damn, damn, damn.”

Sam’s face lit up with delight. “Are we sinking?”

“No, of course not. We just hit the bottom, that’s all.”

Noah began to wail. “We’re sinking! I don’t want to!”

“Sam, help your brother,” she said crossly, pulling in the mainsheet to find the wind. On the beach, suddenly, Mia and Thomas were nowhere to be seen. Daddy is her friend… She shook her head sharply to return her mind to the boat. “Can’t you see my hands are full? He doesn’t understand.”

“We’re sinking!” Noah repeated. The little boy had begun to cry.

Sam glowered across the boat at his brother. “No, we’re not, stupid.”

“Sam, enough.” She paused a moment to calm herself. “Everything’s fine. We’re perfectly safe. The beach is right there.”

Slowly the boat pivoted on its centerboard, pointing into the wind. The centerboard, Kay thought. She reached forward to find the lever that lifted it into its pocket. She did, and they were free, slipping stern-first away from the beach. When they were clear she put the centerboard back down and pointed the boat once again toward open water.

“Come here, both of you.”

The boys moved to the stern beside her. “Here, Noah. Take the tiller. Feel it? See how it moves the boat?”

With Kay’s hand on his he moved the rudder back and forth; but his heart, she could tell, was not in it.

“I didn’t mean to say it,” Noah said. He looked at her plaintively, his eyes windowpaned with tears.

“It’s all right, honey.” With her free arm she hugged his thin shoulders. “You’re not in trouble.”

She gave each boy a turn steering the boat. So, there it was, and Noah knew. Had she? And did Sam? His silence said he did.

“We’ll make a pact. Everything we do and say out here is just for us. Not for Daddy, or Mia, or anybody. Agreed?”

“Like pirates,” Noah said, his voice gone far away again, to safety. “Argh, avast, blow the man down.”

“That’s it. Like pirates on the high seas. Sam?”

Beside her the older boy looked away.

“Sam?”

“If it’s a secret, you’re not supposed to tell.”

When they returned, Jack was in the shower. His news was good-he was ahead eighteen thousand dollars. He was going to take a nap, he said, and have dinner with them, and then return to the casino to play.

“You just don’t screw around with luck like this,” he said. He spoke to her through the frosted mirror as he shaved. In the room behind them the boys were dealing hands of go-fish on the carpet. “I’m going to pay off the house before I’m through. I tell you, I’m on a roll.”

“What’s a roll, Daddy?” Sam asked.

“It’s when you can’t lose. And don’t eavesdrop. You liked the sailing, boys?”

“Noah got scared.”

“Be nice to your brother,” Jack said. “Would that kill you?”

“Can we buy a boat?”

He dried his face with a towel and winked at Kay. “What kind do you want?”

“A white one.” Sam held out his arms. “With a big motor.”

“Ah.” He nodded gravely. “I’ll have to play a lot more cards for that.” He turned from the mirror to face Kay. “Seriously,” he said quietly, “the minute it goes south, I’m out of there. You know that, right?”

“Well.” Then, “Should I worry?”

“C’mon, Kay. Eighteen thousand bucks.” He frowned, searching her face. “You have to trust me on this. After everything we’ve been through, I think that would cheer you up.”

She wanted to laugh, but stopped herself. Was it possible, she thought, that she had actually known? How could she not have known? Another person had stepped into the circle. And yet here she was, with her husband and boys, in the Caribbean, Jack shaving, the boys playing cards, all of it exactly the same as if Noah had said nothing at all.

“I’m not complaining about the money, Jack,” she heard herself say. “I just think we should spend some time together.”

“And we will, I promise. I absolutely promise. I’ve just got to ride this thing out.”

Kay did not reply; Jack sat on the edge of the bed to wriggle into his shorts. “I was thinking. Maybe we should give Mia something extra, considering all the time we’ve been away.”

A gift, she thought: a lover’s gift. She pushed the thought away. “Is that really necessary? She’s getting a nice vacation on top of what we pay her,” Kay said.

“She said she wants to go home in the summer. Maybe we could spring for the ticket. I don’t see why we shouldn’t spread the luck around a bit.” He rose, and clapped his hands. “Okay, boys, outside. Daddy’s hitting the hay.”

He slept three hours, while Kay minded the boys on the beach. Mia had the rest of the afternoon off; she would join them for dinner, and then stay with the boys during the evening, so Kay and Jack would be free to do as they liked. It was, she knew, what made the trip all possible, having Mia along to help. Without Mia there would have been no trip at all. Why was she not angrier than she was? The air was calm, the sky a richly saturated blue above the quiet bay. The cruise ship had vanished without a trace. She watched the boys swimming and digging in the sand, but her thoughts were far away, back in the year of her illness. So sick: it was as if she had gone to some distant country, far away from all of them. It wasn’t the surgery she had minded most of all-all the books and movies had this wrong; the breast was trying to kill her, she wanted it gone-but the hair on her pillow when she awoke each morning, long strands of it marking the place where her head had been, and the whiteness of her scalp as it emerged, first in a crown at the top, then all around. She tried not to let the boys see. I am falling away, she thought. I am being disassembled in the smallest parts. She had sores in her mouth, on her tongue, down the back of her throat. Always, the final taste of blood. The days between rounds of chemo passed in a haze of exhaustion and worry. She took pills to sleep, pills to cheer her up, pills to help her keep her food down or stop the diarrhea that sent her dashing to the toilet. And always there was Mia: shuttling Sam to school or Noah to his therapist, unpacking groceries in the kitchen or negotiating with the boys over naps or treats, bringing Kay a glass of water or a mug of tea on those days when that was all she could keep down. She heard, from her room, the sound of Mia’s voice, mixing with Jack’s and the boys’; one day she sat at the top of the stairs and simply listened. The four of them were playing Parcheesi, or trying to; Noah would not sit still, kept moving his piece at random, and yet, somehow, the game had proceeded, Mia cajoling the boys and letting Noah cheat a little, Jack saying, “See? Watch what Mia does. Do what Mia tells you, boys.” She listened for an hour, and knew what she was hearing: the sound of a family, though one she was not part of. The cancer had traveled to twelve nodes in arm and chest. N12, the chart said. It was not the best situation, they told her. In a college town there could be no secrets, or so she’d thought. The house filled up with friends and colleagues, her bedroom bloomed with scarves and hats, the freezer burst with casseroles. One day, at the end of a month when the bills had piled up, she walked to the end of the driveway to the mailbox and found, tucked in an envelope, five hundred dollars in cash.

But then it was over; she was still young, and her strength returned quickly. She walked each morning, ate the proper foods, gave up the stolen cigarettes at parties. Her hair came in; one day she left the house without a hat and didn’t realize until she was already downtown and saw her reflection in a store window. At Sam’s hockey games, or in line at the grocery store, or in the back of the church after services, a sea of amazed and happy eyes met hers. Look at you! they all said. You’re looking so well! Healthy, normal people: how did they do it? She marveled at their innocence, their easy greed for life. She had friends who rock-climbed, drove without seat belts, who hadn’t had so much as a checkup in years. What could they be thinking? She had stepped back into the world, but not completely; she was an imposter, half ghost, a spy from the shadows. She carried her new health through the crowds like a crystal chalice, and every three months she returned to the far side of the river, that awful ward of the dying: more blood drawn, chest X rays, tumor markers. In August, a year after the surgery, she had a full-body CAT scan-dreadful, a ride in a coffin, her ears pounding with a sound like sheets of metal pushed through a sawblade. It was when the doctor reported the results, smiling for the first time at the good news, that she knew that everyone had expected her to die. Beside her, Jack had broken down and wept.

A waiter came by; she asked for iced tea, then changed her order to wine, though she knew she would only taste it. The boys were building mud castles on the wet plain left behind by the receding evening tide. The waiter returned, bearing her single glass on a tray. After such a year, here she was, holding a glass of wine on a beach a thousand miles away from the April mud of Vermont. She sipped the wine, its cold sweetness like golden light on her tongue. Sunshine, her body strong, Sam and Noah happy again, or at least not afraid: what else was there to wish for? When she was very sick, she had tried to imagine a day like this one, to hold it in her mind. So perhaps that was the reason: all of it felt like a gift.

“Come here, boys.”

They came to where she was sitting. Their bare chests were streaked with wet sand. She hugged them together.

Noah touched her face. “Mama, why are you crying?”

She hadn’t noticed. She wiped a tear away with her thumb. “I’m just happy to see you. Sometimes grown-ups cry because they’re happy.”

Sam frowned skeptically; she thought he was going to ask about his father. “You’re not sick again, are you?”

She hugged them again. “Not at all,” she said.

When they returned to the condo, Jack was snoring away. His arm lay over his eyes. Thirteen years of marriage: her mind circled this thought, feeling only a mild surprise at the swift passage of time. In the adjoining room she bathed the boys, dressed them in clean shorts and T-shirts, and took them to the restaurant to wait for their father. It was the early seating for dinner; most of the other guests had children with them, even babies. At the table next to theirs a young mother spooned food into a little girl’s mouth from a tiny jar. A quick, heady thrill passed through her, remembering the years when the boys were small: Sam’s tiny mouth as he reached for his bottle, the smell and heat of Noah’s skin, like warm bread and cinnamon. So delicious, even to be near them; there were days, she had joked, when she could have eaten them whole. One wasn’t supposed to feel this way anymore-having children was a sideline, a concession to biology one made in the midst of other things-and yet it was the only true desire she’d ever possessed.

“When’s Daddy coming?” Sam asked.

She opened their menus. “He’ll be along. Why don’t we order?”

She ordered hamburgers for the boys, filet for Jack, swordfish for herself. She had given Jack a nudge before they’d left for the restaurant, and she worried that he’d fallen back asleep. But just as their food arrived, he appeared in the doorway of the restaurant.

“Sorry.” He seated himself next to the boys. Beside Noah and Sam she saw how pale his arms and face were. “How was the beach, boys? Did you miss me?” He tousled Noah’s hair. “How’s our zoologist? See any fish?”

The little boy shrugged and chewed. “Minnows.”

Jack looked around. “Where’s Mia?”

“I gave her the rest of the afternoon off,” Kay said. “I think she met someone.”

Jack salted his steak and said nothing.

“A boy her age,” Kay explained. “He works with the boats.”

“His name is Thomas,” Noah said.

Jack frowned. “She should be careful,” he said.

The waiter came to the table, and Jack ordered a beer, and Cokes for the boys; they were each allowed one soft drink with dinner. “I’m just saying we might be liable. If anything happens. You get off the grounds, it’s a different world down here.”

“He seemed very nice,” Kay said. “You wanted her to have some fun, remember?”

They finished their dinner. Outside on the patio a steel band was setting up to play. As they were leaving, Mia arrived, half running, wearing a sundress, her hair gleaming and wet from the shower. The boys took her each by a hand.

“We went to a castle,” she told them breathlessly. “On motorbikes! Just like in Denmark. It was very fun.”

“We finished dinner,” Kay said. “But go get something and charge it to the room.”

“It’s fine,” Mia said, smiling. “I’ve eaten already.”

“Can we go to the castle?” Sam wanted to know.

“Maybe tomorrow,” Kay said.

“Why is it always maybe?” Sam stuck out his lower lip the way he had done since he was a baby. “Just say yes.”

Mia tugged at his hand. “Listen to your mother, Sam,” she said firmly. “If she says maybe, then it is maybe for you.”

At a metal table they listened to the band while the sun went down over the darkening bay. Kay could tell that Jack was antsy to get back to the casino. She left them on the patio and went into the information desk in the lobby, a large open room with plants and flowers everywhere. Was there a castle nearby? she asked. Something like a castle? The attendant took a brochure from a dispenser behind his chair and unfolded it on the counter. Glossy photos of a ruined stone structure with ramparts high above the sea; piles of cannonballs and people waving; a map with the castle’s location on a solitary promontory marked by a red star: It was actually an eighteenth-century Spanish fort, the attendant explained. They could rent mopeds, he said, though the roads were narrow and steep. A van could take them, too, for thirty dollars.

She made a reservation for the van for 9:00 A.M., before the sun would get too hot, tucked the brochure in the pocket of her dress, and returned to the patio. The brochure said that the fort’s high vantage point made it a good spot for whale watching; it was this that had made her decision. She wanted to give Noah a whale.

The band had stopped playing by the time she returned; the table was empty. Down by the water’s edge she saw the boys and Mia. The last of the light was about to go. She took off her shoes and joined them. The sand around and under her feet still hummed with the heat of the day.

“You missed it,” Sam said cheerfully, and arched his back so he was walking on his hands and feet together. “Mia taught me to limbo.”

“How low can you go? How low can you go?” Noah recited. His face and voice were bland; the music was in his head, she knew, a perfect recording without a trace of feeling, except perhaps a mild curiosity. She smiled at him as he clapped his hands joylessly.

“We came down to look for dolphins,” Mia explained.

She looked at Mia. “Did Jack go back to the casino?”

“The professor said to tell you to meet him there,” she replied.

“I see.” What else was there to say? But she found herself glad; she had time yet. Let him gamble. “Perhaps later,” Kay said.

They strolled the length of the beach, Noah dawdling to pick up shells left bare by the tide. Behind them the ambient sounds of the resort grew faint. They made their way to the end, where the sand stopped and a chain-link fence topped with razor ribbon sealed the edge of the property. She had seen it before, in daylight, and thought nothing of it; now, in the darkness, it gleamed forbiddingly. Beyond it stood a run-down house, the stucco peeling away. A skinny dog was chained in the front yard, chewing at something in the dirt. On the porch steps a light suddenly blazed: a match, and then, from the shadows, the scent of marijuana. She heard a man’s deep laugh, and then a pair of voices talking, words she could not understand. Without warning fear sliced through her. How sturdy was the fence? Had they been seen?

She stepped back, calling to her children in a harsh whisper. “Come away from there, boys.”

Sam held fast to the fence, plainly interested. Here was something new. “I want to see-”

“Now.”

They retraced their steps back toward the resort, a blazing oasis of light and music, and by the time they had returned to the condo, her nervousness was gone. The air had taken on a floral sweetness; above them the palm fronds rustled, a sound like girls in taffeta skirts descending a flight of stairs. The steel band had resumed playing on the patio. For the adults the night was just beginning, but for the children it was over; the boys were completely drained by the day, even Sam, who snuck a thumb into his mouth as he stood before the toilet to pee. She tucked them in and told them no nonsense, and joined Mia on the porch.

She was wearing a sweater around her shoulders, and held her purse. “I was wondering,” Mia began, “if you don’t want to play cards tonight-”

“Go, go,” Kay said. “Take the rest of the evening off.”

She hesitated, but her face was delighted. “Thomas says there is a party, for the staff. I can be back in time to watch the boys if you change your mind.”

Kay waved her away. “You’ve done enough,” she said.

She sat in a rocker on the porch and waited for Jack. She supposed that his not returning was a good sign; it meant he was still winning. A gauze of stars hung low above the bay, and a gentle wind blew. At eleven she went inside and dressed for bed, but sleep would not come; sometime later she felt the pressure of the air in the room change and heard the door open. She rose and went to the hall. Mia was putting her purse on the table.

“Oh!” she said, startled. She put a hand over her heart. “You frightened me.”

“I’m sorry. I thought it might be Jack.”

“It is very late. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“I wasn’t sleeping.” She paused a moment and regarded Mia, the girl before her. She didn’t quite know what she was looking for. Mia was barefoot, and her feet were sandy; more sand was on her throat, in her hair, the pure white sand one found just above the high-tide line, as fine as powder.

“Kay?”

“It’s nothing. It’s all right.” She tried to smile. “Did you have a good time?”

“It was just a party.” She shrugged. “American boys can be so… what is the word? They want things.”

“Needy.”

“Yes, they need us. Even the little ones!” Mia laughed. “You can see it in Sam. He’s going to be quite the lady’s man, I think.”

“Like his father.”

Mia said nothing; her face showed nothing.

“When we get back, I’m going to release you,” Kay said. “You can stay a month, and we’ll pay for the ticket home.”

Again, Mia’s face showed no emotion. She looked at the ceiling, then back at Kay. “I don’t know what to say. Perhaps that is for the best.”

“It’s going to be hard for the boys. You’ll have to help me make it easier for them. They’re my first concern. I’m not going to tell them until we get back to Vermont.”

Mia nodded. “Of course.”

“I don’t see the situation as in any way your fault, Mia. You’ve been a great help to me, and to this family. I want you to know that.”

Mia nodded and crossed her arms. Her eyes swelled with tears, though her face was firm. She swallowed once, then exhaled sharply through her nose. “But still, I am fired.”

“Yes. I’m sorry to say it, but yes.”

After Mia had gone to her room, Kay dressed in a skirt and blouse and sandals, brushed her hair, and looked in on the boys once more. They were asleep in a jumble, the sheets of the double bed they shared twisted around them in the heat. She watched them breathe and sleep, as she had done for hundreds of hours since each had been born, then wrote them a note to tell them where she was, and left it on the table where they could see it.

She was two months pregnant. She had figured it out that morning, or begun to, when she had awakened on the beach and heard the band playing on the ship. She had skipped her period again, but she hadn’t taken this absence seriously, not until she’d heard the music. She knew there was no such band; the sound was coming from inside her. Crazy, but that was how she’d known with Sam and Noah. She tried to imagine this new baby, hoping for a girl, but all she could see was a tiny face pressed to her remaining breast, a child who would never know there had ever been two.

Carrying her shoes, she walked across the sand to the casino. She found Jack at the table, and knew at once that he had lost it, lost it all. The eighteen thousand was gone, and more; he was down three grand. It was poker that had done it. Bored with blackjack, he had decided to sit in a few hands, and lost it all fast. For two hours he had tried to recoup his losses at the blackjack table, and watched more dribble away. He’d hardly slept the night since they’d arrived, three days ago. His eyes were wild and desperate.

“Help me,” he said.

“Goddamn it, Jack.” She took him to a quiet corner. “How much cash do we have left?”

“Three thousand.” He put his face in his hands and began to weep. “Kay, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

She computed rapidly. Three days left; they could get by on a thousand if they had to, two to play it safe. The rooms were paid for. How much had they charged for meals, the boat, the trip to the fort to give a whale to Noah? She took his wallet from him, heavy and warm from his pocket.

“We’ll talk later,” she commanded. “Go back and sleep now.”

The casino was quiet; only a few tables were running. She cashed five hundred dollars in travelers checks and took her place at one, stacking her chips on the green felt before her. A waitress approached her and she asked for a glass of water, no ice. It was 2:00 A.M.; she had a van to catch at nine. Seven hours to win back three thousand dollars. She rolled up her sleeves.

“Ma’am?”

She met the dealer’s eye. Others were waiting for her bet before the cards could be dealt. In a moment the game would begin again, but still she paused. In the condo her babies were sleeping; all around she felt the blueness of the sea. It was all real, it was this world and no other, and she was in it. She pulled a fifty-dollar chip from the pile.

“Deal,” she said.