“He was,” Liv said. The astronaut movie had been hers, too.
“I knew it!” Yuri said. “I watch a lot of movies in my cabin.”
“She made that film happen,” Raymond said, indicating Liv, but the steward wasn’t interested in development, only in stardom.
Caviar and toast arrived, with sour cream and egg and chopped onion in little silver dishes.
“A token of my admiration,” Yuri said with a little bow. “Caviar from my country.”
Liv took a bite, the salty beads bursting on her tongue. There was soup, and fish, and lemon tart. She got slightly, pleasantly drunk, as she and Benjamin never did at a restaurant in LA, where they’d have to drive home.
They collected the children at the Kids’ Club and made their way back to their cabins, the surge of the ship making the carpeted corridor into an uphill walk, then a slightly downhill run. The kids raced down, laughing, then did an exaggerated mountaineering trudge when the corridor ran uphill again. There were congratulatory kisses all around as they said goodnight at the cabin doors, and there was a towel twisted into the shape of a swan on the foot of the bed.
In the morning, Benjamin took Penny and Sebastian off to the Kids’ Club, leaving Liv to luxuriate in the empty cabin, in the wide, soft bed between the pressed, clean sheets. Ironed sheets always reminded her of her grandmother, looping the fabric at the ironing board to keep it off the floor. Pressed sheets seemed like the ultimate in both domestic comfort and domestic drudgery.
At lunch they met an Argentinian family, very glamorous, the father silver-haired, the mother with discreet and expensive-looking work done on her face. She’d left the forehead alone. They had two striking adolescent children, a boy and a girl, and they were all going ashore in Acapulco the next morning. After some private discussion, Liv and Nora decided not to join them. Why go ashore in a country of beheadings and food-borne pathogens? Everything they needed was here.
Marcus studied the chart on a wall near the bridge, where an officer updated the ship’s position every hour. Nora stood with her son and talked through the itinerary, their turnaround in Panama and return back up the coast.
That night, the towel on the bed was shaped like an elephant. Liv and Benjamin got Penny and Sebastian into their pajamas, then crowded into Nora and Raymond’s cabin for a bedtime book. Raymond read aloud from Treasure Island, doing all the pirate voices. The book was heavier going than Liv remembered, but it didn’t matter with Raymond narrating. He was more than they deserved, as a bedtime reader. Most people’s husbands just made you appreciate your own, but not Raymond. Marcus and June leaned against him in the big bed. Liv lay on the pullout beside Benjamin and fell asleep. Sebastian had to prod her arm when it was time to go back to their own cabin.
The next morning, anchored in the blue sea off Acapulco, Liv went for a run on deck and came upon her husband with a notebook, sketching the davits that suspended the lifeboats. She loved Benjamin’s capacity for total absorption in the structure of things, even though she sometimes felt she had to tug on his leg to get him back to earth.
Liv and Nora had an unserious game of paddle tennis after lunch, then sat in deck chairs reading novels and talking. Benjamin called it “estro-lock,” the way the two women could talk for hours and lose track of time. They ended up in conversation across any table, screening out noise from kids and men. They could talk about shallow things without judgment and deep things without self-consciousness. They shared a childhood vocabulary, a set of references. Old ladies beamed at their handsome children in swimsuits—freckled Penny and towheaded Sebastian, tall Marcus with his long legs and tiny June in her many braids. Liv felt like a young mother in a Fitzgerald novel, glowing with life. If she’d had pearls she would have sunned them.
A few times during the day, Liv saw the ship’s tenders ferrying people ashore and wondered if they should have gone. That was something she was trying to work on: not always second-guessing her decisions, wondering if she’d made the wrong one. But how could you know if you’d made the right decision, when you only saw one version play out?
The Argentinian family came aboard from their excursion, looking exhausted and hot. “We went snorkeling on a catamaran,” the teenage daughter said. “I threw up four times.”
So maybe that was all Liv needed—someone to check out the alternate path and report back.
At dinner, they debriefed on the day. Raymond said that the Brazilian trainer in the gym was trying to sell him one of the spa treatments.
Nora made a face. “She just wants to slather you in mud and roll you in cling wrap.”
“Is that what the treatment is?” Liv asked. She hadn’t been sure what the ads were selling. Pills? Colonics?
“I think they put electrodes on your—problem areas,” Nora said.
“Wait,” Benjamin said. “This woman thinks Raymond has problem areas?”
“Is it bad that I’m intrigued?” Raymond asked.
“Yes!” the rest of them said, all together.
After dinner, they gathered in the other cabin for Raymond to read aloud. The children stared wide-eyed in dread of the Black Spot, just as Liv had once.
“If I were in Treasure Island,” Sebastian said, nestled under her arm, “there wouldn’t be a book, because as soon as the first scary thing happened, I would just run home.”
“I would go be a pirate,” Junie whispered, into her father’s shoulder.
“You would be a great pirate,” Raymond told her. “And Sebastian could stay back and mind the fort. That’s important, too.”
Liv reminded herself to be grateful for Nora and Raymond, and never to take them for granted. They were her family, and they were also the family she had chosen, and she loved them and felt extraordinarily lucky. If hell was other people, you just had to find the people who weren’t the inferno, and make space for them in your life.
2.
CHRISTMAS DINNER WAS formal, and Benjamin pushed cuff links through the holes at his wrists. The kids were joining them in the dining room. As Benjamin knotted Sebastian’s tie, the kid looked up at him with trusting eyes, and he felt an almost worrying pressure in his heart. But this wasn’t a heart attack. It was that his son was so vulnerable, and such a miniature man, with his fine blond hair combed back, in his tiny jacket. Benjamin remembered his own father taking him to Brooks Brothers for his first blazer, the solemn instructions about buttons and shirt collars. And now Benjamin was the dad. It was so strange. He had some gray in his hair, more if he grew a beard. He considered it premature, but it wasn’t: He was forty-one.
“Will Santa find us on the ship?” Sebastian asked.
“I think so. But the trip is the big present this year.”
“I know,” Sebastian said. “But he knows we’re here?”
Benjamin looked for traces of disingenuousness in his son’s eyes, but Sebastian seemed committed. And why not? What was the point of questioning Santa? Unless of course you were Penny, who had to look under every rock. At least she knew enough to keep her mouth shut around her little brother. They hadn’t done Chanukah presents this year. Usually they tried to, but his parents, who cared the most, had gone to Cuba. And it was a lot to organize, amid the packing and getting out of town.
Penny wore a green velvet dress and had pestered Liv into curling her hair into ringlets. Marcus and June joined them, and the four kids ran down the corridor, June’s silver skirt and her braids flying out behind her, Marcus tall in a blue blazer with a somber lope.
Almost no one else seemed to be in black tie, which made Benjamin self-conscious, but Raymond wore a white dinner jacket. The spectacular tree in the central court was lit up, and there was carol-singing led by the performers. They stayed for a couple of songs, and Benjamin heard Nora, beside him in a red silk dress, singing the unfamiliar second and third verses.
“Are you a Christmas elf?” he asked her.
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“My mother really loved a carol service,” she said, smiling. “Candleholders out of tinfoil, all that.”
At dinner, the kids were excited by the grown-up dining room and the attention of the stewards. The table staff seemed to approve of their formal clothes, which made Benjamin feel less embarrassed. And they did look good, the kids with shining faces. Liv wore a low-backed blue dress that showed off her swimmer’s shoulders, her short hair like a pale flame. Flat sandals for his sake, even though he’d told her he didn’t care.
When the kids fell asleep that night, Benjamin and Liv arranged presents from Santa under the potted palm in their cabin: new swimsuits, small toys, a few books, green and gold flip-flops. In the morning, Penny and Sebastian ran next door to show their haul to their cousins, who had comparable loot, by previous agreement.
Hector, the Argentinian fifteen-year-old, had been given a guitar and he played a few American pop songs in a deck chair, singing softly, sending Penny into a swoon. She liked saying his name as the Argentinians did, “ECK-tor,” rolling the r a little. She and Sebastian had a Guatemalan babysitter when they were younger, and a few weeks of Learn-in-Your-Car Spanish before the trip had uncovered a surprising facility, all these years later. She was a natural mimic.
Hector’s sister, Isabel, had a new bottle of green nail polish, and she painted Penny’s and June’s toes. Then Sebastian wanted his done, too. The Argentinian girl was irresistible, with her long sun-streaked hair. She and her brother had a South American sophistication, jaded and worldly. Marcus hung back and watched as Isabel leaned over the small toes, wiping away extra polish where she’d messed up. Benjamin guessed that Marcus wanted her attention far too much to seek it. The teens didn’t exactly court the adoration of the younger kids, but they seemed to enjoy it. There was no one their age on the ship.
Two unchanging sea days later, Benjamin lay on the made-up bed, enjoying the silence and reading the condensed New York Times on three sheets of printer paper. There was no cell service out here, and the expensive Wi-Fi was iffy. That was good for Liv—to be offline and away from the studio. Even when a movie got made, the path it took always sounded to him like a drug deal gone wrong. Lies, threats, incrimination, betrayal, last-minute bargaining, total lunacy. She needed a break. But Benjamin felt lost without his work. He turned on the cabin’s TV, looking for news.
Flipping channels, he saw a young woman in a stewardess’s uniform, with a black curtain behind her. She was olive-skinned, her hair pulled tightly back.
“It is very hard,” she said. “The work is very hard. The hours are long, and you are all day on your feet. When I finish, I am tired. I go back to my cabin. It is very small, and I share it with another girl. It is okay.”
An unseen interviewer asked her a question.
“My dream?” she asked. She looked startled and then thoughtful. “My dream is to find a job on land.”
The next subject was a slim Indian man with salt-and-pepper hair. He sat in a booth beneath a big still life painting.
“I used to want to be Picasso,” he said with a shy smile. “Or Matisse, you know? The struggle. When I was in art school, I wanted to be a great artist. And now—well.” He looked at the painting of a bowl of fruit behind him. “I do the still life paintings that hang in the extra-tariff restaurants. But I make a living as an artist, which is not easy to do. I remind myself of that.”
The door to the cabin opened and Liv walked in.
“Look at this,” Benjamin said. “It’s supposed to be a tour of the ship, and what everyone does, but they hate their jobs.”
She sat at the end of the bed to watch. A pink New Zealander on the screen was talking with ambivalence about the Kids’ Club.
“Why would they put this on the TV?” Liv asked.
“I don’t know!” he said. “Couldn’t they find one cheerful kid who wants to see the world? Or that Ukrainian girl who’s just happy not to be in Crimea?”
Liv watched the screen, and Benjamin knew she was thinking about their stewardess, Perla, who had three kids in Manila. “Perla’s on a nine-month contract,” she said.
“I know.”
“Imagine what she’s missing, not seeing them grow up,” Liv said. “Maybe the cruise line wants us to know that we should be hit by a bus, to even the score.”
“The bus?” he said. “The bus that goes around hitting people?”
She looked over her shoulder at him and her face went from serious to laughing. He loved watching it change. He had made his own tribe with her, a tribe of two, and then of four. He had not known, in his unmoored youth, if it would happen.
“Yeah,” she said. “The karmic bus.”
He put on an interviewer’s voice, and held the TV remote as a microphone. “We’re talking to a passenger next,” he said. “Tell me, madam, how does it feel to be the most desirable woman on the ship?”
“It’s a low bar,” she said. “Everyone else is eighty.”
“So you admit that it’s true.”
“No,” she said. “There’s Nora.”
He put down the remote. “Nora is a lovely person who doesn’t do it for me.”
“Also the dancers.”
“There’s a reason they don’t have jobs on land.”
“And the Argentinian girl.”
“Let’s reopen that discussion in ten years.”
Liv laughed again. “Oh, I’ve seen the old dudes look at her.”
“Hey, are Penny and Sebastian in the Kids’ Club?”
“They are.”
He turned off the TV. “How much time do you think we have?”
“An hour maybe? I’ll need to check on Sebastian.”
“Come up here.”
“I have to shower.”
“Don’t.”
She made a face, but she scooted up the bed. He lifted her shirt and kissed her stomach. Then she put her hand on top of his and said, “Did those interviews make you feel like your dreams are thwarted?”
“No,” he said. “All my dreams have come true.”
She crossed her legs. “Seriously?”
He sighed at the barrier of her thighs and lay back on the bed, and hoped they weren’t going to have to talk about studio politics. “Yes.”
“And that doesn’t make you think we don’t deserve our luck, that it’ll all be taken away?”
“No.”
She stared at the ceiling. “It does me.”
“Do you think worrying helps?”
“Yes,” she said. “Because the disaster will be the thing you don’t expect. So you just have to expect everything.”
He could feel the child-free time ticking away. “You know, at some point the kids will come back here.”
“I know.”
He reached for her. “So—can we table the disaster thoughts for now?”
3.
PENNY WAS ABOUT to win a game of Crazy Eights on the bright patterned carpet of the Kids’ Club. Part of the game was luck, but Penny knew how to strategize. Her father had taught her to play the suit if she had more of it. If she didn’t have more, she played the number. Marcus was better at geography and directions, but she was better at cards. She put down a two of diamonds.
Marcus drew a card and put down a seven.
Penny played the queen. “Last card.”
Marcus drew and drew, and finally came up with an eight and laid it down, triumphant. “Clubs!”
Penny played the four of clubs and won. Marcus groaned.
“We can play again,” Penny offered.
“No. You always win.”
“Not always.”
Marcus sat back and looked around. “Where’s June?”
He was protective of his sister, who was only six. Penny’s mother said Sebastian was sensitive and they had to be careful with him, too, but sh
e didn’t see it, really. Sebastian had almost died when he was little, and now he had an insulin pump in his back pocket with a line into a port in his skin. Her parents had to stick a new port in every couple of days, and it hurt. And he had to make his finger bleed all the time to check his blood. Penny thought it made him tougher than other kids, not more sensitive.
Marcus got up and checked the playhouse, which was empty. He asked Deb, the counselor from New Zealand, if she had seen his sister and Penny’s brother. Deb said those two hadn’t checked in after lunch.
“They were with us,” Penny said.
“I don’t think so,” Deb said, and she got out her clipboard. “Look.”
Penny saw check marks next to her name and Marcus’s, but not next to Sebastian’s and June’s. “Can we be excused to go look for them?” she asked.
“I’d better call your parents.”
“No!” Penny said. “I know where they are. It’s okay.”
Deb hesitated.
“We’ll be right back, I promise.”
Adults usually let Penny do what she wanted, because they thought she was responsible. They also expected more of her, but it was worth it.
Sebastian and June were not at the buffet. The lunch rush was over and only a few old people sat at the tables.
The elevators were slow, because old people in wheelchairs and on power scooters were always getting in and out. So they ran down the carpeted stairs to their own deck, dodging old people, and raced along the corridor. They didn’t have their key cards, so they knocked at Marcus’s door, out of breath, but no one answered. Then they knocked at Penny’s door.
After a moment’s pause, her father’s muffled voice called, “Who is it?”
“It’s me!”
There was another pause. Her mother opened the door a crack, in a bathrobe. Her hair was messier than usual. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the Kids’ Club?”