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 we
re 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 i
nfusions, 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.”