Family and Other Accidents (8 page)

Jack didn't tell Mona, but two months ago he went in for a physical, certain he had leukemia or a grapefruit-size tumor growing in his guts. It wasn't even that he felt sick, just drained all the time. Jack's doctor told him to get more rest and exercise—the prescription for all hypochondriacs. But over the past few weeks, Jack has been wondering if it's simply his life catching up to him. All those years of working hard for things—writing a thesis as an undergraduate, law review, taking care of his brother after their parents died, billing eighty hours a week to make partner. Perhaps there's a finite amount of what someone can work toward, what someone can want.

“I'm flattered,” he tells Alix-something, “but I'm here with my girlfriend, so it's probably not the best idea.”

Alix-something shrugs and walks away, wiggling her perfect heart of an ass to showcase what Jack is missing.

“I'm going to go check on the girls,” Jack tells George back at their chairs. “We'll see you at dinner?”

“Al-right-y then.” George gives a good-natured salute. “Good to see you're finally getting your sea legs.”

Downstairs, the sunning deck has all the trimmings of the community pools from Jack's youth—skinny kids chilled from frigid water, grilled hot dogs, hopelessly suburban women in hot pink bikinis darkening like bread sticks in the oven, everything slippery and wet. With three empty daiquiri glasses on the table next to her, Mona is on her stomach in a modest one-piece. Her rice-white skin is already the color of a fast car.

“You're burning, Mo,” Jack says. There's a book in the cabin he thinks about getting—some enormous David Foster Wallace thing everybody's reading.

“What?”

“You're getting sunburned.” Loosening into the chair next to her, he abandons all thoughts of his book.

“Shhh. It'll turn to tan,” she murmurs, words drowsy. “Happy or sad?”

“Happy not to be puking anymore.” He closes his eyes, but the sun is so bright, it's still light through the skin of his eyelids. “You should put on some sunscreen.”

Hovering in that place right before sleep, he wonders if turning down Alix-something means that he loves Mona or that he's tired of sex.

Maybe he's just tired.

         

Slumped on the bed against the wall of their cabin, Mona stares at Jack's dress shirts—initials “J.A.R.” stitched on the cuffs, swaying in the closet. She's wearing only gauzy drawstring pants and a silk bra; anything form fitting is an absolute impossibility. In twenty-seven years, she can't recall being this burned, every inch of her skin a sore, tight casing.

“Your initials spell ‘jar,' ” she says.

“That traumatized me as a child.” Jack comes out of the shower shrouded in steam, towel knotted around his waist. “Thanks for bringing it up.”

He smiles and Mona recognizes it as the same smile he gave her five years ago when he literally bumped into her at the water fountain of the Cuyahoga County Courthouse. Then she melted like tar in the sun, fiddling nervously with her press pass, trying to stammer out her name while he helped her gather her notepads and pens. His confidence had dazzled her—she had slept with a couple guys at college, but when Jack smiled at her she'd finally understood the kind of desire her younger sister always bragged about. He'd radiated the same thing she'd felt when she and Joey had driven to Cincinnati from Athens and waited around the Suspension Bridge to see Tom Cruise filming
Rainman
. Now the smile makes her sad, and she looks away. Suddenly, the brass and glass pseudo-splendor of the dining room is a horribly unappealing prospect.

“I don't think I can go to dinner tonight,” she says to his shirts.

“Don't worry, Tarzan will bring food to Jane,” Jack says in the movie icon's stilted voice. Letting the towel drop from narrow hips, he smacks his penis back and forth against his thighs. Mouth rounded into an exaggerated O shape, he makes ape noises until she looks at him.

“Jack.” Her smile dies before it actually becomes a smile, even though she knows that this is supposed to be funny and sweet, that this is why she's supposed to love him. “I'm serious. Look at me.”

“Do you want me to put aloe on your back?” He points to the bottle next to her on the bed.

“Would you?” Her burned skin makes her feel gross and stupid in a way she hasn't felt in years, since she started dating Jack and began meeting him for lunch downtown. Back then she noticed that Jack, and everyone he knew, had a crisp, contoured look. Until she got her job at the
Plain Dealer
, she'd lived her whole life in Athens, Ohio—a college town, where bushy eyebrows and sweatshirts were fine.

Before Jack's fingers even make contact, before he even starts to smooth the goo onto her shoulders, she draws in her breath in pain, anticipating.

“Does that hurt?” he asks.

“Yeah, you're hurting me,” she says, bowing her head forward, curls spilling over her face.

“I didn't mean to hurt you, Mo,” he mumbles. “I'm sorry.”

“What?” She heard what he said, but wants him to say it again. It seems important, because Jack has never apologized to her for anything and because she doesn't think they're talking about sunburns anymore.

“I love you,” he says instead.

“I love you, too.”

And she remembers how the walls of her stomach were ready to cave in the first time she told him she loved him. Six months into the relationship, after sex, the words came out in a high-pitched squeak, like a hiccup stuck in her throat. She froze in his arms after she said it, paralyzed to even breathe until he said something, because it was
that
important, meaning so much more than when she'd said it to those guys at OU.

“I think we should go to the infirmary,” he says. “You probably have sun poisoning.”

“Maybe.” With her thumb, she pushes on the red flesh of her arm. For a moment the spot turns white, then blood rushes under her skin to fill in the thumbprint. “They already know you so well. Don't we make a great pair?”

“Let's just skip dinner,” he says, more to his shirts than to her. “We've still got all those crackers from the other night, and if we're up to it later, we'll go to the midnight buffet.”

Letting the shirts sway in response, she remembers the day before she left for vacation, how Craig rubbed her head, static electricity on his fingers sending her long hairs everywhere. “Wear lots of sunscreen, Red,” he warned her. “Pale folks don't do so well in the tropics.”

         

From a wooden bench in St. Thomas's shopping district, Jack watches a grimy unattractive bird spastically peck a groove in the worn cobblestone streets—like a desk ornament his father had kept in his office. Up and down, up and down, stupid but fascinating.

And, all at once, Jack recalls the last time he spoke to his father about anything consequential. It had been winter break when Jack was a high school senior and working at the firm. Jack had been proofing a memo in his father's big leathery office when, apropos of nothing, he'd asked: “Should I go to Penn?”

“It's the best school you got into.” His father had looked at him as if Jack had suggested the world was flat or the Indians would win the pennant. “Why would you go anywhere else?”

Jack had meant to say something then about Anna Fram and how the two of them had talked about going to Carnegie Mellon together, but realized that if it was something he really wanted, he wouldn't have mentioned it to his father in the first place, he would have just done it. He'd also realized that over the past few summers and holiday breaks he'd grown to like working with his father, to like his father's life.

But now Jack wonders if his father was happy. Happy in that big leathery office just like the one Jack has now, in the big brick colonial that Jack lives in now, with a pretty woman to warm the bed and take to functions—like the woman Jack has now.

And then Mona is standing in front of his bench on the streets of St. Thomas, removing yards of lacy white material from a shopping bag. Because the ship's doctor—who actually sighed when she saw Mona and Jack again—insisted Mona not expose her charred skin to more sun, they'd had to pass on the postcard-beautiful Magens Bay with the Steins. And despite the mercury kissing ninety-five degrees, Mona is wearing jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt with the ship's logo that Jack got her from the gift shop.

“Isn't it beautiful?” she asks, and Jack folds the upper corner of a page in the book he wasn't reading.

“What is it?” He sets the book on the bench next to the things Mona's already bought—perfume for her mother, a marble hunting knife for her father, polished rocks she picked out for
his
brother, rolled tubes of prints by some island artist that they will never hang on the walls of his house—all “duty free,” all charged to his American Express.

“It's a tablecloth.” Holding one end to her sternum with her chin, Mona unfolds layer after layer of seemingly endless delicate fabric. “St. Thomas is famous for its lace.”

“According to the guy who sold it to you?”

“No, Craig lived here for two years after college.”

“Can we
not
talk about Craig?” Something dark rumbles in his chest. “How much was it?”

“I told you I was going to get one earlier, and you said it was fine.” There's an edge in Mona's voice that wasn't there five years ago. It makes Jack very tired. “You never listen to anything I tell you.”

“How much was it?” he asks again, blankly eyeing the material.

“It's not like we can't afford it.”

“
I
can afford it.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means the paper pays you like ten bucks an hour.” Jack watches her face fall and can't believe that some crucial filter between his brain and mouth failed and he actually said it. So much will have to be done to get things back to normal.

“I'm sorry I'm not a corporate whore.” Bunching the cloth back into the bag, she throws it at his feet.

He picks up the bag and thinks about telling her a giant corporation owns the paper she works for, but decides against it.

“You're right, we need a tablecloth,” he says, even though he can't remember a single time they used the dining room table as anything other than a place to put mail.

“No. I'll just take it back.”

She looks so defeated and so red and so ridiculous that he just wants to hold her. But he can't because she's sunburned, because he doesn't hold her anymore. In the distance their ship is anchored to the ocean floor, and Jack is overwhelmed by the desire to go back to the cabin for a nap before the boat leaves port and starts rocking again. Standing up, he tries to take her hand, but she shakes him away. Still, she follows when he picks up her packages and starts walking.

“This is a great tablecloth.” Looking in the bag, he feigns interest. “Now we just need to make some friends so they can come over and eat things off our tablecloth. And you can start cooking so we can serve things on our tablecloth.”

A sound between a laugh and a sigh comes out of her nose. “We
can
return it. And we can return the one we got for Helen and George.”

“We got them a tablecloth, too?” Jack smiles. “For their anniversary?”

“I'm sorry.”

“It's fine. I love you,” he says, because it's easier than apologizing.

“I love you, too.”

The first night she told him she loved him, he hadn't felt ready to say it back. He said it anyway. Her body had been soft and comfortable in his arms; he didn't want to discuss it. Looking back, he was too much of a coward to tell her the truth. But he wonders if he really feels any differently now than he did five years ago, wonders if he ever did or ever could, flashes back to the fall fifteen years earlier, when his father helped him pack a U-Haul for college. Anna Fram had crossed the cul-de-sac to say good-bye, her eyes dry but her voice holding all the gravel and hurt of the truly betrayed.

And then Jack sees the jewelry store. The kind of overpriced place littering every island where they've docked, it's designed to prey on tourists looking to create memories. Like everything else in town, the store is pink, as if it were dunked in Pepto-Bismol. In its window, earrings and chains are propped against glossy shells, driftwood, and draped velvet, a tennis bracelet spills out of a large conch shell. Above a display of engagement rings, square-shaped, pear-shaped, and emerald-cut diamonds in little red boxes, a sign, in decadent cursive writing, offers the slogan
When the islands make you realize it's right
. And maybe it
is
right with Mona, at least as right as it is ever going to be with her or anyone. In Cleveland Anna's father could give him a deal, but Jack can't remember why things like that matter—it's not as though his parents won a prize for dying with money in the bank.

“Is this what you want?” he asks, gesturing to the store. “Do you want to get married?” Even as he says the words, he knows that that isn't what she wants. She wants candles and roses and a bended knee. She wants poetry and love songs and dancing.

It must be close enough, though, because her whole face rises in a way he hasn't seen in the past year.

“Are you asking?” The rushed excitement in her words makes him think of their first date at the coffee shop, after the courthouse, when she spilled her hot chocolate.

Because he can't think of a reason not to, he nods.

“Are you serious?”

“Sure.”

And she's on tiptoes, arms knotted around his neck like the life jackets on the ship.

Happy or sad? he asks himself as she braids his fingers with hers and leads him into the store.

         

When they get back to Ohio, the ring they got in St. Thomas won't fit and will have to be resized. Mona realizes this at the ball on the Promenade Deck, as she leans against the ship's railing, the Atlantic at her back. Here her fingers are swollen from sea salt, but in Cleveland, the two-carat solitaire will be too big.