Justin Cronin - Mary and O’Neil

“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.