Tomorrow There Will Be Sun Read online

  * * *

  • • •

  CAPTAIN DAN has the Mexican boy rinse and clean the equipment and then fits Ivan with a mask as big as his face and a snorkel tube he can barely get his mouth around. Ivan keeps his life jacket on and refuses the fins because they make his feet “itchy.”

  I climb down the ladder off the side of the boat and ease myself into the water. Ivan cannonballs in. I help him adjust his snorkel tube and he immediately takes in a big swallow of ocean water, but it doesn’t deter him: He just spits it out and tries again. Clem would have lost her shit at that age if she swallowed ocean water, and probably still would. She didn’t even learn to swim until she was two years older than Ivan is now because she didn’t like getting her hair wet.

  It’s lovely in the water. Warm and calm; soon, Ivan and I put a sizable distance between ourselves and the boat. We swim under the arc of Los Arcos—a natural archway in one of the two large rock formations. Solly was right to pressure me into coming on this excursion. The snorkeling is top-notch. There’s an astonishing world of sea life. If I knew more about marine biology, perhaps I could name some of what we see, but I don’t; all I know is that the fish are colorful and fanciful and they remind me of my childhood dentist’s office with its huge aquarium in the waiting room.

  Ivan points everything out to me with his chubby little fingers. I respond with an underwater thumbs-up.

  When we come around to the other side of the rocks Ivan pops upright, pulls off his mask and spits out the tube. His life vest keeps him afloat; I tread water.

  “I think I found him,” he says. “I think I found Nemo.”

  “This is so much fun, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. But I’m done.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Let’s go back to the boat.”

  “I’m done snorkeling.”

  “That’s fine. We can head back.”

  “I don’t want to snorkel anymore.” He hands me his mask and tube.

  “That’s fine,” I repeat. “We don’t have to snorkel anymore. We can just swim back to the boat.”

  “I don’t want to swim. I’m done.”

  I reach over and take him by the hand. “Ivan. We have to get back to the boat one way or another.”

  He pulls his hand away. “Ding dong.”

  “Ivan.”

  “I want the boat to come here and get me.”

  “Well, it can’t. So let’s go.”

  “Ding dong.”

  “Ivan.”

  His eyes fill with tears and his bottom lip starts to tremble. “Mommy! Mommy! Help me! Mommy!”

  “Ivan,” I say, more harshly than I intend. “Don’t scream like that.”

  “MOMMY!”

  Two nearby snorkelers poke their heads up and kick their way closer to us with their fins.

  “Everything okay?” says one of the guys in a thick Australian accent. “Are you in distress?”

  Yes, I think. I am very much in distress.

  “I don’t want to snorkel,” Ivan wails. “I want my mommy.”

  The snorkelers look at me, puzzled. “I’m not his mother,” I explain. “I’m a friend. His parents are on a boat with my family on the other side of the rocks. We made our way over here while snorkeling and now he doesn’t understand that we have to swim back.”

  “I don’t want to snorkel anymore!” Ivan shouts.

  “Hey,” the Australian says. “Have you ever ridden a whale?”

  “No.” Ivan has snot running out of his nose.

  “See my mate Jeff here?” The Australian gestures to his friend, who waves at Ivan. “He kind of looks like a whale, doesn’t he? All blubbery and whatnot?”

  “Yeah,” Ivan says, letting a little laugh escape.

  “So take your pick. You can ride to your boat on the back of a whale, or you can ride to your boat on the back of a sleek dolphin.” The Australian points to himself with his thumb.

  “The dolphin,” Ivan says.

  “Good choice.” The Australian turns around and Ivan throws his arms around his neck. I lead us all to the boat, somehow managing to swim the distance while dragging Ivan’s snorkel gear along with my own.

  * * *

  • • •

  IVAN WON’T LET INGRID go off and snorkel with the others. He clings to her leg and cries.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” she says. “I’ll stay. I’ll stay right here with you.” She pulls him onto her lap and he buries his face in her chest.

  I turn to Solly. “I guess maybe I took him too far. I knew he was a good swimmer, I just didn’t think about stamina. But with the life vest . . .”

  “It’s okay, Jen,” Solly says. “He’s just tired.”

  Tired is the catchall for everything when you’re a parent of a small child. When your child throws a tantrum, when your child refuses to kiss his grandmother, when your child doesn’t say thank you, when your child does anything remotely shitty, you can always just say: He’s tired or She didn’t get enough sleep last night and you’re off the hook.

  Peter, Solly, Malcolm and Clem sunblock up, put on their snorkel gear and take off. I count the empty beer bottles on the boat: there are only three, and two of them have a third of the beer left in them, so at least I know they’re sober enough for snorkeling.

  The Mexican boy climbs down the side ladder, and eases himself into the water. He’s not utilizing any of the snorkeling equipment; he’s just taking slow, lazy laps around the boat. Clearly he’ll do anything to avoid being on board and under the command of this fat retiree from Boston, and I have to admit, it’s far more comfortable for me not to have him sitting here, absentmindedly playing with the drawstring on his ratty shorts while Captain Dan stuffs his mouth with potato chips.

  Ingrid and I sit in silence for a few minutes while I watch the boy swim and she rubs Ivan’s back. He sucks his thumb and soon he’s breathing deeply. I look at the sleeping Ivan. I point to the padded bench. “Do you want to try to transfer him so you can join the others?”

  “No,” she says. “I want to sit here on this boat, enjoying the peace and quiet. Just us.”

  “Don’t forget about Captain Dan.” I nod in the direction of the front of the boat where Captain Dan sits, headphones on, face buried in a magazine.

  “Captain Dan, too,” she says. “I want quality time with Captain Dan.”

  I pick up an uneaten sandwich, think about taking a bite, then think better of it.

  “Anyway, it’s good for Malcolm to spend time with Solly,” she continues. “This hasn’t been an easy year for him. He could use the influence of his father. God knows what sort of role modeling he’s getting at home.”

  I guess it’s no surprise that Ingrid blames Maureen for whatever trouble Malcolm has gotten into. Even though he’s the one who decided to go for a do-over on the family front, Solly has always been stingy in his appraisal of the job his ex-wife is doing as the primary parent. Maureen is controlling, unbending, a fun-sponge. She’s a stuffed shirt just because she works for a New York hedge fund. I’m not sure exactly what Solly expected Maureen to do after he left her for Ingrid, but building a thriving career for herself certainly shouldn’t be something he faults her for.

  While I was waiting tables postcollege, Maureen was at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship because in addition to being gorgeous, she is a brilliant and highly capable human being. This trifecta—beauty, brains, competence—is what had Solly so smitten from the minute he met her at a dinner party. Peter and I were also in attendance; we witnessed Solly falling hard firsthand. They married within a year. He was crazy about Maureen, until, of course, he wasn’t. Until domesticity ruined them and he fell for the young bohemian jewelry designer. Solly raves about Ingrid’s free-spiritedness; how she has an artist’s soul. Meanwhile he paints Maureen as uptight and boring and a lousy mother to boot. It’s Solly at his l
east generous and most dishonest.

  He says he plans to throw a rager when Maureen remarries to celebrate the end of his alimony payments. He says he’d relish the opportunity to walk her down the aisle himself, but I know, and I’m sure he does, too, that Maureen is far too smart to get married again—ever.

  Anyway, I can’t defend Maureen to Ingrid if I don’t even know what’s going on with Malcolm. And I do want to know what’s going on, because it is my nature to want to know what’s going on. So maybe now, sitting on this boat, with Ivan fast asleep and the others snorkeling out of sight, with Captain Dan buried in his magazine and the poor Mexican boy on his umpteenth lap around the boat, without Peter here to scold me to mind my own business, maybe now is the right time to finally find out.

  “What’s going on with Malcolm anyway?” I ask Ingrid.

  “I don’t want to say too much. It’s not my place. But let’s just say he’s made some bad choices.”

  “He’s a teenager. Isn’t he supposed to make bad choices? Isn’t that part of the job description?”

  “Yes. I suppose so. Within reason. But look at Clem,” she says. “Clem doesn’t get herself in trouble. She’s a grounded kid. She’s a good student. She’s got that sweet boyfriend.”

  “Clem is perfectly capable of doing stupid shit.” I’m thinking, of course, of Ariella’s parents’ rug.

  “Well, sure. But not like Malcolm, trust me.”

  She’s being intentionally coy. Wielding the power this sliver of knowledge lends her. I decide to abandon my line of questioning; I don’t want to ally myself with her against Malcolm or his mother.

  And anyway I’m not sure I trust her assessment of the situation. I’m not saying Clementine is right—that Ingrid is wary of Malcolm because he is black—just like I don’t believe her issues with Maureen have anything to do with her being black. I think it’s that Ingrid doesn’t have a teenager of her own, she’s never worked with teenagers and she doesn’t write about teenagers, so what does she know?

  Ivan lets out a big sigh and flips over, still sound asleep. Ingrid adjusts her towel to shield his face from the sun.

  “I had a serious boyfriend when I was sixteen,” she says. “We were like Clem and Sean. Always together. And when we weren’t together we were on the phone. An hour away from him felt like a year.”

  I was too loud and opinionated, too stubborn, for boys when I was Clem’s age. I wasn’t interested in doing what I knew I needed to do to get their attention, starting with caring at all about how I looked or what I wore. I spent most of high school hanging around my male teachers, seeking them out for extra help, writing my papers with the goal of impressing them; any praise they’d bestow on me was a small, delicious pleasure.

  “I learned everything from him,” she goes on. “And I do mean everything.”

  I laugh, because that feels like the right thing to do.

  “So . . .” she says.

  “So . . . what?”

  “So . . . do you think Clem and Sean are having sex?”

  It’s funny to me that Ingrid thinks it’s not her place to say what’s going on with Malcolm, but it is her place to ask if my daughter is sexually active.

  “No, they aren’t.”

  “They’re not? Really?”

  “Nope.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because we talk. We’re close.” This is true. I have done everything in my power to present myself to Clementine as someone free of judgment, someone who is not a prude, someone who understands teens and sex. She’s told me that they aren’t ready yet, that she doesn’t see that changing anytime soon; and yes, I’m her mother, so of course that makes my heart sing.

  I don’t tell Ingrid that I also know they aren’t having sex because I’ve seen their texts, and their texts are full of luv u and heart emojis and the quotidian details of their teen lives, and are free of talk of anything having anything at all to do with sex.

  “I never told my mother I was having sex,” she says. “And we were close.”

  In the silence that follows I notice a buzzing. At first I think it’s a mosquito. I didn’t bring any bug spray, only sunblock. Don’t mosquito bites cause Zika? Or is it dengue fever? Why do I worry about the sun and not mosquitoes?

  The buzzing stops. I lean back and close my eyes. If I pretend I’m asleep I won’t have to talk to Ingrid anymore.

  The buzzing starts again.

  “What’s that sound?” Ingrid asks. “Do you hear it?”

  I get up, because Ingrid can’t. I look around. The sound has stopped. Just as I’m about to sit back down, it starts again. I follow it to the other side of the boat where everyone left their clothes in a pile. It’s a phone. It must be Clem’s. I pick through her things, but her phone is silent. The buzzing continues.

  Peter’s T-shirt and hat are covering his wallet and phone. I move his clothes aside. His phone is buzzing with an incoming call from Gavriella Abramov.

  I decline the call. The screen shows five missed calls from Gavriella Abramov all within the last few minutes. I stare at the phone in disbelief. It starts vibrating in my hand with a sixth call.

  “Who’s calling?” Ingrid asks.

  “It’s Peter’s assistant.”

  “Gavi?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t answer it. This is vacation.”

  “She keeps calling.”

  “So shut off the phone.”

  I ignore Ingrid and answer the call. “Hello?”

  There’s silence on the other end of the line.

  “Hello?” I say again. I sound angry, which is okay, because I am angry.

  “Oh. Jenna? Hi. It’s Gavriella? From work?”

  “Yes, I know who it is.”

  “I’m trying to reach Peter?”

  I make a quick calculation. I could tell her that she isn’t supposed to be calling, that I asked Peter to tell her not to call on our vacation, not under any circumstances, and certainly not six times in a row, but if I do this, it will give Peter leverage in the argument we’re inevitably bound to have later on today. He’ll say I overstepped, that I shouldn’t interfere in his communication with someone who works for him, that I should never have answered his phone in the first place. The other factor is that Ingrid is sitting not five feet from where I stand with the phone to my ear and if I scold Gavriella in front of her it will open a window onto a dynamic in my life and marriage I’d rather keep shut.

  “He’s snorkeling.”

  “Oh. Okay. Well. Can you please tell him to call me? It’s important.”

  She sounds upset. I realize I could be imagining this, transferring my own emotional state onto her disembodied voice, but still, I’m a woman, and I tend to know when a woman sounds upset.

  I look out over the side of the boat toward the rocks of Los Arcos. There are dozens of snorkelers out in the water. I think I can see Peter and the others in the distance, but there’s really no way to tell for sure.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll let him know.”

  She’s already hung up. The line goes dead.

  * * *

  • • •

  BACK ON THE BEACH in front of Villa Azul Paraiso, Peter asks me if I have my wallet. I’ve already started up toward the house, not waiting for everyone to unload. He has to run to catch me.

  “Why?”

  “Because we need to pay Captain Dan. We owe him a hundred fifty dollars and I’ve only got a hundred on me.”

  “Why do we need to pay?”

  “Because we hired him to take us snorkeling?” Peter is looking at me like I’ve lost my mind.

  “No. Solly hired him. And he hired him without asking us if we even wanted to go.”

  “Jen.” He lowers his voice. “You’re being petty. It’s not attractive.”

  “W
hat about the boy?”

  “What boy?”

  “The boy on the boat. How much money do you think he’s getting?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll make sure to tip him if you’d just give me some money.”

  “Why don’t you tell Solly to peel off a few bills from that fat, impressive wad he carries everywhere in his pocket?”

  “Jesus Christ,” he says and storms off back toward the water.

  I watched Peter carefully when he returned from snorkeling. He toweled off and gave his gear to the Mexican boy. He picked up one of the bottles with a third of the beer left in it and took a swig. He made a face because that beer was probably close to boiling, then reached into the cooler for a bottle of water. He argued with the others about whether that long striped thing that darted under a rock was an eel. He asked if anyone had some ChapStick. He made his way over to his pile of stuff. He put on his T-shirt and hat. He stuck his wallet in the pocket of his wet swim trunks. He looked at his cell phone.

  His handsome, bearded, sun-tanned face showed no reaction at all.

  I don’t really care about the money for the boat. I suppose that’s obvious. Even if it bugs me that Solly would make a unilateral decision and then count on us to pay half, I normally wouldn’t say anything. I’m used to Solly pretending there’s no inequity in our financial statuses and I’ve made my peace with it. Part of the price of being his friend is accepting that he has more money and more power and that he’s generous at times with both—like how he invited Peter, who had no business experience, to be his partner—but also that his generosity has limits, like how Peter doesn’t seem to benefit as much from the business’s success despite his doing more than half the work. But standing there on the beach in front of the villa, I didn’t want to tell Peter why I’m really agitated. I didn’t want to say her name out loud. I should have just handed him the money. I have my wallet in my bag.

  Maybe I am being paranoid without good reason. Maybe I am misdirecting my anxiety about the book I can’t finish and the lingering worry about my health onto what is a perfectly normal employer/employee relationship. Maybe I tend, as Peter claims, to look in the wrong places when I’m in a state about things. But the fact remains that she called six times in a row. That must be one hell of an emergency, and if it was an emergency, why didn’t he call her back from the boat?