Mariel's daughter, Finny, accidentally pushed a classmate off the jungle gym at break, and the unlucky girl hit her head, hard, on the way down. She was knocked out, and after she stood up and wobbled into the building, she had a fit; the other children, including eight-year-old Finny, stood in a knot around her as she thrashed as if in rage on the tile floor. A ribbon of urine from the fallen girl approached Finny's shoes.
Mariel got the phone call at work.
In four days they were supposed to leave the country on a long-awaited family vacation, and she worried, glancing at the message from the school nurse, that Finny (a nickname for Fiona) had a cold or the flu. Lousy timing, Mariel thought, dialling the nurse's number and scanning her desk for what could be worked on at home, what could be cancelled, what could be transferred immediately to the trash. It was Tuesday; Finny could be home for the rest of the week, but she must recover by Saturday morning, when they were meant to board the plane in Minneapolis for Cancun, strap themselves into their seats, and inhale four hours' worth of re-circulated air, which Finny declared made her vomit.
"I'll let you talk to her," the nurse said, in response to Mariel's question about how Finny was feeling. Mariel thought this was a little odd-did the nurse have no diagnostic skills? The phone clicked. She heard a shuffling. A sniffle. "Finn? Finny? Is that you?" She pictured her daughter's round face, a sweet freckled pie, the short braids ragged and uneven because Finny had wanted to braid them herself.
"I hurt Nan," Finny said. "I didn't mean to."
"Nan who?" Mariel asked, searching beneath the desk for her shoes. "You aren't sick?"
"I pushed her," Finny said. She had a way of confessing to her crimes with copious amounts of self-deprecation, and Mariel didn't want to let her start.
"Of course you didn't mean to." Finny's sniffling was probably the result of some sadistic line of questioning at the hands of the school nurse, a broom-like woman with short thick hair that stood up unnaturally on her head. True, Finny had a tendency to be clumsy-some kind of lapse occurred between what her body felt and how it moved. Still, she was a gentle and shy girl, emotionally frail, and now she was clearly traumatised. "Is Nan at the nurse's office too?"
"No," Finny said.
"She's back in class?"
A pause.
"Finny?"
"They took her away," Finny whispered, and Mariel could hear the tears gathering, the monsoon clouds massing just offshore.
"I'm sure she'll be fine," Mariel said, but the phone had been repossessed by Mrs Wassler, child-hater, Nazi-nurse.
"You need to pick up your daughter and stop by the office," Mrs Wassler said. Mariel heard Finny sobbing. "I'll keep Fiona here with me."
one of the things that most often surprised Mariel about being a parent was the desire for other parents' approval. Some days she felt as if she had produced an object out of clay and had placed it on a table to be evaluated, compared. No one could argue that Finny was the brightest in a sizeable group of children, or the best looking, or the most adept. Oh, but look! Mariel wanted to say. No child on earth could be more endearing, more humanly whole. She knew that. She understood Finny's graces. Still, there she stood at the edge of the table, nudging her sweet imperfect object, both of them subject to the whims and critiques of passers-by.
She tried to resist evaluating her only child, but the feelings rose up in her, unbidden. And Finny was so sensitive, so easily discouraged. She was bound to be one of those girls, Mariel knew, who would look into the mirror at thirteen and suffer from the lovely roundness of her face, her strong and shapely forearms, her dusky hair. She was a highly compassionate child, prone to cry at the sight of roadkill, and timid in the face of cruelty. Although she liked to play with other children, she often preferred to play alone, and her games were eccentric and imaginative, unintelligible to others. Mariel loved her so fiercely that her teeth hurt when she looked at Finny; at the same time, she felt in herself the desire to correct her daughter, to pinch and mould her-a little more confidence and sass, a little less fear.
On the way into the school building Mariel had to walk a gauntlet of older children, and she couldn't help wondering if they knew who she was, if they knew about "the accident" or had leaned out of their classroom windows to see the ambulance come. It was stunning to see the fifth- and sixth-grade children, some of them huge, the girls with breasts, the boys tackling one another, already needing feminine approval: they opened the door for Mariel in a kind of rehearsal for the upcoming mating dance, displaying their gaudy colours like so many birds.
She found Finny asleep on the nurse's blue-plastic couch, her dress hiked up, a hole near the crotch of her tights exposed, her head lolling back against the wall. So vulnerable. How could Mariel allow her outside in the world unguarded? Mrs Wassler, thank God, had been called to officiate at a skinned knee somewhere; the assistant principal filled Mariel in. The other girl, Nan, had been taken to the hospital around noon; apparently she was stable, but she'd had a concussion and would probably be kept overnight for observation. The family was listed in the phone book if Mariel wanted to call them.
Mariel looked at Finny, still oblivious on the couch. Finny slept like the dead unless she was having nightmares, in which case she lurked around the edges of her parents' bed like a nervous spirit. Now she lay limp and removed from the world, as if planning to sleep for 100 years.
"I'm sure it was an accident," the assistant principal said. "Finny's a great kid."
Mariel felt hideously, profoundly grateful. "I know," she snapped. After wrenching Finny from sleep, she signed an absentee paper and took her home.
during the car ride Finny was quiet, morose. She nodded her head very slightly to some kind of internal music, a habit that made her look obsessive. Mariel reached over the back of her seat and touched Finny's cheek, to stop her. When asked how the accident happened, Finny dutifully replied, as if she'd been coached, "I wasn't careful."
"Did you help her up?" Mariel asked.
"After she woke up, I did," Finny said. "She was crying."
"Accidents happen," Mariel said.
Finny was nodding her head again.
"Maybe we'll call her when we get home, to see how she's feeling. Do you think that's a good idea? Finny?"
"She's in the hospital," Finny said. In the rear-view mirror Mariel could see only the cinnamon-coloured smudges that were Finny's eyebrows and the zigzag part in her hair. When she adjusted the mirror to see her better, Finny moved out of her line of sight.
"The hospital has phones," Mariel said. "Phones in every room."
"She mightn't know it was an accident," Finny said.
"Well," Mariel said, "that's just another reason for us to call."
At home, though, Mariel discovered that calling wasn't easy. The injured child's first name had apparently been shortened to Nan in the public schools, but her last name was a tangle of consonants. Either the admissions clerk had spelled it wrong or the hospital didn't yet have the girl on record. Looking up the family's home number in the school directory, Mariel saw from the address that they were poor. Nan didn't live within walking distance of the school, in one of the comfortable suburbs, but was bussed in on one of the yellow trawlers that cruised through the white neighbourhoods, small, tired faces at every window.
For the first few hours no one answered the phone. Finally, in the late afternoon, a child answered. No, her mother and father weren't there. Who was this?
"A friend," Mariel said, hating herself. Finny was playing on the carpet in the other room. "We wondered how Nan was doing. Is she better?"
A radio in another language was clamouring in the background. "Nan's better," the voice said.
"Is she out of the hospital?"
"You want to talk to Nan?"
"No, that's fine. But she's at home?"
"Nan's at home."
"That's great," Mariel said. "Thanks for telling us." She looked at Finny, who was clearly listening. Whoever was on the other end hung up the phone. "Do you want to know what they said?"
Finny didn't move. She was hunched over a pile of coins that she was supposed to be learning to count; instead, twisting the assignment in her own odd way, she was wrapping each coin in a piece of paper and masking tape and then dropping it into a plastic cup.
"They said she's better. Maybe you'll see her in school tomorrow."
Finny shook the paper-covered coins, scowled into the cup, and unrolled a longer strip of tape.
"You can apologise again," Mariel said. "If you want to. It might make you feel better."
"She won't be in school," Finny said. "Why not?" Mariel hated to think of Finny as a junior fatalist.
"She just won't be." Finny's shirt was a little tight, Mariel noticed. Finny developed crushes on articles of clothing and didn't like to let them go.
After Finny went to bed, Mariel unwrapped a few of the paper-covered coins; then she gave up and threw the rest away.
as always when crises came up, Mariel's husband, David, was travelling. She talked to him late that night on the phone.
"So she feels sad about it," he said. "Even guilty. How could she not? That seems appropriate. It'll teach her to be more careful."
David's sunny disposition could be annoying. On a day-to-day basis it was essential, but the way he glibly searched for the upside of all difficulties made Mariel mad. He was an overgrown Shirley Temple.
"She already knows she wasn't careful," Mariel said. "She's already got the hair shirt on. That's not the problem."
"Did we sign her up for T-ball again this year?" David asked. In an effort to socialise her and improve her co-ordination, David had pushed Finny into organised sports the summer before. Holding the bat or trying to catch the ball, she had looked miserable and ill suited to the game. Observing his daughter's wretched performance, David had cheered while Mariel writhed in the stands; poor Finny was rooted like a post out in left field, as if her arms and legs, her very body, were a reproach. It occurred now to Mariel that Finny had looked like that on the way home from school; she had climbed into the back seat of the car gingerly, treating her body like a weapon or a foreign thing.
"Why repeat painful mistakes," Mariel said.
"It wasn't painful. Finny's fine. You worry about her too much."
Mariel could hear him shuffling through a set of papers; she hated it when he multi-tasked her, working while he talked to her on the phone. "I think she's depressed, actually," she said. "I might make a phone call about our tickets."
The shuffling stopped. "What about them?"
"Well, I'm not sure we can waltz off and leave if this girl is still injured. I haven't talked to the parents. And maybe Finny should see a doctor."
"She isn't the one who hit her head."
"She isn't happy," Mariel said, wanting to cry. "I think any person her age deserves to be happy."
David sighed. Maybe, secretly, he detested her, Mariel thought. And why not? At such moments she detested herself. "Cancelling our vacation isn't going to cheer Finny up," he said. "It'll do her good to get away. Think how much fun she had last year." This was the ultimate argument, of course; how could she deprive Finny of going? Imagine making her stay at home, making her think she was being punished.
"I'll go if we can drink a lot," Mariel said. "Starting earlier in the day than we did last year."
"We'll start on the plane," David said, "if that'll make you feel better."
"It might."
"Mariel," he said, "you know, different people are happy in different ways."
"Tell me about Finny's way, then."
David hesitated. "It's different from ours," he said. "I'll see you soon."
the next morning Finny didn't want to go to school. Mariel had expected this-the crumbling confidence, the tentativeness, the fear-but now that it had arrived, her strategies for combating it seemed absurd. She felt impotent, unable to resist the sight of Finny in her favourite dog pyjamas, an inch of flesh showing where the top didn't meet the pants.
"One day," Mariel said. "You can stay home today, and that's all. Not tomorrow." Together they ate muffins in the kitchen in their pyjamas, Mariel half-heartedly reading the paper, nothing but major and minor disasters everywhere, and pushing aside the dirty dishes from the night before. Finny ate half a muffin, dissecting it for raisins and nuts, and then slipped away from the table to start one of her peculiar games, putting Cheerios into a set of plastic cars and sending them on trips around the kitchen floor.
"Maybe Nan's home today too," Mariel said. "Maybe you're both taking sick days."
Finny paused. She had her back to her mother, but Mariel saw her open the little door to a plastic car, take out the oat-flavoured occupants, and eat them.
"We'll call her-and then we'll call the hotel in Mexico and ask them how hot it is there today," she said, knowing that the newspaper in her hand listed such forecasts on the second page. "It'll be good to have hot weather for a change, won't it, Finny?"
The girl shrugged, her broad back a site of pathos. She drove her army of edible passengers out the door.
at noon mariel took a break from several hours of indifferent progress on the computer and called a friend at Finny's school. The friend, Anna, was a teacher's aide, a woman who volunteered in her son's classroom to the extent that she might as well have been home-schooling him.
"Oh, I heard," Anna said. "Poor Finny. Poor Nan. This is one of those awful things that just happen."
Mariel asked whether anyone at school had talked to Nan's family? The girl wasn't back at school yet, was she?
There was a pause. "I think Dorothy, the social worker, talked to them," Anna said.
The tone of her voice gave Mariel the sensation that her stomach had suddenly been flooded with cold water. "What did she say?"
"Well, I think she's still bleeding from the ear, which isn't good. But she did wake up a couple of times. She's still in the hospital."
"But I called them," Mariel said. "I talked to them on the phone. No one said anything about bleeding. Just yesterday they said she was home."
"That's probably a language issue," Anna said. "Two of the daughters-and the mother, I think-are nicknamed Nan. Their full names are really long. We always get them mixed up in the school records."
Mariel's eyes filled. "What does that mean, that she's bleeding from the ear?"
"I only heard this second-hand," Anna said. "Are you keeping Finny home?"
Mariel wondered if Anna was implying that Finny should be kept at home for her own safety. Would a playground vendetta form? "We're so sorry," Mariel whispered, speaking for herself as well as Finny, and addressing anyone who might hear about Nan and imagine that Finny was too young for remorse.
When Mariel hung up the phone, she saw Finny standing behind her in the hall. She was stock-still on the carpet, her body soft, listening.
"Nan's not home yet," Mariel said. It was all she could think of to say.
Finny nodded, "She might stay for a long, long time." She looked like a round-faced oracle, a seer.
"Don't say that," Mariel said.
Finny sat down.
"What's in the car?" Mariel asked. "Are they little people?"
"Yes," Finny said. "But they don't know that that's what they are."
"What do they think they are?"
Finny paused. "They only think they're people when the door shuts behind them," she said. "Then they remember." Mariel watched her put a Cheerio behind the wheel of a blue Camaro. The door clicked shut. Finny looked up at Mariel, who smiled and tried not to shiver. The cargo of doomed and ignorant passengers waited, helpless, on the floor.
the next morning, Thursday, Finny didn't want to change into her school clothes or brush her hair. "You can't stay home forever," Mariel said, realising that despite her dictum of the day before, Finny must have imagined doing just that: if one day, why not two? Why not four? This was the moment for Dad's cheerful demeanour, but of course Dad wasn't home. "Up, up!" Mariel said, lifting Finny beneath the arms, but the effect was more violent than fun. It took her several minutes just to get a clean shirt over Finny's head. "Listen, Fiona," she finally said, "there's a saying about getting right back on a horse after you fall off it, and school is the horse in this case, and Nan's accident is the fall, and you have to go back to school afterward. You can't stay home. I'd be a lousy parent if I let you stay home. You don't want me to be a lousy parent."
Finny stared at her toes. She had short, flat feet, like little paddles. Sometimes Mariel thought that Finny had inherited the worst of her parents' characteristics. Mariel ended up dressing Finny entirely, pulling socks over the sweaty toes, pushing the arms into the sleeves of a pink sweater, brushing the fine, beloved, tangled brown hair. Clipping a duck-shaped barrette into position over one ear, she looked at Finny's sweet face and saw unmistakable dread. She felt she was dressing her only child for slaughter.
"It'll be all right," she said, considering and rejecting the idea of letting Finny stay at home for a second day. How had she ended up with such a horribly sensitive child? She personally knew plenty of children who could have pushed a dozen playmates off the jungle gym (or even the roof of the school building) and never batted an eye. The difference was that those other children's victims were always fine. Finny had had bad luck. And maybe that was part of the problem: Finny was beginning to believe herself unlucky. Mariel held her by the shoulders and looked into her speckled eyes. The world was full of horrifying things-dead children turning up in the trunks of cars, bombs falling, cancer and other illness-from which Mariel had tried to shield her daughter. But it hadn't worked: Finny sensed the existence of disaster, and was afraid. All children were fearful now and then, but Finny's kind of fear was different. She wasn't afraid of lightning or the dark. Mariel looked into Finny's eyes and saw that Finny was afraid of herself-of her own body and the harm it could effect, of its awful dangers, of its secret, unintentional power.
when finny was born, Mariel, more than David, had been terrified. He was the oldest in a big family and remembered carrying and feeding his siblings; calm and confident, he cradled seven-pound Finny in one arm and swooped her around the house, singing tunes from South Pacific and Oklahoma! Mariel tried to imitate his casual attitude but couldn't; she was convinced at every moment that something gruesome was about to happen. Finny would choke on a button, or swallow poison, or impale herself on a pencil while tumbling headlong down the stairs. She was relieved when Finny turned three and then four and five; she seemed further from danger, sure on her feet, less liable to kill herself out of sheer ignorance.
But now that the obvious, dreaded physical dangers were past, and Finny could walk and ride a bike and swim and recognise a skull and crossbones and recite her address and phone number in case she found herself lost among helpful strangers, an entirely new set of hazards was revealed, and they were internal. No matter how vigilant Mariel was, no matter how carefully she stood guard, she couldn't interpose herself between Finny and Finny's imagination. She was doomed to pace outside the inner room and hope for the best, like an old-fashioned husband waiting for news of his child's birth.
And Mariel suffered doubts of her own. Some days, reading the paper, she was convinced that the world would soon come crashing to an end-and how much easier it would be, how much more bearable, if she weren't in the position of having to explain it all to innocent Finny. She was beyond being able to speak about this fear, even to David. Especially to David. At times, horrified at her own train of thought, she almost wished that Finny hadn't been born.
david came home early and unexpectedly in the middle of the day and called Mariel at the office. "I talked to Varda," he said. "He doesn't mind if we visit."
"Visit?" Mariel asked. "Varda who?"
"Nan's father," he said, as if it were obvious that he had cancelled a meeting, flown home early, spirited a phone number out of the air, and now knew the injured girl's whole family by their first names. "She's at Children's Hospital. Sixth floor. Meet me there and then we can pick Finny up together after school."
"Right now?"
David waited, exhaling. Mariel looked at the mess on her desk. "All right," she said. "I'll meet you in the main lobby in an hour."
in the full-length bed with its metal side rails, Nan Gnundatridgida seemed to be half the size of Finny, her limbs no larger than sticks. So small, Mariel thought. The girl's thick black hair lay uncombed against the pillow; a tube invaded one delicate nostril, and bruises up and down her forearm indicated multiple attempts to start an IV. Mariel wanted to collapse at the very sight of her, to kneel at the foot of the bed and press her forehead to the floor.
In the hallway David had introduced himself to Varda, giving him a two-handed handshake-embrace all the way up to the shoulder. David was an ideal presence at a sickbed; calm and friendly and soft-spoken, he never threatened to fall apart or cry. Now he swept the black curls from Nan's forehead. "She's beautiful," he said, and in fact she was. He wrote their phone numbers on the back of a get-well card.
The worst moment of the visit came when the little girl's mother walked through the door, carrying a doll and a cup of coffee. She wanted the other mother to throw her coffee, or shout, or try to push Mariel out of a window. Instead the woman barely looked at them or spoke; she sat in a vinyl chair beside the bed, put down the coffee and the doll, and began to stroke her daughter's arm. She didn't have time for anything but this, Mariel thought, even if the whole world went to hell; she had time only to coax her daughter back from the strange new territory she had entered on her own, to summon Nan back and see her healed.
Later David tried to downplay the mother's reaction. It was probably part cultural difference, he said, part sleep deprivation, part language barrier. The important thing was that the doctors felt Nan was getting better. It was definitely a concussion; and yes, she'd had a seizure. But she was periodically waking, and the signs were good. One of the nurses had offered to keep them informed.
Still, Mariel felt poisonous, depressed. "We won't tell Finny we were here," she said, spying their separate cars in the parking lot.
David looked shocked. "I already told her. I stopped by her school on the way over and got her to make a little card for when Nan wakes up. I left it on the nightstand. I thought it would make everyone feel better."
What a strange idea, Mariel thought. A piece of construction paper as a means of healing. David talked on and on, describing his conversation with Finny's teacher. Mariel watched his lips move, interpreting the words as they left his mouth. She had heard about people who took their children to wakes and funerals to expose them to death and mortality, people for whom every hideous aspect of life was a learning opportunity. She wondered if David would want to do that, whether he could turn the whole unpleasant mess with Finny and Nan into some kind of fuzzy cultural-awareness lesson. Sometimes Mariel felt amazed that she had married-what an odd custom, joining forces for life with an alien being.
"You said you weren't worried," she said. "But here you are, home early."
David walked her across the parking lot. As she drove away, she saw him looking up at the sixth-floor windows, one hand in his jacket pocket, the other absently tapping the roof of his car.
on friday afternoon David spoke to Varda again; Nan was slowly improving, and she had eaten soup and toast. Having made up her mind to do so, Mariel made a speech in bed that night. She was grateful, she said, that David had made contact with Nan's family. She was ashamed of herself for not setting such a forthright example for Finny.
David rolled toward her under the covers. "I wasn't doing it only for Finny."
"No, but it's a good thing," she said. "It was a good thing no matter why you did it."
David's hand navigated the tangle of flannel sheets and found her hip. He was vacillating, she knew, between harbours: sex on the one hand, and the rocking cradle of sleep on the other. She decided to wait, to see what he would choose.
The hand twitched once and then trailed away. "It even occurred to me," he said, "that friendly communication could help discourage a lawsuit."
"A lawsuit?" Mariel said. "What do you mean?" She had never even thought about a lawsuit.
"I doubt it would happen," David said. He kissed her and thumped his pillow. He didn't often talk about his personal demons, but lying awake as his breathing slowed, Mariel knew that they were waiting in the dark regardless of whether she understood them, or whether she discerned their ragged shapes in the midnight air.
throughout the trip the next day, in the cab, in the airport and in the plane, Finny insisted on sitting close to David-maybe because she had missed him, Mariel thought, or maybe because her mother had proved to be useless during this stressful week.
During takeoff the fact that Nan was still in the hospital made Mariel clench her teeth in dread. It seemed to be tempting fate to indulge in a luxury vacation while the poor girl lingered in the hospital; it was tantamount to begging the gods to strike them down, to hurl bolts of lightning at their very section of the plane. For Finny's sake she forced herself to offer bubbly comments about the week to come. Finny was quiet; it was hard to know whether to attribute this to motion-sickness tablets or to depression. She fell asleep over New Orleans, flopping across an empty seat, and Mariel hoped that someone would look at her in disapproval, or ask her to move her bare feet further from the aisle-then Mariel would personally rip out that person's hair.
At the airport in Cancun the heat and light entered them. Mariel felt transported. Travel always gave her that sensation of stepping through a door into a new, exotic compartment in which she would eat someone else's food and sleep in someone else's bed, while her own life lay flat and uninhabited at home.
They spent the night in town and then rented a car and drove south, the highway littered with billboards and trash and wild hibiscus, wrinkled women selling pots and tortillas at the edges of the smaller roads. The resort that they had come back to was out of the way and subdued, a quiet beach without college students or discos, just a few miles of white sand and phosphorescent blue water. Their room was a separate little thatched-roof structure halfway between the tiled swimming pool and the Caribbean; the year before, Finny had wandered dreamily between the two bodies of water every day.
Mariel wondered if this year would be different. Let there be pleasures in life that I receive without earning or deserving them, she thought; let some of these unmerited pleasures remain the same. She unpacked all their clothes, reciting fervent agnostic prayers in the stifling room, while David walked Finny down to the beach. Mariel took it for granted that neither of them would have thought to apply sunscreen.
"What do you think?" David asked her that night, as they watched the sun melt into the exuberant flowering trees that flanked the pool.
Mariel contemplated her drink-she had lost count of what number it was-and answered absently that she'd seen too many plants, too many birds, too much water, for one place. Everything here existed in abundance, as if to point out the stinginess of their own uninspired northern landscape.
"No, I meant Finny," David said, and instantly Mariel was alert. What about her? What did he think? How could she have let her mind wander?
Finny was asleep on a cot in the room behind them, the door propped open with a stone.
"I think she loves it here," he said. "I think she was born for this kind of climate."
"She's already sunburned," Mariel said.
"I mean temperamentally. She loves the sun, the heat. I think winter makes her pinched. Down here she can be more open."
Mariel often wondered if David analysed Finny the way she did-if he spent an unhealthy amount of time reviewing her strengths, her foibles. "She didn't play with any of the other kids," she said. "She spent the whole day by herself."
"She likes being by herself. Those kids were jerks."
This was true. The other American children, all of them skinny and loud and absurdly normal, more like ads for children than the real thing, had screamed and cavorted and plunged obnoxiously into the pool all afternoon, while Finny, ten feet away, had methodically made slits in the centre of several dozen leaves, inserting a stick and two blades of grass into each leaf and laying the altered flora on the sand in an intricate pattern. At such moments Mariel suffered dual and opposite visions of Finny's future: she might end up a lumpkin, an eccentric in a hillside cabin; or she might be a visionary with a sense of humour and compassion, a pioneer.
"Did you get through to them on the phone?" David asked, without looking in her direction.
Mariel stared into the crushed ice in her glass.
"I saw you take the phone card out of your wallet after lunch."
"Spy," she said.
"I figured I'd let you do it," he said. "And maybe you'd let me know if there was any news."
"I tried and tried, but I couldn't get through."
David put down his drink and walked to the blue-tiled steps that lead into the water.
"Of course I'd let you know," Mariel said.
But she had probably spoken too late. David submerged himself in the water, disappearing into the thick and fragrant shadows at the edge of the pool.
he didn't ask about any of her other phone calls. He played Frisbee with Finny, and took her snorkelling, and haggled over an ankle bracelet in the square. Meanwhile, Mariel struggled with unidentifiable coins, credit cards, phone cards and Spanish recordings she couldn't understand. Finally, on the third day of the vacation, a margarita in hand though it was only noon, she heard a small miracle in the receiver: "Children's Hospital. Where may I direct your call?"
Mariel could see the ocean, 200 yards away. The sun on her arms was a blessing. She closed her eyes to deny herself the beauty of the view. But there was a second miracle to come: Nan had been discharged and was now at home. Mariel spelled and respelled the family's name. Yes, the nurse was sure, the little girl with the concussion, she had definitely been discharged. Mariel spilled half the margarita onto herself with joy and then drank the rest of it in a swallow. She walked down to the beach to share the good news with David.
"That's great," he said. Shading his eyes and smiling, he looked up at her from his chair.
"Don't you want to celebrate?" Possibly she had been obsessive and preoccupied; now, at last, she was ready to relax.
"I thought we were celebrating. We're drinking and eating out every day and sitting on a beach and spending money with abandon. What else do you think we should do?"
"I don't know," she said. "Something."
"Do you want to tell Finny?"
Of course she wanted to tell Finny. Finny would be relieved. Wouldn't she be relieved?
David pulled his lounge chair into the shade of a drooping palm.
Mariel sat down. Finny would be happy to know that Nan was fine, but she
