Do Not Become Alarmed(4)
That night, the towel on the bed was shaped like an elephant. Liv and Benjamin got Penny and Sebastian into their pajamas, then crowded into Nora and Raymond’s cabin for a bedtime book. Raymond read aloud from Treasure Island, doing all the pirate voices. The book was heavier going than Liv remembered, but it didn’t matter with Raymond narrating. He was more than they deserved, as a bedtime reader. Most people’s husbands just made you appreciate your own, but not Raymond. Marcus and June leaned against him in the big bed. Liv lay on the pullout beside Benjamin and fell asleep. Sebastian had to prod her arm when it was time to go back to their own cabin.
The next morning, anchored in the blue sea off Acapulco, Liv went for a run on deck and came upon her husband with a notebook, sketching the davits that suspended the lifeboats. She loved Benjamin’s capacity for total absorption in the structure of things, even though she sometimes felt she had to tug on his leg to get him back to earth.
Liv and Nora had an unserious game of paddle tennis after lunch, then sat in deck chairs reading novels and talking. Benjamin called it “estro-lock,” the way the two women could talk for hours and lose track of time. They ended up in conversation across any table, screening out noise from kids and men. They could talk about shallow things without judgment and deep things without self-consciousness. They shared a childhood vocabulary, a set of references. Old ladies beamed at their handsome children in swimsuits—freckled Penny and towheaded Sebastian, tall Marcus with his long legs and tiny June in her many braids. Liv felt like a young mother in a Fitzgerald novel, glowing with life. If she’d had pearls she would have sunned them.
A few times during the day, Liv saw the ship’s tenders ferrying people ashore and wondered if they should have gone. That was something she was trying to work on: not always second-guessing her decisions, wondering if she’d made the wrong one. But how could you know if you’d made the right decision, when you only saw one version play out?
The Argentinian family came aboard from their excursion, looking exhausted and hot. “We went snorkeling on a catamaran,” the teenage daughter said. “I threw up four times.”
So maybe that was all Liv needed—someone to check out the alternate path and report back.
At dinner, they debriefed on the day. Raymond said that the Brazilian trainer in the gym was trying to sell him one of the spa treatments.
Nora made a face. “She just wants to slather you in mud and roll you in cling wrap.”
“Is that what the treatment is?” Liv asked. She hadn’t been sure what the ads were selling. Pills? Colonics?
“I think they put electrodes on your—problem areas,” Nora said.
“Wait,” Benjamin said. “This woman thinks Raymond has problem areas?”
“Is it bad that I’m intrigued?” Raymond asked.
“Yes!” the rest of them said, all together.
After dinner, they gathered in the other cabin for Raymond to read aloud. The children stared wide-eyed in dread of the Black Spot, just as Liv had once.
“If I were in Treasure Island,” Sebastian said, nestled under her arm, “there wouldn’t be a book, because as soon as the first scary thing happened, I would just run home.”
“I would go be a pirate,” Junie whispered, into her father’s shoulder.
“You would be a great pirate,” Raymond told her. “And Sebastian could stay back and mind the fort. That’s important, too.”
Liv reminded herself to be grateful for Nora and Raymond, and never to take them for granted. They were her family, and they were also the family she had chosen, and she loved them and felt extraordinarily lucky. If hell was other people, you just had to find the people who weren’t the inferno, and make space for them in your life.
2.
CHRISTMAS DINNER WAS formal, and Benjamin pushed cuff links through the holes at his wrists. The kids were joining them in the dining room. As Benjamin knotted Sebastian’s tie, the kid looked up at him with trusting eyes, and he felt an almost worrying pressure in his heart. But this wasn’t a heart attack. It was that his son was so vulnerable, and such a miniature man, with his fine blond hair combed back, in his tiny jacket. Benjamin remembered his own father taking him to Brooks Brothers for his first blazer, the solemn instructions about buttons and shirt collars. And now Benjamin was the dad. It was so strange. He had some gray in his hair, more if he grew a beard. He considered it premature, but it wasn’t: He was forty-one.
“Will Santa find us on the ship?” Sebastian asked.
“I think so. But the trip is the big present this year.”
“I know,” Sebastian said. “But he knows we’re here?”
Benjamin looked for traces of disingenuousness in his son’s eyes, but Sebastian seemed committed. And why not? What was the point of questioning Santa? Unless of course you were Penny, who had to look under every rock. At least she knew enough to keep her mouth shut around her little brother. They hadn’t done Chanukah presents this year. Usually they tried to, but his parents, who cared the most, had gone to Cuba. And it was a lot to organize, amid the packing and getting out of town.
Penny wore a green velvet dress and had pestered Liv into curling her hair into ringlets. Marcus and June joined them, and the four kids ran down the corridor, June’s silver skirt and her braids flying out behind her, Marcus tall in a blue blazer with a somber lope.