20

Milwaukee. It was the third of July, and as one of many, many compromises involved with Prin’s travel plans, the family had come to stay with Molly’s mother for the summer. He had told her the real reason he wanted to go to Dragomans, the Real reason, and she took it in without much trouble at all. They’d been discussing it ever since, including the fact that Prin could not point to any sense of Divine wish or desire since that first and only moment he’d heard. Was this God’s silence, and was it to be taken as final? Or—and this was Molly’s position—had Prin heard what he wanted to hear, and now he wasn’t interested in hearing anything else? Molly thought surviving prostate cancer had turned Prin into a holy romantic.

“Why do you need to go to extremes to prove yourself worthy of God’s love and attention, Prin?” she asked.

“But isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? Maybe it makes me a holy fool, but I think there’s a great tradition of that,” Prin said.

“I’m not sure it’s even possible, dear, to prove ourselves so worthy. And yes, we should all try, but why can’t you try closer to home? Why can’t someone else be sent?” Molly asked.

“Because no one else heard what I heard,” he said.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“So you want me to begin canvassing colleagues?” he asked.

“No, but—”

“Look, we’ve gone over this many times, Molly. It’s just a week, and the State Department has lifted its travel warning about Dragomans, and do you really think the government over there, or the people at UFU, or Wende, want to risk this totally failing by putting a professor in harm’s way?” said Prin.

“Maybe you are a holy fool,” she said.

“I’m glad you’re beginning—”

“Or maybe you’re just a fool,” she said.

In silence they finished making four stacks of towels and swimwear and associated goggles and caps and sprays and toys for a trip to a city pool with the cousins.

An hour later, Prin lifted a squirming, yuddering daughter into each of his arms and backed away from the giant black man screaming at him, at his children, at everyone, to Get out! Wearing a stretched-out tank top he rampaged around the edge of the kidney-shaped pool. It took Prin a moment to realize that the body the other lifeguards were dealing with, on the far side of the deep end, belonged to one of his nephews, fourteen-year-old John-Paul.

How could this have happened? What could have happened? Five minutes before, two days into their stay with Molly’s family, they’d been in the midst of a perfect American summertime. Slow and muggy, a big blue sky, plans to go out for custard after everyone went swimming. Then they’d go back to Molly’s sister’s elephantine brick-and-vinyl house for grilled brats and a family rosary in the great room and then FaceTime with the dad on a business trip and Skype with the dad in Iraq, and then more custard and YouTube videos, all in polar-frigid central air.

None of that seemed possible now, even though, just five minutes before, John-Paul and his little brother Ignatius and their cousin Juan Diego had been bobbing around him and his girls, sleek as seals and snickering about some plan they were hatching. They gave each other shoulder punches and high-fives and raced into the deep end. And now one of them was lying on the hard tiles, with lifeguards attending him while his cousins stood off to the side, hands over their mouths.

The chief lifeguard was down on her knees beside the boy’s body, tapping his cheek and checking vitals. She threw back her ponytail, preparing to administer CPR. Prin prayed for his nephew. He also noted the tawny magnificence of the lifeguard’s nape and shoulders as she bent down to breathe life back into his nephew.

He felt nothing. He continued to feel nothing.

Which was great.

He was grateful to have been made forever safe like this, for a week away with Wende. For months now, they’d continue exchanging messages on VaultTok. All the rereading in the world confirmed these were only businesslike. There had been one reference to keeping him abreast of developments, but he was probably just reading into it. And in hopes of what? A temptation he would then have to overcome?

He didn’t even find Wende that attractive anymore. And meanwhile there was all of this non-worrying about non-worry, instead of praying intently for the boy—wasn’t he the godfather to this one? How awful that he didn’t remember just then—while whipping his pleading kids this way and that way so they wouldn’t see whatever was happening. But he could.

“JOHN-PAUL!” his mother said.

But Prin’s heart didn’t buckle and join her pain. It lifted. It eased and sang. Her tone was angry, very angry. She had her oldest son by the ear. He was standing, he was alive, he was wincing and laughing and the lifeguards were walking behind him, to the pool office. The chief lifeguard was at the very back of the scrum. She was six-feet tall, chestnut ponytail, high cheekbones, bee-stung lips, doe eyes, red short shorts, all of her twenty-one years dipped in days of summer sun. She had her arms crossed over the uppermost contents of her gravity-defying swimsuit. And she didn’t look angry, or amused, but something else.

Of course!

If Prin were a teenage boy bobbing around a pool staffed by an Amazonian Venus and not a snipped-out forty-year-old playing mermaid castle in the shallows, maybe he’d fake a drowning too.

And of course this was worth a mother’s vengeance, and a grandmother’s wondering out loud while dishing out custard what his sainted papal namesake must be thinking in heaven. It was also worth the mumbling, awkward confession he’d have to make to their friendly, super-cool young family priest, who would grant God’s forgiveness for all the trouble he’d caused, for all the secret pleasure he’d taken in making trouble: because what else is sin? Of course it was worth it, Prin thought. Not just the lips, but the story of how the boy touched those lips, a story to tell for the rest of the summer.

Prin stopped studying gravity’s rainbows. Off to the side, he saw Molly lecturing the other boys, who were doing their best to feel bad that Aunty Molly was so totally disappointed in them. They were mostly failing. They had a pretty good summer story to tell, too.

“Daddy, is John-Paul in trouble? Is Aunty Elizabeth taking him to the hospital?” asked Maisie.

“Daddy, can you put us down now? Can we go back into the pool and play Elsa mermaid pony underwater castle again and this time can you be Olaf?” asked Maisie.

“No, I want Daddy to play Elsa marries piss-side down!” said Pippa.

“It’s Poseidon, Poseidon, love,” said Prin.